In the south wing, Dr Hendricks, who was single and lived alone, installed himself and supervised the completion of the computer room, the heart of Operation Troy. All the equipment came from GCHQ at Cheltenham, and it was the best. Two other mentors installed themselves in apartment blocks in the forest from which they could easily walk to work inside the manor. Marcus Jennings was enrolled at a very good school just four miles from Chandler’s Court.
Luke Jennings had a room of his own and contentedly began to convert it into an exact replica of the room he once had under the roof at Luton. Because of his mindset, every single detail had to be one he was accustomed to. A furniture van brought the contents of the Luton room to Warwickshire so that every chair and table, book and ornament could be placed precisely where it had to be. Luke even objected to the clock, because it ticked. He wanted a silent clock. He got one.
And his mood brightened. The stress and the consequent tantrums and tears of the weeks since the night raid abated. With his personal space restored and his computer in front of him, just as it ought to be, he could resume his preferred life. He could sit in half-darkness, wander through cyberspace and look at things.
In the far north of Russia, the final hawser cables were thrown down to the quay and the mighty Admiral Nakhimov eased her way out of Sevmash yard to the waiting sea. From their elevated viewpoint on the bridge, Captain Denisovich and his officers could see the distant spires of the nearby port of Archangel as the prow of the world’s most fearsome surface warship turned to the north. Behind her, Severodvinsk dropped away. The captain and officer corps were beaming with pleasure and pride.
They were gazing down from the bridge at the pride of the Orlan-class battlecruisers, the biggest non-carrier warship in the world, a floating fortress of steel and missile power. The Nakhimov was 827 feet long, almost 100 feet wide and displacing 24,300 tons, with a crew of over 700 mariners.
These Russian cruisers are armed-to-the-teeth mobile platforms capable of taking on any enemy warship in the world. As she steamed out of Sevmash yard, the Nakhimov was the most ultra-modern of her class, her every function fully computerized with touch-screen technology.
Below the water her echo sounders would find the hundred-fathom line and guide her along that line so that she never ventured nearer to the shore unless so bidden. Every detail would be reported to the bridge on one of the high-tech controls that governed her. And there was more.
Many years ago, a novel was published in the West called The Hunt for Red October. It was the debut novel of Tom Clancy and proved very popular. It told the
story of a Soviet naval captain who defected to the West, taking his nuclear-missile submarine with him. It was immediately banned in the USSR and read only by a core of very senior men, for whom its plot was an abiding disaster.
In the Soviet Union, defections, especially of high-ranking officials, intelligence or military officers, were a nightmare, and the thought of one disappearing to the West with a large piece of ultra-modern equipment was beyond even that. Clancy’s novel was taken extremely seriously through the Soviet Navy and up to the Politburo.
Now, it was not merely unthinkable but immediately preventable. Every function in the Nakhimov was computerized, and every function could be duplicated in the master database in the Northern Fleet headquarters at Murmansk. Thus, at a stroke, Murmansk could override the computers on board the Nakhimov and take back complete control. That put paid to treachery.
As for malfunction or interference, these too were out of feasibility. Her steerage system was not the more common US-designed Global Positioning System, or GPS, well known to every satnav user on the roads, but the Soviet-designed GLONASS-K2 system, inherited by the post-Soviet Russian state. It was owned and operated by the military.
GLONASS will define a Russian naval ship’s position to ten to twenty yards anywhere in the world. It relies on twenty-four satellites spinning in inner space. Any hacker seeking to disrupt the system would have to suborn five separate satellites simultaneously, which is clearly impossible.
The course of the Nakhimov was pre-ordained. She would cruise out of the White Sea and north to the Barents Sea, then north-west. With Norway’s North Cape to port, she would turn again, easing out of the Barents Sea into the North Atlantic, then south down the length of Norway. There would always be a helmsman at the controls, but he would not be needed. The computers would keep her on the hundred-fathom line and perfectly on course. For five days, that was exactly what she did.
The ice and bitter cold of the White Sea and North Cape receded and the sun shone through. Between duties, her seamen strolled the decks and took in the bracing air. To port, the mountains surrounding the Tromsø Fjords, where, in 1944, the RAF finally sank the mighty Tirpitz, came and went in the mist. The Lofoten Islands slipped away.
At this point, the Nakhimov could have turned west, deeper into the North Atlantic, to skirt the British Isles to the east as she ploughed south to round the Cape of Good Hope and headed for the Orient. But her orders had been decided weeks earlier in Moscow, by the Vozhd himself.
She would continue south into the North Sea with Denmark to port and Scotland to starboard until she left the North Sea behind and entered the busiest shipping lane in the world: the English Channel. Staring out from his office above the Alexandrovsky Garden below the west-facing wall of the Kremlin, the Vozhd had made his wishes very plain to the commanding admiral of the Northern Fleet.
As scores of vessels scattered to get out of her way, the Admiral Nakhimov would cruise down the Channel and through the pinch-point of the Strait of Dover. Let the blasted British sit at their picture windows in Ramsgate, Margate, Dover and Folkestone and gaze at the might of the new Russia cruising past them, towering over them and their puny navy escorting the mighty Nakhimov south.
On day eight after the departure from Sevmash the sailors on the Nakhimov were staring at the sea foaming past them. Far to port, Denmark had blended into Germany and Germany into the Netherlands. Also out of sight and to starboard, the flat fens of Lincolnshire were hidden behind their banks of mist.
In a small apartment behind Admiralty Arch a phone rang. Sir Adrian picked it up. It was a breathless Dr Hendricks on the line.
‘For the second time this year, I do not believe what I am seeing,’ he said. ‘He’s done it. It can’t be done, but the boy has done it. We are in. Inside GLONASS-K2. Five satellites. And here is the really weird thing. They have not even noticed the entry.’
‘Well done, Doctor. Hold position, if you please. Stay within feet of the phone until further notice. Night and day.’
When he had finished the phone call, Sir Adrian dialled again. The Royal Navy HQ beneath the suburb of Northwood in north-west London. They had been forewarned.
‘Yes, Sir Adrian.’
‘I am coming out to visit you. Tomorrow may be a busy day.’
Heading, as she was, to become the flagship of the Russian Pacific Fleet, the Admiral Nakhimov could easily have skirted the British Isles by keeping to the west of Ireland in deep, clear water and out of sight of land. But the Vozhd had clearly made a deliberate decision to insult the British by driving her straight down the North Sea and through the Strait of Dover, at twenty-two miles wide one of the most overcrowded sea passages in the world.
With two streams of marine traffic, one heading north and the other south, the Dover Strait is governed by strict rules to prevent collisions. As predicted, at her size, the Nakhimov could make it only by driving right down the centre. Russian warships had done this before as a deliberate provocation by Moscow to the United Kingdom.
The Admiralty did not need to be told where the Nakhimov was. There were two frigates escorting her and a relay of observer drones out of RAF Waddington overhead. She was off the coast of Norfolk but slowing to let the night pass before she went through the Strait of Dover. The shoals of the Dogger Bank were behind her in the North Sea. Her echo sounders told her she still had over a hundred feet of clear water beneath her keel. Her course predicted that she would never have less than eighty feet.
At dawn she was opposite Felixstowe in Suffolk and she increased her power to optimum cruise. The Channel was narrowing, with Belgium coming into view to port. The radio waves were alive with the chatter of merchantmen in this traffic jam of a Channel as the Russian mastodon broke all the rules.
Ahead lay the narrowest part – the Strait of Dover – and she tucked close to the Essex and Kentish shore on the Goodwin Sands. Wise mariners avoid the Goodwins like the plague. They are so terribly shallow. But the computers were adamant. The Nakhimov would ease past them with plenty of sea room towards the French shore.