H.M.S. Unseen

by Patrick Robinson

  The judge had made it perfectly clear at the hearing that if Laura insisted on running off with her American lover, it would be a very long time before she would see the girls again. As the Anderson lawyer had pointed out, these girls were daughters of Scotland, granddaughters of a famous Scottish admiral on one side, and, on the other, of one of the most important landed families in the country. There were critical questions of inheritance to consider. No, the court would not permit them to be taken to the American Midwest, from where they might very well not have returned.

  It was Admiral MacLean himself who had begun the healing process. He told his disapproving wife, Annie, that he could no longer bring himself to turn his hand against the daughter he loved. He added that he didn’t give a bloody fig for Douglas Anderson, whom he considered an extremely dreary man, and that he liked Bill Baldridge very much and was determined to do something about the situation.

  Assisted by the fact that Douglas wound up in the London tabloids, having an affair with an actress from Notting Hill Gate in London, the admiral moved to have the court order overturned. And he succeeded, citing the facts that Lieutenant Commander Baldridge was the son of one of the biggest ranchers in Kansas, that he had a doctorate in nuclear physics from MIT, that he had been one of the leading weapons officers in the U.S. Navy, and was a personal friend of the President of the United States. “And, perhaps more significantly, of mine,” he added with uncharacteristic immodesty.

  The admiral enjoyed firing a powerful torpedo, and the judge decided that without his support the court order was essentially worthless. Yes, the girls were free and entitled, and could by rights visit their natural mother during any and all school holidays. And now, the imminent arrival of Bill and Laura, on this day, was an occasion of great excitement. Because they were staying for ten days, then taking Flora and Mary to Kansas for the first time, for the remainder of Scotland’s long Easter break.

  The other objective to be achieved was a reconciliation between Laura and her mother. The two had hardly spoken since the custody case ended, since Lady MacLean felt that poor Douglas Anderson had been dealt a cruel and unnecessary blow. But he had married the actress, and things were rather different, particularly since Douglas was fond of saying publicly, albeit self-protectively, “Natalie is a lot prettier than Laura, and a lot less bloody trouble.”

  Sir Iain thought he was a lousy judge, a man to be pitied. But his wife, reversing course, had leapt to the side of her absent runaway daughter like a tigress defending her young, and began making no secret of the fact that, finally, she supported her daughter’s decisions. Both Sir Iain and Laura were hopeful that in the next few days the deep family rift would be healed.

  The Range Rover made it to the airport a half hour early. They parked the car and headed for the international exit gate. Bill and Laura, traveling first-class, were among the first out. Bill, wearing a big leather cowboy jacket over a dark grey suit and tie, his rolling gait straight from the High Plains, was unmistakable.

  Laura followed him through the door. She looked slim and quite stunning in a long, fitted, dark green suede overcoat with matching trilby hat and burgundy leather boots. Iain MacLean had never seen her look so well, nor so happy. The girls fell into her arms, and the two ex–Navy officers shook hands warmly. “She looks marvelous,” said the admiral quietly. “I was quite worried about her a couple of years ago. Thank you, Bill…for looking after her.”

  The Kansan grinned. “And thank you, Admiral, for being so goddamned decent about the whole thing…neither of us could help it, you know. It just happened, and it wasn’t a mistake.”

  “No. I know it wasn’t.”

  Laura introduced the girls to their new stepfather, and for a few moments they just gazed up into the deep blue eyes of the six-foot-two-inch Midwesterner who looked like a young Robert Mitchum. In the end, the elder daughter, Mary, asked earnestly, “Sir, are you really a cowboy like my father says you are?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Bill, grinning. “I sure am…ridin’ them dogies home, out there on the prairie…” This caused the little girl to fall over with laughter.

  “And you’re really my stepfather?”

  “Guess so, Miss Mary. Sure hope we git to ride the range together sometime.”

  “Stop it, Bill,” Laura admonished, laughing. “Mary, ignore him. He really doesn’t talk like that at all.”

  “Jest cain’t wait to git back in the saddle agin,” added the lieutenant commander.

  With the introductions complete, Laura kissed her father, and they walked back to the Range Rover, and the frenzied barking of the Labradors. The 55-mile journey took them almost two hours, thanks to the morning traffic in Glasgow. Bill regaled the girls with tales of Wyatt Earp and the Dalton brothers, never once dropping his cowboy act. He told them about the prairies, and the fact that his mother was on the board of the cowboy museum in Dodge City, “where I’m sure gonna take both you girls, once I git you fixed up with a couple of six-shooters…jest in case we meet any cattle rustlers on the trail.”

  Even Sir Iain was laughing by that time, and it was not until they headed north up the bank of the Gareloch that Bill suddenly offered his hand to Mary, and told her in a completely different accent, “Just kidding, Mary. Lieutenant Commander Baldridge. United States submarine officer by trade. You can call me Bill.”

  Mary looked quite disappointed. “Hmmmm,” she said, “I wish you were still a cowboy.”

  “Well,” said Laura, “I’m glad we got that little charade over…he’s so silly, Daddy. He’s actually been practicing his cowboy act in case we meet any of your stuffy friends.”

  “Good idea, Bill,” said the admiral. “Give ’em the full Wyatt Earp.”

  It was just before ten o’clock when they arrived at the house, and the admiral moved in to deal skillfully with the tensions that remained between his wife and the visitors from the United States.

  Bill did his part here, too. “I just wish you could find some time to come over and visit us, Annie,” he said. “I’ve always thought you would like it, and my mother would love to meet you at last.”

  Lady MacLean smiled. It was a smile that did not quite ask for forgiveness, but almost. It had been so much easier for her husband, who had liked Bill from the very start, and indeed had worked with him on a Royal Navy mission. And even she had to admit that Laura’s second marriage had worked out, that she had never seen her daughter so happy, nor in such a bloom of health. At the end of the winter, too. “Kansas certainly seems to agree with Laura,” she said. “I am sure it will be fine for me as well. Iain loves it there as you know…and I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forget the bitterness of the past…it was such a shock for us all, you know.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, the past is already forgotten,” replied the rancher, gallantly. And turning to Mary, he added, with a conspiratorial wink, “Yes, ma’am.” Which again reduced the little girl to helpless laughter.

  “He’s a cowboy, Grandma,” she said. “That’s how they talk.”

  “Only sometimes,” said Annie. “Don’t forget. I’ve known him longer than you.”

  “Yes, but he’s my stepfather,” she said.

  “And he’s my son-in-law,” replied her grandmother.

  “Easy, girls. Hold your fire. I don’t want y’all to start fightin’ over me.”

  “There!” yelled Mary, triumphantly. “I told you that’s how they talk…”

  At that point Admiral MacLean assumed a loose command. He suggested Annie organize some coffee, and he sent Angus, the red-bearded butler, upstairs with the suitcases, calling after him, “The blue room in the front.” Then, turning to Bill, he added, “There’s a big double bed in there now, so don’t look too forlorn.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot. That’s my old room. I haven’t been in there for what? Four years?”

  “Must be. It was 2002 wasn’t it, when he got the Jefferson.”

  “It was also 2002 when we got him, wasn’t it?�
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  “Well, it was 2002 when the Mossad thought they got him.”

  “Oh, I think they got him, sir. Did I ever tell you the President presented me with Adnam’s little submarine badge…the one he received from Tel Aviv?”

  “No, you didn’t. And will you please stop calling me sir whenever we touch on Navy matters. I’m Iain, plain, simple Iain. Do you understand me, Lieutenant Commander?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Excellent.”

  Both men laughed easily. “As a matter of fact, Bill, the President told me he’d given the badge to you. I talked to him at the wedding. I must say he was very impressed with the way you identified the problem, then hunted the submarine down.”

  “Actually I hunted the man down, rather than the submarine. We’d never have found that, not without a tip-off.”

  “No. I suppose not. They are the devil to find, those diesels, eh?”

  “Sure are…I miss it all sometimes, you know, Iain…that’s not a complaint. Laura and I are very happy running the ranch, and it’ll be great having the girls there for a vacation…but there are times…times when I see an item about the Navy in the newspaper and think about how I would tackle it. There’s not a better life when you’re single, and free, and the issues are international…and you feel you’re helping to run the world.”

  “I know, Bill. I miss it, too. I suppose we all do after we leave. But some of us never quite take off the dark blue, eh?”

  “Not quite, sir,” said Bill to the senior officer, who this time raised no objection.

  By midday, on the other side of Loch Fyne, Ben Adnam had somewhat recovered from his tortured night. He had opened the curtains wide at first light and slept in bright sunlight for most of the morning, missing breakfast altogether. He decided on a quick cup of coffee, which he sipped downstairs in front of the fire. Then he decided to attack his all-time record of fifty-one minutes to St. Catherine’s and back.

  This required him to reach the halfway turning point in twenty-four minutes—six minutes per mile—because the second half was always slower. And he set off along the loch, running hard on the flat surface of the A815.

  The trouble was, his heart simply was not in it. And he found himself dawdling, looking at the water rather than his watch, and he jogged into St. Catherine’s five minutes late, which in his mind defeated the object of the exercise. So he sat on a stone wall looking across at Inverary, while he caught his breath.

  And once more his thoughts returned to the darkest side of his life, to the monstrous acts of destruction he had perpetrated. And again he was haunted by the one question he could no longer answer: “For Whom Did I Do It?” And he was afraid there was no answer, because there was no one to whom he could defer in the matter of his deeply held religious beliefs.

  He did not doubt Allah, nor did he doubt the Prophet, nor indeed the Koran. His worry was that he had performed his great tasks without Allah approving what he was doing. He had been taught that the senior clerics of the Muslim faith, the mullahs and the Ayatollahs, were not in direct touch with God, but were merely teachers, learned men who were there to study the Koran and to guide their fellow Muslims in the words of the Prophet Mohammed. He understood thoroughly that all Muslims must find their own faith, because there can be no direct word, through the mullahs or the Ayatollahs.

  He could not possibly defer to the President of Iraq, for whom he had operated for most of his life. And, despite feeling very much at home in Iran, the clerics of that country had not hesitated to cut him off from his reward, the minute it suited them.

  Who, then, was he? Just a terrorist who would operate for anyone? Was he some kind of an international criminal? A hit man? A mercenary? Because, should that be so, he was uncertain whether he could live with it. Ben Adnam was a man who believed in his own higher calling. And that profoundly held philosophy was in ruins. He did not know what to do, nor where to go. And there was one problem that would not go away: He was, without question, the most wanted man in the world.

  He gazed across the flat, dark, shining waters of Loch Fyne. It was almost 2 miles wide at his present location. But it was a very bright, cold, cloudless day, and Ben could see for a long way. Snow still shone on the high peak of the “submariner’s mountain,” The Cobbler, 9 miles to the east, and Ben could see it up across the huge pines of the Argyll Forest. It reminded him, as everything in that place did, of days long past, especially those days when he had returned to the Clyde estuary in a Royal Navy submarine, watching for the mountain to signify that they were almost home.

  Now he had no home. And The Cobbler was still there. And so was all the grand and glorious scenery on the other side of the loch, the steep lightly wooded foothills that sloped up to Cruach Mohr, which he could also see, towering over the land behind Inverary Castle.

  Directly across the water was the great white mansion of his Teacher, the father of the only girl who had ever loved him. Alone in his desolation, Ben stared at the far bank, trying to see the house where once she had lived, but there were trees to the north of the grounds, he remembered, and it would be hard to catch a glimpse of the building.

  It was strange how he was suddenly drawn back to the memory of Laura MacLean, just when he was not only the most wanted, but also the most unwanted, man in the world. They say that men about to face a firing squad, or the noose, or the electric chair, often cry out “Mummy” as they go to meet their Maker. And Ben wondered if that might not be the reason he so yearned for Laura. Was it just a helpless, despairing cry for unconditional kindness. Although he was not sure she could deliver that anymore. The brutal truth was, there was no one else.

  And he sat on the wall, in the sharp chill of the early Highland spring, knowing that she was far away with Douglas Anderson, but unable to tear himself away from the sight of the place where once she had lived. He felt like a jilted lover, the kind who cherish a masochistic desire to stand secretly and watch the home of their former wife, or girlfriend. Just for a glimpse, just for even a thought-flash of remembered joy, and passion. In the desperate million-to-one hope of a chance meeting, and instant reconciliation, the ungrasped straw of the terminally hopeless.

  Wearily, Ben picked himself up and turned back down the loch, running hard, trying to drive the demon of Laura from his soul, as if he ever could. But he had to get back to the inn. He had ordered lunch for 1345, homemade soup and a grilled Dover sole, and he needed fuel. In the afternoon, before dark, he would attack his St. Catherine’s record again. And then he would concentrate. If he could.

  The bar was fairly empty, but the fire was crackling, and the landlady was unfailingly cheerful. They talked for a while about his work in the South African mining business. And he explained why he was here after a lifetime in the perfect climate of Pietermaritzburg. “My grandfather was a Highlander,” he told her. “And my wife died recently. I just wanted to come here for a month and feel my roots, visit a few little villages in the area. Someone told me how beautiful Loch Fyne was, and someone else told me about this place. Here I am, for another few days…rested and fit. And I’ve enjoyed every moment of it.”

  He liked the people who owned Creggans. They were never intrusive, and allowed him all the space he wanted. They worked on the old Scottish theory that if a man wants company, he’ll ask for it. There’s never a need to intrude. To some visitors this private, standoffish view of the world is precisely what leads to Scotsmen being describe as dour. But to Ben Adnam it was a godsend. And in a few days he would vanish from this place forever, remembered, he hoped, by very, very few people.

  He decided to cancel the afternoon run and instead to take the car and drive the 28 miles up to the northern point of Loch Awe, the thin, 23-mile long serpent of Highland water, at the head of which stood the fifteenth-century castle of Kilchurn, and the great brooding mountain of Ben Cruachan. It stood 3,700 feet above the loch, and Ben was resolved to walk to its peak someday, to claim what was widely regarded as the best view in Scotland. Ben
climbs Ben, as it were. But probably not that day; and he put his binoculars in the car in case he just wanted to look down at the magical waters of the heavily wooded, deepwater fisherman’s paradise. In the back of his mind he also thought he might have a further use for the binoculars on the way back. But it was a thought he refused to recognize.

  There was little traffic, and the Audi made short work of the journey. Ben gazed at the towering bulk of the mountain and decided to walk quietly around the castle instead. He climbed the stairs to the huge turrets and tried to imagine the force of the gale that had destroyed one of them, on that terrible night after Christmas in 1879, when the Tay Rail Bridge in Dundee was also demolished. He inspected the old turret, and then he walked to see the view from atop the castle, right down the long, straight waters of the loch. It was, as the guidebook said, truly spectacular.

  Finally, he returned to the car, to drive, he knew, to the east bank of Loch Fyne, to look across the water to the house where Laura used to live.

  It was growing dark by the time he arrived at his observation post on the edge of the road. A soft tallow mist was already gathering in the central channel of the loch, and it would obscure his view of the grandiose MacLean mansion. But it was still pretty good. The high-powered glasses magnified the far bank many times, and Ben could see the lawn running down the water. He and Laura had walked along that bank before dinner on the one night he was invited.

  Ben focused, and he could see the lawn clearly. He could also see two or maybe three figures moving toward the loch. But it was too far. He could not make them out, and he guessed it was his old Teacher, Commander MacLean, perhaps with his wife and an early-arriving weekend guest. He remembered the family did a lot of private entertaining. But what Ben really wanted to know was the whereabouts of Laura. And he had no way to overcome the obdu-rate stupidity of that thought. His mind ranged over a succession of ludicrous options associated with such a reunion.

  1) Take out Douglas Anderson, and maybe she would come with me, to where?