Once clear of the dockside, the multi-bladed fan-like propeller began to turn, causing the water behind the rudder to bubble and foam. The tow-line from the tug was released and the submarine’s foredeck party hurried below, closing the forward hatch tightly behind them.
‘Slow ahead!’ Carrington almost whispered the command into the microphone he held close to his lips. His voice was hushed in spontaneous reverence at the sight of the crimson curve of the sun rising smoothly over the edge of the world, separating at last the greyness of the sea from that of the sky.
‘Take a good look at it!’ he told himself. It might be weeks before any of them on board saw the sun again.
The growing intensity of the light caused Carrington to shade his eyes. They were passing through the harbour entrance and he squinted anxiously along the line of buoys that marked the deep-water channel, to ensure there were no other vessels ahead which could hamper his passage. It would be a while yet before the water would be deep enough for them to dive and return to the secret world which had become his most natural environment.
His orders from Northwood had been at the same time specific and vague. He was to make his boat ready to launch the test missile at twelve hours’ notice, but no hint had been given as to when that firing might take place. In the meantime he had been instructed to hide his submarine in the eastern Atlantic and to avoid the attention of any Soviet vessels that might try to track him, but the intelligence reports had been less specific than usual as to what Russian ships might be in the area.
Carrington focused his powerful binoculars on the furthest of the channel buoys which he knew, from his earlier study of the chart, to be three miles ahead. A thin haze covered the sea, and he scanned slowly to the left and then to the right, searching for the support ship which was essential to their success in hiding below the waves. The Retribution’s most sensitive listening device was her sonar array, the plastic tube towed hundreds of yards astern which contained hydrophones capable of hearing ships and submarines two hundred miles away. The technology had been invented long after Retribution had been built, so the array had to be clipped on by a support ship each time she went to sea.
‘Any sign of her, sir?’ The officer of the watch had joined Carrington on the bridge. He shivered briefly at the coolness of the morning air.
‘Not yet. She can’t be far away though. Only left harbour about half an hour ahead of us,’ the captain replied, lowering his glasses and scanning the horizon with the naked eye.
‘Half ahead! Revolutions for eight knots!’ he ordered into the microphone. Within seconds the water at the stem began to splash and froth more strongly, and a creamy wake spread out behind them.
‘Give me a shout when you spot her,’ Carrington called, as he gripped the handrails of the ladder and disappeared down the tower into the metallic warmth below. Passing through the control room he paused by the chart table.
‘Where is the rendezvous point exactly?’ he enquired, looking over the navigator’s shoulder.
The young officer pointed to a cross on the chart.
‘Three miles inside the territorial limit, sir,’ he added smartly. ‘Shouldn’t have anybody watching while we do the deed.’
Carrington nodded and returned to his cabin.
Lieutenant Robert Simpson sat quietly in the tiny ship’s office next to the wardroom. In front of him on the small table was the galley stores register, and he was making a pretence at checking it through. But the task that really concerned him was quite different, one of obsessive importance to him, one he was convinced could save millions of lives. It was to prevent HMS Retribution’s nuclear missiles from ever being fired in anger. It was a mission inspired by his conscience.
Bob had been educated at a small, select boarding school, where his housemaster had made a lasting impression on almost every pupil who passed through his care. An old-fashioned crusader, seeking to inspire his pupils to fight for morality and justice in whatever areas their careers might take them, Andrew McGregor had created on his own a sort of secret society perpetuated by annual reunions held at the school.
By the time Bob ended his studies there, he had become the man’s devoted disciple. On his last day at school, ‘old Greg’, as the teacher was known, had warned him as he had warned others before him, that he might need to ‘go underground’, to work in secret, if he was to strike his eventual blow for morality.
They were words of advice that Simpson took to heart in the years that followed. An only child, he had decided to follow his father into the Royal Navy eventually, but wanted to take a degree course first. During his three years at Exeter University, he had faithfully returned each summer to his school for the weekend reunion with Old Greg. At that time, he had still had no clear idea what the ‘great mission’ in his life would be, but felt instinctively that the Navy would one day present him with it.
At university he had fallen in love with Susan Parkinson, who was sweetness itself. Yet even when she had become his closest friend as well as his lover, he had not dared confide in her totally his sense of mission. She was different from him – lively and extrovert, forming firm opinions from first impressions. She had joined a Ban the Bomb group and urged him to accompany her on protest rallies, but he never did, preferring to keep his views private until he had developed them fully.
Susan lived near Newbury now, and worked as a schoolteacher. As they grew closer Bob had become more open about Andrew McGregor and his moral crusade, and when he had been posted to HMS Retribution she had understood immediately that he had finally found the role he had been looking for.
It had not been easy trying to decide what was right and what was wrong, when it came to warfare. Simpson could understand the moral rectitude of using military means to destroy a man like Adolf Hitler, and could accept the need for nations to be armed to prevent such tyrants from gaining power again. But those armaments were for use against other military forces, not civilians. ‘The bomb’ was different. Every missile on Retribution was aimed at Moscow. Millions of innocents would die if they were ever launched.
‘You’ve got it, boy,’ McGregor had said to him at the last school reunion. ‘It’s that crucial difference which makes the nukes immoral. You know what you have to do. Don’t tell me anything about it – I don’t want to know the details, but you’ll know what to do when the time comes. It’s no accident you are where you are, remember that! You’re there for a purpose, boy!’
Simpson devoutly hoped it would never come to that – the weapons were intended as a deterrent after all. But the fact that chance, or the Almighty, in the form of a Naval selection board, had chosen him to be on board that particular boat made Simpson fear the worst.
It would be no easy task to stop a launch of the Polaris missiles if war broke out, he concluded. The firing procedures on board the submarine were hedged about with safeguards designed to prevent any individual acting on his own, either in firing the missiles or in sabotaging the launch. Simpson had studied those procedures carefully. As a supply officer he was not closely involved in the war-fighting tasks of the boat, but the policy of the Navy was that every one of the thirteen officers on board had a part to play if the missiles were ever launched. It was a way of spreading the responsibility and making it seem less awesome.
Simpson’s war role was to verify the navigation data to be fed into the missile-guidance computers, data which told the missiles precisely where they were on the globe at the moment of firing. He had soon realised that a simple refusal to carry out his task would achieve nothing; the data could easily be verified by any of the other officers. The only way to stop the launch would be through deliberate sabotage.
When he had first joined the boat, the captain had talked to him privately in his cabin to ensure that he had no doubts about the rightness of maintaining a nuclear deterrent and of being prepared to use it. ‘If you have any doubts, you shouldn’t be here,’ Carrington had told him. Simpson had kept his thoughts to himself. He bel
ieved this was precisely where people with doubts should be if the world was to be saved from destruction.
Bob often worried about his girlfriend. It was hard, his being away at sea for months at a time. Susan had always had a lively social life, and he had a fear in the back of his mind that she would get tired of his frequent absences and find another man.
Opposition to nuclear weapons had become the strongest bond between them. Susan was now actively campaigning for the cancellation of the Skydancer project, and needed all the information she could get. His phone-calls to tell her what was happening on board the submarine did not reveal much, but she always seemed grateful for them, and to Simpson they were a lifeline keeping Susan attached to him.
With a steely hiss the main periscope was raised from its housing in the control room deck. Carrington pressed his face against the binocular eyepiece and rotated the sight through a full 360 degrees.
‘Officer of the watch, I have control. Come below. Shut the upper lid!’
Carrington’s order triggered a routine on board the boat that was so well practised it was automatic.
‘Upper lid shut! And clipped!’ the voice of a crewman yelled from inside the top of the tower, as the spring-loaded latches completed the hermetic sealing of the hull. Another voice at the base of the ladder relayed the message to the control room.
‘Dive the submarine!’ Carrington ordered.
‘Open one, two and three main vents,’ yelled a strong Glasgow accent from the buoyancy control panel. Hands scrabbled at the stopcock switches above, and there was the roar of air escaping from the main tanks as water rushed in to replace it.
‘Diving now!’ the helmsman shouted, pressing forward on his joystick controls. The hydroplanes cut into the water and pressed the bulbous nose of the vessel down towards the depths. On a gauge above his control stick, the helmsman watched a miniature silhouette of the boat tilt downwards through five, then ten degrees. It was enough to ensure that HMS Retribution would slide cleanly and smoothly beneath the waves.
‘Keep periscope depth!’ Carrington called, raising the scope again for an all-round look. Satisfied that the only vessel in the area was the support ship that had just helped them with their towed sonar, and that they were leaving it well astern, he lowered the periscope and moved over to the chart table. The navigator pointed out a line indicating the edge of the continental shelf, beyond which they would be able to dive into the comforting deep of the Atlantic.
For a while yet they must stay close to the surface, and every few minutes Carrington raised the periscope for a further all-round scan. Small fishing boats with trawl-nets were a hazard that might be visible only seconds before collision or entanglement.
One hour later Carrington ordered the submarine to two hundred feet, and the periscope was lowered into its seating for the last time. No one knew when they would need to raise it again.
The excitement of their shore leave over, the crew of the Polaris submarine slipped quickly back into their routines, almost as if they were a part of the machinery itself. The task of the boat now was to remain undetected and wait for orders. Trailing horizontally from the stern was the sonar array, several hundred yards behind the rudder, listening intently for the tell-tale sounds of other ships and submarines in the area. A second cable also streamed out from the vessel, stretching upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees towards the surface of the ocean. At the end of it was a float which would remain just below the surface throughout their patrol, a buoy which could pick up radio signals from England while staying hidden beneath the waves.
This was the Very Low Frequency radio antenna, able to hear transmissions which could penetrate the surface to a depth of twenty feet. It kept the submarine in permanent contact with Naval Headquarters, ready to receive at any time the order to go to war. The antenna could not easily be detected by surface ships or aircraft, so did not reveal the existence of the ‘bomber’ in the depths below.
Although Retribution could listen thus for her orders, she could not reply to them; the antenna could receive but not transmit. Normally she did not need to, and only in an emergency would come up to periscope depth and transmit back through a satellite aerial pushed above the waves.
The rumbling in his stomach told Carrington it was close to lunchtime. Breakfast had been very early that morning to accommodate their dawn departure from the Cape. He was naturally a very thin man with sunken cheeks and a tall angular frame. It always surprised his wife that he could be such a healthy eater and remain so skinny. As he walked to the wireless room to reassure himself that the communications link was properly established, he tried to calculate what hour of the day it would be in the Hampshire village of West Meon, which was home. His wife Alice would still be asleep there unless the baby had woken her early.
‘All hunky-dory, sir,’ his executive officer announced. ‘Everything bleeping away nicely.’
To confirm that the radio link was established, a coded message was transmitted constantly from three giant aerials situated in remote parts of Britain.
‘Very good, Number One,’ Carrington smiled. ‘I think it’s lunchtime, don’t you? I’ll just check the sound room, then we can eat. Happen to know what’s on the menu?’
‘“Babies’ Heads”, I think, sir,’ replied Lt. Commander Smith.
Carrington rubbed his hands. He was very fond of the individual steak-and-kidney puddings so named.
Inside the sonar room, the rating at the towed array control panel was clasping his headphones to his ears, and he looked puzzled. In front of him a green cathode-ray tube displayed the oscillating wave patterns of the multitude of sounds the array was detecting. By selecting switches the operator could direct the inbuilt computer to filter out unwanted noises and concentrate its analytical power on one particular frequency, which was what the rating was now trying to do.
‘Got a problem?’ Carrington asked, tapping the blue-shirted operator on the shoulder.
The man slipped his earphones off and shook his head.
‘Don’t understand it, sir. Never heard nothing like it before. Don’t even know if it’s really there, it’s so faint.’
The words sent a shiver up the captain’s spine, and all thoughts of food disappeared.
‘What sort of thing are you talking about?’ he asked. ‘And where is it?’
‘Well, the array says it’s dead astern, sir. But what it is, I don’t know. There’s no cavitation or anything, no propeller noise. Sounds like something moving through the water, but there’s no machine noise or reactor bubbling. No propulsion sound at all.’
‘Computer doesn’t recognise it?’
‘No way, sir. Thinks it’s just background. Can’t pick it out at all.’
‘But you’re sure it’s there?’ Carrington pressed anxiously.
The rating hesitated before replying: ‘I suppose it could be damage to the array, sir. The Yanks might have knocked it about a bit while we were in the Cape. I’ll run a test on it. Shouldn’t take more than ten minutes.’
Instinctively Carrington felt sure there was nothing wrong with the sonar. He recalled his orders for this voyage, which had been so specific and yet so vague; the extra warning to be on the alert for Soviet shadows, as if Fleet HQ suspected there was something in the area, yet could not identify what sort of vessel.
‘No. Stick with it. I’ll reduce speed and we’ll go silent – see if that helps clarify things.’
Carrington strode back to the control room and seized the microphone that hung from the roof by the main periscope.
‘Assume the ultra-quiet state! Ultra-quiet until further notice!’
His voice was relayed throughout the length of the boat on a network of loudspeakers. At his command, conversation stopped, or was reduced to a whisper, and all inessential domestic or mechanical tasks that could make a noise were brought to a halt.
‘Reduce speed to one knot,’ he ordered quietly.
‘One knot it is, sir.’
&nb
sp; He could not stop altogether, or the array would start to sink towards the ocean floor.
The executive officer came out of the wireless room, his eyebrows raised inquiringly.
‘Sound room’s got something, Mike. Something very faint,’ Carrington explained.
The two officers returned to the sonar booth, where the operator was working away at his control panel. Impotently they stood behind him, waiting for him to report.
‘Coming closer, sir!’ he hissed suddenly. ‘There’s a doppler shift.’ Then he forgot himself in his excitement. ‘Must be a fucking sub!’
The frequency of the sound had risen, shifting up the scale, indicating, like the whistle from an approaching train, that the object creating the sounds was moving towards them.
Behind them the spools of a tape-recorder turned continuously, recording the full spectrum of sounds picked up by the array, for further analysis later. If Carrington’s suspicion was correct, what they were recording was history, the first sounds ever heard in the West of a new type of Soviet submarine.
Until five years earlier the Russian nuclear-powered boats, operated from the base at Severomorsk inside the Arctic Circle, had been characteristically noisy. Their loudness was due to a lack of sophistication in soundproofing, and was largely caused by particularly noisy pumps circulating cooling water in the reactors. When they sailed south towards the Atlantic, they passed over a network of listening devices laid on the floor of the ocean by the US Navy. Those sensors reported their passage to NATO ships and aircraft, which could then follow them with comparative ease.
Details of NATO tracking capabilities had been leaked to the Russians by the Walker family spy-ring, early in the 1980s, and the shock of learning how much the Western navies could hear had led the Soviet navy to institute a crash programme of new design.
The first of the latest type of Soviet submarine had recently been photographed by American satellites as it left Severomorsk on patrol, and again three weeks later when it returned, but no sound trace whatever had been found of it during the intervening period. Codenamed Akula by NATO assessors, the submarine was a massive eight thousand tons, similar in size to Retribution, but instead of ballistic missiles for threatening Western cities, she carried a stock of torpedoes and anti-ship missiles able to destroy boats like HMS Retribution before they could fire their weapons at Moscow.
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