Shadow Hunter (25 page)

‘We've got a line at 370 Hz., sir,' he explained, grinning. ‘Can't hear it on headphones, but it's definitely not part of the natural background.'

‘Okay, so what is it?'

The TAS officer punched a few keys and displayed the frequency of the noise in a window at the right of the screen. Then the picture changed to a table of data, on the left a list of known sounds in that same frequency range. He pointed to a paragraph on the right.

‘Closest thing in the classification guide is the main coolant pump in one of these.'

‘A
Trafalgar
?'

‘We don't often make that sort of racket, thank God, but if we had undetected pump trouble it'd be somewhere in that range. Must be going fast not to hear it on his own sonar.'

‘Where do you think it is?' Andrew interjected.

‘It's very faint, sir. Right on the edge of the capabilities of even this equipment.' He patted the console. ‘We've got an ambiguous bearing of eighty degrees relative to the array. My guess is it's on our port bow, but I'd like to alter course twenty degrees to starboard to eliminate the ambiguity.'

The initial bearing from the towed array was always ambiguous; the hydrophones couldn't tell which side the sound was coming from. By altering course and taking new relative bearings, one fix would remain constant, the other would diverge further, clearing up the ambiguity.

‘Well, hang on to it. It's all we've got,' Biddle ordered.

Andrew hurried to the chart table.

‘There's nothing on the intelligence plot about any of our subs being in this area, so it could well be our man.'

‘Starboard ten. Steer zero-two-five,' ordered Lieutenant Colqhoun. The blue-shirted rating switched off the autopilot and turned the steering column, glad of something to do.

It would be several minutes before the array steadied again behind them, after which they could get their new bearing.

‘Exactly right,' Andrew breathed, laying the protractor on the chart. ‘If it's confirmed as a portside contact, it puts him precisely where the Nimrod's searching! We may just have struck lucky!'

He took up the dividers and measured the distance between their present position and the track he imagined the
Truculent
was following.

‘About three hours! That's all it would take!' he remarked.

Lieutenant Colqhoun called across from the Action Information Display.

‘Got a confirmed bearing, sir. Two-eight-six degrees. Range – probably between fifty and a hundred miles.'

‘Thanks.'

Biddle settled himself at the chart table. He would calculate an intercept course to close the range. They'd have to guess the speed of the target. Thirty knots probably, making that much noise.

He pulled the keypad of a small computer across the table and tapped in the figures. A split second later its narrow liquid-crystal screen displayed the course to follow.

‘Steer three-five-six. Keep seventy metres, revolutions for fifteen knots!'

Andrew scribbled down his radio signal to FOSM. It was in two parts. The first gave their own position and the bearing and possible range of the suspected target, to be relayed to the Nimrod overhead; the second was to ask for a search of Philip's file for clues.

‘We'll come to periscope depth for the transmission in ten minutes,' Biddle told him.

Then the commander leaned an elbow on the chart table. He didn't want the navigation rating to hear what he said next.

‘If this
is
the right contact, Andrew . . .'

He didn't need to complete the sentence. Andrew beckoned and led the way out of the control room.

‘Can we talk in your cabin?'

‘Of course.'

Biddle pushed open the door for him. Andrew sat on the narrow bunk.

‘My orders are to stop him,' he declared simply.

Carefully, he watched Biddle's face for his reaction.

‘How we do that, I don't know yet. I hope to God it's easy and a few words on the underwater telephone will be enough to let Pike take over.'

‘And if not?'

‘Then I'll need fresh orders. But in the last resort – we're supposed to hit him. That's what they told me.'

He expelled a long breath.

‘You can't do that!' Biddle almost shouted. ‘There's a hundred guys in there, Andrew. I know most of them. You couldn't pull the plug on them.'

‘Depends on the alternative, doesn't it,' Andrew countered sharply. ‘If he's about to do something that'll make the Russians turn my children into nuclear cinders, then a hundred lives is a small price to pay. We let over twice that many die in the Falklands, for Christ's sake!'

‘But how will you know what he's going to do?' Biddle persisted. ‘Who's to be the judge of what effect his action'll have? We can't know down here, that's for sure. Will CINCFLEET decide? Or Downing Street?'

‘You have a point . . . We're going to want to be in contact with base when the moment comes. But if we keep bobbing up to the surface to transmit, we'll risk losing him.'

‘So in the end it may be down to you . . .'

Andrew's eye was drawn to the photograph on Biddle's desk. Two little girls aged about three. Twins, probably.

‘I just hope to God it doesn't come to that.'

* * *

Chief Petty Officer Gostyn was not a happy man. Not only did he have a defective pump in the number two steam system of
HMS Truculent,
and an unsympathetic Commanding Officer, he also had a bad apple among his mechanics.

He knew who it was. But could he prove it? Could he hell!

It was bloody Percy Harwood again, had to be. None of the other five sods whose job it was to check and maintain the steam system would have been so flaming stupid as to drop an eighteen-inch wrench down behind the defective pump and then pretend it hadn't happened.

Anybody else, any other bugger on the entire submarine, would have known what a disaster it was to do something like that and not report it.

Millions of pounds had been spent on inventing ways
to make all this machinery silent. Mounting individual pumps and piping on rubber, developing low-speed bearings, all of it to reduce the noise detectable outside the hull to a bare minimum. And all it took was Percy bloody Harwood to leave his spanner resting one end against the pump, the other on the deck, thus building a bridge across the sound insulation so that the rumble coming from the defective bearing could be transmitted straight out into the deep sound channel of the North Atlantic.

Gostyn had spotted it himself, while making his hourly rounds. Harwood had denied it was him, of course, but it couldn't have been anyone else. It was he who'd drawn the wrench from stores.

The question now was, should he report it? He was the chief down here; it might reflect on him. Lieutenant Commander Claypole might be sympathetic, but with this dodgy mission they were on, he'd probably report it to the captain. And Commander Hitchens could be bloody vindictive.

Something wrong with their captain, this patrol. The whole boat was talking about it. Some of the CPOs had even heard a rumour the other officers were plotting to relieve him of his command. Bloody riot that would cause, when they got back to Devonport. It'd never happen of course. They hadn't got the guts.

So he decided to say nothing about the wrench, nothing about the fact that their secret presence in the area had been revealed for a couple of hours to any passing ship or plane that had cared to listen. With any luck there hadn't been any.

All over with now. No more noises escaping to the outside world. And the pump bearing was holding up despite his fears.

* * *

Rear-Admiral Anthony Bourlet was on his third cup of coffee. At his insistence the WRNS who was his personal assistant had installed a filter machine when he took over the job of Flag Officer Submarines. He looked across his
office to the brass ship's clock on the wall next to the barometer.

Nearly eleven. The ‘crabs' should have been airborne for several hours already. The RAF hated the Navy's nickname for them, but Bourlet thought the tag apt. Airmen did seem to do everything sideways.

He downed a cup of Kenya blend and headed for the staircase.

‘Going down the “hole”,' he growled to his trim, smartly-uniformed PA as he passed the outer office.

‘OPCON's on the line, sir. There's been a signal from
Tenby
.'

He swerved into her doorway and grabbed the out-stretched phone.

‘FOSM here,' he barked, then listened. ‘Aha! Bloody good news!' He listened again.

‘His file? Already been through that. Still, no harm in another look. On my way.'

He passed the phone back to his PA.

‘Hitchens' file – we've still got it here, haven't we?'

‘I think it's with Commander Rush, sir. She asked to look at it first thing this morning.'

‘Ah. Get her to come and talk to me about it in an hour, would you? Or maybe a little later. Say twelve-thirty, and fix us some sandwiches – smoked salmon – and, er, a bottle of the Sauvignon, nicely chilled?'

He winked at her, which made her smile self-consciously. She knew he was a frightful lecher but she liked him anyway.

It took him three minutes to walk to the entrance of the bunker, and another three to descend to the computer-filled cavern of the OPCON centre. Thousands of signals a day were dealt with here, and stored for months on computer files.

‘It's all happening, sir,' the duty operations officer saluted. ‘We've just had the Nimrod on. They're in contact with a
Trafalgar
at this very minute. It has to be
Truculent
.'

‘Bloody good news!'

‘She's got a dodgy pump apparently; making a hell of
a racket. But she's doing twenty-eight knots and can't hear herself.'

‘Where is she?'

The ops officer picked up an illuminated pointer and turned to the giant wall map.

‘About two-fifty miles west of North Cape, heading northeast.'

A signals warrant officer tore a sheet from a printer and thrust it into the Ops officer's hand.

‘Eight Lima Golf again, sir.'

‘Thank you. Our Nimrod, sir,' the Ops officer explained to the Admiral.

‘And . . . ?'

‘They seem to have fixed the pump, sir. Noise signature's almost back to normal. She's slowed down to twenty knots. The Nimrod's asking if you want them to let the boat know they're there.'

‘No! Absolutely not! They must stay with her – keep tracking until the
Tenby
can get close. She'll do the talking.'

‘Right, sir. I'll send that off.'

‘And fast, before the “crabs” bugger it up.'

* * *

Philip stood in the ‘bandstand'. They were getting close to Soviet waters. Time to go ‘invisible'. He'd ordered a cut in speed to eighteen knots and told the MEO he could shut down the pump with the worn bearing. At their slower, quieter speed, Philip had ordered rapid changes of course to lose any hunters who might have tracked them while they'd been moving fast.

Philip looked at the control-room clock set on Zulu time – GMT. In ten minutes precisely, a communications satellite would beam down a stream of signals. The closer they came to Soviet waters, the more he needed the intelligence data it would include.

The sound room had reported nothing except the propeller cavitation of a couple of merchantmen butting their
way round the craggy north Norwegian coast about forty miles away.

The information had not reassured him. Both his own Navy and the Soviets were bound to be looking for him. So, where were they?

At first the intelligence reports had listed the
Truculent
, but no more.
HMS Tenby
had received the same treatment. On Sunday she'd been west of Tromso, but on Monday there'd been no mention of her.

So was it the new
Tenby
they were sending after him? How ironic that it should be her, of all boats.

‘Revolutions for six knots! Ten up. Keep periscope depth!' Cordell ordered.

Philip looked at the clock again, anxiously. Five minutes to their satcom slot.

* * *

Flight Lieutenant Stan Mackintosh was uncomfortably aware of his hangover. The night before, after discovering the price of Norwegian beer, he and his crew had retired to a hotel bedroom with some six-packs of lager and bottles of scotch, bought at NAAFI prices before leaving England.

‘Tosh' had come to the conclusion that he was a bit too old for the heavy drinking the younger men could manage. His brain hurt and his stomach churned alarmingly as the Nimrod banked and turned, trying to keep track of the suddenly elusive submarine below.

He didn't know what had prompted the
Truculent
to take evasive action. They'd certainly not given away their presence. They'd dropped passive buoys only, and had kept above five-thousand feet so the boat wouldn't hear them through the water.

It had been easy at first; ‘spearing fish in a barrel' was how he'd described it when they'd detected the boat's noisy pump over fifty miles away. But now the AQS.
901 acoustic processor was struggling to separate anything from the normal background noise.

He peered over the shoulders of the operators at the green screens. Even on the narrow band analyser none of the buoys they had in the water at the moment had kept a hold on the
Truculent
's noise signature.

‘We've lost the bastard,' yelled the Tactical Navigator in exasperation.

The big round screen showed the plot disintegrating. Bearing lines from the buoys, which had converged neatly to give the boat's position, now diverged wildly.