H.M.S. Unseen

by Patrick Robinson

  “Could be. If Harry’s best guess is correct, Ben Adnam knew how to make that conversion. The only gap in an otherwise reasonably logical progression is that we don’t know how the goddamned Iraqis did the engineering or where they found a trained submarine crew.”

  “No…no we don’t. And it’s a big gap. But he’s fixed it before. I think we are going to assume they did it. And I think we have to consider ways of catching this submarine before he strikes again. I’m just not sure where to start. SOSUS came up with nothing. Do you think we have to talk to someone? Like Scott, or the President? Maybe Robert Mac?”

  “I don’t know. For right now I think we ought to wait for twenty-four hours and see if anything comes out in the media or in the searches going on out there. I think if we’re going to propose a truly outlandish course of action, we need the boost of the continuing mystery. That way people will be a bit more ready to listen to us.”

  “Okay…shall we regroup late afternoon tomorrow, compare notes…here?”

  “Yes, 1700 hours.”

  “You got it.”

  The Navy Chief walked out still frowning. And as he did so Admiral Morgan picked up his secure line and dialed a number on the other side of the world. Seconds later the telephone rang in the big white mansion on the shore of Loch Fyne.

  “Iain?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Arnold Morgan here.”

  “Good afternoon, Arnold. How nice to hear you. I’m afraid to say, you have the most terrible problem.”

  “I know. It’s him, isn’t it. Banging out airliners from a submarine.”

  “Yes, Arnold. Yes it is. It’s him.”

  7

  1500. February 9, 2006.

  The Oval Office.

  ADMIRAL ARNOLD MORGAN HAD JUST WALKED through the door and the President was awaiting him, sitting quietly with Secretary of State Harcourt Travis. Before the admiral could utter even a word of greeting, the Chief Executive said curtly, “National Security Advisor, you are holding out on me.”

  “Sir?”

  “You are holding out on me. When Starstriker was lost this morning, you were the only person in that room who knew what had happened. You were expecting it. You reacted in about a half second. Too quick to absorb a mere possibility. And you were right, a full fifteen minutes in front of the world, and you said, ‘That bastard.’ I heard you.

  “Arnold Morgan, I am sufficiently presumptuous to regard you as a true friend. And I’m not accusing you of anything. Not yet. But you better have a real good explanation for your apparent preknowledge.”

  Admiral Morgan nodded to Harcourt, then said, “Sir, I do have some theories. And I will not pretend I did not have a gut feeling that this could happen. But when it actually did I was as shocked as the next man. Just a bit earlier. And you know me well enough, Mr. President, I tend to react quickly. If there was anything I coulda done to prevent that disaster, you know I’da done it. With or without your permission.”

  And then, over two cups of coffee, in a talk which lasted almost thirty minutes, he recounted to the President and the senior foreign policy executive in the United States government every one of his thoughts, from the moment HMS Unseen went missing to the moment Starstriker was apparently blasted out of the sky.

  He fitted the pieces together, and he plotted the progression of his ideas, and he made particular reference to the fact that he had no explanation as to how the Iraqis could have converted the British submarine into an antiaircraft weapon. In particular he pointed out the real gap, the real weakness in his argument: the question of where the Iraqis could have carried out the work, given the impossibility of their own situation; no deep water, no submarine base, and thus no home, no expertise, not many friends. He also pointed out that the American surveillance system was all-seeing but not fireproof. And the Iraqis had shown once before that they were capable of extraordinary cunning.

  Finally, he talked about Benjamin Adnam and his belief that the presumed-dead terrorist must somehow be involved.

  “I did not, sir, want to alarm you,” said the admiral. “Because I did not have one shred of proof. I still don’t. It’s all just my own thoughts. But when you think, and half believe something, and then you get a hard-ass fact that slams it all together…well, right then you start to believe you may be right. Which I now do.”

  The President nodded. “Very well, Arnold. I understand. Two questions. One, how did Adnam know our oil-negotiating team was on board that particular Concorde flight?”

  “That’s easy. There was a full Iranian delegation at the conference in Baku. Bob Trueman certainly knew at least two of them pretty well. I am sure they just asked politely about his long journey home, and, being a civilian, he told ’em he was flying Concorde the next morning out of Heathrow.”

  “Right. And Starstriker?”

  “That was Adnam’s real objective, and it was one of the most publicized flights in history. Scruff, Kathy’s highland terrier, knew Starstriker’s ETD from Dulles this morning.”

  “Hmmm. I guess he did. How about the missile? Heat-seeking?”

  “Nossir. Both aircraft were going too fast to risk chasing from anywhere astern. They were also damned high, and there are very strict range limits on these highly accurate SAMs. You’d only get one shot at a supersonic. My guess is that the missile was launched vertically, with preprogrammed radar. It adjusted trajectory and course automatically…it’s called fire-and-forget in the trade…came in from dead ahead…smashed straight into the nose.”

  “Jesus. But Arnold, ought you not to have mentioned this to me beforehand?”

  “Sir. For the past ten months I have been pondering the possibility that Adnam might be driving a stolen submarine. Naturally, my thoughts were that he might take another shot at us, even though I knew he had no major weaponry on board. But I didn’t have the remotest idea where he was. I was not even confident enough to talk to the Navy. It was just a theory, mostly intuition, no facts. Then Concorde goes down. Do I connect my off-beat military theory with a crashed British passenger aircraft? Maybe. But not strongly enough to start alerting the Navy to take action. Certainly not to bother the President of the United States.”

  “No. I do see that. When were you going to speak to me?”

  “Probably tomorrow evening. I told Joe Mulligan that before I said anything, we better wait to see that there was absolutely nothing from out of Starstriker’s cockpit, like, ‘We just ran out of gas.’ But, not for the first time, you preempted me.”

  The President relaxed. “Guess I did. And you’re a pretty hard guy to preempt. But Jesus, Arnold, I never saw a public over-reaction like yours this morning. People thought you’d lost it.”

  “Not quite, sir.”

  “No, Arnold, not quite…and now what? What do we do?”

  For the first time now, the refined, scholarly Harcourt Travis spoke. But first he stood up and walked, thoughtfully, the length of the Oval Office and back. “Arnold,” he said, “the trouble with theories is that they take on a life of their own. And if the very basis of their premise is wrong in the first place, they waste a thunderous amount of everyone’s time. Also, they have a way of quite unnecessarily annoying foreign governments with which we are compelled to deal.

  “Greatly as I respect your instincts, I am obliged to remind you that a couple of air crashes do not necessarily give credence to a scenario from a Bond movie…mad underwater terrorist running amok with the world’s airlines.”

  “No, Harcourt. I know they don’t.”

  “Plus the fact that your villain is: A) supposed to be dead, as far as anyone knows, and B) he is from a country that does not even own a submarine at all, far less the most lethal antiaircraft boat ever built.”

  “I know that, too, Harcourt.”

  “When I listen to you fit some of the pieces together, I do accept there is a remote chance you may be correct. But by God, Arnold, it is so remote. If the British submarine was not sunk, if it was somehow stolen
, if this Adnam character is somehow still alive, if Iraq was somehow able to get it, hide it, convert it, man it, and operate it. If this same country was able to buy such a missile system from someone and fit it onto a submarine. If this Adnam was able to conceal himself in the North Atlantic, if he had been able to fire two untried SAM missiles from some kind of a jury-rigged launcher, and actually hit two of the highest-flying, fastest aircraft ever built. If, Arnold, your auntie had balls, I guess she’d somehow be your uncle. Count me out, pal. At least until you can provide me with one solitary shining F-A-C-T.”

  The President shook his head. Then he repeated his last question. “Well, what do we do?”

  “I honestly don’t know, sir,” replied the admiral, ignoring the onslaught of skepticism displayed by Harcourt Travis. “I suppose we could accept my theory and obliterate Baghdad in retribution. But we’d look pretty fucking silly if a different kind of truth came out about the crashes. So that’s out. At least for the moment.”

  “You can say that again,” interjected the Secretary of State. “Do you have any idea what an uproar something like this could cause? Really, Arnold, even you have to get real on matters of this scale.”

  “Harcourt,” replied Morgan, wearily, “you don’t have to keep reminding me of my shortcomings, mainly because I might have to remind you of a few of yours…lemme just run this technical detail past the chief.

  “Just assuming my unsupported theory is largely correct, the search area for a submarine is, by now, massive. Take the spot around 30 West where the two aircraft vanished. It’s at 50.30 North. By the time we get out there with search aircraft, Commander Adnam could have been moving for twenty-four hours, leaving us a search area of at least 30,000 square miles. Expanding with every fucking minute that passes. By the time we get ships out there three days later, the target could be virtually anywhere.

  “If you take 50.30 North, 30 West as the search-center, he could be on an 800-mile radius circle, or, stated another way, in a search area of over 2 million square miles…and that 2 million square miles is all water. Because the crashes happened bang in the middle of the ocean. One suspects by design.

  “HMS Unseen could have gone north toward the coastal area of Greenland; west, way off the coast of the U.S.A. and Canada; east toward the west coast of Ireland; or south to absolutely nowhere. Adnam could be anywhere in that area. We’d have only one chance—that he gets careless and SOSUS picks him up, holds him long enough for MPA to get a fix. Sir, whatever, we’re still looking for a poisoned needle in the Sahara desert.”

  “Supposition, supposition. The entire theory is one of supposition…we’re not just looking for a needle in the Sahara. We’re looking for a needle that probably does not exist. And in my book that’s probably a needle not worth looking for.” Harcourt Travis was on the verge of exasperation.

  But the President wanted to proceed. “Arnold, how would it have been if we’d sent a fleet of nuclear submarines out there the moment we knew about the crash?”

  “Better, but not much. They’d want three days minimum to get to the crash site. Unseen would still be more than 600 miles from the datum. That’s a 600-mile radius circle, or 1 million square miles. We’d still have to trip over the sonofabitch. And we’d be just as likely to trip over ourselves.”

  “Who else knows your thoughts? Just Joe?”

  “And our old friend Admiral MacLean. As you know, I visited him in Scotland. And I spoke to him again about two hours ago. He agrees. Adnam is on the loose, and he will almost certainly strike again. But Iain does have one thought which is useful…refueling. Unseen has a range of about 7,000 miles. He thinks it likely that Ben was topped up, say 1,000 miles out from the datum before Concorde. That means he’s probably used up more than half of it, running back and forth.

  “Joe’s activating a search for any suspicious-looking tanker in the North Atlantic, Iraqi or otherwise, that is apparently going nowhere. If we find any, I guess we could have ’em tailed by a nuclear boat. That’s how the Brits caught General Belgrano off the Falklands. Tracking the refueling ship.”

  “You want Harcourt to call some kind of council of war?”

  “Not yet, sir. We better wait to see if anything whatsoever shakes out of the crashes in the next two or three days. I really think it would be crazy to start sending the Atlantic Fleet out right now. We’ve told ’em to maintain overhead surveillance in the immediate search area, and SOSUS has been briefed to be more than usually vigilant for anything that might be a U-Class signature anywhere in the North Atlantic. Meanwhile, I think we better keep our powder dry…. The last thing we need is coast-to-coast panic because an unseen enemy is wiping out international air traffic.”

  “No. We won’t be thanked for causing that. But, Jesus, what if he hits another airliner?”

  “Sir, I think we have to brace ourselves for that. But we’ll be much more alert, and I think we should quietly send a Carrier Battle Group into the area…they’re pretty good at finding submarines. Usually. Then we can keep land-based Maritime Patrol Aircraft working as well. Make it a general area search. But we should keep the SSN force well clear. Otherwise, we’ll end up with a Blue on Blue. If we stay with surface-and-air search only, we can say they’re just looking for wreckage.”

  “Arnold, as always it was instructive in the extreme. Keep me well posted, will you? I agree we ought not to make an early, rash move. But please, if you have any thoughts whatsoever, make sure I know about ’em. Real early.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  The admiral walked toward the Oval Office door, and, as he opened it, the President spoke again. “That, by the way, was not an admonishment…just my way of congratulating myself on my choice of a national security advisor.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Then turning to the Secretary of State, the President said, “You were pretty hard on him, Harcourt. I know I told you to bounce him up and down a little, find out how strong his theory was, but you came close to making him look a fool.”

  “Men like Admiral Morgan cannot to be made to look very foolish,” replied Travis. “He’s too damned clever. Also he happens to have the only theory in town about the crashes. But it is so far-fetched…more Hollywood than Washington…and I still believe it will be completely discredited in the end.”

  Harcourt Travis stood, gathered up his documents, and made for the door. But he was leaving behind a man in a mammoth quandary. The President had always recognized the admiral’s paranoia about submarines, and he did not want to be sucked into some drastic action against an enemy that might not exist. As Morgan had pointed out, he had not one shred of proof that Ben Adnam was out there, no proof that he was even alive, never mind at the helm of a rogue submarine. Certainly nothing but a bunch of circumstantial evidence to back up a truly majestic theory of international terrorism on an unimaginable scale. Harcourt Travis offered the easy, do-nothing, political solution, the cynical, lethargic stance of the international statesmen. Never get into a fight you might not win.

  Maybe the admiral’s losing it, the President thought. Maybe he’s just worked this one out a step too far, since, by his own admission, the Iraqis seem incapable of operating a submarine, much less making the missile conversion on the stolen submarine. And yet…and yet…being right has a virtue of its own. And with my own eyes I saw that Morgan was the only man in the United States this morning who was right, who was half expecting Starstriker might not make it across the Atlantic. What do they say in horse racing: keep backing him until he loses? I guess he’s my man, for better or for worse.

  By the time the President had made his decision, the admiral had quickened his stride, marching back to his own office, head thrust forward, his mind locked on to one unnerving fact. I have to get this whole fucking scenario right out of the hands of civilians and under the control of the military on both sides of the Atlantic. I just can’t have some fat, dumb, and happy asshole in a Savile Row suit making some loosey-goosey remark on the BBC that
is gonna send half the world into a fucking tailspin. And that is highly likely to happen. Specially if they find one of the black boxes.”

  He walked into his office, closed the door, kissed Kathy, told her he loved her, then ordered her to get her ass firmly into gear and to get Admiral Sir Richard Birley on the line in London immediately, if not sooner. “He’s probably at his residence. It’s 2100 over there…he lives right near the base at Northwood…the number’s on file…comes under FOSM.”

  Before he had finished yelling instructions, Admiral Birley was on the line from his office.

  “Arnold. Hello, I was half expecting you to call…if our last conversation had a basis in truth, we are, shall we say, in the deepest possible trouble.”

  “Dick, we have more or less accepted here the truth of our last talk. I am presuming there has never been a squeak from Unseen?”

  “You presume correctly. And we both know why. But we have to ask ourselves, what now?”

  “Well, I had a purpose in this call…I think circumstances have thrown the Royal Navy and the United States Navy together. What may appear at first sight to be a civilian problem is now no such thing.”

  “Correct. I had absolutely the same thought myself.”

  “Are the search ships for Concorde all Royal Navy?”

  “Yes. Two frigates and a destroyer. We’re running a deep unmanned submarine from a civilian mother ship as well, but I can keep the lid on them.”

  “Great. Because we’re sending three Navy ships out there to search for the wreckage of Starstriker. Also I wanna get a CVBG into the area as soon as possible. And, even quicker, some MPA. The thing is we have to keep any news of any black box we find under very tight control.”

  “We realize that over here. If the recording has the pilot shouting out that he was about to get hit up the arse by a guided missile…well, we won’t want the media getting hold of that too soon. Because they would go instantly berserk. God knows what would happen then. I suppose all transatlantic flights would be in chaos, but also Adnam would know we were onto him…and that way he might make a bolt for it and disappear for good…knocking down a sodding aircraft whenever he felt so inclined.”