Atlantic’ Again Revell looked at the printout of information endlessly and repeatedly marching along the base of the screen. ‘The damned thing’s speed is what’s got me foxed. I expected those surface units to come out of the Sound going hell for leather, this ship is doing barely eighteen knots. How long before we get it on visual?’
‘Forty-three minutes, at present speed.’
‘Good, we should have the generator functioning again by then, if Burke can prevent it from making more batches of petrol cubes.’
Cline decided to have a last try. ‘Could it be a decoy, to flush us out?’
In his mind Revell had already considered and dismissed such a possibility. ‘I don’t doubt the Ruskies have got a few time-worn hulks they might risk for that purpose, but their admiral’s have been a bit short on subtlety and initiative lately. Anyway, the loss of the tonnage might not matter to them, but they’re short on experienced ratings and artificers. Their lives wouldn’t matter, but their skills would take time to replace. No, whatever that is, we can take it at face value.’ He turned to York, who’d been listening to the exchange, and rather enjoying the shooting down of the bombardier’s pet theories. ‘Get on to Command, ask them what it is.’
While the message was tapped in, and the buttons pressed to encode, scramble and condense the text for a transmission of barely a second’s duration, via satellite, to Command HQ, Revell watched the imperceptibly moving trace. The wait was surprisingly short.
A burst of muted chatter from the printer, and York tore off the strip it disgorged and handed it to the officer.
‘Either they don’t believe us, or they haven’t done their homework. We’ll risk another transmission. Tell them we’ve got a blip that’s big and real and heading our way. I want to know of any Warsaw Pact vessel of that size that’s been reported anywhere between here and Bornholm in the last ten days. The damned ship can’t have materialised out of nowhere.’
The wait was longer this time, and when the printer did come to life it did so fitfully, as though the information from the retrieval system the other end was feeding the various pieces of information to them one bit at a time, as it unearthed them in its comprehensive banks.
Four vessels were listed on the ribbon of paper that Revell almost snatched from York. The facts as they were presented were cryptically stark, but his memory, supplementing that of the computer, filled in the ugly detail. Two were tankers, the survivors of a convoy of fifteen that had run the gauntlet of NATO air-attacks and long-range bombardment, from an East German port to the Russian and Hungarian forces occupying the Danish islands: Both had been sunk on the return journey, along with the last of their corvette and frigate escorts. The third vessel on the short list was the Polish floating crane VK27, which had been towed, to Copenhagen to speed the clearance of the last of the scuttled British and Dutch cargo ships from the harbour.
Number four, the last, was a Polish grain carrier, whose crew had loaded it with family and friends and attempted to reach the West. They had failed when the ship, crippled by a NATO mine and dead in the water, had been sunk by shore-based Russian aircraft. NATO naval units, too late on the scene, had only been able to take bodies from the water, after beating off the MIG’s that had spent an hour repeatedly strafing the lifeboats full of women and children. Revell’s mind was crammed with such facts, an endless catalogue of horror and brutality. No wonder the press back home had stopped reporting every incident of that type committed by the Communists. After a while it had become overwhelming, and the people had started to disbelieve. So now they got a ration, only one or two such stories a week, and those chosen not for their truth, but for their variety and plausibility. The worst they never heard; would never have believed.
Crumpling up the paper the major balled it in his fist and hurled it into a far corner. ‘According to the Staff and their all-knowing computer we have a ghost ship coming at us.’
‘I don’t believe in ghosts, Major, not ones that register on radar. Who ever heard of thirteen thousand tons of ectoplasm?’
‘Let’s get Boris in here, he can start to earn his keep properly.’ While York went to fetch the Russian, Revell stepped outside. In the house it was cold enough, but in the open…like jumping into freezing water, it took his breath away. He’d told Cline to cover the temperature monitor. Now it had gone so low that it could only be of academic interest. It would have been good to take a deep breath, flush the smell of petrol and oil from his lungs, but the air was so sharp, so biting and numbing that he did it by degrees, exhaling and inhaling slowly through pursed lips to warm the air before it reached down into his body.
Within the house the generator coughed and spluttered into reluctant life, to expire a moment later. Second and third attempts to start it met with no success and were followed by swearing from Burke.
Revell thought of the gunners huddled in their tents close by their charges. They’d been marvellous so far, the survivors doing the work of twice their number. What they’d be going through out there would be a further hard test of their mettle. They knew only as much as they could glean from the brief periodic exchanges over the land lines. Apart from that fragile contact with the house the artillery men were totally on their own, as they would be when the action started. Then they would have to leap from, chilled lethargy into instant sweating action, traversing and elevating the launchers in accordance with the instructions that would flash on to the ‘black boxes’ attached to each one. Then, when the massive projectiles had gone screaming on their way, in expectation of a counter strike against which they’d have virtually no protection, they would have to hurriedly reload and go through the whole mad process again, and again, until an enemy missile registered on their site or no more targets were presented.
‘They, and Revell, knew which was by far the most likely alternative. Mobility was the artillery’s only protection on the modern battlefield, arid the towed launchers had none without the tractor. Enemy radar would pick up the rockets in flight and, by computing their path, track back along to their place of origin. What happened then depended only on the armaments of the vessel involved.
The command centre at the house shared the danger, not simply because of the Russian tactic of blanket retaliation, but because of the mass of electronic emanations which would come from it at the height of the battle. On the latest detector equipment it would stand out like a flashing sign in the frozen landscape. Since most of the enemy ships were brand-new or fresh from extensive refits, they would have that latest equipment and the weapons systems to go with them.
‘That ghost ship is coming into range of our cameras. Shall I switch on now, Major?’ Cline let his hand hover over the controls. ‘Give it a moment longer. Another mile or so and we’ll get better definition. No point in wasting juice and straining our eyes trying to make out a blur.’ In the kitchen Revell could hear Burke’s successive attempts to start the generator. Each time the recalcitrant engine would turn over for a few seconds, then fade, sometimes with a subdued fart-like backfire. ‘OK, let’s see it now.’
‘There it is.’ With the co-ordinates already supplied and fed in from the radar, Cline’s screen immediately picked up the ship. ‘Range is five miles, and it’s reducing speed. Down to ten knots, Major, and still slowing.’
Revell examined the angular grey outline of the amphibious warfare vessel. Every detail showed clearly, from the 76mm mount on the raised bow, to the pennant flying from the rear of the stern helicopter pad. The number ‘120’ was painted large, in white, on the bow aft of the stowed anchor. He knew the number, and knew that Cline’s frantic thumbing through identification lists would not find it, but he needed to confirm what was much stronger than a suspicion. ‘Boris, come here. Can you make out the name, it’s just below the rear platform?’