Blue Blood

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘OK, Richard. But the instant there’s any lessening of the pressure there, you get out of there. Over.’

  ‘Like a hare at a greyhound track, I assure you. And in the meantime, I’ll try and pull my line back out of the secret bits of Quebec and hope I don’t pull out anything that would get James Bond coming after me after all. Over.’

  ‘Right,’ said the chief. ‘But we won’t just be sitting twiddling our thumbs either. We’re in contact with Gus and the guys on Sissy, trying to come up with something smart. And I mean, the people aboard Quebec have to be doing something. Over.’

  ‘I hope so. Over,’ said Richard. Then he mentally added, Oh God I hope so! But of course it wasn’t his own predicament he was thinking about.

  The bolts and the hinges on the bulkhead door in the crew’s bunk area all failed at once. The door slammed down the length of the room like a missile and would have destroyed the bulkhead opposite had it not been knocked off line by the bunks it was gathering up before it. In the end it span away to port, cartwheeled across the deck and smashed into the side of the shaking vessel. The noise it made was indescribable. So massive, indeed, that it drowned out the screams of the crew themselves - those who were hurt by the massive projectile, or terrified by what they saw of its passage. The only ones who were quiet were Robin and Li who had been expecting the catastrophe and the two gruff guards with the Sabatier who were turned into a kind of pate as it smeared over the pair of them.

  The noise the door made echoed through the hull for an instant - already overwhelmed by the thunderous inrush of the sea. ‘Out,’ screamed Robin. ‘Everybody out!’ She hurt her throat and saw stars with the power she put into the order but she might just as well have held her peace. No one stood any chance of hearing her in that roaring madness. Fortunately, it was absolutely obvious what everyone had to do and they all set about doing it with almost superhuman speed.

  The flying door had cleared the burdens in front of Robin so she was able to take off like a cheetah chasing a gazelle. After her third step, when the water was already up to her knees and trying to trip her with the unrelenting force of its currents, she discovered that Li was well in front of her. Close on his heels for once, she pounded down the room, tail-end Charley bringing up the rear. Incongruously, she saw through the drenched white of his overall that he was wearing garishly coloured boxer shorts. She turned her gaze away at once. It never even occurred to her what the transparency of her own soaking overalls had been showing lately.

  As she ran, Robin began to scan around the place as though this was her own command. On either hand, the wreckage of bunks was beginning to heave and toss on the increasingly stormy waves within the place. But there were no faces in the billows; no bodies amid the wreckage. No hands held high in mute appeal for help. They were alone in the room. That was something after all.

  But then she saw that the others who had so rapidly escaped the place were grouped around the door, swinging it closed against the knee-high flood as it gathered rapidly towards their thighs. And the door closed outwards, away from her. Once it passed a critical angle, the weight of the water on this side would slam it and it would never open again. ‘Wait! ’ she called, her words as silent and pointless as everything she had said in the last ten seconds. They couldn’t hear anything but the joyous roaring of the sea as it gulped down one more vessel. They wouldn’t obey anything now but their terror.

  But, blessedly, Li reached the door just in time. His presence and his own shouting would have made no difference at all - but his quick-thinking certainly did. He swung one of the floating bunks into the closing gap, jamming the metal of its foot between the heavy jaws. Then he leaped up on to the bunk itself and turned, his hand held down for her. Up she went with a leap and a heave, as though they were circus acrobats in performance. He took her waist and all but threw her through the gap then followed hard on her heels as the bunk began to come apart. Its foot folded inwards and it slammed away into the flooded room. The instant that it did so, the door, too, slammed.

  They were floundering out in the flooding corridor between the fridges and the dry-goods store that was rapidly becoming a wet-goods store. Robin swung round, shouting, ‘Secure it!’ But again, her order was redundant. The instant that it was closed, a horde of busy hands pulled handles down and slid bolts safely home. Then they stood gasping and aghast as the pretty pink gingham curtains played out a little drama for them against the strengthened glass - as though it were a television screen.

  First the thin cloth began to jerk and shiver as spray, then foam slammed hard against it. Relentlessly and with awesome rapidity, it was soaked and smeared against the glass, as tight as a layer of paint. But then the hems began to stir and little by little in a land of bizarre strip-tease, the gingham squares were pulled away by the power of the solid water. A centimetre at a time it seemed, the curtains rose with the level of the flood, floating away into the vastness of it. Until at last they were waving like banners pulled away from the door itself by the tug of the ocean ill-contained behind it. And as the sad little flags fluttered helplessly, the deep green glass behind them revealed the relentless rise of the water until someone in the chief’s team had the sense to isolate the circuits and kill the lights before the whole boat fused again. A few moments after that, anyone still there would have heard the distant sound of popping as though a net-full of party-balloons had burst. The water had hit the still-hot bulbs, shattering them one by one, and pressed its surface hard against the deck-head that was all that separated it from the flood in the weapons-storage area above.

  Robin didn’t wait around for any of this. The instant she was out and checked that, everyone else in the corridor was safe, she was off up to the conning tower. She was fairly certain Mark would know what had just happened - he would feel it in the very fabric of his command - but she was equally certain that no one would have made any kind of detailed report or damage assessment yet. So eager was she to get up into the command area that when she slipped, she assumed simply that her shoes were wet. She didn’t realize for quite a while that she had slipped because of the steepening downward angle of the hull.

  * * *

  Richard teased the line back out of the yawning chasm behind him a metre at a time. And as it came he called to Gus to pull it in little by little. It was more for the human contact than for any other reason, because being able to breathe had cleared his head. And his clear head could understand all too clearly how dangerous his situation was. If they didn’t close the flood off inside the sub pretty quickly, then Quebec was off down to Davy Jones’ locker with Richard wedged immovably in its jaws. And indeed, with Robin trapped helplessly somewhere in its slowly imploding belly. His body became almost preternaturally sensitive to any change in the sub’s attitude in the water.

  He catalogued almost every millimetre by which her bow was settling under the added weight flooding into her. He noted the way her forward motion moderated as Tom called Sissy to throttle back again. But he also felt at once how this made almost no difference to the pressure he was under or to the gathering rate of downward tilt. Even when both vessels came to an almost dead stop in the water, Richard’s situation did not ease. The only way he would get any hope of relief, he knew, was if they closed off the flooded area and let the pressure equalize. And if they could do that before the sub began its final downward swoop.

  But then, as Richard was a man who always looked for the positive angle, he began to wonder, if the sub was this finely balanced, perhaps it would be as easy to pull her head back up again. Say Captain Robertson and his crew did manage to close off the newly flooded area. Say Sissy could hold Quebec on the surface for a while longer yet - perhaps not take her back under tow, but hold her - what did they have aboard that would do the exact opposite of what the inrush of water had just done?

  Richard had the answer in his head and was beginning to formulate a plan of action even before the current slackened, telling him that Captain Robertson’s c
ommand had once again managed to save the day, and allowing him to pull himself gingerly out of the gaping steel-lined jaws at the front of the submarine.

  * * *

  ‘How many Yokohama fenders do you have aboard, Tom?’ Richard demanded even as Gus was winching him gently back towards Sissy. Gently but speedily. They were all aware that Richard was low on air, having used it at a higher pressure and a greater speed than planned. And Richard himself was also wondering distantly whether what he had done in order to survive would place him at risk of the bends.

  ‘They won’t be any good to plug the gap, Richard. We’ve discussed that. The damage will tear them apart. They’re only glorified balloons ...’

  ‘That’s what I mean, Tom. That’s what I want to discuss with you. If we’ve got enough aboard, couldn’t we secure them to the netting at the bow of the sub and then shorten the lines holding them in place until they lift her straight up out of the water? That way, if we secure them correctly, Sissy might even be able to take her in tow again, if we have any kind of a destination to tow her to ...’

  ‘We have a destination,’ Bob Hudson told them as soon as they came aboard. ‘While you’ve been working on the damage, I’ve been working on Halifax. It seems that MARLANT has a big exercise running in the Labrador Sea. Another reason why it was so difficult to get through to the top brass. They’re diverting several of their ships towards us as we speak. Admiral Pike himself is aboard. They want to rendezvous as soon as possible.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Tom.

  Bob gaped at him, apparently nonplussed by his question, in spite of the fact that it was so obvious. But then Richard glanced over his shoulder and followed the young officer’s gaze. Even he was shocked to see how far further down Quebec had settled since he had gone back to her an hour ago at dawn.

  ‘We can’t say how soon as soon as possible is until we know where they want us to meet them,’ said Richard gently, recapturing Bob’s attention as he finished pulling off his helmet and reached for a bottle of sparkling water conveniently in a cooler by the divers’ boarding point.

  ‘Oh. Of course. They want to rendezvous at Cape Farewell. But God, it looks as though we’ll be lucky to get her there at all.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Tom easily, almost confidently. ‘I think we have a cunning plan.’

  Twenty-One

  Tension

  Richard was back in his diving suit - still without flippers. Still in it, really, for he had hardly had time to towel himself off and visit the heads in Sissy before he was redeployed straight back aboard Quebec. But it was his own fault, he thought with a wry grin. If you can’t stand the heat in the kitchen then don’t come up with any clever recipes, as President Harry Truman might have said.

  Richard’s helmet was folded back allowing his face the heady combination of fresh air and sunshine, while still letting him talk to Tom, Gus and the chief a couple of hundred metres away on board the tug. The line joining him to Sissy was long enough to be occasionally distracting though there was less tension than might have been expected because, although it was so strong, it was also very fine and light.

  There was a great deal less tension than recently in everything else about Richard also. He was full of the euphoria that comes with surviving a near-death experience. He had experienced none of the telltale stiffness in his joints that might have warned of anything like the bends. And, had Robin been anywhere other than where she actually was, anywhere else at all, it would have been a perfect day.

  He was slopping carefully across Quebec’s foredeck and the water was up past his knees now, with wave crests occasionally slapping him in the lower belly hard enough to make him stagger. On the one hand he could feel the pulse of power and pumps in the net-bound casing over which he was walking - and that was good; on the other hand he was growing increasingly worried about being washed off her altogether - and that was very bad indeed. He was walking uphill from the bow towards the fin, thinking how utterly impossible it would be to get anyone out through the escape hatches now - and that, under the circumstances, was the worst of all.

  Richard was completing the initial recce on the deck with Second Engineer Herbert, the officer who would have filled the third suit had Richard not done so earlier. Even securely tethered as he was, Richard needed a diving buddy. Never one to waste a voyage, Tom had ordered Sparks into the Zodiac with Richard and Herbert. Sparks was up in the fin now, trying to lower a hand-held transceiver on a line - effectively an old-fashioned telephone - into the command area. Beside the battery in the cockpit’s sole he had the actual radio equipment it was attached to. When the system was up and running, Mark Robertson would be back in contact with the world. For as long as they could keep Quebec afloat.

  In the meantime Richard was at work down here. Herbert - Richard had never discovered whether it was the engineer’s first name or his second - was the strong, silent type. Which suited Richard well enough. For once, he wanted to think matters through, not discuss them. This was no time to go trying to spread the responsibility around. It was on his word and his word alone that the big Zodiac would bring the chief across with the first set of Yokohama fenders.

  Each fender would come ready prepared for the job in hand. And that in itself would be the result of a great deal of work and commitment from the tug’s crew. For each one would come with a snap-on attachment ready to anchor it to the net on the sub as well as a series of attachments designed to allow a system of lines to be attached to it.

  If everything went according to Richard’s plan, each fender would float on the water - its indestructible air-filled buoyancy holding it aloft. It would be attached at the top to the netting as near to the surface as possible so that the drag would not pull it back out of place and dissipate its upward thrust when the tow began again. It would not be attached to the netting itself, but to a tight line mounted against the netting that would allow this anchor point to move up and down vertically. Or rather, if all went well, it would allow the fender to sit still while the net rose up beside it.

  Below each fender, a strong line would run through a pulley attached as low as possible on the net wrapped round the sub’s side. That line would run to a tow bar where it would be carefully attached according to some pretty complex calculations that the chief’s acolytes were crunching now. To maximize the effect that Richard hoped for, all the lines had to be cut to a precise length and attached to the bar in the correct way so that maximum power would be exerted when the lines were tightened against the buoyancy of the floating fenders. For the plan was that the tow bar with all the lines from the fenders would then be attached to a heavier line that ran back to Sissy’s central winch, and all the individual lines would be tightened from the tug when the time came.

  When the tow was under way again, the weight of the sub itself would still be carried by the loop of the main tow rope running through the guttering on the foredeck. The buoyancy of the Yokohama fenders at Quebec’s sides would be controlled by the lines running to that lateral tow bar which would sit in the water just ahead of her. And that bar, with the lines attached to it, could be pulled slowly towards Sissy, so shortening the distance between the floating fenders and the pulleys at the bottom of the submarine. That way, with careful and delicate winch work, and if those crucial calculations were correct, all the lines could be shortened together, little by little, as the tow proceeded.

  And, logically, the shortening of those lines would begin to pull the bottom of the sub up towards the Yokohama fenders on the surface, until the upward power of their irresistible combined buoyancy began to lift the bow itself back towards the surface. And when this happened, the fenders would effectively slide down the vertical lines secured to the sub’s side. And they would in theory do so until they met the lowest pulleys and the sub was sitting up above the surface of the sea like a bather sitting on an inflated rubber ring.

  If the weight of the water already aboard the sub would allow it. If they had sufficient fende
rs. If they could all be attached safely. If they could all be secured to the tow bar correctly. If the net held, when and if they were all in place according to Richard’s plan.

  That was the theory, at least. It wasn’t all that mind- numbingly brilliant when you looked at it in the cold light of day, thought Richard, a cloud of depression darkening his sunny disposition suddenly. Except that it really did seem like the only chance they had.

  But it didn’t actually begin to address in any kind of detail the extra challenges of starting the whole Heath Robinson contraption moving through the water towards Cape Farewell once again. These problems were probably the sorts of things that could be dealt with as they appeared - planned for or not - as they proceeded. On a ‘suck it and see’ basis. But if they spent much longer discussing and planning and contingency-predicting Quebec was going to slip away from them in any case.

  Which was why Richard was here in his diving suit with the taciturn Herbert standing listlessly watching him as he tried to turn an apparently good idea into a solid, practical fact.

  The good news was that they had plenty of fenders. One of the joys of the Yokohama inflatable fender system was its flexibility. Sissy normally ran with half a dozen inflated and in place, three on each side. Her work often occasioned the need for many more, however, and so she always carried spares. She carried many more than she usually needed because she carried them deflated, like party balloons in a packet. Richard could have three aside, or six, or nine if he really needed them - and if he and his team could control all that cordage and tension.

  Which Richard thought they might, his confidence beginning to return a little. Amongst all his other experiences he had done some ‘proper’ sailing. He had crewed the experimental Katapult series of multihulls that his company manufactured. He had even crewed one in the Fastnet Ocean Yacht Race only a year or two since. And, as if that wasn’t enough, he had been on the charity committee running a training ship for deprived youngsters, the four-masted square-rigged tall ship Goodman Richard. He had worked aboard her, running up the rigging side by side with the kids, for as long as his heart, lungs and legs could stand it. Ropes and rigging, therefore, held very few fears for him, no matter how many fenders were attached.