H.M.S. Unseen

Patrick Robinson H.M.S. Unseen

This book is respectfully dedicated to the military Intelligence services of both the United States and Great Britain, the men who watch the oceans and skies, and whose diligence and brilliance are often unheralded.

PROLOGUE

January 17, 2006.

It was a morning of savage cold. The raw, ravenous January wind hurled snow at the driver’s side of the car as it crunched along a freezing man-made ravine, between drifts plowed 12 feet high. It had been snowing now for more than three months in Newfoundland, as it usually did. But Bart Hamm did not care, and he chuckled at the local radio DJ’s banter as he pressed on through the howling polar blizzard of his homeland, heading resolutely for the big transatlantic air base outside the eastern town of Gander.

Bart had been working there for ten years, and he was used to the steadiness of the job, the routines, and the regimentation. Unlike most of the coastal population of the island, he never had to worry about the cold. All through the autumn and winter, the weather in Newfoundland is unthinkable, except to a polar bear, or possibly an Eskimo. But Bart was guided by one solitary thought. Whatever the disadvantages may be to this job, whatever the freedoms I have sacrificed, it’s a helluva lot better than being out in a fishing boat.

Bart was the first male member of his family in five generations not to have gone to sea. The Hamms were from the tiny port of St. Anthony, way up on the northern peninsula. Down the years, since the middle of the nineteenth century, they had treasured their independence, earning a harsh living from the dark, sullen waters that surge around the Labrador coast and the western Atlantic.

In the past century, the Hamms had been saltbankers, sailing the big schooners out to the Grand Banks for cod; they had fished for turbot from the draggers; trapped deepwater lobsters; hunted seals on the ice at the end of winter. A lot of teak-hard, rock-steady men named Hamm had drowned in this most dangerous of industries, three in one day back in the early eighties, when a fishing boat out of St. Anthony iced up and capsized in a gale east of Grey Islands.

Bart’s father was lost in that incident, and his only son had never quite recovered from the ordeal of waiting helplessly, with his mother and sister, for six hours in the snow on the little town jetty. Every thirty minutes, in a biting nor’easter, they had walked up to the harbormaster’s shed, and Bart had never forgotten the old man speaking into the radio, repeating over and over, “This is St. Anthony…come in Seabird II …come in Seabird II …PLEASE come in Seabird II.” But there had always been just silence.

That had been twenty-three years ago, when Bart was thirteen; it was the day when he knew that, whatever else, he was never going to become a fisherman.

Bart was a typical member of the Hamm family: thoughtful, quiet, accepting, and as strong as a stud bull. He was a good mathematician and won a scholarship to the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, where he earned two degrees, one in mathematics, one in physics.

He had the perfect temperament for an air traffic control officer, and he settled into a well-paid place in one of the warmest most protected modern buildings in the entire country. Stormswept ATC Gander was where they checked in every incoming transatlantic flight to Canada and the northern U.S.A., the big passenger jets heading back into the world from the huge freezing sky that umbrellas the desolate North Atlantic waters of the 30-degree line of longitude.

That day, driving through the snow, at 0630 in the morning, headlights cutting through the endless winter darkness, Bart was starting a seven-hour shift with an hour’s break midway. He would begin at the busiest part of the morning, because anytime after seven, they would be talking to a different airliner every three minutes. You had to stay alert, on top of your game, every moment of your shift. The Gander Station was a key ingredient in Atlantic air traffic safety, inevitably the first to know of any problem.

Bart loved the job. He had excellent powers of concentration, and his rise to supervisor would not be long in coming. His shift began at 0700, which was 1200 or 1300 in western Europe. And he began to talk into his headset almost immediately upon arriving at his station, connected on the HF radio to the great armada of passenger jets trundling westward, identifying themselves in their airline’s code, then reporting their height, speed, and position.

At 0717 he was talking to the copilot of a Lufthansa Boeing 747, out on 40 West, handing him a weather check, confirming the position of an offshore blizzard to the south, off the coast of Maine.

Two minutes later he picked up a new call, and his heart, as always, just skipped a beat. This was Concorde, British Airways supersonic star of the North Atlantic, streaking across the sky at 1,330 m.p.h. Bart heard a calm British voice saying, “Good morning, Gander… Speedbird Concorde 001… flight level five-four-zero to New York…MACH-2…. 50 North, 30 West at 1219 GMT…ETA 40 West 1241 GMT…. Over.”

Bart replied carefully, “Roger that, Speedbird 001…we’ll be waiting 1241…. Over.”

The information was entered on his screen, and at 0738 Bart was waiting. Concorde was usually a couple of minutes early calling in because of the high speed at which she crossed the lines of longitude. To cover the 450 miles between 30 West and 40 West, she required only twenty-two minutes.

At 0740 he was still waiting, but nothing was coming through from the cockpit of the packed British superstar racing through the skies out on the very edge of space.

Bart Hamm already had a distinctly uneasy feeling. He watched the digital clock in front of him go to 0741 and knew that Concorde must be well past 40 West. But where the hell was she? At 0743.40 he opened his High Frequency line and went to SELCAL (selective calling), the Concorde’s private voice-frequency channel inside the cockpit. But there was no reply.

Transmitting directly, he had already caused two warning tones to sound in Concorde’s cockpit to alert the pilots to his signals. Seconds later Bart transmitted a radio signal designed to light up two amber bulbs, right in the pilot’s line of vision.

“Speedbird 001…this is Gander…how do you read?…Speedbird 001… this is Gander…how do you read?”

By now Bart Hamm’s heart was pounding. He felt as if he were driving the supersonic jet himself, and he willed the voice of the British pilot to come crackling onto the headset. But there was nothing. “Speedbird 001…this is Gander…how do you read?” Unaccountably frightened now, Bart raised his voice and departed from procedural wording…“Speedbird 001…please come in…PLEASE come in.”

He checked his own electronic connections, checked every step he was taking. But he could not remove the lump in his throat, and, unaccountably, a new image stood before his mind. The one that still awakened him on stormy nights, the image of that terrible morning on the quayside at St. Anthony, when he stood in the snow, and then in the radio shed, clutching his mother’s hand, praying for news of his lost father, the skipper of the missing fishing boat Seabird II.

He tried one more time, calling through to the cockpit of Speedbird 001. And his hand was shaking as he finally pressed the switch to summon his supervisor. At 0745 Concorde should have been more than 100 miles beyond 40 West, and continued radio silence could only be the dread harbinger of disaster because this aircraft was nothing short of a flying high-tech masterpiece, in which electronic backup was layered threefold.