Shadow Hunter

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Can’t you read, boy? COMMANDING OFFICER’S EYES ONLY. Don’t you know what that means? No one’s to know about this signal except me!’

  ‘Awfully sorry, sir . . .’

  ‘You’d better watch your step, son.’

  Smallbone flushed purple. He felt hurt and indignant. The captain was talking nonsense. The confidentiality applied to the message they had yet to decode, not to the preamble requesting confirmation of receipt.

  In the wireless room, Hitchens slid his keycard into the deciphering machine, then tapped out his personal code on the numeric key-pad.

  ‘I’d like you all outside,’ he ordered as the teleprinter began its work.

  Pike returned to the control room. Able Seaman Bennett glanced at the sub-lieutenant as they moved to the passageway; sensing the thunderous atmosphere, he said nothing.

  The printer stopped. Philip ripped off the paper, including the self-carbonizing second sheet. He folded the pages into a small square that fitted his trouser pocket and pushed past the radio operators, heading back to his cabin.

  ‘Whew!’

  Hugo Smallbone spun back into the wireless room, before the control room watch could notice his beetroot face.

  The teleprinter was chattering again. Messages for crew members. He busied himself with the intelligence reports. When he calmed down he’d take them to the watchkeeper, so the charts could be updated.

  Philip placed the signal on his desk.

  COMMANDER HITCHENS.

  DUE YOUR UNFORTUNATE DOMESTIC SITUATION, IMPERATIVE YOU TRANSFER TO SHORE. BRIEFING TEMPORARY REPLACEMENT COMMANDER TO CONTINUE

  TRUCULENT’S PATROL.

  SEA KING WILL RENDEZVOUS WITH YOU AT 1600Z.

  SUNDAY 20TH. POSITION N58.50 W06.30.

  PLSE CONFIRM BY SSIX 2000Z TODAY.

  FLAG OFFICER SUBMARINES.

  They knew, despite Sara’s promise to tell no one. The bitch! She’d betrayed him again!

  What had she told them? He re-read the signal.

  ‘Unfortunate domestic situation’. They weren’t giving much away back at Northwood.

  Had she told them about the Soviets or just the personal bits? In either case they all knew the worst part, knew how she’d humiliated him.

  But why? Had she sensed what he intended to do? Were they trying to stop him?

  Who would she have spoken to? Craig probably. There was no one else she knew. Craig would have passed it up the line to CINCFLEET.

  The questions echoed in his head like prayers in a cathedral. There was one which came back from the recesses of his mind where he’d banished it. Why, why had she done what she’d done? What was it he’d failed to give her that she needed?

  Lonely. She’d told him she felt lonely . . .

  That wasn’t enough. Other men’s wives were lonely, but they didn’t parade themselves like whores in public places? Didn’t soil their bodies with other men’s – stuff.

  The trembling started again. An uncontrollable shaking that engulfed him whenever his mind re-ran those desperate shouting-matches with Sara, those moments of awful revelation.

  He’d raged at her and she’d fought back with a taunt – the name of a man she claimed had been the first of her lovers. Someone he’d known closely for twenty years. A name that would hurt him more deeply than any other.

  He’d laughed at her – called her a liar.

  Andrew her lover? Not possible. They’d trained together, served together on their first commission as sublieutenants, stayed friends ever since. Andrew was Simon’s godfather, for heaven’s sake! The idea was ludicrous. Wasn’t it?

  There’d been times in the past week when Philip had wept like a child. One moment he longed for someone to confide in, the next that no one should ever know.

  He stood up angrily now. He had to snap out of it, put those nagging questions out of his mind, concentrate on the matter in hand.

  The signal – he had to respond to it.

  Tim Pike gave orders for the VLF antenna to be recovered into the fin. Their time-slot for monitoring the broadcast was over.

  ‘Steer course zero-two-five. Ten down, keep two-hundred metres,’ Cavendish instructed. ‘Keep revolutions for ten knots. Increase to eighteen when the antenna’s wound in.’

  That could take half-an-hour.

  A leading seaman was doing duty at the chart table. Two strides and Pike stood beside him. Two strides could get you anywhere in the control room.

  ‘Have you plotted the data from the int. brief?’ Pike asked.

  ‘Yessir. The closest Victor is here, sir.’

  He pointed to a box drawn some seventy miles south of them.

  ‘He’ll be listening for the Polaris boats coming out of Faslane. Then there’s another Victor ’bout four hundred miles northeast. On the other side of the Faroes-Shetland gap. A couple of AGIs fifty and seventy-five miles away, and that’s about it.’

  ‘I see. So we’re well out of range of their radar. Aircraft are the worry. And we don’t know where they are. My guess is they’ll be keeping track of the skimmers. The nearest to us is Illustrious, isn’t it?’

  ‘’Sright, sir. Just about here.’

  He pointed to a circle near the Faroes.

  ‘He’ll be down to ten knots with the gale up there,’ Pike commented, checking the weather report. ‘We’ll start catching him up if we don’t watch it.’

  ‘He’s still miles away, sir.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m thinking of the Bears. They’ll be searching a good hundred miles all round Illustrious, so we’ll need to keep our distance. I’m going to slow down a bit.’

  He spun on his heel to face the helm and found himself face to face with Cavendish.

  ‘Nick, I’m worried about Bears . . .’

  He explained the problem. The navigator nodded.

  ‘Keep revolutions for ten knots!’ he instructed.

  ‘Why are we so slow?’ Philip had entered the control room, his face betraying no sign of his private agony.

  Pike took him to the chart table to explain his plan.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the satcom, sir. In an hour we’ll be here.’ He prodded the chart with a finger, pointing out the positions of the Soviet boats and their own. ‘Should be the best place to avoid being spotted when we transmit.’

  ‘What’s the sea state?’

  ‘Force six. Gusting seven . . .’

  ‘Going to be uncomfortable. Have to get the mast high to avoid the waves breaking over it.’

  ‘Gets worse further north.’

  ‘Mmmm. We’ll give it a try, then. I’m about to draft the signal. Send the wireless officer to my cabin to collect it in ten minutes, will you? The message will be brief. Very brief. And Tim –’

  Hitchens pulled his first lieutenant to one side, out of earshot of the others.

  ‘That signal that came in – we’ve got new orders. Top secret. The most sensitive operation I’ve ever known. I can hardly believe what they’re telling us to do.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ll brief you as soon as I can, but it may be a few days yet. I’ll have to tell the crew something soon; thought I’d do it tomorrow, on the pipe. Have to keep it vague, but they’ll need to know we’re on a special op.’

  ‘Will you be giving new course instructions, sir?’

  ‘Stays the same for the moment. As planned. Different tactics, though. CINCFLEET says the Yanks are not to know what we’re doing. Got to get across the SOSUS array without them hearing us.’

  That wouldn’t be easy; the hydrophones on the seabed between the Faroes and Shetlands were remarkably sensitive. The American controllers of SOSUS would be expecting them too, and would listen out for them.

  ‘One other thing, Tim. Listening to the signals traffic – it’ll be a bit irregular from now on. We’ll be going fast, so no trailing of the wire. We’ll use the satcom mast when possible, but because of the sensitivity of the stuff coming in, I can’t have anyone but myself seeing the signals traffic
from now on. I’ll have to clear the wireless room when the mast’s up. Commanding officer’s eyes only, you see.’

  ‘Is that really necessary, sir?’

  ‘Yes, it bloody well is! I wouldn’t have said so otherwise! I’ll distribute whatever I can, of course. Intelligence, met., news reports. But it may not be much. That’s all.’

  Hitchens turned on his heel and left the control room.

  Pike’s jaw dropped.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he breathed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sunday 20th October.

  SUNDAY MORNING BROUGHT relief to the small group of media personnel on board the US aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower. The gale had subsided in the small hours; they’d had no idea a ship of 90,000 tons could roll so much. The three members of the television crew pooling pictures for the four American networks had been seasick to a man.

  The Eisenhower was about three hundred miles south of Iceland, heading northeast, the flagship for the eighteen American warships taking part in Exercise Ocean Guardian.

  The six members of the media pool had been flown onto the ship from Reykjavik the previous evening, smacking down onto the carrier deck in a Grumman Greyhound Carrier-Onboard-Delivery (COD) aircraft. For all the journalists it was their first visit to a big carrier and the COD flight the most hair-raising journey they’d ever made.

  Tightly strapped in to rearward-facing seats, the passengers had felt genuine terror as the almost windowless twin-turboprop aircraft was buffeted by gale force winds and manoeuvred sharply to line up with the bucking deck. Even the aircrew had looked scared; they knew what they were supposed to do if the ‘controlled crash’ of a landing went bad and the plane slipped from the deck into the sea, but they also knew the chances of surviving such an accident were slim.

  One of the journalists had thrown up as soon as his feet touched the carrier deck, and the usual briefing on arrival had been postponed.

  Now the six were seated in the half-darkness of the ‘3 deck’ briefing room, listening to the public information officer, Commander Polk. Vu-foils illustrated his talk.

  ‘Good-day, gentlemen. Hope you’re feeling okay now. I just want to tell you something about Exercise Ocean Guardian, so’s you get the big picture. The starting point for the game is this: a huge world power, which has no name but whose national language is Russian, is assumed to have threatened NATO – Norway in particular. Enemy surface ships and submarines are breaking out from their bases on the Kola peninsular. We have to do something about it. We’ve got eleven NATO navies with 122 vessels taking part, which makes it the biggest we’ve ever done.

  ‘Now, we have two jobs to do. The first is to ensure we can control the sea line of communication – SLOC for short. The SLOC is the route across the Atlantic along which American reinforcements would be shipped if Europe were threatened by the Warsaw Pact.

  ‘Right now, warships from the US and from European countries including Spain and Portugal are securing the SLOC for convoys – down here.’

  Commander Polk pointed rapidly from the Southwest Approaches down to Gibraltar, and westwards across the Atlantic.

  ‘What you are on board today, gentlemen, is the flagship of Striking Fleet Atlantic. The task for this group is to take control of the sea and the air, right up to the Arctic Circle. The Eisenhower is now here, just south of Iceland. And we’re headed here.’

  The journalists’ gaze was directed at the most northerly tip of Norway.

  ‘What we’re doing this year is something new. We’re taking this little tub, 90,000 tons of her, right up to longitude 24 degrees East. Now that’s in the Barents Sea, and the Soviets like to think of those waters as their own.

  ‘Gentlemen, the second main purpose of this exercise is to show the Russians and ourselves that we have the power and the motivation to get right up into the Arctic and stop them, if they try it on.

  ‘We’ve got three jobs to do; to back up land-based airpower with our own combat planes in order to defend north Norway; to locate and destroy enemy surface ships and submarines trying to take over the Norwegian Sea; and to get their missile subs before they can scoot under the ice, and nuke our families back home.’

  The correspondent for the TV networks raised his hand to interrupt.

  ‘Aren’t you gonna be a pretty big target for the Soviets to hit, if you go right into the Barents?’

  ‘Sure. That’s why in past exercises we’ve not gone further north than Westfjord.’

  His pointer landed on the Lofoten Islands some four hundred miles south of the northern tip of Norway.

  ‘And if this exercise was for real, we sure as hell wouldn’t put a carrier up there until the air and sea threat had been minimized.

  He turned back to the vu-foil map.

  ‘There are two main threats Aircraft we look after ourselves; submarines – we have a British Royal Navy Anti-Submarine-Warfare force ahead of us, moving north in the Norwegian Sea. The HMS Illustrious Task Group provides the first ASW screen; we provide the second.’

  He looked at his watch. They had to get moving. He could give them more later. First he had to brief them for the photo-opportunity which had presented itself that morning.

  Admiral Vernon Kritz was proud of his ship, and proud of the role it played in containing the Communist menace. He was glad to have the media on board, so they could tell the world just how good his ship was. But this morning something extraordinary had happened that had made him doubly pleased.

  Without their realizing it, he would deploy the media like one of his own weapon systems. What they would show on breakfast television back home was going to make those soft-heads on Capitol Hill choke on their granola. ‘It’s time to trust the Russians’ was their cry. The hell it was!

  The Admiral had summoned his PIO, while the media group were being given their breakfast, and told him what the photo-reconnaissance aircraft had spotted at first light. When he’d seen the pictures of the Soviet freighter and its deck cargo, the commander had blasphemed in astonishment, then apologized hastily, conscious that the Admiral was a deeply religious man.

  ‘Don’t tell ’em exactly what they’re gonna see,’ Admiral Kritz had cautioned. ‘Let ’em think they’re getting the first close-ups anyone’s seen. They’ll get a kick outta that!’

  All the print journalists and stills photographers were bundled aboard one SH-3 Sea King helicopter, the television team aboard another. The outing was described as a ‘photo-opportunity’ to get aerial shots of the Eisenhower and of a Soviet ship that was passing them in the opposite direction about ten miles away.

  ‘It’s a merchantman,’ the PIO commander explained. ‘But we treat all Soviet ships as hostile. Even if they’re not warships, they’re sure as hell spying on us.’

  The helicopters took off and flew in tandem, one hundred yards apart.

  The television correspondent wore an intercom headset so he could tell the pilot of his cameraman’s requirements. Their first request was for a couple of circuits of the Eisenhower.

  Satisfied they’d shot the carrier from every conceivable angle, the helicopter banked away to the south to fly low and fast towards the Soviet freighter’s position, which had been radioed to the helicopter from a Hawkeye radar plane circling overhead.

  ‘She’s some sort of container ship, ’bout twenty thousand tons, called the Rostov. We believe she’s headed for Cuba, but don’t quote me . . .’ the commander shouted above the grinding whine of the helicopter’s machinery.

  ‘How do you know that’s where she’s going?’ the correspondent bellowed back.

  The commander put his finger to his lips conspiratorially.

  ‘Not allowed to tell!’

  The cameraman had been sitting with his legs out of the open side-door while filming, a safety harness buckled round his chest attached at the other end to a hook on the helicopter’s roof. But the wind was bitterly cold, and the crew-chief closed the door again for the transit to the next location.

/>   There was little room inside. This was an anti-submarine machine, packed with sonar screens, control panels, and a massive winch for dunking the heavy sonar transducer in and out of the sea. There was a nauseating reek of hot oil.

  ‘Okay . . . We got the Sov on the nose,’ the pilot’s voice drawled over the intercom. ‘We’re comin’ up astern. We’ll pass left of her then turn right across her bows, and come back the other side. Okay?’

  ‘That’ll be just great,’ the correspondent answered, tapping his cameraman on the shoulder to be ready.

  The crew chief slid back the big square door and the cold blast of air took their breath away. The tail of the Sea King sank as the pilot slowed to fifty knots. The grey-green sea surged a hundred feet below, the wind whipping white streams of spray from the wave caps.

  To their left the black hull and cream superstructure of the freighter came into view. The correspondent pointed at it unnecessarily; the cameraman was already filming. On the funnel a red band bore the hammer and sickle. They’d need a close-up of that; the correspondent saw the cameraman’s fingers press the zoom button. Good boy! He didn’t need to be told.

  Rusting red and orange containers were stacked on the outer edges of the deck, forming a corral with a space at the centre. There was something stored there. Fin-like objects, cocooned in pale fabric.

  The helicopter reached the bows of the freighter and turned across them, giving the cameraman a long, continuous shot, showing the ship from 360 degrees.

  ‘See that stuff in the middle there?’ the correspondent’s voice crackled in the throat microphone. ‘Can’t see what it is. Can you?’

  ‘Look like wings to me,’ the pilot answered.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Wings. Aircraft wings. Could be MiGs. With the rest of the planes in the boxes.’

  ‘Shit man! We gotta get a closer look at that!’

  ‘I can go round again if you want, but I can’t get closer’n two hundred and fifty feet. Otherwise the big man has me against the wall for harassing the Russians!’

  ‘Let’s try it!’

  The correspondent put his lips close to the cameraman’s ear and told him to focus on the cargo in the middle of the deck. A raised thumb signalled he’d understood.