H.M.S. Unseen (1999)

by Patrick Robonson

  “Admiral, for a story with as many holes in it as that one…you make 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 newspap
ers in a terrible scandal that ended up in the High Court in Edinburgh? In his anxiety to 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.

  An appalling melancholy swept over him. For he knew that the United States was the most dangerous place on earth for him. That was where he would be executed, summarily, if they found out who he was. And Commander Adnam did not underestimate the men in the Pentagon. He knew they were incredibly smart, absolutely ruthless, and would think nothing of “stringing up some towelhead terrorist.” He had met Americans, right here in Scotland, men from the Holy Loch Base. He knew how they talked and what they thought about serious enemies of the U.S.A.

  For the first time, ever, he believed he would never speak to Laura again.

  With a sad heart, he turned off the machine and walked bareheaded out into the cold, rainy streets of Edinburgh. But he did not mind the rain, because it obscured the tears that ran silently down his face. It was the first time the forty-six-year-old Benjamin Adnam had wept since he was a child in the village of Tikrit, on the banks of the Tigris River.

  He did not want to return to the Balmoral Hotel, because that was just another prison. There was only his empty room, and he was frightened of the solitude. He actually thought he might break down completely. And so he kept walking, heading, for no reason, for the great ramparts of Edinburgh Castle, which glowers over the city.

  It was 1235, and he turned into the High Street, walking west up the long rise to Castle Hill, which leads up to the massive granite edifice which has symbolized the innate defiance of Scotland for more than 850 years. Ben had been here once before, in 1988 with Laura, and he stood staring up at the Outlook Tower, just as the castle’s 1300 cannon shot crashed out over the city, as it did every day except Sunday.

  There was a considerable crowd of tourists awaiting the sound of the cannon, and a predictable number of “oohs” and “wows” as it happened. Ben stood still at the sound of the sudden shot, and his muscles tensed. It was the reaction of a military man, in a military place. Although no armed forces have been garrisoned in the castle since the twenties, it was once home to the great Scottish regiments: the Black Watch, the Royal Scots, the Seaforth Highlanders.

  In the Middle Ages, the castle was besieged constantly, mostly by the English. It is impossible to remove the overtones of blood and valor from such places, and Ben Adnam felt more at home there, in those stark, bleak vales of distant courage and gallantry, than he ever did in the Balmoral Hotel. Ben imagined the clash of steel and the thunder of the guns, as he walked slowly along the stone walkways to the twelfth-century St. Margaret’s Chapel, the small stone-arched place of worship inside the castle. These days it is nondenominational, and used only by visiting military, but once it was an important Catholic church.

  Ben opened the door and stepped inside, gazing at the five magnificent stained-glass windows behind the altar. Before him were images of St. Ninian, St. Columba, St. Margaret, and St. Andrew. But Ben had no interest in them. He walked to the bright, beautifully colored window dedicated to Sir William Wallace, the great Scottish national hero of the thirteenth century.

  This, Ben knew, was a real man…William Wallace, who had led his renegades to kill the Sheriff of Lanark, and then to defeat the English governor of Scotland, Lord Surrey, in a brutal battle near Stirling…William Wallace, the man who finally drove the English out of Scotland altogether. Ben knew that in the end Wallace had been executed for treason. Nonetheless, he died bravely at the age of only thirty-three, and Commander Adnam stood in front of the window and bowed his head in front of Scotland’s most noble terrorist.

  He stayed for just a few minutes, then walked outside, where it was still raining, and, within him he felt the old resolve surge again. He gazed out northward across the gray expanse of the city, toward the wide waters of the Firth of Forth, and beyond to the ancient kingdom of Fife. He thought back to the days of Wallace, and the undaunted fearlessness of the man…the audacity it must have taken to move in and ruthlessly attack the enemies of his country.

  Suddenly, for the first time in a month, Ben believed he was thinking clearly again. The face of William Wallace had seemed to look kindly upon him, and the example of the long-dead martyr of freedom seemed to galvanize his spirit. In a flash of inspiration the commander knew where he must go, and what he must do. It was his only chance, and it was a chance that might lead him simultaneously to Laura. But first he had to find her.

  He turned from the castle and headed back downtown, hurrying along the High Street, then turning back along The Bridges to his hotel. He arrived there and found a telephone book with listings for the border country. The Scotsman had always quoted Douglas Anderson as, “Speaking from his estate near Jedburgh last night.”

  “Anderson…Douglas R.—Galashiels Manor, Ancrum, Roxburgh…that’s it.” Ben Adnam wrote down the address and phone number, then debated the merit of making the call and decided against it. The telephone has a disadvantage, he decided. The person on the other end is able to say, politely, “No. I’m afraid I cannot help, and I’m extremely busy at the moment. Good-bye.” Which is essentially the end of the campaign.

  No, he concluded, I’ll go to Galashiels Manor and talk to Mr. Anderson in person, if he’s there. I’ll make up some story to persuade him to give me Mr. Baldridge’s address. Having decided, Ben had a quick cup of coffee in the downstairs vestibule, ordered his car from the garage, and set off out of Edinburgh, southeast to the Borders.

  He drove quietly out past the city limits and onto the A68. It was 28 miles to the Galashiels area, down a long winding road, past the western edges of the Lammermuir Hills. There, on the high ground, were some of Scotland’s finest grouse moors, in particular those of the dukes of Roxburgh, and those of Sir Hamish Anderson, the magisterial father of Douglas.

  Commander Adnam sat behind the wheel, glancing occasionally at the cold bleak winter home of the game birds, and reflecting upon his forthcoming tactics. He would pretend that he knew nothing of the divorce and that he had come to visit Laura and her husband as a result of a long-standing invitation.

  In the end he wanted just one thing from the banker—the American address of Lieutenant Commander Baldridg
e. And if Mr. Anderson should prove difficult, it might be necessary to force the information from him, which might mean he would have to silence him permanently before leaving. But that was a course of action the commander was quite prepared to take. Old habits tend to die hard among terrorists. And Ben Adnam knew that for the rest of his life, if he was to evade capture, he might have to take such actions. Because for him, one witness as to his possible identity was one too many. That would signify, quite simply, the end of his life.

  He reached the junction with the Selkirk–Kelso road and continued on straight for the 6-mile run down to Ancrum. The afternoon had turned suddenly bright, as the rain cleared swiftly away to the northeast, and, after a couple of miles, Ben stopped in a desolate stretch of green hilly countryside and checked his map. He was inside a triangle, bounded on three corners by Selkirk, Jedburgh, and Kelso. Twelve miles away to the southwest was the cashmere and knitware town of Hawick.

  Right there he was in the heart of the great border tribes of Scotland, the men once known as the Border Reivers. Their lawless reign of terror had flourished along those lonely hills for 350 years, until 1600, because England regarded the entire region as “ungovernable.” Ben himself had just seen, in the past 20 miles, signs that remain of them still—ancient castles, stately homes, fortified farmhouses, ruins of historic abbeys, remains of watchtowers built as fortresses with walls 7 feet thick. There were remnants of abandoned hamlets in remote valleys, remnants of a cruel and turbulent history in which the warring tribes of England and Scotland had fought each other savagely over four centuries. Many of their descendants still lived in the area: families with names like Nixon, Armstrong, Graham, Kerr, Maxwell, Forster…and Anderson.