Skydancer

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Why don’t you join me for dinner this evening?’ he had asked hesitantly. ‘I hate going to restaurants on my own.’

  To her own surprise she had accepted immediately, and then became embarrassed by her eagerness.

  They chose a busy little Italian restaurant in Bayswater. Inevitably their conversation had centred on common ground at first, the Ministry and its curious workings. He had been amusingly indiscreet about the way politicians could be manipulated by the technical departments, and she had found her own humour growing waspish as she talked of the odd personalities she encountered in her work. Their conversation had ranged widely after that. They had laughed a lot, and been reflective too. They had compared their upbringings, his in the steely clamour of Tyneside, hers in the quieter comforts of a London suburb. The food had been passable and they had been well into their second bottle of Valpolicella by the time the bill arrived.

  It had still been daylight outside, on a fine summer’s evening, and they had decided to go for a walk; their second bottle only half consumed, Peter had taken it with him, she remembered. Strolling along the railings by Hyde Park, Mary had burst out giggling.

  ‘Just look at you with that bottle sticking out of your pocket!’ she had exclaimed. ‘If you’re not careful I’ll ring the Daily Mirror and get them to come and take a picture of you. It’d look good on the front page with “Britain’s Mr H-Bomb” beneath it!’

  ‘But they’d brand you as a Russian spy!’ he had countered, smiling.

  She had slipped her arm through his, and before long they headed to his hotel to finish the wine. There had been just one glass in his room, so they shared it. It had been years since she had felt so at ease with a man.

  ‘I want to make love to you,’ he had said suddenly.

  The hotel bedroom was cramped, and had smelled of stale pipe-smoke. She had blinked at him in momentary surprise.

  ‘I . . . I think I’d like that.’

  It had seemed as if her voice answered without her brain instructing it. His invitation had been so casual and so natural that it appeared simple, yet quite unlike her to agree so readily.

  She had already known he was married – he had talked about his family during dinner – but on that evening such knowledge seemed no barrier. Normally she would never have considered such spontaneous intimacy with a man – particularly a married man. But somehow this had not felt like adultery; simply a natural conclusion to an extraordinarily pleasant evening.

  It had not stayed so simple however. Perhaps it might have done if they had merely said goodbye the following morning, and returned to their previous official relationship across the desk in the Defence Ministry, but everything had been too good that evening for them not to want to repeat it.

  Peter had arranged to stay in London again a few weeks later, and he contacted Mary discreetly a week in advance. On that second meeting she had asked him more about his wife. She had not intended to at first, but she felt she had to know more.

  At first he had joked about his continuing disagreements with Belinda, and the irony of a nuclear weapons specialist being married to an ardent disarmer. Mary had seen behind the humour, though, and realised his marriage was in serious trouble. Instinct had told her to be cautious, but already she was in the grip of a sexual longing the strength of which she had never experienced before.

  ‘Damn you, Peter!’ Mary cursed in retrospect, tightly pinching the bridge of her nose to try to hold back the tears now relentlessly filling her eyes. ‘It’s all your fault!’

  She picked up the glass from the coffee table and downed the rest of the gin.

  ‘Oh hell!’ she shouted out loud, tempted to hurl the glass across the room.

  Three months had passed since he had told her their affair must end, but that still hurt. Feelings of hatred for him alternated with a passionate craving to win him back again. She had been trying to put it all behind her, but now she would not be allowed to. The investigators were starting to pry – and sexual indiscretion would attract them like bees to honey. Her affair with Peter had been so private and secret; now it would become public knowledge.

  Mary clasped her arms tightly round her chest and shivered. She stared at the silent telephone, willing it to ring, willing it to be Peter at the other end.

  Chapter Two

  FOLLOWING A DAY of acute anxiety, Sir Marcus Beckett had just fallen into an uneasy sleep at his Buckinghamshire home. The telephone woke him abruptly soon after midnight. His wife groaned and pulled a pillow over her ear.

  ‘Great Middleton 2367,’ he mumbled automatically into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Sir Marcus?’ came a crisp voice. ‘Downing Street here.’

  ‘Oh? Oh yes!’ he answered, adrenalin pumping into his veins.

  ‘I have the PM for you, sir. Just a moment,’ the telephonist continued smoothly. There was a click and the sound of an extension ringing.

  ‘Marcus? Are you awake?’ a familiar voice bellowed into his ear.

  ‘I am now,’ he answered quietly, struggling to guess the significance of the call.

  ‘What the hell’s going on, Marcus? Have you seen the Daily Express?’

  ‘We, er . . . we don’t get the papers until morning out here, Prime Minister,’ he winced, dreading what was to follow.

  ‘H-bomb secrets in litter bin. Defence Ministry secrets probe! That’s what the bloody thing says! First edition. All over the front page!’ the head of the Government was yelling down the line.

  Beckett guessed that a few whiskies had been consumed that evening before the early copies of the Fleet Street papers had been delivered to Downing Street.

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ Sir Marcus groaned. ‘How the hell did that get out?’

  ‘More to the point, why the hell didn’t I know about it?’

  ‘I . . . I’d hoped it was a minor matter, a mistake . . . and could be cleared up without bothering you,’ he explained lamely.

  ‘Minor?’ the PM shrieked even louder. ‘Doesn’t sound minor to me! Bloody retired general spouting his mouth off to the papers about how he found a diagram for the new missile warheads on Parliament Hill. You call that minor? What’s the matter with you, Marcus?’

  ‘General Twining talked to the press? I don’t believe it!’ Beckett gasped.

  ‘Well, you’d better believe it, Marcus! So get your finger out of Doris’s bum, and come over here right away!’

  With that, the phone at the other end was slammed down. That man could be disgustingly crude at times, Beckett brooded to himself as he pulled on his clothes.

  It was raining hard as he drove himself towards the capital. Normally he would be conveyed by a Ministry chauffeur, but there was no way of getting his driver to come round to collect him in the middle of the night at such short notice. He was driving his wife’s rusty old Fiat, which he now realised had a decidedly worn exhaust. He would take some pleasure in driving it straight into Downing Street and parking right outside Number 10, something normally unheard of for private cars. He hoped the racket of the exhaust would wake up the whole of Westminster.

  His mind had fully cleared now, and he had determined to counter the PM’s anger with aggression. After all, he had been acting in his friend’s best interest, trying to keep this business out of the political arena. The man should be grateful instead of downright rude, he thought.

  ‘Good morning, Sir Marcus,’ exclaimed the policeman at the Whitehall end of Downing Street, looking uneasily at the car the civil servant was driving. The officer had been warned to expect this late-night visitor, and reluctantly agreed that he could park outside Number 10, but not for too long. He winced at the throaty roar that proceeded on down the street.

  In the event, two hours passed before Beckett emerged again, a chastened man. The Prime Minister had been totally unconvinced by the arguments for keeping him in the dark, and he was summoning a full-scale crisis meeting later that morning. It was nearly 4 a.m., and Sir Marcus decided there was no point in returning to his be
d. The PM wanted to see all his top officials immediately after breakfast, so Beckett drove across Whitehall to the slab-sided building which controlled Britain’s defences. He went straight up to his office on the sixth floor to prepare for the meeting. There were several phone calls he would have to make before long.

  By 7.30 a.m. that same newspaper headline had also caused consternation at the Royal Navy’s Headquarters at Northwood. Polaris missile submarines are sent their orders from inside a deep concrete bunker there, hidden in the leafy suburban hills north-west of London. The Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy Fleet read the Daily Express over his toast and marmalade, sitting at breakfast under the carefully restored Adam ceiling of his elegant official residence a short distance from the command centre.

  Scalding his mouth on coffee sipped too eagerly, he hurriedly scanned the rest of the paper, but found no other reference to the story.

  The admiral was acutely concerned to know more, remembering that HMS Retribution was now approaching the final proving trials of the new Skydancer warheads. Rising from the table, he strode to his study to telephone the First Sea Lord at his official residence in Admiralty Arch overlooking the Mall.

  ‘Good morning, First,’ the C-in-C began. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing your breakfast.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Admiral Baker replied. ‘Had my breakfast ages ago. Been up for hours. Got a morning call from Marcus Beckett at six o’clock. I suppose you’re ringing about the same thing.’

  ‘The story in the Express – I assume you’ve seen it?’

  ‘Certainly have!’ Admiral Baker confirmed. ‘The PM is calling a crisis meeting at 9.30, so it looks serious. Whatever you do, don’t let them go ahead with that test until you’ve found out how bad things are.’

  The Royal Navy was extremely proud of its role as keeper of the British Strategic nuclear deterrent. If the weapon’s secret new ability to penetrate the strengthened Soviet defences had been lost to the Russians, it could be like cutting off Samson’s hair, the two admirals agreed. If that happened, the damaging effect on the Navy’s status could be dramatic.

  Precisely at half-past nine, eight men sat themselves down at the table in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. The angriest of them was Michael Hawke, the Secretary of State for Defence, who was clearly furious that his most senior civil servant had failed to inform him of such a monumental security breach. Hawke had entered politics late in life, and was fiercely ambitious. The fact that the Prime Minister had learned of this security leak before he had would not look good on his record.

  The most unhappy man at the table was the Permanent Undersecretary himself, whose efforts to keep the politicians out of the investigation had failed so dismally.

  They all stood up as the Prime Minister stormed in. It was the sort of formality he expected in his efforts to show that he was as tough and domineering as the woman who had preceded him in office.

  Sir Richard Sproat, Director of MI5, was the first to be called on. Conscious of heading an organisation for which he was still struggling to regain public confidence, he looked uncomfortable as he admitted their investigations had made little progress.

  ‘We have learned one thing,’ he assured the meeting. ‘The Daily Express got their story from some anonymous caller with a well-spoken voice. An English voice at that. He rang their defence correspondent. The quotes from General Twining were then elicited by a newspaper reporter posing on the telephone as someone from the Defence Ministry seeking clarification on precisely where the document had been found. The general was most indignant to find himself quoted all over the Express this morning, and he is demanding that the Government refer the matter to the Press Council.’

  Most of those sitting around the table had felt themselves to be victims of the media at some stage in their careers, and there was a murmur of agreement.

  ‘It’s still far from clear what this security leak amounts to,’ Sproat continued. ‘Some or all of the plans for the new Polaris warheads have apparently been photocopied, and one page has mysteriously found its way in a Defence Ministry folder to a rubbish bin on Hampstead Heath. Now this may well have been a dead-letter box, and the handover to some foreign power may have been aborted by the tramp – we haven’t traced him yet, by the way – and by the general taking his morning constitutional. We don’t know that for sure – but there could well be some other explanation, too. We’re putting out feelers both here and abroad to discover if the Soviets are really behind it, and whether or not they’ve already received other pages from the blueprint.’

  ‘The point is this,’ the Prime Minister broke in, aggravated by the lack of firm information, ‘we have to assume the Russians have acquired the papers – all of them. It’s simply not safe to assume anything else. And we’ve got to make plans to counter whatever advantage the Soviets might now have over us.’

  The PM turned to study the faces of the other men present. The Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary were there from his Government, joined by the head of MI6, the First Sea Lord, and the Chief of the Defence Staff. None of them, though, was fully qualified to assess exactly what was at risk in this affair.

  ‘It’s time to call in that chap we’ve got waiting outside,’ the PM then announced. ‘Would you mind, Marcus?’

  Beckett crossed the room to the door and called down the corridor, ‘Would you come in now, Mr Joyce?’

  As he entered the room, Peter Joyce noticed a look combining both expectation and hostility on the faces of the various politicians. He knew they needed him to tell them precisely what was what – since they were ignorant of the technology – but that they resented the power that his knowledge now gave him. He quietly took the spare chair that Beckett gestured him towards.

  ‘Now then, Mr Joyce,’ the Prime Minister continued, ‘we need your technical expertise so that we can judge the seriousness of this affair. Would you be so good as to explain, in the simplest terms possible, just what the stolen plans revealed. And please remember that most of us in this room are laymen when it comes to the business of ballistic missiles.’

  Peter stood up so that he could get a clearer view of the nine other men around the table. He looked from one face to the next, to see who he recognised. Despite what the PM had just said, four of the men were from the Defence Ministry, so had already been briefed on the project. The security men were the only ones unfamiliar to him.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, as you know, the document found on Parliament Hill was part of the secret plans for Skydancer,’ he began. ‘Perhaps the first thing I should do is remind you why Skydancer was set up to start with. About five years ago, the Soviet Union began to spend a great deal of extra money on Ballistic Missile Defence – literally defences against incoming ballistic missiles. The Americans had already launched their own BMD programme, the Strategic Defence Initiative, the one the media called Star Wars, and, as you will remember, the 1972 ABM treaty between the two countries, which had limited BMD systems, rather fell by the wayside as a result of the technical advances being made.

  ‘We in Britain were faced with a dilemma. We were investing ten billion pounds in the Trident system to replace Polaris, but suddenly faced the danger that the new Soviet Defences might make Trident obsolete early in the next century, only giving us a few years use of it as an invulnerable deterrent. As a nation, Britain cannot really afford defences against Russian missiles, so not only could we not defend ourselves against nuclear attack; we soon wouldn’t have been able to deter one either.

  ‘Well, faced with all this, the Government, as you remember, took a crucial three-pronged decision. The first factor was to cancel Trident as being a waste of money. The second was to launch a new investigation into what form of nuclear deterrence might still be feasible in the twenty-first century. And the third – and this is where I came in – was to instruct Aldermaston to make further modifications to the old Polaris missiles to enable them to penetrate Soviet defences for the next decade or so. And to do that as cheapl
y as possible.’

  Michael Hawke glanced at his ministerial colleagues and winced, knowing full well that Skydancer had been anything but cheap. The expenditure of hundreds of millions of pounds on the project had been the source of constant complaint from other ministers in the Cabinet.

  ‘So we set up the Skydancer programme,’ Joyce continued firmly, ‘to design and build a new front end for the Polaris rockets, which would be clever enough to get through the Russian defences.’

  ‘I think we all know the history bit, Mr Joyce,’ the Prime Minister interjected impatiently. ‘Perhaps you would get to the point now. What we want to know is how much of the project may have been compromised.’

  Peter turned to the PM and nodded. He smoothed back his hair and continued.

  ‘Very well, then. The Russian defences consist of a mixture of technologies, both missiles and high-powered lasers. The key to those defences lies not in the weapons themselves, but in the radar and electro-optical detection systems used to spot the incoming missile warheads, and to track them accurately so that the defending weapons can attack them. Our task with Skydancer was to devise new gadgets that would deceive, blind or mislead those Russian detection systems.’

  He paused to scan the faces of his audience, to see if they were still following him.

  ‘Skydancer itself is what we call a “space-bus”, something that sits on the front end of the missile and separates from the rocket part after it’s been launched from the submarine and gets outside the earth’s atmosphere. This “bus” can manoeuvre in space and change course in a way which makes its future path difficult for observers on the ground to predict, hence its name “Skydancer”.