He’d raged at her and she’d fought back with a taunt — the name of a man she claimed had been the first of her lovers. Someone he’d known closely for twenty years. A name that would hurt him more deeply than any other.
He’d laughed at her — called her a liar.
Andrew her lover? Not possible. They’d trained together, served together on their first commission as sublieutenants, stayed friends ever since. Andrew was Simon’s godfather, for heaven’s sake! The idea was ludicrous. Wasn’t it?
There’d been times in the past week when Philip had wept like a child. One moment he longed for someone to confide in, the next that no one should ever know.
He stood up angrily now. He had to snap out of it, put those nagging questions out of his mind, concentrate on the matter in hand.
The signal — he had to respond to it.
Tim Pike gave orders for the VLF antenna to be recovered into the fin. Their time-slot for monitoring the broadcast was over.
‘Steer course zero-two-five. Ten down, keep two-hundred metres,’ Cavendish instructed. ‘Keep revolutions for ten knots. Increase to eighteen when the antenna’s wound in.’
That could take half-an-hour.
A leading seaman was doing duty at the chart table. Two strides and Pike stood beside him. Two strides could get you anywhere in the control room.
‘Have you plotted the data from the int. brief?’ Pike asked.
‘Yessir. The closest Victor is here, sir.’
He pointed to a box drawn some seventy miles south of them.
‘He’ll be listening for the Polaris boats coming out of Faslane. Then there’s another Victor ’bout four hundred miles northeast. On the other side of the Faroes-Shetland gap. A couple of AGIs fifty and seventy-five miles away, and that’s about it.’
‘I see. So we’re well out of range of their radar. Aircraft are the worry. And we don’t know where they are. My guess is they’ll be keeping track of the skimmers. The nearest to us is Illustrious, isn’t it?’
‘’Sright, sir. Just about here.’
He pointed to a circle near the Faroes.
‘He’ll be down to ten knots with the gale up there,’ Pike commented, checking the weather report. ‘We’ll start catching him up if we don’t watch it.’
‘He’s still miles away, sir.’
‘Yes, but I’m thinking of the Bears. They’ll be searching a good hundred miles all round Illustrious, so we’ll need to keep our distance. I’m going to slow down a bit.’
He spun on his heel to face the helm and found himself face to face with Cavendish.
‘Nick, I’m worried about Bears…’
He explained the problem. The navigator nodded.
‘Keep revolutions for ten knots!’ he instructed.
‘Why are we so slow?’ Philip had entered the control room, his face betraying no sign of his private agony.
Pike took him to the chart table to explain his plan.
‘I’ve been thinking about the satcom, sir. In an hour we’ll be here.’ He prodded the chart with a finger, pointing out the positions of the Soviet boats and their own. ‘Should be the best place to avoid being spotted when we transmit.’
‘What’s the sea state?’
‘Force six. Gusting seven…’
‘Going to be uncomfortable. Have to get the mast high to avoid the waves breaking over it.’
‘Gets worse further north.’
‘Mmmm. We’ll give it a try, then. I’m about to draft the signal. Send the wireless officer to my cabin to collect it in ten minutes, will you? The message will be brief. Very brief. And Tim —’
Hitchens pulled his first lieutenant to one side, out of earshot of the others.
‘That signal that came in — we’ve got new orders. Top secret. The most sensitive operation I’ve ever known. I can hardly believe what they’re telling us to do.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’ll brief you as soon as I can, but it may be a few days yet. I’ll have to tell the crew something soon; thought I’d do it tomorrow, on the pipe. Have to keep it vague, but they’ll need to know we’re on a special op.’
‘Will you be giving new course instructions, sir?’
‘Stays the same for the moment. As planned. Different tactics, though. CINCFLEET says the Yanks are not to know what we’re doing. Got to get across the SOSUS array without them hearing us.’
That wouldn’t be easy; the hydrophones on the seabed between the Faroes and Shetlands were remarkably sensitive. The American controllers of SOSUS would be expecting them too, and would listen out for them.
‘One other thing, Tim. Listening to the signals traffic — it’ll be a bit irregular from now on. We’ll be going fast, so no trailing of the wire. We’ll use the satcom mast when possible, but because of the sensitivity of the stuff coming in, I can’t have anyone but myself seeing the signals traffic from now on. I’ll have to clear the wireless room when the mast’s up. Commanding officer’s eyes only, you see.’
‘Is that really necessary, sir?’
‘Yes, it bloody well is! I wouldn’t have said so otherwise! I’ll distribute whatever I can, of course. Intelligence, met., news reports. But it may not be much. That’s all.’
Hitchens turned on his heel and left the control room.
Pike’s jaw dropped.
‘Bloody hell!’ he breathed.
CHAPTER THREE
Sunday morning brought relief to the small group of media personnel on board the US aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower. The gale had subsided in the small hours; they’d had no idea a ship of 90,000 tons could roll so much. The three members of the television crew pooling pictures for the four American networks had been seasick to a man.
The Eisenhower was about three hundred miles south of Iceland, heading northeast, the flagship for the eighteen American warships taking part in Exercise Ocean Guardian.
The six members of the media pool had been flown onto the ship from Reykjavik the previous evening, smacking down onto the carrier deck in a Grumman Greyhound Carrier-Onboard-Delivery (COD) aircraft. For all the journalists it was their first visit to a big carrier and the COD flight the most hair-raising journey they’d ever made.
Tightly strapped in to rearward-facing seats, the passengers had felt genuine terror as the almost windowless twin-turboprop aircraft was buffeted by gale force winds and manoeuvred sharply to line up with the bucking deck. Even the aircrew had looked scared; they knew what they were supposed to do if the ‘controlled crash’ of a landing went bad and the plane slipped from the deck into the sea, but they also knew the chances of surviving such an accident were slim.
One of the journalists had thrown up as soon as his feet touched the carrier deck, and the usual briefing on arrival had been postponed.
Now the six were seated in the half-darkness of the ‘3 deck’ briefing room, listening to the public information officer, Commander Polk. Vu-foils illustrated his talk.
‘Good-day, gentlemen. Hope you’re feeling okay now. I just want to tell you something about Exercise Ocean Guardian, so’s you get the big picture. The starting point for the game is this: a huge world power, which has no name but whose national language is Russian, is assumed to have threatened NATO — Norway in particular. Enemy surface ships and submarines are breaking out from their bases on the Kola peninsular. We have to do something about it. We’ve got eleven NATO navies with 122 vessels taking part, which makes it the biggest we’ve ever done.
‘Now, we have two jobs to do. The first is to ensure we can control the sea line of communication — SLOC for short. The SLOC is the route across the Atlantic along which American reinforcements would be shipped if Europe were threatened by the Warsaw Pact.