Skydancer (3 page)

‘Yes, I do,' Mary Maclean replied defensively. ‘But I keep the drawer locked whenever I'm out of the room. And I keep the key to the drawer in my handbag. It's always with me, I can assure you.'

The Commander's heart sank. This simple lapse of security procedures meant that his list of suspects had grown dramatically. Literally dozens of people could have attained access to the vital papers.

He watched intently as Anderson opened the file and checked through the sheaf of papers. The thirty sheets of paper were all numbered – and they were all there.

Duncan then took hold of the file and thumbed through the pages himself, until he found the one that matched the photocopy in the buff folder. Each sheet had been hand-stamped with a Ministry seal. He checked the angle of the imprint on the original and on the copy. They matched perfectly.

‘No doubt about that,' he muttered to himself with a certain satisfaction.

‘May I . . . may I enquire what this is about?' Mary asked uneasily.

‘Someone's got at the file – and copied it,' Duncan responded bluntly.

She gasped. ‘And you think it's because . . .' her voice faltered.

‘We're not thinking anything yet, Mary,' Anderson interposed as gently as he could.

‘Well I should hope not,' she remarked almost indignantly. She had put in long service at the Ministry and was proud of her record. Skydancer had played a significant part in her recent life, and it was not solely because of her professional involvement. In the last three months there had been personal reasons why she found it painful just to hear mention of the project.

From the look on Alec Anderson's face it was beginning to hurt him too.

‘Would you mind, Mary?'

Anderson was handing her the file.

‘Would you mind putting this back in the vault?'

As the two men re-entered the office of the Permanent Undersecretary, Sir Marcus Beckett's face expressed his heartfelt wish that they could have solved the mystery. But the Commander's brooding scowl and Anderson's look of shocked bewilderment soon dashed his hopes.

‘How the hell could this have happened?' he demanded when they had told him what they had learned. ‘These are about the most sensitive documents in the whole bloody building, for Christ's sake! How on earth could someone make copies without your knowing?'

Anderson made as if to speak, but no words emerged.

‘What do you know about this, Anderson?' Sir Marcus continued, looking ready to launch a physical attack on anyone he could hold responsible for the disaster.

‘Nothing at all, PUS,' Anderson half stammered in reply. His face was flushed. ‘I'm shocked . . . utterly.'

‘I'll start a review of procedure immediately, sir,' the security man broke in, eager to press on with a detailed investigation.

‘It's a bit bloody late for that!' Beckett snapped. ‘The bird seems to have flown!'

He strode across the room to glare angrily out of the window at the Thames Embankment below. Peter Joyce stared at the Undersecretary's hands clasped tightly behind him. The fingers of one hand turned white with the pressure of his grip, and then began to colour again as the sight of the slow-moving river traffic seemed to exert a calming effect.

‘All right,' Sir Marcus said eventually, breaking the uneasy silence, ‘let's look at the worse case scenario.'

He sat himself at his desk, and drew a blank sheet of paper from a drawer. Then he wrote the figure ‘1' at the top left-hand corner.

‘We have to assume that every page of the document
has been photocopied,' he began. ‘There would be little purpose in doing just one, unless someone is simply trying to make a point.' He paused to look round at the expectant faces of the three men opposite.

‘Well? Is someone trying to make a point?' he demanded. ‘Someone who knew there was a weakness in the security system, and wanted to show it up?'

His enquiry was greeted by murmured denials and frowns.

‘What about your secretary, Anderson? Could she be up to something? Any odd behaviour lately? Change of life, that sort of thing?'

‘Oh . . . I hardly think so, PUS,' Alec Anderson answered hurriedly. ‘She's a bit young for that, and although she's been careless with the keys, I'm sure her loyalty is not in question.'

Anderson cast a furtive glance at Peter Joyce, but the scientist stared back impassively.

Sir Marcus began to write.

‘Then we have to assume we are talking about espionage,' he declared. ‘The assumption must be that someone had copied the Skydancer plans and is feeding them to the Russians. But why was this single page found in a rubbish bin? Were the Russians meant to pick it up from there? It's damned odd; I mean there must be dozens of safer places to make the handover – why choose a rubbish bin?'

‘I've already got someone observing the place, sir,' the Commander interjected, ‘in case someone comes looking for the document. But I agree it's an odd place.'

‘The big question,' Beckett continued, as if he had not heard what the security man had just said, ‘is whether this bungle occurred at the start of the handover process, or whether the Russians already have all or most of the rest of the papers.'

There was no sure answer to that question, but as Peter Joyce had explained, the Skydancer plans were of critical national importance, and if the secrets were already largely in the Russians' hands, several hundred million pounds of taxpayers' money could now have been totally wasted. A political hornet's nest of huge dimensions would be stirred up the moment news of this security leak emerged.

There was a chance, just the slightest chance that the mystery could be solved rapidly, Beckett thought to himself. In which case it might never need to become public knowledge, and the Prime Minister could be spared the damaging publicity and the taunting from the opposition in parliament. He would have to call in the security service immediately, that was clear, but he would hold back from telling his Secretary of State about it in the hope the matter could be quickly resolved, without the politicians' involvement and the inevitable and damaging attention of the media that would follow.

Bringing the meeting to an abrupt end, he instructed his officials to return to their duties, and to discuss the matter with no one other than the men from the security departments. After they left the sixth-floor office, Alec Anderson and Peter Joyce paused in the corridor outside to look at one another uneasily. Each recognised alarm and suspicion on the other's face. Then they nodded at one another and walked off in different directions, without speaking.

Peter Joyce hardly noticed the road as he motored back to Aldermaston. From time to time he touched his forehead to push back those strands of hair that stubbornly refused to grow any way but forwards. His usual air of
confidence had largely evaporated that morning.

He was driving back at only half the speed he had maintained on his journey up to London, his mind in turmoil as he began to assess what a devastating blow this security leak was about to deal him. For the moment he was less concerned by the critical national issue of the leakage of nuclear secrets; he was gripped instead by a personal foreboding, a fear that it could emerge that indirectly and unwittingly he himself had been somehow responsible for the leak – and that those closest to him would see this as just retribution on him.

He vividly remembered the day, three months earlier, when he had first taken that set of vital documents up to London. They were to form the core of a top-level briefing of Government ministers who demanded to know in detail what this vast amount of public money had been spent on. He remembered the occasion with painful clarity, because it was the last time he had spent an evening with Mary Maclean – the night on which he had to tell her that their relationship was over.

Their love affair had lasted two years. It had begun almost by accident, and had blossomed freely, without strains and complications, at a period when his marriage to Belinda was proving increasingly stressful. But eventually Mary had begun to make assumptions about their future together, assumptions involving steps he was not prepared to take.

She had been devastated when he had told her their affair must come to an end. It was the night before the ministerial briefing; and he had visited her flat. Guiltily he remembered now that the top secret plans had been in his briefcase all the time. The crazy – but not so crazy – thought now passed through his mind, that she could have copied the papers later and given them to the
Soviets in an act of revenge. ‘Hell hath no fury . . .' But no – he could not really believe that.

Peter stamped on the brake pedal and swerved into the left-hand lane, as he realised he was about to overshoot the turning off the motorway. He cut in front of a lorry which hooted loudly.

‘Damn!' the scientist hissed. He would end up crashing if he was not more careful. Heading for the country lanes leading back to Aldermaston, he slowed down further, and continued to ponder how events might develop.

His secret affair with Mary Maclean was bound to be uncovered. The security men would question him closely on his care of those secret papers, and be alarmed by what they learned. They would also talk to his wife, and discover she was a confirmed anti-nuclear activist – and an associate of political groupings well to the left of the normal British political spectrum. They might begin to speculate whether it really was only now that those secrets had gone missing, and not months or even years previously.

And what would they say to Belinda? Would the security men ask her how much she knew of her husband's affair with Mary? She had not known anything – Peter was certain of that. But how would she react when she found out? Would she walk out on him? And what of the children, for whose sake he had finally chosen to reject his mistress and preserve his marriage – would he lose them after all?

‘What a mess!' he muttered as he finally turned the car through the gates of Aldermaston.

Once back at his desk, he instructed his secretary to discourage telephone callers. Peter Joyce was a methodical man who had spent his working life confronting apparently insoluble problems. Pulling out a thick
notepad, he sat back and forced his brain to concentrate. First he had to list and analyse the dangers that both he and the Skydancer project now faced. Then he had to think of ways to counter them, or at least to limit the damage.

Three thousand miles away the surface of the western Atlantic heaved and surged in a long, lazy swell, the aftermath of a depression which had moved off to the east to dump its rain on the soft green hills of Ireland.

Five hundred feet below that surface, the dark, still waters were unaffected by the weather above. It was down there that HMS
Retribution
slipped silently westwards, her 8,400 tons of sleek, black steel propelled by the tireless energy of her nuclear reactor. Longer than a football pitch, the leviathan of the Clyde was in her true element down there, amongst the other weird creatures of the deep that relied on sound, and sound alone, to protect themselves from predators.

And predators there were, in increasing numbers, for these boats and their crews who lived under water for two months at a time. The normal role of ballistic missile submarines like HMS
Retribution
was to lie in wait, lurking in the Atlantic depths far enough from the Russian coast to go undetected, but close enough for the sixteen Polaris missiles on board to stay within range of their targets. To lie in wait in the fervent hope that the very existence of her weapons would deter a war, and that they would never have to fire the rockets that could destroy several Soviet cities and slaughter tens of millions of people.

The predators for HMS
Retribution
were the Russian hunter-killer submarines, whose task was to scour the oceans for Western missile boats. If a war was ever to
start, the Russians would try to sink
Retribution
before her deadly missiles could be fired.

The navies of Nato had the reverse task of tracking the Soviet missile boats, and in peacetime the roles of hunter and hunted were constantly rehearsed in a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek.

Evenly placed along the smooth flank of
Retribution
's hull were small, flat plates, the ears of the submarine which could hear other vessels hundreds of miles away. Trailing behind the boat's fan-like propeller, a cable hundreds of yards long towed an array of hydrophones which could listen for distant sounds, unencumbered by the tiny noises generated by the movement of the submarine itself through the water. This was the most powerful tool of all in the electronic armoury that had enabled the Royal Navy's ‘bombers' – as the polaris boats were called – to stay ahead of the game, to hear the Russians before the Russians heard them, and to remain undetected on their Atlantic patrols.

In the belly of the submarine's massive carcase one hundred and forty-three men lived their lives, apparently oblivious of their great depth under water, the pressure of which was such that, without the protection of the steel hull, it would crush them to death within seconds.

It had been nearly two weeks since they had last seen daylight, and Commander Anthony Carrington, the captain of
Retribution,
was looking forward to smelling fresh air again. He had just announced on the boat's public address system that they were due to dock in Port Canaveral, Florida, the following day. An air of anticipation and readjustment had immediately swept through the boat.

Cut off as they were from the regulating influence of the sun, the crew's time on board was broken into periods of work and periods of rest, rather than of day
and night. Men found it easy to lose their sense of time. Now, though, with the prospect of shore leave imminent, they began to adjust their watches from Greenwich Mean Time to the hours observed in the girly-bars of Florida.