‘We’ll risk it. We have to,’ the commander decided. ‘You can have a couple of knots if it’ll help.’
‘Every little bit…’
‘Twenty-eight knots then, Tim.’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Pike acknowledged as Hitchens turned to the chart table.
‘And I want reports every hour, MEO.’
Lieutenant Sebastian Cordell had just taken over the watch from Nick Cavendish, and was leaning over the chart. He eased to one side as Hitchens appeared next to him. Their course had brought them closer to the Norwegian coast, but they were still one hundred and fifty miles west of the nearest land. The Lofoten Islands were well to the south. Beneath them the ocean plunged two-thousand-five-hundred metres to total darkness, and a sea-bed of ooze and rock.
‘ETA abeam North Cape?’ Hitchens asked. ‘At twenty-eight knots?’
Cordell picked up his brass-handled dividers, set them against the latitude scale and measured out the distance.
‘About three-hundred-and-thirty miles to run…’
He pulled the calculator towards him and punched at the keys.
‘2200 tonight, sir. And that allows for some slow running for comms.’
‘Mmmm.’ Hitchens looked reassured. He picked up the dividers and measured the distance for himself.
‘We’ll be crossing the edge of the continental shelf in about four hours. You’d better start plotting sea-bed soundings. When we get round the Cape there’ll be Sovs everywhere. Won’t be able to poke a mast up to get a satellite fix.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Navigating by reading the topography of the ocean floor was a difficult art dependant on finding large features, like underwater mountains. There weren’t too many of those in the shallow waters of the Barents Sea.
Hitchens pulled out the chart showing the northern tip of Norway and the western half of the Soviet Kola peninsula.
‘Where are we heading after North Cape, sir?’ Cordell queried nervously.
‘You’ll know when you need to,’ Hitchens snapped. He slid the chart back into the drawer. ‘Just make sure we get there.’
Unnerved by Cordell’s question, he turned for the door.
‘Call me when it’s time for the satcom.’
‘Sir.’
Philip felt panic rising. It was the tension in the control room that did it. They were all suspicious — all watching him. He had to have solitude to think things through, make decisions.
He slid shut the door to his cabin, and slumped into his chair. What was truth, what was lies?
Those KGB bastards! They’d led him by the nose. He’d believed their ‘evidence’, succumbed to their blackmail, agreed to their plan. But was it true, what they’d told him? How the hell could he tell, down there in the dark silence of the ocean.
And poor Sara. The way they’d used her — trickery, lies. And all to make sure of him, as though the other thing weren’t enough.
He remembered his stunned disbelief when a completely strange woman had stopped him on the cliff footpath, earlier that year, to tell him his father was still alive. The father whom he’d worshipped and whose disappearance thirty years ago he’d never been able to accept.
The letter and the photograph the Russian woman had produced as evidence — he could still picture them. The cheap paper covered with his father’s still familiar scrawl had torn a little in the summer breeze.
It had poleaxed him, shattered him. At that moment, he’d become a boy again, a boy on the edge of his teens; a child who’d idolized a father all too often absent, a boy who craved paternal approval.
The words in his father’s letter had cut into his heart, pleading, begging that he should do something to end his suffering. The handwriting had been uneven and shaky. They’d broken his father in the labour camp — the woman had admitted it. She’d even apologized; blamed it on the Stalinists.
She’d waited until their third meeting before revealing the price to be paid for freeing the sick old man. She was sure of Philip by then.
It was the second letter from his father that had sealed it; the handwriting strayed down the page and told of incurable heart disease. Did he have grandchildren, the old man asked; believing that one day he’d see them had kept him going all those years. He begged that before he died, Philip would make the dream come true.
Treason was the price to be paid for his father’s freedom. Betrayal of his country’s secrets to the KGB. Betrayal of the Navy which was his whole life.
Until that moment Philip had never questioned the meaning of ‘loyalty’. It was absolute. Handing British naval secrets to the Russians was unthinkable. But now he faced a choice; loyalty to his country — or loyalty to his own flesh and blood.
It was only a small thing they asked, the woman had said. Just a small favour.
A small thing. To lay an inert Moray mine at a precise location off the Kola coast, so it could be retrieved by a Soviet submersible. Retrieved and dismantled, so that the most potent anti-submarine weapon ever devised by the West could be understood, and rendered impotent. A small thing.
His mind had rejected the treachery; but his heart hadn’t.
Would it really do so much harm? The Soviets themselves must have similar technology. If they didn’t learn the secret from him, they’d get it from someone else. They’d bribe some underpaid technician at the factory, perhaps. There’d never be a war anyway, so what did it matter?
It would be difficult, he’d warned her. There’d be no opportunity.
Yes, there would, she told him. They knew he commanded Truculent, the trials boat for the Moray mines. The thoroughness of the KGB’s research had startled him.
A few months later, as she had predicted, he was ordered to the Kola, on the ideal mission to fulfil the KGB’s plan. Although just a simulated mine-laying, he would be carrying war stocks, they told him.
Suddenly he had the means to free his father. It was fate; it had to be.
He met the KGB woman in Plymouth that night. She gave him the chart coordinates for the laying of the mine, and said his father would be moved immediately to a clinic in a neutral country, where he would be cared for until other arrangements could be made.
How he would explain the loss of a mine when he returned to Plymouth, he couldn’t imagine. He’d think of something. The plan had to proceed.
Then suddenly, the whole thing had exploded in his face. He’d found out about Sara.
He’d been a puppet all the time. There wasn’t just a KGB woman pulling his strings; there was a man too. A Russian who’d seduced Sara months before to make her talk. Talk about him, his obsession with his father, his vulnerability.
The bastards! They’d invented the whole thing! Faked the letter and the blurred photograph. They hadn’t let him keep them, of course. Couldn’t risk them falling into the hands of the British authorities, the woman had said.
It had been bloody clever. He cringed at the thought of how he’d fallen for it. God, how he hated them, and their evil masters in the Kremlin. Okay, he’d give them a bloody Moray mine. Right up the backside of an Oscar class submarine!
Thus he had begun the patrol blinded by anger and a thirst for revenge.
But now the doubts had come back. Supposing they had been telling the truth after all? Why shouldn’t his father be alive? The writing had looked like his, the words and the expressions had been right. And the photograph — well, who could tell after so many years?
He sank his head in his hands. He must decide; go through it all again, all the evidence for and against. The reports he’d read of the catastrophic ‘accident’ nearly thirty years ago — think back through them. Remember what the Russian woman had told him about the survival of just two men, who’d escaped the destruction of the old Tenby because they’d been ashore on the Soviet coast when it had happened, taking photographs of a radar site.