Launch Code

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘And they have no idea who?’

  ‘I asked that too. They said it was too early to say.’

  Rickover darted out under the tape, but Toby successfully called him back, helped with the bribe of another Polo.

  One of the police officers moved his gaze from the women to Toby and Lars and the dog. It made Toby feel guilty, which was ridiculous. Lars, too, seemed uncomfortable. ‘Let’s go down to the sea,’ Toby said.

  So they turned back down the lane and followed the raised path towards the sea. Moist green fields bordered by ditches and wire fences lay on one side of the dyke, while on the other a wide stretch of brown and orange saltmarsh was bisected by a winding creek of mud and grey tidal water. Ahead stretched a wall of grass-covered humps of sand. The fields were empty of animals at this time of year, save for a powerful red bull and his black-and-white consort, chewing cud amicably side by side.

  Lars seemed tense and uncommunicative, but he also appeared glad of Toby’s company.

  ‘Do you think the murder had anything to do with what Sam was working on?’ Toby asked.

  ‘You mean the Hamilton? No,’ said Lars. ‘Definitely not.’

  It struck Toby that that was wishful thinking. ‘Are you sure? It seems a bit of a coincidence. He comes here asking questions about something that’s been hushed up for thirty-five years and then he is killed?’

  ‘That’s just what it is,’ said Lars. ‘A coincidence. Maybe it was a jealous husband? Or his girlfriend? He mentioned a girlfriend. Maybe she just discovered something.’

  ‘They’d just got engaged!’ said Toby. ‘That would be a strange time to kill your boyfriend. Plus, she’s pregnant, the poor woman.’ Toby winced as he thought of Sam’s girlfriend – Jazz was her name, he remembered. Her life together with Sam shattered. A baby to bring up by herself, without the man who had helped make it.

  ‘OK.’ Lars realized he had gone too far with the girlfriend, but he wasn’t going to give up entirely. ‘Perhaps it was a serial killer. You have those in England, right?’

  ‘I haven’t read of any other murders like that around here.’

  ‘They’ve got to start somewhere.’

  Lars was floundering, which made Toby even more convinced that Sam’s murder was related to the submarine. And then there was Alice. ‘Did the police mention Alice?’

  ‘You mean her seeing Sam last night? Yes, they did. I didn’t know anything about it; I thought she had gone to the grocery store.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ said Toby.

  ‘So you don’t know what she spoke to Sam about?’ Lars said. ‘Did she tell you?’

  ‘No. But my guess is it’s about what happened on that submarine.’

  ‘Weird she won’t tell you?’ Lars said. Toby thought it was weird, but he didn’t like Lars’s question, and so he didn’t answer it.

  It was quiet on the dyke. Back inland, a volley of distant shotguns popped. Down on the mud flats a curlew cried, and a stand of tall brown bulrushes whispered in the breeze as they bowed and curtsied to the ditch running along the side of the path. A squadron of twenty or so geese honked gently as they patrolled overhead in an elegant V formation.

  A lonely figure marched towards them on the raised path, carrying a tripod on his shoulder: a moustachioed birdwatcher, who exchanged nods and grunts with them as they eventually passed each other.

  ‘Why did you come over to England, Lars?’ Toby asked.

  ‘To see my old friend, Bill. I told you.’

  ‘But why now? Did it have something to do with Sam Bowen? You said he had visited you in America?’

  Lars looked for a moment that he was about to claim it was another coincidence, but he thought better of it. ‘It’s true I did want to see Bill again. But it’s also true that Sam’s questions made me think of our time in the Navy together.’

  ‘Is what he said accurate?’ Toby asked. ‘About the order to launch your missiles?’

  ‘Hey. You heard Bill. It’s Classified.’

  ‘But is he on the right track?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s on the right track.’

  Toby ran through the conversation with Sam in his mind. ‘Sam said something about how it was impossible for him to talk to the captain of the submarine. It sounded like the captain was dead.’

  ‘He is,’ said Lars.

  ‘Was that related to the near launch?’

  Lars hesitated before replying. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Because I wondered if that was how Bill “persuaded” the captain to change his mind. By killing him. I don’t know how nuclear submarines work, but presumably the captain has to authorize a launch, and if he’s dead . . .’

  ‘You’re just guessing,’ said Lars, avoiding Toby’s eye.

  ‘I am, but am I right?’

  ‘Toby. You’re fishing and I’m not going to bite. I’m just not going to. You got that?’

  ‘All right,’ said Toby. ‘I’ve got it.’ He was just guessing, but he was pretty sure he was guessing correctly.

  They walked on.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you what it was like?’ Toby asked. ‘To know you had come so close to blowing up the world?’

  ‘No, that’s OK,’ said Lars. ‘It kind of screws you up, is the truth. It screwed up all of us. All of us on the submarine. Especially those of us who were involved in the argument whether to launch: me, Bill, the XO. I mean, if it had gone the other way . . .’

  ‘But it didn’t.’

  ‘No, it didn’t. And that’s a good thing, and you would think that would be enough. You’d think we could just forget it and get on with our lives. But . . .’ Lars took a deep breath. ‘We can’t.’

  Toby waited to see whether Lars would volunteer more, but he had fallen silent.

  They had reached the sand dunes, and cut through them on a twisting path of wooden boards to the narrow beach. The tide was high, and they could only see fifty yards or so out to sea, before the grey water merged into white fog. The air was damp and salty.

  The beach was empty, save for a green fibreglass boat, little more than a tub, that was hauled up to the edge of the sand against the dunes a few hundred yards away.

  Out here, they were quite alone, out of sight of the village or even the marsh. Just sand and sea merging into the milky sky.

  ‘There must be more to it than Bill let on,’ said Toby. ‘You wouldn’t have come all this way if there wasn’t more.’

  Lars glanced at Toby and then stared out into the fog.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘There’s more to it. A lot more.’

  Thirteen

  Alice was glad that when she was finally let out of the interview with the detective inspector, Toby was nowhere to be seen. She needed some time by herself. She needed to think.

  She hurried upstairs to their bedroom and shut the door firmly behind her. She picked up her iPad, stared at one of the half dozen draft documents she was supposed to be working on, and then tossed it on to the bed. Who was she kidding?

  She looked around the room, her room. It was old: the floor was uneven, sloping upwards on one side, toward the window. She had been a student when her parents had bought the place, and scraps of her childhood had survived in that room: in the small bookshelf, her complete set of Harry Potter supported Virginia Woolf on one side and The Master and Margarita on the other. A poster from a 2010 Taylor Swift concert faced the old photograph of the loggers on the Susquehanna that had followed her from bedroom to bedroom all over the world.

  She moved over to the window and gazed out at the marsh. Two figures and a dog were making their way along the dyke and had nearly reached the dunes. That must be Toby, Rickover and someone else: it looked like Uncle Lars.

  She hoped Toby would be away for a while. She felt badly about snapping at him earlier when he had asked her about seeing Sam. It had been a fair question. It was going to be hard to face him, but she would have to. She needed to rely on him, to trust him to stick with her even though s
he had lied to him.

  She had as good as lied to the police as well; she certainly hadn’t told them the whole truth.

  What the hell should she do now?

  She couldn’t ask her dad.

  She wished her mother was still around. She would know. Her mother was the wisest person Alice had met. Alice liked to think that a lot of that wisdom had rubbed off on her, her daughter.

  They had been very close. Mom had been close to all the daughters, but in different ways. Alice was the oldest, and the one that their mother had relied on most, especially in those final months. It didn’t seem so at the time, but in fact it had been fortunate that Mom had been diagnosed just as Alice was in her final months at law school. She had still managed to pass her exams, and the timing meant she could fly over to England right afterwards to spend the last months of her mother’s life with her while she studied for the New York bar. There were only three of these: the cancer had been advanced when it was diagnosed.

  Alice had helped her father look after her mother and had supported him in his dark moments. She had comforted her sisters: Brooke was at graduate school in Chicago, Megan was a sophomore at college and Maya still at her private girls’ school in London. She had spent a lot of time with her mother, most of it up here in Barnholt, walking with her while she could still walk, reading to her. And talking to her.

  Mom had more or less explicitly laid the burden of looking after Bill and the other girls on Alice, knowing all the time that it was a burden Alice would be happy to shoulder.

  And she had told Alice other things.

  One morning, towards the end, when her mother was barely strong enough to get in the car, Alice had driven her along the coast to a spot where it was possible to park on a hard concrete apron right by a creek. The place was popular with boaters of all kinds: kayaks, dinghies, sailing boats, fishing boats and skiffs bobbed on the incoming tide, ready to be taken the half mile through the marshes to the sea.

  Alice had parked high up on the concrete, near the sea wall, but there were three cars parked close to the creek, one of which was an expensive electric-blue Jaguar. She and her mother spent a couple of hours just sitting in the car together, watching the boats being lifted from the muddy banks of the creek by the incoming tide, and the sea creep over the concrete towards the wheels of the parked cars. The two old bangers were quickly moved, but the Jaguar seemed to have been abandoned as the water lapped at its tyres.

  Alice had a desire to do something to save the vehicle – what, she wasn’t sure – but her mother was watching transfixed, a wicked half-smile on her face. So Alice did nothing. And in their mutual helplessness against the relentless tide, she felt a kind of mutual strength. She knew her mother felt it too.

  The water had just about reached the underside of the chassis, when they heard loud, deep shouts, and a large figure in dark red trousers splashed through the water to his Jag, cursing. The vehicle started, and he reversed off the concrete in a thick spray of seawater.

  Donna smiled at her daughter. ‘Oh well,’ she said, with a chuckle.

  ‘We had better move soon,’ said Alice. The water was still a dozen or so yards away from their car, but it was getting closer.

  ‘Wait a moment, sweetie,’ her mother had said. ‘There are some things I ought to explain. About Dad and me. Things somebody should know, and I’m sure Dad will never tell you.’

  Two weeks later, the end had come. Her mother’s ashes were now resting in St Peter’s churchyard beneath an ancient yew tree, barely a hundred yards away from Pear Tree Cottage.

  Alice had been ready. It had felt good to help her father to sort through her mother’s stuff, to help him administer the estate, to comfort her sisters, to make sure that the Guth family remained strong together.

  She had passed the bar exam and joined a New York law firm. As soon as she could, she had secured a transfer to their London office so she could be near her father. And there she had met Toby. Tall, dark, with warm brown eyes that seemed to understand her immediately, she had fallen for him. Hard.

  Alice was good under pressure, she thrived under pressure. The challenge of being a good lawyer, a good wife, a good daughter and a good sister all at the same time stretched her, but she liked it that way. And one day, perhaps one day quite soon, she would be a good mother as well.

  But this? This was stretching even her to breaking point.

  Did she have a breaking point? Everyone had a breaking point. So where was hers?

  She didn’t know, and she was determined not to find out.

  ‘OK, Mom,’ she said out loud, to the marsh. ‘I can do this.’

  Fourteen

  Brooke, Megan and Justin were hanging out in the kitchen when Toby and Lars returned.

  ‘Want some coffee?’ Megan asked.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Toby, accepting a cup. ‘Where’s Alice?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ said Megan. ‘Working on her big deal, I guess. I don’t know how she can think about that with all this going on.’

  ‘Alice can focus,’ said Toby. Although he agreed with Megan.

  ‘Hey, Lars,’ said Justin. There was an ominous tone to his voice that Toby hadn’t heard before; Justin was usually a model of politeness. He was sitting upright at the kitchen table, arms crossed, his shirt pulled tight over his bulging chest. ‘I just talked to Vicky on the phone.’

  ‘Who’s Vicky?’ said Lars.

  ‘You know who Vicky is,’ said Justin coolly. ‘Craig’s sister. My aunt.’

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah. Vicky,’ said Lars. ‘I know.’ He sat down at the kitchen table opposite Justin. Brooke was seated next to her husband looking hunched and miserable, gnawing at her thumb.

  ‘Can I have some of that coffee, Megan?’ Lars asked.

  ‘Sure,’ said Megan, pouring him a cup.

  ‘I called Mom first,’ said Justin. ‘To tell her what had happened to Sam Bowen. She said Sam had come to visit her in New London but she hadn’t told him anything. Apart from to speak to Craig’s sister Vicky. So I called Vicky in New Jersey. She was really upset that Sam had been murdered.’

  ‘Of course she was,’ said Lars.

  ‘She told me what she had told him.’

  ‘Told him?’

  ‘Yes. About that last patrol. And Craig.’ Justin was staring directly at Lars as he spoke.

  ‘Oh.’ Lars shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  ‘You told Vicky right after the patrol that my father’s death wasn’t an accident. You said he was killed.’

  ‘What? Poor Vicky must be confused. I never said that.’

  ‘She says you did.’ Justin’s voice had become quieter, but they could all feel the anger. ‘She says you told her exactly that: “Craig was killed.”’

  Lars’s discomfort increased. ‘Like I told you, she got confused. It was late one night. We had both been drinking, we were both upset about Craig. “Craig was killed” doesn’t mean someone killed him. She just got it wrong, is all.’

  ‘She said you wouldn’t tell her what really happened.’

  Lars sighed. ‘I did tell her what really happened. It was an emergency drill and Craig was sliding down one of those metal ladders on submarines. They’re steep, you hold on to the railings on either side, and slip down. People do it all the time, they never fall. Never. But Craig must have caught his foot in a step or something, because he tumbled and hit his head. He was out cold for an hour at least. We were worried, but then he came round. And a couple of days later he got a headache, lay down and just died.’ Lars took a deep breath. ‘Right there. Just died.’

  Lars stared at Justin. ‘They said afterward it was bleeding in the brain caused by the fall. But I told Vicky all that.’

  ‘And she didn’t believe you?’

  Lars rubbed his moustache. ‘She thought I’d said it wasn’t an accident. Wait! She told Sam Bowen that, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, she did,’ said Justin. ‘And he had told her about the false launch order. She thinks the two
are related.’

  Lars snorted. ‘So that’s why Sam asked about Craig’s accident? Bill explained it all to him. They can’t have been related. The argument about whether to launch the missiles took place in the control room. Craig was in the missile control centre. It’s a whole different department. It’s on a different level.’

  ‘Were you there?’ Justin asked. ‘In the control room? When the order came in?’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ said Lars. ‘I decoded it. With Bill.’

  ‘What happened?’ said Justin.

  Lars hesitated. ‘I can’t tell you, Justin. I’m sorry but I really can’t tell you. All I can say is your father wasn’t involved.’

  ‘What is this?’ said Justin, his voice rising for the first time. ‘You left the Navy decades ago. The Cold War is finished. Which enemies of ours are going to care about what happened on that submarine? Arab terrorists? The Taliban? Just tell me! Tell me what happened to my father!’

  Brooke moved her hand to clasp her husband’s but he flicked it away. He looked angry and he looked determined.

  ‘What about you, Toby? Did you hear Sam Bowen say anything about my father’s death?’

  ‘No, Justin. Only what Lars just told you.’

  Justin seemed on the brink of accusing Toby of being part of whatever cover-up he imagined was going on, but he thought better of it.

  ‘Why does nobody ever tell me the truth?’ he said, his voice quiet again. ‘It took me thirteen years to discover that Craig was my real father. And now you are hiding from me how he died.’ He glared at Lars as he said this, but also at Megan and Brooke as representatives of the Guth family. Toby suspected his real anger was directed at Bill.

  ‘I’m out of here.’ Shaking his head, he got up and left the room. A moment later the front door banged and they saw him head out to the cottage next door. With a look of contempt at Lars, Brooke hurried after him.

  ‘Well this is a fun Thanksgiving, huh?’ said Megan, now left alone with Toby in the kitchen.