Stopping passers-by on any British street, the number discovered who had ever even heard of Chandler’s Court would have been about zero. It was a very clandestine place indeed.
In the First World War its owner had been a cloth manufacturer who had obtained a contract to supply khaki serge uniforms to the British Army. That was when it was confidently expected the war would be over by Christmas 1914. As the slaughter mounted, the contracts for more uniforms became bigger and bigger. The manufacturer got very rich indeed and, in 1918, as a multimillionaire, he purchased the seventeenth-century manor house set in a forest in Warwickshire.
During the Great Depression, when the queues of unemployed snaked for miles, he created work by having teams of workless bricklayers and labourers build an eight-foot wall to surround the entire 200 acres. Dubbed a war profiteer, he was not a popular figure, and he wanted and needed his privacy. With his wall and just two guarded gates, he got it.
When he died in the early fifties, having neither widow nor offspring, he gifted Chandler’s Court to the nation. It became a retirement home for badly wounded ex-soldiers. Then it was abandoned. In the late eighties it achieved a new use. It was converted into a research laboratory, shrouded in secrecy and banned to the public because it delved into some of the most fearsome toxins known to man.
Much more recently, after the poisoning with Novichok of the former Soviet spy Colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, it was Chandler’s Court rather than the much better known Porton Down that came up with the antidote that saved their lives. For obvious reasons, the credit in the media went to Porton Down.
The sprawling manor at Chandler’s Court had been allowed to stand idle, maintained but not inhabited. The research laboratories were scattered through the woodland, as were the comfortable modern apartment blocks where the junior staff lived. Only senior scientists lived off site. There were two gates in the wall, one for commercial deliveries and the main gate for personnel. Both were manned and guarded.
Within a week, teams of artisans and decorators arrived to work on shifts spread throughout the twenty-four-hour day to restore the manor to human habitation. The Jennings family was shown around and, just over three weeks after the White House meeting, moved in. Dr Hendricks had agreed that the huge mini-city of GCHQ Cheltenham would not be right for Operation Troy. Too big, too confusing; for Luke Jennings, too intimidating and too populated. He and a team of two would also transfer to Chandler’s Court to monitor the programmes and mentor the juvenile genius at the centre of it.
There was one flaw, and Sir Adrian had attended a tense family parting at Latimer the day before the Jenningses left for Chandler’s Court. For a decade, the marriage had been on the rocks. The parents had tried to shelter their sons from the breakdown of the relationship between them, but it had become harder and harder, up till the point of impossibility. In short, they wished to part.
It had been decided that, at Chandler’s Court, Luke would live and work on assignments issued by GCHQ. His mother would live with him and assist in his dealings with others. The younger brother, Marcus, could attend any of two or three excellent local schools within easy driving distance. Harold Jennings did not wish to live there and, with the marriage at an end, did not even wish to return to Luton to resume work at his old accountancy practice.
What he really wanted had surprised Sir Adrian. He wished to emigrate to the USA and become a citizen of New York. It was a dream he had nurtured for years, since attending a conference there.
Sir Adrian had mentioned that he had friendly contacts in the USA and might be able to help by arranging some official assistance in fast-tracking the bureaucracy and formalities of residence and work permits.
With great speed, it was done. Harold Jennings had left his Luton practice and resigned from his golf club. The house was put in the hands of a local estate agent. In New York, he had a post with a British finance company just off Wall Street with a good salary. After a period in a hotel he would acquire a comfortable apartment and start his new life.
And now came the parting. It would have appeared unusual to a stranger inasmuch as it was so unemotional, as indeed was Harold Jennings. Had he had feelings and been prepared to show them, he might have saved his marriage years earlier. But it seemed the man’s spirit was as dry and lifeless as the accounts and figures that he had spent his career poring over.
He forced himself to embrace his two sons and, finally, his wife, but awkwardly, as if they were acquaintances at a cocktail party. His sons had caught the mood many times before and responded in kind.
Marcus, the younger boy, said, ‘Goodbye, Dad, and good luck in America,’ which evoked a panicky smile from his father and an assurance of ‘I’ll be fine.’ The lack of warmth in the embrace of the parents indicated why the soldiers a month earlier had found separate beds for the parents on the first floor of the Luton house.
There was a cab waiting in the forecourt of the manor. He left his family in the hallway, went outside and was gone to the airport.
Sir Adrian, hearing this later that evening, presumed that this was the last he would hear of Harold Jennings. He was wrong.
The following morning Sue Jennings and her sons moved into a spacious suite on the first floor of the manor at Chandler’s Court. It still smelt of fresh paint, but the weather was mild for the beginning of May and, with the windows open, the odour soon evaporated.
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.
Chapter Five
IT WAS A beautiful spring dawn. The sun rose to shine from a cloudless blue sky. The early risers of the coastal towns and villages of north-east Kent were up and walking the seashore with their dogs, binoculars and cameras. Out of the north the vast grey shape of the battlecruiser slid through the Strait of Dover. Via fully automated visual media, the world was watching.
In the pretty waterside town of Deal, separated from the just-invisible Goodwin Sands by a small lagoon of navigable water where local fishermen take blue mussels and peeler crabs, breakfasting citizens sat at their sea-facing windows, unaware of the hulking monster cruising towards them.
On the bridge, Captain Denisovich and his officers stood behind their consoles and looked down at the smaller vessels scattering before them. Far away in Moscow, the Vozhd also watched on a huge screen a live feed from an aeroplane chartered by RT (formerly Russia Today), the state-funded television network, which was circling the Kentish coast.
As the Nakhimov began to inch to the right, the helmsman corrected her course immediately. She continued to slip towards starboard.
Staring straight forward over the prow, the officers and crew could see the painted cottages of Deal. Below them in the engine room the revs of the nuclear-powered turbines began to increase. The chief engineer presumed the order had come from the bridge.
‘Five degrees port!’ snapped Captain Denisovich to the helmsman, but the helmsman was already tapping the screen to make the correction. The prow swung through Deal and the ship’s pace increased. The Nakhimov simply refused to obey the command. The navigation officer shouldered the helmsman aside and took over. He hammered in the necessary corrections. Nothing happened.
To the north, in Murmansk, the admiral commanding the Northern Fleet gazed in disbelief at his wall-sized TV screen.
‘Take back command!’ he shouted. At his side, the fingers of a technician flew across h
is console. If the controls of the Nakhimov were malfunctioning, then Murmansk would retake command and bring her back to her pre-destined course. Russian technology would not fail.
In Northwood, a young Royal Navy officer stared at his screen as his fingertips gave the Russian warship her new orders. Beads of sweat ran down his face. Behind him, four admirals gaped at the TV screen. One of them murmured, ‘Bloody hell.’
In Moscow, the cold-eyed little man who controlled the biggest country in the world did not yet realize something had gone wrong. He was not a mariner. The bright façades of the cottages of Deal should not be straight ahead of the prow. They should be well to the right. There should be miles of clear, sparkling seawater ahead.
At low tide, the soft, clinging sands of Goodwin are just visible as the Channel washes over them. At high tide, those sands are ten feet below the surface. The Admiral Nakhimov drew thirty-two feet. At 0900 hours GMT, the nuclear engines of the Admiral Nakhimov drove her 827 feet and 24,300 tons at warp speed on to the Goodwin Sands in front of the eyes of the world.
Far below the stern the huge twin propellers drove her forward as the prow rose in the air. In the engine room the controls were set at full astern, but that command did not reach the drive shafts. It was at that point that the man in the Kremlin realized something had gone very wrong indeed. He began, alone in his private office, to scream with rage.
As the Nakhimov finally came to a complete halt, command and control were restored to the onboard systems. Everything functioned perfectly. The engines went into full astern mode and the propellers responded, slowing to motionless and then starting to turn in the reverse direction. There are no rocks in the Goodwins, and the sand is soft, but it clings. The front half of the battlecruiser was deeply embedded, and she would not move. After half an hour of vain effort Captain Denisovich closed her down.