rooms of the stranded Gepard, inspecting the weapons and finding very little except active wire-guided torpedoes. There were no other warheads on the cruise missiles. There was also no significant damage to the boat, and there had been no gear failure of any kind.
The nuclear reactor was running smoothly, at its lowest pressure, and it was crystal clear the entire incident was due to a classic Russian screwup. They’d misjudged the tide, the distance from shore, the pattern of the channel buoys, and the depth of the water. In fairness to the Russian helmsman and navigation officer, that Skye sandbank rises very steeply 120 feet—80 feet to 15 feet in a few hundred yards.
The contour of the seabed thus sweeps up from deep water to a shallow plateau situated about 36 feet from the surface. On top of this, rising 20 feet higher, stands a narrow ocean mound, about 330 feet long on the chart. Gepard had driven head-on into this small underwater mountain and stopped dead.
A couple of Royal Navy frogmen were currently taking a long, hard look at the acoustic cladding on the hull of the submarine. They thought it looked good, very good, but no better than the British or American
tiles, which were based on the ones that formed the heat shield around the forward fuselage of the space shuttle returning to earth.
Inside the submarine hull, the Faslane technicians were stripping out any computer hard drives that they believed may contain electronic information pertaining to British or American submarine activities in the area.
For a start, Captain McKeown had driven straight through a critical submarine training area on his way up the Kyle Rhea. Just north of the Gepard there was another huge submarine area, either side of the 14-mile Raasay Island, which lies between Skye and the Scottish mainland. This comprises some 50 square miles of submarine country, dark waters, varying in depth from 300 to 1,500 feet, and marked on all charts.
These were clear warnings to fishermen and yachtsmen to take care and to steer either side of Raasay, and stay close to the shore, out of the way of the biggest and most ruthless monsters of the deep. Kapitan Konstantin Tatarinov’s navigation staff had misjudged this detailed Admiralty chart when they reached the southernmost waters and careened out of the marked channel, for no real reason except lack of care.
Nonetheless, the Faslane sonar men found a major amount of data in Gepard ’s computer systems, and they were able to remove it. They were not able to ascertain whether the data had already been transmitted back to Russia. Besides, it all needed to be downloaded, and the engineers also had to dismantle other electronics to ensure that Gepard pressed on home without any more spying.
As for towing her all the way back to Faslane, this was becoming increasingly unlikely. There was little more to learn from the boat, which had now been rendered harmless. So in the opinion of Admiral Ryan and the Admiralty, they might as well tell her, in naval parlance, to bugger off home and stop being such a bloody nuisance.
The engineers assessed they had another five hours’ work to do, and they proposed staying aboard to finish, while Gepard dropped anchor in deeper water at the edge of the channel. The navy estimated she would be released sometime after 2200 hours.
The armed Royal Marine guard stood watch inside the hull while the work continued. The Russians were forbidden to lay hands on any working part of the boat, except for the cooks in the galley, who were busy making soup and toasted sandwiches for the crew and the British visitors.
Angus Moncrief stayed on station until the towing was completed, and
this was a major anticlimax. With the blue-twisted steel of the towing lines firmly attached to the submarine bow and the stern of the Sutherland, the process was carried out almost in slow motion.
Captain McKeown supervised it personally, ordering his frigate’s mighty 31,000-hp gas turbines
The nuclear reactor was running smoothly, at its lowest pressure, and it was crystal clear the entire incident was due to a classic Russian screwup. They’d misjudged the tide, the distance from shore, the pattern of the channel buoys, and the depth of the water. In fairness to the Russian helmsman and navigation officer, that Skye sandbank rises very steeply 120 feet—80 feet to 15 feet in a few hundred yards.
The contour of the seabed thus sweeps up from deep water to a shallow plateau situated about 36 feet from the surface. On top of this, rising 20 feet higher, stands a narrow ocean mound, about 330 feet long on the chart. Gepard had driven head-on into this small underwater mountain and stopped dead.
A couple of Royal Navy frogmen were currently taking a long, hard look at the acoustic cladding on the hull of the submarine. They thought it looked good, very good, but no better than the British or American
tiles, which were based on the ones that formed the heat shield around the forward fuselage of the space shuttle returning to earth.
Inside the submarine hull, the Faslane technicians were stripping out any computer hard drives that they believed may contain electronic information pertaining to British or American submarine activities in the area.
For a start, Captain McKeown had driven straight through a critical submarine training area on his way up the Kyle Rhea. Just north of the Gepard there was another huge submarine area, either side of the 14-mile Raasay Island, which lies between Skye and the Scottish mainland. This comprises some 50 square miles of submarine country, dark waters, varying in depth from 300 to 1,500 feet, and marked on all charts.
These were clear warnings to fishermen and yachtsmen to take care and to steer either side of Raasay, and stay close to the shore, out of the way of the biggest and most ruthless monsters of the deep. Kapitan Konstantin Tatarinov’s navigation staff had misjudged this detailed Admiralty chart when they reached the southernmost waters and careened out of the marked channel, for no real reason except lack of care.
Nonetheless, the Faslane sonar men found a major amount of data in Gepard ’s computer systems, and they were able to remove it. They were not able to ascertain whether the data had already been transmitted back to Russia. Besides, it all needed to be downloaded, and the engineers also had to dismantle other electronics to ensure that Gepard pressed on home without any more spying.
As for towing her all the way back to Faslane, this was becoming increasingly unlikely. There was little more to learn from the boat, which had now been rendered harmless. So in the opinion of Admiral Ryan and the Admiralty, they might as well tell her, in naval parlance, to bugger off home and stop being such a bloody nuisance.
The engineers assessed they had another five hours’ work to do, and they proposed staying aboard to finish, while Gepard dropped anchor in deeper water at the edge of the channel. The navy estimated she would be released sometime after 2200 hours.
The armed Royal Marine guard stood watch inside the hull while the work continued. The Russians were forbidden to lay hands on any working part of the boat, except for the cooks in the galley, who were busy making soup and toasted sandwiches for the crew and the British visitors.
Angus Moncrief stayed on station until the towing was completed, and
this was a major anticlimax. With the blue-twisted steel of the towing lines firmly attached to the submarine bow and the stern of the Sutherland, the process was carried out almost in slow motion.
Captain McKeown supervised it personally, ordering his frigate’s mighty 31,000-hp gas turbines
Similar Books
