“Have a look at him for yourself, Dottoressa Seiffert,” the Russian suggested sardonically. “Judge for yourself.”
The woman shook her head and brushed past, moving in swift, bird-like steps. She darted inside.
“We can’t stand here all night,” Alan Hannay declared.
Planting the couple in the Mess he hurried away, promising to return in a few minutes.
“We’ve only just got here, Arkady!” Clara whispered angrily.
They had been flown direct from Lisbon to interrogate the surviving members of the Red Dawn cell they’d infiltrated on their last visit to Malta; the members of which ought to have been in custody for the last seven days. It was only when they arrived in Mdina that it transpired that the local ‘intelligence men’ had thought it was a better idea to keep the suspected Red Dawn terrorists ‘under surveillance’ than to round them up ‘prematurely’.
Major Denzil Williams had been somewhat put out to discover that the ‘senior officer’ the Head of MI6, Sir Richard ‘Dick’ White, had personally sent to Malta to take over his operation was none other than Arkady Pavlovich Rykov. He had indignantly informed the Russian in somewhat unprofessional, intemperate language that the only way he was going to allow him, a ‘fucking Soviet traitor’, to speak to any of his prisoners was over ‘my dead body’.
Arkady Rykov had been looking for a pretext to do just that.
The former KGB Colonel had needed no further encouragement to oblige the man who’d had him kicked half-way around the Rock of Gibraltar two months ago.
Chapter 12
The Royal Navy only had one nuclear-power hunter killer submarine and when she’d limped into Algeciras Bay before Christmas all the stops had been pulled out. A two-dozen strong team from Vickers Shipbuilding Ltd at Barrow-in-Furness had flown into Gibraltar on an RAF Comet within hours.
The air-dropped Mark 44 thirteen-inch torpedo, one of four dropped by the USS Enterprise’s Grumman S-2 Tracker anti-submarine hunter aircraft, ought to have sunk HMS Dreadnought. The warhead had exploded within feet of the stern of the submarine. Shock damage had shattered machinery footings, shorted out most the boat’s electrical systems, and comprehensively killed her sonar suite. It had taken Dreadnought six days to limp into Algeciras Bay. Once in harbour and dry-docked Commander Simon Collingwood’s initial damage assessment was that his command would not be fit to go to sea again for six months. That was a month ago, now the Royal Navy’s first, and for the foreseeable future, solitary nuclear — powered attack submarine was thrusting out into the Straits of Gibraltar on a dark, starless night, provisioned for a six week war patrol.
The Captain of the Royal Navy’s most complex and valuable asset wasn’t under any illusions that his command was in tip top fighting trim; or that in an ideal World she didn’t still need several months in dockyard hands. However, that didn’t mean that HMS Dreadnought wasn’t fit for combat.
“Depth of water under the keel please!” He called.
“Eight hundred feet, sir!”
Simon Collingwood glanced across the plot table to his Executive Officer, Lieutenant-Commander Max Forton.
“Diving Stations if you please, Number One!”
“Diving Stations, aye, sir!”
In an ‘ideal’, perfect World, Simon Collingwood would have preferred to have test dived the boat in dock, or within the inner dockyard basin but they didn’t live in a perfect World. God knew they didn’t! So they’d have to get on with it in the open ocean instead. Dreadnought had put to sea with five civilian workers onboard; Flag Officer Submarines had thought this would support the fiction that Dreadnought was departing on a slow, safe run home to Plymouth. That was fine for Flag Officer Submarines, who bless his cotton socks, wasn’t the man who was going to have to explain to five disgruntled civilians sometime in the next few hours that Dreadnought — notwithstanding the boat was a tad worse for wear — was heading not for Blighty, but for the Eastern Mediterranean.
The two men who had been on watch in the cockpit at the top of the sail thirty feet above the control room, slid down the ladder and dogged the hatch shut over their heads.
“The boat is ready to dive, sir!”
“Carry on,” Simon Collingwood said to his Executive Officer before casually settling in his command chair.
He heard the air rushing out of the ballast tanks, felt the planes grip the water and the bow of the submarine begin to dip. It was all very quiet and orderly, there were no raised voices, no anxiety other than the normal breathlessness everybody experienced the first time a boat dived after a spell in dockyard hands.
“Seventy feet!”
Dreadnought was submerged.
“Eighty feet!”
“Ninety feet”
“One hundred feet!”
Shortly the submarine’s wake would be subsumed by the ocean and her passage through the water would be invisible at the surface.
“NO LEAKS!”
“Level the boat at one-five-zero feet please!”
At one hundred and fifty feet they would check again for leaks. They would check every single inch of the boat, just to be sure.
“Helm. Make our course two-seven-five degrees!”
“Two-seven-five degrees, aye, sir!”
“Come up to six zero revs please!”
Two hours later after dropping down to two-hundred and thirty feet below the surface there were still no leaks, nothing had shorted out and the engineering department reported a clean bill of health.
“This is the Captain,” Simon Collingwood announced over the boat’s public address system. He would worry about running silent another time. “The boat is dry and nothing important has broken since we left port. This being the case in five minutes time when I turn the boat around HMS Dreadnought will commence her second War Patrol. This time we won’t be playing hide and seek,” he allowed a suggestion of wry levity to tinge his words, “we will be operating in support of allied naval units in the Eastern Mediterranean. We are carrying a full load of torpedoes and we are fully provisioned for a six week cruise. I offer my sincere apologies to the civilians in our midst but for security reasons it was deemed necessary to make it look as if we were either going out for a short proving trip or heading straight home. I suggest you enjoy the trip. That is all.”
Trying not to chuckle too loudly he looked to his Executive Officer.
“Revolutions for twenty knots, Number One!”
“Helm. Make your course zero-eight-five!”
Simon Collingwood went to his claustrophobic cabin — spacious and luxurious compared to any other on the boat he often joked, very much with his tongue in his cheek — shut the door behind him and opened the small safe by his bunk head with the small key he always carried with him.
Sealed orders which were only to be opened once a vessel had departed port and was out of sight of land rarely contained good news.
He opened the envelope unhurriedly with an odd lack of interest.
He was astonished to discover two hand-written sheets of note paper bearing the crest of the Prime Minister’s Office.
Sunday 19th January, 1964.
Dear Captain Collingwood,
I have written this note by leave of the First Sea Lord and the Flag Officer Submarines, as it would otherwise be highly irregular for a Prime Minister to communicate directly with a serving offer, thereby circumventing the chain of command.