"Fox, Anthony - Threat Warning Red" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fox Anthony)

'Who wants bad news at this time of day?'

'Like a Soviet takeover of the north-east Atlantic?'

Two thoughts came quickly: one, those trawlers off the Shetlands: two, that Hooky was always full of chat and leg-pulling was his favourite sport. It might have been his way of getting his own back on men who didn't attend his services.

'Hear it over an egg and bacon, may I.'

'If you like. But Notices to Mariners are your pigeon, I presume?'

They were, of course. They were issued weekly from the Hydrographer's office and they gave details of navigational hazards, or changes to lights, buoys, dredged channels, or of the positions of new pipelines, drilling platforms, wrecks. All those corrections that Hunt was putting on the Norwegian charts came out of Notices to Mariners.

Hooky Winters added, 'This 'un was originated in Leningrad.' He nipped open the notebook in which he recorded items for inclusion in the ship's newspaper, the Devon Times, which he edited. He'd found the place now.... 'Prohibited area declared - look, this is only the gist of it, I didn't get every word - prohibited area declared for purposes of manoeuvres by fleet elements of Warsaw Pact countries  area bounded by latitudes fifty-five and sixty degrees north and twenty to thirty degrees west. From------'

'That's a lot of sea...."

But he wasn't getting the point yet. Exercise areas were declared often enough. All right, so it was a big one, but...

'Area declared prohibited to all vessels, and prohibition is to start from -' The chaplain frowned at his notes, evidently finding his own scrawl difficult to-read. Then he checked the date on his wrist-watch and glanced up at Comerford. 'From midnight twenty-first. That's midnight the day after tomorrow.'

'An exclusion area - is that------'

'Right. They're claiming that chunk of ocean for themselves. Indefinitely.'

'Oh, surely-'

Showdown at sea, here and now?

It might not have been unexpected, after the recent bully-boy exercises in Africa, plus the enormous build-up of their deepwater fleet. But you could expect certain developments, see logical outcomes looming, and there was still a shock of surprise when they happened. He felt like waking up out of it, finding it wasn't true.... Winters was looking down at his scribbles again, with a forefinger marking the point he'd reached. 'Notice of termination to be promulgated at later date.' He looked at Comerford. 'Reads to me rather like "period indefinite".'

Comerford was trying to visualise the chart of the north-east Atlantic - south of Iceland, west of Ireland----He said, still only half believing it, 'If you're right with the co-ordinates --'

'I am.'

'- if you are, it's smack across the approaches to the Iceland Gap. And that's - hell, it's impossible!'

Fifty-five to sixty north was a spread of five degrees of latitude, and five times sixty made three hundred - three hundred miles. And from twenty to thirty west would outline an area that was more or less square. He'd check it presently on the chart but a near-enough estimate was that the Soviets were extending their empire to include an area of the Atlantic - the high seas, international waters - three hundred miles by three hundred. Ninety thousand square miles, with vital strategic routes passing through it--- Winters said, 'It's strong-arm stuff, Frank. They're saying "This part of the playground's ours - keep off it!" And if they got away with that - well, what, declare more areas? Across tanker routes perhaps?'

The padre was either thinking fast or he'd already had plenty of time for thought. Comerford, on the other hand, had a sense of unreality.... He said slowly, 'Might be quite - harmless, a mistake 'Frank, wake up! Don't you realise they might have to send us - this squadron?'

If the threat was as real as all that, the Commodore wouldn't long be left in ignorance of it. Wires might be humming already between the power-centres, signals flying between Northwood in Middlesex, where the Royal Navy's C-in-C Fleet was also NATO's C-in-C Eastern Atlantic, and Norfolk in Virginia, USA, where an American admiral who was Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic bossed all of NATO that floated. This squadron was his baby, except that when it happened to be over here it was nursed from North-wood. And in Brussels too - where NATO's overlords lived.... But - send this squadron? To break into Soviet fleet manoeuvres?



Chapter Two


Chris Ozzard felt like a man on holiday. And at this time yesterday he'd felt like one in exile and lumbered with a tedious chore - the Brussels NATO post which he'd occupied before, when he'd been younger and slightly lower on the ladder - in what seemed now like some earlier century.....

(Traffic building up: fast-moving, impatient traffic, several lanes of it and you had to get into the right one in good time for the turn-off. Like now ... slackening speed, edging over.) One reason the earlier days in Brussels seemed so distant was that when he'd been here before, Julie had been alive. She'd loved Brussels, and so had he: the life, the people, the city itself with its mixture of chic and old-world beauty, downtown bustle contrasting with the surrounding peace of woods and lakes.... Skirting some of the greenery now, passing grass and water as he swung his Rover 3500 round the shallow S-bend in the Avenue de Tervuren, getting set to fork right into Boulevard de Woluwe, heading roughly north so as to reach the autoroute where the NATO headquarters sprawled. He was in no hurry to get to work. The NATO routines and the procedures of his own old department seemed to be ticking over very smoothly and he wasn't intending to stir up anything or initiate new systems. In that sense it was like a kind of holiday. Holding the fort for Bob Priest as Assistant Secretary-General for Defence Planning and Policy, while Priest was in the London Clinic having something drastic done to his insides. Chris, who was a Deputy Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence but at this time between jobs, about to be promoted to a new one, had been available and of course knew the ropes, so London had offered him to NATO as a temporary replacement and the Secretary-General had welcomed him with open arms, each of them about seven feet long. To clinch the neatness of the arrangement a lawyer friend who worked for one of the international corporations had lent him an old house out at Leefdaal.