“Are we plotting this?” Peter asked, wondering if he ought to have already ordered somebody to start a tactical plot.
The ship’s Combat Information Centre (CIC) was only partially operational because many of the critical automated feeds to the ‘plot’ — the big table that displayed the tactical situation out to a distance of over a hundred miles — were still nominal, courtesy of the shortcomings of HM Dockyard Chatham.
“No, sir,” CPO Crawley reported, standing at Peter Christopher’s shoulder. “That’s a lot of activity from nowhere in no time at all,” the older man observed. The CIC had become deadly quiet. The whir of fans, the hum of the score of cathode ray tubes seemed unnaturally loud. He turned, unbidden. “Griffin, warm up the ops board.”
“Aye, aye, Chief.” The other man was already obeying as he acknowledged.
Suddenly, there were more contacts on the big Type 965 screen.
The ‘ops board’ or ‘tactical plot’ in the CIC was a table on which the outputs of the Type 293 and the Type 965 would automatically repeat providing a foundation of real time tactical data upon which other inputs could be selectively added or removed at a touch of a button to provide a ‘layered’ representation of the surrounding battle zone. Superficially, HMS Talavera’s ‘plot’ was only a glorified electronic fire control table. However, in a real combat situation it would be continuously updated by additional inputs from other air and sea units and real time tactical inputs from the flotilla leader or battle group flagship’s own CIC. The technical wizardry involved in bringing together and representing, in a coherent and readily translated way the modern three-dimensional electronic battlefield still turned most old Navy men’s heads.
“Inform the bridge that the CIC plot is being activated,” Peter Christopher called, belatedly taking command of a situation he ought to have assumed command of long before Chief Crawley had got the ball rolling.
“Contacts climbing,” Called the technician in front of the Type 293 screen. “I’d say at maximum climb rates, sir.”
“Bridge acknowledges ops board nominal, sir.”
“Thank you.” Peter Christopher had never taken his eyes off the screens. “How many is that?” He asked Ralph Hobbs.
“Twenty, thirty. No, no, more than that, a lot more than that…”
Distant contacts were merging together, losing individual identities, coalescing into the unusually noisy electronic background. Automatic systems were attempting to label targets but becoming swamped with real and false returns. HMS Talavera’s contact detection and tracking systems were state of the art. It made no difference. Target identification was a mess because hardly any of the target’s transponders were squawking friend or foe codes. The big Type 965 bedsteads might be all seeing but there simply wasn’t the human or the mechanical computational power to process the mass of returns when the targets weren’t squawking IFF. Especially, not in an environment when the atmosphere was buzzing and squealing with a mounting barrage of electro-magnetic countermeasures transmissions. Sooner or later somebody somewhere would work out how to stop the latest radars getting swamped this easily but that was no comfort tonight.
Peter Christopher’s mind was racing.
He knew what he was seeing but he didn’t understand it.
However, for the moment the fact that he didn’t understand it didn’t matter.
He reached for the bridge phone.
“Bridge,” rasped the voice at the other end of the line.
“EWO for the officer of the watch, please.”
There was a short pause.
“What is it Peter?” Drawled the Talavera’s executive office, Lieutenant-Commander Hugo Montgommery.
Peter Christopher had taken a liking to the destroyer’s second-in-command from the outset. Hugo Montgommery was an old hand; a reservist who had come back into the Navy after his wife had died — in childbirth — and dedicated himself anew to a career he’d previously eschewed for a job in a City of London stockbroker’s office and marital bliss on land. Montgommery was calm, patient, very competent and a veritable font of Service knowledge. He was also a good, old-fashioned seaman which was why he’d taken the middle watch on this filthy North Sea night.
“Are you watching the Type 965 repeater, sir?”
“Yes, looks like it’s throwing another tantrum.”
The younger man hesitated for a moment. He glanced at the screen. What it was showing made no sense. None whatsoever. But he didn’t think the system was throwing a ‘tantrum’.
“I don’t believe so, sir.”
“Oh. Tell me more.”
“I think we’re watching every single V-Bomber base and every single US airbase flushing their birds as fast as they possibly can, sir.” Peter didn’t recognise his own voice. “Absolutely everything at once, sir.”
There was a pause of several seconds.
“Very good. Keep me informed, Peter.”
“Jamming,” Ralph Hobbs declared, thinking out aloud. “Airborne jamming,” he added, as an afterthought. “A lot of it. Many, many frequencies. No, forget that, spectrum-wide jamming!”
Peter Christopher sucked his teeth, glanced around at the other men in the CIC. CPO Crawley shrugged, nobody offered a comment.
“Has anybody ever seen anything like this before?”
There were shakes of the head.
The news about Cuba and America had been worrying but they’d been at sea for forty-eight hours, largely out of contact with the outside world barring snatches of news they’d heard in passing. The ship wasn’t at a heightened alert level, although that didn’t mean a great deal because Talavera wasn’t due to start taking onboard the remaining 93 members of her normal peacetime complement of 240 men for another fortnight. Currently, she was operating on a full engineering and sea-keeping establishment, with an over-sized mixed electrical division of specialists and civilian workers. The galley was fully manned but there was nobody to man the guns, the Sea Cat launcher or the Squid A/S mortar, even if all the magazines hadn’t been empty. Moreover, many of the sea duty men and engineers onboard Talavera were freshly trained recruits straight from HMS Sultan and HMS Collingwood. HMS Talavera was a warship in name alone.
Peter Christopher concentrated on the evidence of the radar screens.
There were a lot of aircraft in the air over East Anglia. Aircraft climbing, fanning out across the North Sea. The jamming was getting worse. He knew that a proportion of the V-Bomber force was often kept on Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) — literally standing at the end of the runway fully fuelled and bombed up and ready to go to war at a five minutes’ notice — and that practice scrambles were relatively frequent. But even as he watched the repeater screen more contacts were appearing, climbing like bats out of Hell. And nobody was broadcasting IFF signals. Nobody.
“What’s going on?”
“Captain in the compartment!” Yelled Jack Griffin.
“As you were,” Commander David Penberthy directed evenly.
“The air space over East Anglia is filling up with contacts, sir,” Peter Christopher reported. It was vital to report exactly what he was seeing and exactly what he knew to be the facts before speculation ran rife.
Commander David Penberthy, the forty-six year old captain of HMS Talavera placed a hand on his Electronic Warfare Officer’s shoulder for a moment. Like the executive officer, Hugo Montgommery, the Old Man was a World War II veteran. He’d spent most of the war hunting U-Boats in the North Atlantic. HMS Talavera was the third destroyer he’d commanded; a complex, rebuilt ship like Talavera with a largely green crew was invariably placed in a very ‘safe pair of hands’.