Cobra

By James Calum Campbell

'Cobra, now."'
'One of our Dreadnoughts is missing…'
'It's not a ship, it's a boat.'
'My name is Adverse Camber. I am the Chairperson and Chief Executive Director of WEEVIL, Waffenschmuggel: Explosiv Expressgut – Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Lederhosen…'
When Mimsy Borogoves gets the summons at 3 am to attend Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, she knows that Something Really Bad must have happened. A dastardly international criminal organization has hijacked a nuclear submarine and intends, should Her Majesty's Government refuse to pay the ransom, to annihilate London.  
Mimsy watches as the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and the military top brass struggle to mount a coherent response to the threat. She alone knows that there is one man who is indispensable at this time of national crisis. His name is Crude. Brent Crude. 
But Crude, charismatic, unpredictable, and flawed, is not a team player. When the Cobra committee rejects his strategic advice, he slips under cover, picks up a lead in a dingy Viennese Bier Keller, and embarks on a lone-wolf hunt for Adverse Camber.    
Meanwhile WEEVIL has a mole in Cobra. And Mimsy Borogoves knows the Prime Minister isn't up to the job.  Deep down, the PM knows it too. Just because you suffer from Impostor Syndrome doesn't mean you aren't a real fake.  
The only person standing between London and Armageddon is Brent Crude.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Impress Books
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911293736

Book preview

Thursday, December 31st

One

Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, 0300 Zulu

Have you ever noticed, when the telephone rings at three o’clock in the morning, that the caller is seldom the bearer of glad tidings? Mimsy Borogoves retrieved the delicate ivory receiver to the warmth of the duvet.

‘Yes?’

‘Cobra. Now.’

She recognised the gruff, calm, understated voice of her boss. Ypsilon.

‘What’s happened?’ But already the line was dead.

She got up and slipped into the bathroom, laved her face, and paused briefly to apply a trace of lippy. No national crisis was ever so desperate that there wasn’t a spare moment for emergency cosmesis. Then she dressed hurriedly, in order to divert any attention, in clothes that were deliberately frumpish – slacks, jumper, and a duffel coat – and, armed with a slim satchel containing nothing but a sketch pad and a pencil case, went out into the night. It didn’t take her long to cross Whitehall on foot. With the contagion, the curfew, and the lockdown still not fully eased, the place was deserted. She didn’t mind. It was, she imagined, how the blackout must have been, back in 1940. It gave her a frisson of excitement. But this particular Blitz had its own peculiar, threatening quality, darker, more silent, more sinister, and perhaps more protracted. As she approached the wrought iron gates to Downing Street, a policeman stepped out in front of her and stopped her with an admonitory hand. She produced her government pass and held it up from a distance of two metres. The policeman nodded, and touched his dark blue helmet with a forefinger. She passed through. A Black Maria bell clanged somewhere in the distance. Mimsy Borogoves felt nostalgic for a London that no longer existed, if it ever had; a London of street criers and good-humoured cockney costermongers, strange people dressed in jackets made out of buttons, the BBC Home Service and the chimes of Big Ben. The London of tolerance and fair play. Where had it all gone?

As she approached her destination, the big black door swung silently open. She stepped into the hallway and a different world, crowded, noisy, and buzzing with electricity. A grim, obese woman in an unflattering and androgynous brown corduroy three-piece suit frowned at her.

‘You’re late. And you are improperly and sloppily dressed.’

‘Nonsense, Grizzle! Ms Borogoves is bang on time. Sensible attire for the time of year.’ Mimsy’s boss winked at her as he picked his way delicately through the crush in the hallway.

‘Don’t attempt to undermine me, Ypsilon.’

‘And don’t attempt to intimidate my secretary.’

‘My house, my rules.’

‘Your house? Come along, Ms Borogoves.’ He made a gesture as if he was grabbing for her sleeve, although he’d never grabbed any part of her, and she followed him, squeezing through the throng and finally falling in behind him as he weaved his way through to the rear of the house.

‘Who’s she?’

‘Griselda Grendel? PM’s Special Adviser. Dragon. Even the Chief Whip’s frightened of her.’

It occurred to Mimsy that the hippogryph Grendel was what in a former age used to be called a ‘scold’. She might have had a cast-iron balaclava fitted over her head to shut her up, and she might have been placed in a bucket suspended on a pulley from a gibbet, taken down to the Thames, and dunked. Mimsy felt a little cheered by the image.

She passed with her boss straight through No. 10, out into the Downing Street garden, and across to the cabinet briefing rooms. Here, they stepped into Room A, and the midst of a heated argument.

‘And who the fuck,’ bellowed the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, ‘invited Mrs Jimmy fucking Crankie along?’ It was an uncompromising, thick, smoky, heavily industrialised West of Scotland voice. For one excruciating moment Mimsy Borogoves thought it was referring to her, but it was a tiny, neat lady in a well-tailored red suit who returned the rapid serve.

‘No show without Punch, Humph.’ The woman was entirely unnerved. ‘But by the same token, why have they dredged up a wreck of a dinosaur like you?"

First Minister,’ said a Permanent Undersecretary, ‘I really must insist that you address the Leader of the Opposition by his appropriate style or title.’

‘After what Humph has just called me?’

‘I’ll call Nippy Sweety Peaches fucking McSmellypants if I feel so inclined. D’you know what I mean?’

No love lost between these two, clearly.

Ypsilon whispered to Mimsy Borogoves. ‘Sit there.’ He pointed to a low chair in the far corner of the room. ‘Don’t minute this.’

‘If I’m not taking the minutes, why am I here?’

‘Because you have a good memory.’

‘Two minutes, everybody!’ called the Prime Minister.

She took her chair. She glanced casually at the group gathering round the board room table. There was a plethora of military uniforms, epaulettes, stripes, campaign and battle honours, and a ton of spaghetti. She recognised them. Top Brass. An expression flew into her mind, coined as a rah-rah call by John Lennon in Hamburg during the drudgery days of ‘The Silver Beatles’. The toppermost of the poppermost. Unobtrusively she extracted the sketchbook and a selection of coloured pencils from her satchel and she began to sketch. She drew a rectangle to represent the table, and then identified those seated around it by their respective rank, or office of state. Top brass on one side, politicians – ‘the frocks’, as the military once called them – on the other. Party of twelve. All male. Six on each side of the table, from south to north: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, PM, Chancellor, Home Secretary, Leader of the Opposition; and facing them, again from south to north: First Sea Lord, Air Vice-Marshal, the C.I.G.S., Ypsilon, ?****, ?Boffin (Mimsy had picked up from an old medic boyfriend the affectation of prefixing something held doubtful with a question mark.)

The four asterisks referred to a four-star general from across the Pond. She recognised the uniform but she could not remember the wearer’s name. The last one was a punt – a heavy grey man in a shabby grey suit. He looked like Sir Michael Redgrave in the role of Barnes Wallis. The twelve men comprised the top table. Their aides and secretaries occupied positions around the periphery of the room. Scotland’s First Minister was similarly relegated.

‘One minute! Please make sure your mobiles are switched off, comme ça.’ The PM held up his own cell phone and set it on silent mode. ‘Phasers on stun!’ He chortled at his own quip. He sat centrally beneath the ornate antique Harrison clock on the mantel (the one that won the prize for solving the longitude problem), his the only chair with arm rests. On either side of him, the great offices of state propped him up like scaffolding. It occurred to Mimsy that the presence, within these hallowed confines, of somebody from the opposition benches was highly significant. What could have happened instantly to annul the ancient tribal warfare in this show of national unity? She thought, Something Big has happened. No, Something Immense. Whatever it was, it couldn’t wait until the morning. It must have something to do with the Contagion. Maybe they’d been too quick to slacken the quarantine and the social distancing. The R number is creeping up again. Maybe the infective organism has evolved, and is staying one step ahead of our best efforts at containment. Food shortages, civil unrest, people dropping like flies… And yet, the Health Minister wasn’t there, no medics, and only one scientist. No, Mimsy concluded. This had to be something else. The double whammy. The unexpected insult that comes out of left field while your attention is diverted elsewhere. This had to be The Next Big Thing. She awaited the start of the meeting with bated breath, and intense curiosity.

Finally the Prime Minister called the meeting to order. The diffuse baritone grumble dissolved into silence. As the meeting got underway, and as the men round the table spoke in turn, Mimsy began deftly to sketch each talking head, adding a name, and occasionally a brief hat-check description. She’d discovered a cartoonist’s flair in art classes as a schoolgirl, and never done anything with it except pass the time. She captured the essence of each individual almost in a single line, and fleshed out the detail as the meeting progressed. She omitted Ypsilon, her own boss, whom she knew well. She didn’t add his name, nor a description. He remained a cypher. The other person at the table she didn’t sketch was the nameless man she assumed was a scientist. A cartoonist needs some trait to caricature, some feature to distort and exaggerate. This putative scientist’s appearance was so bland that there was nothing to work on.

‘Gentlemen, thank you for your attendance, and I apologise for the rude awakening, and a summons at this unseemly hour.’

Sir Sphagnum Moss. Ms Borogoves sketched a tired middle-aged face, and a tousle of grey hair, unfashionably long. She wrote ?Squiffed.

‘But something’s come up. Or perhaps I should say…’ - the PM smirked mirthlessly - ‘gone down. First Sea Lord?’

Mimsy wrote, ‘Lord Gilbert Phearting.’ It was a gaunt, heavily lined, weathered face. She added a Nelsonian naval cap, an eyepatch, amputated an arm, and put a parrot on the right shoulder. She added, ‘Silent, but deadly.’

‘Thank you, Prime Minister. I won’t beat about the bush. We’ve lost a boat.’

She wrote on her scratch pad Boat?

‘Define lost’, demanded the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, with customary terseness and despatch. ‘You mean it’s sunk?’

General Sir Spatchcock Poussin. The style or title ‘C.I.G.S.’ had all but disappeared after ‘Imperial’ had become a dirty word, but this particular administration had thought to reinstate, and breathe fresh life into it. Mimsy sketched a hatchet face with a belligerent chin and, on the bust beneath, a ton of ironmongery. For valour.

‘If it were merely sunk,’ explained the First Sea Lord patiently, ‘it would hardly matter. The boat in question is HMS Reprimand.’

‘Reprimand. Deserves a sight more than that.’ The C.I.G.S.’s left lower eyelid had a tic, and his jowl an intermittent twitch. He had been frequently thrashed at school. Wykehamist. ‘Damn sight more. Too soft!’

The Air Vice-Marshal leaned in and whispered to his combined services colleague, ‘Spatch, it’s the name of a Dreadnought.’

Sir Burton Prang. His was a gallant, debonair face. Mimsy added a huge handlebar moustache.

‘Dreadnought?’ exclaimed the C.I.G.S. ‘I thought those ships were all mothballed or scuttled after The Great War.’

Lord Phearting remarked pedantically, ‘It’s not a ship. It’s a boat.’

‘HMS Reprimand is a submarine, Spatch. Part of the new fleet,’ the Air Vice-Marshal intervened. ‘The C.A.S.D.’ Ms Borogoves, a step ahead, wrote down another single word beside Boat: Trident.

‘C.A.S.D? Must you speak in acronyms?’

The Chancellor of the Exchequer translated. ‘The Continuous At-Sea Deterrent.’ Roy Minto. Ms Borogoves sketched a Roman head, in profile, embossed on a gold sovereign.

The C.I.G.S. blinked.

The Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition launched a depth-charge into the deep silence that had fallen across the room. ‘Are you telling us you’ve lost a clutch of hydrogen bombs?’ Humphrey Glasgow. Mimsy Borogoves sketched a marauding Pict. Old Labour. Big bruiser.

‘Well,’ said the C.I.G.S., ‘where in God’s name is it, your Reprimand?’

‘Reprimand,’ remarked the Prime Minister, ‘seems rather a euphemistic title for an instrument of such… firepower.’

‘Yes, but where’s it gone?’

‘That,’ said the First Sea Lord, ‘is what I’m trying to explain. We’ve lost it.’

The C.I.G.S. waited for the spasm in his jaw to settle. ‘You mean, lost contact?’

‘Exactly. All contact.’

‘For how long?’

‘One hour and forty-seven minutes,’ answered the First Sea Lord, without looking at his watch.

‘Surely,’ said the Home Secretary, ‘this is just a technical issue. Radio failure, or such like.’

Tyburn Ague. Ms Borogoves sketched Judge Jeffreys, grim featured and heavily bewigged. She added a black cap.

‘We don’t think so. You see, they appear to have deployed the final tier of Scaramouche.’

‘Scaramouche?’

‘A blanket of invisibility. State of the art. Impenetrable. Under Scaramouche, the enemy cannot detect you.’

‘Well that’s just peachy,’ interjected the four-star General from across the Pond. ‘But surely you guys know how to disarm your own firewalls?’ Mimsy recalled his name. She wrote it down beside the ****: Randy Drone. She drew a cowboy with a six-shooter, on horseback.

‘Not if the final tier of Scaramouche has been deployed.’

‘The final tier?’

‘Fandango.’

Mimsy suppressed a yelp of laughter.

The Secretary of State for Defence said, ‘They’ve deployed Fandango?’

Dregs Wicked. He was the government glamour boy. He loved to drop in on the armed forces abroad, in his fatigues, pose with them at Camp Basra, sit astride the gun barrel of a tank. He cultivated his reputation as a tough outdoor survivalist, but Mimsy suspected it was all a front. Pseudo hairy chest. She drew it.

Yes.’

The Defence Secretary repeated, with incredulity, ‘They’ve deployed Fandango? Fandango is irreversible.’ Then he buried his face in his hands.

‘Why on earth,’ asked the Home Secretary, ‘would you design a system that could not be overridden by anybody?’

‘Fandango,’ explained the First Sea Lord, ‘was only supposed to be deployed in the event that the United Kingdom ceased to exist.’

‘And what would make your Reprimand chappies’ – this from the C.I.G.S. – ‘think the UK had ceased to exist?’

‘Signals would stop arriving. To the boat, that is.’

‘But wouldn’t the submariners seek out an alternative explanation for radio silence?’

‘Oh yes, they would work through an algorithm. Presumably they reached its bottom line. A final point of arbitration. A decisive factor. It’s at that point that you know the UK has been incapacitated.’

‘And what is this decisive factor?

‘Radio 4 stops broadcasting.’

The silence was as heavy as Dead Air on a public broadcast radio station.

‘Reprimand concludes the end of the world is nigh because they can’t tune into the Today Programme?’

‘That’s it.’

‘You mean it’s curtains, just because John Humphrys says so? Or doesn’t say so, as the case may be?’

‘Mr Humphrys has retired from the Today programme.’

‘So what are the submariners supposed to do if they can’t tune in?’

‘They activate TAP.’

‘TAP?’

‘The Armageddon Protocol. They must secure the boat. Effectively, they vanish.’

‘This is madness.’

‘Not at all. It’s perfectly logical and rational. Given that the UK no longer exists, there is no reason why Scaramouche should not proceed to the highest tier of impenetrability. There is no point in maintaining lines of communication if there is no longer a line of command.’

‘So, given that Scaramouche proceeds to Fandango, what would we expect Reprimand to do?’

‘That would depend upon the Letter of Last Resort.’

All eyes swivelled on the Prime Minister, who muttered under his breath, ‘Oh Lord.’

It was at that point that Mimsy Borogoves, ahead of everybody else, realised Just How Huge This Thing Was Going To Be. All round the table, she could hear the mental processes clicking and whirring. The Prime Minister had turned a deathly shade of pale. He looked completely stunned, staring vacantly into the middle distance. It crossed Mimsy’s mind that the shock had been too great; surely he had suffered a stroke. Yet in the silence that ensued, the senior politicians and the military chiefs of staff were waiting for him to take command, and to show leadership. Now was the time for Sir Sphagnum Moss to say something Prime Ministerial. His mouth opened and closed several times before he could finally summon the will to articulate.

‘Gentlemen. You see the gravity of the situation. Well, we came into this room as a team, and we shall leave it as a team. But for now, we have a problem to solve, and we are in lockdown. There must be no breach of security. For the time being, nobody outside this room must know of this. If you think we need more expertise, if somebody else needs to join the party, then say so now.’

Mimsy whispered under her breath, ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ She waited for her boss to speak up.

Ypsilon said nothing.

Yet, to Mimsy, it was patently and glaringly obvious what was needed. Who was needed. Surely her boss, of all people, would mention the name. She gave him another minute, and when he didn’t, she took a deep breath, rose from her chair and took a few paces to stand right behind him.

‘Sir.’

She looked down upon Ypsilon’s bald pate, conscious that she was exceeding her brief. Big time.

‘Excuse me, sir.’

He didn’t appear to have noticed her. She laid a tremulous hand on his sleeve. It occurred to Mimsy that she, too, had never grabbed her boss’s sleeve, or any other part of him.

He half-turned in his chair and glanced up at her irritably. ‘Yes, what is it, Ms Borogoves?’

‘Bravo Charlie, sir.’

‘What?’

Then, remembering Ypsilon’s penchant (ipso facto) for the phonetic alphabet in German:

‘Berta Cäsar. Sir.’

‘What’s the matter with you, woman?’ The Prime Minister growled from the other side of the table. ‘If it’s bladder trouble, just say please may I leave the room and get on with it.’

It crossed Mimsy’s mind to do just that, to run away to the powder room and burst into tears. But she stuck to her guns. In for a penny. She addressed the Prime Minister directly.

‘Sir, there is a man named Crude.’

Two

Rakes, Kensington, 0300 Zulu

Beneath the frieze of the elegant, high-ceilinged Georgian withdrawing room, the spectral portraiture of the fortune-makers of the past gazed down upon the speculators of today with expressions of satiety and disgust. Everything is nauseating at three o’clock in the morning.

At the Draw Poker table, Frau Wünscher deftly shuffled the cards and offered the deck, sequentially anticlockwise round the table, for the cut. Four times the cut was declined, and then the girl on the dealer’s left, the girl with the beautiful golden hair falling to her waist, accepted. She made the cut with great deliberation, as if trying exactly to bisect the pack. Frau Wünscher retrieved the cards, and observed each player place the ante. The stakes were high, the pot already a very considerable sum. With seasoned facility she dealt clockwise round the table until the six players each had five cards. She sat back and watched with curiosity as the man seated opposite her, the man who all night had played so quietly and so authoritatively, gazed unemotionally at his cards, still face down on the baize. She said, with a wry smile, ‘Surely your luck must run out soon, Mister…’

‘Crude. Brent Crude.’

He retrieved the cards, glanced at them momentarily, and, without reordering them, laid them back face down on the baize. She had been watching him now for two hours, as he had systematically accrued a small fortune in multicoloured plaques. He reminded her of Lord Byron. How had Lady Caroline Lamb described him? Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Lady Caroline had become obsessed with Lord Byron, and when he finally called their affair off, at Lady Heathcote’s ball in July 1813, she smashed a glass and started cutting herself. A man like this, thought Frau Wünscher, might evoke similar passions, the more so as he was magnificently dressed, in full white tie Highland evening dress. She had noted its particulars: the Sherriffmuir doublet in barathea, the white stiff-front shirt with wing collar and white lace jabot; gold cuff links; a white Marcella waistcoat. The kilt itself was a plaid of startling pinks and yellows; a silver mounted sporran in sealskin held by a silver chain belt; diced kilt hose with silk garter flashes;