“One problem, Bill. I wanted to ask you. If it was Iraq, and we know Adnam is an Iraqi, where? That’s what’s exercising Arnold and me, where could they have made the conversion. They have no submarine facilities.”
“I don’t see that as a major problem, because I think such a system could be bolted onto the deck. You could get most of the high-tech work completed inside the submarine. If you could hide her for a short while, alongside a submarine workshop ship…well, I’m saying you might get it done without even going into a dry dock, so long as there was a crane on board. Remember, Adnam got ahold of a submarine before when he needed it. I guess he could have done it again.
“No, I think the biggest problem for Adnam would be getting a crew. There are no submariners in the Iraqi Navy. And there would be no way to train them. And he surely could not have persuaded an entire crew of Brazilians to go along with the scheme. Did Admiral Morgan have any ideas on that? Or did he just assume Adnam found a way, like he did with the Russian Kilo?”
“He didn’t mention any of that. I thought perhaps he might know something he was not prepared to share with me. Anyway, Bill, that more or less brings you into line with our thinking. But the problem of finding it is very tough. And there have been a few developments around here that I’ve been pondering, probably stupidly, just because I’ve got a bit too much time on my hands these days. Let’s just finish our coffee, then we’ll go over to the study and have a glass of port, and I’ll show you a few things…Laura, you wouldn’t pop over and put a couple of logs on the fire in there, would you?”
“Only if I can come over with you and have some of that port,” she replied. “How about you, mum?”
“Oh, I won’t, dear. I’m off to bed. It’s been rather a long day, so don’t keep your father up half the night.”
“No danger of that…Bill and I would like to be a-l-o-o-o-o-ne in the room where we first fell in love…I’ll send Daddy packing, don’t you worry.”
Everyone laughed, and they helped take the cups and dishes to the kitchen before crossing the hall to the book-lined study, in which Laura was blasting the fire with bellows. Then she thoughtfully poured three glasses of Taylor’s ’78 and sat in the left-hand chair, leaving Bill and her father to sit closer and study an atlas he had obviously been using recently.
Sure enough, he handed the heavy book to the Kansan, holding it open to a map of the eastern side of the North Atlantic. “You will see on there, I have made a succession of crosses placed in circles…well, the one on the far left is the place where the two supersonic jets went down. The next one, more easterly, is where you lost the Vice President in Air Force Three. The next two are more recent…very up-to-date. You see the one about 35 miles west of St. Kilda?”
“Got it.”
“Well, we have reports in the Scottish papers this month of a mysterious incident…a fishing boat just vanished somewhere out near there. And there were a few rather baffling circumstances attached to it. My next cross is exactly on the island of St. Kilda, where, a couple of days later, two trained British soldiers, an officer and an experienced corporal, just vanished, and they haven’t found ’em yet.
“My fifth cross is in the harbor of Mallaig, where there may be yet another mystery. The tender from the lost fishing boat, a 15-foot Zodiac, suddenly turns up on someone’s mooring a couple of days later, and everyone is saying the chap who discovered it, a lobsterman, was a habitual drunk and ought not to be listened to. He says the boat had been on his mooring just a few hours. The police say in the newspapers, it must have been on the mooring for days.
“Bill, quite frankly, if you are a fisherman, I don’t care how pissed you are, you’d know if someone had parked a bloody great rubber boat on your mooring four days ago, or last night. I think the lobsterman ought to be listened to.”
“Mmmmmm,” said Bill, studying the map intently.
“And now I’m going to leave you with this thought…follow my crosses…look at the dates…see how they move in a steady easterly direction…a chain of circumstances…leading to what? Ben Adnam? I wonder. Let’s regroup in the morning…breakfast 0900 I think. Good night, you two…oh, and Bill have a look at the little book there…the one about St. Kilda. I think you’ll find it interesting.”
Laura walked across the room and removed the atlas from Bill’s lap, folded it, and placed it, with exaggerated firmness, on a shelf. She then took from a side table a CD, walked over to the player, and turned it on.
“Rigoletto,” he said.
“The first one we ever listened to together, my darling,” she whispered. “Right here in this room, nearly four years ago…Placido Domingo as the duke, Ileana Cortrubas as Gilda.”
And as the rhapsodic sounds of Verdi’s overture rang out, dominated by the glorious violins of the Vienna Philharmonic, Laura walked to her husband, sat on his lap, and hugged him as she always did, as if she would never let him go.
“I love you,” she said. “And it happened in this room. When I had known you for about three hours. I’ve never doubted it, and I would change nothing.”
“Nor me,” said Bill.
“Nor I,” she corrected, laughing at his inability to deal with “me” and “I.” And then she kissed him as she always did, softly, with her hands in his hair, and her touch electrified him as ever.
“Same bedroom tonight,” she said. “How lovely. How unbearably romantic.”
Neither of them knew that beyond the deep red curtains of the study, out under the tall hedges beside the road near the main gate, was parked a metallic blue Audi A8, its driver finding an unbalanced peace just in being there.
10
March 31, 2006.
BY 0100 THE DOWNSTAIRS LIGHTS WERE OUT IN THE locked, silent MacLean household. The three Labradors were asleep in the big kitchen near the Aga, but they had, at the insistence of the admiral, the complete run of the house throughout the night hours, should an intruder decide to press his luck. However, this had never happened, since most burglars were aware that the average Labrador is a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde, once dark has fallen and a house is quiet. From a cheerful, boisterous companion, he turns into a suspicious, growling watchdog, likely to go berserk at the slightest sound. That huge neck of his powers jaws that can snap a lamb bone in two. The reason the British police do not use Labradors in confrontational situations is their instinct to go straight for a man’s throat.
Ben Adnam was unaware of these canine subtleties, and at 0115 he stepped out of his car and walked softly down the drive toward the house. He did so for reasons that were beyond him. He just wanted to be close to the building where once he had been near to Laura. The trouble was, the black, burly Fergus was unaware of his motives, and, with ears that could hear a shot pheasant hit the ground at 200 yards, he heard a footfall on the gravel drive. He came off his bean bag like a tiger, barking at the top of his lungs, racing toward the front door, pursued now by the even bigger Muffin, and Mr. Bumble.
The noise was outrageous. Upstairs, the admiral awakened and walked out into the corridor, where Bill was already standing in his dressing gown, with all the downstairs hall lights on.
“What’s the matter with them?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Iain, but when dogs react like that in the middle of the night it’s always because they heard something.”
And even as they spoke, they heard the unmistakable sound of a car pulling away, heading up toward the village of Inverary, fast.
“Probably someone was lost,” said the admiral. “It’s pretty dark out there.”
The dogs were quiet now, and Sir Iain turned out the lights. “See you in the morning Bill, 0900.”
“Yessir,” said Bill, against house protocol.
Commander Adnam shot through Inverary at almost 70 mph his headlights on full beam. He might not have had much success at beating his all-time record to St. Catherine’s and back. But he set some kind of a mark for the Scottish all-comers Inverary–Creggans Inn run. Right around th
e north end of the loch, pedal to the floor. He used his key to slip in the side door and went immediately up to his room. And there he lay exhausted on his bed, wondering exactly who was at home in his former Teacher’s house, and where Laura was.
Would he ever see her again? And what had he been doing, lurking in the night shadows, like some burglar? He did not know. Except there was nowhere else where he could connect with anyone, even in his mind. It was as if the aura of the MacLeans, a family that once had almost liked him, had created a roomful of memories. And to sit in his cold car outside the house was to sit in that room. The alternative was so lonely, so frighteningly isolated, that he did not believe he could face it for much longer.
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, o
r 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.”
H.M.S. Unseen (1999) Page 33