H.M.S. Unseen (32 page)

He left the bank, once more feeling a sense of desolation, and wandered through the town in search of a cab. That took him ten minutes, and by the time he arrived to spend the weekend at an old haunt from his Faslane days, the Rosslea Hall Hotel in Rhu, it was almost 1300.

At that precise time, a Royal Army Service Corps sergeant, George Pattenden, was stumping around the military camp on the island of St. Kilda making one loud and noisy demand, “Right, then. Well…where the fucking ’ell is everyone, then?”

Back on the beach, Captain Peter Wimble, R.C.T. was still holding the landing craft in the shallows near the church in readiness for the two soldiers, Lieutenant Larkman and Corporal Lawson, to move down the beach ready for evacuation. This was unusual in itself because everyone knew by radio the ETA of the landing craft, and thus far in his two-year tour of duty in the Hebrides, Captain Wimble had never yet arrived without the two departing men already standing on the beach ready to go.

On this Friday lunchtime, Sergeant Pattenden had leapt onto the beach and yelled. When no one showed up, he had, with considerable bad grace, walked up to the camp and been mildly surprised that the lights were all on, the generator was still running, but the jeep had gone, and of the lieutenant and the corporal there was no sign.

“Funny,” he had muttered. “That’s bloody funny. Where the fuck are they?” His irritation was plain, since it was obvious his landing party could not return to base at Benbecula without the men they had come to take off St. Kilda. Larkman and Corporal Lawson could not just be left behind with limited supplies.

At its longest stretch, the southwestern shore, the island stretched for 3 miles, from Soay Stack to the tip of Dun. At its widest point, from Gob Chathaill on that long shoreline, east to the Oiseval, the island measured almost 2 miles. But its coastline was a largely unapproachable panorama of towering black cliffs, riddled with caves, no beaches, and fairly high mountains in the interior. It was not a desperate place to search, if you had a half dozen Land Rovers. But Sergeant Pattenden knew they had virtually nothing. And in Army terms that meant they would have to walk, and there were only two hours of daylight left.

The sergeant headed back down to the beach to report the situation, and the young captain, a friend of Chris Larkman’s, immediately ordered the landing craft to be made fast at the jetty farther along the bay. Then, he said, two parties of three men each, would begin a search, one on the Ruaival side of Village Bay, the other up on Oiseval.

They kept going until 1630, when it became hopelessly dark, then returned aboard, radioing to their Hebrides HQ the distressing fact that Lieutenant Larkman and Corporal Lawson were missing. Everyone knew the weekend was shot to pieces. There would be no going back until Chris Larkman and his corporal were found. Everyone had the most terrible feeling of foreboding, because there was really nowhere they could be unless they’d gone over the edge of a cliff.

Captain Wimble decided they would be more comfortable at sea, and all six men spent the first night in the landing craft anchored off in the bay.

In the morning, back alongside, they set out once more to scour the Atlantic island.

By lunchtime the situation was judged to be critical, and two Army helicopters were dispatched from Benbecula. They combed the area for two hours, searching above the walking troops, clattering along the shoreline, gazing at the cliffs through binoculars, using infrared sensors. By dark, which fell at 1640, there was not a sign of the missing men, or their Land Rover, and the two choppers had to return to base for more fuel.

Back in the huts the search party had sleeping bags, food, and supplies. Plus a new Land Rover that had been brought over in a second landing craft. The Army also replaced the fuel cans borrowed by Commander Adnam. But, with a heavy heart, Captain Wimble accepted that Chris Larkman and Corporal Lawson were dead, although he had no idea what had become of them. But he knew Chris, and he knew that something terrible must have happened. The ex–Rugby player from Hampshire was a very solid citizen in Wimble’s view, and Lawson was a cool, experienced, cockney soldier. It was, to Captain Wimble, inconceivable that either of them could have done anything ridiculous. He just could not imagine what had happened. Neither could anyone else.

Monday morning, March 6, found Ben Adnam still ensconced in the Rosslea Hall Hotel, still resting, but shaved and comfortable, operating under the name of Ben Arnold. His plan was to lie low for a month. He needed to find a quiet place, miles from anywhere, where he could rest, think, and walk, regaining his composure and fitness. Because just then, with his mind in a turmoil, he judged himself to be “no good to anyone.” He could not even go home. He
had
no home. There was not even an office he could call. Any phone call, any journey, was, for him, fraught with peril. All he needed was time to think, because he required, unlike other men, a completely new life. And that, he guessed, might be pretty hard to come by.

Five months in a submarine had played havoc with his sense of well-being. He was anxious to get into shape and bought himself a new pair of training shoes, a track suit, sweatpants, and a guidebook to the Highlands. What he really needed was a guidebook to the universe, because the boundaries of this earth were extremely confining to an ex–Navy officer with Ben Adnam’s track record.

He studied the guidebook all through his dinner in the hotel. And by 2200 he had drawn up a short list. Ben retired to his room at 2245, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and sat down to make a decision. Half an hour later, he made it. He would rent a car for cash from a local garage. And he would drive up to a little village named Strachur, on the Cowal Peninsula. And there he would check into Creggans Inn, right on the eastern shore of Loch Fyne. It was a place he had been to, long ago, and he remembered it well, with its awesome views across the lonely water. They had dined there on the night he had passed his Submarine Commanding Officers Course. So far as he could recall it was possibly the happiest night of his entire life.

He was not experienced in matters of the heart, and every instinct he had told him there was no point ever going back. Nothing was ever the same, or could ever be the same. There were so many things he had never said, wished he had said, and would never say. And returning to the place where once they had been so content would make matters, probably, appreciably worse.

She was gone. And she had been gone for several years—five at least since they had spoken. He knew she had married a wealthy Scottish landowner. They had seen each other twice since then. But surely a return to Creggans could do nothing except enhance his sadness and highlight the fact that life held little promise for him. The longer he was alone, the worse the depression became. Few people had ever compiled such a personal record as he had…rejected and betrayed by the only three employers he had ever had, all of whom had tried to assassinate him. He had no home, no future, no love, no relatives nor friends. And a past that would surely devour him in the end.

Nonetheless, he picked up the telephone and booked himself into Creggans Inn for a month. He informed the receptionist that he was a South African, mainly because he always carried a South African passport, along with those of Iran and Turkey. For this journey he also had a four-year-old British passport, but had not, thus far, used it.

He checked out of the Rosslea Hall Hotel when the garage brought his car, for which he gave them £300 in cash, the other £300 due when he returned it in a month. It was a six-year-old metallic blue Audi A8, with 70,000 miles on the odometer, but it ran well, and the garage mechanic had not even bothered to check his British license, which had been carefully forged for him in Egypt a few years previously, under the name Benjamin Arnold, like his Helensburgh bank account and two of his passports.

It was a little over 30 miles around the lochs to Strachur, and Ben drove it slowly, especially the first part, running north up the east bank of the Gareloch, the dark familiar waters in which he had so often driven submarines. He ran through the Argyll Forest Park along the A83 much quicker, before slowing down again, dawdling along the bank of Loch Fyne, looking for the big white house on the far bank, where once, and once only, he had been a guest. That, too, he remembered as if it had been yesterday.

He checked into the renowned warm and comfortable inn and sat by the fire in the bar. He had chicken sandwiches for lunch and sipped orange juice, while he read
The Scotsman.
And in the pages of that venerable journal, on a misty Monday morning, he found two items that took up a considerable amount of space.

The first was on the front page, from which the unsmiling faces of two soldiers stared out. On the left was Lieutenant Christopher Larkman, and on the right was Corporal Tommy Lawson. The headline read:

OFFICER AND CORPORAL MISSING
IN ST. KILDA MYSTERY

The story went on to detail the Army search that had been going on throughout the island all weekend. It quoted the officer in charge, Captain Peter Wimble, confessing that everyone was completely baffled by the disappearance of the two men with their Land Rover. “They did not have a boat,” he said. “Anyway, it’s more or less impossible to land on St. Kilda at this time of the year without a military landing craft. Which means they must be either on the island or in the ocean. And we now know they are not on the island. Which, I am afraid, leaves only the ocean. Though how, or why, or where, we cannot say.”

The story concluded with the statement that the Army did not believe either of the two men could still be alive, but that the search would continue along the shore, beneath the cliffs, weather permitting.

The second item, inside on page three, concerned a missing fishing boat, the
Flower of Scotland.
And the newspaper treated it as another mystery, that the harbormaster at Mallaig had lost contact with the boat in the small hours of last Thursday morning, March 2. This was not altogether unusual, since radio failures can occur anytime. But there was now concern for Captain Gregor Mackay and his crew, even though that very experienced master often fished deep, lonely waters out toward the Rockall Bank.

The situation was regarded as sufficiently serious for a seaand-air search to be initiated, and the newspaper revealed, “the Royal Air Force were expected to send out two Nimrods at first light on Monday morning.”

It was, however, the latter part of the story that interested Ben Adnam. According to the Harbormaster, the Zodiac tender from the
Flower of Scotland
was located on the outer edge of the Mallaig harbor on Friday morning. It was parked on a mooring used by a lobsterman with a small boat, and that lobsterman knew it had not been there when he had left the previous evening. Even more baffling, the lobsterman, Ewan MacInnes, who had spent all of his life in Mallaig, knew Gregor Mackay well and had seen him leave, two nights previously “with a foreign-looking laddie” on board. Ewan had watched them clear the harbor. The stranger was standing on the stern, he said, “right by the Zodiac.”

Now, Ewan MacInnes was not, apparently, the world’s most reliable source. A cheerful, bearded man of fifty-five, he had a reputation as a hard drinker and a bit of a romancer. But the coast guard had grilled him, the police had grilled him, and the local newspaper reporter had grilled him. And, despite the assertion of a local landlady, that “Ewan had spent half the day in here drinking, before he sailed,” the lobsterman was adamant. No, the Zodiac had not been on his mooring when he left, “for the plain and obvious bloody reason that it was on the bloody stern of Gregor’s boat, where it always bloody well is.”

Yes, said MacInnes, I saw it leave. And yes, the foreigner was standing next to it. And, “What’s more, I can tell you what he was wearing, a dark blue jacket, looked military, with a fur hat…”

The Scotsman
plainly believed the fishing boat was gone. On an inside feature page they ran a big speculation piece on “yet another disappearing trawler.” And they cited the ever-lurking menace to fisherman: Royal Navy submarines prowling beneath the surface. For the moment, the newspaper was prepared to disregard a different sort of menace, one which the Royal Navy also had to deal with. For now, the features department would concentrate on the age-old problem of an underwater warship hooking into a trawler’s net and dragging it down, stern first, to the bottom.

They named all of the trawlers which had apparently suffered this fate in recent years. And they mentioned the Navy’s reluctance ever to accept responsibility for these mishaps, unless the evidence was overwhelming. The problem was that no submarine can see the lines that hold the net, and there was a rule to deal with that…all trawler captains are supposed to station a man with an ax, on the stern, while the boat is running through the submarine roads around the Clyde estuary. If the net snags on a periscope or a mast, the drill is to sever the lines instantly and let the net go. The Navy, subject to an internal investigation, had long made it clear that they would bear the cost of new gear.

Out at sea, in the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean, however, the issue was more complicated. A trawler could be dragged down by a submarine owned by either the Royal Navy, America, or Russia, and no one was ever much the wiser. It sometimes took a full week before anyone even realized the fishing boat was gone. And this was most certainly the case with the
Flower of Scotland.

The Scotsman
had a “house list” of former Royal Navy commanders, retired but still Scottish residents, who were always good for a pithy quote. And on this occasion they took delight in quoting the former Polaris commanding officer Captain Reginald Smyth. “Oh, Christ,” he told the reporter, in his usual languid drawl. “Another one? Bloody bad luck, hmmmm? That’s the trouble with Scottish fisherman, they’re usually pissed (drunk). Couldn’t trust any of ’em to swing an ax straight—they’d probably chop their dicks off.”