He studied the faces of the other men.
While both of the politicians were looking a little sheepish; and the CIGS was avoiding his eye, the First Sea Lord, on the other hand, seemed quite cheerful, almost relieved. It was as if the four men were about to confess their sins…
Tea cups clinked in saucers.
Soon, Eleanor had organised the men around her. Bringing up a brood of clever, competitive and frequently quarrelsome children was marvellous preparation for marshalling a group of men of a certain age, notwithstanding that the men in question were among the great men of the Empire.
Everybody took their seats; the King and Queen in the centre flanked by Sir Hector Hamilton and Sir George Walpole to their left, and the two military men to their right.
Troubridge had a small, grey remote-control unit in his hand.
“If I may, sir?” He inquired tersely.
“Carry on.”
The screen flickered to life as the lights in the room dimmed.
There was no commentary on the movie itself.
Instead, the First Sea Lord spoke.
“The first pictures you will see are of a secret base in Newfoundland at the head of Placentia Bay, Your Majesties,” he explained.
On screen there was an aerial view of a port, dockyards and what appeared to be a tanker farm built to the model of such Royal Navy oiling facilities all around the globe.
The aircraft taking the pictures – which were amazingly, pin-point clear and of astonishingly high definition – circled lower, and lower until it became obvious that the ‘tanker farm’ was built on high ground overlooking the empty anchorage.
“The tanker farm hides and underground complex approximately the size of nine or ten football fields,” Lord Troubridge declared.
The camera shot altered, now it was on the deck of a ship offshore, focusing on the hillside next to the small port. In the distance a section of shoreline began to change colour, darkening. It was some moments before the King or the Queen recognised what they were looking at; a huge blast door slowly revolving forward, and sinking beneath the cold, northern waters.
“There are six ‘pens’, each of which can serve as either a maintenance or a construction dock. The steel doors protecting the individual pens are four feet thick and each bunker has twenty-three feet of reinforced concrete above it, and at each longitudinal side, in addition to some thirty feet of earth and rubble on top of them.”
“Most impressive,” the King murmured.
“The complex was designed to be resistant to a conventional armour piercing bomb twice the size of the largest munition of that type ever dropped from an aircraft, and,” the First Sea Lord hesitated, “a ground blast hit within one hundred feet of any part of the facility by an atomic bomb with an explosive yield in the range of mid-tens of kilotons of munitions-grade high explosives…”
The construction of such weapons, and of such bunkers – categorised as ‘defensive infrastructure under the protocols of the Submarine Treaty of 1966 – were explicitly forbidden.
“First Sea Lord,” the King growled, warningly. He would have continued, voicing his growing concerns had not he been suddenly transfixed – there was no other word for it – by the long, low, black shape which had begun to emerge from the shadows of the concealed dock.
There was a moment of shocked silence.
“Is that a,” the King gasped, flabbergasted.
“Yes, sir,” Lord Trowbridge said quietly. “That is HMS Splendid, the first of her class, going to sea after her acceptance trials refit in October 1973.”
No, none of that sunk in for several more seconds.
“Bertie,” Eleanor murmured, touching her husband’s arm, “your mouth is hanging open, darling. If you’re not careful, you’ll swallow a fly.”
The King shut his mouth, knowing that he was not going to be capable of coherent speech for several seconds to come. Leastways, not until his roiling thoughts began to calm a little.
What he was looking at was not one of those ugly, iron, bodged together, two or three hundred-ton coastal submersibles that the Germans had experimented with in the early 1960s, or that the Cubans were supposed to have constructed in more recent times. What he was looking at was a big, very long – possibly over four hundred or more feet – vessel with a bridge, conning-tower, whatever it was called, structure streamlined like a giant whale’s fin, that soared perhaps thirty feet above the near wave-swept rounded pressure casing. Which itself did not look remotely metallic, rather it seemed rubbery, and somehow, granular.
“The vessel’s pressure hull is covered in acoustic tiling, sir,” his First Sea Lord informed him. “The material is rubbery to the touch; additionally, that shielding – essential to isolate the operating noise of the boat’s machinery from the outside world – is covered in a synthetic material which mimics the effect of a shark’s skin, reducing the hull’s resistance to the water as it moves through the depths.”
“How big is that ship?” The King asked, momentarily too awed to be angry or actually, to be thinking at all about the earth-shaking implications of what he was looking at.
“She’s over six thousand tons surfaced, nearer seven thousand-three hundred submerged, sir. She has six twenty-one-inch torpedo tubes forward and storage capacity for twenty-seven fish.”
“Torpedoes?” The Queen asked, by then in ‘polite inconsequential conversation’ mode, as she too began to assimilate the momentousness of the mind-boggling secret that she and her husband had just been let in on.
“Torpedoes, yes, Ma’am. They come in several variants. The standard Tigershark Mark III with a contact detonator or magnetic initiator, the Searcher Mark VII, that’s a fire and forget wholly electrical – very quiet and doesn’t leave a wake – fish that locks onto its target and homes in on it,” Lord Troubridge paused, picked his next words with infinite care, “and, of course, the Mark XX, that’s a special munition.”
“Special?” The King snapped, breaking from his reverie.
“The Mark XX is an ultra-long-range weapon – twenty-five plus miles – which can be configured to carry a special physics package, sir.”
“A nuclear bomb, you mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
The movie was carrying on in the background showing HMS Splendid blowing her ballast tanks and dipping beneath the surface. There was a sequence shot in the submarine’s gleaming, antiseptically clean and air-conditioned control room; it was like something out of a science fiction movie about space travel!
“Well over a decade ago, My Government,” the King said with barely contained icy cold rage, “solemnly signed an undertaking with the German Empire to desist from all warlike underwater research and development, to scrap all our existing operational submersibles of one hundred and fifty tons or more, and to absolutely curtail for a period of not less than twenty-five years, the development of nuclear power for military purposes.”
“Yes, sir,” the First Sea Lord agreed, blandly, as if he really did not see what the problem was.
The King glared at his Prime Minister and his Foreign and Colonial Secretary. The latter had actually, briefly, been Prime Minister around the time of his untimely accession to the throne, and the former ‘first among equals’ for most of the last decade.
It was the Queen who asked the really obvious question.
“How on earth did you keep the building of that ship secret, gentlemen?”