Skydancer (20 page)

Bob often worried about his girlfriend. It was hard, his being away at sea for months at a time. Susan had always had a lively social life, and he had a fear in the back of his mind that she would get tired of his frequent absences and find another man.

Opposition to nuclear weapons had become the strongest bond between them. Susan was now actively campaigning for the cancellation of the Skydancer project, and needed all the information she could get. His phone-calls to tell her what was happening on board the submarine did not reveal much, but she always seemed grateful for them, and to Simpson they were a lifeline keeping Susan attached to him.

With a steely hiss the main periscope was raised from its housing in the control room deck. Carrington pressed his face against the binocular eyepiece and rotated the sight through a full 360 degrees.

‘Officer of the watch, I have control. Come below. Shut the upper lid!'

Carrington's order triggered a routine on board the boat that was so well practised it was automatic.

‘Upper lid shut! And clipped!' the voice of a crewman yelled from inside the top of the tower, as the
spring-loaded latches completed the hermetic sealing of the hull. Another voice at the base of the ladder relayed the message to the control room.

‘Dive the submarine!' Carrington ordered.

‘Open one, two and three main vents,' yelled a strong Glasgow accent from the buoyancy control panel. Hands scrabbled at the stopcock switches above, and there was the roar of air escaping from the main tanks as water rushed in to replace it.

‘Diving now!' the helmsman shouted, pressing forward on his joystick controls. The hydroplanes cut into the water and pressed the bulbous nose of the vessel down towards the depths. On a gauge above his control stick, the helmsman watched a miniature silhouette of the boat tilt downwards through five, then ten degrees. It was enough to ensure that HMS
Retribution
would slide cleanly and smoothly beneath the waves.

‘Keep periscope depth!' Carrington called, raising the scope again for an all-round look. Satisfied that the only vessel in the area was the support ship that had just helped them with their towed sonar, and that they were leaving it well astern, he lowered the periscope and moved over to the chart table. The navigator pointed out a line indicating the edge of the continental shelf, beyond which they would be able to dive into the comforting deep of the Atlantic.

For a while yet they must stay close to the surface, and every few minutes Carrington raised the periscope for a further all-round scan. Small fishing boats with trawl-nets were a hazard that might be visible only seconds before collision or entanglement.

One hour later Carrington ordered the submarine to two hundred feet, and the periscope was lowered into its seating for the last time. No one knew when they would need to raise it again.

The excitement of their shore leave over, the crew of the Polaris submarine slipped quickly back into their routines, almost as if they were a part of the machinery itself. The task of the boat now was to remain undetected and wait for orders. Trailing horizontally from the stern was the sonar array, several hundred yards behind the rudder, listening intently for the tell-tale sounds of other ships and submarines in the area. A second cable also streamed out from the vessel, stretching upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees towards the surface of the ocean. At the end of it was a float which would remain just below the surface throughout their patrol, a buoy which could pick up radio signals from England while staying hidden beneath the waves.

This was the Very Low Frequency radio antenna, able to hear transmissions which could penetrate the surface to a depth of twenty feet. It kept the submarine in permanent contact with Naval Headquarters, ready to receive at any time the order to go to war. The antenna could not easily be detected by surface ships or aircraft, so did not reveal the existence of the ‘bomber' in the depths below.

Although
Retribution
could listen thus for her orders, she could not reply to them; the antenna could receive but not transmit. Normally she did not need to, and only in an emergency would come up to periscope depth and transmit back through a satellite aerial pushed above the waves.

The rumbling in his stomach told Carrington it was close to lunchtime. Breakfast had been very early that morning to accommodate their dawn departure from the Cape. He was naturally a very thin man with sunken cheeks and a tall angular frame. It always surprised his wife that he could be such a healthy eater and remain so skinny. As he walked to the wireless room to
reassure himself that the communications link was properly established, he tried to calculate what hour of the day it would be in the Hampshire village of West Meon, which was home. His wife Alice would still be asleep there unless the baby had woken her early.

‘All hunky-dory, sir,' his executive officer announced. ‘Everything bleeping away nicely.'

To confirm that the radio link was established, a coded message was transmitted constantly from three giant aerials situated in remote parts of Britain.

‘Very good, Number One,' Carrington smiled. ‘I think it's lunchtime, don't you? I'll just check the sound room, then we can eat. Happen to know what's on the menu?'

‘“Babies' Heads”, I think, sir,' replied Lt. Commander Smith.

Carrington rubbed his hands. He was very fond of the individual steak-and-kidney puddings so named.

Inside the sonar room, the rating at the towed array control panel was clasping his headphones to his ears, and he looked puzzled. In front of him a green cathode-ray tube displayed the oscillating wave patterns of the multitude of sounds the array was detecting. By selecting switches the operator could direct the inbuilt computer to filter out unwanted noises and concentrate its analytical power on one particular frequency, which was what the rating was now trying to do.

‘Got a problem?' Carrington asked, tapping the blue-shirted operator on the shoulder.

The man slipped his earphones off and shook his head.

‘Don't understand it, sir. Never heard nothing like it before. Don't even know if it's really there, it's so faint.'

The words sent a shiver up the captain's spine, and all thoughts of food disappeared.

‘What sort of thing are you talking about?' he asked. ‘And where is it?'

‘Well, the array says it's dead astern, sir. But what it is, I don't know. There's no cavitation or anything, no propeller noise. Sounds like something moving through the water, but there's no machine noise or reactor bubbling. No propulsion sound at all.'

‘Computer doesn't recognise it?'

‘No way, sir. Thinks it's just background. Can't pick it out at all.'

‘But
you're
sure it's there?' Carrington pressed anxiously.

The rating hesitated before replying: ‘I suppose it could be damage to the array, sir. The Yanks might have knocked it about a bit while we were in the Cape. I'll run a test on it. Shouldn't take more than ten minutes.'

Instinctively Carrington felt sure there was nothing wrong with the sonar. He recalled his orders for this voyage, which had been so specific and yet so vague; the extra warning to be on the alert for Soviet shadows, as if Fleet HQ suspected there was something in the area, yet could not identify what sort of vessel.

‘No. Stick with it. I'll reduce speed and we'll go silent – see if that helps clarify things.'

Carrington strode back to the control room and seized the microphone that hung from the roof by the main periscope.

‘Assume the ultra-quiet state! Ultra-quiet until further notice!'

His voice was relayed throughout the length of the boat on a network of loudspeakers. At his command, conversation stopped, or was reduced to a whisper, and all inessential domestic or mechanical tasks that could make a noise were brought to a halt.

‘Reduce speed to one knot,' he ordered quietly.

‘One knot it is, sir.'

He could not stop altogether, or the array would start to sink towards the ocean floor.

The executive officer came out of the wireless room, his eyebrows raised inquiringly.

‘Sound room's got something, Mike. Something very faint,' Carrington explained.

The two officers returned to the sonar booth, where the operator was working away at his control panel. Impotently they stood behind him, waiting for him to report.

‘Coming closer, sir!' he hissed suddenly. ‘There's a doppler shift.' Then he forgot himself in his excitement. ‘
Must
be a fucking sub!'

The frequency of the sound had risen, shifting up the scale, indicating, like the whistle from an approaching train, that the object creating the sounds was moving towards them.

Behind them the spools of a tape-recorder turned continuously, recording the full spectrum of sounds picked up by the array, for further analysis later. If Carrington's suspicion was correct, what they were recording was history, the first sounds ever heard in the West of a new type of Soviet submarine.

Until five years earlier the Russian nuclear-powered boats, operated from the base at Severomorsk inside the Arctic Circle, had been characteristically noisy. Their loudness was due to a lack of sophistication in soundproofing, and was largely caused by particularly noisy pumps circulating cooling water in the reactors. When they sailed south towards the Atlantic, they passed over a network of listening devices laid on the floor of the ocean by the US Navy. Those sensors reported their passage to NATO ships and aircraft, which could then
follow them with comparative ease.

Details of NATO tracking capabilities had been leaked to the Russians by the Walker family spy-ring, early in the 1980s, and the shock of learning how much the Western navies could hear had led the Soviet navy to institute a crash programme of new design.

The first of the latest type of Soviet submarine had recently been photographed by American satellites as it left Severomorsk on patrol, and again three weeks later when it returned, but no sound trace whatever had been found of it during the intervening period. Codenamed Akula by NATO assessors, the submarine was a massive eight thousand tons, similar in size to
Retribution
, but instead of ballistic missiles for threatening Western cities, she carried a stock of torpedoes and anti-ship missiles able to destroy boats like HMS
Retribution
before they could fire their weapons at Moscow.

The silent operation of the Akula class boats had made many of NATO's listening techniques obsolete. It was feared the Soviets could now patrol the Atlantic shipping lanes undetected by the West. No one knew how they had achieved such silence, but there were reports that the Akulas had a secret new motor in addition to their nuclear-powered turbines, a motor that used the revolutionary technique of electro-magnetic thrust, producing a speed of ten knots in almost total silence and without leaving any detectable wake.

‘Akula!' Carrington exclaimed hoarsely. ‘It has to be. Nothing else could be as quiet as that. The bastard must have been waiting for us!'

‘He's still closing on us, sir! Doesn't seem to realise we've slowed down,' the rating whispered excitedly. ‘I can definitely hear turbulence round his hull. I don't understand it, sir! Why can't I hear his fucking propeller?'

‘Because he's not using one,' Carrington answered softly. ‘Right, let's see what he can do!'

He leapt to his feet and strode back to the control room.

‘Wind in that VLF antenna, or we'll lose it. Then make maximum revs!' he barked. ‘Full speed ahead!'

The helmsman turned from his dials and hydroplane controls in astonishment. Polaris missile patrols were normally conducted at a stately three knots. Now the skipper was ordering a speed of thirty!

An even vibration took the submarine in its grip as the control rods were raised in the nuclear reactor core, producing an instant increase in heat and steam for the turbines. The needle on the dial showing the rotational speed of the propeller shaft rose steadily, until it approached the section marked in red. The chief engineer watched it closely.

‘Twenty-eight knots!' the executive officer called, peering fixedly at the log.

Carrington prowled round the control room, glaring at the dials one minute and studying the chart the next. He had taken a calculated gamble. If the Soviet submarine which he believed was sitting on his tail was to keep up with the speeding
Retribution
, it would have to abandon its silent electro-magnetic thrust and resort to the greater power of its nuclear reactor and large propeller. That was bound to be noisier, and they would be forcing the Akula to make a sonar fingerprint, allowing a Western navy to record its noise characteristics for the first time.

Carrington grinned to himself; either way he was going to win something. If the Akula stayed on his tail the Soviets would lose some of their secrets. If the boat stayed quiet, it would rapidly drop behind and
Retribution
would give it the slip.

Confident that all was well in the control room, the captain returned to the sonar booth where the rating was urgently pressing switches on his panel. Their high speed through the water was making so much noise on their own sonar systems that he could no longer tell if the Russian was behind them. Suddenly he cocked his head on one side.

‘Cavitation, sir!' he exclaimed. ‘Dead astern! Suddenly come on. Nothing there before, but I can hear the bubbles on his propeller now.'

‘So! We have a huntsman on our tail! A hunting pinko no less!' Carrington looked at Mike Smith for appreciation of the pun. He glanced across at the spools of the tape-recorder, rotating smoothly, and debated how to make the most of the opportunity that faced him.

‘We'll keep up this speed until he's firmly hooked, then cut the power and let him come closer,' he decided.

The sonar operator was busy with his controls again, filtering and processing the signals which were now audible not only to the towed array but also to the hydrophones fixed to the side of the hull. By comparing bearings from the two sets of sensors, he could now calculate that the Soviet submarine was fifty feet above them and about half a mile astern.