Shadow Hunter (24 page)

‘Where are we heading after North Cape, sir?' Cordell queried nervously.

‘You'll know when you need to,' Hitchens snapped. He slid the chart back into the drawer. ‘Just make sure we get there.'

Unnerved by Cordell's question, he turned for the door.

‘Call me when it's time for the satcom.'

‘Sir.'

Philip felt panic rising. It was the tension in the control room that did it. They were all suspicious – all watching him. He had to have solitude to think things through, make decisions.

He slid shut the door to his cabin, and slumped into his chair. What was truth, what was lies?

Those KGB bastards! They'd led him by the nose. He'd believed their ‘evidence', succumbed to their blackmail, agreed to their plan. But was it true, what they'd told him? How the hell could he tell, down there in the dark silence of the ocean.

And poor Sara. The way they'd used her – trickery,
lies. And all to make sure of him, as though the other thing weren't enough.

He remembered his stunned disbelief when a completely strange woman had stopped him on the cliff footpath, earlier that year, to tell him his father was still alive. The father whom he'd worshipped and whose disappearance thirty years ago he'd never been able to accept.

The letter and the photograph the Russian woman had produced as evidence – he could still picture them. The cheap paper covered with his father's still familiar scrawl had torn a little in the summer breeze.

It had poleaxed him, shattered him. At that moment, he'd become a boy again, a boy on the edge of his teens; a child who'd idolized a father all too often absent, a boy who craved paternal approval.

The words in his father's letter had cut into his heart, pleading, begging that he should do something to end his suffering. The handwriting had been uneven and shaky. They'd broken his father in the labour camp – the woman had admitted it. She'd even apologized; blamed it on the Stalinists.

She'd waited until their third meeting before revealing the price to be paid for freeing the sick old man. She was sure of Philip by then.

It was the second letter from his father that had sealed it; the handwriting strayed down the page and told of incurable heart disease. Did he have grandchildren, the old man asked; believing that one day he'd see them had kept him going all those years. He begged that before he died, Philip would make the dream come true.

Treason was the price to be paid for his father's freedom. Betrayal of his country's secrets to the KGB. Betrayal of the Navy which was his whole life.

Until that moment Philip had never questioned the meaning of ‘loyalty'. It was absolute. Handing British naval secrets to the Russians was unthinkable. But now he faced a choice; loyalty to his country – or loyalty to his own flesh and blood.

It was only a small thing they asked, the woman had said. Just a small favour.

A small thing. To lay an inert Moray mine at a precise location off the Kola coast, so it could be retrieved by a Soviet submersible. Retrieved and dismantled, so that the most potent anti-submarine weapon ever devised by the West could be understood, and rendered impotent. A small thing.

His mind had rejected the treachery; but his heart hadn't.

Would it really do so much harm? The Soviets themselves must have similar technology. If they didn't learn the secret from him, they'd get it from someone else. They'd bribe some underpaid technician at the factory, perhaps. There'd never be a war anyway, so what did it matter?

It would be difficult, he'd warned her. There'd be no opportunity.

Yes, there would, she told him. They knew he commanded
Truculent,
the trials boat for the Moray mines. The thoroughness of the KGB's research had startled him.

A few months later, as she had predicted, he was ordered to the Kola, on the ideal mission to fulfil the KGB's plan. Although just a simulated mine-laying, he would be carrying war stocks, they told him.

Suddenly he had the means to free his father. It was fate; it had to be.

He met the KGB woman in Plymouth that night. She gave him the chart coordinates for the laying of the mine, and said his father would be moved immediately to a clinic in a neutral country, where he would be cared for until other arrangements could be made.

How he would explain the loss of a mine when he returned to Plymouth, he couldn't imagine. He'd think of something. The plan had to proceed.

Then suddenly, the whole thing had exploded in his face. He'd found out about Sara.

He'd been a puppet all the time. There wasn't just a KGB woman pulling his strings; there was a man too. A Russian who'd seduced Sara months before to make her talk. Talk about him, his obsession with his father, his vulnerability.

The bastards! They'd invented the whole thing! Faked the letter and the blurred photograph. They hadn't let him keep them, of course. Couldn't risk them falling into the hands of the British authorities, the woman had said.

It had been bloody clever. He cringed at the thought of how he'd fallen for it.
God,
how he hated them, and their evil masters in the Kremlin. Okay, he'd give them a bloody Moray mine. Right up the backside of an
Oscar
class submarine!

Thus he had begun the patrol blinded by anger and a thirst for revenge.

But now the doubts had come back. Supposing they
had
been telling the truth after all? Why shouldn't his father be alive? The writing had looked like his, the words and the expressions had been right. And the photograph – well, who could tell after so many years?

He sank his head in his hands. He must decide; go through it all again, all the evidence for and against. The reports he'd read of the catastrophic ‘accident' nearly thirty years ago – think back through them. Remember what the Russian woman had told him about the survival of just two men, who'd escaped the destruction of the old
Tenby
because they'd been ashore on the Soviet coast when it had happened, taking photographs of a radar site.

He wanted the story to be true, wanted desperately to bring his father home to England, back to life. But he had to guard against self-deception.

Think. Think hard. Then decide. He mustn't have doubts when the time came.

The last time he'd seen his father had been in Guernsey in August 1962. Philip had been fourteen. That summer he'd felt closer to his father than ever before.

That's how he remembered it anyhow. Had it really been like that?

His father had been such a confident man, with firm views on everything – never a moment's doubt in his own judgement. Whenever he came home from sea, Philip would follow him round the house like a dog, he remembered, drawing strength from being close to him.

His father had been an aloof man, however, and in
truth there'd been few occasions when the two of them had been really close.

It had rained most of that summer. Much of the holiday had been spent indoors playing Monopoly, or even bridge whenever his father managed to bully a fellow holidaymaker into making up a four. Philip had no brothers or sisters; his mother had confided once that giving birth to him had been such a ghastly experience, she'd determined never to repeat it.

He'd sensed an unusual tension between his parents that summer. Perhaps his mother had known his father was about to embark on a spying mission; perhaps it was something personal. He would never know now.

When the news came that his father's boat was Missing Presumed Lost, his mother retreated into extended mourning, bitter at the world for taking away her husband.

Philip shuddered. Looking back on his unhappy boyhood would do nothing to answer the questions in his head.

What would Andrew do in his situation?

He often asked himself that – an old habit acquired soon after the two of them began their naval training together at Dartmouth. To Philip, every decision Andrew Tinker took seemed effortless; the man knew instinctively what to do, while he himself floundered in uncertainty and self-doubt.

He'd used Andrew as a life-raft when they were students; uncomfortably aware of it, he'd wondered that his room-mate tolerated him so gladly. One day in a flash of insight, he worked out why; for all Andrew's decisiveness and competence, there was one ingredient for a naval career which he lacked. Background.

And that was something Philip had plenty of. With a dead hero for a father, and a grandfather who'd been a Rear Admiral, it was ‘background' that had brought him into the Navy and ‘background' which he'd hoped might offset any lack of brilliance as an officer.

Coming from a family with no naval connections,
Andrew had hungered for the true taste of the Navy and its traditions. It was a knowledge Philip could provide.

The complementary nature of their original friendship had turned later into good-natured rivalry in everything they did – even marriage. Philip knew it had been Andrew's engagement to Patsy that had spurred him to find a wife for himself.

He and Sara had been wildly in love when they married. Dreams, all dreams. A nightmare now.

* * *

Andrew Tinker sat huddled over the wardroom table of
HMS Tenby
and chewed his thumbnail. Spread before him were charts of the underwater landscape north of Norway and inside the Kola inlet.

‘What we really need is a mind-reader,' Andrew sighed.

‘He's been sitting in that boat for nearly a week,' Commander Biddle reminded him. ‘Even if he were planning to blow up some Russians because a KGB man poked his wife, surely he'd have thought better of it by now?'

Andrew nodded. His own thoughts exactly.

‘And if he hasn't, he must be really off his head. Somebody on board should have twigged.'

‘But they haven't,' Biddle said. ‘There's just been a signal in from FOSM. No news at all. No sign of the
Truc
since the “crabs” found and lost her yesterday.'

‘The Nimrod should be airborne again by now.'

‘That's confirmed. They're starting at twenty degrees east and working west.'

Andrew found the longitude line on the chart and nodded.

‘'S' about right. Couldn't have got any further than that if he'd gone flat out. Where are we?'

Biddle's finger traced a line northeast from where they'd picked up Andrew the previous evening.

‘We're doing eighteen knots. Means we can listen on sonar and still end up in front of him. We'll sit tight off North Cape and wait for his signature as he comes steaming up behind us.'

‘I can't for one moment believe it'll be that easy.'

Andrew pulled towards him the chart showing the Kol'skiy Zaliv, the Kola Inlet where the Soviet Northern Fleet had its headquarters.

‘We can't be sure that's where he's going,' Andrew continued.

‘Best place if he's looking for Sovs to shoot.'

‘Ah, but is that what he's planning? I've known Phil a long time. This picture we're painting of a man ready to risk war to avenge his wife's indiscretions – it just doesn't fit.'

‘No? What about the mental breakdown theory?'

‘I've thought a lot about that, and I don't buy it either. If Phil had a breakdown, he wouldn't be able to conceal it. He'd just go to pieces. Tim Pike's his first lieutenant; he's a good hand and he'd soon sort him out.'

‘But he hasn't.'

‘Exactly. Which is why I'm convinced there's something else behind it. Something much more complicated.'

‘Such as?'

‘Christ! If I knew that . . .' Andrew spread his arms wide and stretched.

‘Would it be worth getting FOSM to look in his personnel file?'

‘Maybe. I'll send a signal. Trouble is, I don't know what they should look for.'

They fell silent.
Tenby'
s wardroom began to fill up with officers finished with the night watch, but not yet ready to get their heads down. There were thirteen officers on board, but the dining table only had seats for ten. In a corner by the door was a small refrigerator containing beer and soft drinks. Andrew had been offered a beer the night before, but had noticed none of Biddle's officers drank when at sea, and had declined it.

‘We've got a satcom slot at 12.20. But we can do an HF burst sooner than that, if you want.'

‘Okay. I'll draft a signal.'

Instinctively Andrew made as if to return to his cabin, but checked himself in time. His sleeping quarter was a mattress pallet, clipped to the torpedo rack in the forward
weapons compartment. Biddle had offered the use of his own quarters as an office, but it was desperately small, which was why they'd chosen to sit in the wardroom. He pulled out a small notebook and turned to a clean page.

‘Captain, sir
!
'
the loudspeaker crackled.

Biddle stood up and pressed the microphone key.

‘Yes, Murray.' It was the executive officer.

‘Got a contact. At least, TAS says we have.'

‘On my way.'

They both headed for the sound room.

‘The trouble with being the trials boat for a new sonar system,' Biddle explained, ‘is the shortage of background data. Without more experience with the gear, we don't know whether we've really got a contact or whether the transputer analyser's imagined it!'

The green-glowing sonar displays in the big grey, shock-mounted cabinets looked the same as the ones on his own boat, but Andrew had been told that both the hydrophones trailed astern and the computer that analysed and categorized the different sounds had been developed a step beyond his own equipment.

‘This is Algy Colqhoun. A very enthusiastic TAS. Says this new gear's so sensitive it can pick up the moaning ghosts from World War Two shipwrecks! Now then, TAS; what're you up to!'

The tactics and sonar officer pointed to the VDU at his shoulder. Vertical bands of green shading moved slowly up the screen. He pointed to a very narrow line running up the screen between two broader bands, and spun the screen cursor onto it, using the roller-ball control on the console.