‘Aircraft overhead!’ barked the tannoy.
Coming alive again, the sonar had picked up the roar of jet engines.
‘Jesus! What is this? A plane too?’
‘Because of the exercise?’ Cordell guessed. ‘The Sovs keeping tabs on Ocean Guardian?’
‘Or something else. Something to do with what the captain was talking about. The East-West crisis!’
Pike hurled a silent curse at the sleeping Hitchens. Why hadn’t the bastard told him what was going on?
Cordell’s head turned, snake-like on his long, thin neck. There was a flicker of fear in his eyes.
‘You mean the Victor was trying for a firing solution?’ he asked aghast. ‘Wants to torpedo us?’
‘That’s the usual reason for going active, isn’t it?’
‘You’re joking!’
‘Well, I hope I am!’
‘Shit! The tubes are empty! We’re defenceless!’
Pike thought hard. The intelligence reports had let them down. They were on their own. Better play it safe. He grabbed the microphone for the tannoy.
‘Watch stand to!’ he spoke, steadying his voice. ‘We’re being shadowed by a Soviet SSN, and will adopt defence watch conditions.’
‘Taking it a bit personally, aren’t you?’ the weapon engineer chided as he entered the control room at a run.
‘Taking no chances. Anyway, you were the one worrying about World War Three starting. Better bring the bloody tubes to the action state!’
Spriggs raised one eyebrow, but disappeared fast down the ladder to the torpedo stowage compartment below, where the ratings were already wrenching open the tube rear doors and loading the 1½ tonne Tigerfish torpedoes. Attached behind each propeller was the drum of guidance wire that would spool out after launch, keeping the weapons under the control of the submarine.
‘Where’s the target, TAS?’ asked Pike.
‘Moving away, sir. Bearing one-nine-three. Range ten-thousand yards. Heading one-seven-zero. Still pinging.’
‘Good. Let’s show him some more leg. Set course ten degrees. Revolutions for thirty knots.’
‘Aye, aye, sir!’
In the sky above, the Nimrod banked and weaved. When the British boat slowed down she became desperately difficult to track.
They’d detected the start of her turn to port, but by the time they’d dropped a pair of buoys on what they thought was the new track, there was no sign of her.
Locating the Russian boat was easy. Its sonar ‘pings’ set the ink-pens quivering on the hard-copy printers of the acoustic processor.
‘Noisy bastard!’ growled the AEO. ‘Doesn’t want to lose our boy, does he?’
The pens quivered again and then a third time.
The AEO began to frown. It was doubly odd; a Soviet sub using active sonar, and a British boat being somewhere it wasn’t meant to be.
‘I don’t know what’s going on down there, but I’m not taking any chances,’ he told the TacNav. ‘Arm up a couple of Stingrays just in case that Victor decides to do something nasty.’
The navigator punched buttons to switch on the giros in two of the torpedoes in the bomb bay.
‘Getting a reply to that signal, by the look of it,’ remarked the radio operator, as the teleprinter began to buzz. He read the cipher as it was being printed and began to decrypt it from his code cards.
The AEO took the handwritten note when it was completed.
‘Well, bugger me!’ he exclaimed. ‘They didn’t know they had a boat here! They’re ordering us to track her, and they’re sending a tanker to refuel us so we can stay on task longer.’
‘You mean we’re not getting home today?’ the TacNav groaned.
‘’Sright, sunshine.’
‘My wife’ll kill me. It’s our anniversary! We’d got a dinner booked!’
The flight bringing Vice-Admiral Feliks Astashenkov back from Moscow was delayed again; then the taxi bringing him from Murmansk to the naval town of Severomorsk suffered a puncture, so it was four in the morning before he arrived at the comfortable villa that went with the job of Deputy Commander of the Northern Fleet.
He didn’t go to bed. Apart from not wanting to wake his wife, he’d come straight from the arms of another woman, and his conscience pricked him.
It had been a painful farewell with Tatiana. They’d both known they wouldn’t meet again, but neither had said it.
He made himself some tea and slumped back in the red-velvet, wing-backed armchair that had belonged to his grandmother.
He felt afraid. Savkin had tricked him into making a personal commitment that could put him at odds with his own Commander-in-Chief, even the entire Stavka, the high command.
He knew what pressure the General Secretary was under from the Politburo. Savkin’s survival was by no means certain, and if he lost his gamble to preserve perestroika Astashenkov could see himself being pulled down with him.
Why had he committed himself? Because he still believed in the complete restructuring of Soviet society that Gorbachev had begun, and Savkin was struggling to continue. But what if he could see that Savkin was going to fail, and still the call came to honour that commitment? Was he ready to destroy his own career for a lost cause? Better surely to hold his hand, to fight another day. All he could hope was that the call would never come.
His eyes focused on the canvas over the fireplace, an heroic oil painting of the destroyer Sevastopol, which his father had commanded in 1943 and in which he’d died. From childhood Feliks’ ambition had been to honour his father by reaching the highest levels in the Soviet Navy, and having a warship named after him. At the age of fifty he was on track to achieve that goal — or would be if Nikolai Savkin didn’t ask him to throw it all away.
In the dim light from the desk lamp, Astashenkov’s eyelids began to droop. He dozed for about an hour.
He came to when the carriage clock on the mantelpiece chimed six. He stroked his chin and decided to begin the new day. Quietly he made his way upstairs to the bathroom.
After a shower and a shave he felt refreshed. His dressing room was separate from the bedroom, so he need not disturb his wife as he hung up his brown civilian suit and donned the dark-blue uniform of a Vice-Admiral with its two stars on the heavy gold shoulderboards, one broad band and two narrow ones on the sleeves.
The smell of coffee told him that his staff were awake and about their business. The house was managed by a middle-aged civilian couple from Leningrad; the woman cooked and cleaned, and her husband served at table, polished brass and silver and acted as valet to Feliks.
He also had a personal driver, who lived in the barracks in the main naval base area, a starshina who would arrive outside the house at 6.30 each morning, drunk or sober.
Feliks would take his breakfast in the kitchen, bread, sliced sausage, and coffee. His staff took pleasure in his passing the time of day with them; his wife treated them like serfs.
The kitchen window faced east, overlooking a distant creek where sailing boats lined the jetties of a small marina belonging to the officers’ club. The sky was grey, but gold where the clouds broke to reveal the rising sun.
He would start early as soon as the driver arrived, tour the harbour and see who he could catch off-guard.
Severomorsk is a grey, granite naval town, ringed by greenhouse farms to provide fresh vegetables for the Navy. The town’s only purpose is to serve as the headquarters of the Northern Fleet. Set on a bay on the east bank of the Kol’skiy Zaliv, the Kola inlet that leads to Murmansk, its piers stretch from the dockyard like outspread fingers. Heavy cranes tower black against the clouds.