George Washington's Ghost

What he was looking at was not one of those ugly, iron, bodged together, two or three hundred-ton coastal submersibles that the Germans had experimented with in the early 1960s, or that the Cubans were supposed to have constructed in more recent times. What he was looking at was a big, very long – possibly over four hundred or more feet – vessel with a bridge, conning-tower, whatever it was called, structure streamlined like a giant whale’s fin, that soared perhaps thirty feet above the near wave-swept rounded pressure casing. Which itself did not look remotely metallic, rather it seemed rubbery, and somehow, granular.

“The vessel’s pressure hull is covered in acoustic tiling, sir,” his First Sea Lord informed him. “The material is rubbery to the touch; additionally, that shielding – essential to isolate the operating noise of the boat’s machinery from the outside world – is covered in a synthetic material which mimics the effect of a shark’s skin, reducing the hull’s resistance to the water as it moves through the depths.”

“How big is that ship?” The King asked, momentarily too awed to be angry or actually, to be thinking at all about the earth-shaking implications of what he was looking at.

“She’s over six thousand tons surfaced, nearer seven thousand-three hundred submerged, sir. She has six twenty-one-inch torpedo tubes forward and storage capacity for twenty-seven fish.”

“Torpedoes?” The Queen asked, by then in ‘polite inconsequential conversation’ mode, as she too began to assimilate the momentousness of the mind-boggling secret that she and her husband had just been let in on.

“Torpedoes, yes, Ma’am. They come in several variants. The standard Tigershark Mark III with a contact detonator or magnetic initiator, the Searcher Mark VII, that’s a fire and forget wholly electrical – very quiet and doesn’t leave a wake – fish that locks onto its target and homes in on it,” Lord Troubridge paused, picked his next words with infinite care, “and, of course, the Mark XX, that’s a special munition.”

“Special?” The King snapped, breaking from his reverie.

“The Mark XX is an ultra-long-range weapon – twenty-five plus miles – which can be configured to carry a special physics package, sir.”

“A nuclear bomb, you mean?”

“Yes, sir.”

The movie was carrying on in the background showing HMS Splendid blowing her ballast tanks and dipping beneath the surface. There was a sequence shot in the submarine’s gleaming, antiseptically clean and air-conditioned control room; it was like something out of a science fiction movie about space travel!

“Well over a decade ago, My Government,” the King said with barely contained icy cold rage, “solemnly signed an undertaking with the German Empire to desist from all warlike underwater research and development, to scrap all our existing operational submersibles of one hundred and fifty tons or more, and to absolutely curtail for a period of not less than twenty-five years, the development of nuclear power for military purposes.”

“Yes, sir,” the First Sea Lord agreed, blandly, as if he really did not see what the problem was.

The King glared at his Prime Minister and his Foreign and Colonial Secretary. The latter had actually, briefly, been Prime Minister around the time of his untimely accession to the throne, and the former ‘first among equals’ for most of the last decade.

It was the Queen who asked the really obvious question.

“How on earth did you keep the building of that ship secret, gentlemen?”

Sir Hector Hamilton looked to the floor while he gathered his courage.

The First Sea Lord, obviously deciding it was best to make a clean breast of matters as soon as possible, stepped into the breech with an alacrity typical of what the Senior Service still termed ‘the Nelsonian spirit’.

“HMS Splendid is one of eight vessels either already in service or expected to join the Fleet in the next year or so. Prior to the launching of the first of the ‘S’ class boats, three experimental vessels were commissioned, two of which are presently on active service.”

The King was suddenly on his feet.

“Stop that bloody film!”

Everybody else rose to their feet, except Eleanor, who decided that if the men in the room were temporarily incapable of keeping a level head, then she must.

“Bertie,” she suggested quietly, “I am sure that our friends had a very good reason for keeping this from us?”

She understood that this was one of those rare moments when her dear, profoundly decent husband needed to be reminded that the men who had just sprung the shock of the century on him, were still their ‘friends’.

“They’ve got a damned odd way of showing it!” The King retorted, grimly.

The Foreign Secretary cleared his throat.