He finished scribbling a note.
‘Store that signal for Tenby on the satellite, so she’ll get it whenever she calls,’ he ordered, and headed back along the tunnels and up the stairways to the surface.
It was always good to get into real air again. Underground the atmosphere smelled filtered and artificial.
He strode up the tarmac road to the office block by the entrance to the headquarters. The wind had got up and tugged at the White Ensign flying from a mast in front of the doorway.
He took the stairs at a run, and his heart felt surprisingly light considering the crisis he faced.
The reason for his headiness stood waiting outside his office, chatting to his PA, Hitchens’ file tucked under her arm.
‘Ah, Felicity, my dear. Thank you so much for coming,’ he greeted her.
Commander Rush smiled saucily.
‘I took it as an order, sir.’
As she followed him into his office, she turned to his PA and winked. The young WRNS raised an eyebrow.
The long, black submarine passed undetected from the Norwegian Sea into the Barents. She’d zigged and zagged, alternating thirty knot bursts of speed with periods of near immobility. For the Nimrod to have kept up with her progress would have taken more than skill; the RAF would have needed extraordinary luck and an almost limitless supply of sonobuoys.
Without closing with the surface again, they’d never know for sure that they’d thrown off their shadow, but Sebastian Cordell was confident they were safe when he handed over the watch at lunchtime to Lieutenant Nick Cavendish.
‘We got a satellite fix before the old man panicked,’ Cordell confided to Cavendish. ‘It showed the SINS is still spot on. We’re here, at this moment.’
He pointed to a position half way between the shallows of the Fugley Bank and the pinnacle of rock thirty miles northwest of it which rose from the ocean floor like an aberration in the almost flat underwater landscape.
‘Course-change due at 1315. New course zero-nine-eight. Next stop North Cape. All aboard for the mystery tour!’
Cavendish shook his head.
‘He thinks we’re a load of bloody schoolchildren,’ he scoffed, ‘not old enough to be told the facts of life! It’s not on, you know. Bloody dangerous if we don’t all know what we’re up to. Did you get an intelligence summary on the satcom?’
‘Yep.’
He pushed across the page of teletype.
‘Still no mention of Tenby. Odd that. Nothing since Sunday, as if she’d disappeared.’
‘Perhaps she’s doing the same as us. Covert op,’ Cavendish suggested. His eye ran further down the page to the Soviet deployments. ‘Christ! That’s quite a barrier for the Sovs. They don’t usually get that many ships out for us.’
‘Mmmm. I think we’ll be looking for some little friend to help us through, don’t you?’
Sebastian patted Cavendish on the shoulder and left him to it.
Lieutenant Commander Tim Pike was waiting for him in his cabin. The first lieutenant looked tense, and tugged at the short tufts of his ginger beard.
‘Okay. Let’s have it. What is it you wanted to say about the captain?’
Cordell felt a hot flush creeping up his neck.
‘Oh, sit down, Sebastian, for heaven’s sake.’
Pike pointed at the spare chair.
‘As I said, sir, it’s rather personal. But…, well…, about a couple of years ago I met a girl — a woman — in a restaurant, and we…, we went to bed together. I only knew her by her Christian name, you see. But it turned out she was Mrs Hitchens,’ Sebastian concluded miserably.
‘What? You’ve been knobbing the captain’s missus? You rotten little sod!’
‘I didn’t know at the time, sir. She did all the picking up, not me!’
‘I can believe that,’ mocked Pike. ‘Bloody hell! And you think the captain’s found you out, is that it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And that it accounts for his um…, overreaction this morning?’
‘Exactly. And not just this morning. He’s been pretty odd the whole patrol.’
‘And you think it’s all down to you?’
‘Well, yes. I suppose I do.’
Tim Pike frowned. Could it be as simple as that? He doubted it. Rumours about Philip Hitchens’ marital problems had been circulating for months, yet it hadn’t affected his professional conduct before.
‘Okay, Sebastian. Thanks for telling me about it. It’s right that I should know. And I shan’t tell anyone else, don’t worry.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Now, you’d better get along to the wardroom, or there’ll be no lunch left.’
‘Right, sir.’
Why would Sara Hitchens want to seduce a boy like Sebastian, Pike wondered? Did women fancy kids just out of school?
He spun the combination lock on the small wall-safe beneath his desk and took out a notebook. He looked through the list of things that had concerned him about Commander Hitchens on that patrol.
Each incident of jumpiness, aggression or secretiveness looked small and insignificant on its own, but a picture was beginning to emerge. But a picture of what?
Evidence of mental instability? Or just the tension of working under highly secret, highly sensitive orders?
But Hitchens had been on the point of strangling Cordell in the control room earlier; Pike had seen it with his own eyes. He’d lost his self-control, and that was dangerous. If he did it again when they were in contact with the Soviets he could put all their lives at risk.
The curtain across the doorway was brushed aside and Paul Spriggs came in. He spotted the notebook.
‘Something new happened?’
‘Could be.’
They’d each been making notes on Hitchens since the previous morning, keeping their writings separate. That way, if it came to anything, each man’s evidence would have some claim to validity.
Suddenly the tannoy crackled.
‘Do you hear there! Captain speaking.’
Both men looked at one another in surprise. Pike was expecting to make ‘the pipe’ himself in a few minutes’ time.
‘Thought you’d like an update on our situation. We’ve just altered course to the east. Should be abeam North Cape sometime later tonight. We’re heading on into the Barents Sea. Things are pretty tense up on the surface, so we’ll all need to be very much on our toes from now on’.
‘Things are pretty tense down here too, old chap,’ Pike muttered.
‘According to the World Service News summary,’ Hitchens’ voice continued, ‘there was a little confrontation yesterday between one of the American flat-tops and a Soviet Bear bomber that got too close. The Yanks came within an inch of shooting it out of the sky.’
‘Fucking Americans! Always overreact,’ snarled Spriggs.
‘The Soviet Northern Fleet has mustered a pretty strong ASW barrier to protect their bastions. We’ve got to get through it tomorrow, undetected, and close with the Kola Inlet before all their SSNs get loose. Can’t say any more than that at the moment.
‘Ahead of us we can expect up to two Victor Ills and two Sierras, according to the intelligence report. With a bit of luck three of those will be well to the north of us, but we’re sticking close to the coast — we have to because we’re in a hurry — so there’ll be a few SSKs around and a lot of aircraft.