“Red Dawn is like a disease,” he said. The man was lying on his back staring into the darkness. “Iosif Vissarionovich would have been proud of what he created. He understood that if nuclear war consumed the Motherland then the surviving splinters of the military-industrial complex and the security apparat would look for something just like Krasnaya Zarya; that they’d been drawn to it like moths to the flame. Red Dawn corrupts and consumes everything it touches. Like gangrene, once it takes hold the limb must be amputated or the body will die a horrible, disgusting, inevitable death. The British and the Americans do not yet understand this. They still hope that they can meet Krasnaya Zarya in battle and that if they are victorious later there will be peace talks, and accommodations can be reached. But that is not the nature of the beast. I think the British are closer to understanding the evil they confront. Admiral Christopher is a man who understands that in war things happen which no rational man would normally sanction; that in time of war decency and humanity are suspended. And that sometimes in war one has to do things which will haunt one forever. The greater good is a peculiar thing; an excuse to commit untold atrocities and the Admiral is a man who understands this.”
“Atrocities? What are you talking about?”
“There were eight of them. Samuel Calleja, whom you knew about, or rather, you guessed correctly was the probable leader of the cell when we were on this island in November…”
“You were interested in his sister and she obviously wasn’t a terrorist,” Clara retorted.
“Two men in Samuel Calleja’s organisation were killed when HMS Torquay was bombed in the December raid,” the man continued.
Clara froze; he was going to tell her everything.
“Two men were arrested by Major Williams’s associates before we returned to Malta, and three others were under what that fool regarded as ‘surveillance’,” he scoffed derisively. “I had to hunt them down. After the sinking of HMS Torquay Admiral Christopher gave me carte blanche to do whatever needed to be done to roll up and dispose of the cell. I tortured the terrorists until they had told me all their secrets, and all the secrets of everybody they had ever known.”
“Arkady, I…”
The man reached up and placed his fingers on her lips.
“And when I finished torturing them I staged their ‘deaths’ to make it look as if the Redcaps and the Army had done all the work. I choked the woman and,” he moved his fingers gently down to her chin, “and put a bullet in her brain.”
The quietness was suddenly crushing.
“I have killed many women before,” the man continued flatly. “I have tortured many women. I was never ashamed until now.”
Chapter 39
“SUBMERGED CONTACT BEARING ZERO-TWO-SEVEN!”
Captain Simon Collingwood acknowledged the report as if he’d been expecting it for some minutes. In fact, he had been expecting it for at the last two hours and was beginning to wonder if he was being a little paranoid. No, one couldn’t command one’s Navy’s only nuclear-powered submarine and not have a paranoid streak.
“Designate submerged contact as Bandit Two.”
“Speed six knots, course two-seven-five degrees!” Then immediately, another report. “She’s very noisy, sir. She must have been sitting right under one of the bigger sailing boats. She suddenly came out of nowhere. Two screws, she’s got a worn bearing on one of them!”
HMS Dreadnought had been idling, barely maintaining steerage way in the middle of the much reduced, no doubt traumatised, dwindling number of survivors of the sailing convoy which had been tormented and mauled by the long-range gunfire of the Sverdlov class cruiser Admiral Kutuzov, and used for target practice by a loitering Krupny class destroyer. The Kutuzov and her other escorts were now below the southern horizon, the Krupny class ship — designated Bandit One on Dreadnought’s tactical plot — was slowly circling the sailing boats at a range of about eight thousand yards firing star shells to illuminate the area every ten minutes.
“Range to submerged contact estimated at two thousand yards, sir!”
That was close, too close for comfort but if the contact held her current course she’d draw slowly west of north and the range would widen.
“Your hunch was right, sir,” Max Forton, the boat’s red-bearded Executive Officer grinned as he looked up from the plot.
The enemy had baited a trap for Dreadnought.
They had hoped she would intervene to stop the slaughter of the innocents; sink the Krupny class destroyer wreaking such carnage among the wooden-hulled sailing ships. But only fools rushed in where angels feared to tread, and Simon Collingwood was neither a fool nor an angel.
He hadn’t taken the bait and there was never any possibility that he would. When you commanded a nuclear submarine you made the rules and everybody else danced to your tune. Dreadnought had crept into the huddle of broken sailing ships three hundred feet beneath the surface, slowly eased up to one hundred feet; and waited.
“Do we have a firing solution on the submerged contact?”
“Negative, sir. There’s a lot of wreckage in the water and she’s too close to one of the surviving sailing ships.”
So, the waiting continued a little longer.
After about fifteen minutes: “We have a firing solution for Bandit Two, sir!”
“Okay. We will execute attack plan Alpha,” Simon Collingwood decreed. “We will fire the Mark XX homing torpedo in Number One tube at Bandit Two and turn towards Bandit One at twenty knots. We will fire the Mark VIIIs in Number Two, Three and Four at a range of between fifteen hundred and one thousand yards.”
HMS Dreadnought’s blunt bow slowly swung around to the north.
“Firing solution for the Mark XX fish in Tube One is set, sir.”
“Very good.”
“The plot is automatically updating, sir!”
“What’s Bandit One up to?”
“Holding at seven thousand five hundred yards, sir!”
“Range to Bandit Two?”
“Two thousand three hundred yards, sir!”
“Check firing solution for Bandit Two!”
“Checked. The board is green, sir.”
Captain Simon Collingwood did not hesitate.
“Fire One!”
“The fish is running straight!”
The Mark XX had to run for approximately a thousand yards before its passive sonar guidance system kicked in. Ideally, its programmed target would be somewhere in a relatively narrow cone of sea in front of it when that happened. If there was nothing in front of it the torpedo would start searching to acquire a target and it was never a good idea to allow a dumb machine to pick its own target. Given the crowded nature of the waters nearby the Mark XX was configured to actively ping its target to confirm acquisition before reverting to silent running. Of course, if Bandit Two’s sonar men were on their mettle they’d already have detected the propeller noise of the missile cruising towards them at twenty knots. Against a fast surface target like a destroyer or a frigate capable of performing violent evasive manoeuvres the relatively slow Mark XX could, theoretically, be evaded, assuming that it was fired from far enough away, detected in the water early, and that the vessel under attack was already steaming fast. The diesel-electric submarine hiding among the shattered sailing flotilla attempting to spring and ambush on Dreadnought was too close and far too slow to run away or to evade a Mark XX once it had acquired target lock.