Shadow Hunter

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Back to the stoke-hole,’ muttered the marine engineer, noticing nothing and heading for the door.

  ‘Yes . . . fine,’ Philip managed to reply.

  He forced down a sip of tea, and felt better for it.

  He gripped the knife and fork and began to eat, forcing the food down. He mustn’t give way like that again.

  ‘If you’ll excuse us, sir . . .’

  Cordell and Smallbone were heading for the door.

  ‘Of course.’

  Lieutenant Commander Peter Claypole was brushing his teeth in his cabin, when the phone call came from the chief of the watch, aft. Trouble with a pump in the reactor’s secondary cooling system.

  Claypole looked like the popular idea of a submariner, stocky and bearded. He was a man of routine; three meals a day, regular as clockwork and never a problem with his health. Bodies were like machines; keep them fuelled and maintained and everything should run smoothly. He thought of submarines in much the same way.

  But now a pump was playing up.

  Passing through the control room, he glanced at the dials on the power panel. They were doing thirty-one knots.

  ‘I may have to slow you down, Tim,’ he warned.

  Pike had been in command most of the night, and looked weary.

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘Let you know.’

  With that he was on his way. Claypole never used two words where one would do.

  He reached the tunnel over the reactor and pulled the lever on the airlock door. Before entering, he checked his radiation monitor card was clipped to his belt.

  He hurried down the tunnel that led aft. Beneath his feet was the reactor compartment with its primary cooling circuits and steam generators.

  Through the second door, and he was into the machine-spaces. He entered the manoeuvring room, the reactor control centre, where every aspect of the power plant and propulsion system was monitored. His eye went straight to the gauges showing the temperature in the pumps. The needle was high for pump three in the number two steam loop.

  ‘Where’s the chief of the watch?’ Claypole asked.

  ‘Three deck, sir.’

  Logical. That’s where the secondary circuit pumps were. He gripped the rails of the ladder and slid below.

  The secondary circuit carried superheated steam from the reactor compartment through the turbines that drove the propulsor and the electrical generator. After the steam had released its energy it passed through a sea-water condenser; then, as water, was pumped back into the reactor heat-exchanger to start the process all over again.

  Two deck. One more ladder, and he’d be there.

  CPO Gostyn was crouched beside the silver-grey pump. He wore headphones connected to sensors built into the pump casing, listening to confirm his suspicion that the grinding noise from inside was getting steadily worse.

  They were two of a kind, Claypole and Gostyn, yet separated by rank and status. Both men lived for their machines, knew the workings of them intimately. But Claypole, with his engineering degree ranked as an officer; Gostyn with his ‘O’ levels and an engineering diploma would probably never rise above warrant officer.

  Gostyn removed his headphones and passed them across. ‘Bearing, sir. Almost certain.’ In a war, machine noise could be the death of them all. The smallest extra vibration or rumble could transmit itself to the water outside and pinpoint their position for an enemy.

  Claypole pressed the phones to his ears.

  ‘Not much doubt. Bloody dockyard was supposed to have checked that last time we were in!’

  They both knew the fault probably lay with a microscopic flaw in the steel used in the bearing, but it helped to have someone to blame.

  ‘We’ll have to shut it down,’ Claypole decided. ‘If we leave it running, it’ll seize. Captain’ll go bananas.’

  ‘Can’t be helped, can it, sir? Not our fault.’

  There were four pumps in each coolant loop, mounted on rubber rafts to absorb noise. Shutting down one pump meant the loss of about five knots.

  ‘He’s not going to like it. Wherever it is we’re going, he’s in one hell of a hurry to get there. What d’you think? If he won’t play ball, how long can we keep it running before it seizes?’

  Gostyn shrugged.

  ‘Fuck knows! If the fucking bearing breaks up, he’ll fucking ’ave to slow down!’

  Claypole smiled. He couldn’t have put it better himself.

  ‘Right. Wish me luck.’

  In the control room Tim Pike was desperate to get his head down, but had hung on to hear what the marine engineer had to say.

  ‘Don’t baffle me with jargon, Peter,’ he began. ‘Words of one syllable please. Two at the most.’

  ‘Got a duff bearing in a pump. Simple enough for you?’

  ‘And you’re proposing. . . .?’

  ‘Shut it down. Means you’ll lose a few knots.’

  ‘That’ll knock us back on our schedule. Captain won’t like it. Do you have to?’

  ‘The bearing could go at any time. If it does you’ll be down to twenty-five knots anyway. Shut it down now and you’ll still have it in reserve – turn it on again if you really need it.’

  ‘Sod it! We’ll need to talk to the captain. This is his mission we’re on. Only he knows our deadline. You’d better come with me.’

  At that moment Philip entered the control room.

  ‘Problem, Tim?’

  ‘Trouble with a pump, sir. MEO wants to shut it down. We’d lose five knots.’

  ‘We can’t do that! We need the speed! And why is there trouble with a pump?’ His voice began to rise. ‘They’re not supposed to need attention from one refit to the next. If one of your men’s fouled it up, Mr Claypole, I’ll have him on a charge!’

  Philip’s eyes blazed.

  ‘Nobody’s fouled anything up, sir,’ Claypole bristled. ‘Leastways, not any of my men. There’s a bearing that’s noisy and overheating. Ship’s engineers don’t have access to them. Dockyard job. But it must be shut down.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what must be done! You’re being too bloody cautious, MEO. If we were at war you wouldn’t be talking about stopping a pump.’

  ‘I bloody would, sir!’ Claypole growled.

  Hitchens flinched. He could smell mutiny.

  The men were staring. He suddenly realized he’d been shouting. Careful! He swallowed hard.

  ‘All right, Peter. What’s the percentage chance of that pump failing?’

  ‘Oh, it’ll fail. Hundred per cent. The only question is when. The bearing’s got a rumble. Low-frequency. Probably not bad enough yet to be heard outside the hull. But it’ll get worse. Could go very quick. If the bearing breaks up and bits of metal get into the lubricating system, then we could write the whole pump off.’

  ‘What’s the chance of failure in the next forty-eight hours?’ Hitchens pressed.

  ‘God knows!’

  ‘Give me your considered judgement. You’re an engineer, aren’t you?’

  Claypole frowned, as if deep in thought. Sod the bloody CO! Why couldn’t he just accept that something was wrong and let them put it right? He tried to remember a previous incident that would give him a clue. He’d never heard of a bearing actually disintegrating on one of these pumps. Still, there was always a first time.

  ‘Outright failure? I suppose the chance of that is low,’ the MEO conceded. ‘But deterioration, with the pump overheating and the noise level becoming detectable outside? The chance is higher. Much higher.’

  ‘In forty-eight hours?’

  ‘Can’t guarantee anything, sir,’ Claypole concluded sullenly.

  ‘We’ll risk it. We have to,’ the commander decided. ‘You can have a couple of knots if it’ll help.’

  ‘Every little bit . . .’

  ‘Twenty-eight knots then, Tim.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Pike acknowledged as Hitchens turned to the chart table.

&n
bsp; ‘And I want reports every hour, MEO.’

  Lieutenant Sebastian Cordell had just taken over the watch from Nick Cavendish, and was leaning over the chart. He eased to one side as Hitchens appeared next to him. Their course had brought them closer to the Norwegian coast, but they were still one hundred and fifty miles west of the nearest land. The Lofoten Islands were well to the south. Beneath them the ocean plunged two-thousand-five-hundred metres to total darkness, and a sea-bed of ooze and rock.

  ‘ETA abeam North Cape?’ Hitchens asked. ‘At twenty-eight knots?’

  Cordell picked up his brass-handled dividers, set them against the latitude scale and measured out the distance.

  ‘About three-hundred-and-thirty miles to run . . .’

  He pulled the calculator towards him and punched at the keys.

  ‘2200 tonight, sir. And that allows for some slow running for comms.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Hitchens looked reassured. He picked up the dividers and measured the distance for himself.

  ‘We’ll be crossing the edge of the continental shelf in about four hours. You’d better start plotting sea-bed soundings. When we get round the Cape there’ll be Sovs everywhere. Won’t be able to poke a mast up to get a satellite fix.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Navigating by reading the topography of the ocean floor was a difficult art dependant on finding large features, like underwater mountains. There weren’t too many of those in the shallow waters of the Barents Sea.

  Hitchens pulled out the chart showing the northern tip of Norway and the western half of the Soviet Kola peninsula.

  ‘Where are we heading after North Cape, sir?’ Cordell queried nervously.

  ‘You’ll know when you need to,’ Hitchens snapped. He slid the chart back into the drawer. ‘Just make sure we get there.’

  Unnerved by Cordell’s question, he turned for the door.

  ‘Call me when it’s time for the satcom.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Philip felt panic rising. It was the tension in the control room that did it. They were all suspicious – all watching him. He had to have solitude to think things through, make decisions.

  He slid shut the door to his cabin, and slumped into his chair. What was truth, what was lies?

  Those KGB bastards! They’d led him by the nose. He’d believed their ‘evidence’, succumbed to their blackmail, agreed to their plan. But was it true, what they’d told him? How the hell could he tell, down there in the dark silence of the ocean.

  And poor Sara. The way they’d used her – trickery, lies. And all to make sure of him, as though the other thing weren’t enough.

  He remembered his stunned disbelief when a completely strange woman had stopped him on the cliff footpath, earlier that year, to tell him his father was still alive. The father whom he’d worshipped and whose disappearance thirty years ago he’d never been able to accept.

  The letter and the photograph the Russian woman had produced as evidence – he could still picture them. The cheap paper covered with his father’s still familiar scrawl had torn a little in the summer breeze.

  It had poleaxed him, shattered him. At that moment, he’d become a boy again, a boy on the edge of his teens; a child who’d idolized a father all too often absent, a boy who craved paternal approval.

  The words in his father’s letter had cut into his heart, pleading, begging that he should do something to end his suffering. The handwriting had been uneven and shaky. They’d broken his father in the labour camp – the woman had admitted it. She’d even apologized; blamed it on the Stalinists.

  She’d waited until their third meeting before revealing the price to be paid for freeing the sick old man. She was sure of Philip by then.

  It was the second letter from his father that had sealed it; the handwriting strayed down the page and told of incurable heart disease. Did he have grandchildren, the old man asked; believing that one day he’d see them had kept him going all those years. He begged that before he died, Philip would make the dream come true.

  Treason was the price to be paid for his father’s freedom. Betrayal of his country’s secrets to the KGB. Betrayal of the Navy which was his whole life.

  Until that moment Philip had never questioned the meaning of ‘loyalty’. It was absolute. Handing British naval secrets to the Russians was unthinkable. But now he faced a choice; loyalty to his country – or loyalty to his own flesh and blood.

  It was only a small thing they asked, the woman had said. Just a small favour.

  A small thing. To lay an inert Moray mine at a precise location off the Kola coast, so it could be retrieved by a Soviet submersible. Retrieved and dismantled, so that the most potent anti-submarine weapon ever devised by the West could be understood, and rendered impotent. A small thing.

  His mind had rejected the treachery; but his heart hadn’t.

  Would it really do so much harm? The Soviets themselves must have similar technology. If they didn’t learn the secret from him, they’d get it from someone else. They’d bribe some underpaid technician at the factory, perhaps. There’d never be a war anyway, so what did it matter?

  It would be difficult, he’d warned her. There’d be no opportunity.

  Yes, there would, she told him. They knew he commanded Truculent, the trials boat for the Moray mines. The thoroughness of the KGB’s research had startled him.

  A few months later, as she had predicted, he was ordered to the Kola, on the ideal mission to fulfil the KGB’s plan. Although just a simulated mine-laying, he would be carrying war stocks, they told him.

  Suddenly he had the means to free his father. It was fate; it had to be.

  He met the KGB woman in Plymouth that night. She gave him the chart coordinates for the laying of the mine, and said his father would be moved immediately to a clinic in a neutral country, where he would be cared for until other arrangements could be made.

  How he would explain the loss of a mine when he returned to Plymouth, he couldn’t imagine. He’d think of something. The plan had to proceed.

  Then suddenly, the whole thing had exploded in his face. He’d found out about Sara.

  He’d been a puppet all the time. There wasn’t just a KGB woman pulling his strings; there was a man too. A Russian who’d seduced Sara months before to make her talk. Talk about him, his obsession with his father, his vulnerability.

  The bastards! They’d invented the whole thing! Faked the letter and the blurred photograph. They hadn’t let him keep them, of course. Couldn’t risk them falling into the hands of the British authorities, the woman had said.

  It had been bloody clever. He cringed at the thought of how he’d fallen for it. God, how he hated them, and their evil masters in the Kremlin. Okay, he’d give them a bloody Moray mine. Right up the backside of an Oscar class submarine!

  Thus he had begun the patrol blinded by anger and a thirst for revenge.

  But now the doubts had come back. Supposing they had been telling the truth after all? Why shouldn’t his father be alive? The writing had looked like his, the words and the expressions had been right. And the photograph – well, who could tell after so many years?

  He sank his head in his hands. He must decide; go through it all again, all the evidence for and against. The reports he’d read of the catastrophic ‘accident’ nearly thirty years ago – think back through them. Remember what the Russian woman had told him about the survival of just two men, who’d escaped the destruction of the old Tenby because they’d been ashore on the Soviet coast when it had happened, taking photographs of a radar site.

  He wanted the story to be true, wanted desperately to bring his father home to England, back to life. But he had to guard against self-deception.

  Think. Think hard. Then decide. He mustn’t have doubts when the time came.

  The last time he’d seen his father had been in Guernsey in August 1962. Philip had been fourteen. That summer he’d felt closer to his father than ever before.

  That’s how he re
membered it anyhow. Had it really been like that?

  His father had been such a confident man, with firm views on everything – never a moment’s doubt in his own judgement. Whenever he came home from sea, Philip would follow him round the house like a dog, he remembered, drawing strength from being close to him.

  His father had been an aloof man, however, and in truth there’d been few occasions when the two of them had been really close.

  It had rained most of that summer. Much of the holiday had been spent indoors playing Monopoly, or even bridge whenever his father managed to bully a fellow holidaymaker into making up a four. Philip had no brothers or sisters; his mother had confided once that giving birth to him had been such a ghastly experience, she’d determined never to repeat it.

  He’d sensed an unusual tension between his parents that summer. Perhaps his mother had known his father was about to embark on a spying mission; perhaps it was something personal. He would never know now.

  When the news came that his father’s boat was Missing Presumed Lost, his mother retreated into extended mourning, bitter at the world for taking away her husband.

  Philip shuddered. Looking back on his unhappy boyhood would do nothing to answer the questions in his head.

  What would Andrew do in his situation?

  He often asked himself that – an old habit acquired soon after the two of them began their naval training together at Dartmouth. To Philip, every decision Andrew Tinker took seemed effortless; the man knew instinctively what to do, while he himself floundered in uncertainty and self-doubt.

  He’d used Andrew as a life-raft when they were students; uncomfortably aware of it, he’d wondered that his room-mate tolerated him so gladly. One day in a flash of insight, he worked out why; for all Andrew’s decisiveness and competence, there was one ingredient for a naval career which he lacked. Background.

  And that was something Philip had plenty of. With a dead hero for a father, and a grandfather who’d been a Rear Admiral, it was ‘background’ that had brought him into the Navy and ‘background’ which he’d hoped might offset any lack of brilliance as an officer.

  Coming from a family with no naval connections, Andrew had hungered for the true taste of the Navy and its traditions. It was a knowledge Philip could provide.