Commander-in-Chief

16

A deckhand hard at work clearing fishing nets of their mackerel just happened to look up and off the starboard bow of his fifty-foot trawler. It was sunrise, thirty-eight miles northwest of Scotland’s Shetland Islands, and there were no other fishing boats or cargo ships in sight. This meant this boat should have had the sea to itself, because no pleasure craft ever came up here, since there was not one thing pleasurable about bobbing and rolling and freezing to death on this stretch of the North Atlantic.

The deckhand glanced away from the bow and back down to his work, but then his head lifted back up quickly and his eyes focused on a point less than a mile distant. It took a second to pick out the anomaly in the waves that caught his attention, but once he found it again, he knew what it was. The fisherman was still a young man, and his eyesight was excellent. The low form was gray like the water around it, but a few shades darker, and its edges were unmistakable. Man-made. It was also massive, easily the length of a train car and three times the height.

He looked out across the water by himself for a moment, ignoring the fish falling out of the net and onto the deck behind him, but soon he grabbed the man next to him and pointed.

This deckhand was much older, his eyes weren’t so sharp, and he agreed only that he saw “something.”

The younger man said, “It’s a bleedin’ submarine.”

“You’re bleedin’ daft. That out there is not as big as a submarine. Haven’t you seen one?”

“It’s the… It’s that hat thing on the top of the cigar thing. I don’t fuckin’ know what they call them.”

The young fisherman waved his arms up toward the bridge of the trawler, where the captain sat on the other side of a pane of glass. When the captain noticed the movement, the deckhand pointed toward the squat form off the starboard bow.

Quickly the captain stopped the nets, grabbed his binoculars, and looked out into the early-morning waters.

But not for long. After just a few seconds he flipped a switch on the console in front of him and his voice came high and flat over the speaker over the deck. “It’s a fuckin’ sub, Danny. Big bloody deal. The Brits have submarines. Back to work!”

Danny dropped his shoulders, the excitement robbed from him, and he bent down to scoop up the mackerel flopping around on his deck, but the captain lifted his binoculars back to the big conning tower moving through the water off his bow, now just crossing over to the port side. The captain assumed the sub was British, but he saw no markings on the black form, so it was only a guess. It ran like a knife’s blade through the rough water on a southwesterly course, and he knew in minutes he’d lose sight of it.

As he told the young man below, military vessels here were normally nothing to get excited about, but a year earlier, a fishing boat off the Orkneys had reported a sighting of a periscope, and the British Navy had reacted with alarm. They claimed to have no boats in the area and, even though an exhaustive search had turned up nothing, the final conclusion by the Royal Navy had been that it was a Russian submarine patrolling off the Scottish coast.

Of course, the captain of the mackerel boat could not imagine why a Russian submarine would sail with its conning tower proudly on display to a Scottish trawler if it wished to skulk around the United Kingdom, but, the captain thought, it wouldn’t hurt to reach out to officials in the area, just to let them know he’d seen an unidentifiable sub.

Before he radioed in his sighting, however, the captain grabbed a point-and-shoot digital camera with an eight-power optical zoom. He stepped out of the bridge and into the cold, fought the roiling sea for balance, and took a few pictures with the camera zoomed in as tight as it would go.

After taking the snapshots he returned to his helm on the bridge and reached for the radio.

Within ninety minutes of the deckhand on the trawler seeing a queer sight off the starboard bow of his boat, Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde, known more commonly in the area as Faslane, had the images of the sighting in its possession. And in less than another half-hour, the base went on full alert. Faslane was on the Scottish mainland in Argyll and Bute, a good 450 miles from the incident, but they notified their ships in the area, as well as those along the Atlantic coast, of the general heading of the sub sighting.

The HMS Bangor was a mine hunter, but it was closest, just west of the Orkney Islands and directly on the path of the conning tower. The Bangor headed northeast in search of the mysterious vessel.

The HMS Astute, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, was just leaving Faslane on an eighty-day patrol mission of the North Atlantic, so it was ordered to make best possible speed to a position ahead of the submarine.

It would take two and a half days for the Astute to arrive on station, so no one was optimistic about its chances.

A more immediate chance for identifying the sub came from the Royal Air Force. RAF stations in the Scottish Highlands scrambled helicopters with antisubmarine capabilities, but it was known from the outset that the distances required would mean the helicopter missions would be less about search patrols and more about hoping for another sighting from a fishing trawler that could vector the helos in to exactly the right coordinates.

But one after another the helicopter missions returned to base without locating their quarry.

The British used to have the perfect tool for this job, but no longer. The Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft had been recently retired from service, a victim of British defense budget cuts. This left few options for the British short of calling up the United States to ask for help.

So they did.

A pair of U.S. Air Force P-3 Orion aircraft were flown from their home station at RAF Mildenhall, up to RAF Lossiemouth in the Scottish Highlands, and from here they began launching on patrols. The Orion could fly racetrack patterns over the sea for many hours and use its high-tech cameras and sensors, built expressly for antisubmarine warfare.

While the Orions flew off the west coast of Scotland and the British naval vessels hunted from the surface, the British submarine Astute closed on its quarry.

By now it was certain the sub had gone deep, since the hunt itself turned up nothing, but the identity of the sub was determined thousands of miles away in an office just southeast of Washington, D.C. The Office of Naval Intelligence Farragut Technical Analysis Center spent days with the photographs taken by the captain of the fishing trawler, looking over each pixel.

Finally, their analysts came to a consensus about just what it was they were looking at.

At the same time, the HMS Astute picked up faint acoustic readings of a large submarine passing to the northwest, but they were unable to catch up to it, and within moments of the dim signals, they lost it. The only thing they were able to determine with near certainty was that it was heading westerly, into the Atlantic Ocean.

From this, inferences could be drawn. The sub seen on the northern tip of Scotland was sailing, almost certainly, to America.