“Bring the boat to periscope depth if you please, Number One!
The sporadic detonations continued as the Kutuzov group steadily drew away to the south. Dreadnought’s primary task was gathering intelligence, clinging onto the cruiser secondary now that ‘Operation Reclaim’, the rather unimaginatively named exercise to empty the nuclear weapons stockpile on Cyprus had been put on hold for forty-eight hours, possibly longer.
Thirty minutes later Simon Collingwood was studying a scene from a bad dream. Over a dozen sailing boats, several small lateen-rigged and three or four larger, two-masted brigs were running west while the Admiral Kutuzov fired speculative long-range salvoes at them from her rear turrets, and one of her escorts, a Krupny class destroyer idled at around three thousand yards sporadically picking off fresh targets. The quality of the gunnery was abysmal but it didn’t have to be very good to every now and then cause carnage. Smoke rose from two unseen victims as Dreadnought’s periscope cruised very slowly through the flotsam and jetsam of wooden ships blown to pieces with high explosive shells. From what Simon Collingwood could make out the sailing boats were packed with bodies.
There were a lot of bodies floating in the water.
The periscope camera clicked and whirred.
“Down periscope!”
The control room waited patiently.
“The bastards are using a refugee convoy for target practice. There’s a Krupny class destroyer on the other side of the convoy firing pretty damn near over open sights. She’s holding position letting the wind blow the sailing boats onto her guns.”
It was of course, pure cold-blooded murder.
Although Dreadnought’s rules of engagement gave him unusually broad discretion, they did not give him unfettered licence to risk advertising his presence in daylight by putting a Mark XX twenty-one inch homing torpedo with a one hundred and ninety-six pound warhead, under the keel of the Krupny class destroyer. Simon Collingwood re-considered this. No, he decided, I’d probably put a couple of old-fashioned Mark VIIIs into the bastards. Why waste modern kit on people who behave like eighteenth century pirates?
“We have to assume they don’t know we’re here,” he explained irritably. “Take us down to two-zero-zero feet. Plot a course to put us in front of the Kutuzov group.”
The captain of HMS Dreadnought stalked out of the control room.
Summoning a yeoman he dictated a terse report to be transmitted to Malta.
He checked his deck head chronometer.
Darkness came suddenly at this time of year, in about an hour’s time.
Coming to a new decision he walked back to the control room.
“Belay my last orders. A change of plan,” he announced. “It will be getting dark up top soon. We’ll loiter at periscope depth westward of the convoy. Whatever’s left of it, that is, until dark and see what our friends on the Krupny do next.”
He hoped the destroyer would rejoin the rest of the Admiral Kutuzov force.
If so he’d surface, take on board the first survivors he found. If one couldn’t see with one own eyes what was going on ashore; the next best thing was talking to somebody who had seen and experienced what was going on!
Simon Collingwood went to his command chair to wait.
Waiting was a thing a man got used to in the submarine service; and a wise man used his ‘waiting time’ wisely. From what he had seen of Red Dawn at sea — if Red Dawn in action was what he had actually seen in the last few days because nothing really made much sense in comparison to the World he’d lived in before the October War — his putative enemy was profligate, arrogant, and brutal. His briefing notes on the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean spoke in vague terms about pirates, the island of Crete ravished by invaders, people fleeing to British territories in small boats with garbled tales of unspeakable horrors in their homelands. At the heart of the darkness seemed to be a thing called Krasnaya Zarya, but what might seem to be going on and what was really happening might well — in fact they often did — turn out to be completely different things. He had never met a member of the Red Dawn movement, never heard a named individual labelled a member of that organisation, and unless he’d seen that giant blood-red flag flying from the mast of the Admiral Kutuzov with his own eyes he would have been none the wiser. His assumption would have been that the cruiser had survived the war and was in the Aegean because frankly, once your home port had been nuked, practically anywhere else was a huge improvement.
If Dreadnought had been at sea during the October War and the United Kingdom had been totally devastated; he’d probably have sailed to Canada or the United States, or if they were as devastated as Europe, then South Africa or Australia, anywhere that didn’t glow in the dark where he and his crew were welcome. Many Soviet citizens, military and civilian, must have had to make decisions like that. Red Dawn might simply be one of many ‘homes’ for people, ships, and families who had literally nowhere else to go. His initial acquaintance with the naval representatives — probably of Krasnaya Zarya — told him that murdering helpless refugees just for the sake of it was probably par for the course. Which was explicable, in a way because that was what monsters did sometimes. However, what was going on with that Krupny class destroyer and the convoy of sailing boats was so inexplicable as to be almost theatrical. If the name of the game was barbaric slaughter then why not just circle the convoy with the whole firepower of the Kutuzov group and get it over and done with fast. Presumably, the big cruiser had somewhere it needed to be, so why drag things out like this and waste so much main battery ammunition on ships that could be sunk by a couple of short close range bursts from a twenty millimetre anti-aircraft cannon?
A nasty, suspicious mind was an invaluable asset for a submarine commander. Without it a man wouldn’t have advanced far in the service; and in the way of things it was only the men with the most highly developed nasty suspicious minds that got to the top of the tree. Suddenly, Captain Simon Collingwood’s very nasty, suspicious mind was working overtime.
“Flood down torpedo tubes one, two, three and four if you please, Number One!”
Max Forton acknowledged this and began to issue quietly voiced orders.
Tube One was loaded with a Mark XX homing torpedo, the other three tubes with infinitely more reliable World War II vintage Mark VIIIs. Currently, Tubes five and six were empty.
“The boat will come to actions stations!” He added: “Very quietly please!”
Chapter 37
“Willie! Margaret Thatcher scolded her Secretary of State for Defence. “If I’d had any idea you were laid so low I’d never have allowed you to make your ‘flying visit’ to Malta!”
The man with the hangdog, paternally reassuring looks of a man a decade or more his senior smiled wanly. There was greyness in his face and an bone deep weariness in his limbs that reminded him of the toll illness had taken on him in the last year. Others had greater burdens to bear than he, and the Secretary of Defence was not about to complain about his own minor aches and pains. He had hardly known the Angry Widow before the war and it had not occurred to him that in forming her new Cabinet she would rely so heavily on men friendly with, and held in esteem by her predecessor.
‘I know Ted Heath wanted you in Government as soon as you were recovered, Mr Whitelaw,’ she’d assured him in the moments before she had offered him his current portfolio.
‘My closest colleagues and friends tend to call me Willie,’ he’d responded and they had gotten on famously ever since. His calmness and grace under was more of a comfort than he realised to a harassed single mother of two who still, occasionally, felt a little out of her depth.