Free Shadow Hunter by Geoffrey Archer

sensitive operation I’ve ever known. I can hardly believe what they’re telling us to do.’
    â€˜Oh?’
    â€˜I’ll brief you as soon as I can, but it may be a few days yet. I’ll have to tell the crew something soon; thought I’d do it tomorrow, on the pipe. Have to keep it vague, but they’ll need to know we’re on a special op.’
    â€˜Will you be giving new course instructions, sir?’
    â€˜Stays the same for the moment. As planned. Different tactics, though. CINCFLEET says the Yanks are not to know what we’re doing. Got to get across the SOSUS array without them hearing us.’
    That wouldn’t be easy; the hydrophones on the seabed between the Faroes and Shetlands were remarkably sensitive. The American controllers of SOSUS would be expecting them too, and would listen out for them.
    â€˜One other thing, Tim. Listening to the signals traffic – it’ll be a bit irregular from now on. We’ll be going fast, so no trailing of the wire. We’ll use the satcom mast when possible, but because of the sensitivity of the stuff coming in, I can’t have anyone but myself seeing the signals traffic from now on. I’ll have to clear the wireless room when the mast’s up. Commanding officer’s eyes only, you see.’
    â€˜Is that really necessary, sir?’
    â€˜Yes, it bloody well is! I wouldn’t have said so otherwise! I’ll distribute whatever I can, of course. Intelligence, met., news reports. But it may not be much. That’s all.’
    Hitchens turned on his heel and left the control room.
    Pike’s jaw dropped.
    â€˜Bloody hell!’ he breathed.

CHAPTER THREE
Sunday 20th October.
    SUNDAY MORNING BROUGHT relief to the small group of media personnel on board the US aircraft carrier
Dwight D. Eisenhower
. The gale had subsided in the small hours; they’d had no idea a ship of 90,000 tons could roll so much. The three members of the television crew pooling pictures for the four American networks had been seasick to a man.
    The
Eisenhower
was about three hundred miles south of Iceland, heading northeast, the flagship for the eighteen American warships taking part in Exercise Ocean Guardian.
    The six members of the media pool had been flown onto the ship from Reykjavik the previous evening, smacking down onto the carrier deck in a Grumman Greyhound Carrier-Onboard-Delivery (COD) aircraft. For all the journalists it was their first visit to a big carrier and the COD flight the most hair-raising journey they’d ever made.
    Tightly strapped in to rearward-facing seats, the passengers had felt genuine terror as the almost windowless twin-turboprop aircraft was buffeted by gale force winds and manoeuvred sharply to line up with the bucking deck. Even the aircrew had looked scared; they knew what they were supposed to do if the ‘controlled crash’ of a landing went bad and the plane slipped from the deck into the sea, but they also knew the chances of surviving such an accident were slim.
    One of the journalists had thrown up as soon as his feet touched the carrier deck, and the usual briefing on arrival had been postponed.
    Now the six were seated in the half-darkness of the ‘3deck’ briefing room, listening to the public information officer, Commander Polk. Vu-foils illustrated his talk.
    â€˜Good-day, gentlemen. Hope you’re feeling okay now. I just want to tell you something about Exercise Ocean Guardian, so’s you get the big picture. The starting point for the game is this: a huge world power, which has no name but whose national language is Russian, is assumed to have threatened NATO – Norway in particular. Enemy surface ships and submarines are breaking out from their bases on the Kola peninsular. We have to do something about it. We’ve got eleven NATO navies with 122 vessels taking part, which makes it the biggest we’ve ever done.
    â€˜Now, we have two jobs to do.