Talavera’s captain was a big man who didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard or to exert his authority. He was known to have a blowtorch temper and very occasionally, a lashing tongue but from what Peter had seen so far he was careful to reserve both for people whom he’d decided weren’t up to the job.
“What do you think is afoot, Peter?” The older man asked with a conversational sang froid that left a lasting impression of everybody in the CIC.
Peter Christopher hesitated, collected his wits.
“I’d say the V-Bomber Force has scrambled, sir,” he reported, his voice thick with tension.
“I think we have missiles launching!” Ralph Hobbs interjected from out of the nearby, green glowing gloom. “One, two, three…”
Altered symbols danced around the new contacts.
“The ESM and DF arrays are getting swamped with noise, sir,” called another voice in the gloom. “All around the compass now, sir.”
The Captain of HMS Talavera patted his EWO’s shoulder again and stood tall in the eerily illuminated CIC.
“More missiles launching,” Ralph Hobbs grunted, not quite believing what he was seeing on the cold, uncaring repeaters.
Commander David Penberthy stepped to the bulkhead telephone.
“Bridge, this is the Captain speaking.” A momentary delay, and then, very calmly, he said: “The ship will come to action stations. Repeat, the ship will come to action stations. I shall be on the bridge directly.”
Chapter 3
Lieutenant-Commander Simon Collingwood blinked into the harsh light, disorientated for a moment but only for a moment. Then the long-conditioning of his eighteen year naval career kicked into action. He was fully awake even before he rolled onto his side throwing off the sheets and sitting up to peer, irritably up at the silhouetted face of the man standing over his bed in the first floor room of the dingy hotel fifty yards from the main dockyard gates.
“What’s going on?” He asked, not pausing to rub the sleep from his eyes as he planted his feet on the floor and reached for his watch on the rickety bedside table. He became aware that the other man, a very young seaman with a shore patrol band around his right bicep, looked shaken and on the verge of panic.
“War order, sir…”
“What?”
“General war order, sir. It came in a few minutes ago. Your name was at the top of the first emergency duty list, sir…”
Collingwood pushed the seaman aside and groped for his uniform dungarees.
He was a small, prematurely balding, dapper man with a calm, organised mind and a reputation for steadiness in the most stressful of situations. General War Order! It might be an exercise although deep down he doubted it. Although he’d only been paying passing attention to the news lately, and hadn’t read a paper for several days he’d shared the unease of others in the Mess.
“Who else is on your wake up list?” He asked brusquely.
“Sir?”
“Never mind. Wake up everybody in this building. All Dreadnoughts are to report to the boat immediately.”
The man literally ran out of the room.
Nobody at the dockyard gates knew what was going on.
Collingwood flashed his pass and ran between the big, blocky workshops towards the floodlight graving basins in the near distance. Other men were walking fast, several trotting. Nobody gave him a second look.
It was a little surreal. The air was icy cold, the wind spitting sporadic drops of rain. There were no alarms, no klaxons blaring, a few shouted commands in the distance and the sound of running feet, otherwise, nothing.
There were two armed sentries at the main gangway.
Behind them the submarine’s tall sail jutted into the night. They’d pulled away the cranes and jibs a fortnight ago but multiple umbilicals still snaked from the land down into the carcass of HMS Dreadnought in the dry dock. Power, communications, water. Until the boat’s Westinghouse reactor pile was online she was totally dependent on the land.
There was a fixed telephone link to the Dockyard Supervisor’s Office at the head of the gangway.
Collingwood picked it up.
“This is Dreadnought,” he reported, breathlessly, “can you tell me what’s going on, please.”
No, the duty officer could not tell him what was going on.
“The General War Order was broadcast in the clear to all active units and shore establishments at zero-two-three-seven hours Zulu, sir. That’s all I know.”
Collingwood glanced at his watch.
03:03.
Men were arriving on the dockside.
“Everybody on the boat!” He shouted. “Quickly, now!”
Half of Dreadnought’s future crew — including her captain and all bar two of her officers — were hundreds of miles away in Southampton training in a specially constructed simulator while the boat continued fitting out at the other end of the country. Dreadnought wasn’t supposed to commission until the spring but to all intents, she was — reactor excepted — practically ready for sea.
Collingwood gazed thoughtfully at the great black whale-like shape of Britain’s first nuclear power hunter-killer submarine lying silently, unknowingly in the shadows of the dry dock beneath the blazing floodlights. He’d been with the boat eight months overseeing the fitting out. Eighteen years in the Royal Navy, a long, gradual progression from lowly seaman to being posted second in command of the most advanced fighting machine in the Fleet. Now war might have been declared and Dreadnought lay helpless in plain sight, like a beached cetacean on the foreshore.
General War Order…
Simon Collingwood wasn’t thinking about the madness those words implied. Not right then. Right then he was thinking that if only the fools could have staved off the insanity for another two, or better still, three or four months, the great enterprise of his professional life would have come to fruition. HMS Dreadnought had been the fulcrum of his existence since long before her keel was laid down on 12th June 1959. For the boat; Britain’s first nuclear powered submarine to be trapped helplessly in a dry dock in Cumbria when the world might be about to go up in flames was almost unbearable. He’d poured so much of his life into the great black hull before him in the dock and now it seemed it might have all been for nothing.
He’d been sent to Groton, Connecticut, to train alongside his US Navy ‘allies’ ahead of joining first the Design Project Team at Barrow-in-Furness, and later being appointed Naval Construction Liaison Officer (Engineering and Electrical Systems) as Dreadnought slowly progressed from a lifeless half-completed hulk to a living, breathing deadly, mind-bogglingly complex fighting machine. Six months ago he’d been confirmed as the boat’s first executive officer.
General War Order…
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 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 suddenly 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 basically a standing start, in the mid 1950s there seemed no prospect of a British version of the Nautilus joining the Fleet for at least another decade, or perhaps not even before the end of the 1960s. It was a depressing scenario for the Royal Navy and shameful one for the politicians who’d let it happen by starving the original reactor research project of funds and then compounding their parsimonious blunder by stopping it dead in its tracks at the very moment the Americans were racing ahead.