H.M.S. Unseen

because there’s been no sign of any wreckage, no oil, no buoys, nothing. Which means it went down intact. Now there could be a complete electrical failure, I suppose, but the Brits are damned good at this sort of thing, and modern sonars are damned good at sweeping the ocean floor. Chances are she’s got some power, but no one’s heard anything. And her area of operations was not that big. They’ve got God knows how many ships in there. And to me that suggests the submarine is not in its ops area. For some reason it went outside the square.”

“Well is that so bad?”

“Only because it’s missing. But if it did go outside the square, there are five clear reasons why it may have done so.”

“Tell me what they are.”

“One, they got confused, made a mistake. Two, they got careless, weren’t paying attention. Three, catastrophic mechanical failure. Four, the submarine was hijacked by persons unknown who forced the crew to drive it somewhere. Five, the submarine was stolen, and the crew are all dead.”

“Jesus. Are you serious?”

“Kathy, let me tell you something. When we lost the Thomas Jefferson, nearly three years ago, the whole darned thing started with a missing submarine. And a Navy that simply did not know where it had gone.”

“I notice you always get very jumpy when there’s any kind of a problem with a submarine.”

“That’s because I know what a menace they are in the wrong hands. And I’m not going to be all that relaxed until I know those guys in Plymouth have found it, either in good shape or wrecked. I just hate not knowing.”

“You haven’t spoken to anyone over there?”

“No. Not yet. But I was thinking about having a chat with FOSM tomorrow. He’s an old friend.”

“FOSM?”

“Sorry. Flag Officer Submarines. Dick Birley. He and I were in London together for a few months. Haven’t spoken to him for a while. But he always sends me a Christmas card.”

“Do you send him one?”

“Well, I don’t really do Christmas cards.”

“Perhaps we should think about rectifying that this year.”

The admiral smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I think we should. Perhaps it’s nearly time we shared one.”

“Then you’d have to find yourself a new secretary…and then I’d be the one waiting at home like all your other wives, while you run half the world. No thanks, Arnold Morgan, I’ll marry you when you retire. Not one day earlier.”

“Jesus Christ. It’s like trying to negotiate with the Russian Navy. I’m not ready to retire.”

“And I’m not ready to stay home waiting. Besides, I like to keep a good eye on you. And I can’t do that if I’m Mrs. Arnold Morgan. I think things are just fine, just the way they are.”

“I guess I love you, Kathy O’Brien. Don’t ever go away.”

“No chance of that. Are we going home, or are you going back to the factory?”

“We’re going home.”

310500MAR05. 47.02N 08.49W. Course 225. Speed 9.

HMS Unseen ran steadily southwest, almost 300 miles from Plymouth, 250 miles from the massive air-sea search being conducted, by four nations, on her behalf. The submarine had snorkeled for much of the night, and her battery was well topped-up as she made her way across the western reaches of the Bay of Biscay toward her first refueling point in the Atlantic, 500 miles off the Strait of Gibraltar.

Right there, in two days, she would locate the Santa Cecilia. And the crew could hardly wait to get there. Not because of a shortage of fuel, but because of the forty-two bodies piled in the torpedo room, zipped up in the bags, but decomposing and unsettling for the new owners of the ship.

Lieutenant Commander Pakravan was in favor of firing them straight out through the tubes, with the garbage, but that was principally because he had not given the matter serious thought. When he mentioned the subject to Commander Adnam he quickly realized just how little thought.

“No, Ali. Wouldn’t work. Every time you use a torpedo tube to get rid of loose stuff, like an ill-fitting body bag, something always gets caught up. Then you have to get someone into the tubes to free it all up. It’s more damned trouble than its worth.

“I worked out our plan of action long before we left Bandar Abbas, because I knew we would have to dispose of at least forty bodies, because that’s how many Brazilians I knew there would be. The problem is they need to be weighted down. Decomposing bodies blow up with gases, and they float to the surface. Someone would plainly find one of them. So I decided we would have to be very thorough.”

“You mean we have to get them up onto the casing?”

“We do.”

“But they’re heavy as hell.”

“Yes. I know. We’ll rig up the small-stores davit, with a block and tackle right above the hatch. The blocks need to be 8 feet above it, so that each body can swing out onto the deck. There’ll also be a big canvas bag, the one they use to catch seawater coming down the tower in rough weather on the surface. Looks like a huge spinnaker bag from a sailboat, but it’ll do fine for us. All we need to do is get each body into it, then haul away.”

“Sir, what about the weights? We don’t have anything like that.”

“I never thought we would. Which is why the freighter is bringing us a little gift, like 50 cubes of specially cast concrete, each one weighing 80 pounds, with a steel ring, and a long plastic belt to attach it to one of the bags. They’ve been aboard since we first left Bandar Abbas.”

“I didn’t see them.”

“They don’t take up much room, just a space 8 feet by 5 feet by 5 feet high. We stored them aft on the middle deck. No problem.”

“Why do you want to tie them on? Why not just unzip the bags and shove a cube inside each one?”

“Have you ever smelt a five-day-old body, Ali? I wouldn’t wish that on any of you. Specially times forty.”

“Nossir.”

Commander Adnam took her deep at 0600, just as the sky began to brighten over the Bay of Biscay. They would run all day 250 feet below the surface, and then come to periscope depth to snorkel again during the night. The same would apply during the following twenty-four hours, and Ben expected to make his rendezvous with the Santa Cecilia in the small hours of the next day, April 2.

011200APR05.

Submarine Staff Office. Royal Navy Dockyard,

Devonport.

Lt. Commanders Roger Martin and Doug Roper were absolutely baffled. Not a sight, not a sound, not a fragmented sonar bleep. No wreckage, no buoys, no signals. Nothing. HMS Unseen had simply vanished. Whatever air had remained in the lost diesel-electric boat must have long since run out, and there was no longer any possibility of survivors.

The situation was officially SUBSUNK. The chilling Royal Navy signal to that effect had been put on the nets the previous day at 0900. This signal is reserved for use only when a submarine is known to have sunk. Consequently, the urgency had gone out of the search, because the ships were no longer involved in a life-or-death race to get the crew off the bottom of the sea.

Henceforth, it was strictly by the book. But HMS Unseen had to be found. And the area of search was being extensively widened, because it was clear the submarine had gone beyond its quite small exercise area. Three Royal Navy frigates and Captain Mike Fuller’s Exeter were methodically sweeping the bottom with sonars, as were the two minesweepers. Eight times they had sent divers down, plus TV cameras, but there was never even a hopeful sign.

Meanwhile the press were laying it on the Royal Navy. “Experts” were demanding to know how such a thing could have happened. There were already distant allegations about bad training, poor discipline. “What on earth was the Navy thinking of, allowing a bunch of Brazilian rookies to drive this boat underwater?…when it was known they were behind schedule in their training, and presumably competence… was it not a fact that Lt. Commander Bill Colley was unhappy with their progress…was this not an accident waiting to happen…?”