Hunter Killer Read online

  Easy is the descent into the dark deeps!

  But to retrace your way and issue into

  space—there is the toil and there is the

  task!

  Virgil, Aeneid

  1 C O M M A N D E R G E O F F R E Y P E A C E R . N . Geoffrey Peace was dead.

  I could not believe it. For three days, ever since a naval officer had enquired ' Mr. John Garland?' and handed me

  that agonizing message from the flagship, I had not believed it. Even when the ominous shape, covered by a tarpaulin,

  had been brought alongside in a launch by a naval party, my mind rejected the thought. But now there could be no doubt: I stood looking through the glass trap in the coffin lid into the hard face of the man who had been so much a part of

  my life: Commander Geoffrey Peace, Royal Navy, D.S.O. and two Bars.

  Death had not softened the clean-shaven face ; the strong

  jaw with the cruel line of the mouth was held shut by the

  black rubber diving-cap he had worn at the time of his death. They had dressed the body again in the underwater suit. Its cowled effect brought no feeling of sanctity but rather one of evil, or—I told myself in hurried excuse for the dead—the desperate rejection of any hope of afterlife, like the wild keen of a piper's lament in the Outer Isles.

  Geoffrey Peace should not have died like this, I thought angrily—to be hauled from a few feet of water with heart

  failure. Automatically my eyes sought the hands which had

  sent so many other men to their deaths, but they were hidden. All the Peaces had died hard. A strange resentment welled

  inside me that this one should have met his end so tamely

  after so violent a life. Simon Peace, his grandfather, had gone to meet his Maker with the cry of the sea and England on

  his lips ; old Sir John Peace, his piratical ancestor who had terrorized the Indian Ocean, had been cut in half on his own quarterdeck by a triple-shotted broadside. But Geoffrey Peace, who was in the full glare of the public spotlight in Britain and America because of his part in the controversial American Navy missile project, had died no more excitingly than an overfed businessman who drops dead after a dip at Ramsgate.

  Now he lay ' slung atween the roundshot '—not old Sir John's way, perhaps, but as near as they could get to it in this age when men had already stepped on to the moon ; for Geoffrey Peace's wasn't an ordinary coffin at all. The coffin at which I looked was steel, fashioned like a cylinder : it 7

  might have been a section of torpedo-tube or, more likely, a length of discarded missile-casing from a cruiser in the bay. No, it couldn't be that, I realized, bending closer. The metal Was riveted, not welded, and a missile needs a smooth bore. I ran my fingers unseeingly along the line of grey-painted metal studs. Perhaps if the sight of my dead comrade-inarms had not affected me so greatly, I might then have suspected something of the secret which was to shock the world and the United States in particular.

  The sound of a powerful jet engine overhead jerked my attention away from the dead man's face. Here were the top brass coming to pay their last tribute to Geoffrey Peace. The plane circled the anchorage. Peace was ' lying in state' aboard his own luxury motor-yacht, Bellatrix. In the bay, backed by palm-fringed islets, I could see the American Seventh Fleet, a magnificent array of fighting ships. Among them were two

  of the new Shenandoah-class nuclear subs, replacing the first Polaris-firing George Washington class, which had become obsolete in the early 1970's. To the north-east lay the Royal Navy's new Limuria Squadron, a crack task-force which had again raised the Navy's battle ensign of glory after the long starved years of the 'fifties and 'sixties. It did my sailor's heart good to see the lean, deadly silhouette of two Lochclass cruisers, Loch Vennachar and Loch Torridon. Complementing the American submarines were the British Devastation-class nuclear subs. Bellatrix was at anchor in Port Victoria, Mahe Island, largest of the Seychelles group in the northern Indian Ocean. The Seychelles, a 5,000-square mile agglomeration of islands, atolls, cays and coral reefs, lie about one-third of the way between East Africa and India. This group stands at the head of another immense chain stretching away boomerang-shape for over 1,000 miles to the south-east. The northern pivot

  is Mahe and the southern Mauritius. These islands—often

  no more than a fringe of coconut palms round a strip of sand a few feet above water-level—have been named collectively Limuria. They are inhabited by fewer than 2,000 people

  spread over tens of thousands of square miles of sea. The

  islands are believed to be the last visible peaks of a drowned continent which once lay between Africa and Australia. The inhabitants—descendants of pirates, natives and slaves—speak Creole, a tongue which has mutated as far from its original French as have the strange animals of Limuria from their African homologues. Limuria is a never-never land of soft tropical islands and languor, a surfeit of sweetness among

  the endless palms, lagoons of breath-taking loveliness at

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  dawn and sunset. Here, some years ago, Britain had established her big missile base. I screwed up my eyes against the afternoon sun and watched

  the big jet bank round Mount Howard, Mahé's northern tip,

  and circle over the densely wooded ravines and peaks which

  back Port Victoria. I lost it momentarily, then it reappeared from behind Morne Seychellois, the highest peak in the

  island, to make its landing approach. I turned away from it, sick at heart, dreading it for what it represented: the publicity ordeal of Peace's funeral, with myself as the chief mourner.

  What secret did that hard face hold below the glass, the

  secret which he had summoned me to tell and yet, for reasons which had died with him, had held back for one week, a week which was to prove his last on earth? My eyes searched the

  dead face, tried almost to get beyond the half-closed lids, to find out.. What was it all about, I kept asking myself, as I had done while we had raced towards the Seychelles from

  Mauritius, where we had met. I had sought the answer then,

  but in life Peace was not the man to be approached—not even by his closest friend—if he did not want to be approached. I saw now that his tense, highly nervous state in the days

  preceeding his death was not, as I,thought, due to the weight of his secret, but was caused by the shadow of the heartattack which had killed him. The superficial explanation he had given for asking me to

  come all the way to Mauritius from South Africa was, of

  course, a blind. That was clear to me soon after our meeting. I had left the Royal Navy to take charge (thanks to my knowledge of navigation) of the head office of NACCAM, an advanced commercial air and sea navigational system, in

  Johannesburg. Under my supervision, we had installed

  navigational aids for ships and aircraft round the southern, strategic tip of Africa. Peace had cabled me asking if I would meet him to discuss the installation of a similar system in the islands of the Indian Ocean. He had suggested Mauritius as

  the rendezvous, since the island is only six hours by jet from Johannesburg. Peace's message came as a surprise to me, for I had been out of touch with him for several years, although

  his work in connection with the British missile mission to

  America had kept his name constantly in the news.

  For months before his death, Peace had been the centre of a bitter controversy over an Anglo-American missile. British scientists had developed a small light-weight nuclear power plant for missiles and satellites. The newspapers nicknamed it SNAP—System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power. The motor,

  9

  according to the papers, was considerably in advance of anything in
America or Russia. Peace had led a British technical mission to the United States, offering the Americans the new motor as a co-operative effort in space exploration. Britain made no secret of her pride in her invention, and SNAP was equally well received in the United States. Its merits were endorsed by no less a man than Marvin K. Green, the brilliant young American astronaut and scientist who had become Vice-President. MKG, as he was popularly known, had turned that rather stultifying office to splendid account as the representative of the new technocratic society which had

  sprung into being in the United States. He had assumed the

  chairmanship of Special Projects—an independent body

  answerable to the President only—whose function was the

  development of special American missiles. Special Projects

  was enthusiastic about SNAP, MKG and Peace formed a close friendship, and it seemed that a new bond in Anglo-American relations was about to be forged.

  Then—success struck. The Americans launched two men,

  Davis and Acton to the moon. Using a land-based Air Force

  Sirius rocket staged from a space-station orbiting round the earth, these astronauts reached the moon but failed to return, and were cremated in a shallow orbit round the earth.

  The great American success—a skyport was established on

  the moon itself by Davis and Acton—killed the new AngloAmerican project. Against the wishes of the President, an economy-minded Congress scrapped it. What point had it,

  they argued, now that there had been a successful landing on the moon?

  Peace—and to a lesser extent MKG—had been publicly outspoken against the dropping of the project and Peace's forthright views had made him the storm centre of the controversy in the United States.

  I had thought Peace to be in England when his cable arrived. Glad to go and 'eager to see my old friend, I had been shocked at his tenseness when he met me at Mauritius as the South Africa—Australia jet landed. He had hurried me aboard his luxury yacht Bellatrix—another surprise for me—and persuaded me that the place for the discussion with unspecified persons over the NACCAM installation was the Seychelles. We had sailed from Mauritius within a few hours on the fourday trip. Apart from his tenseness, the first indication I had of the impending shadow over Peace was a diversion to a

  remote island group 250 miles north-north-east of Mauritius known as St Brandon, or Cargados Carajos. St Brandon is

  nothing more than a hellish group of islets and coral rocks 10

  with one tiny port on Raphael Island. Peace's excuse was

  that his ancestor, Sir John Peace, had used St Brandon in the reign of Charles II as a base for piratical forays against shipping in the Indian Ocean. Peace made much of the fact that Sir John had been the first Englishman to chart the group. To my astonishment, he had insisted on spending days in an island boat charting the risky seaward passages of St Brandon's great 25-mile coral barrier reef. When I protested, and pointed out that I had joined him to discuss a big business proposition, he became withdrawn and angry. I got no more

  out of him until we reached the Seychelles, where, instead of going ashore at Port Victoria to discuss what I had irritably ceased to regard as a deal, he decided to go spear-fishing. When Peace announced that he intended to take Bellatrix to a cluster of islets centering on Frigate Island, 25 miles east of Mahé, I exploded. If he wanted me, I told him angrily, he would find me ashore at the hotel—if I hadn't left on the

  next plane for South Africa. MacFadden, the tough Scots engineer who had been with us on the Skeleton Coast of South-West Africa in earlier years, had gone on a bender

  ashore immediately we arrived. I sympathized with him. I

  had no wish to go wandering aimlessly about the islands

  under the pretext of a business deal in the offing.

  My irritation with the whole affair increased when I found that I would have to stage back to, Johannesburg via East

  Africa, and that the aircraft was an old flying-boat which only made the leisurely trip once a week. That meant a further

  delay of three days in the Seychelles. I cursed the soft languor of Limuria.

  Peace. had seemed animated, less tense, when I announced my intention of going ashore. He didn't try to stop me. For a moment I thought he was about to say something, but

  then he shrugged as if he had, changed his mind.

  As I sat at dinner at the hotel that evening, a naval officer came to my table and saluted.

  Mr. John Garland?'

  I nodded, wondering if my anger had provoked somebody

  to do something about discussing the deal.

  He handed me a note, which I took more in irritation than anticipation. It said: ' I have to inform you that the body of Commander Geoffrey Peace was taken from the water at Noddy Rock, half a mile northward of Frigate Island; at

  approx. 1330 hours today by a boat's crew from H.M.S. Loth Vennachar, operating in that area. Artificial respiration was applied without success. Commander Peace was taken aboard Loch Vennachar, where he was pronounced dead by 11

  the Senior Naval Surgeon. The body will, at the direction of the Commander-in-Chief, Limuria Command, be held aboard Loch Vennachar until suitable arrangements have been made . .

  I hadn't seen the room after that. All I saw was an indelible vignette from the past ; Peace at the periscope of a submarine, Peace going in for the kill .. .

  The sub-lieutenant was dutifully sympathetic. ' You were his friend, sir, weren't you? They say he was the greatest skipper that ever took a submarine to sea ..

  I had my own memories of that. I cut him short. The manner of our parting ate into me like acid, now. ` Can I see him?'

  Àfraid not, sir.'

  I got up. I had to see Geoffrey Peace—only once again. Not the way we had parted, with a flare of anger and a shrug. `

  By whose orders?' I demanded.

  ' Commander-in-Chief's, sir. No one allowed to see the

  body. As a serving officer . .

  I must have raised my voice, for several of the diners turned. ` Take me to Loch Vennachar.'

  The sub-lieutenant had obviously been chosen for the job. `

  Sorry, sir, no civilians allowed aboard missile cruisers. Security and all that.'

  ` Civilian!' I exploded. Ì'm no bloody civilian, man—. I'

  m a reserve captain in the Royal Navy! Ask! Ask!'

  He was cool and sure of himself. ' Ask—who, sir? Perhaps

  we could discuss this . . . ah . . . away from . . .' he gestured at the staring diners. He led the way outside. I demanded again to see Peace's body, the C-in-C, the Senior Naval Officer ashore. The most I could wring out of the young sublieutenant—whom I heartily detested by now—was that he would try and establish my bona fides.

  I walked down to the pierhead. I do not know how long I stood and stared at the lights of the fleet. He could not end like this, I told myself over and over—not Geoffrey Peace. I had to talk to someone. I spent the next few hours looking for MacFadden among the pubs and joints. There was no sign

  of him. I tried to telephone the SNO, but the naval exchange was adamant. For the next two days I fretted and fumed. Then the sub-lieutenant came to the hotel and reported that Bellatrix was back in port. I could go aboard, I was informed politely, but must not leave harbour. I tried again to find MacFadden, but he must have holed up somewhere. 12

  If, however; the body of Peace was being concealed, the

  news of his death was not. The morning after his death, the BBC gave it a high place in its early bulletins. The evening newscast contained a tribute from the Prime Minister to

  Peace's part in the development of the SNAP motor and his mission to the United States.

  Other bulletins stated that Peace would be buried at sea

  with full naval honours by the Limuria squadron and the

  u.s. Seventh Fleet. This seemed to me a belated attempt at

  recognition of what, on the face of it, mi
ght, have been a

  highly successful joint space effort between the two nations. The British Defence Minister would fly to Mahé to attend,

  as well as senior naval officers from Allied countries, it was stated. I took it, was because of Peace's famous wartime exploits. I was interviewed by long-distance telephone from London about Peace. A television news crew arrived and the hotel foyer looked like a studio. Through all this I was denied access to the C-in-C.

  I went aboard Bellatrix—still no MacFadden. Then came the awful moment when the naval party arrived with the

  body and my realization that the face below the glass was

  indeed dead. There was also a message to say that the Cin-C would be pleased to discuss the funeral arrangements with me at my convenience. The funeral was to be delayed, I was informed, pending the arrival by plane of more VIPS. The big jet came round once again, flaps hard down for

  the landing. Perhaps this was a plane-load of them. If I

  could have had my way, it would have been a quiet committal to the sea from the deck of Bellatrix .. . Had the soft thump on the hull come a few minutes earlier, it would have been lost in the roar of the jet. Its very gentleness made it sinister. A boat makes its own particular noise against the hull of a bigger vessel. This was the thump of—a body.

  I slipped over to the opposite porthole, and crouched down

  with my ear against the sycamore panelling. There it was!

  The slow slide of 'a body pulling itself up to the deck, with great caution. Had this suspicious approach something to do with the secret Peace never told me? I glanced round the

  cabin hurriedly and then ducked behind the bar-counter in

  the corner.

  Whoever it was made no sound on deck. I waited.

  Then the after door of the cabin began to open slowly.

  Out of sight, I would have to rely on sounds from now onwards in order not to be seen. 13

  Silence.

  I risked a quick sideways glance round the bottom of the bar.

  Back towards me, a man, wet, naked except for swimming

  trunks, was kneeling at the side of Peace's coffin. His head was cocked to one side and a rubber tube led from his head to the steel cylinder. A stethoscope! Like a veterinary surgeon sounding the heart of some strange creature, the man placed the stethoscope against the metal. I could almost hear his breathing. As if the instrument were not functioning properly, he slipped the earplugs off and put his ear—face sideways to me—against the coffin. Still not satisfied, he went to the head and listened again. I heard the faint hiss of his breath. I craned round the bar. It could not have been his breath, for the man was standing, every nerve alert, looking down at the coffin. He was muscular, sun-tanned, and I saw thrust into his belt, the walnut butt striking against the Whiteness of his belly, a Colt .38 Detective Special., He moved slightly and the gun clunked faintly against the steel. He must have been as taut as I was, for he wheeled round on the empty room. I jerked my head back._ Colt Special! That was the gun used by American police, the FBI and detectives, a beautiful little weapon with a stubby barrel and a lethal s t r i k e . I h a d s e e n , t o o , s o m e t h i n g t h a t a l a r m e d m e — t h e hammer of the Colt had been hocked, to enable a quick draw f r o m a s h o u l d e r - h o l s t e r . W h o e v e r i t w a s k n e w h i s w a y around with guns.