“Sound room reports distant cavitations! No constant bearing, sir!”
HMS Dreadnought had sailed from Devonport over three months ago with a full set of Admiralty charts for the area her orders required her to patrol. The boat’s chart locker was therefore, cluttered with a plethora of highly detailed and meticulously updated charts of the Western Approaches to the United Kingdom and the Atlantic coast of Western Europe. At Gibraltar, Dreadnought had not taken on board a new set of charts for the Eastern Mediterranean because that would have given the lie to the fiction that she was heading back to England. For the last week the most sophisticated weapon in the Royal Navy’s armoury had been navigating with the aid of a school atlas and half-a-dozen out of date large scale sea maps — they hardly deserved the title ‘charts’ — Max Forton had had picked up in a bookshop on a walk along Main Street before Dreadnought departed the Rock. In a peacetime scenario in which the boat could use its active sonar to monitor the depth of water beneath the keel and any nearby obstructions — like rocks, wrecks or anti-submarine ships — the lack of adequate charts would not have been a problem. He would have avoided moving too close inshore, but the boat’s safety would not have been overly compromised. In the current situation where the last thing he wanted to do was to advertise the boat’s presence, stumbling around unknown and uncharted coastal waters was akin to Russian roulette.
Crete’s north-eastern extremities curved raggedly away from the body of the island into the north. The resultant peninsula was a jagged, wooded sparsely inhabited region of coast deeply pitted with sheer-sided, treacherous anchorages some of which were large enough to hide ships much larger than the Admiral Kutuzov. Close inshore Dreadnought’s battery of hydrophones would be baffled with back echoes and deflections; they would have to be almost on top of a contact to be certain of what kind of beast they had by the tail.
“Here!” The Captain of the Royal Navy’s only nuclear-powered hunter killer submarine decided, stabbing a point on the tactical plot ten miles due north of the tip of Cape Sideros. “We’ll take the boat down to three hundred feet and work our way up to here. Nice and slow. Five knots will do it.”
It took nearly three hours to get into position but as Dreadnought eased up to periscope depth everybody on board could hear the onrushing screws of a big ship. The trouble was it was the wrong ship.
“Chapayev class cruiser, there is a big eight-six-two on her side!” Simon Collingwood growled.
He stood up straight.
“Down periscope! Make our depth two-zero-zero feet if you please!”
“Eight-six-two makes her the Komsomolets, sir!”
“Thank you.” Simon Collingwood smiled like a wolf who has spotted his next meal. “Everybody on their toes please! The Komsomolets is in company with at least three, maybe four escorts. One of them is going to run right over the top of us in the next two minutes. I only got a look at her bow on but she looked like a Krupny class destroyer. I didn’t get a good line of sight on the other ships in the screen.”
While Dreadnought moved invisibly to the north the destroyer thundered over her stern like a runaway express train as the submarine quietly slid into the depths. No matter how many times a big ship ran over the top of him Simon Collingwood’s blood pulsed faster and harder with the exhilaration of the moment.
“I want bearings on all the surface units around us please!”
It soon became apparent that the Komsomolets, a slightly — only very slightly — smaller and earlier version of the Sverdlov class ships, carrying a similar main battery of a dozen six inch guns in four triple turrets, was in company with at least four other warships.
Simon Collingwood started doing the maths: a Great War battlecruiser, two Soviet cruisers, at least half-a-dozen ocean going escorts. For all he knew it was the tip of the iceberg and more worryingly, if so many surface warships had survived the destruction of the Black Sea ports; how many Soviet submarines might have escaped the holocaust? Put a respectable number of surviving surface units from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet together with the Turkish Navy, which before the October War had boasted at least ten former US diesel-electric submarines on its lists, and suddenly, the Royal Navy’s presence in the Mediterranean started looking awfully threadbare.
“Active pings!” Called a sonar man.
“What bearing?”
“Three-one zero! Very distant, sir!”
The Captain of HMS Dreadnought noted his Executive Officer’s raised eyebrow. He shrugged.
The faraway detonations were like thunder, half-imagined on a sultry summer afternoon. Except they went on, and on, and on for minutes, slowly drifting south as minutes turned into a half-hour and then an hour.
Somewhere to the west, perhaps ten to fifteen miles away ships were rolling old fashioned drum depth-charges over their sterns. Other vessels were shooting clusters of small anti-submarine mortars.
It went on for eighty-seven minutes.
“How many big bombs?” Simon Collingwood asked idly.
“Over two hundred, sir.”
“Maybe they stopped because they ran out of depth charges?” Max Forton suggested dryly.
His Captain grimaced. In the last few days he had witnessed the Yavuz expending antique eleven inch rounds as if she had access to an unlimited supply of such arcane — and presumably unobtainable and therefore irreplaceable in modern times — ancient ordnance. No munitions factory on the planet had manufactured shells to that specification since 1945; and when the old ship’s magazines were empty that, as they say, was that! Now they had listened, thankfully from afar, to a depth charge attack that would have been considered unforgivably, possibly criminally, profligate in a U-boat hunt in the North Atlantic in 1943.
Those were the facts but what did it mean?
Some kind of realistic exercise to shake the cobwebs out of ships and crews which had been sitting in port for most of the last year? Or a plain simple demonstration of naval muscle? Or both?
“Contact bearing one-two-zero!”
“Range five miles!”
“Bring her up to periscope depth if you please, Number One!”
“More contacts bearing one-two-five degrees!”
The Komsomolets and her escorts had moved off to the south-east. Another group of ships had been responsible for the overlong and recklessly exuberant depth charging somewhere out to the west. Now a third set of contacts was coming towards them from a few points west of south.
Dreadnought rose gently to periscope depth.
The day was turning stormy and waves were breaking over the periscope mast as it dipped up out of the depths. Visibility, which had been several miles earlier in the day had closed in and Simon Collingwood didn’t get a good look at the nearest contact until it was less than a thousand yards away.
“Skoryy class destroyer!” He called, clicking the camera button repeatedly. The colour of the great dark flag streaming out from the approaching destroyer’s forward tripod mast wasn’t readily decoded by the human eye, everything was grey and the shadows were almost black such was the weight of the descending overcast. But the flag would be red; it could only be cardinal blood red. The escort was tearing across Dreadnought’s bow with a great bone in her teeth, crescents of white water sheering away from her forepeak as she raced headlong through the choppy seas.
Simon Collingwood swung the periscope to the left.
“Sverdlov class cruiser. Looks like the Admiral Kutuzov but I can’t be sure.” He kept taking photographs, the winding mechanism constantly in motion, whirring lowly above his head. The big ship was throwing up a broad bow wave even thought she was only making fifteen or sixteen knots. “Looks like a second Skoryy class escort behind her and the two M class destroyers that were in company before…”