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| DEAD LETTER | |
| By russ11 | ||
| 02 February 2008 | ||
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This is meant to be a complete short story. Any comments welcome. Hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading. DEAD LETTER We were ‘running silent’, thirty fathoms below the English Channel, all 16,000 tons of the best killing weptech the UK possessed. I’d inspected the crew, they were still at their posts just as they should be, just as I wanted. Now in the ready room, now in my ready room, the Captain’s ready room, I was….what? Ready? It was where I had been, making my report when the exercise had started. More dreary war gaming till the brass decided they’d had enough and called ‘endex’. Us, the jolly jack tar brits, against Orange forces. That was a détente thing. We didn’t fight Red forces anymore. The Soviets were our new friends. So for the moment it was us against Orange forces, a pretend non-descript nebulous enemy controlled by the war gamers. More politically correct, or not, depending on your world view. So we ducked and dived and…triumphed as always. They’d taken us to the brink - Emergency War Action Message, Authentication, SLBM target pack selection for the warheads, launch depth acquisition. All the way right into ‘DefCon 1’ and back again before ‘endex’. That’d had been hours ago. Now lives were going to end because the drills had finished, peace had turned to war, and war gaming theory was about to become devastating practise. It all had changed, well beyond anyone’s experience. And all from right flank at flag speed. Flash bang, wallop out of nowhere. From drill to kill in a moment. I laughed. I was the only one. Able Seaman Hughes disapproved. More precisely, it was his feet that signalled disapproval. Hour after hour Hughes had stood, very occasionally the ruffle rasp of his anti-static soles reaching through the open doorway to me. That had been only one leisurely foot at a time but now in quick succession his feet schuffled at me. He didn’t approve of levity. He was no age to speak of, not much broader than a hawser, his RN uniform bagging around him, fattening to deceive. I dismissed him from my mind for him and this sub were mine to command. I laughed again and fiddled at the desk. From Hero to Nero? I hoped not, just impatience. I moved the sexton paperweight, a momento and sentiment from a previous command - ‘May calm waters become you, Captain. With best and loyal wishes, the Officers and Stewards of the Ward Room, HMS Valiant’. I wasn’t done fiddling. It was a habit. I zeroed in on the cube nestling on the desk all plastic and transparent, an abhorrent contrast to the old school walnut veneer beneath. A spasm of weakness fletched within me, as through the plastic – clear and plain to see - was the kind of melange of family photos all submariners bore with them. A wife, young and certain; a holiday sunny and overexposed; the baby pics; adoring kids on the way to sunken adolescence; a Christmas when Polaroid was new - Jennifer, Robert, Jane, and Juliet – mother, son, daughters and frequent hosts or servants on the run’s ashore to ‘Captain’s Drinks’. Jane, bless her, 23 in years but little else. To the whole crew she was special, to the doctors she was special, to her father…I stopped. She was Downs Syndrome, ‘endex’, end of story. This maudlin introspection added nothing. I put down the cube and its jolly inhabitants, a wife and 2.4 kids for that was how it was for me, Jane was not a whole daughter to me. Even if they survived, they would be strangers to me, no family would want to know me once this job was done. I looped a finger along the brass inlay of the chronograph, a decorative adjunct to the Captain’s cabin…ancient, functional but entirely otiose. A past thing from vessels long broached on the tide of progress. Now Hughes was the last defence, the final barrier at my door but against what? I could see no obstacle to overcome, nothing, not even the tiniest blip on my mental radar. We were moving at a fast walking pace 150 feet or so beneath the English Channel and where we were going was through to launch point, fully silent, stealth enabled I hadn’t read the instructions still in the envelope, its luxuriantly smooth creaminess contrasting with my hand, unopened, waiting. A missive intended from beyond the grave. Just beneath the House of Commons crest I could see how the Prime Minister had addressed it: Captain Reginald D Pomery Commanding Officer HMS Vengeance It took years to get a command but here I was commanding HMS Vegeance. No justice, not right they were bound to say but now I was here. Not the man they’d originally selected, he’d died and I’d taken his place. Things like that happened in the Navy, life was predictable but just not the way you expected. So was death. So now all this was going to happen on my watch.
Despite all the planning, all the preparation I never thought I would really get here but it was what I’d been trained for, orders were orders and I’d taken an oath ‘to Queen and Country’, obedience and courage. Only at BRNC Dartmouth had I learnt just how much could be required. More useless introspection, you’re saying but I couldn’t help it…if you were about to do this your mind would be wandering too, like mine now wondering away from this clear and present danger to those early days… ….I’d been first to arrive, first to step through into the world of Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth. I was treated differently because of that, not just because of that but it was pretty much what I expected. “You’re hours early, sir, can’t you read your perishin’ timetable”. “Yes, Sgt Major, early bird and all that”, I’d said. He was colossal and shiny from his peaked cap to his brilliantine toe caps. A veteran from the days when Ealing Studios still made films and bit part actors in the Cruel Sea and the like still said ‘perishin’, ‘lorks’, ‘ and ‘blimey’. You could almost smell the salt off him. I was pleased with my response - ever so British toff, ever so refined, don’t you know, and the right note of deferential enthusiasm. So was he. He became my mentor. And in that way he too treated me differently but that I didn’t mind. He had such high expectations. His only hope, so I already knew then, was that he would die before I showed him how wrong he was. It’d had taken nine months of the best training that Dartmouth could fathom before they’d distilled us, the elite of the year’s cadet intake, down far enough. By then they were almost ready to get to it, the contents of the Prime Minister’s Envelope. But first there was a little more of the same. So they tried again to change us, to mould us, to test us into and beyond our thresholds. Some choose to leave, others had to but the rest of us made it through that first nine months and on to meet ‘Pizza Boy’. I didn’t like that, like a lot of how I was treated and what I saw, but I accepted it as his nickname. Capt (Retired) Steele was senior instructor and College Second in Command. He was also a survivor of HMS Sheffield, all but sunk in the Falklands Conflict. He bore the medals they awarded and the scars they had cost him, most egregiously on his face. It was cruel to see and, no doubt, harder to bare but his face was a living, twisted, bubbled, suppurating testament to how he had burned. He was also, about to begin his lecture. I settled my feet on the burnished parquet, carefully apart to preserve their gloss. Outside, beyond the leaded glass of Trafalagar Lecture Hall, a flag pole impaled the ground, its lanyard ropes clanging in the wind and, atop, a sentinel rook beaking this way and that.“Gentelemen, you’ve heard it before and you’re going to hear it again. This material is UK TOP SECRET EYES ONLY….” It was a marvel, this English we used. What was a difficult language anyway the Navy contorted further with fripperese like this. ‘Eyes only’ for a spoken lecture? I noticed but kept my silence, as I did about so much else. “….any repetition not required by the exigencies of the service is punishable by up to and including life imprisonment. No notes are to be taken. This is EYES ONLY I repeat EYES ONLY. He rattled this off, paused, looking down from his podium as if for traitors, the tissue in his right hand dabbing autonomously at his face. “The UK, as part of its NATO treaty obligations, operates a second strike nuclear capability. This is presently platformed out of our Polaris submarines. These are currently configured as HMS Vanguard, HMS Victorious, HMS Vigilant, and HMS Vengeance operated out of Faslane Naval Base. Each sub carries the Trident multiple war head Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM) system. Each missile has a target delivery capability of fifteen individual warheads. Each warhead can be wep’d up to a 100 Megaton max killage. In essence each sub alone has the power to end all life on this planet. At any given time one such sub is always at sea. You will remember, Gentlemen, that the Permissive Action Link system – known as PAL - for nuclear authentication and release, was perfected after the 1962 crisis. But this PAL protocol is incompatible with the characteristics of submarine warfare. I don’t intend to repeat my earlier lectures on the exact key and release mechanisms used on our nuclear subs but you may find it useful in what follows to have as much of that in mind as your hangovers permit. For years now successive British governments have had to accept that the best early detection systems still could not fully prevent a first or pre-emptive strike. The probability is very high that such a strike would so destroy, or so disable, our political and military command and control infrastructures that management of our armed forces would be impossible. To this end the first job of each incoming Prime Minister is to write and seal the Prime Minister’s envelope. This envelope is delivered to and held secure aboard the nuclear sub on patrol. It contains the Prime Minister’s instructions to the Captain of that sub. I have never seen them. No one but the author knows what it contains and fortunately to date no envelope has ever been opened. You’ve been briefed on the protocols in place. But for those of you who need reminding, listen in. Should the duty sub at sea be unable to communicate with the mainland chain of command for 48 hours, the Captain is required to open and act upon the contents of the Prime Minister’s envelope. God help you and what’s left of us if you ever have to. Now, as to the launch…..” Of course there’d been more, and more questions than there should have been. What would the envelope say? What to do after those instructions had been followed? What was the point of instructions to retaliate if this nuclear capability was supposed to be a detterent since such instructions would only be opened after the nation had been destroyed. And, without comms and any C2 with the mainland, how could it be known who to launch against…. Captain Reginald D Pomery RN Commanding Officer HMS Vengeance Less than twenty four hours ago I was elected prime minister, the most powerful man in the UK, and already I have lost that status, in a sense, because I am writing to you and when you read this, it is you, not I, who will have that power. Five hours of briefings on this subject are no real preparation for the task to hand now. All the years of my life hardly equip me any better. I hope with a fervour greater than any I have held before that you will never read what I struggle to write here. Yet in that quiet place within I know that you will, for I have had to accept the irrefutable proof presented to me. Forgive me for my meanderings and the trespass I make into your already foreshortened future. I understand you will by now be at a heightened state of readiness and will have been thus for so many long hours. You will want some clear and unequivocal direction. You will, so I have been briefed, already be at or heading for the pre-determined launch point in readiness for these instructions. But those instructions I cannot give you without first burdening you with some, at least, of the terrible information that has this day been imparted to me during what must be the most shocking security briefing any Prime Minister, since and including Churchill himself, has received. I do so because I want, in communicating to you your final instructions, to be as sure as I can that you will follow them. No, I mean no slight to your professionalism nor to your allegiance but I can take no comfort from writing what I must unless I know that you too will come to believe what I know now to be true for, once you do, no British officer could do any less than what I will demand of you and your men. I have seen the documents, heard the presentations, and, more convincingly still, seen the evidence. It is hard, compelling, and without doubt the signal, most petrifying moments of my existence. I cannot and will not detail all that evidence here but what follows is what I think you must know. The information is clear and unequivocal – China will wage a war of acquisition. Why, on the verge of acceptance by the international community and about to springboard into an economic, financial, and consumer renaissance, should China do so, is what I asked. Bear with me, please, if ‘a bottom line’ is what you are looking for. Writing it all now will as much inform you as it will help me to accept this colossal edifice of information. China has a population of nearly 1 ¼ billion in a country only a little smaller than the USA and its 350 million Americans. China’s rebirth is consuming resources at a voracious rate, at a rate which neither internal resources nor imports can sustain. Simply put, they need more than they have and cannot buy through trade enough to fill the gap. And the target of China’s avarice-driven war? Siberia, the greatest still undeveloped land mass in the world. With the Russian Republics in economic collapse and political disarray, if not, civil war, the Chinese path to victory has but two obstacles – the Americans and the 100s of feet of ice cover presently standing between the Chinese and the almost limitless oil and other mineral resources there. Global warming will, in a time scale insignificant to the patient Chinese, take care of the ice. The Americans, however, required subtle and insidious preparation over many years. Taking the long view is the Chinese way and the arrangements in place began decades ago, not just to facilitate this international piracy but to prepare for a future in which China saw itself as the dominant nation. During that lengthy time their single most coveted – and absolutely essential goal – was to compromise and emasculate the USA’s PAL system. We came to know this in the most convoluted manner through an agent in place at the highest level among the Chinese. But the Americans do not yet know nor can we inform them their much trumpeted nuclear arsenal is all but ornamental. It seems incredible but true. Our greatest allies will be unable to act. Not only are their defences penetrated but also their intelligence agencies. It is irony heaped on irony that, only because of our diminutive status on the world stage, did we escape complete Chinese infiltration. Even so, I have had to write this letter twice, once for reasons I will touch on briefly in a moment and once in the format you now read. I am briefed that should we warn the Americans and so reveal the whole business, it would compel the Chinese to act now, rather than allow their plans to be defeated. Telling the Americans would precipitate an all-out first strike against them and us by the Chinese. What a tangled web we weave…in the 80’s it was the Americans, following Burgress, Maclean et al, who felt they could not confide in us and now we find our roles reversed in the deadliest game imaginable. But you will be saying, I am sure, what I said. The Chinese could never launch against us and precipitate the destruction of the UK (and yet, of course, you are reading this letter so must assume that a devastation of immense proportions has already overwhelmed us). I too said the same. Surely, I remonstrated, Filingdales and its sister units comlinked in Greenland and Alaska would detect any incoming ICBM or SLBM missile attacks. Correct, I was told. But it was not Chinese warheads borne by in-bound ICBMs that we had to fear nor even any other country’s ICBMs. It was our old American Allies’ nukes that were going to destroy us. Let me outline what I was told about this. During WWII our island became a floating aircraft carrier and general staging post for the invasion of Europe but, so the American strategists concluded, what worked once could work again and be adapted. The greatest American fear in the 80s and 90s – a time when Ronald Reagan had only to ask for Maggie to give - was that Europe would fall to the Russians. Their next greatest fear was that the UK would reprise that WWII role but this time under control of occupying Russian forces, providing Russian missile launch sites, access to Ireland thence to Iceland, next stop Alaska. Fear is a great motivator, as you will know. And the Americans, in their fear and doubt, were ingenious if callous. They called it the SBNN programme – this Stay-Behind Nuclear Neutralisation plan was clandestine, secret, and entirely cynical. The SBNN sites selected were at Greenham Common, NSA Menwith Hill Station, USAF Mildenhall, USAF Lakenheath, USAF Alconbury, USAF Feltwell, JAC Molesworth, the US Deep and Near Space Tracking Facility at Feltwell, USAF Fairford, NSA Croughton, and these are just the sites I remember from the briefing. Over the years carefully and with subterfuge a large number of warheads were buried and left. They are surveilled and monitored constantly by American satintel. Unbeknownst to the USA, of course, whatever they learn and observe one day was in the hands of the Chinese the next day. And so, in a way, coming to discover this information has not helped. We live amidst, in effect, a huge nuclear arsenal, placed here by the betrayal of our allies and controlled, not by them, but by the Chinese. For the Chinese, having compromised the American Permissive Action Link protocols, have the codes required to detonate these stay behind nukes. The same codes, including those for missile self-destruct, mean any launch of the American ICBM missiles must fail. Instead, as a counsel of despair, we wait and do what little we can. There is work afoot to neutralise the systems for armament and detonation of these buried warheads but it is gruesomely slow. We know they are protected with electronic anti-tamper shields and other precautions. It requires the utmost care. It would be a shame if we blew ourselves to hell before they do! And that brings me to my earlier letter, the one addressed to you that you will never read, the one that will only be read by the Chinese for even here there is a mole at the highest level. I, the Prime Minister of the UK, have to play toady to a traitor who is privy to my office and my doings. But we are hamstrung. To apprehend this individual would reveal all at a time when we are not ready, so for the moment I play ball in a rigged game. It is not as bad as you may think. We share nearly everything with the Americans anyway so there is little extra that this traitor can tell the Chinese as yet. For obvious reasons this letter you are reading now must not be seen. But to be able to feed selectively false information to the Chinese is one of the very few aces in the hole that we have. What the Chinese will read in that dummy version of this letter is a benign – and to them, comforting - set of instructions to you to report to and place your vessel under command of the Americans. Some use that would be! It was at this point, with the MI5 and MI6 chiefs, that I felt a berserker rage come upon me. I will spare you what I said as anger ripped the words rough and raw from my throat. The stupidity of it, the absolute insanity. They seemed unphased and, now that I comprehend, I too accept not only their reply but also that other prime ministers – or, at least, any worth their salt – will have reacted similarly. What incensed me was the idea that we should allow the Chinese to believe that our deterrent was no threat. But, so they told me. it was a gamble that had to be taken. We could not maintain a deterrent since, to deter an enemy, not only do you have to display the ability to retaliate but also proof that you are aware of the threat that the enemy constitutes. Unfortunately, we could not even hint of our knowledge of the Chinese preparedness or their plans generally. The fact that you are reading this shows that we gambled and lost. Now, having read this far, you will understand and understand why I must give you these instructions. You are to use the new analysis and detection equipment installed earlier this year during your refit at Faslane. Using three air samples from three different coastal areas of the UK you are to compare the results with the table annexed to this letter. If the proportions of plutonium. Cesium, uranium, and strontium are as shown there you will complete the orders noted below. For your own peace of mind and confidence in execution of these my last orders to you, I should say that the 1980/1990 weapons of American construction are acknowledged, though the multiple tests carried out during that and earlier periods, to be configured in their fissile content in ways different to that prevalent today. The results in the annexed table are those that will be produced by American weapons of that era buried within the UK. If the tests you carry out, therefore, record the presence of these substances in the proportions indicated, your confidence can be very high that the destruction of the UK will have resulted from the detonation of these stay-behind weapons. IF that is so, you can also be equally confident that it is the Chinese, and not the Americans, who are responsible. Let me be clear, Captain, if these weapons have been exploded the land surface of the UK will have turned to molten glass and that which used to be a thriving home to millions will be uninhabitable for 50,000 years. There can be no question of survivors. It is what the Americans intended and, though we can now decry their arrogance and the weakness of their intelligence and other facilities in the face of Chinese penetration, they knew how to build their weapons. Your orders are as follows: I laughed again. The fool, the emotional fool. I was reading the letter and yet nothing whatsoever had happened to the UK, yet. How wrong could he be? I looked at the shaky signature ‘Gordon Brown’. How ironic that in fact it was those very orders… ‘You bastard…’, the voice was weak, sibilant and rasping as the owner struggled to breathe despite his injuries. Hughes was the first to react, yanking the curtain separating Captain’s domain from ship, stepping in with his weapon drawn, its muzzle black and questing. ‘No, no Azis’, I shouted to Hughes, ‘ricochets’. In a sub of steel, ricochets were a lethal lottery. This close to success I had more caution than hate. I turned around to look. ‘That’s no way to talk to your Captain’, I scoffed. ‘I am… your Captain… you traitor Hussein’ said Captain Pomery gaspingly,’ what have you done with my crew.’ ‘All still at their posts but sadly….dead like you should be. I wonder what alerted you to the bio weapon but then you didn’t get to be Captain because you were born at the shallow end of the gene pool, did you, Pomery? And as for ‘Captain’, being Weapons Officer and also the most senior officer still alive made me exactly that, Captain.’ Aboard ship Hughes was an Airqual Maintenance Operative. Officially, that is. To that he and I had added traitor, saboteur, and mass murderer. As AMO he’d had unsupervised access to the air recon units He’d added the canisters and he and I had worn our S10 respirators for the 30 minutes it took for the crew to die and the pathogen to be oxidised. Pretty uncomfortable way to spend half an hour, actually, but judging from the contorted expressions and vomiting much more pleasant for us than the crew. Pomery had twigged something and had had only a partial dose before he’d snatched an S10 and come for me. I’d shot him enough to believe he was dead until now. And he nearly was, his breath sounds raw and sucking through the twin exit wounds in his chest. ‘You can’t hope to succeed…’, he wheezed. I could feel the hatred fulminate from that deep impenetrable place where it, my true self, and obedience to Allah had had to reside since I was recruited as a teenager, the youngest in the cell apart from Aziz. ‘What should I tell you about, eh? Palestine, the Gulf Wars, the crusades, the Great Satan……….’ my words caromed one upon the other in a cascade of venom but I stopped. Even near death and with his crew horribly dead around him, Pomery was trying. He palmed his left hand to his neck as if to ease his breathing but he was checking. What blood was still there, left his face because beneath his empty hand, the neck chain and launch key were gone. He looked at me, eyes still and whitely large in the moment of his knowledge. Then he laughed. For the first time, I was uneasy looking him over for some weapon, some advantage, something to explain this sudden incongruity in the reaction to what he’d realised, namely, that we were going to launch the weapons. He laughed again, a maroon aerated spume of spittle evanescing briefly from his lips. ‘We have the keys and the launch manual’, I said, nodding in the direction of his safe its door unhinged upon the floor thanks to Aziz and his little tech wonders. More laughter, his not mine. I eased a finger between my collar and a neck damp with the humidity on deck. It was getting worse but we’d had to shut down the air recon systems just in case. Bio weapons had not been used like this before and at the best of times bio tech was a black art. But it had worked and we had enough air to get us to launch point. For the umpteenth time I flicked a glance at the louvered slats of the air grill here in his Ready Room. The ribbon attached there was still, hanging limply down as if disappointed by the absence of air flow. ‘You can’t….you can’t…’ but I interrupted him. ‘But we can. The target pack selection has already been downloaded. Very soon all the birds will fly and their destinations? Citybuster strikes and strategic military targets in China.’ ‘China…insane! Your quarrel…. is with… the West.’ ‘Yes, Captain, but the Chinese will detect the source of the attack and will believe the Americans are in on it. They will launch massively against the USA and UK. Or so we thought. Now having read your Prime Minister’s letter, things may be slightly different for the UK but just as acceptable to us’. I smiled, a warmth suffusing and cacooning my hate to satisfaction. He laughed. He shouldn’t be laughing. I could see Hughes’ fingers whitening on his weapon and checked him with a word. I needed him alive, to know. This was all wrong. A Captain whose ship was to commit the single greatest act of terrorism ever inflicted should not be laughing especially since he must also know he was dying. Laughter should be…impossible. ‘Fools…’he paused coughing crimson gouts into the silence. ‘You bloody fools….refit at Farslane wasn’t just that air sampling stuff…they changed…’, his voice fractured as the coughing overwhelmed him and the redness blossomed on his lips. I was sweating fully now. Neither Hughes nor I had been on ship that week at Faslane. What did he mean? ‘They changed the key sequence…the manual’s not amended…only I know…’ Now his mirth had a maniacal edge, almost eldritch in its pitch. ‘They couldn’t have, you bastard’. I spat the words from my mouth as if trying to bite them. Waving Hughes and his desire to kill back from Pomfrey, I stepped toward him ready enough to do it myself. ‘They’d seen you coming… or something terrorist like you…’, he was almost jolly now, ‘get the wrong key and the launch aborts…commits the fail-safe to detonate. Try it… you’ll just blow yourselves to hell’. He was smiling through the pain, snatching defeat for me from the jaws of my victory. I drew my own weapon and bent down, crabbing over his prostrate form. And then I did some of my own laughing. His face blanked to stillness, eyes narrowed to my reaction, looking to understand. ‘I remember at Dartmouth they said a plan only stayed intact till D-Day and H-Hour’, I said with as much scorn as I could muster. ‘Well, we’ve less than ten minutes to go but I’m afraid we still win.’ Torturing him was no option, I knew. I could never amputate the truth from him. He was almost dead as it was. He thought he had won. He was wrong. His look cast scepticism my way and, for a moment, something else I couldn’t quite detect straight off, There was something more but time was so short and in a moment it was absent. So I told him why he was wrong. We had intended to make our actions obvious, so obvious that the Chinese would never doubt. So our launch point was the mouth of the River Thames and, though it would have been nice to take down the USA as intended, it looked like we would have to make do with the UK. I wanted him to be there at the end, to see it all done till that moment of oblivion for him, for Hughes, and for me as the fail-safes imploded enough of the missiles to bring Ragnorak to life for London and most of the South of England . So Hughes and I grabbed his ankles and pulled him with us, his useless respirator flopping weakly around his neck. There in Missile Control Hughes buckled into his seat and me into mine fifteen feet away. We prep’d, enabled, readied, coded inputs, confirmed target selections, pressed, turned, and keyed all the right sequences for a launch we would never make. I preyed to Allah as I did so and watched Pomfrey’s face, he was frightened and something else I couldn’t finger, fidgeting his turmoil through hands which trembled on the deck where he lay. ‘See, Captain, courage, determination and Allah’s will never fails’. I looked at Hughes for the final key turn. ‘On my mark, keys to primary ignition, ready?’ ‘Keys to primary ignition on your mark, ready’, repeated Hughes. ‘Three-two-one, mark’ We keyed the end and…nothing. It would take time, of course, for the electronics to bring the munitions beyond fail safe but seconds became a sweaty minute. From somewhere a breeze eased the heat but the exhaustion of it all had me slumped in the launch seat. I tried to…but Pomfrey’s voice intervened. ‘Fools…so much… for Allah’s will’, Pomfrey almost spat, ‘did you think anyone… in their right mind would try to defeat a terrorist takeover… with some cockamamie plan to detonate the missiles. I just had to…had to distract you long enough… to misdirect your minds. Look at the air recon grill.’ Before I could, he was rasping out more words. ‘It wasn’t just the key sequence they changed…there was something special…’ his voice was muffled now. ‘You’ve released a paralysing gas…. lighter than air….down here on the deck maybe safe but…’ he tapped the respirator he was now wearing. ‘You’re finished….also activated an alarm…transmitted to Faslane and a GPS emitter…. I may not make it…but neither will you.’ My head seemed so heavy I could only move my eyes but there fluttering like a butterfly was the ribbon attached to the louvered opening of the recon grill. It was a gargantuan effort to get my lips even a little apart for the barest whisper to expel itself. ‘But the world will know we tried this time, next time we’ll….’ ‘Very doubtful… D notices…would look bad in the newspapers… upset voters at the ballot box…’. These last words were hollow as his eyes fluttered still, his last breath exactly that. Extract from the World at One, BBC Radio 4 broadcast 1st August 2009 1315hrs Zulu‘Meanwhile in news closer to home, the Minister for the Armed Forces confirmed that the location of HMS Vengeance, lost recently with all hands, had been classified for reasons of national security. When asked if any attempt would be made to recover the bodies, the Minister said it was a matter of regret there would be no formal coroner’s inquests and also a great sorrow that the families of those so tragically lost could not bury their dead. Perhaps in the future the necessary technology would be available but for the moment the truth would have to remain a mystery. In another story from Westminster the Prime Minister’s goodwill visit to China has been delayed…..’
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