Free H.M.S. Unseen by Patrick Robinson

the priceless data from the database, turned out all of the lights, and locked the door. Then he slipped through the main floor and into his own office, which he also placed in total darkness. Finally, he sat behind his desk, looking out through the door and beyond to the unlighted corridor along which he expected to see Reg advance in ninety minutes.
    It was a boring wait, but at 10:35 the lights went on in the outer corridor. John Patel softly closed his office door and positioned himself directly behind it. He could hear the security man opening and shutting doors swiftly, each one sounding a little closer. When he reached John’s office he opened the door and stepped inside, but he did not bother to turn on the light, and he certainly did not bother to look behind the door. He was gone inside ten seconds, and John heard him check the next office immediately.
    Reg skipped the computer room altogether, but even had he entered he would not have tampered with a running program. His brief was to locate intruders, nothing else. And, anyway, the late movie tonight was an old 1997 comedy called The Full Monty, which he thought was the funniest film he had ever seen.
    John Patel entered the computer room at eleven o’clock, disconnected his laptop, and switched off the main system. Then he retreated to his pitch-dark office, placed the Toshiba in his briefcase, locked it, and spread out on the floor behind his desk, guessing correctly that Reg was done for the night. At eight-fifteen the following morning, he opened his office door, switched on his desk light, and began work. No one would appear before nine. No one ever did at Vickers, not anymore.
    That night he would leave on time with everyone else, and he looked forward to that. In the evening he and Lisa were driving over to his father’s Indian restaurant in Bradford, 80 miles away across the high Pennines in Yorkshire. That was always fun. But while he and his wife drove home, Ranji Patel would journey through the night, 175 miles south down the M1 motorway to London, taking the Toshiba laptop to the Iranian Embassy at 27 Prince’s Gate, Kensington, special delivery to the naval attaché. Old friends would be up, waiting for him there in the small hours. And the little computer would be in the Iranian diplomatic bag on board Syrian Arab Airways’ morning flight from Heathrow to Tehran.
    November 2, 2004.
Bandar Abbas Naval Base.
    In two months there had been immense progress on two fronts. Commander Adnam had mastered the rudiments of the Farsi language, using every modern computerized technique. And the Iranian contractors had completed the foundation for the concrete dry dock. They also had in place the 30-foot-thick wall on its left-hand side facing the harbor. It towered 60 feet high. The wall on the other side was nearing completion, and the great steel girders of the roof were in place. Against the long left-side wall the 300-foot model room was already under cover, and teams of carpenters were hammering home the sidewalls.
    Beneath the roof concealed by sheets of tarpaulin, a huge, full-scale, cylindrical model of a diesel-electric submarine was being created out of wood and grey plastic. Commander Ben Adnam spent several hours each day in there with Iran’s senior naval architects and submarine experts. The boat could have been a Russian Kilo, but it was not quite so big, and it contained many significant differences, particularly of internal layout. To the expert eye, it was several degrees more sophisticated.
    Commander Adnam had been careful not to reveal the precise type and class of submarine they would use on the mission, other than to Admiral Badr. He had thus slightly irritated the Iranian Navy hierarchy by brushing aside their questions of when, how, and the Special Ops submarine was coming from? Will you require the new Kilo?
    To every question, the commander answered the same. “I am not yet ready to reveal the whereabouts of the submarine we will