Shadow Hunter (36 page)

‘I'll change course back to the south again,' Cordell decided. ‘Then ease round to the east so we get back on our original track. There's a big surface contact heading for Murmansk. If we can close with it, we can hide in her shadow.'

‘Sounds good to me,' Pike agreed. The boy was doing all right for his first run as tactics officer.

Suddenly all heads turned towards the door. Ashen-faced, Philip Hitchens entered the control room.

‘Everything all right, sir?' Pike asked softly.

‘Fine. Cordell can brief me, then I'll take over,' he snapped.

‘Right, sir. I'll leave you to it.'

Pike hurried to the wardroom. There were two men he needed to collar before they disappeared into the bowels of the submarine.

Claypole, the stocky, bushy-bearded marine engineer, was one of them. Pike stopped him as he was heading towards the tunnel over the reactor.

‘We need to talk,' he whispered urgently. ‘You, me and Paul. Confidential. In my cabin at 0900?'

Claypole shrugged, showing no curiosity.

‘Sure. I'll have finished my rounds by then.'

Paul Spriggs was downing the last of his coffee. Pike dropped into the seat beside him and delivered the same message.

‘Excuse me, sir. You 'avin' Standard, sir?' The voice came from behind his shoulder.

The steward looked at his watch to make the point that the first lieutenant was late for breakfast.

‘Yes. Standard,' Pike glared.

When the rating was out of earshot again, Spriggs responded.

‘You've spoken to him?'

‘Yes. Just now. We need to get our act together. I think we're about to hit the shit!'

* * *

‘Active sonar, sir! Forty mile range. Bearing northwest.'

The call from the sound room brought Andrew Tinker, hard on the heels of Commander Peter Biddle, squeezing into the cramped sonar compartment.

‘Frequency shows it's a buoy from the Nimrod, sir.'

‘Could mean a change of plans, Peter,' Andrew breathed over Biddle's shoulder.

They'd been moving fast towards Ostrov Chernyy, hoping to reach the island ahead of
Truculent,
to head her off.

Andrew pulled Biddle out into the corridor, where they could talk privately.

‘The Nimrod wouldn't want to go active with so many Sovs around,' he whispered. ‘If he's pinging, he's trying to warn the guys on
Truculent
that something's up. And to tell us that he's found her.'

‘So we close in?'

‘We need more data. If the crabs are tracking her, they can vector us. We'll have to risk putting a mast up.'

‘Mmmm. Don't like that much. We're only forty miles from the Russian coast.'

‘Got a better idea?'

Again the rating called out from the sound room.

‘Submarine contact astern, sir!'

Biddle poked his head back through the doorway.

‘Classification?'

‘Looks like a
Victor III.
It's suddenly come on quite strong. Must've turned up the power.'

‘Going to investigate our pinger maybe,' Andrew suggested.

Biddle pushed back into the control room to order a change of course.

‘Steer zero-eight-five!'

The towed array was giving ambiguous bearings for the
Victor
The change of course would clarify it in a few minutes.

‘The soccer we try communicating with the Nimrod the better,' Andrew insisted. ‘In a few hours we'll be smack in the middle of the main shipping lanes into Murmansk.'

He crossed to the wireless room to alert the operators and to prepare a signal for CINCFLEET.

Biddle checked in the sound room again. The CPO confirmed that the
Victor
was to the west and heading north. Safe to ignore for the time being.

‘Keep 30 metres!' Biddle ordered. ‘Sound room, plot all surface contacts on the AIO!'

Andrew joined Biddle at the chart table.

The navigator had their position plotted half-way across the thirty mile wide mouth of Varanger Fjord, east of the Norwegian/Soviet land border. Soon they'd be on their own; the Nimrod would go no further east, for fear of trespassing in Soviet airspace. It'd be one submarine against another.

Commander Biddle studied the Action Information plot. North of them in the main shipping lanes there were several contacts, the largest identified as a naval supply ship based in Murmansk. He needed to be further from them, for safety.

‘Steer one-six-zero,' he ordered. ‘Revolutions for fifteen knots.'

Then he turned to Andrew.

‘Ten minutes, and we'll stick the mast up.'

* * *

The pilot of the Mil Mi-14 helicopter was not a happy man. He'd been scrambled, along with every other available aircraft, despite having a defective radar.

How the hell was he supposed to look for enemy submarines when only half his equipment was working? The squadron commander had given him the Varanger Fjord to patrol, assuring him no foreign submarines would enter the bay; there was nothing there worth spying on.

Operating from the Bolshaya Litsa naval base, the Mi-14 had an endurance of four hours; with a forty minute transit flight each way, the pilot could afford two hours on station and still have fuel in reserve for a diversion.

They'd been on station for an hour already, criss-crossing the bay, dipping the sonar transducer as they went, and hearing nothing but seals and porpoises for their trouble.

Soviet time was three hours ahead of GMT, so for the helicopter crew it was late morning. The
michman
loadmaster handed out ration packs.

Grey and showery at first, it had become a fine morning. The sun had broken through, casting silver-gold shafts onto the sparkling water. On the horizon was silhouetted the traffic of the shipping lanes. Closer to them, there was nothing but unbroken sea.

Suddenly the pilot did a double-take. Smack in the middle of a patch of light a thin mast protruded from the water. He nudged his navigator and pointed, flicking the intercom switch on the control stick.

The navigator nodded excitedly and pointed to the chart to show where they were. Deep water. No rocks nearby masked with warning posts. It had to be a periscope.

The two men in the cockpit laughed at their incredible
luck. It was difficult enough to spot a periscope with radar, but with the naked eye? Astonishing!

The pilot pulled the machine back into a hover. They were nearly a kilometre away from the target; if they got closer the submarine might see or hear them.

The Captain Lieutenant commanding the aircraft from the sonar suite in the rear cabin called his base by radio, and was startled to find his call being routed straight to the operational control centre at Severomorsk.

He was even more startled when, after a pause of a few minutes, his sighting report was answered by a very odd question. Did he speak English?

He could manage a few words, he replied.

Suddenly the pilot alerted him that the submarine had dived. The Captain Lieutenant reported the fact by radio. The orders he received a few minutes later left him stony-faced with astonishment.

The nose of the helicopter dipped. They began to race ahead of the spot where the periscope had been seen. They flew on for a kilometre, then hovered low over the water. The winchman released the safety lock on the cable and the bulky sonar transducer dropped through the hole in the helicopter floor, entering the water with a slight splash.

* * *

The communications had worked well. The encrypted VHF call to the Nimrod revealed the plane had lost contact with the
Truculent
but the RAF gave them the last known position of the boat, less than fifteen minutes old.

In a burst transmission of the SSIX satellite, they'd passed back to CINCFLEET their theory about
Truculent
's destination, and picked up a string of signals stored for them.

Andrew and Peter Biddle consulted the chart, trying to guess the direction
Truculent
would have taken to avoid the Nimrod.

Ping.

‘Shit!'

The sonar transmission had been so loud they'd all heard it through the casing.

‘Bloody hell, sound room! Where's the contact?' Biddle screamed.

Ping.

‘Dead ahead, sir! Less than 500 yards.'

‘Helm hard-a-port! Ten down. Keep one hundred metres. Revolutions for maximum speed!'

Biddle glared round at Andrew, as the submarine banked hard to the left.

‘Told you this would happen!'

‘We have no sonar contact, sir,' yelled the CPO in the sound room. ‘Classified as active sonar from a
Haze
helicopter.'

Suddenly a high-pitched whistle issued from the loud-speaker at the back of the control room.

The underwater telephone!

The men froze.

The whistle stopped. A voice spoke, in a heavy Slav accent.

At first the words were terrifyingly incomprehensible, but then became mystifyingly clear.

‘Helsinki is arranged. Helsinki is arranged.'

The voice repeated the words about ten times and then ceased.

‘What the fuck's going on?' exploded Biddle.

‘God knows!' Andrew answered, his mind racing.

Biddle stood over the Action Information console like a predator, pre-occupied with getting his boat away from the Russian aircraft that had so dangerously and embarrassingly found him.

Andrew felt himself in the way, and walked to the empty wardroom, where he slumped into an armchair.

The message from the Soviet helicopter could not have been meant for them. The Soviets wouldn't have known they were the
Tenby.
Yet it was intended for an English boat. The voice had spoken English.

Truculent.
The Russians thought they were
Truculent
.

Suddenly the unbelievable possibility that Philip Hitchens had done a deal with the KGB seemed more real.

Helsinki. Was that where Phil was to see his father again, after leaving a Moray mine at Ostrov Chernyy?

The Russians had taken a hell of a risk with that underwater message, a risk of giving it to the wrong boat, or of arousing suspicion in the control room of
HMS Truculent
. Why would they do that?

Because they were scared. It had to be that. Scared that Phil intended to renege on their deal, because of the KGB's seduction of Sara.

Andrew looked up from his thoughts. The communications officer walked in to the wardroom.

‘Signal for you, sir. Came in on SSIX. Just finished unscrambling it.'

‘Thanks.'

He took the page of printout and the youth left.

FLASH 230630Z OCT

FROM CINCFLEET

TO HMS TENBY

TOP SECRET

PERSONAL FOR CDR TINKER

STILL CONSIDER IT MOST LIKELY CDR HITCHENS UNDER PRESSURE FROM KGB TO DELIVER NEW MINE.

ALTERNATELY HE MAY USE MINES TO ATTACK SOVIETS. UNCLEAR. CONSIDER ALL POSSIBILITIES. CANNOT ADVISE FURTHER.

INTERNATIONAL SITUATION VERY TENSE. ANY OFFENSIVE ACTION BY TRUCULENT WOULD BE SERIOUS THREAT TO WORLD PEACE. DOWNING STREET ORDERS YOU STOP HITCHENS. IMPOSSIBLE TO GIVE YOU OTHER SUBSURFACE ASSETS AS BACKUP.

ALL NOW UP TO YOU. USE WHATEVER RPT. WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY TO STOP HIS ACTIONS.

GOOD LUCK. GODSPEED.

FOSM.

Andrew swallowed hard. All up to him, now, the signal said. To stop an old friend from doing something unspeakably stupid.

‘Phil! What have you got into?' he moaned. ‘You crazy bastard!'

He strode back to the control room. Peter Biddle looked puzzled.

‘That
Haze.
He's made no effort to track us, as far as we can tell.'

‘Perhaps he doesn't need to. If the Sovs think we're the
Truc
, they may reckon they know where we're going.'

‘Ahh. Got you.'

Biddle took him by the elbow across to the chart table.

‘We're heading for a position thirty miles northeast of Nemetskiy Point.'

He indicated the tip of the Rybachiy Peninsula, the most northerly point on the Kola. South of them lay the densest concentration of military bases anywhere in the Soviet Union.

Andrew shivered as a wave of fear swept through him, from seeing on the chart just how close they were to the Russian bases.

‘The
Truc
has to be west of us,' Biddle continued. ‘She won't be doing more than eighteen knots, and taking a line from where the Nimrod lost contact puts her somewhere here.'

He indicated a wide arc of sea. Without the help of aircraft, it was a hopelessly large area to search.
Tenby
would need to be within five miles for her sister boat to have any chance of hearing her.

‘We have to narrow the search area,' Andrew decided.

He moved his hand down the chart to the mouth of the Kola Inlet, which led to the Coastal Defence Headquarters and main submarine base at Polyarny, and the Soviet Northern Fleet HQ at Severomorsk.

To the west of the inlet the approach was narrowed by the protruding mass of the Rybachiy Peninsula. Twenty miles east of Rybachiy, beyond the main channel into the inlet and about ten miles north of the main Kola coast lay the island of Ostrov Chernyy.

‘That's where Philip's going; into that gap. And that's where we've got to be, Peter. Looking straight up the nostrils of the Russian bear!'

Biddle chuckled, nervously.

‘Bit heavy on the melodrama?'

‘I'm not so sure. The Sovs are waiting for Philip. They don't know whether he's going to give them a mine, or try to sink some of their submarines. They're going to be using every asset they've got to keep track of him. We've got to find him before they do.'

‘There's plenty of cover about. The AIO plot's filling up.'

They crossed the control room to the Action Information display.