The Einstein Code (29 page)

‘Control. The PAT is complete. Testing integrity.’

‘Copy that,
JV3.
’

Lamb adjusted a few more settings and watched a digital display on the panel in front of her. Numbers and symbols skittered across the monitor.

‘How we doing?’ Kate asked.

Lamb ignored her for a moment as she concentrated on calibrating a series of parameters. ‘Not bad . . . Just need to . . .’

On the screen they could see coloured lines dash left to right. Lamb made a few alterations to the controls, a green line and red line merged. She hit a plastic pad and the lines locked in.

‘Done.’ She clicked on the comms. ‘Integrity green 100, control. All systems check positive.’

‘Copy that,
JV3.
’

They could hear a cheer in the background as the voice from
Gladstone
came over the speakers.

‘Is that Captain Jerry Derham we hear?’ Kate asked, grinning.

‘It is he.’ Jerry’s voice boomed through the speaker. ‘Well done, Commander. Now, Lou and Kate – your turn to shine, guys.’

The PAT swayed almost imperceptibly as Kate and Lou edged along it. They took it slowly. All they could see was orange nanofibre and, up ahead, the grey rusted metal of
Phoenix
, a circle of hull about a yard across.

Kate was leading the way and as she reached the point where the PAT connected to the sub she removed a small device from a pouch in her suit. The micro-laser was about six inches long,
barrel-shaped with a half-hemisphere at the end. Holding it out, she checked a control on a rectangular panel to one side.

‘
JV3
, we are at the hull, calibrating the laser.’

‘Copy that, Kate. Your vitals are all fine. PAT integrity one hundred per cent.’

‘Fully charged,’ Kate said to Lou as he pulled up beside her in the narrow tunnel, ‘. . . and set.’ She pressed the micro-laser against the metal of the hull. ‘Here
we go.’

A muffled throb came from the device and it started to vibrate. Kate held it steady and an intense narrow red pinprick of light came from the end just below the metal hemisphere. The two
scientists watched fascinated as a line appeared in the metal surface of the old sub. Kate moved the laser slowly and the line, a deep cut in the hull, moved with her. The beam was cutting through
more than two inches of steel as though the sub were made of candyfloss. As the metal dissolved and cooled, wafer-thin curls of metal slithered away and were sucked into the hemispherical end of
the device.

It took no more than sixty seconds for the laser to cut a hole two feet wide in
Phoenix.
As the last of the metal vaporized, the section of hull slipped away, tumbling into the sub. It
hit the floor of the chamber directly beneath the conning tower.

Kate deactivated the laser and returned it to the pouch in her suit. Lou slipped through the hole and into the wreck, Kate came through immediately behind him.

That was when they saw the first body, a man crumpled against the wall close to the base of the periscope a few feet away. The light from the PAT splashed into the small room. They could see the
flesh of the man’s hands and the back of his neck had started to decay before the temperature had dropped enough to halt the process. There were crystals of ice over his uniform and in his
hair. Kate crouched down and turned the body over. The face was smashed in, pink and red around bloated white flesh.

‘I think he died when the sub struck the sea floor,’ she said. And flicked on her comms to
JV3.
‘We’re aboard. There’s a body in the conning tower chamber.
Young guy, partially decayed as predicted. We’re proceeding on to the control room.’

‘Acknowledged.’

‘How’s the hull integrity, Commander? I hope I wasn’t too rough with the laser.’

There was a momentary silence, then Lamb’s voice came down the line. ‘Only slight perturbations by the look of things.’ They heard her at the control panel. ‘I think it
was a good choice of location as an entry point.’

Lou found a sealed circular door in the floor and pulled it upwards to reveal a connecting tunnel about six feet long with a ladder bolted to the wall. He led the way, lowering himself into the
control room below the conning tower. Reaching the metal floor, he stood aside as Kate came down.

It was completely black. Lou flicked on his helmet light and activated two powerful torches built into each sleeve of his thermal suit. Between them the lights threw out over two hundred watts.
Kate did the same. The control room was the largest open space on the vessel, a rectangle about twenty-five feet by fifteen. Every surface was covered with dials, pipes, openings into voids,
leather patches, levers and pressed-steel compartments. They noticed a patina of dust over every surface. Some of the metal components were tarnished by the toxic atmosphere in the sub. The
ceiling, lined with white and grey pipes, stretched away just a few inches above Lou’s head.

There were four dead men in the room. Close to a secondary periscope and a small panel dotted with levers and dials the captain, Vince Jacobs, sat crumpled, his face eaten away by bacteria. Next
to him, the co-pilot’s seat was empty. Two bodies lay on the floor between the control stations. It was clear how the men had died, each had a ragged hole where a part of their skull had been.
Two pistols lay close by. The fourth body was slumped on the threshold of a narrow passage that led aft to the crew’s quarters.

Lou glanced at Kate – she seemed to be transfixed by the horrifying sight.

‘You OK?’

She nodded slowly and snapped back to the moment, steely professionalism taking over. ‘Yes. So . . . where do we start looking?’

‘I guess we should try to find Grenyov.’

The body across the doorway was that of a young sailor. They lowered him back to the metal and stepped into the crew quarters.

Lou was first into the room, the powerful light beams from his suit slicing the black. It was a long, narrow compartment with rows of bunks either side of a gangway. They could see most of the
bunks were occupied, frozen humps under brown ice-sprinkled blankets. They walked slowly along the gap between the racks of the dead, checking each corpse.

At the third upper cot on the right, Lou stopped, peered closer at a face turned towards the narrow aisle. The beam from his helmet illuminated the face. It looked waxy, a mask. The stubble on
the man’s chin was white and glistened with ice crystals. His dark eyes were open, his mouth contorted into a grimace. Skin, grey as a seal’s, was stretched taut over the bones of his
face.

‘Grenyov,’ Lou said.

London. 9.15 a.m.

Chief Inspector Derek Warminster was seated in the police car with DS Paul Carrington at the wheel. From there they both had a clear view of the SWAT operation without having
to don bulletproof vests and helmets. They could see the black painted door of Glena Buckingham’s London home, a three-storey white mansion in The Boltons, Kensington. The door was about to
be stoved in by the team of four officers charging towards it brandishing a battering ram.

Ten seconds later they were inside. Two of the men charged across the black-and-white tiled hall floor and into a collection of generously proportioned high-ceilinged rooms to each side,
sweeping their MP5s before them. As they did this the other two took the stairs to the next floor. Every few seconds one of the officers would shout ‘clear’ through his radio, and then
move on.

Four minutes twenty-two seconds later, they had checked every square inch of the building and the static-laced voice of Team Leader Zero Four One came over the radio of the squad car in which
Warminster and Carrington sat.

‘Building clear, sir,’ the team leader said. ‘No one home.’

Warminster cursed and flicked a glance at Carrington. The radio crackled again with a new voice. It was DS Dave Martin.

‘Sir. Leaving Eurenergy HQ. The building is clean. Neither Glena Buckingham nor Hans Secker are here. We have taken seventeen individuals into custody for questioning.’

‘Fuck!’ Warminster exclaimed and brought a bunched fist down on the plastic dashboard.

Flotta, Orkney Islands. 9.15 a.m.

Glena Buckingham and Hans Secker stood at the centre of the horseshoe of consoles in the main control hub of Eurenergy’s Flotta base off Orkney, precisely where they had
been five days earlier.

On the giant screen dominating the centre of the room, Buckingham, Secker, Chief of Operations Dr Cecil Freeman and his staff could all see the sleek grey profile of the Eurenergy stealth ship
Orlando.
The vessel was stationary twenty nautical miles north-west of the
Gladstone
, anchored off the coast of Norway. Those gathered in the main control hub were able to see
Orlando
through a live uplink via the satellite network that had been online now for a week. The projection onto the screen was crystal clear.

‘
Gladstone
has remained in position for over two hours, now,’ Buckingham said quietly to Secker. ‘They must be directly over the location of the American submarine.
Toit was true to his word, his information accurate after all.’

‘Toit has been briefed?’

Secker nodded.

‘We’ve managed to key into
Gladstone
’s comms and can eavesdrop on their bridge, ma’am,’ Dr Freeman said. He nodded to an operative on his right and a voice
from the ship spilled from the speaker in the Main Control Hub on Flotta.

‘JV3? Come in, Commander Lamb, come in.’
It was Jerry Derham’s voice.

‘This is JV3, over. We have reached the
Phoenix
site and are preparing to dock.’

They’ve sent one of the
JV
s down,’ Buckingham said gleefully. ‘That’s a good . . .’

She did not finish the sentence. Blood drained from her face and she could not move her eyes from the screen. Several seconds passed before she could bring herself to speak. ‘What in the
name of fuck is that?’

North Sea. 9.15 a.m.

A few feet to Derham’s right, a radar tech jerked upright in his chair and leaned towards the two officers. ‘Unidentified vessel,’ he announced.
‘Position nine hundred yards NNW, approaching fast.’

‘Why wasn’t it picked up earlier?’ Windsor snapped. ‘It’s almost on top of us.’

He had barely finished his sentence when the water beyond
Gladstone
’s bow began to churn. No more than a quarter of a mile away a grey shape appeared in the foam. It expanded with
frightening speed, thrusting upwards, water streaming over its sides. The conning tower bore the symbol of a red star inside a red bar. Below this was written: 09–111.

One of the crewmen tapped at a keyboard. ‘Sir . . . Shang class sub, People’s Republic of China. NATO database designation: Alpha564/D.’

A voice broke through the bridge comms. ‘HMS
Gladstone
, stand down, prepare to be boarded.’ The English was only faintly accented.

‘Put a call through to
Ark Royal
,’ Windsor said. He lifted binoculars to take a closer look at the sub.

‘Long-range comms down, sir.’

‘Oh, excellent!’

The bridge speakers burst into life again, and the voice repeated the message: ‘HMS
Gladstone
, stand down, prepare to be boarded.’

‘Prep forward gun.’

‘Prepped, sir.’

‘Fire across her bow.’

A roar filled the bridge as the Mark 42 5
"
/54 calibre deck gun fired. The shell whistled over the water, fifty yards off the bow of the Chinese sub, coming down in the sea a mile beyond
the vessel.

‘HMS
Gladstone
, stand down, prepare to be boarded.’

Derham leaned in towards the comms operator. ‘Warn
JV3
,’ he said.

Windsor was preparing to send a reply to the persistent commander of the Chinese sub when a buzzer sounded on the No.2 radar monitor to his right. The operator stiffened.

‘What is it?’

‘
Ark Royal
, sir. Heading this way . . . fast.’

MI6 HQ, London. 9.17 a.m.

Prime Minister Nigel Townscliff’s face looked huge on the screen. He was rather an ugly man; and as Sir Donald Ashmore, Deputy Chief of the SIS, considered his
leader’s visage, for a second he wondered how the PM’s face had not hindered his electoral success.

‘This has to stop, right now,’ Townscliff was saying, his gravelly baritone spilling too loudly from the speaker under the flat screen.

Ashmore’s assistant, Seth Wilberforce, was seated next to him. Wilberforce flicked a glance at his boss as Ashmore started to reply.

‘I understand your alarm, sir.’

There was a buzzing sound and the image on the screen split into three. Two new faces appeared. Ashmore recognized them immediately: Air Vice Marshal Pip Johnson and First Sea Lord Admiral Sir
Kenneth Frobisher.

‘Sorry, Prime Minister,’ Johnson said, ‘. . . technical hiccups.’

The PM looked disgruntled. ‘What’s the latest, Frobisher?’

The admiral, a cadaverously thin man who all on the call knew had recently fought and apparently beaten prostate cancer, cleared his throat. ‘
Ark Royal
has halted twelve miles
west of the Chinese . . . visitor, sir.’

‘And standing down.’

‘On red alert, sir, but holding. The Chinese have gone quiet.’

‘Sir,’ said Ashmore, ‘I assume you have been briefed on the importance of this operation?’

‘A retrieval of some documents that have been under the North Sea for . . . what?’ Townscliff consulted a sheaf of papers on the desk in front of him. ‘Sixty-odd years . . . is
that right?’

‘Sir, they are not just
any old
documents.’

Townscliff raised a hand and looked down. ‘American scientific papers. From Russia . . . I’m confused.’

Ashmore took a deep breath.

‘May I, sir?’ Seth Wilberforce intervened.

Ashmore waved a hand indicating that the younger man should speak.

‘Prime Minister, these papers – and the source document they refer to – were originally intended for Albert Einstein in 1937. The original document was part of something he was
developing with the US Navy. It never reached him. It was stolen by the crew of a German U-boat and taken to Germany. After the war it fell into the hands of the Soviets. In 1954, a defector, a
scientist called Dimitri Grenyov, who worked on and developed the ideas in the document, was bringing it and his work to the West when the sub he was travelling in, the American submarine USS
Phoenix
, was sunk . . . by the Royal Navy.’