The submarine towed a communications buoy. The antenna could only receive, but she’d reply within minutes by raising a VHF mast above the waves.
Belikov drummed his fingers on his desk as they waited until the printer began to chatter. The Captain Lieutenant tore off the sheet, noted the contents and, with eyebrows raised, passed it to the Admiral. Then he tapped the keys on his computer terminal.
On the large wall-screen in front of them, a red circle appeared for the Ladny, well to the left of the triangle which was the contact reported by the aircraft.
‘Hah! So the Ladny has a ghost!’ Belikov exclaimed.
‘I’ve asked the IL-38 to re-confirm the position of its contact, Comrade Admiral.’
‘Where’s the Ametyst got to? Could it be her the aircraft’s tracking?’ Belikov demanded.
‘Not out there. She was detected close to the Kol’skiy Zaliv, half an hour ago.’
The printer spewed out more paper.
‘Reconfirmed,’ declared the Captain Lieutenant. ‘The IL-38 reports the contact has headed east at speed, conducting evasive manoeuvres. They’ve lost it now. Should they try to track it?’
‘Tell them, yes. And put out a general alert that the British submarine Truculent seems to be using a noise generator. She’s pretending to be one of ours.’
Feliks Astashenkov heaved a sigh of relief when he checked on the chart the position of the Truculent that the Severomorsk headquarters had just transmitted. If she was still that far out the chances were she’d not yet laid her mines.
The thought of the undetectable threat that might be sitting on the sea-bed anywhere in their path had terrified him since leaving port. Against another submarine they could fight, but a mine gave no warning, no possibility of retaliation.
Suddenly, he was filled with hope. There was a chance, after all, that they could complete their mission, that the British boat could be destroyed inside Soviet waters and the wreckage brought up so that the Soviet people could be shown how NATO threatened the security of the State.
‘There you are, Yury. Those are the co-ordinates of the target,’ he said, putting his arm round the younger man’s shoulders. ‘Let’s go and look for it!’
The young, white-coated doctor crashed through the swing doors with a trolley carrying a cardiac-arrest emergency kit.
Ahead of him he could see the Russian nurse holding open the door to the small, private room.
He swung the trolley inside; one of the clinic’s own female nurses was pressing rhythmically on the breastbone of the old man on the bed.
They hadn’t been told his name; they knew him simply as ‘the patient in room 112’. But a nurse had heard him speaking English.
‘He must be kept alive, doctor,’ whispered the Soviet official who’d been guarding the room since their arrival earlier that day.
The Finnish doctor ignored the remark. Goddamned KGB! He could smell them a mile off.
He grabbed the old man’s wrist. No pulse. The trace on the electrocardiograph screen was flat.
‘How long?’
‘Two, three minutes,’ answered the nurse.
The doctor uncoiled cables and placed two electrodes either side of Alex Hitchens’ immobile heart, removing the ones connected to the electrocardiograph.
‘Stand back,’ he instructed, and pressed the switch.
Four times he repeated the process, checking after each shock for some sign that the heart had restarted. There was none.
The ECG was reconnected. The trace stayed flat.
‘He’s dead,’ he announced.
‘Not possible,’ hissed the Russian guard. ‘He has to live!’
The doctor suppressed a desire to seize the Russian by the throat.
‘He was half-dead when he arrived here this morning. You gave us no medical records for him. But he had clear signs of heart failure. You must’ve known that before you brought him here. You knew the risks. He should never have been moved in his condition.’
With that he began to pack up his equipment.
The Finnish nurse looked down at the wrinkled old man, his sunken eyes hidden beneath closed lids. No name. No past. No future. It was sad that anyone should end their days in such anonymity.
Then she noticed something that gave her a certain comfort — a trace of a smile on the old man’s thin lips.
Philip’s mind was made up. The decision had come quite suddenly, as if placed in his brain by some outside agency.
His father was dead; he was suddenly certain of it. He’d been dead for years probably, though exactly when it had happened was irrelevant. The ‘evidence’ that he was alive, which the KGB woman had produced, was fake. The whole scheme was a trick. He knew he had been stupid, but it no longer mattered.
Now the Soviets would pay the price for destroying his father, destroying his marriage and eventually destroying him too. They were going to get what was coming to them.
‘Captain, Control Room!’
‘On my way,’ Philip said into the communications box.
He hurried to the control room.
‘Two submarine contacts, sir,’ Pike told him. ‘Both approaching from the west, both appear to be Victor Threes.’
On the chart he pointed to the island of Ostrov Chernyy with the underwater spit of sand extending from its northern shore.
‘We’re four miles from the island itself, two miles from the edge of the shallows. The first contact is five miles behind us on a bearing of three-one-zero. Coming straight at us. Fifteen knots. She may be tracking us, or else getting a steer from an aircraft.’
‘Our speed?’
‘Seven knots, sir.’
‘And the second contact?’
‘Less of a threat. Twelve miles distant.’
‘Right. Spriggs, over here!’ Philip ordered, suddenly sounding decisive and confident. ‘We’ve got to be quick. They could be about to attack. Our task, gentlemen, is to lay three Moray mines close to their submarine lanes. Set the fuses for any submarine target, WEO, but with remote triggering. The mines won’t be activated until later — by sonar burst. When, and who by, that’ll be up to CINCFLEET. Is that clear?’
Pike hesitated. Spriggs was looking to him for a sign.
‘The orders, sir…, they specify geographical coordinates for the mines? You’ll give us the signal you received?’
Philip ground his teeth, determined to keep his nerve.
‘The co-ordinates I was given no longer apply,’ he snapped. ‘It was supposed to be right in the mouth of the Kola Inlet. We’ll never get there now. The fall back plan was to place them somewhere else. That’s down to me.’
He prodded the chart.
‘There. Just on the edge of the shelf, where it rises up towards Ostrov Chernyy. That’s where we’ll put them.’
In his mind’s eye he imagined the spot; a slope of mud and fine sand, 150 metres down; protruding from it — the twisted metal of the old T-class boat, HMS Tenby. Soon, very soon, two Soviet Victor class submarines would be joining that pile of wreckage, if all went well.
‘Right, gentlemen. Get on with it. We only have minutes to put those mines on the bottom and get the hell out of here!’
And Philip strode off to the sound room.
‘Well?’ asked Spriggs.
‘Shit! I dunno! They won’t be armed when we lay them. He says it’ll need further orders.’
Spriggs raised an eyebrow.
‘Look. I’m the one that’ll get the chop if I’m wrong!’ Pike reasoned. ‘It’s not the moment, Paul. We just haven’t got enough evidence for me to relieve him. You’d better get the mines ready!’