The journalist nodded.
‘Look, we got a problem,’ he reasoned to the pilot. ‘We have to be able to look right down on the deck from overhead…’
‘No way, bud!’
‘Look, that ship’s going to Cuba! If she’s carrying warplanes, that could threaten the US of A! That’s something the American people should know about!’
‘You want to get me thrown out the Navy?’
The correspondent turned to the PIO who was not wearing a communications set and was unaware of what had been said.
‘Commander, you’ve got to help us…’
Shouting slowly, word by word, he explained their need to be certain of the Russian cargo. The commander pursed his lips and shrugged. He took the headset and began to talk to the pilot.
Looking through the open doorway they could see some of the Rostov’s officers gathered on the bridge wing looking up at them with binoculars. One had a camera and was taking photographs.
The commander grabbed the journalist’s arm.
‘Okay. You got your shot,’ he shouted hoarsely into his ear.
The correspondent clamped the headset back on and clipped the microphone pads to his larynx.
‘So, we’re okay with that now, yeah?’ he asked cautiously.
‘I got new orders. It’s his arse gets kicked now, not mine. But I still can’t fly over that goddam Russian. But see here! I’m just gonna move up ahead and practise a hover. Now if that ship decides to steam right underneath my hover — that’s his problem!’
‘That’s real neat!’
The helicopter banked to the left and the nose dipped to accelerate. Five hundred yards ahead the pilot pulled it sharply up into a hover, one hundred feet above the waves. He swung the nose round so that the side door looked directly back at the Soviet ship bearing down on them. The cameraman switched on and adjusted his focus.
The second SH-3 with the stills photographers on board flew parallel to the ship, but turned sharply away when it saw the first machine hovering in its path.
As the ship passed beneath them the correspondent’s excitement mounted. The cocooned deck cargo revealed itself indisputably to be what the pilot had said; the wings of jet fighters. As the ship’s bridge passed below, dark uniformed figures could be seen waving and gesticulating furiously.
Ten minutes later they landed back on the deck of the Eisenhower. The TV crew hurried below to prepare their tapes for transmission to New York by satellite. With help from aircraft recognition manuals provided by the PIO, they concluded the wings were for MiG-29 fighters, aircraft considerably superior to anything the Cubans had at present. They counted twelve individual wings; that meant six fighters.
Admiral Vernon Kritz appeared reluctant to jeopardize the secrecy of his ship’s location by allowing the TV and newspaper men to transmit their reports, transmissions which could be detected by Russian satellites and spy planes. But eventually he allowed himself to be persuaded, and the media men set up a small gyro-stabilized satellite dish on the flight deck, in good time for the material to be turned round for the morning news programmes back home.
Andrew Tinker caught the early flight to London. Patsy had grudgingly driven him to Plymouth airport after an early breakfast.
She’d scowled for most of the previous evening, after he told her he’d been ordered to take command of HMS Truculent so that Philip could be brought home.
‘It’s not bloody fair!’ she’d railed. ‘Home for three days, and now you’re off on patrol again! You’ll be gone for weeks!’
She could well be right. He hadn’t told her the real reason Philip was being brought back, simply that the Navy took domestic upsets pretty seriously.
‘And so they should,’ she’d answered. ‘Damn Sara! If she couldn’t have her affairs discreetly, she should’ve taken up pottery instead!’
At Heathrow, Andrew was met by the driver to Flag Officer Submarines. The black Granada slipped easily through the light Sunday morning traffic to Northwood. Forty-five minutes after touching down, he presented his identity card in the guardroom of the combined NATO and Royal Naval headquarters.
He was directed straight to ‘the hole’, the deep underground bunker that houses the operational command. Further identity checks, then he was through the heavy double doors, and down the steps to the Submarine Ops Room.
Flag Officer Submarines was Rear-Admiral Anthony Bourlet, a short, peppery man who had overall command of the Royal Navy’s thirty nuclear and diesel-powered attack submarines.
‘Very grateful to you for coming, Andrew,’ he welcomed, grabbing him by the arm and leading him into his own small office next to the ops room. ‘Alarming business, this.’
‘We’ll probably find when we get him back that it was all in Sara’s imagination,’ Andrew replied. ‘I can’t really believe Phil would do anything daft.’
‘You’re an old friend, aren’t you?’
‘Since Dartmouth.’
‘Mmmm. Now look. This is what we’ve arranged. We’ve signalled Hitchens that he’s to rendezvous with a helicopter off the Western Isles at 1600, and that he’s to be replaced on board. He’s acknowledged the signal, so with a bit of luck the scare’ll be over by this evening.
‘You’ll leave Northolt in a 125 at 1300 hours for Stornoway. That’s where you’ll pick up the helicopter. The 125 will wait and bring Hitchens back here. When he’s safely in our hands, we’ll get the security boys in and find out what’s at the bottom of all this. All right so far?’
Andrew looked at his watch. It gave him barely two hours to get briefed on Truculent’s mission.
‘Fine, sir.’
‘Now…’
Bourlet’s voice sank lower.
‘What you don’t know is that Hitchens was given a special briefing before he left. A secret task for the exercise which is terrifyingly sensitive. The C-in-C shat himself when I told him the Russians had been sniffing round Philip.’
Andrew’s eyebrows shot up. Craig had told him of a special mission, but not what it was.
‘You’ll know about the new “Moray” mines…’
‘Of course. Remotely programmable microprocessors, incredibly clever target selectivity — laid in deep water they launch an underwater guided-missile that can penetrate even the heaviest Soviet double-hull.’
‘Precisely. And at the first threat of war with Russia, and politicians willing, you lot would be told to lay them outside all the main Kola submarine bases.’
Andrew’s jaw dropped.
‘And that’s Phil’s mission?’ he asked, stunned.
‘To try it out. To try slipping through their ASW screen, get right up to the Kola Inlet and fire water-shots to simulate laying the mines.’
‘Wheew!’
‘Not the sort of job to give a man who’s facing a personal crisis.’
‘You can say that again! A hairy enough job for anybody!’
‘The Yanks are in on it, too. They’ve tasked one of their Los Angeles boats to do the same thing further east, at Gremikha. As I’m sure you realize, the point of doing this in the middle of a big exercise is that the Russians’ll probably be running a big ASW screen in the Barents. They’ll be looking hard for our boats, and we need to know how good they’d be at finding us if we had to do it for real.’
Andrew nodded. It was almost routine for Allied submarines to probe Soviet waters on intelligence-gathering missions, but such operations were invariably conducted when the Soviets were known to be at a low state of alert. Going in when the Northern Fleet was mounting a fullscale anti-submarine sweep would be another matter.