His chuckle was like treacle.
‘I see. Been needing a little therapy yourself, sir?’ Andrew grinned.
‘Mmmm. Not a good topic in the current circumstances.’
‘Maybe not. I’ll try the number now.’
Andrew felt in his pocket for change, then headed for the payphone.
He returned a few minutes later.
‘Did you get her?’
Andrew nodded.
‘She’ll be here at eight in the morning.’
‘Good. Then I’ll bid you goodnight. Pop into my office for a word before you leave tomorrow, will you?’
Lieutenant Commander Tim Pike ran a comb through his short, wavy hair. He always did that before going to bed, a hangover from his prep-school when Matron would inspect them all for neatness before lights-out.
It was after 0100 hrs. He’d stripped to his underpants for the night; there was no room on a submarine for luxuries like pyjamas. He looked at himself in the mirror, wondering if his skin still bore traces of the suntan acquired in Portugal four months earlier. His fiancée had insisted they go abroad to get rid of his undersea pallor.
Pike pulled at the elastic of his briefs to compare the untanned skin underneath with the rest.
‘Checking your knob’s still there?’ Paul Spriggs jibed, lifting the curtain and entering the cabin.
‘I don’t do that by looking at it,’ Pike quipped back, swinging himself up onto the top bunk. ‘Sandra asked me to leave it behind, this trip. Said it was the only bit of me she’d miss!’
‘So, instead you gave her a new battery for her vibrator.’
‘Coarse at times, aren’t you?’
Spriggs switched off the reading light, leaving the dim glow of the red lamp on the ceiling. The whole submarine was in red-light conditions in the hours of darkness. The men needed night-vision to use the periscope.
Spriggs didn’t bother to undress — just took off his shoes and lay down on the lower bunk.
‘Can I ask you a straightforward question?’ the weapons engineer asked softly.
Pike braced himself to be interrogated on some aspect of his sex-life; he suspected his cabin mate had had little experience of women.
‘If you must…’
‘Well… have you any idea what the hell’s going on. The captain won’t let anyone in the wireless room when the signals come in. What’s so secret about this change of plan, where the hell are we going, and why?’
Tim Pike lay staring at the ceiling. The answer he wanted to give was a bitter, anguished one, reflecting the offence he felt at not being taken into his captain’s confidence. A first lieutenant on a submarine was meant to be the CO’s right-hand man, but on this patrol Hitchens had been treating him like a mere sub-lieutenant.
‘No.’
‘No, what?’
‘No, I don’t have any idea what the hell’s going on.’
They were silent again, the hum of the ventilation fans loud in the tiny cabin.
‘Uh…, don’t you think you should know?’
‘There’s nothing in the rule book that says a captain has to take his first lieutenant into his confidence, unless it’s absolutely necessary for operational reasons. Our captain’s doing it by the book. That’s the on-the-record answer… Privately, and just within these walls — I’m as pissed-off as hell!’
‘What has he told you?’
‘Same as he told you and everyone else on the “pipe”. Simply that the patrol task had been changed; we have to make all speed to the Barents Sea and he’s been ordered to vet all communications personally until after the mission’s completed.’
‘Bloody odd, that — vetting all the comms. Ever happened to you before?’
‘Once, maybe. For forty-eight hours or so.’
‘But this is open-ended. Supposing World War Three breaks out up there — how’ll we get to know about it? Can we rely on our captain to tell us?’
‘Don’t worry. The Russians’ll let us know. They’ll tap on the casing with a nuclear depth charge.’
‘That’s not funny, Tim.’
‘Just put it down to experience. It’s good training. Submariners are supposed to be lone wolves, operating in the dark. He’s passing on the intelligence briefs telling us what else is in the area, so we won’t hit anything, I promise you.’
Pike deemed it his duty to be reassuring, but it wasn’t how he felt.
‘You’re sure he’s all right, are you?’ Spriggs asked with renewed earnestness. ‘You don’t think he’s lost his marbles, or anything?’
‘Why do you say that?’ Pike snapped, alarmed that he was not alone in his suspicions.
‘Well, Kitchens has always been a tight-arse, but he seems twitchier than ever this trip. He has domestic problems, doesn’t he? Neurotic wife, or something?’
‘Never confided in me…’
‘Oh, come on, Tim! Stop being so fucking stiff-necked! You know bloody well what they say about him!’
Pike rolled over and looked down onto the bunk below.
‘Tell you what, Paul — if you’re really worried about him, then so am I,’ he confided finally. ‘But we need to be bloody careful. I’m no mutineer.’
‘Nor me, for God’s sake. But what do we do about it?’
‘We start making notes. Independently. Every time we notice something about his behaviour that’s not normal, every time he does something that’s not the usual procedure — we make a note of it. Just you and me. Nobody else. No conspiracies or he’ll have us both by the neck!’
He rolled back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, hands behind his head.
‘Okay,’ Spriggs eventually acknowledged from below.
For a good ten minutes they lay there, staring at the red glow, disinclined to sleep, searching their memories for things Commander Hitchens had said and done since they’d left Devonport, things different from his normal behaviour. The more they thought, the more disturbed each became.
‘The trouble with this game,’ Spriggs moaned suddenly, ‘is it leads to paranoia!’
‘Mmmm. Let’s rethink it in the morning.’
‘OK. Goodnight.’
‘’Night.’
Less than a minute later, a sharp rap on the door frame brought them fully awake again.
‘Sorry, sir.’
It was the young navigator. He was duty watch leader.
‘Tried to raise the captain, sir, but he’s out cold. Snoring his head off. Just can’t wake him.’
Pike slipped feet-first from the upper bunk and reached for his shirt and trousers.
‘What’s the problem? What’s happened?’
‘Sodding great contact, sir. Sound room thinks it’s a Russian Victor class sub, coming straight for us!’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘REPORT!’ PIKE SNAPPED at Cavendish, as he ran into the control room, still buttoning his shirt.
‘Depth — two-hundred-and-fifty. Speed — fifteen knots. Course — zero-five-five,’ called out the navigator.
‘Water under the keel?’
‘Plenty. Two-thousand-three-hundred metres.’
Pulling the back strap of his sandals over his heel, Pike hopped to the video displays of the action information consoles. The cross in the centre of the screen marked their own position, the small square box lower down and to the left that of the contact.
‘We’ve been sprinting at thirty knots for three hours. Dropped our speed just five minutes ago for a listen, and then we heard him. We’d been deafening ourselves going fast.’
‘Range?’
‘Don’t know. Could be ten miles.’