Skydancer

by Geoffrey Archer

  The silent operation of the Akula class boats had made many of NATO’s listening techniques obsolete. It was feared the Soviets could now patrol the Atlantic shipping lanes undetected by the West. No one knew how they had achieved such silence, but there were reports that the Akulas had a secret new motor in addition to their nuclear-powered turbines, a motor that used the revolutionary technique of electro-magnetic thrust, producing a speed of ten knots in almost total silence and without leaving any detectable wake.

  ‘Akula!’ Carrington exclaimed hoarsely. ‘It has to be. Nothing else could be as quiet as that. The bastard must have been waiting for us!’

  ‘He’s still closing on us, sir! Doesn’t seem to realise we’ve slowed down,’ the rating whispered excitedly. ‘I can definitely hear turbulence round his hull. I don’t understand it, sir! Why can’t I hear his fucking propeller?’

  ‘Because he’s not using one,’ Carrington answered softly. ‘Right, let’s see what he can do!’

  He leapt to his feet and strode back to the control room.

  ‘Wind in that VLF antenna, or we’ll lose it. Then make maximum revs!’ he barked. ‘Full speed ahead!’

  The helmsman turned from his dials and hydroplane controls in astonishment. Polaris missile patrols were normally conducted at a stately three knots. Now the skipper was ordering a speed of thirty!

  An even vibration took the submarine in its grip as the control rods were raised in the nuclear reactor core, producing an instant increase in heat and steam for the turbines. The needle on the dial showing the rotational speed of the propeller shaft rose steadily, until it approached the section marked in red. The chief engineer watched it closely.

  ‘Twenty-eight knots!’ the executive officer called, peering fixedly at the log.

  Carrington prowled round the control room, glaring at the dials one minute and studying the chart the next. He had taken a calculated gamble. If the Soviet submarine which he believed was sitting on his tail was to keep up with the speeding Retribution, it would have to abandon its silent electro-magnetic thrust and resort to the greater power of its nuclear reactor and large propeller. That was bound to be noisier, and they would be forcing the Akula to make a sonar fingerprint, allowing a Western navy to record its noise characteristics for the first time.

  Carrington grinned to himself; either way he was going to win something. If the Akula stayed on his tail the Soviets would lose some of their secrets. If the boat stayed quiet, it would rapidly drop behind and Retribution would give it the slip.

  Confident that all was well in the control room, the captain returned to the sonar booth where the rating was urgently pressing switches on his panel. Their high speed through the water was making so much noise on their own sonar systems that he could no longer tell if the Russian was behind them. Suddenly he cocked his head on one side.

  ‘Cavitation, sir!’ he exclaimed. ‘Dead astern! Suddenly come on. Nothing there before, but I can hear the bubbles on his propeller now.’

  ‘So! We have a huntsman on our tail! A hunting pinko no less!’ Carrington looked at Mike Smith for appreciation of the pun. He glanced across at the spools of the tape-recorder, rotating smoothly, and debated how to make the most of the opportunity that faced him.

  ‘We’ll keep up this speed until he’s firmly hooked, then cut the power and let him come closer,’ he decided.

  The sonar operator was busy with his controls again, filtering and processing the signals which were now audible not only to the towed array but also to the hydrophones fixed to the side of the hull. By comparing bearings from the two sets of sensors, he could now calculate that the Soviet submarine was fifty feet above them and about half a mile astern.

  The captain returned to the control room and bent his tall frame over the chart, talking urgently with his navigator.

  Lieutenant Robert Simpson leaned into the control room, eager to know what had caused the submarine’s unaccustomed burst of speed.

  ‘George? What’s going on?’ he whispered to the assistant Polaris systems officer who was standing to one side with his arms folded.

  ‘Hide and Seek! And we’re “it”!’

  ‘Who else is playing? A Russian?’

  ‘Well, it’s not one of ours, is it?’

  Commander Carrington paced past them, scowling.

  ‘Permission to be in the control room, sir?’ Simpson asked smartly, knowing he had no automatic right to be there.

  ‘As long as you keep out of the way,’ was the brusque reply.

  The commander carefully scanned the dials which showed how the propulsion machinery was performing.

  ‘I want you to cut the power and dive to four hundred feet,’ he told the marine engineer quietly. ‘Then turn hard to port – that’ll keep us in the deep water. What I want is to let the bugger go shooting over our heads, so we can get a good listen to all his noise parameters, and then for us to creep back the way we came in an effort to lose him. Think you can make us quiet enough?’

  ‘Can but try, sir,’ the engineer answered stolidly. ‘After all that speed, the reactor pumps’ll keep churning for a bit, even if everything else is quiet.’

  ‘Right away then,’ Carrington ordered.

  The depth at which the hunt had been pursued up to now was in the middle of a broad band of water of even temperature, allowing free passage of sound waves. Nervously rubbing his jaw, inadequately shaven in his haste that morning, Carrington judged that by diving steeply the Retribution would pass through a thermocline, where the water would become sharply colder. The temperature difference should create a sound barrier, below which the Retribution could hide. What an extraordinary medium the sea was; its salinity and temperature variations sometimes allowed sound waves to travel for hundreds of miles, and at others made it impossible to hear another craft just a few feet away.

  The men in the control room grasped at the pipework as the large vanes either side of the bulbous nose tilted the submarine steeply downwards.

  ‘Oh, shit!’ Simpson whispered at the suddenness of the manoeuvre.

  The tension on the faces around him had given him a nightmare vision of what it would be like in war, wrestling in the deep with a Russian submarine: a trial of strength which only one of them could win.

  He had been taught that when it began, the Soviet boats would make an all-out attack to try to neutralise the Western missile submarines in a pre-emptive strike. For a split-second he imagined it could actually be happening at that very moment: men in a Russian submarine trying to kill them, kill him even though he was committed to saving the lives of those same men’s wives and families.

  In sudden confusion he thought about the secret role he had been chosen to play, and realised with a jolt that he was far from ready, far from certain what he would do. The meagre preparations he had made were secreted illegally in the drawer beneath his bunk.

  He glanced at the captain. There was a look in Carrington’s eye that was not just excitement; it was fear too.

  To hide his uncertainty, Carrington quickly turned away and went over to the sonar booth. The Soviet boat was faster and quieter than his own, and its sonar equipment probably at least as good. If the contest was purely technical the Russian would win, he felt sure of that. There was another element, though, which could decide this contest – human skill.

  He had never faced the test so directly before. The endless simulations he had practised were supposed to have prepared him for this moment, yet now he felt strangely unready. In the past they had tended to take for granted that British equipment and techniques were so superior that the Soviets would never get close enough to challenge the Polaris boats’ mastery of the deep.

  ‘Want to listen on these, sir?’ the rating asked, passing him a spare set of headphones. Carrington struggled to separate the different sounds that crowded in on his brain. It took him a few moments, but at last he could pick out the cavitation, the turbulence caused by the Akula’s propeller biting into the water.

>   ‘Getting closer?’ Carrington asked anxiously.

  The sonar operator nodded. ‘And following us down, sir.’

  ‘Shit!’

  He snapped the headphones back on to the table, then swung his long body out of the swivel-chair and through the doorway back into the control room, in one continuous movement.

  ‘Hard a-port now!’ he yelled at the helmsman. ‘We’re going to have to shake the bastard off!’

  Bob Simpson felt the shirt sticking to his neck. The submarine manoeuvred with unaccustomed violence. It was not just the motion that made him feel queasy; it was also the claustrophobia created by the tension of the men around him.

  He thought of Susan. Was she really with him still? Would she care if he died here at sea, buried alive? The uneven motion of the boat began to affect him seriously, and he hurried back to his bunk.

  Carrington hovered over the chart table in a pose that was almost predatory. His hair was ruffled where he had nervously run his fingers through it, and his once-crisp white shirt had dark patches under the arms. The chart itself was scrawled with lines marking the zigzag course they had followed in their unavailing efforts to lose the Akula.

  He was beginning to despair; the readiness of the Russian captain to reveal the capabilities of his new boat suggested that his orders had been very specific: any price was worth paying in order to observe from close quarters the test launch of the missile that would carry Skydancer aloft for the first time.

  ‘Captain!’

  The shout had come from the sound room.

  ‘Got something here you might be interested in, sir,’ the rating grinned. He turned up the volume on one of the loudspeakers. The heavy rumbling noise was unmistakeable.

  ‘QE2, sir. On her way south from New York to the Caribbean!’

  A grin spread across Carrington’s tired features. The good old QE2. It was the answer to a prayer.

  ‘What’s her range?’ he asked eagerly.

  ‘About thirty miles, sir.’

  ‘Good! Give me the very best bearing you can! We’re going to say hello to her!’

  By the time Bob Simpson returned to the control room, he was feeling better and had regained his composure. HMS Retribution had settled on to a steady course at a speed of twenty knots. High speed would not shake off their adversary; the Akula was faster than they were and was firmly on their tail. What they needed was a sonar ‘smoke screen’, and there was none bigger than the QE2.

  He went over to the chart table and rested an elbow on the edge of it.

  ‘What’s the latest?’ he asked the navigator casually.

  ‘We’re on our way to a rendezvous with a big, fat, red herring!’ his young colleague answered, grinning.

  Simpson raised his eyebrows.

  The navigator pointed to the chart and a small cross where two straight lines met.

  ‘This one’s us,’ he indicated, ‘and the other line is the estimated course of the liner QE2. We’re on track to intercept her in about two hours’ time.’

  ‘And this track here?’ Simpson asked, pointing to a third line running parallel and very close to their own course, but a short distance astern. ‘That’s the Russian?’

  ‘’Sright. That’s Boris, currently playing the part of the cat. A fat cat at that, at eight thousand tons.’

  ‘About the same size as the mouse,’ Simpson commented quietly.

  ‘True,’ the navigator conceded, ‘and in a couple of hours we’ll find out which one’s more cunning. My money’s on the mouse!’

  Back on the American mainland, the FBI’s electronic surveillance systems had been carrying out their allotted tasks meticulously. With so many sensitive military installations close to Cape Canaveral, every public phone-box within a fifty-mile radius of the missile-launching centre was monitored by a central computer. Every call was listened to electronically; the bugging was by microprocessor rather than by man.

  The computer was programmed to analyse speech. Each call made from those hundreds of telephones was recorded digitally. The computer would listen for the use of certain key words stored in its memory, and would check the callers against a ‘voice-print’ file, in case they were known to the authorities. Each digital recording would be checked through twice, but if the voices were unknown, and if no keywords were present, then it was automatically erased. If it held something of significance, it was transferred to magnetic tape, together with a record of when and from where the call had been made. Twice a day the tapes were studied by FBI agents at a counter-espionage centre in Miami.

  The telephone-call which Lieutenant Robert Simpson had made from outside Millies’ disco to his girlfriend in England was now on that tape. His English voice had produced no response from the digitised ‘rogues’ gallery’ in the central memory. However, one particular word that he had used had not gone unnoticed. It was one which had never triggered this particular alerting system before; ‘Aldermaston’ was not an American establishment after all, and had only been included in the list of FBI keywords as a gesture of transatlantic co-operation. But there it was, in the middle of a conversation from a Florida call-box to a number in the home counties of England.

  Because it was an unusual word, not related to any American defence project, ‘Aldermaston’ had caused the computer’s priority coding system to work in Bob Simpson’s favour for a while. If he had referred to an American defence establishment, his conversation would have received urgent attention from a human agent. ‘Aldermaston’ did not mean much to the men from the FBI, so for the time being the tape which could reveal that an informer was on board the British nuclear submarine Retribution lay on an American intelligence officer’s desk marked ‘Low Priority’.

  Commander Carrington had returned to his cabin to think, after instructing the officer of the watch to call him when they were within ten minutes of their rendezvous with the QE2.

  ‘What a fucking shambles,’ he muttered, as the long-term significance of what was happening began to sink in. The Soviet Navy had managed to sail a hunter-killer submarine right through several lines of Western detection barriers in the Norwegian sea, through the Iceland-Faroes gap which NATO considered almost as a Maginot line, and right across the Atlantic to within a few miles of the American coastline, but had remained utterly undetected until it revealed its presence by giving chase to HMS Retribution.

  With this new Soviet capability, NATO’s chances of defending itself against a Russian submarine attack had been dramatically reduced, as Carrington realised with dread. But more than that, the Royal Navy’s confidence in being able to successfully hide its Polaris missile submarines could no longer be justified, particularly when the Skydancer warheads were installed. Carrington had been told that the manoeuvring and decoy equipment in the Skydancer nose-cones made the new warheads heavier than the old ones, and the rockets would have a shorter range as a result. Less range meant that the Retribution and her sister vessels would have to patrol closer to the Soviet coast than before, and the closer to Russia they came, the easier it would be for the Soviet navy to find them.

  Carrington shuddered. He pulled a signal pad from his locker and began to outline the message that he must send back to his HQ as soon as it was safe to poke the transmitter mast above the surface.

  ‘Control room to Captain!’ The voice of the officer of the watch squawked from the communications box on the cabin wall.

  Carrington pressed a key. ‘Captain!’ he called back.

  ‘Three miles to target, sir!’

  ‘Right!’

  He opened his wall safe and pushed the signal pad inside. He would finish it later. The message was top secret, so he closed the safe door and spun the combination lock to secure it. Then he headed back to the control room.

  At the navigator’s table he paused briefly to look at the chart. He was pleased to note there was more than a thousand feet of water beneath them, and it was getting deeper all the time as they headed east.

  Then he hurried to
the sonar room, where he clamped on the second set of headphones. The throbbing cavitation from the giant screws of the Cunard liner seemed to be drowning out everything else. However, the sonar operator pointed to the green cathode ray tube, and indicated a barely-visible but separate line, below the jagged pattern created by the QE2.

  ‘That’s our Akula, sir,’ he explained. ‘Still sitting on our tail about half a mile astern, keeping about three cables off our starboard quarter. He’ll be nibbling our array if he comes any closer!’

  ‘What’s he expect us to do, that’s the big question isn’t it?’ Carrington asked, half to himself.

  ‘Certainly is, sir. Trouble is, this stuff’s pretty good but it can’t read minds yet,’ the operator joked, patting the top of his screen.

  ‘Damned shame, I call it!’ Carrington forced a laugh.

  Back in the control room the captain was suddenly conscious of the harsh meaning of the words ‘the loneliness of command’. Here he was, surrounded by young enthusiasts who would be only too eager to give him their opinions of what to do, were he to ask them. It was the last thing in the world that he needed at that moment, however; to listen to a host of conflicting views could only hinder the already difficult process of deciding on his tactics when they met the QE2.

  In his mind he had narrowed the options down to two: they could take up position underneath the liner and follow the same course, knowing that all noises from the submarine would be masked for as long as they stayed there, or he could pass right through the ‘noise footprint’ of the ship and out the other side, hoping the Soviet boat would think he had stayed beneath the liner and would follow the QE2 towards the Caribbean.

  What if their positions were reversed, Carrington thought to himself? What would the Soviet captain do if he was ‘driving’ Retribution? There was an obvious answer to that, based on years of study of Soviet submarine tactics. A Russian captain would hide his vessel under a surface ship for days, if necessary. They did it regularly, particularly when sailing their northern fleet round into the Mediterranean for annual exercises. A submarine would invariably try to make the journey undetected by sailing beneath the keel of an aircraft carrier or a cruiser.