Shadow Hunter by Geoffrey Archer Page A

was nothing he could put his finger on, but something wasn’t right with his captain.
    Philip closed his eyes and held his breath.
    Damn it! Pike’s request had caught him by surprise. He should’ve been ready for him, and he wasn’t.
    He ran through their brief conversation. It had been okay. He’d handled it. But he had to be prepared for next time, have an answer for their questions.
    He expelled the air from his lungs.
    Philip needed the men under his command. He was driving a nuclear-powered, hunter-killer submarine – one of the most deadly weapons-systems in the world. Those bastard Soviets would soon be finding out just how deadly, he told himself. But he couldn’t operate it on his own. Co-operation and obedience from men like Pike and Spriggs would be vital if his mission was to succeed.
    Philip knew what he had to do. That much was clear. How to manage it, however, was a different matter. There was still time to think the details through. Until Wednesday he’d follow the exercise brief. After that, he’d be his own master.
    The loudspeaker clicked. Pike’s voice boomed forth authoritatively.
    The ‘pipe’ was heard on loudspeakers throughout the submarine. The broadcast to update the crew was made at least twice a day, a communication essential to team spirit on board.
    The first lieutenant spoke for two minutes, telling the 130 men on board of the day’s sonar contacts. They’d included a school of whales.
    He talked of the upcoming communications slot, knowing some of the crew would be expecting the forty-word ‘family-grams’ that kept them in touch with their homes. He ended by reading the menu for the evening meal.
    The next pipe – that’d be the time, Philip decided. Start to prepare them for what was to come. Little by little. Step by step.
    His eyes strayed to the photograph he’d doggedly kept on his desk, to preserve his mask of normality.
    He looked at her image and his guts turned inside out again. He closed his eyes tightly. Would he ever be able to look at Sara’s picture without wanting to kill her?
    She’d been everything he’d dreamed of when they’d met fifteen years earlier. He’d been serving on a
Swiftsure
class submarine at the time, circling the globe as part of a military sales drive. They’d gone ashore in Hong Kong, to a reception at the British High Commission. Their host had been accompanied by his stunningly pretty daughter – Sara. He’d fallen in love with her instantly.
    Sara had glowed that evening; as they circulated socially, her eyes reached across the room to him like a light-house beam. Excitement had almost choked him. Until then, apart from brief relationships, the only woman in Philip’s life had been his own straitlaced mother. Sara was vivacious, sensual and provocative; if his mother had ever had such qualities, she’d successfully repressed them afterthe trauma of her husband’s disappearance. In Hong Kong he sensed he’d finally met a woman with the power to cut through his shell of inhibition, and free him from the dour restraint of his upbringing.
    His mother had tried to prevent their marriage. Nineteen was far too young for a girl to marry, she’d declared. He’d ignored her, terrified that if he didn’t bind Sara to him quickly he’d lose her to someone else.
    Now he’d lost her anyway.
    They’d been immensely happy together for their first two years. He’d had a shore-based job in Scotland, and the sense of personal liberation he’d hoped for became a reality.
    Then he’d been given a commission at sea. Sara had been devastated by the separation and had applied intense emotional pressure on him to change his job. Philip had retreated into his shell, as he had learned to do as a youth when pressured by his mother.
    Her face smiled at him from the frame. Deceptive, cruelly deceptive. Laughing eyes. Laughing