‘Captain, sir. You asked to be called when we reached the specified position.’
‘Thank you. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.’
On the Astute-class hunter-killer submarines, the commanding officer’s cabin is just aft of the control room and directly below the forward part of the sail, so when Commander Neil Forrest said ‘two minutes’ that was exactly what he meant. In fact, he walked in less than 90 seconds after the watch-keeping officer had called him.
The first thing he looked at was the boat’s position. Not because he had any doubt that the submarine was in the right place in the sea, but because submariners check everything at least twice, every time. Their lives can depend on that kind of care, and so they check, recheck and then they check again.
The Artful was where she was supposed to be, and she’d made it with a little over an hour to spare, which pleased Forrest. Now all he and the crew could do was lurk in the depths – something all submariners are well used to doing – and wait for a pre-determined time. Then she would ascend to the correct level below the surface of the ocean and stream the communications buoy ready to receive either a tasking or an execution message.
And what he hoped, more than anything else, was that it was the former. The idea of torpedoing a helpless civilian ship, irrespective of the nationality of its crew and what they were doing, was repugnant to him, and was not the kind of operation for which the Astute-class submarines had been designed. And sinking a submarine, even a Russian submarine, in a time of peace would be equally, or perhaps even more, disturbing.
Neil Forrest would stay in the control room until that message, whatever its contents, had been received.