Sea Leopard Read online

  Sea Leopard

  Craig Thomas

  While charting the new Soviet underwater defense system, HMS Proteus, a British nuclear submarine, is unaware that the Soviets are waiting to spring a deadly trap and steal the British submarine's equipment

  Craig Thomas

  Sea Leopard

  For Mike, agent and friend

  and in memoriam

  ANTHEA JOSEPH

  a kind and courageous lady

  Principal Characters

  Kenneth de Vere AUBREY: Deputy Director, British Intelligence (SIS)

  Patrick HYDE: a field agent of SIS

  Ethan CLARK, USN: on liaison to the Admiralty

  QUIN: an eminent electronic engineer

  Tricia QUIN: his daughter

  Col. Giles PYOTT, RA: a member of the NATO StratAn Committee

  Comm. Richard LLOYD, RN: captain of the submarine HMS Proteus

  Lt. Comm. John THURSTON, RN: first lieutenant, HMS Proteus

  Sir Richard CUNNINGHAM: Director of British Intelligence

  Peter SHELLEY: assistant to the Deputy Director, SIS

  Sqn. Ldr. Alan EASTOE, RAF: Nimrod pilot

  Valery ARDENYEV, Red Navy: O/C Underwater Special Ops. Unit

  DOLOHOV: admiral of the Red Banner Northern Fleet

  Tamas PETRUNIN: KGB Resident, Soviet embassy in London

  Viktor TEPLOV: petty officer to Ardenyev" s unit

  INTER OFFICE MEMO

  from: Head of Project L

  to: Mead of Research

  ref: "LEOPARD"

  I quite realise the pressure you must be under from the Board to achieve results. You may, when you report to them, inform them of the following —

  The broad effect of "Leopard" is already working. We have progressed to the point where we can prevent an enemy sonar signal registering the presence of a vessel using "Leopard", and we can also, after nullifying that signal with the equipment, return to the enemy a false echo as if from the sea bed below the submarine.

  The remaining problems are related to the variable quality of the false signal. I am confident the improvements can be made.

  Commodore D. N. Blackshaw, R.H.,

  Senior Projects Officer,

  Royal Navy (Projects),

  Old Admiralty Building,

  Whitehall,

  LONDON.

  Dear Commodore,

  In considering your urgent request to the company to accelerate the final stages of development of the field prototype of our "Leopard" project, I am advised by the project head, Dr. A. J. Quin, that it is possible to shorten the time prior to full sea trials, only by a matter of a few days. I respect the urgency of the matter, and understand the kind of mission on which "Leopard" would be of inestimable value, but I am afraid that is the best we can do.

  Yours sincerely,

  R. M. Bennett,

  Deputy Chairman.

  LEOPARD 42

  MOST SECRET

  FROM: Peter Shelley

  TO: Kenneth Aubrey,

  Deputy Director, SIS

  You requested a copy of the accompanying report on the sea trials of the LEOPARD anti-detection equipment as soon as possible, together with a summary in layman" s terms.

  As you know, a specially equipped Nimrod and a Sea King helicopter were used in the sea trials with HMS Proteus. They could not effectively detect or pinpoint the submarine, on any single occasion.

  The full report is complex and highly technical, as well as being liberally sprinkled with service jargon! However, I have discussed it with the Director of Technical Services Section, and he has summarised the sea trials in the following terms —

  1. No problems were encountered with the hull sensors;

  2. The "noise generator" unit effectively cancelled all external acoustic emissions, and dealt successfully with all attempts to detect the submarine using sonar;

  3. In shallower waters, the unit" s delayed response system effectively transmitted a sonar echo which accurately simulated a "seabed" response— in other words, the vessels seeking out HMS Proteus only registered the seabed and not the submarine. She was effectively "invisible", as expected.

  DEFENCE DEPARTMENT (NAVY)

  UNITED STATES NAVAL INTELLIGENCE

  US (Intelligence) Form TAL 1

  Our Ref Deputy Director

  Your Ref Capt. E. V. Clark, USN

  page 2 of 2

  so I don't have to tell you how much of a threat to the British, to ourselves and to the whole of NATO the new Soviet sonar buoy carpet in the Barents Sea represents. Unless it is fully mapped, and therefore neutralised as a threat, the Soviet Navy can close the Barents Sea at any time, and that would mean the loss of NATO't northern flank without a shot being fired.

  For the reasons I have outlined, it was decided that the Navy Department ask the British Royal Navy to investigate and chart this new sonar carpet, codenamed CHESSBOARD, using the submarine Proteus. with the new LEOPARD equipment. The submarine, if your reports on her sea trials are accurate, should remain undetected throughout the time she is in the area of the Barents Sea.

  Your brief is liaison and observation, both for the Navy Department and for NATO. Don't overstep your mission orders, but get back to this office immediate and direct through the embassy if anything happens you don't like. Neither the Director nor myself are really happy about risking this LEOPARD equipment, if it't as good as they say. But, we don't have much choice.

  Adml. J. K. Vandenburg, USN.

  Deputy Director,

  US Navy Intelligence.

  TAPE TRANSCRIPTIONS

  FILE REF SIS/26S54/3A— PH/Aubrey

  TAPE NO B/163487/82/4/2S

  DATE

  REFERS QUIN — DISAPPEARANCE

  …Continued

  furthermore, none of his personal effects appear to have been removed from the flat. There was still mail behind the door, dating back more than three weeks. There have been no subsequent sightings.

  In conclusion, I think the bird has flown. On the other hand, I don't believe it was his decision. There was no pre-planning. Coupled with the information regarding the 'trade Mission" arrivals and departures at the Soviet embassy during the relevant period. I am certain that Quin was snatched and is now in Moscow.

  I am inclined to believe that his daughter is with him, Since Birmingham Special Branch haven't had a peep from her since the time of Quin't disappearance.

  I have ordered the continuance of 24-hour surveillance on the flat Quin occupied in Bracknell and on his estranged wife't home in Sutton Coldfield.

  Patrick Hyde

  Part One

  A Game At Chess

  Chapter One: BAIT

  The office of Tamas Petrunin, Trade Attaché at the Soviet embassy in London, looked out upon Kensington Palace Gardens, across the lawns of the embassy grounds. The straight lines of bare plane trees marked the boundary between himself and the western city he both despised and coveted. A fierce early spring wind searched for, and found, the remains of last autumn’s leaves, and hurried them along the road and beneath the wrought-iron gates into the drive of the embassy, finally scattering them like burnt secret messages and papers over the gravel and the grass. The sky was unrelievedly grey, and had been threatening rain all morning. Tamas Petrunin had leisure to reflect, as he listened angrily to the tape cassette from the duty room and its recorded conversation, that London irritated him particularly at that time of year. There was no snow. Wind, and rain — an umbrella threatening to turn inside out carried by an old man passing the gate, unceremoniously jostled by the wind — wind and rain, but little snow. Only sleet in the evening air sometimes, turning instantly to slush in the gutters, like a promise broken. In Moscow, there would be inches of snow, and everyone rotund and anima
lised in fur coats and hats.

  The Scotsman’s recorded voice enraged him. Almost always it did. Now nasality and meaning combined to grip his stomach with an indigestion of rage.

  "We have been trying to contact you for two days," the authoritative Russian voice insisted. Ruban, the Naval Attaché who worked under the auspices of Petrunin and the KGB at the embassy. "You fully understand how difficult movement outside London is for our people here. Why have you not contacted us on schedule? Now you say the submarine has sailed."

  There was an additional nasality, and a promoted, cultivated cough in the Scot’s voice when he replied. "I’ve been in bed with the flu. It’s no’ my fault. I havena been to work all week. I’ve been in my bed, y’understand?" The whine was almost rebellious.

  "We do not pay you to be ill, MacFarlane."

  "I couldna help it. I still feel lousy. I got up to come to the phone. There's fog, too." A small, projected bout of coughing followed the weather bulletin. Petrunin, in spite of his anger, could not suppress a smile.

  "When did the submarine sail from Faslane?"

  "Three nights ago, early hours."

  "What? Three nights? What else did you learn?"

  "I couldna ask, could I? Just that she sailed three nights ago."

  "You are useless to us!" stormed Ruban on the tape behind Petrunin. One of the embassy chauffeurs was walking, leaning against the wind, towards a parked black Mercedes saloon. His black uniform trousers were flapping around his legs, and he was holding his peaked cap firmly on his head.

  "I couldna help it — it was no" my fault if I caught the damn flu, was it?"

  "Was the equipment on board? Do you know that much for certain?"

  "I heard it was."

  "You don't know?"

  "Yes, dammit, it was on board!" The Scot sniffled on the tape. Petrunin pictured him. Pale, rat-faced, unshaven, untrustworthy. Trash. He was poor material with which to start a blaze. Ruban thought so too, by the sound of his voice. Ruban would have to report to Murmansk, via himself, and they would have to decide, on MacFarlane's word alone, whether the British submarine Proteus was carrying the "Leopard" equipment or not when she slipped out of Faslane into the Atlantic three nights before.

  "You're guessing," Ruban said after a pause. "You can't know for certain."

  "I'm sure, dammit! Nothing was taken off the ship after she returned from sea trials with this “Leopard” stuff!" MacFarlane had forgotten his habitual ingratiating manner. "I found out that much. Nothing came off the ship."

  "And where is she now?"

  "I dinna know." MacFarlane retreated from anger into surliness.

  "And that ends your report?"

  In the silence that followed, Petrunin moved to his desk and switched off the cassette player. Then he returned to the window of his office, rubbing his chin. In no more than thirty minutes, he would have to summon Ruban, and they would have to make a decision before five or five-thirty as to the nature of the signal they would send to Moscow Centre and to Red Banner Northern Fleet HQ, Murmansk, EYES ONLY Admiral Dolohov. Damn MacFarlane and his attack of influenza.

  "Leopard". Was it on board? If so, then the likelihood that Proteus was on her way to map the location and extent of the newest Soviet sonar-grid across the Barents Sea from North Cape to Murmansk was transmuted into a virtual certainty. The only way to do that was by means of a submarine indetectable by sonar; which would mean Proteus using the "Leopard" equipment. Ethan Clark, the American expert, was in London on liaison work, Proteus had sailed on secret orders to an unknown destination as soon as her sea trials were complete. It was a likelihood — was it a certainty?

  Petrunin paced the room carefully, keeping to the border of the patterned Turkish carpet, studying his footsteps with apparent intentness, rubbing his chin lightly with thumb and forefinger in a ceaseless motion of his hand. Proteus had to reach North Cape in order for the Red Banner Fleet's cock-eyed plan to be put into operation. If she were sailing elsewhere, all the preparations would have been a waste of time and effort.

  Petrunin found himself before the window again. The newly-imprisoned leaves seemed to be scurrying aimlessly across the embassy lawns, seeking escape. He shook his head. Proteus's target had to be "Chessboard". The development of "Leopard" had been violently accelerated during the past six months, the sea trials had been conducted with maximum haste; both facts implied an urgent task for the equipment. After all, there were no other "Leopard" units as yet, none fitted to any submarine or surface ship in the Royal Navy. Just this one priceless example of anti-sonar equipment, being used for one special task —

  Yes. He nodded vigorously. He would go over it again with Ruban in fifteen minutes or so, but he had decided. They would signal Moscow and Murmansk that Proteus was on her way north, making for North Cape. Then it was up to the Red Banner Fleet.

  And, he reminded himself, not for the first time that afternoon, there then devolved upon himself the task of finding Quin. Quin, the inventor and developer of "Leopard". Disappeared without trace. Not under protective custody, because British Intelligence, the Directorate of Security and Special Branch were all looking for him. Quin. More important — at least in Petrunin's estimation — than "Leopard" itself. Where was he?

  He realised, with a mounting disappointment, that his decision with regard to Proteus was no decision at all. Merely a side-issue, a piece of self-indulgence, a war-game for sailors. Quin was what mattered. And Quin could not be found.

  * * *

  It had become routine, watching the house in Sutton Coldfield, in a quiet, residential street between the roads to Lichfield and Brownhills. A pre-war detached house, standing a little back from the road and elevated above its level, partially screened by a stone wall and a dark hedge. Leaded windows, trained ivy like an artificial ageing process climbing wooden trelliswork around the front door, and cherry blossom trees waiting for the spring. The street was still stained from the recent rain, and the slim boles of the trees gleamed green. Routine, boring routine. The young officer of the Special Branch unit attached to the West Midlands constabulary knew the facade of the house in which Quin's divorced wife lived with a familiarity that had become sour and stultifying. She worked part-time in the elegantly refurbished premises of an antique shop a hundred yards away. She was there now. The Special Branch Officer had parked his unmarked Ford Escort so that he had a clear view of the house and the entrance of the shop. He had observed well-dressed women, the occasional couple, a small delivery van, but no sign, none whatsoever, of Quin or of his daughter who had disappeared from her teacher training college in Birmingham at the same time that he had vanished. And there had been no visitors to the house except the milkman, the grocery delivery on a Thursday, the fish van on Wednesdays —

  Sugden found himself idly flicking through the leaves of his notebook, rehearsing the boredom of two weeks" surveillance of the quiet street in a quiet suburb, shook his head, and snapped the notebook shut on the seat beside him. He put another cigarette to his lips, lit it, looked at his watch — Mrs Quin would be coming home for a salad lunch in another half-an-hour — and slid lower in the driving seat, attempting to stretch his legs. He yawned. He and Lane, day and night for two weeks, just in case the missing man contacted the wife he'd left four years before, or in case the daughter turned up.

  No chance, he told himself with a spiteful satisfaction that seemed to revenge him on the London superiors who had placed him in his present limbo, no chance at all. It was even duller work than preparing for the visit of the Queen to a Lichfield school a couple of years before, or Princess Margaret's opening of another Lichfield school before that, just after he had joined the Branch in Birmingham. Dull, deadly, dead. Quin and the girl had gone over. Not voluntarily, of course. Kidnapped. Snatched. Sugden yawned again. Quin was building "Leopard" for the Soviet Union by now, watched by his friendly neighbourhood KGB man. Despite wishing to maintain a frosty contempt for his present task and for those who had given him his
orders, Sugden smiled to himself. Once Mrs Quin was inside the house, a quick sandwich and a pint for him in the pub opposite the antique showroom. In the window seat, he could just about see the path up to the Quin house. Well enough, anyway. Certainly he could observe any car that parked near the house, or a pedestrian on the pavement.

  He wondered why Quin had left his wife. Perhaps she had left him. They'd moved down to London when he began working for Plessey, and she'd come back to the Midlands after the separation because both of them were from the area and because the girl, Tricia, was enrolled at a training college in Birmingham. She'd repeated her first year twice, the file said, then failed her second year after the decree nisi, and only someone's pull high-up had prevented her from being expelled from the college. Now she'd disappeared along with her father. Another lever for the KGB to use on him, Sugden presumed. Mrs Quin looked pleasant and capable. Greying blonde hair, smartly turned out, could be taken for early forties. Quin, from the look of his picture — on the dash of the Escort — wasn't much of a catch, at least not in looks. The girl was pretty, but student-scruffy rather than making the most of herself. Almost drab, like the female of some brightly-plumaged species of bird.

  She came down the path as Sugden rubbed his face and stifled another yawn. Tricia Quin, coming out of her mother's house. The closing of the door alerted him. She took no notice of the car, turned left, and began walking briskly down the hill towards the Lichfield Road. Frayed denims, a long cardigan in some sludgy colour beneath a cagoule, untidy fair hair. Tricia Quin.

  She was almost fifty or sixty yards down the hill before his hand jerked at the door handle, and he got out of the Escort. He could not believe it, though the confirmatory photograph was in his hand. He opened his mouth, fish-slow and silently, and then slammed the door behind him with an angry curse. He appeared stupid, would appear stupid, even when he took the girl in…