“Two-eight-zero…Come up ten degrees on the planes…”
“Water temperature?” Simon Collingwood asked quietly in the sepulchral stillness of the control room.
“Consistent gradient, sir.”
The Captain of HMS Dreadnought suppressed a scowl. He’d hoped for a thermocline — a thin layer of water significantly warmer or colder than it ought, statistically to be given its depth in the water column which would act as a partial barrier to sonar detection — somewhere between two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet down. Never mind, one rarely got what one deserved in this life.
“Level the boat. We’ll check fore and aft trim then we’ll go down to four hundred feet.”
“Level the boat, aye, sir. Check trim, aye, sir.”
“CVN Six-five is altering to starboard,” reported Dreadnought’s Executive Officer, Lieutenant-Commander Max Forton, without looking up from the CIC plot. The thirty-four year old career submariner had come aboard the boat three weeks after the October War. By then it had been confirmed that the boat’s original captain and several other officers — detached to Southampton for training on the specially constructed Dreadnought simulator — had been ‘taking in a show in London’ and ‘doing the town’ when the balloon went up. “If we turn onto one-two-five pretty much about now she’ll steam right over us again, sir.”
Simon Collingwood smiled what he hoped was not an overtly predatory smile. He raised a hand to rub his stubbly chin. As many as possible of the boat’s inessential functions had been turned off to quieten her operations. One such inessential function was pumping hot water for washing and shaving.
“Helm. Make your course one-two-five degrees if you please.”
“The boat is trimmed fore and aft, sir,” called the diving officer lowly. “Ready to dive to four hundred feet.”
“Belay that. Hold at three hundred.”
“Hold at three hundred feet, aye, sir.”
“Range to CVN Six-five?” CVN65 was the US Navy’s nomenclature for its first, eighty thousand ton thousand feet long nuclear-powered super carrier, the USS Enterprise. It was probably no accident that the Americans had deployed their biggest, most powerful and certainly most intimidating asset in waters adjacent to the European continental shelf prior to the arrival of the first of the Operation Manna convoys.
“Five thousand yards on the port bow, sir.”
“Constant speed?”
“Negative, sir. It looks like she’s working up to launch or recover aircraft. She’s making twenty-three knots… Correction, twenty-four…”
Max Forton sidled over to join his Captain.
“She’s obviously upset to see us go, sir,” he observed wryly. The younger man was built like a whippet. Dreadnought’s men knew him as an angry perfectionist with a wit that could sometimes be brutally sardonic, and who knew every inch of the boat like he knew the back of his hand. Submariners didn’t mind if their officers were martinets so long as they were very, very good at their jobs. Besides, if Dreadnought’s Exec was a holy terror, they knew their Captain was probably one of the calmest heads in the Navy.
“We’ll run a stern attack simulation once she’s gone past us, Mr Forton,” Simon Collingwood decided, mirroring his second in command’s roguish smirk. “How many times have we sunk the Big E now?”
“About a dozen and counting, sir!”
There was a whispered murmur of chortling and gently gloating amusement in the control room.
“Everybody on their toes if you please,” the Captain of HMS Dreadnought declared quietly. With eighty thousand tons of aircraft carrier rushing towards the boat this would be a bad time for somebody to make a mistake. While the forefront of his mind ran methodically through the tactical complexities of the current situation and planned the simulated attack Dreadnought would carry out from astern of the carrier in about ten minutes time, he reflected on the delicious irony of his command’s very existence.
HMS Dreadnought as a project would have been impossible without the active assistance of, and the subsequent massive transfer of the US Navy’s most secret and most advanced technology. Dreadnought incorporated all the lessons learned in the design, construction and operation of the USS Nautilus, enabling the Royal Navy to bypass at least five and probably as many as ten years development time in joining the nuclear powered submarine club. That this had been possible was down to two remarkable men, and a little known clause in the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement.
The first remarkable man was Admiral the Earl of Mountbatten, the First Sea Lord. The second was Admiral Sir Wilfred Woods, Flag Officer Submarines in the mid-1950s and between 1958 and 1960 Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic based in Norfolk, Virginia. Mountbatten was the political powerhouse with a trans-Atlantic contact book unrivalled in history, Woods the professional and technical master submariner who’d spent every minute of his time in America making friends.
Initially, the two men had planned to build a new generation of all-British nuclear boats. Given that the Americans had shut Britain out of the nuclear weapons loop almost as soon as the Second World War ended, this seemed a realistic basis on which to proceed. As late as 1956 Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, the high priest and implacable guardian of the US naval nuclear power programme had vetoed Mountbatten’s request to visit the USS Nautilus. In retrospect this marked the high water mark of US-British non co-operation in the field because later that year Rickover came to the United Kingdom with an offer to supply third generation S3W reactor technology — then being deployed in the American Skate class nuclear powered attack boats — to the Royal Navy. Behind the scene Mountbatten had been hard at work, capitalising on his old friendship with Arleigh Burke, the US Navy’s Chief of Operations. Eventually, Rickover was persuaded — presumably reluctantly — to agree to the transfer of the latest reactor technology under the terms of the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement. Dreadnought was built around an American power plant; a British hull populated with British combat systems heavily influenced by virtually unrestricted access to the Electric Boat Company’s yard at Groton where vessels of the Skipjack class were currently under construction. Dreadnought was being made ready for reactor initiation and her first ‘in dock’ dive trial at the time of the October War.
“CVN Six-five is making two-six knots…”
“She’s altering course to port…”
Simon Collingwood glanced at his Executive Officer who shrugged and returned to his CIC plot.
“Helm. Steady as you go.” He called across the control room. “Where’s the nearest escort, Number One?”
“Two thousand yards off the Big E’s starboard bow, sir!”
The carrier’s change of course would put Dreadnought between her and the screening destroyer.
“Belay simulated attack evolution,” he decided, thinking and speaking aloud. “All stop. Diving,” he added, “hold us at this level if you can please. Rig the boat for absolute silence.”
Absolute silence was a nice idea but wholly impractical, impossible to achieve on Dreadnought. Collingwood had studied the blueprints for the next class of Royal Navy hunter killers and they would — if they were ever built — incorporate all manner of new innovations to dampen sound outputs. Everything from massively cushioned power plants to several inches of rubber coating covering every inch of the pressure hull. No matter, Dreadnought would run as silently as possible.
The Americans had transferred so much technology and divulged so much classified information that even while Dreadnought had been being laid down, on 12th June 1959, Rolls-Royce, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and the Admiralty Research Station at Dounreay had begun work on a wholly British nuclear propulsion suite. The first of a new class of nuclear powered attack boats, HMS Valiant, had been ordered in August 1960 and laid down in a dock at Barrow-in-Furness near the already well-progressed Dreadnought in January 1962. Valiant’s construction had not been well-advanced by the night of the October War and as far as Collingwood knew her partially formed skeleton had remained untouched since that day.