H.M.S. Unseen

in all the ocean to hide a submarine.

“And then Air Force Three. Virtually new. Flown by one of the best pilots in the United States Air Force. Vanishes, and I hear on the grapevine, there were smoke trails spotted, of the kind that might fit a missile.”

“One major point, Iain. Unseen has no weapon that would fire such a missile. Neither does any other submarine in the world. Such a system would have to be custom-made and fitted…I think.”

“Well, Bill, I think Arnold believes the Iraqis found a way, and did fit such a system. I intended to ask you what you thought might be feasible.”

“I suppose one of those advanced Russian SAMs might do it…maybe the Grumble Rif. It’d have to be radar- guided. Heat-seeking wouldn’t do it, because the supersonics would be going too fast. Come to think of it, you could probably adapt the submarine’s regular radar just to a part of the system, the launcher and the missiles. Then you could catch the aircraft coming in…just in the normal way. Then send the bird away right off the casing, to the correct altitude, and let the missile’s own radar in the nose cone do the rest. Couldn’t miss if it was done right.”

“One problem, Bill. I wanted to ask you. If it was Iraq, and we know Adnam is an Iraqi, where? That’s what’s exercising Arnold and me, where could they have made the conversion. They have no submarine facilities.”

“I don’t see that as a major problem, because I think such a system could be bolted onto the deck. You could get most of the high-tech work completed inside the submarine. If you could hide her for a short while, alongside a submarine workshop ship…well, I’m saying you might get it done without even going into a dry dock, so long as there was a crane on board. Remember, Adnam got ahold of a submarine before when he needed it. I guess he could have done it again.

“No, I think the biggest problem for Adnam would be getting a crew. There are no submariners in the Iraqi Navy. And there would be no way to train them. And he surely could not have persuaded an entire crew of Brazilians to go along with the scheme. Did Admiral Morgan have any ideas on that? Or did he just assume Adnam found a way, like he did with the Russian Kilo?”

^MAP

“He didn’t mention any of that. I thought perhaps he might know something he was not prepared to share with me. Anyway, Bill, that more or less brings you into line with our thinking. But the problem of finding it is very tough. And there have been a few developments around here that I’ve been pondering, probably stupidly, just because I’ve got a bit too much time on my hands these days. Let’s just finish our coffee, then we’ll go over to the study and have a glass of port, and I’ll show you a few things…Laura, you wouldn’t pop over and put a couple of logs on the fire in there, would you?”

“Only if I can come over with you and have some of that port,” she replied. “How about you, mum?”

“Oh, I won’t, dear. I’m off to bed. It’s been rather a long day, so don’t keep your father up half the night.”

“No danger of that…Bill and I would like to be a-l-o-o-o-o-ne in the room where we first fell in love…I’ll send Daddy packing, don’t you worry.”

Everyone laughed, and they helped take the cups and dishes to the kitchen before crossing the hall to the book-lined study, in which Laura was blasting the fire with bellows. Then she thoughtfully poured three glasses of Taylor’s ’78 and sat in the left-hand chair, leaving Bill and her father to sit closer and study an atlas he had obviously been using recently.

Sure enough, he handed the heavy book to the Kansan, holding it open to a map of the eastern side of the North Atlantic. “You will see on there, I have made a succession of crosses placed in circles…well, the one on the far left is the place where the two supersonic jets went down. The next one, more easterly, is where you lost the Vice President in Air Force Three. The next two are more recent…very up-to-date. You see the one about 35 miles west of St. Kilda?”

“Got it.”

“Well, we have reports in the Scottish papers this month of a mysterious incident…a fishing boat just vanished somewhere out near there. And there were a few rather baffling circumstances attached to it. My next cross is exactly on the island of St. Kilda, where, a couple of days later, two trained British soldiers, an officer and an experienced corporal, just vanished, and they haven’t found ’em yet.

“My fifth cross is in the harbor of Mallaig, where there may be yet another mystery. The tender from the lost fishing boat, a 15-foot Zodiac, suddenly turns up on someone’s mooring a couple of days later, and everyone is saying the chap who discovered it, a lobsterman, was a habitual drunk and ought not to be listened to. He says the boat had been on his mooring just a few hours. The police say in the newspapers, it must have been on the mooring for days.

“Bill, quite frankly, if you are a fisherman, I don’t care how pissed you are, you’d know if someone had parked a bloody great rubber boat on your mooring four days ago, or last night. I think the lobsterman ought to be listened to.”

“Mmmmmm,” said Bill, studying the map intently.

“And now I’m going to leave you with this thought…follow my crosses…look at the dates…see how they move in a steady easterly direction…a chain of circumstances…leading to what? Ben Adnam? I wonder. Let’s regroup in the morning…breakfast 0900 I think. Good night, you two…oh, and Bill have a look at the little book there…the one about St. Kilda. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

Laura walked across the room and removed the atlas from Bill’s lap, folded it, and placed it, with exaggerated firmness, on a shelf. She then took from a side table a CD, walked over to the player, and turned it on.

“Rigoletto,” he said.

“The first one we ever listened to together, my darling,” she whispered. “Right here in this room, nearly four years ago…Placido Domingo as the duke, Ileana Cortrubas as Gilda.”

And as the rhapsodic sounds of Verdi’s overture rang out, dominated by the glorious violins of the Vienna Philharmonic, Laura walked to her husband, sat on his lap, and hugged him as she always did, as if she would never let him go.

“I love you,” she said. “And it happened in this room. When I had known you for about three hours. I’ve never doubted it, and I would change nothing.”

“Nor me,” said Bill.

“Nor I,” she corrected, laughing at his inability to deal with “me” and “I.” And then she kissed him as she always did, softly, with her hands in his hair, and her touch electrified him as ever.

“Same bedroom tonight,” she said. “How lovely. How unbearably romantic.”

Neither of them knew that beyond the deep red curtains of the study, out under the tall hedges beside the road near the main gate, was parked a metallic blue Audi A8, its driver finding an unbalanced peace just in being there.

10

March 31, 2006.

by 0100 the downstairs lights were out in the locked, silent MacLean household. The three Labradors were asleep in the big kitchen near the Aga, but they had, at the insistence of the admiral, the complete run of the house throughout the night hours, should an intruder decide to press his luck. However, this had never happened, since most burglars were aware that the average Labrador is a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde, once dark has fallen and a house is quiet. From a cheerful, boisterous companion, he turns into a suspicious, growling watchdog, likely to go berserk at the slightest sound. That huge neck of his powers jaws that can snap a lamb bone in two. The reason the British police do not use Labradors in confrontational situations is their instinct to go straight for a man’s throat.

Ben Adnam was unaware of these canine subtleties, and at 0115 he stepped out of his car and walked softly down the drive toward the house. He did so for reasons that were beyond him. He just wanted to be close to the