Launch Code

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘That’s something,’ said Toby. ‘Good. Thank you.’

  Bill raised his eyebrows in a ‘she’s my daughter’ gesture. ‘She’s going to be OK. The lawyer has told her not to say anything until tomorrow morning.’

  ‘What about us?’ said Toby. ‘Presumably we have to answer the police’s questions.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘But we don’t have to tell them too much.’

  Toby felt a flash of anger in his chest, not helped by the three-quarters of a bottle of Bordeaux he had drunk. ‘Why shouldn’t we tell them everything?’ he said. ‘It’s the truth that’s going to free Alice.’

  Bill gave him a tired smile. ‘That’s correct. Probably. But it’s best to let the lawyer decide the strategy. She was very firm on that.’

  ‘What did they ask you, Lars?’ It was Megan. Interesting she asked Lars and not her father, Toby thought. Smart.

  ‘Same as before,’ said Lars with a glance at Bill. ‘What happened on the submarine. What Sam spoke to us about. His visit with me in Wisconsin a couple of weeks ago. Where everyone was last night.’

  ‘And what did you tell them?’ Megan said.

  ‘The truth,’ said Bill.

  ‘Did you tell them what happened on the submarine?’ said Toby.

  ‘No,’ said Bill. ‘We can’t. It’s Classified. And it has nothing to do with Sam Bowen’s death.’

  ‘How do we know that?’

  ‘I know,’ said Bill, his deep voice at its most authoritative. ‘And you shouldn’t tell them the details of what Sam spoke about either.’

  ‘Why not?’ Toby asked. ‘If it will get Alice out of jail.’

  ‘Because it won’t get Alice out of jail.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  For a second, Bill looked irritated. But then he controlled himself. ‘I can be sure because I know it has no relevance. Look, Toby. And Megan. I shouldn’t have invited you in to that meeting with Sam. I only did it because it seemed like a safe way for you to hear what . . .’ Here he paused. ‘What may have happened on the Alexander Hamilton. But I would never have done it if I knew the police would be asking questions about it the next day. So I would like you both to promise me you won’t tell the police the details.’

  Megan nodded. ‘OK, Dad.’

  Bill glanced at Toby.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Toby said. ‘I mean, it’s a murder inquiry. If they ask me questions, aren’t I obliged to answer them?’

  Bill looked at his son-in-law levelly. ‘Do what you can, OK?’

  Toby nodded. ‘All right.’ But he didn’t think it was all right.

  Outside, somewhere over the dark marshes, an owl hooted.

  The wine was having its effect. After having deadened the initial worry, Toby now felt his emotions churning. He was worried about Alice. While he was pleased that Bill had got her a hot-shot London solicitor, his instinct was to tell the police as much rather than as little as possible. If Alice was innocent, the only thing preventing the police from letting her go was that they didn’t know the truth, so anything Toby or Bill or any of the rest of the family could do to help reveal the truth must help.

  If Alice was innocent.

  Toby knew she was innocent. But did Bill think that? Did the solicitor?

  Toby glanced at Megan, who was looking right at him. He could tell she was thinking the same thing.

  Trust in the solicitor? Or trust in telling the truth? Toby’s brain was fuzzy. Things would be clearer in the morning. He poured himself another drink, realizing as he did so that he would probably have one hell of a headache in the morning. Maybe things wouldn’t necessarily be clearer; at that moment he didn’t care.

  Then they heard the sound of footsteps outside and the front door opened. Justin came in, followed by Brooke. His brown eyes were hard, as were the muscles under his sweatshirt. The habitual friendliness of his expression had disappeared. Toby was only just now beginning to realize what a big guy Justin was.

  ‘Well?’ he said to Bill. It was more of a demand than a question.

  Bill turned to his other son-in-law and gave him a patient smile. ‘Have a seat, Justin. Do you want some wine? Brooke?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Justin. He remained standing. But Megan got to her feet and fetched a full glass for her sister, who took it without acknowledgement.

  ‘Did you tell them about my father?’ Justin demanded.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, I was at the police station this afternoon. I put them in touch with Vicky in New Jersey, and I know they’re going to talk to her about what happened to her brother on the sub. Sam Bowen’s girlfriend is in Norfolk and has been speaking with them. She says that Sam thought the death of one of the officers on the submarine might be suspicious. That’s got to be my father’s.’

  Bill glanced at Brooke, who was looking down at her wine. ‘Justin,’ Bill said. His voice was tight, he cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Justin.’

  It was clear to Toby Bill was having trouble keeping calm. It was also clear that Bill and Lars hadn’t told Megan and him everything about what the police had asked them at the station.

  ‘I understand that you are upset by Craig’s death,’ Bill continued, looking up at his son-in-law. ‘But I was there. It was an accident, I know that and you should believe it. And it doesn’t have anything to do with Sam Bowen’s death.’

  ‘So you say,’ said Justin, coldly.

  Bill slammed his fist down on the table. Toby’s wine glass toppled, spilling a dribble, and Rickover yelped. ‘Yes, Justin, I do say so! It turned out that Craig was your father, but you never knew him. I did. He was a good friend of mine, and it was a tragedy that he died. That’s why I looked after you and your mother, even though she had just run off with someone else. And now my daughter is in jail. So, yes, I do say I don’t want you feeding the police bullshit that you know nothing about and don’t understand.’

  Brooke reached for her husband’s sleeve, but he batted her hand away.

  Toby had never seen Bill this angry before. But Bill’s voice carried authority as well as rage, and for a moment Justin hesitated. But only for a moment.

  ‘You can’t shut down the truth like that,’ said Justin. ‘Your submarine refuses an order to launch nuclear missiles. My father dies in a so-called accident. The guy who puts those things together is murdered. There’s something there, Bill, there’s something there. And you getting so upset about it just makes me more sure. You feel guilty. You are guilty.’

  ‘Are you saying I killed Sam Bowen?’ Bill’s tone was menacing.

  ‘Not Sam Bowen.’

  Bill hesitated, letting the implication sink in. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I am telling you, Justin. Don’t go there. This is stuff you don’t understand. Craig was in the missile control centre when the order came in. Lars and I decoded it, and we discussed it with the captain and the executive officer in the control room. Craig died several days later.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘Yes! So I say. And it’s my daughter who is in jail. If you screw this thing up so she goes down on a murder charge, I swear I’ll . . .’

  ‘You’ll what?’ said Justin.

  There was silence around the table as Bill glared at his son-in-law.

  Then Lars coughed. ‘I killed him,’ he said, quietly. ‘Craig, I mean. I killed Craig. On the submarine.’

  ‘What?’ Justin stared at him. They all did.

  ‘It was an accident. We had a fight. Craig fell and hit his head. He died a couple days later.’

  The anger on Justin’s face was replaced by confusion.

  Lars turned towards him, his eyes full of sadness. ‘I’m sorry, man. I killed your father.’

  Justin sat heavily on one of the chairs around the kitchen table.

  ‘Why?’ he said softly.

  ‘Why what?’ said Lars.

  ‘Why did you kill him?’

  Lars glanced at Bill. ‘It was an accident,’ he sa
id. ‘We got into a fight. It wasn’t even a real fight – I just pushed him. But he lost his balance and fell. Hit his head against a bulkhead. Then he lost consciousness. He came around, but a couple of days later he collapsed and died, just as Bill said. Bleeding in the brain.’

  The family were all looking at Justin, waiting for him to take the lead with the questions.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘So why did you have the fight?’

  ‘It was an argument.’

  ‘An argument? About what?’

  ‘A girl.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lars. ‘I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter – it’s not important.’

  ‘Was it my mother?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not. It wasn’t your mother.’

  ‘So you killed him?’

  Lars paused and then nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I did. And I’m sorry.’

  ‘And what happened? Were you arrested? Court martialled, maybe? Sent to jail?’

  Lars shook his head. ‘No. With the near launch the Navy decided not to prosecute me. It was an accident.’

  ‘You mean the Navy covered it up?’

  Lars didn’t answer.

  ‘Right. They covered it up. No wonder Vicky was angry.’ Justin sat back, his face pale. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t any of you tell me?’

  ‘We didn’t know,’ said Brooke.

  ‘You knew,’ said Justin to Bill.

  Bill hesitated, glanced at Lars, and nodded.

  ‘You make me sick,’ said Justin, pulling himself to his feet. ‘All of you.’ He glared down at Lars. ‘You sit there like you’re apologizing for – I don’t know – spilling the wine or something, when what you did was murder my father.’

  Justin’s muscles tensed. Lars was over sixty and in poor shape. Justin was in his thirties and in top physical form. It looked like he was about to beat the shit out of Lars.

  Toby got to his feet. Unsteadily. He had drunk a lot, but he would intervene if he had to.

  Brooke put her hand on Justin’s arm. Justin looked at his wife, at Toby and then back at Lars. ‘An apology doesn’t cut it, Lars.’ And he stalked from the room.

  Brooke turned to her family. ‘Couldn’t you have told us about this, Dad? Told me? Justin has a right to know what happened to his father. It had nothing to do with those stupid missiles after all, so you could have told us. Dad, you should have trusted me!’

  ‘It was my fault,’ said Lars. ‘I made him promise to keep quiet.’

  Brooke looked at her father for a response, but he seemed helpless. ‘Sorry,’ he said, eventually.

  A tear leaked from Brooke’s eye, and then another. ‘Justin is right. “Sorry” doesn’t cut it. I’m going to the Cottage now. He needs me. Good night.’

  And with that she left the house.

  Nineteen

  October 1983, Holy Loch

  I glanced back at the heather-clad mountain that rose above the ancient village of Kilmun on the north shore of the loch. It was 0800 and the sun was just rising to the east, a red glow wriggling beneath the grey cloud to paint the heather a glorious brown and purple.

  Craig, Lars and I had used a brief afternoon of freedom to climb the mountain a few days before. We liked to do that whenever we could during the ten-day turnover when we were relieving the Gold Crew. The view from the summit was spectacular: Loch Long in one direction, the island of Arran in another, and to the south the River Clyde reaching up towards the metropolis of Glasgow. The other officers chose to use what spare time they had to travel into Greenock, or even Glasgow itself, but we preferred the sense of space, of clear Scottish air that the mountain afforded.

  It set us up for the seventy days underwater.

  I wouldn’t have long to enjoy the view. The first couple of miles of the journey out to sea were the quietest, especially in winter when the pleasure boats were either safely moored or out of the water. The submarine tender USS Hunley squatted in the middle of the loch, usually with one or two submarines snuggled up to it. At that moment there was only one tied up there: the Will Rogers, another Lafayette-class nuclear submarine, which had arrived back from patrol two days before.

  The US nuclear submarines of SUBRON 14 operated out of a forward base in Scotland because from there they could quickly take up a patrol within missile range of the Soviet Union. But rather than keeping both crews for each submarine stationed in Britain, the Navy shuttled them back and forth by plane from Connecticut. I would rather have spent more time in Scotland, among the brooding hills we glimpsed only too briefly.

  The loch was deep and silent. Centuries before it had been revered as a holy place after a ship returning from the Crusades sank there, filled with earth from the Holy Land. Now monsters of destruction lurked at its centre.

  The submarine’s bridge was perched at the top of the ‘sail’, a structure that rose up from the hull, towards the bow, like a giant fin. There were six of us up there, crammed into a very small space. I was the officer of the deck. Then there was the captain, Commander Driscoll; Ensign Marber, the most junior officer on the boat; the quartermaster; a lookout and a Scottish pilot, a dour tub of a man with a ruby-red face who would guide us through the sea lane once we reached the Clyde. Beneath us, in the control room, the XO oversaw the navigators and the helmsman and planesman who would manoeuvre the Alexander Hamilton out to sea.

  Driscoll grinned at me as he lit up a stogie and waved it to the east. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen the dawn on the way out this tour, Bill,’ he said. ‘The problem with Holy Loch is you don’t often get to see the sun. I like to see the sun before we dive. Always saw the sun leaving Guam.’

  The Hamilton was my first submarine, but the captain had been XO on a boomer out of Guam. The difference between Guam and Holy Loch was only apparent on the first and last days of a patrol. The rest of the time the Pacific was pretty much the same as the North Atlantic, at least when you were a couple of hundred feet beneath it.

  I was interrupted by the phone. ‘Bridge, navigator. Five hundred yards to the turn, counting down the turn.’

  ‘Navigator, bridge, aye,’ I answered, looking ahead to a buoy at the entrance to the loch. The Alexander Hamilton was sleek and graceful underwater, but on the surface she was a four-hundred-foot clumsy lump of metal, desperately slow to respond to her rudder. The navigators, the captain and I always had to be thinking two waypoints ahead, getting the lines of approach just right.

  Time to concentrate.

  Several hours later, we had threaded our way through the crowded shipping lanes of the Firth of Clyde into the Irish Sea. There was quite a chop out there, and the big submarine was rolling as it ploughed through the water, its bow-wave kicking up a surging spray. The sun had long disappeared, as had the pilot back to shore and the captain down below. Above was the dark grey of low cloud, all around the lighter grey of the sea. Out there somewhere was the Scottish mainland, hidden beneath the heavy cloak of moisture.

  There were still two vessels visible, a local fishing boat ahead and a Russian ‘trawler’ three miles to starboard. These ‘trawlers’ were crammed full of electronic equipment and lurked outside the submarine bases tracking who came in and out.

  The radar display showed another contact twelve miles to the north-west, out of sight in the grey murk. It was HMS Minerva, a British frigate. She had made brief contact with an Alfa-class Soviet attack submarine in the area. Once again, not a surprise.

  The Alfa would try to track the Hamilton once she was underwater, taking advantage of the bottleneck we would have to pass through – the North Channel between Antrim and the Mull of Kintyre. It would be a fruitless task. We would shake her and, once we had, the Hamilton could run so quietly that the Soviet sub would never pick us up.

  ‘Rig the bridge for dive and lay below.’ It was Robinson, the new XO, from the control room.

  ‘Rig the bridge for dive and lay below, aye,’ I replied. We were answering ahead one-third at a spee
d of about five knots. I ordered the quartermaster to disconnect the ‘suitcase’, a portable silver case full of communications and navigation equipment used while the submarine was on the surface.

  ‘Clear the bridge.’ The quartermaster was first down, with the communications suitcase, followed by the lookout and Ensign Marber.

  I took one last look at the wet grey world, savouring the cold mixture of air and moisture on my cheek, and dropped down the ladder myself, shutting and dogging the watertight hatch. ‘Last man down. Hatch secured. Bridge is rigged for dive.’

  ‘Submerge the ship,’ the XO ordered. ‘Make your depth sixty feet.’

  Immediately the diving klaxon sounded twice, a distinctive ah-oo-gah blare. ‘Dive! Dive!’

  The helmsman rang up to two-thirds ahead, and the planesman set the vessel to five-degrees-down bubble. The chief of the watch opened the ballast tank vents.

  The nose of the Alexander Hamilton dipped forward, and I could hear the Irish Sea slurping over the deck above.

  We were going down, and staying down. For more than two months.

  Twenty

  November 1983, Norwegian Sea

  ‘How about Barbarella?’

  Craig glanced at the other officers seated around the wardroom table. We were four weeks into the patrol, coming up to the halfway point, and we were discussing important matters: what movie to watch that evening.

  ‘We saw Barbarella two weeks ago,’ said Lars.

  ‘Yeah, but a movie like that you only appreciate properly the second time you see it, you know?’

  ‘Weps, you’ve got to have seen Barbarella half a dozen times,’ Lars said. On the submarine, Craig, like every weapons officer before him, was always known as ‘Weps’. Craig had a thing for Jane Fonda, and since Maria had walked out on him it was getting out of control. There was even a poster of her on the wall of his rack. ‘What about Blade Runner?’

  ‘I hate sci-fi.’

  ‘What do you think Barbarella is? A war movie?’

  Commander Driscoll stirred at the head of the table. ‘How about The Magnificent Seven, gentlemen?’