Shadow Hunter (2 page)

The briefing over, the two men crossed the quay towards
HMS Defiance,
the Captain hurrying to keep pace with Andrew's longer stride.

‘Patsy picking you up?' Craig asked. Andrew looked at his watch.

‘She'll be teaching. Home for lunch, I expect.'

‘My car can take you back if you want.'

‘You sure, sir? That'd be great.'

‘The driver can't spend
all
day polishing it! It'll give her something to do. What time do you want to leave?'

‘In about an hour? That'll give me time to complete my paperwork.'

The black Cavalier was driven by a WRNS, a plump girl with rosy cheeks and a warm Devon accent. As she swung the car expertly out of the suburbs of Plymouth and into the country lanes, they talked of the fortunes of Plymouth Argyll football club, of which both were fans. But the more she talked the slower she drove, which grated on his nerves, so he pulled a folder from his briefcase and pretended to read.

Coming home always made him anxious, gave him a fear that his domestic life might have changed radically while he'd been away.

The lanes grew narrower as they approached the village where he and Patsy had lived for the past four years. They'd had four different homes; appointments had moved him round the country, but they'd determined to settle in the West Country. Two limestone cottages knocked together had created a home large enough. The three children were away at boarding school; eight-year-old Anthony was just experiencing his first term of separation from his parents. School had started five weeks ago, so Patsy had handled the boy's last-minute tears on her own.

The red Devon soil glowed in the midday autumn sun. The car turned into a narrow lane and dived between banks and hedges. Soon it wound its way into the village of Yealmsford.

The vicar stepped out of the tiny post office carrying a newspaper, looked at the naval registration of the car, peered to see who it was, then waved in recognition.

He'll be getting me to read the lesson again before long,
Andrew thought. The vicar said he had a voice that made the congregation sit up and listen.

The Tinkers were well known in the village and Andrew was a celebrity. To command something ‘nuclear' carried kudos in this part of the world.

Patsy was out. It irked him she wasn't there to greet him. She taught in the mornings at the village primary school, but should have been home by now. He carried his small grip into the house – a submariner takes few possessions to sea.

The emptiness of the cottage alarmed him. With all the children away at school now, there were no toys littering the hall. He put his bag down and called out. No answer. Where the hell was she?

Then he heard her car.

‘Oh, you're back!' Patsy looked startled, as she came through the doorway. ‘I wasn't sure when you were coming. Have you been here long?'

She dropped her briefcase in the hall and hugged him. Her copper-coloured hair brushed his cheek; it smelled of shampoo and the cigarette smoke from the school office. He squeezed her and lifted her feet off the ground.

‘I missed you,' she purred, the way she always did.

‘Missed you too!'

‘You didn't! You had your boat to play with!'

‘Not as much fun as playing with you!'

She pushed him away with a forced smile. It was stupid, but she always felt shy when Andrew came home. To cope with his long absences she'd made herself unnaturally self-sufficient. His homecomings were like the arrival of a stranger.

‘Have you had lunch?'

‘No, and I'm starving.'

‘I'm not sure what there is. You can come shopping with me later!'

He followed her to the kitchen. He was used to this; whenever he returned from patrol, Patsy seemed to feel the need to ‘house-train' him again.

‘It'll have to be a sandwich for now. With the children away, I haven't been stocking up.'

‘I was worried something had happened. It's so quiet in the house . . .'

‘I know . . .'

She looked pained. She would never tell him how lonely she felt at times.

‘How was Anthony when you took him to school?'

‘He howled all the way there, and I howled all the way back! But he's fine now. I got a super letter from him this morning. We can have him home for a weekend soon. He's dying to see you.'

Andrew watched her work. With Patsy having her own job, her own friends, and being life's mainstay for their children, he sometimes felt himself an outsider.

‘I saw Sara this morning. She looked dreadful,' Patsy said, slicing bread.

‘Hitchens?'

She nodded.

‘She's having problems with Simon. He's going to be thirteen soon and still hasn't got used to boarding school. His headmaster's accused him of vandalizing microscopes in the biology lab. Sara's worried he'll turn to arson next!'

‘That's appalling! Philip sailed today. He ignored my salute! Not like him at all. Perhaps he was worrying about Simon. Last thing you need when you're going to sea.'

‘Last thing a
mother
needs at any time,' she stressed pointedly. ‘Particularly Sara. You know how unstable she is.'

‘Over-emotional, that's all.'

‘You fancy Sara, that's your trouble!'

‘I just feel sorry for her. She's not so good at coping as you are. And I have to take an interest. Simon's my godson.'

‘Ohh! Well remembered!' Patsy mocked. ‘When did you last even see him? Last year? Year before?'

‘Oh, come on . . .'

‘Sorry. That wasn't fair. Here's your sandwich.'

She passed him a plate and they sat down at the kitchen table. ‘I'm afraid we're out of beer.'

She smiled apologetically.

‘Welcome home!'

* * *

Commander Philip Hitchens had seldom experienced claustrophobia, but now the cabin felt as narrow as a coffin, as
HMS Truculent
hummed towards the Atlantic depths.

For eight hours after leaving Devonport, Philip had hardly left the control room. Inshore waters were the most dangerous, and avoiding collisions took maximum concentration. He didn't trust the watch; all young men, their minds wandered when he wasn't around.

They'd kept at periscope depth in the Channel; the sea was calm and visibility good. The sonar produced a jumble of tanker traffic, confused by echoes from the sea-bed, but he could see the ships clearly enough through the periscope up to five miles away.

Keeping busy had served another purpose, too; to distract his mind from the nightmare of the past three months, a personal nightmare of duplicity, the depth of which he had yet to fathom.

Now it was evening. South of Ireland, they were away from the shipping channels. Time to leave it to the watch. He withdrew to his cabin, to his solitary hell. Once there, he sat hunched at the foot of his bunk like a child. It was the furthest he could get from his work-table, from the framed photograph of Sara. Every time he looked at her picture, the shock, the misery, the pain engulfed him anew.

Betrayal! The word echoed in his mind like a slamming door; not just her – the bastard Russians, too!

He'd thought of putting the photograph in a drawer so as not to look at her, but ruled it out. Everything had to stay normal; no one must know. His cabin was also his office, visited by others. Family photographs were like icons in officers' quarters. Their absence would be quickly noticed.

He couldn't stop thinking of her. The night before they'd sailed he'd stayed on board, unable to sleep, knowing she was seeing that man again. She'd promised it was to say goodbye, to tell him they'd never meet again. But
did he believe her?
Could
he believe anything she said, any more?

As for Simon – he couldn't imagine, didn't dare think, what his future would hold now. His son was the one restraint on what he planned. But he was at a good school; they'd see him right. Nothing must stand in his way.

There was a debt to be settled, vengeance for a past wrong, a terrible wrong which transcended all other considerations.

‘Captain, sir! Officer of the Watch!'

The tannoy loudspeaker above his desk startled him.

He leapt up from the bunk and clicked the microphone switch.

‘Captain!'

‘
Sound room's got a sonar contact. They think it's a trawler, sir
.'

‘I'm coming now.'

His cabin was just yards from the control room. He was there within seconds, glad of the distraction. Trawlers were the bane of submariners' lives in coastal waters. Fouling their nets could mean the early end of a patrol.

He headed for the navigation plot. The submarine's position was being provided by SINS, the Submarine Inertial Navigation System, a gyroscopic device that had proven remarkably accurate.

The navigator and officer of the watch was Lieutenant Nick Cavendish, a twenty-five-year-old on his first patrol with
Truculent
.

‘Depth?'

‘Seventy metres, sir. Thirty metres under the keel.'

‘Should be okay at this depth. What's the contact's bearing?'

‘Ten degrees on the starboard bow. Range unknown.'

He stared at the chart. They were approaching the edge of the continental shelf west of Ireland. A few more hours and the sea bed would drop thousands of metres, giving them all the water they could want to avoid hazards trailing from the surface. The chart showed no obstructions for miles.

‘I need more sea room. They're bloody long, those trawl wires. Officer of the Watch, come round to 210.'

‘Aye, aye, sir. Helm! Port thirty. Keep course two-one-zero.'

Best to take no chances; trawl nets were undetectable until their hawsers scrapped the acoustic tiles off the casing, by which time it was too late.

‘Anything else on sonar?'

‘One other surface contact up to the north-west, very distant. Sounds like a tanker. No submarines, sir. And none expected for the next twenty-four hours, according to the intelligence sitrep.'

Philip shot a glance round the control room. In the centre, the oiled steel periscope shafts glistened in their deck housings. About a dozen men, ratings in blue shirts, officers in white, were concentrating as the boat manoeuvred. The planesman at the one-man control console operated the stick that ‘flew' the submarine through the water, marine engineers monitored gauges for the trim valves and propulsion system, and seamen, some of them not much more than eighteen, peered at the amber screens of the tactical systems.

Those who caught the captain's eye looked away quickly. They didn't like him much, the men of
Truculent
, but they respected him, and that was what mattered. He'd need that respect when the crunch came in a few days' time.

Across the room at the weapons control console, the weapon engineer officer, Lieutenant Commander Paul Spriggs was talking to a rating. Hitchens liked Spriggs; the man was crisp and concise in the way he handled his men, everything by the book. Spriggs would be vital to him at the end, a WEO who wouldn't question orders.

Philip hovered by the chart table, pulling out the sheet for the north of Scotland and the water between Iceland, the Faroes and the Shetlands. Known as the GIFUK (Greenland, Iceland, Faroes, UK) Gap, this was NATO's underwater front line, a strategic barrier through which Soviet submarines should not be able to pass undetected on their way to the central Atlantic.

A ridge of sand, mud and rock ran between the land masses, along which the US Navy had laid a string of hydrophones known as SOSUS, SOund SUrveillance System, able to detect the passing of almost any submarine. Sonar-equipped surface ships and aircraft patrolled above, to complete the barrier.

Truculent
was taking part in Exercise Ocean Guardian, which involved over a hundred NATO ships and submarines, practising the reinforcement of Norway and control of the Norwegian Sea.

‘Are we going tactical on the transit, sir?' asked the WEO. ‘See how many Yank skimmers we can zap before they get a whiff of us?'

‘Certainly not!'

Heads turned at the sharpness of Philip's reply.

‘Sorry, sir,' Spriggs mumbled. ‘Thought that was the plan.'

‘No,' Philip repeated softly, conscious of his overreaction. ‘We've got to avoid any risk of detection. We're blue at first, as you know. But then we go unlisted.'

Paul Spriggs frowned. He'd attended the pre-patrol briefing in the Northwood headquarters of Flag Officer Submarines, along with the captain and the first lieutenant; that briefing had certainly put them playing ‘blue' (NATO) first, but by midweek they were due to switch to ‘orange' (enemy). There'd been no mention of their going ‘unlisted'. That meant some sort of secret mission, usually intelligence gathering deep inside Soviet waters.

‘Will you be briefing us on that, sir?' he asked edgily.

Hitchens felt his face begin to flush. They were staring at him.

‘Yes, WEO. In due course,' he answered curtly.

He stepped into the sound room adjoining the control room. Cordell, the tactics and sonar officer, was listening intently on headphones. Three ratings sat at panels controlling glowing green video displays. Here, the myriad sounds of the deep detected by hydrophones spread round the bulbous bows were translated into vertical patterns and gradations of light, unintelligible to the uninitiated. One of the ratings stood up from his seat and crossed to
a cabinet to change the laser disc on which every sound detected was recorded in digital code.

‘Got a hiccup with sonar 2026, sir.'

Lieutenant Sebastian Cordell had removed his headphones.

‘Processor's gone barmy. The CPO's going to change a board, see if that cures it.'

The 2026 was the processor for the second sonar array, a yellow plastic tube over a hundred metres long, filled with hydrophones, towed a thousand metres behind the submarine. The computer for analysing the sounds it detected was highly sophisticated, and had developed a fault.