He expelled the air from his lungs.
Philip needed the men under his command. He was driving a nuclear-powered, hunter-killer submarine — one of the most deadly weapons-systems in the world. Those bastard Soviets would soon be finding out just how deadly, he told himself. But he couldn’t operate it on his own. Co-operation and obedience from men like Pike and Spriggs would be vital if his mission was to succeed.
Philip knew what he had to do. That much was clear. How to manage it, however, was a different matter. There was still time to think the details through. Until Wednesday he’d follow the exercise brief. After that, he’d be his own master.
The loudspeaker clicked. Pike’s voice boomed forth authoritatively.
The ‘pipe’ was heard on loudspeakers throughout the submarine. The broadcast to update the crew was made at least twice a day, a communication essential to team spirit on board.
The first lieutenant spoke for two minutes, telling the 130 men on board of the day’s sonar contacts. They’d included a school of whales.
He talked of the upcoming communications slot, knowing some of the crew would be expecting the forty-word ‘family-grams’ that kept them in touch with their homes. He ended by reading the menu for the evening meal.
The next pipe — that’d be the time, Philip decided. Start to prepare them for what was to come. Little by little. Step by step.
His eyes strayed to the photograph he’d doggedly kept on his desk, to preserve his mask of normality.
He looked at her image and his guts turned inside out again. He closed his eyes tightly. Would he ever be able to look at Sara’s picture without wanting to kill her?
She’d been everything he’d dreamed of when they’d met fifteen years earlier. He’d been serving on a Swiftsure class submarine at the time, circling the globe as part of a military sales drive. They’d gone ashore in Hong Kong, to a reception at the British High Commission. Their host had been accompanied by his stunningly pretty daughter — Sara. He’d fallen in love with her instantly.
Sara had glowed that evening; as they circulated socially, her eyes reached across the room to him like a light-house beam. Excitement had almost choked him. Until then, apart from brief relationships, the only woman in Philip’s life had been his own straitlaced mother. Sara was vivacious, sensual and provocative; if his mother had ever had such qualities, she’d successfully repressed them after the trauma of her husband’s disappearance. In Hong Kong he sensed he’d finally met a woman with the power to cut through his shell of inhibition, and free him from the dour restraint of his upbringing.
His mother had tried to prevent their marriage. Nineteen was far too young for a girl to marry, she’d declared. He’d ignored her, terrified that if he didn’t bind Sara to him quickly he’d lose her to someone else.
Now he’d lost her anyway.
They’d been immensely happy together for their first two years. He’d had a shore-based job in Scotland, and the sense of personal liberation he’d hoped for became a reality.
Then he’d been given a commission at sea. Sara had been devastated by the separation and had applied intense emotional pressure on him to change his job. Philip had retreated into his shell, as he had learned to do as a youth when pressured by his mother.
Her face smiled at him from the frame. Deceptive, cruelly deceptive. Laughing eyes. Laughing at him? Mocking him?
In the control room, Pike hung the microphone back on its hook and bowed theatrically to the navigator.
‘All yours, Pilot!’
Cavendish raised an eyebrow at the mock courtesy, then turned to the helm.
‘Ten up, planesman. Keep sixty metres. Revolutions for four knots.’
The rating at the controls pulled back on the control-stick and watched the gauge. The deck began to tilt as the hydroplanes lifted the nose of the submarine. Pike grasped one of the overhead cable-ducts to steady himself.
‘Sound room. I want a check for surface contacts!’ Cavendish called.
‘Aye, aye, sir!’
HMS Truculent came up fast from the depths, passing through the thermocline which had refracted their faint sound downwards, keeping them hidden from listeners on the surface. Her speed dropped from eighteen knots to four, at which it was safe to trail the wire antenna without breaking it.
‘Level at sixty metres, sir,’ the helmsman called.
‘Deploy the wire.’
On the outside of the fin a small aperture appeared, and the VLF antenna began to unreel. Black plastic strips trailed from the wire to disguise it as seaweed.
In the sonar compartment the tattooed hands of the ratings tuned their acoustic processors to the new sounds of surface ships, or ‘skimmers’, as they were known.
Sensors outside the hull analysed water temperature and salinity and fed the data into a computer which predicted the refracted paths that the sounds would follow through the water.
‘Cavitation on port bow, chief!’ shouted one of the junior sonar ratings. Chief Petty Officer Hicks looked over his shoulder at the VDU, and confirmed it.
On the green ‘waterfall’ display, low frequency ‘spikes’ of sound detected by the bow sonar showed as overlapping vertical stripes. Hicks counted them.
‘Two shafts. Six blades. That’s Illustrious,’ he announced with confidence. The last intelligence report had told them the British aircraft carrier was in the area.
‘Range and bearing?’
The rating keyed in additional data from the towed array. Bearings from the two sonars were triangulated by computer.
‘Range, 32.4 miles, bearing 039, Chief.’
The CPO pressed a button which transferred the data to the Action Information panel in the control room. There the carrier appeared on the tactical display as a triangle — a friendly target.
‘What about her escorts?’ demanded the officer-of-the-watch through the intercom.
Eyes scanned the screens and ears strained at headphones.
‘Nothing else registered, sir,’ came the eventual reply from the CPO.
Sound in water seldom travels in straight lines. HMS Illustrious had at least two frigates keeping her company, but Truculent couldn’t hear them. The sound waves from the warships curved downwards away from the surface, then curved up again many miles distant, to a so-called ‘convergence zone’. Truculent was in just such a zone for the carrier’s noise signature to reach her, but not yet in one for the frigates.
Hicks stood up, desperate to stretch his legs. He stepped into the control room, leaving the sonar ratings to plot the remaining contacts — distant trawlers fishing the edge of the continental shelf around Scotland.
He crossed to the Action Information plot, and yawned as he watched it begin to fill with contacts from the sound room.
‘Keeping you up, are we, Hicks?’ Pike quipped.
‘Off watch in an hour, sir. Boring day! Once we’d finally sorted out the 2026, there’s been sod-all to do.’
‘Did you report that to the captain? He wanted to know.’
‘Yes, sir. Have no fear.’
Pike looked at his watch. Time for the broadcast. He stepped into the communications office as Cavendish ordered the final manoeuvre to align the boat to receive signals.
‘Planesman, steer one-one-zero, revolutions for four knots!’
At three sites inside Britain, enormous Very Low Frequency transmitter arrays, masquerading as civilian wireless stations, broadcast a constant stream of information for submerged submarines. Weather and intelligence reports are transmitted as routine, on an hourly cycle, backed up at fixed times with specific messages for individual submarines.