by James Philip
Jack Griffin had brought mugs of Kye for everybody in the CIC, including the civilian, as he called Hobbs when the man in question was out of his hearing.
“Thank you, Jack,” Ralph Hobbs murmured, not looking up.
“Don’t mention it, Chief.”
As he spoke the civilian frowned hard at the fuzzy green sweep of the antenna through another 360 degrees. The screen seemed to shiver, settling anew several times each orbit and the distortion effect had got worse in the last few minutes. Its other worldly green glow threw the faces of the men around it into cruel reliefs, every deep shadow taking on a sinister hue.
“That’s definitely not interference from the Type 293, Peter,” the civilian declared, glumly.
“What do you think, Ralph? Something external?”
“It’s as if we’re sailing across some kind of very strong directional...” The civilian’s voice trailed away.
Both men were studying the changing returns on the repeater.
“Are you seeing this, Selvey?” Peter Christopher asked, without turning to look at the specialist manning the range finding Type 293 display.
“Yes, sir. Many low level contacts climbing...” Leading Electrical Artificer Denis Selvey’s voice was distracted as his mind worked through the possibilities. The only time he’d seen patterns remotely like the one on the Type 293Q repeater was on a half-forgotten training course over a year ago. That mocked up training display had been a kind of practical joke, a test to discover who’d been paying attention.
“Are we plotting this?” Peter asked, wondering if he ought to have already ordered somebody to start a tactical plot.
The ship’s Combat Information Centre (CIC) was only partially operational because many of the critical automated feeds to the ‘plot’ - the big table that displayed the tactical situation out to a distance of over a hundred miles - were still nominal, courtesy of the shortcomings of HM Dockyard Chatham.
“No, sir,” CPO Crawley reported, standing at Peter Christopher’s shoulder. “That’s a lot of activity from nowhere in no time at all,” the older man observed. The CIC had become deadly quiet. The whir of fans, the hum of the score of cathode ray tubes seemed unnaturally loud. He turned, unbidden. “Griffin, warm up the ops board.”
“Aye, aye, Chief.” The other man was already obeying as he acknowledged.
Suddenly, there were more contacts on the big Type 965 screen.
The ‘ops board’ or ‘tactical plot’ in the CIC was a table on which the outputs of the Type 293 and the Type 965 would automatically repeat providing a foundation of real time tactical data upon which other inputs could be selectively added or removed at a touch of a button to provide a ‘layered’ representation of the surrounding battle zone. Superficially, HMS Talavera’s ‘plot’ was only a glorified electronic fire control table. However, in a real combat situation it would be continuously updated by additional inputs from other air and sea units and real time tactical inputs from the flotilla leader or battle group flagship’s own CIC. The technical wizardry involved in bringing together and representing, in a coherent and readily translated way the modern three-dimensional electronic battlefield still turned most old Navy men’s heads.
“Inform the bridge that the CIC plot is being activated,” Peter Christopher called, belatedly taking command of a situation he ought to have assumed command of long before Chief Crawley had got the ball rolling.
“Contacts climbing,” Called the technician in front of the Type 293 screen. “I’d say at maximum climb rates, sir.”
“Bridge acknowledges ops board nominal, sir.”
“Thank you.” Peter Christopher had never taken his eyes off the screens. “How many is that?” He asked Ralph Hobbs.
“Twenty, thirty. No, no, more than that, a lot more than that...”
Distant contacts were merging together, losing individual identities, coalescing into the unusually noisy electronic background. Automatic systems were attempting to label targets but becoming swamped with real and false returns. HMS Talavera’s contact detection and tracking systems were state of the art. It made no difference. Target identification was a mess because hardly any of the target’s transponders were squawking friend or foe codes. The big Type 965 bedsteads might be all seeing but there simply wasn’t the human or the mechanical computational power to process the mass of returns when the targets weren’t squawking IFF. Especially, not in an environment when the atmosphere was buzzing and squealing with a mounting barrage of electro-magnetic countermeasures transmissions. Sooner or later somebody somewhere would work out how to stop the latest radars getting swamped this easily but that was no comfort tonight.
Peter Christopher’s mind was racing.
He knew what he was seeing but he didn’t understand it.
However, for the moment the fact that he didn’t understand it didn’t matter.
He reached for the bridge phone.
“Bridge,” rasped the voice at the other end of the line.
“EWO for the officer of the watch, please.”
There was a short pause.
“What is it Peter?” Drawled the Talavera’s executive office, Lieutenant-Commander Hugo Montgommery.
Peter Christopher had taken a liking to the destroyer’s second-in-command from the outset. Hugo Montgommery was an old hand; a reservist who had come back into the Navy after his wife had died – in childbirth – and dedicated himself anew to a career he’d previously eschewed for a job in a City of London stockbroker’s office and marital bliss on land. Montgommery was calm, patient, very competent and a veritable font of Service knowledge. He was also a good, old-fashioned seaman which was why he’d taken the middle watch on this filthy North Sea night.
“Are you watching the Type 965 repeater, sir?”
“Yes, looks like it’s throwing another tantrum.”
The younger man hesitated for a moment. He glanced at the screen. What it was showing made no sense. None whatsoever. But he didn’t think the system was throwing a ‘tantrum’.
“I don’t believe so, sir.”
“Oh. Tell me more.”
“I think we’re watching every single V-Bomber base and every single US airbase flushing their birds as fast as they possibly can, sir.” Peter didn’t recognise his own voice. “Absolutely everything at once, sir.”
There was a pause of several seconds.
“Very good. Keep me informed, Peter.”
“Jamming,” Ralph Hobbs declared, thinking out aloud. “Airborne jamming,” he added, as an afterthought. “A lot of it. Many, many frequencies. No, forget that, spectrum-wide jamming!”
Peter Christopher sucked his teeth, glanced around at the other men in the CIC. CPO Crawley shrugged, nobody offered a comment.
“Has anybody ever seen anything like this before?”
There were shakes of the head.
The news about Cuba and America had been worrying but they’d been at sea for forty-eight hours, largely out of contact with the outside world barring snatches of news they’d heard in passing. The ship wasn’t at a heightened alert level, although that didn’t mean a great deal because Talavera wasn’t due to start taking onboard the remaining 93 members of her normal peacetime complement of 240 men for another fortnight. Currently, she was operating on a full engineering and sea-keeping establishment, with an over-sized mixed electrical division of specialists and civilian workers. The galley was fully manned but there was nobody to man the guns, the Sea Cat launcher or the Squid A/S mortar, even if all the magazines hadn’t been empty. Moreover, many of the sea duty men and engineers onboard Talavera were freshly trained recruits straight from HMS Sultan and HMS Collingwood. HMS Talavera was a warship in name alone.
Peter Christopher concentrated on the evidence of the radar screens.
There were a lot of aircraft in the air over East Anglia. Aircraft climbing, fanning out across the North Sea. The jamming was getting worse. He knew that a proportion of the V-Bomber force was often kept on Q
uick Reaction Alert (QRA) – literally standing at the end of the runway fully fuelled and bombed up and ready to go to war at a five minutes’ notice – and that practice scrambles were relatively frequent. But even as he watched the repeater screen more contacts were appearing, climbing like bats out of Hell. And nobody was broadcasting IFF signals. Nobody.
“What’s going on?”
“Captain in the compartment!” Yelled Jack Griffin.
“As you were,” Commander David Penberthy directed evenly.
“The air space over East Anglia is filling up with contacts, sir,” Peter Christopher reported. It was vital to report exactly what he was seeing and exactly what he knew to be the facts before speculation ran rife.
Commander David Penberthy, the forty-six year old captain of HMS Talavera placed a hand on his Electronic Warfare Officer’s shoulder for a moment. Like the executive officer, Hugo Montgommery, the Old Man was a World War II veteran. He’d spent most of the war hunting U-Boats in the North Atlantic. HMS Talavera was the third destroyer he’d commanded; a complex, rebuilt ship like Talavera with a largely green crew was invariably placed in a very ‘safe pair of hands’.
Talavera’s captain was a big man who didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard or to exert his authority. He was known to have a blowtorch temper and very occasionally, a lashing tongue but from what Peter had seen so far he was careful to reserve both for people whom he’d decided weren’t up to the job.
“What do you think is afoot, Peter?” The older man asked with a conversational sang froid that left a lasting impression of everybody in the CIC.
Peter Christopher hesitated, collected his wits.
“I’d say the V-Bomber Force has scrambled, sir,” he reported, his voice thick with tension.
“I think we have missiles launching!” Ralph Hobbs interjected from out of the nearby, green glowing gloom. “One, two, three...”
Altered symbols danced around the new contacts.
“The ESM and DF arrays are getting swamped with noise, sir,” called another voice in the gloom. “All around the compass now, sir.”
The Captain of HMS Talavera patted his EWO’s shoulder again and stood tall in the eerily illuminated CIC.
“More missiles launching,” Ralph Hobbs grunted, not quite believing what he was seeing on the cold, uncaring repeaters.
Commander David Penberthy stepped to the bulkhead telephone.
“Bridge, this is the Captain speaking.” A momentary delay, and then, very calmly, he said: “The ship will come to action stations. Repeat, the ship will come to action stations. I shall be on the bridge directly.”
Chapter 3
02:51 Hours GMT
Vickers Armstrong Yard, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria
Lieutenant-Commander Simon Collingwood blinked into the harsh light, disorientated for a moment but only for a moment. Then the long-conditioning of his eighteen year naval career kicked into action. He was fully awake even before he rolled onto his side throwing off the sheets and sitting up to peer, irritably up at the silhouetted face of the man standing over his bed in the first floor room of the dingy hotel fifty yards from the main dockyard gates.
“What’s going on?” He asked, not pausing to rub the sleep from his eyes as he planted his feet on the floor and reached for his watch on the rickety bedside table. He became aware that the other man, a very young seaman with a shore patrol band around his right bicep, looked shaken and on the verge of panic.
“War order, sir...”
“What?”
“General war order, sir. It came in a few minutes ago. Your name was at the top of the first emergency duty list, sir...”
Collingwood pushed the seaman aside and groped for his uniform dungarees.
He was a small, prematurely balding, dapper man with a calm, organised mind and a reputation for steadiness in the most stressful of situations. General War Order! It might be an exercise although deep down he doubted it. Although he’d only been paying passing attention to the news lately, and hadn’t read a paper for several days he’d shared the unease of others in the Mess.
“Who else is on your wake up list?” He asked brusquely.
“Sir?”
“Never mind. Wake up everybody in this building. All Dreadnoughts are to report to the boat immediately.”
The man literally ran out of the room.
Nobody at the dockyard gates knew what was going on.
Collingwood flashed his pass and ran between the big, blocky workshops towards the floodlight graving basins in the near distance. Other men were walking fast, several trotting. Nobody gave him a second look.
It was a little surreal. The air was icy cold, the wind spitting sporadic drops of rain. There were no alarms, no klaxons blaring, a few shouted commands in the distance and the sound of running feet, otherwise, nothing.
There were two armed sentries at the main gangway.
Behind them the submarine’s tall sail jutted into the night. They’d pulled away the cranes and jibs a fortnight ago but multiple umbilicals still snaked from the land down into the carcass of HMS Dreadnought in the dry dock. Power, communications, water. Until the boat’s Westinghouse reactor pile was online she was totally dependent on the land.
There was a fixed telephone link to the Dockyard Supervisor’s Office at the head of the gangway.
Collingwood picked it up.
“This is Dreadnought,” he reported, breathlessly, “can you tell me what’s going on, please.”
No, the duty officer could not tell him what was going on.
“The General War Order was broadcast in the clear to all active units and shore establishments at zero-two-three-seven hours Zulu, sir. That’s all I know.”
Collingwood glanced at his watch.
03:03.
Men were arriving on the dockside.
“Everybody on the boat!” He shouted. “Quickly, now!”
Half of Dreadnought’s future crew – including her captain and all bar two of her officers - were hundreds of miles away in Southampton training in a specially constructed simulator while the boat continued fitting out at the other end of the country. Dreadnought wasn’t supposed to commission until the spring but to all intents, she was – reactor excepted – practically ready for sea.
Collingwood gazed thoughtfully at the great black whale-like shape of Britain’s first nuclear power hunter-killer submarine lying silently, unknowingly in the shadows of the dry dock beneath the blazing floodlights. He’d been with the boat eight months overseeing the fitting out. Eighteen years in the Royal Navy, a long, gradual progression from lowly seaman to being posted second in command of the most advanced fighting machine in the Fleet. Now war might have been declared and Dreadnought lay helpless in plain sight, like a beached cetacean on the foreshore.
General War Order...
Simon Collingwood wasn’t thinking about the madness those words implied. Not right then. Right then he was thinking that if only the fools could have staved off the insanity for another two, or better still, three or four months, the great enterprise of his professional life would have come to fruition. HMS Dreadnought had been the fulcrum of his existence since long before her keel was laid down on 12th June 1959. For the boat; Britain’s first nuclear powered submarine to be trapped helplessly in a dry dock in Cumbria when the world might be about to go up in flames was almost unbearable. He’d poured so much of his life into the great black hull before him in the dock and now it seemed it might have all been for nothing.
He’d been sent to Groton, Connecticut, to train alongside his US Navy ‘allies’ ahead of joining first the Design Project Team at Barrow-in-Furness, and later being appointed Naval Construction Liaison Officer (Engineering and Electrical Systems) as Dreadnought slowly progressed from a lifeless half-completed hulk to a living, breathing deadly, mind-bogglingly complex fighting machine. Six months ago he’d been confirmed as the boat’s first executive officer.
General War Order...
The Royal Navy had begun investigating the possibilities of seaborne nuclear propulsion plants in 1946. The work had never had a very high priority and during the Korean War, in 1952, all research was suspended. It had not been until in 1955, when the US Navy commissioned the Nautilus that the Royal Navy, until then the acknowledged masters of anti-submarine warfare had awakened to the fact that everything had changed. In exercises with the new American vessel it was suddenly horrifyingly obvious that the tactics and the technology that had won the Battle of the Atlantic simply didn’t work against the new undersea threat. Faced with attempting to join the nuclear submarine building game from what was basically a standing start, in the mid 1950s there seemed no prospect of a British version of the Nautilus joining the Fleet for at least another decade, or perhaps not even before the end of the 1960s. It was a depressing scenario for the Royal Navy and shameful one for the politicians who’d let it happen by starving the original reactor research project of funds and then compounding their parsimonious blunder by stopping it dead in its tracks at the very moment the Americans were racing ahead.
Simon Collingwood was one of only a handful of serving officers who knew the whole story of the Royal Navy’s race, against all odds, to join the nuclear submarine club. HMS Dreadnought as a project would have been impossible without the transfer of the US Navy’s most secret and most advanced technologies. Dreadnought incorporated all the lessons learned in the design, construction and operation of the USS Nautilus, enabling the Royal Navy to bypass at least five and probably as many as ten years of horrendously costly development time. That this had been possible at all was down to two remarkable men, and a little known secret clause in the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement.