Skydancer Read Online Free Page B

mistress and preserve his marriage – would he lose them after all?
    â€˜What a mess!’ he muttered as he finally turned the car through the gates of Aldermaston.
    Once back at his desk, he instructed his secretary to discourage telephone callers. Peter Joyce was a methodical man who had spent his working life confronting apparently insoluble problems. Pulling out a thicknotepad, he sat back and forced his brain to concentrate. First he had to list and analyse the dangers that both he and the Skydancer project now faced. Then he had to think of ways to counter them, or at least to limit the damage.
    Three thousand miles away the surface of the western Atlantic heaved and surged in a long, lazy swell, the aftermath of a depression which had moved off to the east to dump its rain on the soft green hills of Ireland.
    Five hundred feet below that surface, the dark, still waters were unaffected by the weather above. It was down there that HMS
Retribution
slipped silently westwards, her 8,400 tons of sleek, black steel propelled by the tireless energy of her nuclear reactor. Longer than a football pitch, the leviathan of the Clyde was in her true element down there, amongst the other weird creatures of the deep that relied on sound, and sound alone, to protect themselves from predators.
    And predators there were, in increasing numbers, for these boats and their crews who lived under water for two months at a time. The normal role of ballistic missile submarines like HMS
Retribution
was to lie in wait, lurking in the Atlantic depths far enough from the Russian coast to go undetected, but close enough for the sixteen Polaris missiles on board to stay within range of their targets. To lie in wait in the fervent hope that the very existence of her weapons would deter a war, and that they would never have to fire the rockets that could destroy several Soviet cities and slaughter tens of millions of people.
    The predators for HMS
Retribution
were the Russian hunter-killer submarines, whose task was to scour the oceans for Western missile boats. If a war was ever tostart, the Russians would try to sink
Retribution
before her deadly missiles could be fired.
    The navies of Nato had the reverse task of tracking the Soviet missile boats, and in peacetime the roles of hunter and hunted were constantly rehearsed in a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek.
    Evenly placed along the smooth flank of
Retribution
’s hull were small, flat plates, the ears of the submarine which could hear other vessels hundreds of miles away. Trailing behind the boat’s fan-like propeller, a cable hundreds of yards long towed an array of hydrophones which could listen for distant sounds, unencumbered by the tiny noises generated by the movement of the submarine itself through the water. This was the most powerful tool of all in the electronic armoury that had enabled the Royal Navy’s ‘bombers’ – as the polaris boats were called – to stay ahead of the game, to hear the Russians before the Russians heard them, and to remain undetected on their Atlantic patrols.
    In the belly of the submarine’s massive carcase one hundred and forty-three men lived their lives, apparently oblivious of their great depth under water, the pressure of which was such that, without the protection of the steel hull, it would crush them to death within seconds.
    It had been nearly two weeks since they had last seen daylight, and Commander Anthony Carrington, the captain of
Retribution,
was looking forward to smelling fresh air again. He had just announced on the boat’s public address system that they were due to dock in Port Canaveral, Florida, the following day. An air of anticipation and readjustment had immediately swept through the boat.
    Cut off as they were from the regulating influence of the sun, the crew’s time on board was broken into periods of work and periods of rest, rather than of dayand night. Men found it easy to lose their