But even if the Soviet captain’s own instinct would be to hide himself under the liner, would he expect Carrington to think in the same way? There was no answer to that.
‘Rendezvous point now half a mile distant, sir!’ the navigator shouted across the control room.
‘What speed the Cunarder?’ he snapped back.
‘Twenty-four knots sir!’
‘Chief, give us maximum revs! I want twenty-eight knots on the clock!’
‘Aye, aye, sir!’
All round the control room, men stiffened at their posts. Eyes focused hard on charts and dials, hands hovered over levers, ready to respond instantly to the orders which were about to come thick and fast.
‘Where’s Boris?’ Carrington barked into the intercom linking him with the sound room.
‘Still on our starboard quarter, sir!’
‘Cunarder’s dead ahead, three hundred yards, sir!’
‘Course?’
‘One-nine-five, sir.’
‘Coxswain! Steer one-nine-zero! Maintain one hundred and fifty feet!’
The chief engineer glanced uneasily at the captain. Getting close to a fast-moving liner was a dangerous business. Unexpected suctions and vortices could suddenly drag the two vessels together. The Cunarder would draw about forty feet, so that only gave them about a hundred feet clearance, not much when travelling so fast.
Suddenly, as one man, the control-room crew all looked up to the curved roof. The sound of the QE2’s propellers was pounding through the hull. The coxswain wiped the sweat from his brow.
‘Cunarder overhead now, sir!’ the voice barked from the sound room intercom.
‘Steer one-nine-five! Drop back to twenty-four knots! Stay under her!’
They were now on exactly the same course as the massive cruise liner above them, where three thousand passengers and crew continued their afternoon activities, blissfully unaware that two gigantic submarines were playing hide-and-seek in the dark waters beneath them.
‘Can you still hear Boris with all this din?’ Carrington shouted into the microphone.
‘Fallen behind to one mile, sir! Still on the quarter!’
What was he doing, that Soviet captain? What was he thinking? Carrington was sure the Russian was now ‘deaf’, unable to hear the British submarine any more because of the noise from the liner. The Retribution was not quite so ‘deaf’, however, because her listening array was towing well behind the liner and between herself and the Soviet boat. They could still hear the Akula, but she could no longer hear them. It was the best situation possible.
What the Russian did next would dictate which tactics Carrington would choose.
‘Sound room!’
‘Captain here!’ Carrington came back.
‘Burst of speed, sir! He’s gone up to thirty knots! Just crossed our track, coming up fast to port!’
At last! He had made his move! Carrington grinned. The Soviet skipper had gambled that the Retribution had maintained a speed faster than the liner overhead and was hoping to disappear through the noise screen. The Akula was racing ahead on the port side of the ship, hoping to recapture a trace of Retribution as she came out ahead of her.
But the bastard’s got it wrong, Carrington chuckled gleefully. He’s not going to find us where he’s going.
‘Coxswain! Hard-a-starboard!’
In the control room, men hung on to tables and supports as the submarine began to heel over and turn sharply to the right. The thudding of the QE2’s propellers began to fade away to port, but they were keeping the noise firmly between themselves and the Soviet vessel. Carrington calculated that as the Akula pulled steadily ahead of the liner on the port side, the Retribution would fall back further and further to starboard, and the liner’s noise shadow would continue to hide them.
‘Lost him, sir! Sound room here! The Russian’s the other side of the liner. Still making thirty knots at last trace.’
‘Reduce speed to ten knots and take her down to five hundred feet, Coxswain,’ Carrington ordered quietly. They needed to go deep rapidly, but had to cut their noise dramatically, too. At twenty-four knots the Retribution sounded like a steam train, but at ten she was a lot quieter.
‘Well, gentlemen? Do you think we’ve done it?’ the captain smiled round the control room.
‘I think you may well have done, sir!’ the navigator grinned back.
‘Better not count the chickens just yet, though,’ Carrington continued, hooking his hands together and stretching the tension out of his shoulder muscles. ‘I’ll be in the sound room.’
Weaving his tall frame round the periscope housings, he headed for the sonar booth.
Two thousand miles south-east of the submarines’ position, Kapitan Karpov was finding the almost equatorial heat of the mid-Atlantic increasingly uncomfortable. The giant Akademik Sergey Korolev was now steaming slowly in circles, waiting for information from Moscow that would tell her precisely where to position herself to observe the British missile test. The British could launch their Polaris from anywhere within an area of several thousand square kilometres. Where the missile was fired from would dictate the part of the ocean in which it would come down, and it was within fifty kilometres of there that the Korolev had to be.
For the time being her massive radar and telemetry dishes were at rest, but when the time came they would be pointing upwards, carefully recording the responses from the Skydancer warheads as they re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, trying to crack the code for the data being transmitted to earth, and to learn something from the outlines and reflections recorded by the radar.
‘I suppose we do have something following that British submarine,’ Karpov grumbled to his first officer. His headquarters had told him no more about the operation than he needed to know. ‘We’ll probably find our submarine is still in harbour with engine trouble!’
‘Perhaps we should ask Comrade Smirnov!’ the other said sarcastically. They had managed to escape the overbearing company of the ship’s political officer for a few minutes. Colonel Smirnov had his own communications equipment on board which kept him in direct touch with KGB headquarters in Moscow. Hence he was often better informed about the ship’s plans than the captain himself.
‘To do that, I’d have to like the smell of his arse,’ Karpov growled. ‘And I don’t.’
That morning a Nimrod reconnaissance plane from the Royal Air Force had flown out from Ascension Island to take a look at them. Kapitan Karpov had never expected to be able to hide a ship as large as his, but he was nonetheless annoyed that the British should have pinpointed his location so easily. He felt certain they had had help from their American allies, who could have used an intelligence satellite to fix the Soviet ship’s position by detecting one of the political officer’s radio transmissions. Even when Soviet naval rules dictated radio silence, the KGB man could not be stopped from calling up his headquarters, much to Karpov’s annoyance.
The RAF Nimrod had made several low passes over the ship, taking photographs of all the antennae mounted on the upper deck. Karpov hadn’t minded that so much; the most sensitive pieces of equipment were safely covered up.
It was late afternoon; there would be no more activity that day. Karpov looked at his watch. The KGB man was bound to inflict his presence on them again before long, and there was something very important to do before he did. Comrade Smirnov was a very youthful political officer, who had done his KGB training at the height of First Secretary Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign. And Comrade Smirnov was not a very understanding man.
The captain pulled open a drawer in his desk and took out a bottle of vodka. With a conspiratorial wink, he passed it to his first officer.
Chapter Six
PETER JOYCE HAD spent much of that Friday pacing round his house in frustration. He was still smarting from the ignominy of being suspended by the Defence Secretary, pending completion of the investigation into the affair of the Skydancer papers.
Shortly before lunchtime
an official car had arrived from the Ministry of Defence, and the driver had handed him a letter from Sir Marcus Beckett formally confirming his suspension on full pay. There had been no other communication and, with Belinda working at the craft co-operative and the children at school, he had been left alone with his thoughts all day.
He knew he had been careless, knew he had broken several security regulations, and that the department had every right to dismiss him if they chose to. But he was certain too that the crisis over the Skydancer secrets was not the result of anything he had done, and had nothing to do with his affair with Mary Maclean.
The night before, his wife had told him about Helene Venner’s strange disappearance, and her consequent suspicion that the woman might have been something other than she seemed. He had telephoned John Black first thing that morning to inform him about it, but the MI5 man had been almost dismissive.
‘You’d be surprised, Mr Joyce,’ he had purred, ‘but in almost every investigation I’ve ever run, there’s always been at least one unnoticed little predator that has felt the heat and decided to break cover and run. We know about Ms Venner . . . and about her dubious relationship with your wife. But it wasn’t she who left your secret documents on Hampstead Heath, I can assure you of that.’
Peter had felt so soiled by that conversation that he had vented his anger on a pile of logs that needed splitting. Later he had taken a walk in the beech woods, unable to shake from his mind the picture of the bloodstains in Mary’s flat. Guilt gnawed at his soul; perhaps it had been suicide after all. Perhaps he was just trying to avoid acceptance of his own responsibility for her death – as Black and Field-Marshal Buxton seemed to believe.
‘No, dammit!’ he thought. ‘They’re wrong, but how the hell do I prove it?’
Something or somebody was being overlooked in the official investigation, deliberately or otherwise. There seemed no other explanation for MI5’s unquestioning acceptance of Mary’s death as suicide. Who or what had they missed? One name kept coming back to him; he knew it was significant. One name . . .
In his house in Hampstead, Alec Anderson took off his spectacles and put them on his father’s old desk. In the last few days it seemed he had spent every waking moment sitting in this library when he was not at work at the Strategic Nuclear Secretariat in the Defence Ministry, with Mary Maclean’s unattended desk outside his office door as a constant reminder of his dilemma.
Pressing down on the leather-upholstered arms of the lovingly restored swivel-chair, he lifted himself up and rubbed the small of his back. He took little regular exercise apart from an early-morning walk, and his joints were stiff. His normally ruddy cheeks had grown visibly paler in the last few days, and dark shadows under his eyes reflected his difficulty in sleeping. Every evening when he came home with another worry-line etched into his face, he took shelter in this room in an effort to avoid Janet’s mostly unspoken questions.
When Mary’s suicide had been reported on the television news – with the Prime Minister’s reassurance that the Skydancer leak had not affected national security – Janet could simply not understand why her husband seemed more distressed at the news rather than relieved that the crisis appeared to be over. When she had probed him about it, he had mumbled something about the situation being a ‘tragedy’, but that it was impossible for him to explain the real reason. How could he tell her that he wanted the crisis to continue, wanted the Ministry to keep its guard up, all in the interests of protecting his wife and the children?
He now looked at his watch: nearly time to go down to the Maid’s Head pub. Every Friday he would go there to meet a small group of friends for beer and billiards. This particular evening it was the last thing he wanted. But Karl had insisted.
Karl Metzger had first joined their drinking circle one evening about a year ago. He had introduced himself as a West German working in the travel business, with an agency in Hampstead High Street specialising in Rhineland cultural tours. He had stood up patiently to their schoolboy jokes about ‘Krauts’, and had quickly shown himself a master with the billiards cue. Soon he had become a regular member of the Friday group, and Alec discovered their shared interest in nineteenth-century painting, which led to a more personal friendship between them.
Anderson sat on the edge of the desk and polished his glasses with a handkerchief. The fruits of that year’s friendship now hung on the walls of his library: some of the finest works in his collection of Victorian miniatures had been acquired thanks to Karl.
Setting his glasses firmly in place again, he peered at the exquisite craftsmanship contained within these small gilded frames. The intricacy of brushwork depicting Swiss and Italian landscapes was the closest thing to perfection that he knew. Yet now he wished to God that he had never clapped eyes on them. Those exquisite little masterpieces had brought him to this present situation which threatened with destruction both his career and his family’s happiness.
Joyce had decided against telephoning before he arrived in Hampstead. He was determined to talk to Alec Anderson that evening, and was worried that Anderson might find some excuse to avoid a meeting. He had never visited the house before, but knew the address from a Christmas card Anderson had sent him the previous year. Belinda had a habit of hoarding old cards which he had never had cause to be thankful for before.
It was nearly ten o’clock as he drove down the quiet side-road, peering at the numbers, till he found the house. A reproduction brass coach-lamp glowed in the porch. Somehow the style of it seemed wrong for Anderson.
The doorbell chimed a melody. Through the bottle-glass panel he could see the outline of a figure moving down the hall towards him, hesitating and leaning to one side as if trying to recognise his shape through the glass.
There was the rattle of the lock and the door opened a few inches, secured by a chain.
‘Yes?’ came a timid female voice from inside. Peter could see one dark eye blinking at him through the gap.
‘Mrs Anderson?’ Peter enquired gently.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m so sorry to trouble you. My name is Joyce, Peter Joyce. I’m a colleague of your husband’s from work. Is he . . . is he at home?’
There was silence as Janet pondered what to do next.
‘Do you have some identification?’ she demanded, talking in a louder voice to project a braveness she did not feel.
For a moment Peter was thrown by the request. It was hardly what he had anticipated.
‘Oh, er, yes, of course.’
He fumbled for his wallet, wondering what sort of document would satisfy her.
‘If Alec is here, he would . . .’
‘He’s not,’ she replied sharply.
‘Well, look, here’s my security pass from Aldermaston. That’s where I work. The atomic weapons place.’
He slipped the card through the crack in the door and she snatched it from his fingers. She seemed to study it for ages, then suddenly the chain was slipped free and the door swung open.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Joyce,’ she fluttered. ‘You must think me very foolish. It’s just that some truly dreadful things have happened in this area to people opening their doors to strangers. And I’m on my own, you see, with two little girls upstairs . . .’
The way she stressed the word girls conjured a vision of rapists prowling for victims. Perhaps he should have telephoned beforehand.
‘I quite understand, Mrs Anderson. You’re absolutely right to be careful, and I suppose it is rather late for me to turn up on your doorstep. It’s just that I need to talk to your husband right away. Do you expect him back soon?’
‘Oh yes, I should think so,’ she replied resignedly. ‘When the pub shuts. It depends on Karl really, and you know what he’s like.’
Janet Anderson was one of those women who tend to assume that even complete strangers know all the friends and personalities who feature in their lives.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Anderson, but I don’t know Karl,’ Peter explaine
d patiently.
‘Oh, good heavens! But how silly! Why should you! Well, he’s a great friend of Alec’s. They meet at the pub every Friday. You see, this is Alec’s night for getting away from me and the children!’ She laughed awkwardly.
‘I have my night off on Mondays, though I don’t always take advantage of it. Anyway, Karl rang this evening to check that Alec was going to be drinking. Sounded terribly keen to see him, and Alec went rushing off hot foot. I wish I could say something to Alec that would have the same effect!’
She laughed shrilly at her own cattiness. She was a short, bird-like woman, forever touching her hair to ensure it was in place.
‘What would you like to do? You could wait for him,’ she suggested eagerly. The thought had suddenly occurred to her that if her own husband would not talk to her about that suicide girl, perhaps this man would.
‘Well, if he’s not going to be very long . . .’ Peter answered hesitantly.
‘Why don’t you come into the library, Mr Joyce?’
She opened the door to the front room and led him in.
‘This is Alec’s favourite room. All his pictures and things are here.’
Peter was immediately struck by its style. An antique glass-fronted mahogany cabinet was packed with leather-bound volumes, and the floor was covered with a Persian rug. At least a dozen small paintings lined the walls.
‘Lovely room,’ he began, crossing to the far wall to examine one of the pictures more closely. ‘These are nice. Have they been in your family a long time?’
‘Oh, no. Alec’s bought them all. It’s his hobby. They’re sweet, aren’t they?’
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