H.M.S. Unseen am-3

by Patrick Robinson

  George Morris laughed politely. “Anyway, they have found literally nothing. No buoys, no signals, no wreckage, no oil slick, no survivors. Damn thing just vanished off the face of the ocean. Sorry, Arnold…off the face of the mudflat.”

  Admiral Morgan chuckled. “They asked us for help yet?”

  “No. At least no one’s told me. But SUBLANT will know.”

  “Okay, George. Keep me posted on it, will you? And if the Brits do get in touch, would you have their Flag Officer give me a call…he’s an old friend just got promoted. Admiral Sir Richard Birley. ’Course when I knew him he was Commander Dick Birley, trying to drive a Polaris boat. We shared a few laughs in London…too long ago. So long, George.”

  Arnold Morgan was late. It was after eight o’clock, the exact time he was due at a small French restaurant in Georgetown for an assignment to which he increasingly looked forward. It was only dinner with his secretary, which might almost have been mundane for a sixty-year-old, twice-divorced admiral. Except this secretary, the thirty-six-year-old divorcée Kathy O’Brien, was possibly the best-looking woman in the entire White House. A long-legged redhead from Chevy Chase, she had worked for the tyrannical Texan since first he had entered the building and almost fired his new chauffeur on opening day.

  For one month she had gazed with awe at his command of the workings of the world’s navies, his knowledge of international events, the intentions of various countries, his total mistrust of foreigners. For another six months she had watched him ride roughshod over men in the highest offices, contemptuous of stupidity, withering in his judgments, cynical in his appraisal of diplomats, especially foreign ones.

  The President himself, a right-wing Republican from Oklahoma, trusted Arnold Morgan implicitly. He actually loved Arnold Morgan. So, fortuitously, did the beautiful Mrs. Kathy O’Brien. And the friendship had grown, hesitantly at first. For it was beyond the comprehension of Arnold Morgan, who had no illusions about his craggy lack of good looks, how any woman could be attracted to him, far less this goddess who worked as his secretary.

  His failed marriages, and the endless criticisms of his wives, both of whom had summarily left him, had created a man who believed that all women were a mystery, and whatever it was they wanted or liked, it most definitely was not him. As such, he chose to “get along without ’em,” and it had been so long since any woman had shown the slightest interest in him, he almost died when Kathy O’Brien said one day, “You, sir, eat too many of those damned roast beef sandwiches, and you drink too much coffee. Why don’t you come out to my house tomorrow night, and I’ll cook you a decent dinner?”

  He was so utterly flabbergasted, he had just said lamely, “Okay, what are you going to cook for me?”

  The slender Kathy, sassy to the last, called back “Roast beef,” as she swung out of the door.

  That had all started a year ago, during which time the admiral had discovered that this lady, who had her own money and did not particularly need the job, offered him what he had never had from either wife. She offered him total respect for what he did. In her heart Kathy O’Brien worshiped him, although she was not anxious for that aspect of the relationship to become known.

  But unlike the wives, she had seen him operate first hand…talking to the President as an equal, laying down the law to people of incredible stature on the international stage. She had seen high officers of the CIA tremble before his wrath. She had seen top brass from the Pentagon arriving at the White House just to hear his opinion. She had fielded calls for him from the heart of the Kremlin. Even from Beijing.

  As far as she was concerned, this five-foot-eight-inch, powerfully built military dynamo was the most important man in Washington. He was important not for his family background, and not just for his job. Nor even for the fact that he had been one of the Navy’s best captains of a nuclear submarine. No, in Kathy’s mind, Admiral Arnold Morgan was important for his towering intellect and his towering personality. He was biggest medium-sized man she had ever seen.

  In turn she never minded if he was late…Christ, he’s probably saving the world. She never scolded him when he forgot a gift, or failed to thank her, or was suddenly unable to accompany her to her mother’s house in northern Maryland. Because she knew him. If Arnold could cram those little matters into his crowded life for her, he would do so. If not, he was probably in the Oval Office, or in the Pentagon, or visiting Admiral Morris at Fort Meade. He could be anywhere. How many girlfriends could say that? Not many. And above all, he was most definitely not a womanizer. As his secretary, Kathy really knew that.

  And now as she waited at Le Champignon, nursing a kir royale, she smiled at how she knew he would look when he came in the door — flustered, irritated, preoccupied, worried he had forgotten something, a look like thunder on his face, frightening the maitre d’ to death, telling him to get someone out there to park his car…until he saw her. And then the pent-up fury of Admiral Morgan would evaporate while she watched, and his face would light up, and he would lean over and tell her that he loved her above all else. And she almost wept with joy at the very thought of him.

  He finally arrived at 2025, having fought his way up Pennsylvania Avenue in the pouring rain, cut across M Street and into Georgetown along Twenty-ninth Street. As she expected, he told Marc, the maitre d’ to get someone to get rid of his car. But he was too late. Marc, like Kathy, was honored to be in the great man’s presence, and he’d had someone out there waiting under the awning ever since Kathy was seated. The admiral always arrived and just jumped out, right outside the door, leaving the car running, with no thought for the two slightly confused Secret Servicemen who followed him everywhere in another vehicle. One of them would drive them both home to Mrs. O’Brien’s house later.

  The admiral greeted her with enthusiasm, since it had been all of three hours since they had seen each other. And he ordered the same drink as Kathy. The admiral was a curious dichotomy, because, for a man who professed to mistrust all foreigners, he had developed the most cosmopolitan taste in food, thanks in part to Kathy, who had lived in Paris with her former husband for almost three years in the 1990s.

  Tonight they chose pâté de foie gras, followed by sole meunière for her, and coq au vin for the admiral. He selected a bottle of 1995 Puligny Montrachet to share with the first course, which Kathy could finish with her fish. And he chose a half bottle of 1996 Château Talbot to go with his chicken. It was an expensive dinner, and they tried to make time for it twice a week.

  Admiral Morgan was financially better off than he had ever been, because his job as national security advisor to the President now carried a salary of almost $200,000, and under a new law he was also entitled to collect most of his admiral’s pension while he served in the White House. The President himself had pushed that law through, because he believed it was absurd that top military people were being lost to government simply because their pensions were suspended while they worked as senior public servants.

  “The pensions have been earned, over years and years of service,” he said. “I expect these outstanding men to be paid entirely separately should they choose to enter another important job in government when their days in the armed services are over.”

  All of this was outstandingly good news for the admiral, because his two former wives had both remarried, his children were grown and earning, and, anyway, his daughter, like the wives, was not actually speaking to him right at the moment. His obligations were minimal.

  Kathy, meanwhile, was noticing that her admiral was not actually speaking to her much at the moment either. He was very much within himself, and munched contentedly.

  “Is there anything the matter?” she asked.

  And he looked up suddenly, “No, no…I’m sorry. I was just thinking about something…kinda bothering me.”

  “What kind of thing? Not me I hope.”

  “No, no. You don’t look anything like an Upholder-Class submarine…entirely the wrong shape…and you’re faster.” He g
rinned his lopsided grin.

  “What submarine?”

  “Oh, it’s just been announced that the Brits have lost a submarine in the English Channel. It’s on all the news channels, and it’ll be in every newspaper tomorrow. It’s the first time they’ve lost one for a half century. There’s a real fuss going on over there. Right now, as we sit here, half the Royal Navy is trying to find it, but there seems to be no sign.”

  “Oh, how horrible. Do you think it’s on the bottom somewhere, and they’re all still alive? How long have they got before the air runs out?”

  “Not long…forty-eight hours at most…and they were last heard from about twenty hours ago. They’re gonna have to move very quickly to save them.”

  “Look, darling, I know how awful it is and everything. But why is it giving you such concern?”

  “To tell you truth I’m not sure. There’s just something in the back of my mind that’s bothering me. I think it’s because there’s been no sign of any wreckage, no oil, no buoys, nothing. Which means it went down intact. Now there could be a complete electrical failure, I suppose, but the Brits are damned good at this sort of thing, and modern sonars are damned good at sweeping the ocean floor. Chances are she’s got some power, but no one’s heard anything. And her area of operations was not that big. They’ve got God knows how many ships in there. And to me that suggests the submarine is not in its ops area. For some reason it went outside the square.”

  “Well is that so bad?”

  “Only because it’s missing. But if it did go outside the square, there are five clear reasons why it may have done so.”

  “Tell me what they are.”

  “One, they got confused, made a mistake. Two, they got careless, weren’t paying attention. Three, catastrophic mechanical failure. Four, the submarine was hijacked by persons unknown who forced the crew to drive it somewhere. Five, the submarine was stolen, and the crew are all dead.”

  “Jesus. Are you serious?”

  “Kathy, let me tell you something. When we lost the Thomas Jefferson, nearly three years ago, the whole darned thing started with a missing submarine. And a Navy that simply did not know where it had gone.”

  “I notice you always get very jumpy when there’s any kind of a problem with a submarine.”

  “That’s because I know what a menace they are in the wrong hands. And I’m not going to be all that relaxed until I know those guys in Plymouth have found it, either in good shape or wrecked. I just hate not knowing.”

  “You haven’t spoken to anyone over there?”

  “No. Not yet. But I was thinking about having a chat with FOSM tomorrow. He’s an old friend.”

  “FOSM?”

  “Sorry. Flag Officer Submarines. Dick Birley. He and I were in London together for a few months. Haven’t spoken to him for a while. But he always sends me a Christmas card.”

  “Do you send him one?”

  “Well, I don’t really do Christmas cards.”

  “Perhaps we should think about rectifying that this year.”

  The admiral smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I think we should. Perhaps it’s nearly time we shared one.”

  “Then you’d have to find yourself a new secretary…and then I’d be the one waiting at home like all your other wives, while you run half the world. No thanks, Arnold Morgan, I’ll marry you when you retire. Not one day earlier.”

  “Jesus Christ. It’s like trying to negotiate with the Russian Navy. I’m not ready to retire.”

  “And I’m not ready to stay home waiting. Besides, I like to keep a good eye on you. And I can’t do that if I’m Mrs. Arnold Morgan. I think things are just fine, just the way they are.”

  “I guess I love you, Kathy O’Brien. Don’t ever go away.”

  “No chance of that. Are we going home, or are you going back to the factory?”

  “We’re going home.”

  310500MAR05. 47.02N 08.49W. Course 225. Speed 9.

  HMS Unseen ran steadily southwest, almost 300 miles from Plymouth, 250 miles from the massive air-sea search being conducted, by four nations, on her behalf. The submarine had snorkeled for much of the night, and her battery was well topped-up as she made her way across the western reaches of the Bay of Biscay toward her first refueling point in the Atlantic, 500 miles off the Strait of Gibraltar.

  Right there, in two days, she would locate the Santa Cecilia. And the crew could hardly wait to get there. Not because of a shortage of fuel, but because of the forty-two bodies piled in the torpedo room, zipped up in the bags, but decomposing and unsettling for the new owners of the ship.

  Lieutenant Commander Pakravan was in favor of firing them straight out through the tubes, with the garbage, but that was principally because he had not given the matter serious thought. When he mentioned the subject to Commander Adnam he quickly realized just how little thought.

  “No, Ali. Wouldn’t work. Every time you use a torpedo tube to get rid of loose stuff, like an ill-fitting body bag, something always gets caught up. Then you have to get someone into the tubes to free it all up. It’s more damned trouble than its worth.

  “I worked out our plan of action long before we left Bandar Abbas, because I knew we would have to dispose of at least forty bodies, because that’s how many Brazilians I knew there would be. The problem is they need to be weighted down. Decomposing bodies blow up with gases, and they float to the surface. Someone would plainly find one of them. So I decided we would have to be very thorough.”

  “You mean we have to get them up onto the casing?”

  “We do.”

  “But they’re heavy as hell.”

  “Yes. I know. We’ll rig up the small-stores davit, with a block and tackle right above the hatch. The blocks need to be 8 feet above it, so that each body can swing out onto the deck. There’ll also be a big canvas bag, the one they use to catch seawater coming down the tower in rough weather on the surface. Looks like a huge spinnaker bag from a sailboat, but it’ll do fine for us. All we need to do is get each body into it, then haul away.”

  “Sir, what about the weights? We don’t have anything like that.”

  “I never thought we would. Which is why the freighter is bringing us a little gift, like 50 cubes of specially cast concrete, each one weighing 80 pounds, with a steel ring, and a long plastic belt to attach it to one of the bags. They’ve been aboard since we first left Bandar Abbas.”

  “I didn’t see them.”

  “They don’t take up much room, just a space 8 feet by 5 feet by 5 feet high. We stored them aft on the middle deck. No problem.”

  “Why do you want to tie them on? Why not just unzip the bags and shove a cube inside each one?”

  “Have you ever smelt a five-day-old body, Ali? I wouldn’t wish that on any of you. Specially times forty.”

  “Nossir.”

  Commander Adnam took her deep at 0600, just as the sky began to brighten over the Bay of Biscay. They would run all day 250 feet below the surface, and then come to periscope depth to snorkel again during the night. The same would apply during the following twenty-four hours, and Ben expected to make his rendezvous with the Santa Cecilia in the small hours of the next day, April 2.

  011200APR05.

  Submarine Staff Office. Royal Navy Dockyard,

  Devonport.

  Lt. Commanders Roger Martin and Doug Roper were absolutely baffled. Not a sight, not a sound, not a fragmented sonar bleep. No wreckage, no buoys, no signals. Nothing. HMS Unseen had simply vanished. Whatever air had remained in the lost diesel-electric boat must have long since run out, and there was no longer any possibility of survivors.

  The situation was officially SUBSUNK. The chilling Royal Navy signal to that effect had been put on the nets the previous day at 0900. This signal is reserved for use only when a submarine is known to have sunk. Consequently, the urgency had gone out of the search, because the ships were no longer involved in a life-or-death race to get the crew off the bottom of the sea.

  Hencefort
h, it was strictly by the book. But HMS Unseen had to be found. And the area of search was being extensively widened, because it was clear the submarine had gone beyond its quite small exercise area. Three Royal Navy frigates and Captain Mike Fuller’s Exeter were methodically sweeping the bottom with sonars, as were the two minesweepers. Eight times they had sent divers down, plus TV cameras, but there was never even a hopeful sign.

  Meanwhile the press were laying it on the Royal Navy. “Experts” were demanding to know how such a thing could have happened. There were already distant allegations about bad training, poor discipline. “What on earth was the Navy thinking of, allowing a bunch of Brazilian rookies to drive this boat underwater?…when it was known they were behind schedule in their training, and presumably competence… was it not a fact that Lt. Commander Bill Colley was unhappy with their progress…was this not an accident waiting to happen…?”

  Every day the Navy was besieged by these simplistic questions, about a wildly complicated problem. The Public Relations department was on duty twenty-four hours a day. And Captain Charles Moss knew that his days in the Royal Navy were probably numbered. Someone was going to be blamed for this, and there was no one else really. He could imagine what the admirals would say. Captain Moss should have initiated SUBMISS earlier when it was perfectly clear there was no communication of any kind from Unseen. And the question of the Brazilians’ competence must come into the matter. Did he or did he not know that Lieutenant Commander Colley was concerned? If not, why not? Captain Moss, aged forty-seven, was already considering his future career opportunities out of uniform.

  020230APR05. 35.22N 14.46W. Course 180. Speed 9.

  240 miles due west of the Rock of Gibraltar.

  Unseen continued south, in the dark, snorkeling. Commander Adnam took a sweeping all-around look for the lights of the Santa Cecilia. They still had ample fuel, but the CO was as anxious as anyone to get rid of the bodies in the torpedo room.