He didn’t know what had prompted the Truculent to take evasive action. They’d certainly not given away their presence. They’d dropped passive buoys only, and had kept above five-thousand feet so the boat wouldn’t hear them through the water.
It had been easy at first; ‘spearing fish in a barrel’ was how he’d described it when they’d detected the boat’s noisy pump over fifty miles away. But now the AQS. 901 acoustic processor was struggling to separate anything from the normal background noise.
He peered over the shoulders of the operators at the green screens. Even on the narrow band analyser none of the buoys they had in the water at the moment had kept a hold on the Truculent’s noise signature.
‘We’ve lost the bastard,’ yelled the Tactical Navigator in exasperation.
The big round screen showed the plot disintegrating. Bearing lines from the buoys, which had converged neatly to give the boat’s position, now diverged wildly.
‘Last seen heading north but believed to be turning west. We’ve got buoys still listening on that side, and there’s nothing.’
‘Perhaps the bugger’s coming up to periscope depth,’ the AEO suggested. They hadn’t used their Searchwater radar so far. No need, and anyway its transmissions would give away their presence to any warship within a hundred and fifty miles.
Mackintosh swung his burly frame down the narrow tube of the aircraft to the radar operator’s position. The bored flight sergeant was idly turning the pages of the Searchwater manual.
‘All fired up?’ the AEO asked.
‘Red hot, sir!’
Tosh reflected for a moment. If Truculent stuck her periscope above the surface, she’d soon know the Nimrod was there. Northwood had told them to keep their presence secret. Yet if they didn’t use the radar they might never find the boat again.
‘Oh, what the hell! Give it a burst.’
The radar operator flicked the switch that brought his screen sparkling to life.
* * *
HMS Truculent.
Cordell checked the control room clock. Just minutes to go.
‘Course zero-four-five. Reducing to three knots. Returning to periscope depth!’
The zig-zag they’d been following should have confused any trackers, in the unlikely event there were any. Their sensors had detected none. But you couldn’t be too careful in these northerly waters; the Bears were everywhere.
‘Periscope depth, sir!’
‘Up ESM!’
The Electronic Support Measures mast, covered with radar detectors, slid upwards, its dome just breaking the surface. Shaped to reflect radar beams no more strongly than a wave-crest, it scanned the electromagnetic spectrum for emitters.
Cordell leaned over the shoulder of the CPO at the Action Information console.
Printed on the amber VDU screen was the data processed by the ESM computer.
‘Four radars detected, but none of them a threat, sir.’
Cordell ran his eye down the list. The first trace was from the Soviet RORSAT ocean surveillance satellite, passing 180 kilometres above their heads. Truculent’s periscope wouldn’t be large enough to register. Two other traces were the navigation radars of passing freighters, the fourth from a Soviet TU-95 Bear-F reconnaisance plane, too far away to matter.
‘Raise the search periscope! Standby, wireless room!’
The search periscope came hissing up from the control room deck. Mounted atop its optical system was a conical satellite antenna.
Cordell pressed his face to the eyepiece and swung the viewfinder through 360 degrees.
‘Nothing in sight!’
He looked away to the control room clock. It was time.
In the wireless room, Hitchens hovered behind the signaller, waiting for the burst of satellite data to be received and stored in the communications computer. At that point he would expel the others from the room, so that he could print out the signals unobserved.
The digital clock completed the hour. On the dot, a red l.e.d. on the satcom panel began to flicker. The signals were being sucked in. Within fifteen seconds the transmission would be over.
‘Aircraft overhead!’ bawled the Action Information rating.
‘Searchwater, sir!’
‘Bearing?’
‘One-nine-two, sir.’
‘One of ours. Thank God for that! What’s he doing this far north?’
‘What’s happened?’ Hitchens had heard the shout and came running from the wireless room.
‘Nimrod, sir. South of us. Detected its radar.’
‘What?’ Hitchens screamed. ‘Get the masts down, you stupid sod! Go deep! Go deep! Get this bloody boat out of the way!’
‘But the aircraft’s friendly, sir,’ Cordell gaped.
Hitchens’ eyes almost burst from their sockets. He looked ready to kill. Fists clenched, he advanced on Cordell.
Then he checked himself, Cordell’s face, open-mouthed, inches from his own. All around him he sensed a stillness, the men watchful.
Unnoticed, Tim Pike had entered the control room. He saw the expression change on his captain’s face. Rage became fear, then bewilderment; then the mask was back in place.
‘Depth under the keel?’ Hitchens demanded, breaking the silence.
‘Two-sixty metres, sir!’ called the navigator.
‘Keep two hundred metres, come left, steer three-two-zero.’
Still struggling to control emotions which seemed not to belong to him, Hitchens took Cordell by the arm to one side of the control room. The boat heeled to port as the planesman responded to the orders.
‘That aircraft. It’s on the exercise. But we’re not any more, see?’
Cordell didn’t see, but nodded as if he did.
‘Now, get us away from the datum. Evasion tactics. Lose the bloody Nimrod!’
Philip pushed past Lieutenant Smallbone and Radio Operator Bennett and closed the door firmly behind him.
Tim Pike caught the eye of the weapon engineer, Paul Spriggs. This was one more incident to add to the list.
Cordell took a grip on himself.
‘Sound room! Call the best evasion depth when we reach it!’ he barked into the intercom. ‘Planesman! Call out the depth every thirty metres!’
‘Sixty metres, sir!’
Built into the outer hull, a water sampler constantly measured the temperature and salinity of the sea, feeding a computer in the sound room which calculated the best conditions in which to hide and distort their underwater sounds.
‘Ninety metres, sir!’
Pike joined Cordell at the chart table.
‘The bastard was gonna hit me! Did you see?’
‘Forget it. Sort yourself out. Concentrate on evading.’
‘I’m not going to bloody forget it! There’s more to this than you know about, sir.’
‘One-hundred-twenty metres, sir!’ the planesman yelled.
‘What d’you mean?’ asked Pike.
‘The reason he’s so bloody bolshie, sir. I know what’s behind it.’
The two men leaned over the chart, so as not to be heard.
‘What?’
‘Well, it’s er . . . , look it’s dead personal, sir. Can we . . . ?’
‘Okay. Tell me later. Now, let’s think what the bloody “crabs” are going to do.’
* * *
Nimrod Eight-Lima-Golf.
‘Riser, bearing zero-one-two!’
‘Got it!’
The tactical navigator tapped the key which brought the radar data onto his display.
‘Turned half a circle from his last position. No wonder we lost him.’
The flight navigator gave the new course to the pilot, and the plane banked sharply. They’d be overhead the submarine in two minutes.
‘Prepare Barra 9 and Difar 20.’
In the rear of the aircraft the air electronics operator selected the directional buoys, set them and loaded them into the ejection tubes.
‘Radar’s cold! He’s gone deep again!’
‘Here we go,’ Mackintosh groaned.
‘I need a bathy-buoy, fast.’
‘Bathy 34 ready in the multilauncher,’ crackled the voice from the rear of the plane.
‘Bathy away.’
‘Barra 9 away.’
They’d just flown over the last known position of the submarine. The tacnav put one buoy to the west and south, told the pilot to turn hard right, and launched the other buoy to the north and east. It would take about a minute for the buoys to start transmitting their information.
‘Difar 20 away.’
‘Can’t we go active?’ the tacnav asked Mackintosh. ‘Best chance of finding him.’
‘Need clearance from Northwood for that, and there’s no time. Just have to keep our fingers crossed.’
One of the processor operators called, ‘Best evasion depth one-hundred-and-fifty metres, the bathy says.’
The bathythermographic buoy had measured the temperature and salinity of the water down to the sea bed. Up here the North Cape Current could produce sudden changes in water conditions that could affect drastically the passage of sound through the water.
‘Touched bottom at three-hundred-and-fifty metres.’
‘Thanks. Anything on the Barra yet?’
‘Nope. Barra and Difar both cold.’
‘Sod him! We’ll have to put a circle round the area. Ten mile radius. And we’ll be out of Lofars by the time we’ve finished.’
‘Time to signal Northwood again,’ Mackintosh sighed. None of this was making his hangover feel any better.
* * *
CINCFLEET, Northwood, England.
Rear-Admiral Bourlet cursed himself for having been so stupidly optimistic. When the earlier signals had come in saying Truculent had been detected, he’d called the Commander-in-Chief to tell him. Admiral Waverley said he’d ring Downing Street immediately with the good news.
Arse-licker! If it weren’t for Waverley’s bum-crawling he wouldn’t now be facing the humiliation of having to tell the PM they’d lost the boat again.
There’d been no further signals from Tenby, but she was still over fifty miles from the search area, and if the Nimrod had lost track of Truculent while sitting almost on top of her, Tenby wouldn’t stand a chance of hearing her at that range.
He finished scribbling a note.
‘Store that signal for Tenby on the satellite, so she’ll get it whenever she calls,’ he ordered, and headed back along the tunnels and up the stairways to the surface.
It was always good to get into real air again. Underground the atmosphere smelled filtered and artificial.
He strode up the tarmac road to the office block by the entrance to the headquarters. The wind had got up and tugged at the White Ensign flying from a mast in front of the doorway.
He took the stairs at a run, and his heart felt surprisingly light considering the crisis he faced.
The reason for his headiness stood waiting outside his office, chatting to his PA, Hitchens’ file tucked under her arm.
‘Ah, Felicity, my dear. Thank you so much for coming,’ he greeted her.
Commander Rush smiled saucily.
‘I took it as an order, sir.’
As she followed him into his office, she turned to his PA and winked. The young WRNS raised an eyebrow.
* * *
HMS Truculent.
The long, black submarine passed undetected from the Norwegian Sea into the Barents. She’d zigged and zagged, alternating thirty knot bursts of speed with periods of near immobility. For the Nimrod to have kept up with her progress would have taken more than skill; the RAF would have needed extraordinary luck and an almost limitless supply of sonobuoys.
Without closing with the surface again, they’d never know for sure that they’d thrown off their shadow, but Sebastian Cordell was confident they were safe when he handed over the watch at lunchtime to Lieutenant Nick Cavendish.
‘We got a satellite fix before the old man panicked,’ Cordell confided to Cavendish. ‘It showed the SINS is still spot on. We’re here, at this moment.’
He pointed to a position half way between the shallows of the Fugley Bank and the pinnacle of rock thirty miles northwest of it which rose from the ocean floor like an aberration in the almost flat underwater landscape.
‘Course-change due at 1315. New course zero-nine-eight. Next stop North Cape. All aboard for the mystery tour!’
Cavendish shook his head.
‘He thinks we’re a load of bloody schoolchildren,’ he scoffed, ‘not old enough to be told the facts of life! It’s not on, you know. Bloody dangerous if we don’t all know what we’re up to. Did you get an intelligence summary on the satcom?’
‘Yep.’
He pushed across the page of teletype.
‘Still no mention of Tenby. Odd that. Nothing since Sunday, as if she’d disappeared.’
‘Perhaps she’s doing the same as us. Covert op,’ Cavendish suggested. His eye ran further down the page to the Soviet deployments. ‘Christ! That’s quite a barrier for the Sovs. They don’t usually get that many ships out for us.’
‘Mmmm. I think we’ll be looking for some little friend to help us through, don’t you?’
Sebastian patted Cavendish on the shoulder and left him to it.
Lieutenant Commander Tim Pike was waiting for him in his cabin. The first lieutenant looked tense, and tugged at the short tufts of his ginger beard.
‘Okay. Let’s have it. What is it you wanted to say about the captain?’
Cordell felt a hot flush creeping up his neck.
‘Oh, sit down, Sebastian, for heaven’s sake.’
Pike pointed at the spare chair.
‘As I said, sir, it’s rather personal. But . . . , well . . . , about a couple of years ago I met a girl – a woman – in a restaurant, and we . . . , we went to bed together. I only knew her by her Christian name, you see. But it turned out she was Mrs Hitchens,’ Sebastian concluded miserably.
‘What? You’ve been knobbing the captain’s missus? You rotten little sod!’
‘I didn’t know at the time, sir. She did all the picking up, not me!’
‘I can believe that,’ mocked Pike. ‘Bloody hell! And you think the captain’s found you out, is that it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And that it accounts for his um . . . , overreaction this morning?’
‘Exactly. And not just this morning. He’s been pretty odd the whole patrol.’
‘And you think it’s all down to you?’
‘Well, yes. I suppose I do.’
Tim Pike frowned. Could it be as simple as that? He doubted it. Rumours about Philip Hitchens’ marital problems had been circulating for months, yet it hadn’t affected his professional conduct before.
‘Okay, Sebastian. Thanks for telling me about it. It’s right that I should know. And I shan’t tell anyone else, don’t worry.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Now, you’d better get along to the wardroom, or there’ll be no lunch left.’
‘Right, sir.’
Why would Sara Hitchens want to seduce a boy like Sebastian, Pike wondered? Did women fancy kids just out of school?
He spun the combination lock on the small wall-safe beneath his desk and took out a notebook. He looked through the list of things that had concerned him about Commander Hitchens on that patrol.
Each incident of jumpiness, aggression or secretiveness looked small and insignificant on its own, but a picture was beginning to emerge. But a picture of what?
Evidence of mental instability? Or just the tension of working under highly secret, highly sensitive orders?
But Hitchens had been on the point of strangling Cordell in the control room earlier; Pike had seen it with his own eyes. He’d lost his self-control, and that was dangerous. If he did it again when they were in contact with the Soviets he could put all their lives at risk.
The curtain across the doorway was brushed aside and Paul Spriggs came in. He s
potted the notebook.
‘Something new happened?’
‘Could be.’
They’d each been making notes on Hitchens since the previous morning, keeping their writings separate. That way, if it came to anything, each man’s evidence would have some claim to validity.
Suddenly the tannoy crackled.
‘Do you hear there! Captain speaking.’
Both men looked at one another in surprise. Pike was expecting to make ‘the pipe’ himself in a few minutes’ time.
‘Thought you’d like an update on our situation. We’ve just altered course to the east. Should be abeam North Cape sometime later tonight. We’re heading on into the Barents Sea. Things are pretty tense up on the surface, so we’ll all need to be very much on our toes from now on’.
‘Things are pretty tense down here too, old chap,’ Pike muttered.
‘According to the World Service News summary,’ Hitchens’ voice continued, ‘there was a little confrontation yesterday between one of the American flat-tops and a Soviet Bear bomber that got too close. The Yanks came within an inch of shooting it out of the sky.’
‘Fucking Americans! Always overreact,’ snarled Spriggs.
‘The Soviet Northern Fleet has mustered a pretty strong ASW barrier to protect their bastions. We’ve got to get through it tomorrow, undetected, and close with the Kola Inlet before all their SSNs get loose. Can’t say any more than that at the moment.
‘Ahead of us we can expect up to two Victor Ills and two Sierras, according to the intelligence report. With a bit of luck three of those will be well to the north of us, but we’re sticking close to the coast – we have to because we’re in a hurry – so there’ll be a few SSKs around and a lot of aircraft.
‘I’m sorry we didn’t manage to take in any family-grams this morning. We had to put the mast down before we’d received them – for operational reasons.’
‘Huh,’ Pike mocked. ‘In case our own side finds out what we’re up to.’
‘Do you mean that?’
‘Shh!’
Shadow Hunter Page 20
