H.M.S. Unseen am-3

by Patrick Robinson

  He knew one thing, however. For the first time in his life, he was in danger of losing his grip. Because there was nothing for him to do. He was friendless, stateless, and certainly homeless. And his ungrasped straw was Laura.

  Ben did not sleep at all that night. Partly because he was afraid to do so, because of the nightmares. But mostly because he knew he had to move and seek out a direction. The problem was he could not even make a phone call, because there was no one he could call. One false move, and he would be arrested and possibly deported to the United States, where he was undoubtedly Public Enemy Number One. If they nailed him, they would not, he knew, bother with murder or life imprisonment. He would face a charge equivalent to treason against the state, and that, he guessed, meant the chair.

  He drank just coffee at breakfast, in sharp contrast to the splendor of the spread that was prepared at the MacLeans. The admiral loved fish for breakfast, so long as it was served after 0900, and Angus had prepared both kippers and poached haddock, for two, since none of the female members of the household had yet made an appearance.

  Bill had never had fish for breakfast, but he entered into the spirit and tasted his first kippers, ended up having two pairs of the rich, smoked Scottish herrings.

  Over China tea, and toast with locally made chunky marmalade, he and the admiral settled down to chat about the Great Theory. The atlas was already open on the table. “Well, Bill,” said Sir Iain, “what did you come up with?”

  “Not much really. I was tired as hell, and Laura wanted to play some opera for sentimental reasons. By midnight I thought Rigoletto was driving HMS Unseen.”

  The admiral chuckled, and produced some newspaper clippings. “Here,” he said, “read this one…it’s got the stuff in it from the lobsterman, the stuff they have all, apparently, dismissed as unreliable. I’d be glad if you’d read it.”

  Bill did so slowly. “Well, Mr. MacInnes was pretty definite, wasn’t he? I mean about the Zodiac suddenly showing up in the small hours of the morning. And he was also pretty definite about the new guy on the fishing boat, the one wearing the military jacket.”

  “Wasn’t he, though? Very definite. And I can understand why. That chap has lived all his life in Mallaig, where his father was also a fisherman. The sight of that harbor is unchanging. Anything slightly out of the ordinary would register, even to a man who’s had a few drinks. He’s probably seen Gregor Mackay’s boat pull out of that harbor a thousand times…but on that particular day he noticed something different, a new face…strange clothes. A man standing on the stern by the Zodiac, where MacInnes had never seen anyone before. To him, that would be a major departure from the norm. As if you reported to Boomer Dunning’s Columbia and found a Zulu warrior at the periscope.”

  Bill laughed, but he was very serious. And he interjected, “Like seeing a sheep on my land. We’ve never raised them. Just cattle.”

  “Exactly so, Bill. That man, even through the alcohol, remembered. If I were the investigator, I’d regard the drinks as a plus, not a minus.”

  “I think I would, too, Iain. So what you’re saying is that someone got off the fishing boat, in the Zodiac, and drove it all the way back to Mallaig. Christ, it’s gotta be, what? A hundred and sixty miles?”

  “At least…more like 175, I’d say.”

  “It couldn’t carry that much gas, could it?”

  “Easily. If it had four of those four-and-half-gallon jerry cans. Then it might.”

  “Well, let’s assume, it did. What does this have to do with the man commanding the rogue submarine?”

  “Only that someone may have got off the rogue submarine.”

  “Onto Gregor Mackay’s kipper ship?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You think he was out there recruiting?”

  Sir Iain laughed loudly this time. “Bill, I love that American sense of humor…but that’s not really what I meant. I meant maybe Gregor’s boat had been hired to go out and take someone off the rogue submarine.”

  “But who could have hired it? The Iraqi Embassy?”

  “No,” replied the admiral. “But how about the foreign-looking laddie in the Navy jacket standing by the Zodiac.”

  “Jesus, I’ve been so busy making jokes, I never really thought about that.”

  “Well, son-in-law. Think.”

  “Right. I’ll do it. One question. How far from the place Air Force Three went down was the Flower of Scotland’s last-known position?”

  “I’ve calculated it, Bill. The VP crashed at 53 North, 20 West. The Flower’s last known was around 57.49 North, 9.40 West, about 490 miles. That’s the distance between the final hit on Air Force Three and the place where the Flower of Scotland vanished.”

  “How about timing?”

  “The Boeing was lost around 1300 GMT on Sunday, February26. The harbormaster at Mallaig lost contact with Captain Mackay on the night of March 1.”

  “So the submarine had six days to get there.”

  “It would have done, my boy, if February had more than twenty-eight days in this non — leap year.”

  “Christ, I’d forgotten about that. So it had only a little over three and a half days?”

  “Correct.”

  “You got a calculation on that, sir?”

  “Uh-huh. Four hundred ninety divided by three and a half is 140 miles a day. Divide that by 24, and you have a nice quiet little running speed of 5.8 knots. Just about reasonable for a submarine creeping away from a crime to a meeting point, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Just. But then what? Ben gets off, pinches the Zodiac, and somehow sinks the fishing boat? I can’t buy that. If Captain Mackay had come all the way out to meet him, why didn’t Ben just travel to Mallaig with the boat?”

  “Well, I agree, Bill. It’s all a bit far-fetched. But in the middle of it all, we do have one incontrovertible fact — the fishing boat did vanish. I suppose Ben, or whoever it was, could have shot the crew dead, left in the Zodiac, and lobbed a hand grenade on board as he went. But that’s unreal, reckless thinking. Not at all like him. Too noisy. Too likely to be discovered. What if someone heard the explosion? He could not afford that.”

  “And how about the gas for the outboard? There’s no chance there was enough for 175 miles. And the trawler’s diesel fuel would not work in an outboard. Which puts Ben in the middle of the Atlantic in the middle of the night with no fuel. Don’t like it, sir. Doesn’t stack.”

  “Not quite. I agree. And the disappearance of the trawler is something I don’t really have an answer for. But Ben would know how to sink a boat…if he was prepared to kill the captain and the two crewmen.”

  “Only to be stranded himself, Iain. Stranded absolutely nowhere. And no way to get anywhere.”

  “Ah, but Bill. There is something you have forgotten. Someone got somewhere. Someone got the Zodiac back to port, right back to Ewan MacInnes’s mooring, on the morning of March 3. That’s when he says it arrived. You see, I believe him.”

  “All true. But how? They don’t usually run on air.”

  “No. They don’t. But it would be nice to ask the two missing soldiers, don’t you think? St. Kilda is only 35 miles from the Flower of Scotland’s last known. Ben could have made it to there.”

  “Jesus, sir. So he could. I wonder if they’ve noticed missing gas, or missing gas cans.”

  “I imagine they’re too busy looking for missing soldiers…but it’s food for thought, don’t you think?”

  “It sure as hell is.”

  “What I can’t work out, is what happened to the fishing boat? But I can work out that Ben Adnam, having planned his evacuation from the submarine, might have been the man in that Zodiac, for whatever reason. So he goes to the military base at St. Kilda, takes out the two soldiers, steals as much gas as he needs, and arrives in Mallaig a couple of days later, on the morning of March 3, when Ewan MacInnes noticed Gregor Mackay’s tender on his mooring.”

  “Admiral, for a story with as many holes in it as that one…you mak
e out a very good case. Tell me your conclusion.”

  “I think Ben Adnam was in Scotland. I actually think he might still be here…and what worries me is what he might be planning. I mean it would not be beyond him to take a shot at a Trident submarine. I just don’t know, but Arnold Morgan and I both think he stole HMS Unseen. And God knows what he might do next.”

  “Be kinda interesting if he stole a Trident and blew up half the world, wouldn’t it?”

  “Extremely. The trouble is there are really only three people in this world who understand the man and his capabilities. I, who taught him. You, who caught him. And Arnold, who’s paranoid about him.”

  “Mmmmmm…one thing, Iain…picture this yourself. You’re in a 15-foot boat climbing through the Atlantic swell. It’s freezing cold, you’re all alone in the pitch-dark heading for an uninhabited rock called St. Kilda. According to your little book the place is surrounded by huge black cliffs and is just about unapproachable in winter. How the hell could anyone manage a safe landing under those circumstances?

  “You’d get swept onto the rocks and drown and no one would ever know.”

  “Not Ben. He’s been there before. At least he’s been close enough to have a good look at Village Bay in the southeast, right from the fin of a submarine.”

  “He has? How do you know that?”

  “I was there.”

  On Monday morning, April 3, Ben Adnam checked out of the Creggans Inn and drove to Helensburgh. He paid the second cash installment on the car and asked if he might keep it another week. He’d pay £150 extra if it was less than a week, £300 if it was more. “As long as you like, sir. Just keep us informed if you want it more than two weeks.”

  Ben picked up more cash at the Royal Bank of Scotland and requested they provide him with two credit cards, a VISA and an RBS bank card, plus a couple of checkbooks. He expected, he said, to be going on a journey, and he would be wiring £50,000 into his account that same day.

  The bank was more than happy to oblige an excellent, if frequently absent, customer like Mr. Arnold, and agreed that his business mail would be held there at the Helensburgh branch until further notice. The bank would deduct credit-card bills from his account automatically. He could pick up both cards in a few days.

  The commander then set off for Edinburgh, a drive of 70 miles, straight through Glasgow and on to Scotland’s capital city along the M8 motorway. He located and checked into the Balmoral Hotel, at the eastern end of Prince’s Street, right above the Waverley Railway Station. And, in the absence of a credit card, left a deposit of £500 with the receptionist.

  He checked into his room and immediately left the hotel, walking swiftly up The Bridges to the nearby offices of The Scotsman, with its new computerized reference room in which, for a fee, readers can sit in a small cubicle and pull up on the screen clips and pictures from any news event that the newspaper has covered. There is a further charge for printouts and copies, but the place is a fountain of information, and the Iraqi terrorist wished to bring himself up-to-date with world events that had taken place in the long months he had been at the helm of HMS Unseen: particularly those events in which he had personally been involved.

  He began by pulling up the stories on the missing submarine itself, and there were many of them, around the time Ben and his men were running south down the Atlantic a year previously. But the news of Unseen died out quickly, as the Royal Navy’s search came to nothing. There was a routine “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO UNSEEN?” But there was no knowledge, no progression of the facts. No one had speculated anything even close to the truth. At least, not in The Scotsman they hadn’t.

  He then pulled up the stories on Concorde and was shocked at the amount of coverage, pages and pages of feature articles, reams of pictures, identifying the victims, their families and the crew who died out over 30 West in the North Atlantic. There were, in addition, two sprawling features over two pages on two separate occasions speculating on the “Bermuda Triangle” out on the edge of space — detailing an eminent scientist’s view that the hole in the ozone layer might make supersonic flight impossible in years to come. Ben permitted himself a thin smile at that one.

  The Starstriker catastrophe received matching coverage, with a proportionate rerun of the “Bermuda Triangle” theme. One scientist felt that it was more or less decisive. And agreed with the Greenpeace spokesmen, that all supersonic flights should be suspended until a thorough investigation was completed.

  By then it was 1700 and the reference room was about to close. Ben put on his sheepskin coat and stepped out into the chill Edinburgh afternoon, walking slowly back to his hotel, alone as perhaps he must always be, the great terrorist with nowhere to turn.

  The following morning he was back in the reference room by 1000 reading through the accounts of the death of the Vice President and the crash of Air Force Three. He found the account of the merchant ship captain, who saw the wreckage falling from the sky, and who talked, initially, of smoke trails. But there was no follow-up to that. The captain, a former Royal Navy officer, had either not been pressed for more detail or, thought Ben, had been told to shut up.

  The fact was, there was no mention of missiles. No connection anywhere with the possibility of anything being fired from a submarine. He had accomplished his task with the maximum of publicity, the maximum of terror, and the minimum of identification. Commander Adnam considered he had completed his task for the Islamic Republic of Iran impeccably. And the best they could do was to refuse to pay him, then try to have him murdered. Ben shook his head.

  Next he pulled up the stories on the St. Kilda soldiers. Still no sign of them. But he was somewhat unnerved by the testimony of Ewan MacInnes, the man who knew someone had driven the Zodiac back from the Flower of Scotland, and who categorically saw that idiot Lieutenant Commander Alaam standing publicly on the stern of the departing trawler.

  Ben Adnam thought that was an example of amateurism at its worst. And he was gratified to see that no one had expanded on the observations of the lobsterman. It seemed to Ben that no one believed the man.

  In the next hour he pulled up everything he could find on the Iranian Naval Headquarters at Bandar Abbas. There was very little, certainly no mention of the big dry dock in which they had converted Unseen. No mention of terrorism, nothing on missiles, not a word about Iran purchasing new SAM systems from Russia. He checked, too, the military news from Baghdad, and that was just about nonexistent. Just a small item about the Pentagon checking into the possibility of test-firing surface-to-air rockets somewhere down in the southern marshes.

  So far as Ben could see, neither he nor anyone else was under direct suspicion for the atrocities that had taken place in the middle of the Atlantic. Which might have meant he could make a clean getaway, except that he had nowhere to get away, to or from. And, as ever, his thoughts returned to Laura MacLean.

  And he gazed at the computer, afraid to slide back down into the well of maudlin introspection that had consumed him for several days. But afraid more of being alone. He told himself to get up, and get out, and think, and make a plan. But the memory of her perfect face stood before him still. He stared back at the keys and willed himself to leave the newspaper offices. But then he punched in the name of MacLean—Admiral Sir Iain, by now, I guess. And within seconds the file jumped onto the screen, and Ben scanned down the list. One item popped right out at him: DAUGHTER’S DIVORCE AND CUSTODY CASE.

  He ran the cursor down, pressed ENTER to retrieve, and a stack of reference material became available. Not quite so much as that on the crash of Concorde, but more than he found on the missing Unseen.

  Ben could scarcely believe his own eyes. It was all there, and he scrolled down the computer pages, reading with amazement the story of Laura’s split with her Scottish banker husband, Douglas Anderson.

  He considered the entire thing so out of character. Laura? On the front pages of the newspapers in a terrible scandal that ended up in the High Court in Edinburgh? In his anxiety t
o devour as many facts as possible, Ben skipped over the part about the man with whom she had run off. It took him ten minutes, paging back through the reports, to find his name, Lt. Commander Bill Baldridge (Retd.) of the United States Navy. “At least I outrank him,” muttered Ben.

  There was very little in the paper about the divorce itself, because that was heard in camera, as these personal matters often were in Scotland. The newspapers printed the name of the man cited by Mr. Anderson, but very little more. The real public uproar had erupted over the custody battle for Laura’s two children. So far as Ben could tell, the American had come to the court and been photographed but, of course, took no part in the case. The rights and future entitlements of the little girls were discussed by the judge, the lawyers, and the two very influential families.

  Laura’s barrister had pleaded her case valiantly, but reading the reports in retrospect it was obvious that the judge was never going to allow Laura’s daughters to leave Scotland while they were so young. And, to Ben’s amazement, Laura had left without them.

  In an unguarded moment, in reply to a reporter’s question about when she would return, she had turned around, and snapped, “I never want to lay eyes on this damned place, ever again.”

  Douglas Anderson had been very dignified throughout the whole proceedings and said nothing outside the court, except that he and his family, assisted by Admiral Sir Iain and Lady MacLean, had a duty to raise the little girls in the best possible way, and to ensure that their inheritance was properly managed.

  So that was it. Laura was gone. And, save for a short mention in The Scotsman that the American had become a farmer in the Midwest after leaving the Navy, there was no further clue as to where Mr. and Mrs. Baldridge lived. Ben assumed they were somewhere together, and married, since all of this had taken place in the winter of 2003/4, over two years ago.