H.M.S. Unseen

the fishing boat did vanish. I suppose Ben, or whoever it was, could have shot the crew dead, left in the Zodiac, and lobbed a hand grenade on board as he went. But that’s unreal, reckless thinking. Not at all like him. Too noisy. Too likely to be discovered. What if someone heard the explosion? He could not afford that.”

“And how about the gas for the outboard? There’s no chance there was enough for 175 miles. And the trawler’s diesel fuel would not work in an outboard. Which puts Ben in the middle of the Atlantic in the middle of the night with no fuel. Don’t like it, sir. Doesn’t stack.”

“Not quite. I agree. And the disappearance of the trawler is something I don’t really have an answer for. But Ben would know how to sink a boat…if he was prepared to kill the captain and the two crewmen.”

“Only to be stranded himself, Iain. Stranded absolutely nowhere. And no way to get anywhere.”

“Ah, but Bill. There is something you have forgotten. Someone got somewhere. Someone got the Zodiac back to port, right back to Ewan MacInnes’s mooring, on the morning of March 3. That’s when he says it arrived. You see, I believe him.”

“All true. But how? They don’t usually run on air.”

“No. They don’t. But it would be nice to ask the two missing soldiers, don’t you think? St. Kilda is only 35 miles from the Flower of Scotland’s last known. Ben could have made it to there.”

“Jesus, sir. So he could. I wonder if they’ve noticed missing gas, or missing gas cans.”

“I imagine they’re too busy looking for missing soldiers…but it’s food for thought, don’t you think?”

“It sure as hell is.”

“What I can’t work out, is what happened to the fishing boat? But I can work out that Ben Adnam, having planned his evacuation from the submarine, might have been the man in that Zodiac, for whatever reason. So he goes to the military base at St. Kilda, takes out the two soldiers, steals as much gas as he needs, and arrives in Mallaig a couple of days later, on the morning of March 3, when Ewan MacInnes noticed Gregor Mackay’s tender on his mooring.”

“Admiral, for a story with as many holes in it as that one…you make out a very good case. Tell me your conclusion.”

“I think Ben Adnam was in Scotland. I actually think he might still be here…and what worries me is what he might be planning. I mean it would not be beyond him to take a shot at a Trident submarine. I just don’t know, but Arnold Morgan and I both think he stole HMS Unseen. And God knows what he might do next.”

“Be kinda interesting if he stole a Trident and blew up half the world, wouldn’t it?”

“Extremely. The trouble is there are really only three people in this world who understand the man and his capabilities. I, who taught him. You, who caught him. And Arnold, who’s paranoid about him.”

“Mmmmmm…one thing, Iain…picture this yourself. You’re in a 15-foot boat climbing through the Atlantic swell. It’s freezing cold, you’re all alone in the pitch-dark heading for an uninhabited rock called St. Kilda. According to your little book the place is surrounded by huge black cliffs and is just about unapproachable in winter. How the hell could anyone manage a safe landing under those circumstances?

“You’d get swept onto the rocks and drown and no one would ever know.”

“Not Ben. He’s been there before. At least he’s been close enough to have a good look at Village Bay in the southeast, right from the fin of a submarine.”

“He has? How do you know that?”

“I was there.”

On Monday morning, April 3, Ben Adnam checked out of the Creggans Inn and drove to Helensburgh. He paid the second cash installment on the car and asked if he might keep it another week. He’d pay ?150 extra if it was less than a week, ?300 if it was more. “As long as you like, sir. Just keep us informed if you want it more than two weeks.”

Ben picked up more cash at the Royal Bank of Scotland and requested they provide him with two credit cards, a VISA and an RBS bank card, plus a couple of checkbooks. He expected, he said, to be going on a journey, and he would be wiring ?50,000 into his account that same day.

The bank was more than happy to oblige an excellent, if frequently absent, customer like Mr. Arnold, and agreed that his business mail would be held there at the Helensburgh branch until further notice. The bank would deduct credit-card bills from his account automatically. He could pick up both cards in a few days.

The commander then set off for Edinburgh, a drive of 70 miles, straight through Glasgow and on to Scotland’s capital city along the M8 motorway. He located and checked into the Balmoral Hotel, at the eastern end of Prince’s Street, right above the Waverley Railway Station. And, in the absence of a credit card, left a deposit of ?500 with the receptionist.

He checked into his room and immediately left the hotel, walking swiftly up The Bridges to the nearby offices of The Scotsman, with its new computerized reference room in which, for a fee, readers can sit in a small cubicle and pull up on the screen clips and pictures from any news event that the newspaper has covered. There is a further charge for printouts and copies, but the place is a fountain of information, and the Iraqi terrorist wished to bring himself up-to-date with world events that had taken place in the long months he had been at the helm of HMS Unseen: particularly those events in which he had personally been involved.

He began by pulling up the stories on the missing submarine itself, and there were many of them, around the time Ben and his men were running south down the Atlantic a year previously. But the news of Unseen died out quickly, as the Royal Navy’s search came to nothing. There was a routine “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO UNSEEN?” But there was no knowledge, no progression of the facts. No one had speculated anything even close to the truth. At least, not in The Scotsman they hadn’t.

He then pulled up the stories on Concorde and was shocked at the amount of coverage, pages and pages of feature articles, reams of pictures, identifying the victims, their families and the crew who died out over 30 West in the North Atlantic. There were, in addition, two sprawling features over two pages on two separate occasions speculating on the “Bermuda Triangle” out on the edge of space — detailing an eminent scientist’s view that the hole in the ozone layer might make supersonic flight impossible in years to come. Ben permitted himself a thin smile at that one.

The Starstriker catastrophe received matching coverage, with a proportionate rerun of the “Bermuda Triangle” theme. One scientist felt that it was more or less decisive. And agreed with the Greenpeace spokesmen, that all supersonic flights should be suspended until a thorough investigation was completed.

By then it was 1700 and the reference room was about to close. Ben put on his sheepskin coat and stepped out into the chill Edinburgh afternoon, walking slowly back to his hotel, alone as perhaps he must always be, the great terrorist with nowhere to turn.

The following morning he was back in the reference room by 1000 reading through the accounts of the death of the Vice President and the crash of Air Force Three. He found the account of the merchant ship captain, who saw the wreckage falling from the sky, and who talked, initially, of smoke trails. But there was no follow-up to that. The captain, a former Royal Navy officer, had either not been pressed for more detail or, thought Ben, had been told to shut up.

The fact was, there was no mention of missiles. No connection anywhere with the possibility of anything being fired from a submarine. He had accomplished his task with the maximum of publicity, the maximum of terror, and the minimum of identification. Commander Adnam considered he had completed his task for the Islamic Republic of Iran impeccably. And the best they could do was to refuse to pay him, then try to have him murdered. Ben shook his head.

Next he pulled up the stories on the St. Kilda soldiers. Still no sign of them. But he was somewhat unnerved by the testimony of Ewan MacInnes, the man who knew someone had driven the Zodiac back from the Flower of Scotland, and who categorically saw that idiot Lieutenant Commander Alaam standing publicly on the stern of the departing trawler.

Ben Adnam thought that was an example of amateurism at its worst. And he was gratified to see that no one had expanded on the observations of the lobsterman. It seemed to Ben that no one believed the man.

In the next hour he pulled up everything he could find on the Iranian Naval Headquarters at Bandar Abbas. There was very little, certainly no mention of the big dry dock in which they had converted Unseen. No mention of terrorism, nothing on missiles, not a word about Iran purchasing