Thank you, Mrs Quin. I may be back. I just have to use your telephone —"
Mrs Quin dismissed him with a slight motion of one hand. The other rubbed at the edge of the pine table, erasing memories. Hyde went out into the hall.
Aubrey had to know. The Deputy Director of SIS had been with the Foreign Secretary when the call from Birmingham had finally been routed through to Queen Anne's Gate. Hyde had left a message, but now Aubrey had to know the extent of their problem, and their hope — or lack of it.
He was dialling the number when the front door opened, and the inspector reappeared. Hyde ignored him and went on dialling.
"Whoever you're reporting to," the policeman remarked with evident, hostile sarcasm, "you'd better mention the car that just drove past. I'd say it contained the two men who worked Sugden over."
"What —?" The telephone was already ringing in Aubrey's offic even as Hyde examined a residual sense that he had once more blundered into, and through, a private world. Mrs Quin hadn't deserved the way he had treated her. Yet, had he altered his manner, even though he might not have bludgeoned there would have been little gentleness, almost no sensitivity. He took the receiver from his cheek. "You" ve got them?"
The inspector shook his head. "Foot down and away, as soon as they saw my lads. The registration number won't be of any use either, I shouldn't wonder —"
"Shit!"
"I beg your pardon!" Aubrey's secretary demanded frostily at the other end of the line.
Ethan Clark, of the US Naval Intelligence Command (ASW/Ocean Surveillance), had been made to feel, throughout the week since he had joined the "Chessboard Counter" team in the Admiralty, very much like an executive of some parent company visiting a recently taken over small firm. He was present in both his USN and NATO capacities, but these men of the Royal Navy — of, more precisely, the Office of Naval Intelligence (Submarine Warfare) — exuded a silent, undemonstrative resentment of him. Which, he well knew, made any doubts and hesitations he had concerning the mission of HMS Proteus seem no more to them than American carping. The commodore and his team in this long, low room in the basement of the Old Admiralty Building in Whitehall were dry-land sailors playing a war-game, and thoroughly and blithely enjoying themselves.
Clark supposed it had its basis in a buried sense of inferiority. For years, the contracting Royal Navy had belied its great history, and now, quite suddenly, they had developed "Leopard" and installed it in a nuclear-powered fleet submarine and were engaged in mapping the "Chessboard" sonar grid in the Barents Sea. Their high summer had returned. NATO needed them as never before, and the USN wanted greedily to get its hands, and its development budgets, on the British anti-sonar system.
Nevertheless, he told himself again as he sipped coffee from a plastic cup and observed the British officers waiting for the ritual serving of afternoon tea, "Chessboard" should have waited. NATO and the Navy Department had required of the Royal Navy that they install the only operationally-functioning "Leopard" unit in a submarine, rush their sea trials, then send it racing north to the Arctic Circle. The British had responded like a child doing everything at top speed to show its willingness and its virtue. Even before they had paid Plessey the bill for what they had, and before they had ordered any more "Leopard" units. With that kind of haste, things often got smashed, plates got dropped. Boats had been lost before. It would be a great pity if "Leopard" was lost; a tragedy if anyone else found it.
The long room, with its officers seated at computer terminals in front of their screens, its maps, wires, cables, fold-away tables, was dominated by a huge edge-lit perspex screen which stood upright in the middle of the room. The perspex secreted a multitude of optic fibres which registered the input of the computers that controlled the screen. The lighting at the edges of the perspex allowed the team to use chinagraph for temporary handwork additions to the computer-fed information. At that moment, much as it had done for the last week, the screen displayed a projection of the fjordal north coast of Norway, from North Cape to Murmansk. The coast was green and brown, the sea a deepening shade of blue as it reached northward. A fine grid of red lights, no larger than dots, was shown off the coast, as if some current in the screen were knitting, or marking a school register. Other lights moved slowly or remained stationary, units of the Red Banner Northern Fleet, ships and submarines. One or two NATO units. The Commodore's team seemed to scuttle round the base of the perspex screen as if propitiating some idol.
The room was now quiet, orderly. An hour before, Proteus had come up to periscope depth for one of her periodic, random but pre-determined transmissions. The transmission, using RABFITS (Random Bit Frequency Intelligence Transmission System) and via a satellite link, had contained every detail of the mapping work of the submarine since the previous message. This had been fed into the map-board's computers, updating the network of red spots which marked the "Chessboard" sonar grid.
Clark could not but admire, and envy, the "Leopard" equipment. He had been aboard Proteus as an observer during some of the sea trials, and he had also been aloft in the RAF Nimrod as the specially equipped plane tried to find the submarine. The Nimrod had been unable to locate, fix or identify the submarine, not even once, either in the Channel, the North Sea, or the north Atlantic. Not even in conjunction with the US-laid sonar carpet in the north Atlantic. No sonar trace, little and poor infra-red, nothing. It worked. Even pitted against surveillance satellites, it worked.
Perhaps, he told himself, his concern arose — like smoke, unformed but dense and obscuring — solely from the fact that when he had lunched with Kenneth Aubrey at his club at the beginning of the week, he'd learned that the man who had developed "Leopard" at Plessey had gone missing, presumed lost to the Russians. "Leopard" was both useless and unique, if that were so.
"It's going splendidly, Captain Clark, don't you agree?" Clark snapped awake from his unseeing contemplation of the dregs in the plastic cup. Lt.-Commander Copeland, the anti-submarine warfare expert on the "Chessboard Counter" team, was standing in front of him, six inches shorter and exhibiting a grin that shaded into smug mockery. The lights of the perspex map were bright behind him. "You don't seem to be too pleased," Copeland suggested with a more pronounced mockery. He waved an arm towards the glowing map. "Everyone else is feeling on top of the world."
"You're really pleased, aren't you, Copeland."
"Your people will be delighted, too, and NATO will be over the moon."
"Sure." Clark shifted his weight on the edge of the desk where he had perched.
"Really, Clark!" Copeland's exasperation was genuine. "Neither the United States nor ourselves have been able to send a ballistic missile boat, or any other sort of submarine for that matter, east of North Cape for two months, ever since the Ohio was first traced, shadowed, and escorted from the area." Copeland turned to study the huge map-board. "We're helpless up there until we know how big, how good, and of what kind “Chessboard” is." He turned back to Clark. "Your Chief of Naval Operations saw that quite clearly, so did Supreme Allied Command, Atlantic. Proteus has the most distinguished sponsors." Again, the silent, mocking smile.
"What if we lose her? Then we" ve lost “Leopard” for good."
"Lose? Lost? What do you mean? Oh, Quin, I suppose."
Copeland shrugged. "If Quin is over on the other side, then “Leopard” will be useless in a matter of months, don't you agree?" Clark nodded. "Well, then? We must neutralise “Chessboard” now, while we have the means."