Skydancer

by Geoffrey Archer

  Three thousand miles away the surface of the western Atlantic heaved and surged in a long, lazy swell, the aftermath of a depression which had moved off to the east to dump its rain on the soft green hills of Ireland.

  Five hundred feet below that surface, the dark, still waters were unaffected by the weather above. It was down there that HMS Retribution slipped silently westwards, her 8,400 tons of sleek, black steel propelled by the tireless energy of her nuclear reactor. Longer than a football pitch, the leviathan of the Clyde was in her true element down there, amongst the other weird creatures of the deep that relied on sound, and sound alone, to protect themselves from predators.

  And predators there were, in increasing numbers, for these boats and their crews who lived under water for two months at a time. The normal role of ballistic missile submarines like HMS Retribution was to lie in wait, lurking in the Atlantic depths far enough from the Russian coast to go undetected, but close enough for the sixteen Polaris missiles on board to stay within range of their targets. To lie in wait in the fervent hope that the very existence of her weapons would deter a war, and that they would never have to fire the rockets that could destroy several Soviet cities and slaughter tens of millions of people.

  The predators for HMS Retribution were the Russian hunter-killer submarines, whose task was to scour the oceans for Western missile boats. If a war was ever to start, the Russians would try to sink Retribution before her deadly missiles could be fired.

  The navies of Nato had the reverse task of tracking the Soviet missile boats, and in peacetime the roles of hunter and hunted were constantly rehearsed in a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek.

  Evenly placed along the smooth flank of Retribution’s hull were small, flat plates, the ears of the submarine which could hear other vessels hundreds of miles away. Trailing behind the boat’s fan-like propeller, a cable hundreds of yards long towed an array of hydrophones which could listen for distant sounds, unencumbered by the tiny noises generated by the movement of the submarine itself through the water. This was the most powerful tool of all in the electronic armoury that had enabled the Royal Navy’s ‘bombers’ – as the polaris boats were called – to stay ahead of the game, to hear the Russians before the Russians heard them, and to remain undetected on their Atlantic patrols.

  In the belly of the submarine’s massive carcase one hundred and forty-three men lived their lives, apparently oblivious of their great depth under water, the pressure of which was such that, without the protection of the steel hull, it would crush them to death within seconds.

  It had been nearly two weeks since they had last seen daylight, and Commander Anthony Carrington, the captain of Retribution, was looking forward to smelling fresh air again. He had just announced on the boat’s public address system that they were due to dock in Port Canaveral, Florida, the following day. An air of anticipation and readjustment had immediately swept through the boat.

  Cut off as they were from the regulating influence of the sun, the crew’s time on board was broken into periods of work and periods of rest, rather than of day and night. Men found it easy to lose their sense of time. Now, though, with the prospect of shore leave imminent, they began to adjust their watches from Greenwich Mean Time to the hours observed in the girly-bars of Florida.

  Information about the submarine’s activities was strictly rationed on board to those few who needed to know. On a normal patrol the majority of the crew would have no knowledge whereabouts they were in the world’s oceans. On this voyage, though, the entire company had been informed they were heading for America, and all knew from past experience that meant they were going to use the American Eastern Test Range, and fire a missile. Only a handful of officers and specialist technicians, however, knew that the missile would be carrying the new Skydancer warhead, on which hundreds of millions of pounds of income tax had been spent in recent years.

  ‘What’s the latest from the sound room?’ Carrington quietly asked the officer of the watch, as he prepared to leave the control room and return to his cabin.

  ‘Plankton are being a bit noisy, sir, but not much else,’ the young lieutenant joked. ‘Oh, about an hour ago we heard a Benjamin Franklin boat passing us in the other direction. About a hundred miles south of us. Presumably heading for her patrol area over our side of the pond.’

  The Benjamin Franklins were American submarines carrying Trident missiles, and the signal-processing computer on board Retribution had automatically identified the vessel from a library of acoustic signatures. Analysis by microprocessors meant that almost every vessel could be positively identified from its individual sounds, and all but the very latest Russian submarines had their tell-tale noises recorded.

  ‘All right, OOW., I shall be in my cabin,’ Carrington told his junior as he weaved his tall shape past the shiny periscopes which had not been raised from their rests since Retribution left the Clyde two weeks earlier.

  Moving from one part of this submarine to another was easy compared to the traditional diesel-electric boats with their narrow gangways, claustrophobic hatches, and bunks amongst the torpedo tubes. Being six feet four inches tall, Carrington was grateful to have command of a nuclear-powered vessel which was almost as spacious as a surface ship. His cabin, though, only had room for a small desk apart from his bunk, and he found it cramped for his tall frame.

  He sat at that desk and turned the pages of his log, reflecting on a voyage which had been exceptionally full of incident. The problems had started the moment they had left the Clyde. A Russian submarine had been heard nosing around just outside the estuary, clearly hoping to tail the Polaris boat out on to patrol. The Royal Navy still made the proud boast that none of their ‘bombers’ had ever been successfully tracked by the Russians, and they were prepared to go to extreme lengths to maintain that record.

  Another British nuclear-powered submarine – a hunter-killer boat similar in size and sound to the Retribution, but carrying torpedoes rather than ballistic missiles – had been called back from patrol near Iceland to act as a decoy. Using the cover of a noisy cargo ship to drown its own propeller sounds, the submarine had slipped unnoticed into the Clyde, and had then immediately turned out to sea again. Pretending to be the Retribution, it had led the Russian shadow on a wild-goose chase round the Scottish islands, while the Polaris boat itself had slipped unnoticed into the deep waters of the Atlantic.

  Two weeks was much longer than was needed to cross the ocean, but HMS Retribution had just been modified and refitted, requiring a long series of tests and sea trials to be undertaken. These had been the cause of Commander Carrington’s second major headache.

  The Retribution was over twenty years old, and so was most of her missile-launching equipment. The grafting of new systems on to old often produced teething problems, and with the vital test launch of the new Skydancer warheads coming up, Carrington had been determined that if the firing failed, it would not be because of inadequate practice with the systems beforehand. During their journey across the Atlantic they had repeatedly run through the complex countdown procedures. On the first four successive runs, four different electronic faults had appeared which could have caused an abort if the launch had been for real. The engineers had sweated and cursed as they grappled with the printed-circuit panels. Eventually they had solved all the problems, but only after four perfect tests did the captain consider they were ready.

  ‘Can I bring you a cuppa tea, sir?’ the chief steward poked his head round the cabin door, which had been left half open.

  ‘Ready for the rock shrimps?’ the commander asked, when the tea was brought in. They were a speciality around Cape Canaveral.

  ‘Er . . . well, I’m a steak man myself, sir,’ the steward answered with a grin of anticipation of his run ashore.

  ‘You should try ’em. They steam them in beer, you know.’

  ‘Yes sir, I know. Some of the lads go for them, but me . . . well, I know what I like.’

  When Alec Anderson arrived home
that evening from one of the most harrowing days he had ever spent at the Ministry of Defence, he had timed his return to the house in North London to coincide with the moment when his wife Janet would be too preoccupied with the children to bother him with questions. He knew he could not disguise his anxiety, and if he had to tell her what had happened that day, she would make matters worse with her worrying.

  Anderson was aged thirty-seven and had been doing very well in his career as a civil servant. He had enjoyed a succession of good promotions through a wide variety of departments – just what was needed if he was to succeed in reaching the top of the professional tree, and he was an ambitious man.

  The position he now held as head of the Strategic Nuclear Secretariat had been one of the ripest plums on that tree, and he had plucked it eagerly when offered to him some six months earlier.

  ‘Hullo. You’re early,’ Janet called from upstairs. The sound of running bathwater and the high-pitched chatter of his two small daughters told him that his return had been well timed.

  ‘Had to bring some work home,’ he shouted up to her. ‘I’ll be in the library.’

  ‘Library’ was a somewhat pretentious word for the front room of their suburban Edwardian house, but it was the place where he kept his father’s old roll-top desk and the few possessions that he really valued. On the shelves of a glass-fronted mahogany cabinet there were rows of leather-bound volumes in varying states of repair, and most of the Latin text-books from his schooldays. On the walls hung his most prized items of all, miniature paintings that he had collected over the past fifteen years – delicate watercolours of lakes and castles painted by Victorian artists making the Grand Tour of Europe.

  He rolled open the lid of the desk and switched on the brass lamp that shone down on to the tooled green-leather interior, marked with the ink stains of past decades. From his briefcase he pulled a file, and spread it open before him. His eyes did not focus on the printed pages, though; the file was there only to provide an excuse for the seclusion that he sought.

  Anderson had always favoured Britain being a true nuclear power. Having developed the technology in the first place, it would undermine the country’s stature to abandon it, he believed. He had always argued his case forcefully in the Ministry with those of his colleagues who considered a British nuclear deterrent redundant alongside the massive American arsenals. His fluent advocacy of the case had clearly played a part in his selection for his present job.

  He even used to expound his arguments regularly at the dinner table when they had guests round, much to Janet’s annoyance. She hated to think of the horror that would be unleashed if such weapons were ever used, and preferred to shut her mind to the whole issue. To her there were innumerable more pleasant topics of conversation, and secretly she rather regretted that Alec had gained his last promotion.

  Nevertheless Janet adored her husband, devoting all her energies to him, their home, and their two girls aged seven and nine. She had never been academic by nature; much of her education had been directed towards learning the social graces. She knew she was in no way an ‘intellectual’ companion for Alec, and she loathed ‘women’s-libbers’, because they made her feel guilty at being so satisfied with the life she had chosen.

  Although content to have an adoring wife – and to an extent his ego demanded that his female companion should be his intellectual inferior – Anderson occasionally found that the mundane level of their conversation and her clinging lack of independence grated on his nerves. He longed secretly for the mental companionship he had experienced in his boarding-school, something he had never been able to recapture in his adult life. The closest he ever came to that now was his regular escape from domestic claustrophobia on Friday nights, when he would visit the local pub and relax with a group of male friends, drinking draught bitter and playing bar billiards.

  Suddenly, however, the world had become threatening. He was under suspicion. Friends were becoming enemies, and the bright future he had envisaged was now clouded by uncertainty. As he stared absently at his father’s old gold-plated pen-stand, and fiddled nervously with a bottle of ink, he realised how important to him were those three members of his family splashing the bathwater upstairs. Whatever their inadequacies, they were devoted to him, and he needed that devotion more than anything else.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling. I had to see to the children,’ Janet bustled into the room, her sleeves rolled up and her arms still red from their immersion in the hot water. ‘Can I get you a drink or something? And how awful that you have to work this evening . . .’

  She stopped in mid-flow when she saw his face so drained of colour, and the haunted look in his eyes.

  ‘Alec, you look dreadful,’ she exclaimed. ‘What on earth’s happened?’

  For a few seconds he stared at her without answering.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing much,’ he answered eventually, trying to smile confidently. ‘Just some papers that have gone missing from the office, and I’ve got to try to figure out how it happened.’

  Peter Joyce turned the car gently into the driveway to his house, anxious for the wheels not to scatter gravel on to the lawn, where it would blunt the blades of his mower. Built in the previous century, his home had originally been a small farm, but when Peter had bought the property it had been left with just over an acre of ground. During the years of their occupancy the Joyces had developed the land lovingly.

  At the side of the house he had built a double garage, one half of it occupied by a small sailing boat on a trailer, which Peter raced at a nearby lake during the summer months. The other garage space was empty. The Citroën was not there, so Belinda would not be at home to greet him. He parked his own car next to the boat, swung the jacket of his grey herring-bone tweed suit over his shoulder, and walked through the back door of the garage into the large rear garden. In the flower bed to the left, under the partial shade of an oak tree, the buds on the azaleas were setting well, ready for the following spring. He looked beyond them to the half-completed greenhouse at the far end of the lawn, and wondered when he would next find time to continue with its construction.

  ‘Daddy!’ A yell of enthusiasm burst through the kitchen doorway as thirteen-year-old Suzanne ran out to greet him.

  ‘Sylvie and I are doing our homework, groan, groan!’ She reached up to hug him. ‘And Mark is out playing football. But Mummy’s late as usual.’

  Peter put his arm round her shoulder and they walked back into the house. Suzanne adored her father, whereas at fifteen her elder sister had grown more circumspect – involved with boyfriends of whom her father disapproved and holding rebellious young views about the Establishment which he represented.

  ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’ the thirteen-year-old suggested.

  ‘No, I think it would be better if I made it myself and you got on with your homework,’ Peter replied kindly, patting her gently on the backside. She smiled self-consciously, pulling her shoulders back so that her developing breasts gave shape to her school blouse, and set off back to her bedroom, grumbling quietly.

  Peter found it both pleasing and sad to see the second of his daughters turning from a child into a woman. He wondered how long it would be before she too began to find fault with him, like her elder sister.

  He filled the electric kettle at the sink and plugged it into the mains. While waiting for it to boil, he eased himself on to a chair at the kitchen table. A cork pin-board on the wall opposite was plastered with ‘Ban the Bomb’ posters, and notices announcing the dates of forthcoming protest meetings.

  Peter was forty-eight and had been married for nearly twenty years. Staring at those posters which criticised his lifetime’s work, he reflected on how much had changed since he had first met Belinda.

  Brought up in a middle-class district on Tyneside, he had moved south after graduating, to take up a research post at Imperial College London. Belinda had been working there as a laboratory assistant.

  She had undoubtedly been one of
the most attractive women in the college; he had first spotted her in the canteen. A frequent focus of attention when students and lecturers gathered for lunch, her face was oval and her chestnut hair shoulder-length. He remembered how her skin had looked so perfectly smooth, without need of make-up, her lips wide and sensual. Her dark brown eyes had seemed to extend an invitation, yet promised a challenge too.

  The third time he had seen her there, she was sitting alone at a table. He had stifled his shyness and had carried his tray across the room to join her. She had smiled at him encouragingly, and it had been easy to chat to her. She was sharp and witty, yet with an attractive sense of reserve. In those days he had tended to express himself in bursts of wild enthusiasm, and she had found that exciting.

  A relationship had developed quickly. They had become lovers within a few days. It was the 1960s, when the moral climate was newly liberated, and before long they had been sharing a two-roomed flat together.

  There was a click as the boiling kettle switched itself off. He stood up, dropped a tea bag into a mug, and extracted a milk bottle from the fridge. Giving the tea a few moments to brew, he looked through the window into the garden. He loved his home; it was peaceful, secure and permanent. Those early days with Belinda seemed like distant history to him now. They had been carefree in some ways, he supposed, but uncertain too. The relationship had begun so quickly that he always suspected it could end just as suddenly.

  Life with Belinda had been fun then, and that fun had lasted for a long time. They had lived together for over a year before marrying. The ceremony had been brief and simple, one Saturday morning. They had invited only their closest relatives to the register office, and had not bothered with a honeymoon. They had felt no different after the wedding, which had somehow seemed wrong at the time, and they had spent the next few days fearing the marriage had been a mistake. Before long, though, their relationship had developed a new sense of security. Peter went on to establish his career at Aldermaston, and Belinda decided to become pregnant.