Bolt Action (8 page)

Three days after the heist – Operation Macchar, minus ten days

The Pepys Suite

Fifth floor, Ministry of Defence HQ

Whitehall

T
he threatening grey sky hanging over London perfectly matches the mood of this opulent room. Seven men are seated around a long mahogany table. In varying degrees of distress. And one robust, middle-aged woman with a tight silver perm stands at the window, listening to the angry exchanges behind her:
Outrage! Treason!
She’s quite enjoying herself actually, in a prickly sort of way, as she looks down at the River Thames from the Embankment side of this impressive Portland stone edifice.

After long study, she is sure she prefers the view from her own corner office of MI5’s Thames House building farther upstream, by Lambeth Bridge.

Her name is Sheila Davane (known to one and all, behind her back, as Noppy – as in
No Oil Painting
). She looks like a comfortable granny: sensible country tweed suit, large bifocals on a long gold chain, and an elaborate brooch. In truth, she is anything but.

Among her peculiarities is everything that an unbendingly Protestant upbringing in the County Antrim farming community of Carrickfergus could give her. For instance, she must be one of the very few who thinks
papacy
when she hears the word
Whitehall
. It’s a simple reflex action bred of severe, suspicious
parents and a watchful childhood. It was, after all, from Cardinal Wolsey’s extravagant new palace, built in its white ashlar stone, that Whitehall got its name.

She places her thick hands on the cold of the window. Then turns to face the room. Five of the seven men are senior soldiers of one description or another but none is in uniform. The Chief and Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, who look glum, heavy jowelled but, in this matter, basically impotent. The First Sea Lord, called Craddock, who is handing out most of the outrage and reminds Davane of a boiling kettle screaming for attention. The chief scientific adviser, Sir Roddy Kerr, very bored. The chief of Defence Materiel, deeply embarrassed, and his number two, the hapless and about-to-be sacrificed Dougal MacIntyre.

The seventh man in the room is Bill Grainger. The deputy director-general of MI5. Nominally her boss – but in practice, and especially when there’s a scare on, more of an equal. He is bookish and cerebral by inclination, a fine frontman for parliamentary committees and collegiate dinners. If he is the shine and polish, then she is the steely, cutting edge of the MI5 blade. A person of instinct and action. Yet unobtrusive. Someone best suited to the shadows.

Davane puts her hand up and, strangely enough, within seconds the room is quietened. The meeting grateful for somebody to show leadership.

She moves stiffly towards the table, grips the back of one of the chairs. ‘Forgive me . . . but what will it mean if these three pages are in the public domain?’

‘Bloody disaster, that’s what; what?’ says the throaty, cigarette voice of the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff. An air chief marshal.

Her urbane colleague from MI5, Grainger, steals the moment. He speaks mechanically, like a lawyer, from a sheaf of notes. ‘Sheila, I think we can summarise the information as follows:

‘Each new prime minister writes a personal letter to the commanders of the four Vanguard submarines that carry
Trident. The letter is basically advice from the PM to each commander about what to do in the event of a nuclear incident that takes out the command-and-control functions of the UK government . . .’ Grainger clears his throat for an irksome detail. ‘. . . which would have to be a massive, end-of-the-world sort of attack.

‘Only the PM, and verifiable authorisation from the PM, can launch a Trident missile. Except, of course, in an end-of-the-world scenario. If this happened, the submarine commander could elect to put himself under the command of another force, the Americans, for instance, or he could attack on his own initiative. Either way the commander and his senior weapons officer would select a pre-designated target and, on his sole authority, the missile could be independently fired . . .’

‘I’ve got all of that, thank you.’ Davane sways against the back of the chair. Slightly irritated. ‘What I need to understand is the significance of
these
three pages.’

Craddock, the First Sea Lord, taps an impatient finger on the lustrous mahogany surface. ‘These three pages explain the fail-safe system that would allow us, or anyone with the knowledge, to neutralise an independently fired Trident . . .’

‘So anybody with this knowledge could . . . could bring the Trident down?’

Craddock again. ‘Not exactly bring it down.’ His finger beating faster and faster. ‘The fail-safe is designed for a scenario where we’ve been bombed to hell. Therefore all of our high-price technical communication stuff is finished. Anything with a chip in it. Burnt. Exploded. Irradiated. Whatever. The same would apply to navigation, which is normally by Global Positioning System, or variants thereof. All gone.’ And, to underline the point, he swishes his hands vigorously. ‘In that scenario, on board a Trident is a software system that maps out the stars. The sun, the Pole Star, Spica, for instance. Just like sailors, using the stars to navigate.’

‘I get all of this . . . I do . . .’

‘These three pages tell you how to activate the fail-safe. How
to override the submarine commander’s instructions. How to talk to Trident after it’s been launched. It’s very low-tech because we’re assuming that a massive nuclear attack will not leave us much to communicate with. So, it’s a simple radio signal basically. But the consequence is just as final . . .’

These people could
really
beat about the bush. ‘And what is that consequence?’

‘The fail-safe tells the missile to select the brightest of the stars it can see – and the dear old Trident will just keep progress towards it . . . no atmospheric re-entry. No target acquisition.’

‘You mean, keep on going . . . ?’

‘Keep on going until it runs out of fuel. Somewhere up there. In outer space. The point is it won’t come down. Not here, anyway. Which is what the fail-safe is all about.’

Davane nods carefully. Drums her fingers on the back of the chair. ‘The Royal Navy have only got four subs in the Vanguard class, a dozen missiles on each boat, and only one of those is on patrol at any given time. So why not just reprogramme the software? Tweak the system a bit?’

The gloom is so thick and heavy she can almost feel it weighing on her shoulders. Heads and shoulders sink. Eyes look down. The disgraced MacIntyre, so abject his forehead is almost touching the table.

It’s Grainger who speaks up. ‘We don’t actually own the Trident missiles. We have a lease agreement on a certain number of Tridents belonging to the US Navy. Fifty-eight all told, out of a US cache of more than five hundred. But the rocket, the propellant, fuses, the motor sets, guidance system, the overall technology solution, it’s all owned by Uncle Sam.’ Grainger makes very sarcastic inverted commas with his fingers. ‘“Our missiles” are actually their missiles, stored for us at a submarine base in Georgia. We can’t tweak the software . . . without . . .’ ‘. . . without telling the Americans,’ Davane finishes the sentence. ‘And if we tell the Americans, they might just,
what
? Kick us out of the programme.’

Craddock looks around the table, before nodding gravely. ‘The principle of deterrence is that your enemy never knows the disposition of the forces he is facing. The what, when, where and how.

‘Some of it he can work out, or guess, or war-game. But it’s the value of your last card, that continuous at-sea deterrence, that submarine making quiet on the floor of the Atlantic, which makes this whole thing a guessing game. That’s why it was termed mutually assured destruction. If you do it to me, then I’ll give it back to you, with interest. That’s how deterrence has kept the world safe for almost seventy years, and why this government is wagering a billion and a half pounds a year that it will keep us safe for another seventy . . .’

Had Davane really been in a black mood, it would have been at this point that she would have observed that the principle of deterrence had done exactly nothing during the Troubles . . . there were plenty of citizens in Northern Ireland who hadn’t felt the least bit protected by Trident.

‘. . . but if the enemy knows your last card – even more than that, knows how to neutralise it . . . Then. Really. It’s game over. We’re just so many little pigs hiding out in our straw house.’

A long, dismal silence fills the elegant conference suite.

Davane is suddenly aware of ghosts. For the men at this table had not just failed themselves. They’d failed all the military leaders who’d preceded them, who’d championed nuclear deterrence in this very room during much more hostile times and who, when finishing their terms, must have felt they were passing the baton on. Entrusting it to the next generation, with stern words.
This is the iron rock on which Britain depends. The very Last Line of Defence.
Not just the weapon itself, but the relationship with the United States, through which is defined Britain’s role at the top table. That
special
relationship. Agreed to by no less a president than John F. Kennedy in 1963, for the Polaris programme, and restated by Ronald Reagan in 1982 for Trident II.

The room wore its history well, as if to underline that this
was
the
conference suite. Proud traditions shouted from each panel of darkened oak. The Pepys Suite. Named after the diarist, who served Charles II and James II as their Admiralty Clerk. And in one corner of the room, a very serious display cabinet. Locked inside, the Letters Patent: the vellum manuscript with the Queen’s Great Seal of the Realm attached, from which derive all the powers and responsibilities of the armed forces. The right to wage war, to be answerable to Parliament and so on. Hand-enscribed parchment like a living page of history.

The ghosts in the room are not happy.

Craddock nervously rattles his teacup. And Davane straightens her back, works her shoulders from side to side. Feels a big smile coming over her face. Gentle chuckle under her breath. It’s quite simple really.

‘I’m sorry to say, gentlemen . . .’ She sniffs rather regally. ‘On this one, I think you’re screwed. Good and proper.’

Which is when the shouting starts up again, with cries of
Outrage! Damnable woman!
Nothing she hasn’t heard before.

The next turn of events is something of a surprise. Less than half an hour later, emerging from the ladies’ on the fifth floor, Davane is accosted by Dougal MacIntyre. Panicked, he takes her by the wrist and leads her along the polished floor of the long corridor to a vacant office. Closes the door behind him, leans back against it. Gasping slightly.

When he turns to her the man’s eyes are wired with anxiety. ‘They won’t tell you the truth.’

‘Who won’t?’

‘Them . . . inside there,’ and MacIntyre nudges his shoulder towards the Pepys Suite.

‘And you will?’

‘Look. I know this doesn’t look good for me.’ And he turns away, then swings around decisively. ‘This Ward 13 . . . it isn’t the first time.’

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘How much
worse
could it be for me? Why would I be lying
to you right now? For what earthly reason: a little grease on my noose perhaps?’

Fair point. MacIntyre had already been measured for his MoD coffin. You could almost hear the thing being hammered together. A leak to a friendly journalist on a Sunday paper would do the trick, start the stampede.

So Davane moves in close. Well within MacIntryre’s personal space. She looks up at him, and the heavy layers of her neck dangle as she speaks. ‘You screw me up here, and I will personally make you suffer pain. Vast pain. Understand?’

Understood, MacIntyre nods gratefully. And he proceeds to tell his tale . . .

Earlier that morning Davane’s black Jaguar had nosed out of the MI5 basement car park for this meeting at the MoD, and as the first splats of rain hit the windscreen and the powerful wipers started
whup-whupping
, her colleague Bill Grainger had asked a straightforward question.

‘I sense you don’t have much time for the people we’re going to meet.’

She had smiled at him. A grim look, because her teeth, like much else about her, she didn’t waste time over. ‘You sense correctly.’

‘So, is this going to be a problem today?’

‘We’ll just have to see where the discussions take us.’ There was a sparkle in her eyes, and it seemed it was all Grainger could do to stop himself from laughing at the prospect of a roomful of stiff military types coming up against Sheila ‘
Noppy’
Davane.

‘I don’t suppose you’d care to enlighten me as to the reasons for this . . . animus?’

Which is why they had spent the relatively short drive in discussion. Not something she was planning to do, but Grainger had asked, and he deserved to know. And that brief dialogue had brought those dark, angry shapes into sharper focus in her mind, given clarity to what it is that so claws at her . . .

. . . those typecast men who would be around the table (excepting Grainger, of course). Each one red faced and blustering, and
but-butting
his disapproval.

What steels Davane’s backbone is a profound disrespect for what becomes of officers once they’re sufficiently senior to come into contact with the Sirens of the Ministry of Defence.

They start out so promisingly. Revved up and full of action.
We’ll fix this, change that, think outside the box.
But as inevitable as the slow creep towards autumn and the dark of winter, the civil servants win out, deaden that reforming spirit with the shrewdness of their indecision: overwhelm them with committees, White Papers, consultations, policy reviews and five-year personnel strategies. And before the reforming zealot knows what’s hit him, he’s been sucked into the system. Suddenly he’s not seeing an issue in black and white, but in all those bureaucratic, indecisive shades of grey.