H.M.S. Unseen (12 page)

011200APR05.
Submarine Staff Office. Royal Navy Dockyard,
Devonport.

Lt. Commanders Roger Martin and Doug Roper were absolutely baffled. Not a sight, not a sound, not a fragmented sonar bleep. No wreckage, no buoys, no signals. Nothing. HMS
Unseen
had simply vanished. Whatever air had remained in the lost diesel-electric boat must have long since run out, and there was no longer any possibility of survivors.

The situation was officially SUBSUNK. The chilling Royal Navy signal to that effect had been put on the nets the previous day at 0900. This signal is reserved for use only when a submarine is known to have sunk. Consequently, the urgency had gone out of the search, because the ships were no longer involved in a life-or-death race to get the crew off the bottom of the sea.

Henceforth, it was strictly by the book. But HMS
Unseen
had to be found. And the area of search was being extensively widened, because it was clear the submarine had gone beyond its quite small exercise area. Three Royal Navy frigates and Captain Mike Fuller’s
Exeter
were methodically sweeping the bottom with sonars, as were the two minesweepers. Eight times they had sent divers down, plus TV cameras, but there was never even a hopeful sign.

Meanwhile the press were laying it on the Royal Navy. “Experts” were demanding to know how such a thing could have happened. There were already distant allegations about bad training, poor discipline. “What on earth was the Navy thinking of, allowing a bunch of Brazilian rookies to drive this boat underwater?…
when it was known they were behind schedule in their training, and presumably competence…
was it not a fact that Lt. Commander Bill Colley was unhappy with their progress…was this not an accident waiting to happen…?”

Every day the Navy was besieged by these simplistic questions, about a wildly complicated problem. The Public Relations department was on duty twenty-four hours a day. And Captain Charles Moss knew that his days in the Royal Navy were probably numbered. Someone was going to be blamed for this, and there was no one else really. He could imagine what the admirals would say.
Captain Moss should have initiated SUBMISS earlier when it was perfectly clear there was no communication of any kind from
Unseen
. And the question of the Brazilians’ competence must come into the matter. Did he or did he not know that Lieutenant Commander Colley was concerned? If not, why not?
Captain Moss, aged forty-seven, was already considering his future career opportunities out of uniform.

020230APR05. 35.22N 14.46W. Course 180. Speed 9.
240 miles due west of the Rock of Gibraltar.

Unseen
continued south, in the dark, snorkeling. Commander Adnam took a sweeping all-around look for the lights of the
Santa Cecilia.
They still had ample fuel, but the CO was as anxious as anyone to get rid of the bodies in the torpedo room.

At 0240 they spotted her navigation lights, out on the southern horizon, returning from the North African port where she had refilled her massive converted diesel-fuel tanks, just in case
Unseen
was getting low. Thirty minutes later, Ben ordered the two ships together on the surface of a calm, moonlit sea.

The commanding officer explained that they did not currently require fuel, but that he would like to make a new rendezvous eighteen days hence, down in the doldrums, the hot windless seas around the equator. For now, they would just like food and water, and the concrete weights lifted over. Ben had no intention of telling anyone on the freighter what he wanted the weights for, and no one asked. There was something about Benjamin Adnam. He was not a man for idle chatter. If he wanted you to know something, he would tell you.

Ben stood up on the casing, watching as the hydraulic lifting arm on the
Santa Cecilia
hoisted and lowered the concrete cubes in a heavy-duty tarpaulin, ten at a time. His crew stacked them neatly on the unlit deck, and within a half hour the freighter captain waved them good-bye and turned back to the south.

At that point Ben’s crew went to work. The davit was unbolted from its stowage in the casing, slotted into its sleeve in the deck, the block and tackle rigged ready. Down below they were dragging the sealed bodies from the torpedo room to the point where the big sail bag rested on the lower deck. Six men worked on the relocation and positioning of each body inside the hoist-bag. Two more hauled it up and out of the hatch. Then three men lashed the concrete weight to it with three turns of the plastic belt and heaved it into the water.

First to take the long 10,000-foot drop to the floor of the Atlantic were Lieutenant Commander Colley and his men, the last ones to die, and the first four out of the torpedo room. The average time taken per body worked out to six minutes, and the entire exercise took a little over four hours. But the bodies would never be seen again, and there was a thin, self-satisfied smile on the face of Commander Adnam as he, too, turned south, and took
Unseen
deep once more, just as the sun began to rise above the eastern horizon.

031100APR05.
Office of the National Security Advisor.
The White House.

“Hi, George. Anything happened?”

“Nothing in Plymouth. But we just got a new set of pictures from Bandar Abbas. I can reveal that damned great building is definitely not a football stadium. They just flooded it. It’s a dry dock for sure…here, take a look…right here…see where they moved that beach in front. The water just flows straight in now.”

“So it does. And we can’t see in from either of the Big Birds, can we?”

“Nossir. The angle’s not good, and they keep the door shut. We can’t photograph inside. Also, sir, we don’t know much about the other building, the one constructed hard against it. I suppose it might be just a big storage area. But there must be something in it. Beats me.”

“Hmmmmm. Guess so. What are they saying in Plymouth?

“Not much. There are a few reports, just detailing what the submarine’s program was for the day. Funny, they were scheduled to work on emergency maneuvers…you know, system failures, mechanical, electrical, hydro, fire drills, flooding drills. Also they were out for thirty-six hours, practicing night snorkeling.”

“I’ll tell you something, George. She’d have been a hell of a submarine to steal, if the guy doing the stealing was familiar with the Brits’ workup routine…knew how to read the signals off the Squadron Orders.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, if he sent in his signals on time at twelve hours, then twenty-four…then missed when his Diving time expired, Christ…he’da been about 300 miles away before he was missed. In another twenty-four hours, while the Brits groped around his ops area, he’da been another 200 miles farther on.”

“Sir, are you sure you’re not letting your imagination run riot?”

“No, George, I’m not sure. But what I just said is possible. Sherlock Holmes would not have dismissed it. Neither should we, however remote it might be.”

“Arnold, they did have the signals in.”

“I know. But signals do not announce where they began. Either by radio or satellite, you can send in a signal to the operating authority, and the Brits wouldn’t have the first idea whether it came from Plymouth Sound or Plymouth Rock. Signals are signals. No one would bother to check, because they all know where the goddamned submarine is…in its ops area, right?”

“Right.”

“Wrong. I do not believe the sonofabitch was in its ops area, because the goddamned British have been combing it for five fucking days with half the Home Fleet, and found nothing. The chances are it’s not there. So where the fuck is it?”

“I’m not sure, sir.”

“I know you’re not fucking sure, George. Now let me ask you this. If you had to stake $10,000 of your hard-earned personal money on a bet, would you bet, yes, it’s in its ops area, but the stupid Brits can’t find the bastard? Or would you bet, no, it’s not in its ops area. It’s somewhere else, either by accident or design?”

Admiral George Morris thought carefully and then he replied, “My $10,000 says it’s somewhere else, beyond the ops area.”

“Exactly. So does mine.”

April 2005.

C
OMMANDER ADNAM DROVE
UNSEEN
DOWN THE
coast of North Africa, running southwest for 1,600 miles, past the long, hot coastline of Mauritania, where the shifting sands of the Sahara Desert finally slope down to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Right there, just north of the Cape Verde Islands on latitude 17.10N, longitude 22.40W, he changed course to the south, still running at nine knots at PD, all the way down to the Sierra Leone Basin.

He made his final course change there, before the refueling stop, then headed southeast for another 800 miles.
Unseen
crossed the equator at 1500 on April 20, moving silently through the lonely blue waters of the Guinea Basin toward their rendezvous point at 04.00S, 10.00W. There was 17,000 feet of ocean beneath the keel.

The
Santa Cecilia
showed up right on time at 0300 on the morning of April 22. They were 3,600 miles and eighteen days from their previous meeting point west of Gibraltar, and the submarine was low on diesel.

It was a stifling-hot night, and there was no wind whatsoever, and no waves. But the swells were deep, and the great, flat, moonlit waters of the doldrums rose and fell in those long glassy seas that lie between the north-flowing Benguela Current surging up the coast of Africa, and the south-flowing Guinea Current.

The fuel transfer was not easy and took four hours. The good-byes were brief, and the two ships turned south once more, arranging to meet again, thirty-two days hence, east of the island of Madagascar.

May 10.

Admiral Arnold Morgan was breaking the habit of a lifetime. He was going on vacation tomorrow. And, as a further break with tradition, he was taking his secretary with him. This, incidentally, caused no consternation in the White House, where secretaries normally remain in the office to cover for vacationing bosses.

Everyone knew about Admiral Morgan and Kathy O’Brien. Everyone had known for the past six months. Ever since the national security advisor had decided no longer to keep their secret. He had even touched base with the President, and informed him of the relationship, on the basis that the Chief Executive ought rightly to be the first to know who the third Mrs. Arnold Morgan might be.

The President was delighted for them both, but accepted that Mrs. Morgan would, for reasons of propriety and professionalism, leave the White House once they were married. He also made one strict condition, that he would be invited to the wedding.

Since then every young stud on the Presidential staff had refrained from asking Mrs. O’Brien out for dinner, which was as well, since she always said no anyway. But the subject of her discreet romance became unaccountably off-limits. No one ever mentioned it, and certainly no one risked a joke about it, possibly because there was the unseen threat that anyone who really pissed off the severe and autocratic ex–nuclear submarine commanding officer might find himself on the wrong side of one hundred lashes. Admiral Morgan had a way of exuding authority.

Two weeks previously, he’d talked to the President about the vacation first, told him he would like to take Kathy to the Western Isles of Scotland. There were a couple of people he wanted to talk a little business with in the UK, for reasons he would be happy to reveal to the President. But he would prefer to wait until after he returned.

“Arnold,” said the great man, “however you want to play it is almost certainly the right way. However, for security reasons I would prefer you to travel in a U.S. military aircraft, and I hope you can make it back for my birthday on May 24.”

“No trouble, sir. I’ll be gone ten days max. Leaving on the eleventh. But I might have a little interesting stuff when I get here.”

“Okay, Admiral. Stay cool. We’ll talk soon.”

He was finally ready to leave, and two White House secretaries were detailed to stand guard over Kathy’s executive domain while she was gone. The admiral and his distant bride-to-be would fly in a U.S.A.F. modified KC 135 jet, the military equivalent of a DC10, manufactured by McDonnell Douglas and fitted with a secure, ultramodern communications system in case the President should wish to speak to the admiral in-flight.

They took off from Andrews Air Force Base at 0700 sharp, and came in to land at the Royal Air Force’s Lyneham base in Wiltshire at 1800 local time. A U.S. Navy staff car met them and drove them 50 fast miles to a beautiful, private, hotel-restaurant, the Beetle and Wedge, on the banks of the River Thames at Moulsford, Oxfordshire.

The car that followed them contained two Secret Servicemen, plus the high-security communications system that would patch the admiral directly to the Oval Office. The hotel owner had previously worked in 10 Downing Street and understood the intricacies of such matters. Though her ex-boss, the pedantically polite and careful former Prime Minister, Edward Heath, might have found little in common with the irascible right-wing American national security advisor.

Arnold Morgan and Kathy checked into separate but adjoining rooms. ”Just in case those assholes from the London tabloids have planted some ugly little bastard with a camera up the goddamned chimney.”

Later they dined by the river, looking out at one of the most perfect stretches of water on the Thames. They ate fresh grilled fish that the landlord prepared for them personally, and they sipped glasses of golden Montrachet Chevalier, 1995. The admiral’s long-suffering secretary had rarely, if ever, felt so happy.

“Why won’t you tell me where you’re going tomorrow morning?” she asked, just before they retired for the night.

“Because tomorrow, my private thoughts and fears suddenly become business. And that’s classified, even from you.”

By 8
A.M.
the following morning the admiral was gone, driving through the little towns of Wallingford and Thame to the Oxford–London motorway, the M40. His driver sped him in the direction of Northwood, home of the Flag Officer of the Royal Navy’s Submarine Service.

A young submarine officer met him at the main gate and hopped into the car for the short downhill drive to FOSM’s lair. He was escorted immediately into the inner sanctum, and he was greeted personally by Rear Admiral Sir Richard Birley, a lean, slightly built man, with smooth-combed fair hair, who walked athletically, and whose smile had caused deep wrinkles at the sides of his eyes. He had not smiled much lately, however.

“Arnold! How terrific to see you…it’s been too long. Actually…it’s been ten years. Come and sit down.”

“Hey, Dick…good to see you, old buddy. How’s Hillary and the girls?”

“Well, they’re both at university now…but basically everything’s fine. Bit quieter without them…”

“Guess so…I forgot to tell you before, but I’m thinking of getting married again myself…but she says she won’t do it till I retire.”

“Christ, that probably won’t happen for about thirty years since you’re A) indestructible, and B) wedded to the security of that country of yours.”

“Heh, heh, heh…I’ll talk her into it.”

“Bully her into it !”

“Heh, heh, heh.”

“Want some coffee?”

“Good call, Dick. Black with buckshot.”

“Black with what?”

“Buckshot. That’s what I call those little white bastards that make it sweet…I always forget the proper name.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I’ll pour it while you tell me what you want to see me for. I’m assuming this isn’t purely social?”

“No it’s not. I came to see you because I wanted to have a chat about HMS
Unseen.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve been doing quite a lot of chatting about that particular submarine just lately. But not more than about seven hundred times a day.”

The British admiral poured the coffee, invited his lieutenant to locate buckshot, which caused huge merriment among the American Secret Service detail sitting in the outer office. They were very used to seeing people scurrying around looking for Hermesetas for the Big Man.

“Dick, we’re old friends. And I want you to answer me straight. Was there a real problem with the Brazilians? Were they really as incompetent as the newspapers are suggesting? I mean the general impression we’re getting is that your department somehow allowed a bunch of lunatics to go out and kill themselves in a Royal Navy submarine.”

“Arnold, how confidential is this conversation?”

“Totally. I just want to get filled in, privately, with a conversation that will never go beyond these four walls. Not even to the beautiful lady who won’t marry me.”

Admiral Birley chuckled. “Arnold, the Brazilians were not wonderful, but they were not that bad. They were a little behind in their training, but only about a week, and I had four sea trainers on board, men who we think are the best in the world.

“The Upholder-Class boats are very good. We spent a year ironing out all the initial difficulties before we were forced to put them out of service and into reserve.
Unseen
was completely sound mechanically. As a matter of fact she was in excellent shape. It is very hard for me to accept that the Brazilians did something so absurd that it sank the bloody boat.”

“But what about all this newspaper stuff?”

“Christ, you of all people know what they’re like. Give them just a sniff of the possibility of incompetence, and they move in like vultures, regardless of the damage they might be doing, regardless of who might be irretrievably hurt. Regardless of whether they are right.”

“I suppose that’s the difference, Dick, between proper executives and media executives. The proper ones have to be right, or suffer often horrendous consequences. The media guys can more or less get away with anything.”

“That’s how it feels from here at the moment. We’ve now been conducting our search for six weeks, and we’ve found absolutely nothing. It’s bloody expensive in time and money. It preoccupies the submarine service, in return for which we are all being pilloried on a daily basis. The training captain in Devonport knows his career is on the line…and I have to say, I think mine is as well. The Royal Navy has not lost a submarine since the
Affray
in 1951.”

“Yes. It’s a goddamned bad business. You guys only took five weeks to find the
Affray,
and that was with equipment half a century behind what we have now.”

“And Arnold, it’s all made worse by the unmistakable fact that we have not found her, and we ought to have found her. Privately, truly between you and me, I’m just beginning to think something pretty bloody odd might be going on.”

“I’ve been thinking that since around April 5.”

“You would, cynical bastard. But I could not allow myself that luxury. Not with my whole department under fire. And, of course, we’ve had all this grief from the Brazilians.
Where’s my submarine? Where are our people? What kind of an operation are you running? This is a disgrace. We hope you don’t expect us to pay for this.
Not that they paid much for her anyway…$50 million for a submarine that cost $300 million plus.

“Of course the damned media don’t understand anything about a deal like this, and how damned difficult it would be to stop the Brazilians going to sea anyway. It is their submarine, after all, and it’s awfully hard to tell a foreign Navy their chaps are incompetent, even if they are. Which in this case they actually weren’t.”

“Hmmmmm. Let me suggest something to you, Dick. I expect you know that when we lost that aircraft carrier nearly three years ago, we had reason to think it was hit by a nuclear-headed torpedo delivered from a Russian Kilo.”

“No. I did not know that.”

“Then I must ask you to please make sure this conversation never gets repeated. That particular Kilo was, in effect, stolen from the Russian Navy, although there was no suggestion of violence. For weeks, the Russians swore it had sunk in the Black Sea. And they were telling the truth as they knew it. But when the dust cleared, it had not sunk. It had been removed. And I’m very afraid we might be looking at something similar right here.”

“Jesus…Arnold, my heart is telling me that such a thing could not possibly happen in the Royal Navy, in which I have served all of my working life. But there is a small voice in my mind that is saying yes it could.”

“I’ve been hearing that same voice for several weeks, Dick,” replied the American. “Just because I know how good you guys are. I know how thorough a job you’re doing. I know that modern sonars are excellent at sorting out what’s on the bottom. And you are telling me you had your own sea trainers in that boat and that the Brazilians weren’t
that
bad anyway. I know all that to be true. So where is the sonofabitch?”

Both men were silent. Then Admiral Morgan spoke again. “Dick, this is the most secret information I have ever uttered to a foreigner. But when we ran the mystery of the
Jefferson
to ground, we came up with an Arab terrorist, trained as a submarine officer in Israel, and here in Scotland, where he passed your Perisher with flying colors. He was a submarine genius, and he obliterated a United States aircraft carrier.

“According to the Mossad, he’s dead. But I could not place my hand on my heart and say I
know
he’s dead. And I suspect neither could the Mossad. I’m scared shitless the bastard’s still alive. I’m scared shitless because he’s familiar with the U-Class…and I’m really scared shitless that he’s out there, driving HMS
Unseen.”

Rear Admiral Sir Richard Birley sucked in his breath between his teeth, an involuntary gesture made at the enormity of the American’s words. “Where do you think he’s going?”

“That I don’t know. But if he’s taking weapons on board somewhere, I guess we have to face up to the possibility that he might be planning to slam a few more warships, ours, yours, whoever. He’s a Fundamentalist, working for Iraq. He hates the West…he’ll do anything to strike against us. We’ve already established that. But I can’t see him going home to Iraq. They simply do not have deep enough water to operate a submarine.”

“Do we begin a search?”

“I don’t know how. Your
Unseen
is like the Kilo, only even quieter. Can’t hear it. Can’t see it. I don’t know where to start. And I’m afraid to instigate anything. I just can’t advise the President to start looking for a submarine all over the goddamned oceans of the world when it might just have had a battery explosion and destroyed itself in the English Channel.”