Skydancer Read Online Free PDF Page A

sense of time. Now, though, with the prospect of shore leave imminent, they began to adjust their watches from Greenwich Mean Time to the hours observed in the girly-bars of Florida.
    Information about the submarine’s activities was strictly rationed on board to those few who needed to know. On a normal patrol the majority of the crew would have no knowledge whereabouts they were in the world’s oceans. On this voyage, though, the entire company had been informed they were heading for America, and all knew from past experience that meant they were going to use the American Eastern Test Range, and fire a missile. Only a handful of officers and specialist technicians, however, knew that the missile would be carrying the new Skydancer warhead, on which hundreds of millions of pounds of income tax had been spent in recent years.
    â€˜What’s the latest from the sound room?’ Carrington quietly asked the officer of the watch, as he prepared to leave the control room and return to his cabin.
    â€˜Plankton are being a bit noisy, sir, but not much else,’ the young lieutenant joked. ‘Oh, about an hour ago we heard a Benjamin Franklin boat passing us in the other direction. About a hundred miles south of us. Presumably heading for her patrol area over our side of the pond.’
    The Benjamin Franklins were American submarines carrying Trident missiles, and the signal-processing computer on board
Retribution
had automatically identified the vessel from a library of acoustic signatures. Analysis by microprocessors meant that almost every vessel could be positively identified from its individual sounds, and all but the very latest Russian submarines had their tell-tale noises recorded.
    â€˜All right, OOW., I shall be in my cabin,’ Carrington told his junior as he weaved his tall shape past the shiny periscopes which had not been raised from their rests since
Retribution
left the Clyde two weeks earlier.
    Moving from one part of this submarine to another was easy compared to the traditional diesel-electric boats with their narrow gangways, claustrophobic hatches, and bunks amongst the torpedo tubes. Being six feet four inches tall, Carrington was grateful to have command of a nuclear-powered vessel which was almost as spacious as a surface ship. His cabin, though, only had room for a small desk apart from his bunk, and he found it cramped for his tall frame.
    He sat at that desk and turned the pages of his log, reflecting on a voyage which had been exceptionally full of incident. The problems had started the moment they had left the Clyde. A Russian submarine had been heard nosing around just outside the estuary, clearly hoping to tail the Polaris boat out on to patrol. The Royal Navy still made the proud boast that none of their ‘bombers’ had ever been successfully tracked by the Russians, and they were prepared to go to extreme lengths to maintain that record.
    Another British nuclear-powered submarine – a hunter-killer boat similar in size and sound to the
Retribution,
but carrying torpedoes rather than ballistic missiles – had been called back from patrol near Iceland to act as a decoy. Using the cover of a noisy cargo ship to drown its own propeller sounds, the submarine had slipped unnoticed into the Clyde, and had then immediately turned out to sea again. Pretending to be the
Retribution,
it had led the Russian shadow on a wild-goose chase round the Scottish islands, while the Polaris boat itself had slipped unnoticed into the deep waters of the Atlantic.
    Two weeks was much longer than was needed to cross the ocean, but HMS
Retribution
had just been modified and refitted, requiring a long series of tests and sea trials to be undertaken. These had been the cause of Commander Carrington’s second major headache.
    The
Retribution
was over twenty years old, and so was most of her missile-launching equipment. The grafting of new systems on to old often produced teething