Warday

Now that’s the lot from the Office of Information. I’m supposed to give copies of that to any reporters who approach me, so here are two copies.

So, what can I say about myself? I am captain of the Type 12 antisubmarine frigate Ulysses, operating in cooperation with Fleet Air Arm antisubmarine forces and U.S. Navy antisubmarine forces based in Hawaii, Midway Island, and San Diego. Our theater of operations is the western Pacific. We are attached to STANAVFOR-PAC, the Standing Naval Force Pacific of the International Treaty Organization countries. Our mission is to destroy unidentified submarines.

I am invariably asked, when I am on shore leave, whether we destroy American nuclear submarines. I can only repeat the aim of our mission. We do destroy all unidentified submarine craft. That means that we may or may not know what countries those submarines are from. Perhaps some are American, although that would surprise me. Since they lost communication with their bases, most American submarines have returned to U.S. waters and surfaced, or are in communication with us in some way. The mission of the Royal Navy with regard to submarines is not to destroy the remaining nuclear capacity of the United States and the USSR, or to impede them in the reformation of government in their countries, but to remove the threat of the unknown—submarine crews, loyal perhaps to governments that no longer exist, under severe psychological pressure, suddenly firing their missiles in the mistaken belief that they are obligated to do so. There is also the possibility that both sides left “long-trigger” ships with orders to hide for a period of years, then suddenly attack. These ships must be sunk before they open their orders.

I suppose the greatest engagement of my career was with a pack of one Typhoon-class submarine and three smaller vessels in the Aleutians about a year ago. These ships had been hiding under the Arctic ice for approximately forty-four months and were making a run for Vladivostok, evidently unaware that this port no longer exists. We suspected that they were there because of persistent reports from isolated communities in Alaska and Canada of raiding parties who spoke Russian to one another and who appeared out of nowhere to steal food. Sometimes these reports took as long as six months to reach us, because of unreliable communications, but we felt that they certainly indicated the presence of Soviet vessels under the ice cap. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that there are not still Soviet and American submarines on station there. Present long-range detection techniques do not offer us as reliable an indication of submarine activity beneath ice as we would like.

At any rate, we got a very good signal on these boats just as they were coming round the island of Umnak in the Pox Islands.

Why they were there, and not hugging the coast of Siberia, we do not know.

As you might or might not know, a Typhoon-class submarine was the Soviet equivalent of a Trident, displacing twenty-five thousand tons and armed with twenty missiles of intercontinental range. We identified the presence of a Typhoon-class vessel by the emission signature of its reactor. Naturally, we were eager to destroy this ship, as it was one of four remaining Typhoons and, next to the three Tridents still unaccounted for, is certainly the most dangerous vessel on the high seas. This one ship would, for example, be capable of reducing your California, in its entirety, to the present condition of Washington or San Antonio.

So we were very eager to get a kill while avoiding even the suspicion of detection ourselves. We found that we were out of range of the only Royal Navy carrier operating in the area, the old Hermes with its complement of Harriers. Thus we determined that the Typhoon would have to be located very precisely and then destroyed by Ulysses. The job was quite an exciting challenge, I can assure you.

It was one of those gray, cheerless days common in the North Pacific, when the wind blows with massive force and the sea birds fly before it. When I went on deck, bits of ice quickly formed in my beard. In addition to the winds, we had blowing fog. Earlier we had passed through a vast fleet of Japanese fishing vessels, including a huge automatic whaler. As fish meal is now the primary source of protein for that nation of ninety-seven millions, you can well imagine the size of this fleet. It was operating in INTO-foreclosed waters, meaning that fishing operations there are illegal except to signatories. In this case, the Gulf of Alaska. We had detached a frigate to check the papers of the Japanese fishermen; there have been many reports of Chinese fishing vessels operating illegally in American waters in recent years, and they are to be sunk if they are found. Only the Japanese, the British, the Danes, the Icelanders, and the Norse may fish former U.S.-controlled waters.