Taking the Tunnel

by James Adams

  Freedom had brought with it the successes she had dreamed of. But then the British had done their deal with the Chinese and it had all suddenly gone very sour. Her belief in British justice had been destroyed and her confidence that she could rely on British honour to stick to promises already made had been cruelly undermined.

  At the start of the Tunnel crisis, she had actually believed that the British might finally be persuaded to do what was right and just. But each successive meeting she had attended had depressed her further. After the first few hours, the participants had taken up positions which were supposed to be flexible but which were in fact set in stone. No one wanted to argue for negotiation, for it would be seen as weakness amongst a group that had trained in and practised a policy of never giving in to terrorism. Instead the focus had shifted to turning the crisis against the IRA, and as that sideshow had played out, there had been considerable satisfaction around the table that something had been salvaged from the mess.

  But Mary knew that if the assault on the Tunnel went ahead, there would be a bloodbath. She knew the Triads, understood how they trained and how they worked. She knew that lives — both among the terrorists and the hostages — would be lost and nothing gained. The apparent satisfaction that men got from the prospect of action she thought childish. Unable to contain her anger she spoke directly to Whitmore.

  “I don’t think you understand just what you are planning to do,” she began.

  Whitmore turned to her, his spectacles glinting in the fluorescent light, eyebrows raised in interrogation. She saw his lips move in that half-smile which the British reserve for foreigners when they think they are being welcoming but are, in fact, merely being supercilious.

  “I know these people. I understand how they think and how they work. It was Sun Tzu who told us that “The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.” In other words, the people in the Tunnel will have prepared for this, be expecting you as they were last time. You go into the Tunnel and the people holding the hostages will kill as many of them as they can. There will be carnage in there.”

  “Oh, I think you underestimate the capabilities of our forces, Dame Mary,” Whitmore said, his tone dismissive of her remarks.

  Mary brought a small fist down on the table, her anger now clear to everyone. The noise the blow made was small but its effect was to still her audience. They were shocked. All those who had played the COBRA war games had learned to think and do without outward display of emotion. This outsider clearly didn’t understand.

  “No. I understand what your SAS can do. But I also know that the terrorists will be dedicated people. They will give their lives for a cause they believe in and I can assure you they believe in what they are doing. And you choose to believe that if you take the Tunnel, this will be over. These are Chinese people; they deal in subtlety, in move and counter-move. You recapture the Tunnel and what then? Perhaps you will simply expose the next move in the game, a move that could be far worse than anything we have seen so far.”

  Jonny had listened to Dame Mary with growing respect. She believed passionately in her people but equally believed in trying to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. It was clear where her sympathies lay but, even so, what she said made sense.

  “I agree with Dame Mary,” Jonny interrupted. “These men are tough. They will have fought dozens of battles for their masters in the Triad and will be used to the idea of violence and its consequences. Once they know you are attacking, they will kill the hostages and then fight to the end. It’s going to be very messy whatever we do. The key is to keep surprise on our side and that means stopping any orders reaching Dai Choi and his men.”

  “And what happens if you attack, free the hostages and kill the Chinese in the Tunnel?” Mary Cheong asked. “You have demonstrations in Hong Kong today, you’ll have riots tomorrow. General Foley has told you — and you know he’s right — that he will be unable to keep control of the situation. You won’t be able to get reinforcements there fast enough and the Chinese will move in rather than have their crown jewel destroyed.”

  Whitmore took off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “I think you are being over-alarmist, Dame Mary. If we send the Gurkhas from Brunei today then they should be there in time to help keep the security situation under control. The alternative is negotiation, which will only be fruitful if we actually plan to concede anything, and I’m afraid that remains out of the question. However, if you have any alternative suggestions, I would be happy to hear them.”

  It was clear to her that the course for confrontation was set, that there was no further point in hoping that those in the Tunnel could provoke a change in policy. It was time to try and extract some dignity from a lost cause.

  “There is one solution we haven’t thought of,” Jonny began, thinking out loud. “The one person the terrorists might listen to is Dame Mary. She is the one person all the Chinese in Hong Kong respect and her commitment to the cause they are fighting for is well known. Perhaps if Mary spoke to them directly and at the same time we stop any other instructions getting through?” He left the thought hanging in the air. It was Whitmore, still smarting from her attacks, who picked it up.

  “That’s a splendid idea,” he said warmly, his voice picking up speed as the thoughts gelled. “We could fly you down in a helicopter, rig up some system so that you could talk through a microphone straight into the Tunnel. Great idea.” And it would play well on the news tomorrow morning, he thought to himself: “GOVERNMENT’S OLIVE BRANCH”. He could see the headlines now. He turned expectantly to Dame Mary.

  “Actually, PUS, there’s a chopper leaving from the Horse Guards parade ground in ten minutes,” said Williams. He had kept to his part of the deal. The helicopter will take Jonny down to Campbeltown and it could take Dame Mary as well.”

  There was a pause. Then, realizing that she had been cleverly boxed in by her own concerns, Mary spoke, scepticism clear in her voice. “Well, I suppose I could give it a try. I can’t believe that I could do anything to persuade such dedicated people to surrender. But if you think I can, of course I’ll try.”

  “Good. Good,” Whitmore was almost rubbing his hands together in satisfaction. “I knew we could rely on you.”

  “Right. John,” he said, turning to Witherow. “You make the arrangements to fly Dame Mary down there. I’ll go upstairs and give them the current state of play. We should reconvene in three hours by which time we’ll have the result of Dame Mary’s peacemaking.”

  Jonny thought that Dame Mary’s expedition would almost certainly be futile. Fie simply could not imagine that some of Hong Kong’s most hardened hoods would give themselves up on the basis of some sweet words from anybody, let alone a woman, and particularly after they knew that they would all be charged with murder. It was a futile gesture.

  Whitmore got up to leave the table and the others followed suit. As Jonny and Williams left the room, a police officer came up to Williams and muttered in his ear. Williams turned to Jonny. “Our men are with your wife. She got a call a few minutes ago and needs to speak to you.”

  Jonny called the number and a moment later a frantic Lisu was on the line. They’ve taken her, Jonny. They’ve taken her.”

  Taken who?” he responded automatically, although he already knew the answer.

  “Julie. They’ve taken Julie. A man rang a few minutes ago to say that they had her. You’re to go back to Hong Kong tonight or they’ll kill her.”

  He put the phone down. He felt the anger course through his veins. Again, White Lotus had moved against him. But this time the pressure point was badly chosen. He owed Julie his life but theirs was a relationship between professionals and she knew the risks. Flying back to Hong Kong was unthinkable. That way lay the certainty of defeat. In the Tunnel was Dai Choi. It was a sim
ple decision.

  CHAPTER XXV

  Mike Hodder and his team needed to know precisely where the train was in the Tunnel. That would tell them which access hatch to approach with the mini submarine. The task should have been easy enough but the destruction of the electrics in the Tunnel had taken away the eyes and ears of the Tunnel controllers. They knew to within a mile where the train was but that was not good enough. One hatch removed from the right location and Hodder would drop not on the train but into a trap.

  Since the end of the Second World War, the focus of all submarine development work has been on either the detection or suppression of sound. Sonar, which detects sound emissions, has become more sensitive, while all parts of a submarine have been made quieter until the limits of what is scientifically possible have almost been reached.

  It was an ex-Royal Navy able seaman sonar operator called Jeff Sims who provided the Nato navies with the answer. After leaving the Navy he had joined the Liverpool Fire Brigade and was one of those called to fight the spectacular blaze that engulfed much of the city’s undeveloped old docks in 1985. Searching for bodies in the rubble he had used a new piece of equipment recently purchased by the Brigade. It was a hand-held infra-red detector that could send out an invisible beam through the rubble to detect heat spots. It was astonishingly effective and solved the age-old problem both of finding the dead and injured and seeing the heart of a fire in the middle of a large blaze.

  Fireman Sims mentioned the equipment to a submariner friend and idly wondered if such a system would work underwater to detect submarines. His friend mentioned it to the weapons engineering officer and he in turn talked to a friend at Marconi Underwater Systems. A little idea became a stunning technological breakthrough.

  The result of that development is the Tentacle, a new system for detecting submarines that has only just started being installed in British anti-submarine frigates. It is so new and so secret that few in the Royal Navy have even heard of it and it was only in 1993 that the US Navy was given a demonstration of its capabilities.

  The technology is simple yet revolutionary. A ship tows behind it a small robot which has a number of highly sensitive infra-red sensors on board which can detect heat sources at up to 11,000 metres. At a stroke, the ocean, which had become at best opaque, and more usually pitch black, was transparent once again. All submarines give off large amounts of heat and wherever that signature is, Tentacle can detect it.

  Tentacle had never been used to try and detect heat through rock. But after a hurried meeting in his cabin with the principal warfare officer and an equally hurried conversation with Marconi Underwater Systems at their headquarters in Waterlooville, Greaves thought he had a solution to Hodder’s problem that was worth trying.

  The Batch 3 of the Broadsword Class had been back-fitted with Tentacle beginning in 1992. Campbeltown had received the system at the beginning of 1993. It was stowed aft on the port side, opposite the more conventional towed array sonar which was also used to detect submarines.

  Since taking up position over the Tunnel, Jeremy Greaves had ordered action stations and moved down from the bridge to the operations room one deck below. Looking around the square room from his small stool in the centre, Greaves could understand why it was known as the gloom room to officers and men alike.

  The light was dim, the only illumination coming from the reflected glow of the screens and the red lights recessed into the metal ceiling. Behind Greaves eight screens provided the picture for the tactical and surface plot and for the control of the helicopter and its dipping sonar. To his right, a flat table recorded the general operations plot and three screens provided different sonar images for the surface and subsurface.

  In front of him there were four larger screens. The two in the centre drew information from all the different systems for the two principal warfare officers (PWOs) who coordinated the response to threat from the sea surface, the air and the subsurface. The left-hand screen controls the Harpoon anti-ship missile and the right-hand screen handles Tentacle.

  To Greaves’s left there were six screens for the weapons systems, including Sea Wolf, Goalkeeper and the 4.5-inch gun. There were also two seats for the electronic warfare director and his deputy. In a modern ship, the EW is critical to a ship’s survival and it is his response, often measured in seconds, which really matters. Ironically, in such a high technology environment, the PWO carries a whistle around his neck which he blows to attract attention. This not only works but avoids blocking the communications channels.

  Each man in the room wore headphones and had a small boom microphone in front of his mouth. Through his own headphones Greaves could hear the low-level chatter as his men constantly updated the data appearing on the screens before them. It was a whispered Babel of sound.

  Greaves levered himself out of the leather chair and walked the five paces to the Tentacle operator’s console. Looking over the man’s shoulder, he made out the bushy white beard and knew that Petty Officer Bob Pleming was manning the Tentacle. Good, he thought with relief, the most experienced hand for the job.

  “What sort of picture are we getting, PO?” he asked.

  “It’s not bad, sir,” Pleming replied, “but it’s taking a long time. The Tentacle’s working at the limit of its range and we are having to go very slowly just to get the returns.”

  Greaves looked at the screen in front of Pleming and watched as the image unfolded. One mile astern of Campbeltown, the heart of the Tentacle, a sphere-shaped object four feet long, was being towed through the water twenty-five feet above the sea bed. The Tentacle has a hundred small saucer-shaped blisters attached to its body which look very like the suction pads on an octopus’s tentacle. In fact each blister is a highly sensitive infra-red detector. The images picked up by the sensors are relayed down the command wire and then converted by a Logica 3020 computer into pulses of electricity.

  The screen in front of Greaves had a black background with a white overlay which showed the ambient temperature of the sea. As the temperatures picked up by the sensors became colder so the white turned progressively more blue; as it picked up sources of heat, the white turned red.

  “You can see that we have found the Tunnel.” Pleming pointed to the pink oblong within the dark blue of the cold chalk and rock of the sea bed. “Our problem has been pinning down the train and the people. So far we’ve got the outline of what looks like the two train carriages.”

  His hands flickered over the keyboard, delving back into the computer’s memory. The screen cleared and a new set of images appeared.

  “This was the third pass; the clearest so far. You can see the carriages and there are two concentrated heat sources within that which could be the terrorists and the hostages.”

  Greaves looked at the screen and could see the changes in colour but little else. As always, he was astonished at the detail a good operator could prise from the merest hint of information appearing on the waterfall in front of him.

  “Well done, PO,” Greaves congratulated him. “We’ve got enough for a Go. Keep at it and see if you can extract some more details.”

  Greaves walked out of the ops room, turned right down a flight of metal stairs and walked 200 feet to the helicopter hangar at the stem of the ship. Inside the hangar, the outer doors were shut, blocking the view of the Avalon secure on her missile mountings. The SBS team were there, their equipment spread out on the deck. Each of the men was bent over a small pile of gear going through the meticulous checks that all Special Forces do as a matter of routine before trusting their lives to the machinery that is supposed to give them the edge against the opposition.

  Seeing the captain enter the hangar, Hodder put down a gas mask and moved towards him.

  “Well, Mike, we’ve found your bandits,” Greaves said.

  “Great. Great,” Hodder replied. “Are they near one of the access points?”

  “As far as we can tell, it looks like you should be able to drop among them. But what they’ll have wa
iting for you we can’t tell.”

  “That’s my problem, Captain,” Hodder replied. There was a grimness about the man, Greaves noted. His men had changed out of their Royal Marine uniforms into all-black neoprene diving suits and now they were busy festooning their smooth bodies with all the accoutrements of war. They looked sinister and chilling, Greaves thought. He was glad he wasn’t going with them to see their bloody work at first hand. He preferred the remote and clinical war decided by missile or torpedo. These men were trained in the arcane skills of close-quarter killing.

  “Do we have a Go from Northwood?” Hodder continued.

  “I’m just going to send them a signal that we have located the terrorists. We should get a response pretty quickly provided they can get the politicians to make a decision for a change. I suggest we meet in my cabin in twenty minutes.”

  Hodder saluted and turned away, anxious to return to the comfort of the weapons and systems he understood.

  The IRA are patient observers of the foibles of men. Their intelligence cell that operates under the direct control of the Army Council is extraordinarily methodical. The small staff of seven work from an anonymous terraced house in Clonard Gardens in the Falls area of Belfast, just down the road from the St Vincent’s Convent School. They cut and paste from magazines, reference books and newspapers, piecing together pictures and articles on potential targets.

  Curiously, one of the most useful sources of information is parish newsletters. Many of their targets tend to be churchgoers and newsletters frequently recount their activities around their home. To manage this resource, the IRA established a small Dublin-based church charity in the early 1989s which claimed to carry out missionary work in Africa. A letter to ail the parishes in England including a modest donation to church funds and asking for copies of parish newsletters as examples to the struggling Christians in Africa had proved remarkably productive.