Power Play (4 page)

“Well, why don’t other European nations want to use it as well?”

“Not many of them have much of a submarine fleet. Hell, the Royal Navy hardly has any fast-attack submarines these days. No nation likes trespassing in foreign waters with submarines, because they’re quite likely to be sunk and never heard from again. Submariners don’t like foreigners.”

“So that more or less rules out the submarine theory, right?” he replied. “Never any foreigners. And no Brits last week.”

“On the surface, so to speak,” said Chief Macrae, “it does rule it out. But navies do not feel obliged to speak the truth at all times. I very much doubt the first sea lord would be anxious to announce one of his underwater boats had just hooked up and drowned six Scottish fishermen. With the state-of-the-art sonar our submarines use, they would, and should,
have detected a two-and-a-half-thousand-ton dragger on the surface above them.”

“Not much use to me, then,” said the reporter. “I can’t just write a story suggesting the navy was responsible when they have categorically stated there was no RN submarine in the area all week.”

“No, laddie. Ye canna do that. But I believe something either hit or otherwise sank the
Misty
. She was a very powerful boat, and there was no skipper better than Gordon MacLeash. I just won’t accept she somehow sprang a leak and went down or capsized. The sea was rough, but not that rough. We had a force-five gale warning, but Gordon’s been through seas like that dozens of times.
Misty
’s last known position was in very deep water. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Do you object if I speak to the navy again?”

“Absolutely not. Ask them if they’re certain. Ask them if they have any other theories. They won’t tell you, but you might learn something.”

And so the media juggernaut rolled on. For a couple of days, they loved the idea of a submarine dragging down the trawler, and they scoured their files and libraries for other instances when this may have happened. They found around twenty. By the time they’d gotten through with it, you’d have thought all Royal Navy submarines were sharks in disguise, in search of prey.

But the journalists grew tired of the somewhat hollow “story” and inevitably moved on to new pastures, more important “stories,” like the latest dresses various members of the royal family wore to some film premiere.

This did not apply, however, to the coast guard station at Stornoway out on Battery Point above the harbor. It was another damp, blustery, cold day. The Ullapool-Stornoway ferry was an hour late, fighting a strong tide, headwind, and heavy seas. The sea was gray. The skies were gray, and the main street seemed gray.

Donald Macrae, with his craggy, windblown face and deep-sea blue eyes, had other tasks. Indeed, he had never heard anything even remotely connected with glamour that in any way affected rugged little Stornoway, except that Donald Trump’s mother, Mary MacLeod, had been born four miles down the road from the coast guard station in the village of Tong.

Right now he was staring at a radar screen, checking the progress of the ferry.
And
there had been an emergency call from an Icelandic trawler in some trouble ten miles north of the island.
And
there were six journalists
lined up to speak to him on various matters from current sea conditions to the still-warm issue of the
Misty
.

But the most important call was from London. His assistant had shouted the name: “Lieutenant Commander Wenton . . . line 4 . . . ”

This was the Royal Navy calling from RN Submarine Fleet HQ, Northwood, west of London. And when they called, it mattered. Chief Macrae muttered, “I wonder what the hell they want . . . ” Deep down, though, he knew full well.

Everyone had played down the sinking of the trawler as much as possible to protect the families from unnecessary grief and intrusion. But the professionals did not buy it. Officers in the Navy Department and in the fleet were looking askance at the various accounts of the lost fishing boat. The coast guard knew something sinister had happened.

Fishing communities all over the Western Isles did not accept for one split second that Gordon MacLeash had drowned by accident. Something had happened out there. Everyone wanted answers, but they were damned if they were going to give any to outsiders. Especially journalists.

Chief Macrae grasped the full dimension of the situation when Lieutenant Commander Wenton immediately put him through to a rear admiral who wasted no time with recaps. A cheerful, informal man who had reached his high office because everyone liked him, Rear Admiral John Young, the Royal Navy’s submarine flag officer, came straight to the point. “Donald,” he said, “did Captain MacLeash make any form of emergency radio contact with any coast guard station on either side of the Minch Channel? And if not, why not?”

Chief Macrae, who, in his youth, had served time as a gunnery officer in a Royal Navy frigate, was fifty-two years old now, but he had not forgotten how to speak to admirals.

“Negative to the first, sir,” he replied. “No contact whatsoever. I do not know why that should be so.”

The admiral was succinct in his answer: “There’s only one possible reason, and it’s a very simple one—Captain MacLeash did not have time. I have dismissed the possibility of some kind of suicide pact.”

Chief Macrae smiled to himself . . .
Bloody admirals, they’re all the same . . . sardonic wee bastards
.

“I agree, sir,” he said. “He did not have time. That trawler met catastrophe and death in a matter of seconds, not minutes. Otherwise, we’d
have found a body. Not one of the six-man crew had time to jump overboard and take his chances in the water. On a night like that, they were surely wearing life vests, even if the men weren’t clipped on.”

“My thoughts entirely,” said Admiral Young, “which somewhat narrows our list of possibilities. Either someone hit her with a torpedo, a missile, or an iron bomb, all of which are hugely unlikely, despite fitting our sinking profile, or something simply dragged the
Misty
under.”

“Aye, sir. No other viable solution. And I also write off the torpedo-missile theory.”

“So what dragged her down? That’s a mystery because even a big minke whale, twenty-five feet long, is not that powerful. It would have taken four of them, working in harness, to haul a trawler to the bottom of the North Atlantic. So what, Donald, does that leave?”

“Only a submarine, sir.”

“And we did not have one within five hundred miles of
Misty
’s last known position.”

“So where does that leave us, sir?” asked Donald.

“Looking for someone else’s submarine,” answered the rear admiral. “Which, by the way, we are unlikely to locate.”

“Anything particular you want us to deal with?”

“I just want your crews to keep the keenest possible watch for foreign submarines. Particularly Russian. Because we believe they may have been prowling around last week. We actually believe that with their suspect sonar, they may have blundered into Gordon MacLeash’s trawler and taken it down.”

“I suppose we would nae dare to ask them?” suggested Donald Macrae.

“We’d dare all right, Donald. In fact, we already did. But they refused even to speak to us, and when the Russian Navy refuses to come to the telephone, or to answer an e-mail, you know the lies are just too profound, even for them.”

Donald Macrae permitted himself a significant chuckle.

“Anyway, keep us posted. Anything shows up, sound the alert as fast as possible.”

“You can count on that, sir. We’ll be watching.”

 

Admiral Young’s car was awaiting him. He left his office immediately and headed directly to the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall, central London,
for a meeting with the first sea lord. Again, the subject was obvious: a Scottish trawler had been hauled underwater by a submarine off the Western Isles. It was not a British submarine. There were no RN submarines within hundreds of miles.

The question for both of these experienced naval commanders was: whose damn submarine was it? Their shared opinion was that none of the European Union members would have dreamed of running north through the Minch Channel without requesting permission and giving times and dates for the voyage: certainly not France or Spain, nor any of the Low Countries, or the Scandinavians.

The Minch, in fact, separates the northwest highlands of Scotland from the long offshore crescent of the northern Hebrides. To the south, it is known as the Little Minch and separates the Isle of Skye from the Hebridean islands of North and South Uist and Benbecula. These are intense submarine waters, deep and lonely, used by the Royal Navy’s underwater service for generations, both for training and for the workup of new boats.

No other national navy would think of intruding in these waters, except, perhaps, the Russians. And even they’d be pretty darn careful. In fact, they’d probably have touched base with Fleet HQ. As for other neighboring submarine fleets, as Rear Admiral Young told the boss, “Foreign submarines are pretty thin on the ground these days.” He then presented the following list:

“Which leaves just our old friends the Bears, correct?” said the first sea lord. “Though what the hell they’re doing in the Minch Channel, in the middle of the night, knowing they might meet up with a Royal Navy attack submarine patrolling its home waters . . . Well, God knows.”

“With due respect, sir, I don’t think anyone is bothered about meeting an RN submarine in home waters. We hardly have any of them operational. And everyone knows it. Nearly forty years of defense cuts have seen to that.”

The Royal Navy boss was silent, his expression a mixture of irritation and sadness. He knew as well as anyone that the legendary iron shield the navy provided for Great Britain was no more. There was no aircraft-carrier strike force. The navy personnel numbers were down to twenty-five thousand. At times there were no British warships patrolling the home waters of this island nation, which, quite frankly, he regarded as the daftest situation even Britain’s savagely discredited politicians could come up with.

The old Trafalgar Class submarines were on their last legs, and the new Astute Class boats, which had been given formal government clearance, were running badly behind their production schedule. The truth was the government did not care about lateness, because that usually meant delays in the payment schedule, and they really liked that.

The sea lord loved the Astute Class submarines, with their sensational Rolls-Royce PWR2 (Core H) reactors, which never needed renewing throughout the entire life of the submarine. Only a shortage of food would bring to the surface these underwater masterpieces of marine engineering.

To a former submarine commanding officer, which the first sea lord was, the Astute boats were simply things of gigantic beauty, 30 percent larger than any other Royal Navy attack submarine had ever been, with one heck of a wallop—thirty-eight weapons on board, guided torpedoes, plus submerged-launch guided missiles with a range of twelve hundred miles capable of knocking down a North African mosque from a parking spot in the English Channel.

That kind of weaponry unfailingly warmed the heart of any seagoing commander, but this first sea lord was more than that. He was a navy politician, expert in the infighting of Westminster, a master at arguing the case for bigger budgets.

And while, after three years, he was severely bloodied by the slings and arrows of half-witted politicians, he was triumphant in his endless campaign to preserve the new Astute Class submarines. They were late, yes, but still under construction at $1.2 billion each. Of the five scheduled hulls, two of them were floating, with three chugging along toward completion in the great dry docks of BAE, Barrow-in-Furness (British Aerospace Electronic Systems, the world’s largest defense manufacturing conglomerate).

“You’d think they’d get it, wouldn’t you?” mused the boss. “BAE has six thousand people working on the Astute program alone. Imagine the shattering loss if some government canceled it. Imagine the desolation in Barrow, the thousands of skilled men who would go on welfare programs: the loss of confidence, the smashing of morale.

“Not to mention the irreparable loss to the town—because it would quickly become a place that had lost its soul. It does not take long for engineers to forget, for sons of engineers to look elsewhere for work, for an entire industry with a sensational history simply to let their skills slip away. And when that happens, it’s damned hard to get them back.

“And pretty soon it’s all gone, a great British shipbuilding center no longer in the front line of its profession, highly skilled young British scientists, shipwrights, and engineers looking for work in Korea or Japan. For me it’s heartbreaking every time I have to go and fight those numbskull ministers, whose only talent is making fucking speeches. Jesus Christ, it makes me madder than hell.”