Oh, what a wicked web we weave…
It was hardly surprising the Service Chiefs were getting nervous.
“My fellow chiefs have asked me to ask you,” the First Sea Lord explained, at pains not to seem to be interrogating his political master, whom he liked and respected as a man and whom he trusted to keep a confidence, “why that woman is on the plane to Scotland?”
“I’ve given that question a great deal of thought, David,” Jim Callaghan said with a sardonic twitch of his pale lips.
“Um,” the professional head of the Royal Navy grunted. “The woman has undoubted organisational and analytical skills and she has a knack of getting things done but her and her friends, especially Airey Neave, have a particular talent for putting people’s backs up. Frankly, I was under the impression she and the Prime Minister were…”
“Chalk and cheese?” Peter Thorneycroft suggested dryly.
“Yes, exactly.”
Chapter 15
Commander Simon Collingwood released the twist grip handles of the attack periscope as the gun metal tube slid smoothly into its well in the middle of the control room of the Royal Navy’s first, and in the foreseeable future, only nuclear powered attack submarine.
“Take us down to three hundred feet,” he ordered quietly. He glanced up at the chronometer above the helmsman position in the forward bulkhead. “We will hold on zero-three-zero degrees for five minutes and then turn right onto one-two-zero degrees. Five minutes on my mark…now!”
The order was repeated back to him.
The diving officer was calling depths.
“One-zero-zero…One-one-five…”
Collingwood stretched his aching neck. He’d spend most of the last quarter of an hour on his hands and knees at the attack periscope desperately trying to show no more than six to twelve inches of the scope above the water. Dreadnought was running silent, or rather, as silently as any four thousand ton man-made denizen of the deep could possibly run. Her Westinghouse propulsion plant was every bit as noisy as that powering the first classes of US Navy nuclear attack boats and Dreadnought hadn’t — as odd as it might seem — been built to be a state of the art operational warship. She was a work in progress — albeit a remarkably accomplished work in progress — primarily intended to be the foundation or test bed upon which the Royal Navy would subsequently develop its own unique design and tactical doctrines basically, learning as it went along independently of the USN. She was no less deadly than her US Navy counterparts but pound for pound, she was inherently ‘noisier’.
“One-four-five feet…One-six-zero…”
The deck beneath Simon Collingwood’s feet was inclined down by the bow by six degrees according the inclinometer above the planes man’s head. The submarine was flying slowly down into the cold black depths of the North Atlantic.
They’d been stalking the Enterprise Battle Group for six days and until yesterday evening their quarry had been blissfully unaware of Dreadnought’s presence — quite literally — in their midst. Now it was time to skulk away and live to fight another day because Commander Simon Collingwood was one of a growing number of Royal Navy officers who’d realised that one day, it was inevitable that there would be another war. But hopefully, not today. His orders had been to shadow the Enterprise Battle Group, collect combat intelligence and withdraw to a ‘safe range’ if discovered. He didn’t think the Americans had him in their sights right here and now but by the way they’d suddenly begun to zig zag and the way the close escorts were clinging close to the flanks of the huge nuclear powered carrier, something had panicked the Yanks. He’d been amazed how long it had taken ‘the opposition’ to catch the scent of the rat in their water; although not, in truth, very surprised.
The seventh HMS Dreadnought, pennant number S101, had been built by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, launched by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on Trafalgar Day 1960, and after much sweat, toil and terrifying trial and error commissioned into the Royal Navy in May that year. She was powered by a fifth generation Westinghouse S5W reactor that was in many respects identical to that fitted in the USS Skipjack class hunter killer boats. In fact, handled adroitly, Dreadnought could be made to sound and manoeuvre exactly like an American boat.
The possibilities of this characteristic had first lodged in Simon Collingwood’s mind over three years ago when he was posted to Groton, Connecticut, to train alongside his US Navy ‘allies’ ahead of joining first the Design Project Team at Barrow-in-Furness, and later becoming the Naval Construction Liaison Officer (Engineering and Electrical Systems) as Dreadnought was slowly transformed from a lifeless half-completed hulk to a living, breathing deadly, mind-bogglingly complex fighting machine.
The Royal Navy had begun investigating the possibilities of seaborne nuclear propulsion plants in 1946. The work had never had a very high priority and during the Korean War, in 1952, all research was suspended. It had not been until in 1955, when the US Navy commissioned the USS Nautilus that the Royal Navy, until then the acknowledged masters of anti-submarine warfare had awakened to the fact that everything had changed. In exercises with the new American vessel it was horrifyingly obvious that the tactics and the technology that had won the Battle of the Atlantic simply didn’t work against the new undersea threat. Faced with attempting to join the nuclear submarine building game from what was essentially a standing start, in the mid 1950s there seemed no prospect of a British version of the Nautilus joining the Fleet for at least a decade at the earliest, or perhaps not even before the end of the 1960s. It was a depressing scenario for the Royal Navy and for the politicians who’d let it happen by starving the original reactor research project of funds and, compounded their error, by stopping it dead in its tracks at the very moment the Americans were racing ahead.
Simon Collingwood felt the bow down angle of the boat alter.
The diving officer went on calling depths.
“Two-six-five feet…”
The captain of HMS Dreadnought planned to run across the stern of the Enterprise Battle Group to test if the hunters had had more than a fleeting inkling of the boat’s proximity to their massive charge. Two days ago the big carrier had slowed to sixteen knots to save her smaller consorts a battering in the vile weather topside. Collingwood had taken the opportunity to steam up the carrier’s wake and to sit — for the best part of seven hours — two hundred feet under her keel. When the weather had moderated the Enterprise had worked back up to twenty-eight knots and resumed flying operations. In a real shooting war he might have tried to hold station; he’d opted for prudence and let the target steam off into the distance before running fast and deep to the east to get ahead of his quarry, then lain silent until the whole Battle Group obligingly sailed right over the top of him. It was the kind of sport a true submariner lived and died for, the most exhilarating, draining, marvellous, frightening, addictive thing he’d ever done in his whole life!