Nor were they aware that Captain Valentin Savitsky was at the end of his tether. B-59’s commander was unaware that the other three vessels in his flotilla had already submitted to the US Navy’s humiliating Submarine Surfacing and Identification Procedures and been allowed to go home. Valentin Savitsky did not know whether war had broken out. Valentin Savitsky, like every man on the B-59 had a blindingly violent headache from breathing the putrid air in the submarine. Valentin Savitsky, his judgement impaired by the onset of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide poisoning, felt himself to be personally responsible as flotilla commander for the honour of the new Soviet Navy. And Valentin Savitsky needed the consent of only two other men onboard B-59 to start a nuclear war.
The names of B-59’s Political Officer and of Savitsky’s second-in-command are lost to history since Northern Fleet’s records were almost entirely lost in the holocaust. However, it is known that Soviet tactical nuclear doctrine held that if all three men agreed unanimously, a nuclear-tipped torpedo might be deployed. Given what happened on the afternoon of Saturday 27th October 1962 it is safe to assume that just such a unanimous decision was reached.
The men in the sonar rooms of the USS Beale and the two other destroyers circling slowly within a thousand yard radius of the B-59 would have detected the outer door of Tube № 1 opening, the explosive rush of compressed air which expelled the torpedo into the grey waters of the Atlantic, the cavitations of the racing propeller.
Onboard the USS Beale alarms sounded.
Shortly afterwards the warhead detonated under her stern.
Chapter 2
HMS Talavera was shouldering into the south westerly gale blowing up from the English Channel at twelve knots. The destroyer was a long, lean hunter built to be a good sea boat first, second and last but her recently completed reconstruction as a Fast Air Detection Escort had added weight topside, and now she rolled without the stiffness of earlier years. Nevertheless, she took the ten foot seas on her port bow easily enough without the plunging, corkscrewing motion of many of the smaller, older destroyers in the Fleet.
Lieutenant Peter Christopher, who’d once been a martyr to sea sickness was immensely grateful for his new ship’s relatively sedate sea-keeping characteristics. Especially so, because his duties mostly kept him cooped up in the destroyer’s Combat Information Centre beneath the bridge. In heavy weather standing a bridge watch was actually a welcome relief. He was one of the Navy’s new breed of Electronic Warfare Officers, a radar and electronics specialist and as such, his posting to Talavera — with her suite of expensive state of the art ‘toys’, as the Captain called them — had been like all his Christmases coming at once.
Peter Christopher looked younger than his twenty-six years. He was tall, a fraction over six feet, angular rather than slim, with a boyish face topped with tousled fair hair and his grey blue eyes spoke of a keenly intelligent restless mind that was never really truly at rest. In his eight years — after his induction at Dartmouth the first three at University College London studying physics and applied electrical engineering alternating with detachments to the Marconi Labs in West London and the Telecommunications and the Royal Navy Radar Experimental Establishment at Portland — in the senior service he’d learned not to transmit his surfeit of nervous energy to the men under his command. He’d learned also not to worry about it when he was in the company of friends, or men who’d known him long enough to not treat it as a sign of weakness.
He’d been assigned to HMS Talavera half-way through her conversion at Chatham Dockyard. The Battle class destroyer had the distinction of having been the last of her class commissioned into the Royal Navy. Laid down late in the Second World War on 29th August 1944 at the yard of Messrs John Brown and Co on Clydebank, she’d not been launched until 27th August 1945 and then only to clear the slip. The majority of uncompleted War Emergency Program ships had gone for scrap soon after the war ended but Talavera, after lying half-built, apparently forgotten in a Scottish creek for four years, was taken in hand and eventually commissioned into the Royal Navy on 12th November 1950. In typical act of Admiralty bureaucratic muddle she’d been mothballed after a single, eighteen month commission, and but for the decision to convert six aging Battle class destroyers into so-called Fast Air Detection Escorts, she’d probably have been scrapped by now.
So, for all that Talavera had been laid down over eighteen years ago mechanically she was a relatively young ship whose youth had been enhanced by the radical nature of her recent conversion. Of the original ship only the hull, engines, funnel, forward superstructure and main armament remained. A huge new lattice foremast had sprouted immediately abaft the bridge — the base of this great structure straddling the entire beam of the ship — topped with a four ton Type 965 AKE-2 double bedstead aerial. A Type 293Q array was mounted on a platform beneath the huge bedsteads. The Type 965 aerial was the ship’s long-range ‘eye’, the Type 293Q was the most recent derivation of a Second World War vintage gunnery control ‘range and height-finder’. Abaft of the funnel all torpedo tubes and light AA armament had been discarded and a big, blocky deckhouse containing generators and radar rooms had been welded to the main deck. Between this new superstructure and the old aft deckhouse, a new lattice mainmast carried a Type 277Q height finder dish and several — variously temperamental — Electronic Warfare Support Measures (ESM) and Direction Finding (DF) aerials. The existing after deckhouse had been extended and strengthened to mount a quadruple GWS 21 Sea Cat surface-to-air-missile (SAM) system. On what remained of the cramped quarterdeck the ship retained its original Squid Anti-Submarine (A/S) mortar.
Peter Christopher had assumed this latter was a design-bureau oversight since given the new profile of the ship with its towering radar masts and a superstructure sprouting with twenty foot whip aerials, it was hard to see how the Squid could be safely fired over Talavera’s bow. Besides, the destroyer’s sonar was the one element of her electronic armoury that was distinctly not state of the art.
As for the GWS 21 Sea Cat SAM system he was reserving judgement. If the ship was under air attack she’d be manoeuvring like a scalded cat and he didn’t know how his radars were supposed to lock onto a close range fast moving modern jet aircraft in that scenario. He hoped this was something he’d discover during the intensive trials scheduled ahead of the ship’s first deployment. The four completed Battle Fast Air Detection conversions had all been rotated to the 7th Destroyer Squadron in Malta and he’d been wrestling to keep his emotions in check ever since his posting to HMS Talavera.
Thoughts of Malta and the prospect of finally meeting Marija Elizabeth Calleja stirred a welter of perturbing feelings that invariably distracted him from his duties. He’d resolved to try to not to think too far ahead, or to take things for granted which might so easily blow up in his face. He didn’t — for a nanosecond — try to put Marija out of his mind; for that was simply impossible. Instead, he did his best to sit her in a comfortable chair in a side room of his thoughts, somewhere close but just out of his direct line of sight. It wasn’t easy. Just before Talavera had sailed the Captain had taken him aside and informed him, confidentially, that sometime in March the ship was scheduled to transfer to Mediterranean Fleet. HMS Agincourt was due for a refit and when she returned to home waters, Talavera would take her place at Malta. All things being equal next spring he would finally come face to face with Marija and he hardly dared to believe it.