For Lane-Nott, Splendid’s war was personal and that’s the way he wanted it. Stuck on the bulkhead in the mast well of the boat’s control room were pictures of Soviet submarine commanders. He wasn’t fighting an enemy boat, he was fighting its Captain. He had to outwit him; be better than him.
Splendid had been at sea continuously now for nearly three months. But the success or failure of the patrol had been distilled into the last forty minutes. For sixteen hours she’d been vectored into position by RAF Nimrods. Intelligence from the RAF patrol planes would be sent back to Northwood HQ then on to Splendid via ‘the broadcast’, a very-low-frequency transmission sent from an aerial in Northamptonshire. The reports could be received at any depth just thirteen minutes after first being made by the RAF. The beauty of ‘the broadcast’ was that at no point did the submarine have to advertise its position – the submariner’s worst fear. Not for nothing were Splendid and her sister ships known as ‘Sneaky Boats’.
The Nimrods worked closely with the attack boats. Submariners would fly with Nimrod crews to understand how they thought and operated and vice versa. Now that close co-operation had paid off, and Splendid had to maintain her contact without alerting the enemy boat.
To minimize noise from her screws and maximize the value of the intelligence he was gathering, Lane-Nott followed silently between a mile and a half and two miles to port and aft of the Soviet boat. He was aware that at any time the enemy could do something unexpected. It wouldn’t have been the first time. In 1972, a Soviet submarine entered the Clyde Channel for the first time. Lane-Nott was a young navigator aboard HMS Conqueror, the boat given the simple order to ‘Chase him out.’ On being discovered, a very aggressive Soviet captain turned his submarine and drove it straight at Conqueror. It had been an extremely close call. There had been other occasions when harassed Russians had fired torpedoes to scare off trails. British attack boats never went to sea without live weapons in the tubes.
This is what it was all about. Lane-Nott felt energized that he’d found his quarry so quickly. Now there was no need to rush things. A nuclear submarine had endurance to burn. As long as his sonar operators maintained contact he could stay with her as long as he liked. The indications were that she was something new, a ‘Victor 3’ or ‘Akula’ class. Something they didn’t have much intelligence on. By the time Splendid turned for home, they’d be groaning with it. Every minute of the patrol was recorded. There would be miles of tape to analyse.
They were in difficult water though, and before continuing the trail Lane-Nott wanted to know precisely where he was rather than rely on what the Inertial Navigation System was telling him. Without breaking contact with the Soviet boat he rose to periscope depth to fix his position. The shallower water also made communication easier and as Splendid returned to depth the Captain was interrupted by one of his radio signals men.
‘There’s a Blue Key message for you, sir.’ For the Captain’s eyes only. Fucking hell, he thought, I don’t want this now. I’m in the middle of a bloody trail. Lane-Nott had been waiting his entire career for a Blue Key message and he was excited by the prospect of new, significant intelligence on the Russian, but a Blue Key meant that he had to decrypt it personally. Crypto codes changed every four hours and his personal safe was stuffed with the crypto cards and deciphers. Reluctantly, he left Splendid in the hands of his First Lieutenant.
As he decrypted the message he couldn’t believe what he was reading. So he did it a second time. It seemed inexplicable. He had orders to abandon the trail, return to base under radio silence, and to store for war in preparation for another mission. He was to ‘Proceed with all dispatch’ – an expression that dated back to Nelson’s time and all in the Navy understood. In naval terms, Lane-Nott’s orders could not have been put more forcefully.
By three o’clock the following afternoon, Splendid was tied up in number 1 berth at Faslane naval base.
Air Vice-Marshal George Chesworth was furious. Since the early 1960s Chesworth’s career had been devoted to finding and tracking Soviet submarines. Perhaps more than anyone else in the RAF, he’d been behind the introduction of the Nimrod into the service. He’d written the Air Staff Requirement, commanded the first squadron and now was Chief of Staff at 18 Group at Northwood HQ with operational responsibility for the entire Nimrod force. Nestled among the golf courses of London’s leafy north-west suburbs, Northwood had since 1938 been the headquarters of the old Coastal Command, 18 Group’s predecessor. By 1982, it was also home to the Navy. The two services worked closely and well together in an era when joint operations were not the norm. But what on earth, Chesworth wanted to know, were they up to now?
His Nimrods had painstakingly steered HMS Splendid to within striking distance of a Soviet boat. At Northwood, his team had been poring over the analysis of the tapes made by his aircraft, examining the signature of the boat, looking for new developments. And now, just as he thought the operation was about to pay off, the Navy were pulling their boat out. A bitterly disappointed Chesworth berated his naval counterpart.
‘It’s not our fault’ was the only explanation he was given.
The decision was out of the Navy’s hands. Political. And no one could tell him why. But by the time Chesworth travelled north with his family to their cottage in Scotland the following weekend, he, like everyone else in the country, knew exactly where the problem lay.
The MoD was finally acting on the contingency plans that had so depressed the Defence Secretary, John Nott, when he’d first read them a week earlier. He’d returned from the NATO summit in America to realize that the South Georgia situation had escalated. Over the weekend he read intelligence reports telling him that two Argentine destroyers armed with Exocet missiles had been ordered to sea following the diversion of Endurance to Grytviken. Nott decided it was time to send the submarines. Splendid was the second submarine being prepared to head south. Her sister ship, HMS Spartan, had been ordered into Gibraltar docks to take on stores on Monday. But with the Argentine fleet already at sea, there was nothing either boat would be able to do to stop the invasion. Without expecting to unearth anything that hadn’t already been considered and dismissed, Nott discussed other possibilities with Sir Michael Beetham – with the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terry Lewin, in New Zealand, the Chief of the Air Staff was holding the reins. Could the Falklands garrison destroy the runway to prevent the Argentinians flying in men and equipment? They didn’t have the explosives to do it. Could the Parachute Regiment be flown into the islands by C-130? The dependable old workhorses of RAF’s transport fleet simply didn’t have the range to cover the vast distances involved. The only comfort was a false one. Both men believed they were still discussing contingencies. At this point neither Nott nor Beetham knew that the Argentine invasion force was just a day away from the islands.
By six o’clock the following evening, they were in no doubt.