Skydancer (19 page)

But tonight he had no sexual expectations, and no intention of limiting his intake of comforting liquor.

‘Oleg?' Katrina had finally put down her magazine and was trying to smile.

‘Mmmm?'

‘Why don't you take me out to dinner? I feel like going out. What about the Tsentralny? We haven't been there for months.'

It was a trap, and he knew it. He should have realised that as soon as she had started demanding the impossible – a visit to Geneva. It was a game played many
times before, but which never failed to take him by surprise. Dutifully he played the counter-move she expected.

‘We'll never get in there this evening. They're always full,' he replied wearily.

‘I telephoned this morning,' Katrina smiled triumphantly. ‘I booked a table. I thought it would make a nice change.'

He shrugged his inevitable consent. He knew what it meant: the evening had been prearranged, and they would be meeting other couples who were Katrina's friends rather than his. The conversation would revolve around Paris and New York, and he would have nothing to say because he had not been anywhere recently apart from Novosibirsk in Siberia – and he could not even mention that, because his work there was top secret.

It was going to be a dreadful evening. He knew he would get very drunk indeed.

In the kitchen of the old farmhouse in Berkshire, Belinda Joyce held open the door of her deep-freeze, trying to decide what to cook her children for supper. It would have to be fish fingers – she could not concentrate enough on anything more elaborate.

Something had transpired that day which gave her a strange creepy feeling: Helene Venner had disappeared.

She had first met the woman three years earlier, when Belinda was already establishing her skills as a lathe-operator at the craft co-operative. Helene had joined as a potter, producing attractive hand-made jugs and bowls which sold well to American tourists in a souvenir shop in Oxford. They had taken an instant liking
to one another, sharing the same jaundiced view of the vested interests of big international companies and of the nuclear arms race.

Belinda had quickly recognised that Helene had lesbian tendencies, and knew that Helene found her desirable. To start with she was mentally quite attracted to the idea of sex with another woman, just as an experiment, but in the end her deep-seated disinclination had proved insurmountable. Even so, their friendship remained firm and intimate.

It had been Helene who encouraged her to join ATSA, or Action To Stop Annihilation, Helene who had helped her co-ordinate her loosely gathered anti-nuclear thoughts into a coherent thread, and Helene who tried to persuade her to steal secret papers from her husband so that they could be leaked to a left-wing newspaper.

Yesterday Helene had not turned up for work. Today she was again absent, and there had been still no phone-call to explain. So Belinda had called round at the terraced cottage she rented in the village, but found no one at home. A neighbour who held a key let her in to the house. Every trace of Helene was gone: the cupboards were bare, the bed stripped of linen; even the fridge had been emptied. The place was spotlessly clean, as if it had been scrubbed to remove any sign that she had ever lived there.

Belinda could not make herself believe Helene would just disappear without a word. She would surely have said something if going away of her own choice. So at first she wondered whether her friend had been kidnapped. But then she reflected on the line of questioning John Black had pursued, and began to consider that his talk of subversive left-wing groups plotting to undermine the fabric of the nation might not be entirely
fanciful after all. Had Helene Venner been a spy? Surely not. Yet with growing disquiet Belinda remembered how close she had come to being physically seduced by Helene, and began to wonder whether such an act had been designed to achieve her final mental seduction as well.

The sound of a bicycle bell jerked her thoughts back to the present.

‘Oh Christ! Back already,' she cursed, pushing the fish fingers under the grill.

By the time she next had a moment to herself, the early evening news was coming on television. The lead story concerned the Prime Minister's statement that afternoon to the House of Commons that ‘following the untimely death of a female employee of the Ministry of Defence, the source of the leak of secret documents from the Ministry seems to have been uncovered. There is no evidence of any loss of secret material to a foreign power.'

‘He doesn't know about Helene Venner,' Belinda thought. ‘Nobody knows about Helene, except me.' Suddenly she longed for Peter to come home.

At that very moment he walked in. Belinda turned towards him anxiously, and the sight of his ashen face and crushed expression brought her to her feet.

‘What's the matter, Peter? What's happened now, for God's sake?'

‘I've been suspended,' he croaked. ‘I've just spent the afternoon being bollocked by the Defence Secretary, Mr Michael bloody Hawke, and he's suspended me from duty until further notice!'

JUST BEFORE SUNRISE
a US Navy tug positioned itself to ease the smooth fat shape of the submarine away from the quayside. The grey, pre-dawn light cast no shadow, and the overall-clad dock-hands looked almost faceless to Commander Carrington as he peered down at them from the top of the fin. The anonymous figures unhooked the mooring lines from the bollards and cast them into the water. The seamen on the narrow casing of HMS
Retribution
hauled the sodden ropes from the sea and stowed them securely under a steel hatch.

Once clear of the dockside, the multi-bladed fan-like propeller began to turn, causing the water behind the rudder to bubble and foam. The tow-line from the tug was released and the submarine's foredeck party hurried below, closing the forward hatch tightly behind them.

‘Slow ahead!' Carrington almost whispered the command into the microphone he held close to his lips. His voice was hushed in spontaneous reverence at the sight of the crimson curve of the sun rising smoothly over the edge of the world, separating at last the greyness of the sea from that of the sky.

‘Take a good look at it!' he told himself. It might be weeks before any of them on board saw the sun again.

The growing intensity of the light caused Carrington to shade his eyes. They were passing through the harbour entrance and he squinted anxiously along the line of buoys that marked the deep-water channel, to ensure there were no other vessels ahead which could
hamper his passage. It would be a while yet before the water would be deep enough for them to dive and return to the secret world which had become his most natural environment.

His orders from Northwood had been at the same time specific and vague. He was to make his boat ready to launch the test missile at twelve hours' notice, but no hint had been given as to when that firing might take place. In the meantime he had been instructed to hide his submarine in the eastern Atlantic and to avoid the attention of any Soviet vessels that might try to track him, but the intelligence reports had been less specific than usual as to what Russian ships might be in the area.

Carrington focused his powerful binoculars on the furthest of the channel buoys which he knew, from his earlier study of the chart, to be three miles ahead. A thin haze covered the sea, and he scanned slowly to the left and then to the right, searching for the support ship which was essential to their success in hiding below the waves. The
Retribution
's most sensitive listening device was her sonar array, the plastic tube towed hundreds of yards astern which contained hydrophones capable of hearing ships and submarines two hundred miles away. The technology had been invented long after
Retribution
had been built, so the array had to be clipped on by a support ship each time she went to sea.

‘Any sign of her, sir?' The officer of the watch had joined Carrington on the bridge. He shivered briefly at the coolness of the morning air.

‘Not yet. She can't be far away though. Only left harbour about half an hour ahead of us,' the captain replied, lowering his glasses and scanning the horizon with the naked eye.

‘Half ahead! Revolutions for eight knots!' he ordered
into the microphone. Within seconds the water at the stem began to splash and froth more strongly, and a creamy wake spread out behind them.

‘Give me a shout when you spot her,' Carrington called, as he gripped the handrails of the ladder and disappeared down the tower into the metallic warmth below. Passing through the control room he paused by the chart table.

‘Where is the rendezvous point exactly?' he enquired, looking over the navigator's shoulder.

The young officer pointed to a cross on the chart.

‘Three miles inside the territorial limit, sir,' he added smartly. ‘Shouldn't have anybody watching while we do the deed.'

Carrington nodded and returned to his cabin.

Lieutenant Robert Simpson sat quietly in the tiny ship's office next to the wardroom. In front of him on the small table was the galley stores register, and he was making a pretence at checking it through. But the task that really concerned him was quite different, one of obsessive importance to him, one he was convinced could save millions of lives. It was to prevent HMS
Retribution
's nuclear missiles from ever being fired in anger. It was a mission inspired by his conscience.

Bob had been educated at a small, select boarding school, where his housemaster had made a lasting impression on almost every pupil who passed through his care. An old-fashioned crusader, seeking to inspire his pupils to fight for morality and justice in whatever areas their careers might take them, Andrew McGregor had created on his own a sort of secret society perpetuated by annual reunions held at the school.

By the time Bob ended his studies there, he had
become the man's devoted disciple. On his last day at school, ‘old Greg', as the teacher was known, had warned him as he had warned others before him, that he might need to ‘go underground', to work in secret, if he was to strike his eventual blow for morality.

They were words of advice that Simpson took to heart in the years that followed. An only child, he had decided to follow his father into the Royal Navy eventually, but wanted to take a degree course first. During his three years at Exeter University, he had faithfully returned each summer to his school for the weekend reunion with Old Greg. At that time, he had still had no clear idea what the ‘great mission' in his life would be, but felt instinctively that the Navy would one day present him with it.

At university he had fallen in love with Susan Parkinson, who was sweetness itself. Yet even when she had become his closest friend as well as his lover, he had not dared confide in her totally his sense of mission. She was different from him – lively and extrovert, forming firm opinions from first impressions. She had joined a Ban the Bomb group and urged him to accompany her on protest rallies, but he never did, preferring to keep his views private until he had developed them fully.

Susan lived near Newbury now, and worked as a schoolteacher. As they grew closer Bob had become more open about Andrew McGregor and his moral crusade, and when he had been posted to HMS
Retribution
she had understood immediately that he had finally found the role he had been looking for.

It had not been easy trying to decide what was right and what was wrong, when it came to warfare. Simpson could understand the moral rectitude of using military means to destroy a man like Adolf Hitler, and could accept the need for nations to be armed to prevent such
tyrants from gaining power again. But those armaments were for use against other military forces, not civilians. ‘The bomb' was different. Every missile on
Retribution
was aimed at Moscow. Millions of innocents would die if they were ever launched.

‘You've got it, boy,' McGregor had said to him at the last school reunion. ‘It's that crucial difference which makes the nukes immoral. You know what you have to do. Don't tell me anything about it – I don't want to know the details, but you'll know what to do when the time comes. It's no accident you are where you are, remember that! You're there for a purpose, boy!'

Simpson devoutly hoped it would never come to that – the weapons were intended as a deterrent after all. But the fact that chance, or the Almighty, in the form of a Naval selection board, had chosen
him
to be on board that particular boat made Simpson fear the worst.

It would be no easy task to stop a launch of the Polaris missiles if war broke out, he concluded. The firing procedures on board the submarine were hedged about with safeguards designed to prevent any individual acting on his own, either in firing the missiles or in sabotaging the launch. Simpson had studied those procedures carefully. As a supply officer he was not closely involved in the war-fighting tasks of the boat, but the policy of the Navy was that every one of the thirteen officers on board had a part to play if the missiles were ever launched. It was a way of spreading the responsibility and making it seem less awesome.

Simpson's war role was to verify the navigation data to be fed into the missile-guidance computers, data which told the missiles precisely where they were on the globe at the moment of firing. He had soon realised that a simple refusal to carry out his task would achieve nothing; the data could easily be verified by any of the
other officers. The only way to stop the launch would be through deliberate sabotage.

When he had first joined the boat, the captain had talked to him privately in his cabin to ensure that he had no doubts about the rightness of maintaining a nuclear deterrent and of being prepared to use it. ‘If you have any doubts, you shouldn't be here,' Carrington had told him. Simpson had kept his thoughts to himself. He believed this was
precisely
where people with doubts should be if the world was to be saved from destruction.