by Peter Tonkin
‘I don’t know. It’s hard to tell in all this. And Sissy’s pulling away quite fast now…’
He might have said more, but his words were lost in the strangest sound that Richard had ever heard. It was as though a massive mainsail on the four-master Goodman Richard had torn. Had ripped asunder quite slowly. So that individual threads and lines could be distinguished as they snapped apart. And infinitely more loudly than the destruction of such a sail might be. And the whole, terrifyingly, echoing from under water like the bells in a sunken cathedral.
‘Oh shit,’ said Bob. ‘That’s the net.’
‘Too right,’ agreed Richard. ‘I hope to God they’ve got everyone off, because…’
Even as he spoke, the submarine dived. One minute it was there, then it was gone. ‘Cut your cable,’ said Richard to Gus. ‘If you don’t she’ll pull you under.’
Gus hesitated, and Richard could see why he might, given the price of cable and the length of the stuff they had just fed out. But he knew what was happening now as though he could see it. And he knew what would happen in the immediate future with a kind of scientific prescience. Like a chemist observing a reaction. Like a physicist recording a well-tried experiment.
Quebec was on her way down, free of the nets at her forecastle. The added pressure of her dive would be popping open even the best secured of the bulkheads as the Atlantic relentlessly squashed the last of the air out of her.
Pike could see this too. ‘Cut your lines,’ he ordered Iroquois and Huron. ‘Or she’ll tear your winches out.’
As the submarine sank, the fenders would float and Sissy’s towrope, with the Yokohama line, would stay tangled in the netting between them. But at five metres down, or at ten or fifteen, the lines around the propeller would tighten. The fenders would vanish in a twinkling and if Sissy’s towlines were still in place, the power of the sub’s crash dive would pull her under the water as well.
‘Gus!’ he rasped again. ‘Cut the tow or she’ll pull us down!’
As though in slow motion, Gus turned at last to obey. And Richard watched him until a new distraction burst in upon him. The transceiver hissed into life. ‘Captain Mariner?’ came an unfamiliar voice, oddly deep and reassuring.
‘Mariner here.’
‘Captain. My name is Watson. Petty Officer First Class and Quebec’s medic. I have some bad news, I’m afraid.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m here at the bedside of Captain Robertson, who escaped from Quebec by the skin of his teeth and got pretty badly injured in the process. And he has asked me to tell you that Captain Robin Mariner and some others under her command went back below at the last moment, sir. He wanted me to tell you that they didn’t get off in time, sir. I’m afraid to say they’re still aboard Quebec.’
Richard said nothing. There was nothing left to say. He stood there, stunned, waiting for his mind to race into rescue mode as the three towlines fell away, severed at his command. But all he could think was that he had, quite literally, just cut off his last hope of pulling Robin back out of this.
And no sooner had the three lines settled into the roiling water than the fourteen Yokohama fenders between the razor- sharp bows of the destroyers jerked under the surface and out of sight as though they and the vessel they were tied to had never existed at all.
Twenty-Five
Farewell
Robin stood for a moment in the freezing downpour looking upward as Richard’s last words echoed down to her.
I’ll never give up. I’ll never stop looking.’
Then the upper hatch closed with a Bang! that sounded unsettlingly final. The dangling handset on the great long line of spiral cable gave a terminal twitch, but hung in place like a length of dead ivy. And the downpour stopped. The effect of the words on her was the opposite of what Richard intended. The simple phrases brought home to her the hopeless enormity of her situation. It was as though until that moment she had been living in some kind of a fantasy where everything was guaranteed to come to a happy ending. All of a sudden she felt helpless and utterly alone. As though he had known she was bound to die and this was his last farewell.
But Robin did not stand there in the icy puddle of despond for long. Ever someone who reacted to depression with action, she swung round to Mark, sparking with febrile energy. ‘Right! ’ she snapped, abruptly consumed with burning rage that she should have allowed herself to get into such a ridiculously life-threatening situation in the first place. ‘What’s next?’
Robin spent the next hour undoing some of her own handiwork and then finishing something that the heavily bandaged Pellier should have tackled in an ideal world. But this pitching, tossing, heaving and groaning little world was very far from ideal. She went through from the command area into the corridor outside the heads where Gupta’s body had been found. The doorway into the heads was open now, for the door itself was part of the system shoring up the bulkhead door into the flooded weapons-storage area beneath the forward escape hatch.
With Li and a couple of others that she had built into a useful little general-purpose team, Robin set about undoing some of this very precisely fashioned work. Her objective was simple. Instead of wedging the bulkhead door tightly closed and containing the flood in weapons storage, she wanted to wedge it thirty centimetres open. Then she wanted to hold it there while the water that stood between the crew and the forward escape hatch flooded through the open doorway into the heads and drained away down the plugholes in the shower stalls. The pumps were back to fifty per cent power now and Quebec was hardly running in secret mode, so everything from bilge to bog water was being pumped straight out into the Atlantic.
It was done within the hour. A very active hour, far too full of work to allow fear and depression to get a grip. Some fifty minutes later, Robin was able to remove the makeshift buttressing and step through the fully open door into a shallow lake contained only by the raised rim of the bulkhead behind her. What struck her most in the darkness of the cavern was the way the water was heaving. Perhaps it was the way the light was coming through the door behind her and reflecting off the restless wave-tops. Perhaps it was the fact that she had almost expected things to be calm and quiet in here - in spite of the increasingly extravagant motion of the hull. But it was as though she had stepped into a strangely contained maelstrom.
And the noise! The hull itself was groaning as it rolled, pitched and tossed. The tow-point up above was growling as the submarine heaved and yawed. The lines against the sides thrummed and quivered with tension, attaining deep bass notes like the strings in a wild orchestra. Each Yokohama fender had its own individual squeak, grumble and grunt. Every one seemed to reverberate like an ill-pitched drumskin under the solid booming batter of the wind, like the band of some devil’s army beating the retreat.
At first, Robin could not place the irregular but insistent tapping that seemed to echo up as though there were mermen beneath her feet trying to get up and at her. Then she remembered just how full of floating debris the flooded crews’ quarters downstairs were, even before the lights exploded under the pressure of the icy surge. But the water sounds washed over all. Slithering, rippling, tinkling, pattering, hissing, sloshing, slapping, thumping, battering, bellowing and roaring - coming from outside and inside, far and near, above and below.
Robin spent less than ten seconds in soaking up all these fearful impressions as she strode purposefully across to the ladder and swarmed swiftly up to the forward escape hatch. She reached up for the handle and tested it lingeringly, on the verge of giving in to that insane yet overwhelming desire to open it. Her preoccupation was broken almost at once, however, by a broad beam of brightness that struck up from shockingly close below her. ‘Everything OK up there, Captain?’ came Li’s voice from somewhere around her knees.
‘Fine,’ she answered briskly. ‘Now, what’s next?’
But as if in answer to her question, Quebec gave a kind of double heave, first one way and then the other, as though she had been s
lapped on both cheeks by a Frenchman challenging her to a duel. The groaning and grunting of the Yokohama fenders became at once an outraged squealing. And even as Robin and Li stood looking up at the tight- closed hatchway, the first footsteps splashed down on to the deck scant centimetres above their heads. ‘Sounds like the cavalry’s arrived,’ sang out Li cheerfully.
Then the fenders really started screaming.
‘That or the local pork butcher,’ said Robin, quietly ironic, climbing down. The surge of hope that went through her was tinged with an all too lively awareness that things could still go wrong. Wasn’t it in Jaws, she thought, that Quint had given that speech about going down with the Indianapolis and being attacked by sharks for days on end? About how the most terrifying time in the whole terrifying experience had been when rescue had arrived and he was just waiting to be lifted out of the water.
* * *
It was Mark’s turn to spark now, with a combination of relief and restless energy. Like everyone else aboard, the captain knew what must be going on. The moment that they had planned for, trained for - and prepared for ever more religiously as their hope ran out - was only mere minutes distant.
They were so close to safety now.
And, like Robin, he was all too well aware that so many things could still go wrong.
Mark caught Robin’s eye as she and her team stepped dripping into the command area. ‘Forward hatch?’ he asked.
‘Free and clear, Captain,’ she answered formally. He beamed at her, his face suddenly cherubic with relief and excitement.
They could all feel it now. The whole demeanour of Quebec's long teardrop hull had changed. Her increasingly wild movements were contained. Her oddly truncated pitching - down-strokes brought up short against the buoyancy of the fenders - was gone. Instead there was a settled, steady, upward thrusting. The decks were tilting slowly, but upward, ever upward. The inner workings of their ears, attuned so carefully to motion of all sorts, told them that they were rising - as though in a very slow lift car. And the strange relentless roaring from all around was the sound of ton after ton of water pouring off her decks and into the stormy enormity of the Atlantic.
Then they all heard the footsteps on the decks above. Footsteps that rang and echoed, their reverberation no longer dimmed by a metre or so of water. The decks at least must be above the surface now.
‘To your emergency positions,’ ordered Captain Robertson, his voice rasping with ill-controlled emotion. ‘Prepare to abandon ship!’
Robin’s position was with the wounded. She had taken on many tasks since she had been pulled aboard, but she had kept coming back to Doc Watson’s little kingdom. And she hurried back there now, fighting the urge simply to give up and get out. Like some medieval nun half in love with martyrdom. Like Joan of Arc. The occupants of the infirmary were mostly beyond rescue, she thought grimly. It was a brutal but practical requirement of the situation that Annie Blackfeather, CPO Monks, Lieutenant Gupta and what was left of poor Faure should all remain aboard until the vessel was absolutely safe. This was a fighting unit, after all. The wounded deserved selfless and heroic help. The dead were not worth dying for. There was no way that the lives of the living should be put at risk for their fallen comrades in situations as desperate as these.
Watson would be bringing Leif Hunter up, but Robin had no way of knowing who else might be hurt down there. And it was as well that she checked, for the restoration of light and power had by no means come free. Engineering Lieutenant Chen had received a range of burns to her hands and arms - then a badly twisted ankle. She could neither walk unaided nor support herself on crutches. Robin’s arrival was providential, therefore. She took the suffering woman round the waist and helped her out into the corridor in the wake of Watson who had the groggy Lieutenant Hunter draped over his shoulder. She noted the little icebox (which did not have ice in it anymore, but offered a chilled and sterile environment) that Watson had in his left fist. It contained Hunter’s cleanly severed hand, of course.
‘How did you do this?’ she bellowed to Dorothy Chen as they laboured along the corridor side by side. She needed her quarterdeck voice even though Chen was so close to her because the outraged squealing of the fenders seemed to be rising to new and overwhelming heights. And the simple volume seemed to alleviate the raging frustration that seemed still to be consuming her.
‘Twisted the ankle falling off a ladder,’ bawled the laconic engineer, then she had to pant for a moment to recover the energy expended on the volume of the words.
‘How did you come to fall off a ladder?’ persisted Robin as though she was somewhere in Austria calling from one alp to another.
‘Got a shock when the system I was isolating shorted out.’
‘What system was that?’
‘The one to the lights in the crews’ quarters. I understand things got a little damp in there.’
Robin recognized that she was by no means the only mistress of ironic understatement aboard. ‘You could say that. Yes,’ she said more quietly; but it was unlikely that Chen actually heard her.
The conversation, punctuated by pauses and grunts, was sufficient to take the women to the command area. Here Mark was overseeing the orderly evacuation of his command through into the flooded weapons-storage area and up out of the forward escape hatch. Chief La Barbe would be doing the same at the aft escape hatch, Robin knew, sending his teams up out of the motor room. She knew this because there were only navigating officers and crew down here.
Lieutenant Pellier was standing officiously beside Mark, looking like some sort of Sikh with the thickness of the bandage round his battered head. In the midst of all the calm and orderliness, he was armed with one of the SIG-Sauer handguns, as though he was really expecting riot and mutiny.
‘You four had better jump the queue,’ Mark said gruffly, able to speak almost at normal volume as the screaming of the fenders settled into a ululating whimper.
‘That’s not a queue,’ observed Robin drily, scanning the obedient line of well-disciplined and patient submariners. ‘There’s only a dozen or so. You should see the crowd at the Peacehaven Post Office every Saturday morning. Now that’s what I call a queue...’
But she followed Watson through into the weapons area as she gave her utterly impenetrable little speech. For the sake of Dorothy Chen at least, she eased to the head of the patient line. Ironically, she found herself just in front of Seaman Li, who was waiting hopefully at the foot of the ladder, looking up at the busy figures of the oh so welcome strangers going to and fro up there. Happy to go up ahead of her for the first time since she had come aboard.
‘There’s usually blood on the carpets by noon,’ she finished the bitter observation that no one else had any chance of understanding, placing her charge immediately behind Watson’s.
But either the phrase Robin spoke just behind him or the sight of the ladder immediately in front of him - or, perhaps, both - had an electrifying effect on Leif Hunter. Enough of an effect, certainly, to jerk him out of the near catatonia induced by Doc Watson’s painkillers. He froze in the automatic act of reaching for the nearest rung with both his hands. He stared at the bandaged stump of his right arm for an instant. He gave an inarticulate cry. He tore himself out of Watson’s grip and turned. ‘Where is he?' he demanded, fixing a disturbingly drug-widened and wild look on Robin.
It took Robin just an instant to realize who Hunter was talking about, though the stump he was waving in her face should have given her a clue. And it struck her with an almost physical shock that she didn’t actually know where he was at all. She had had neither the time nor the inclination to spare a thought for Psycho Bob since Li had hit him with the spanner and carried him away. And she realized with a frisson of genuine horror that she had come within a hair’s breadth of abandoning ship without him - and leaving him alone in there with only the corpses for company. Very likely all the company he would ever have, on the last long screaming ride down to the ocean floor that they all feared
so much - and he feared more than all the rest of them put together. And, oddly, that fact seemed to make her more bitterly angry than everything else put together.
Robin turned to Li, her gaze almost as intense as Hunter’s. ‘Where did you put Psycho Bob, Li?’ she demanded.
The seaman’s long, dark eyes became almost shifty, sliding away from the frowning intensity of her wide grey gaze. ‘We put him beyond the sick bay,’ he admitted. ‘There’s some really secure rooms there.’
That was enough for Hunter. He was off.
‘Far beyond?’ demanded Robin. ‘How far beyond?’
Li shrugged. His eyes wandered up and to his left. Dorothy Chen was halfway up the ladder now. Although her girlish hips were far slimmer than Robin’s, the seat of her overall was tight enough to outline each seam and every stitch of the underwear beneath it in almost shocking detail. Then Watson was there behind her, taking her weight with an arm round her waist and preserving her dignity. Li looked back at Robin. Saw in her face the beginnings of realization; almost of accusation.
‘Show me,’ she said. And it was an order, direct and unmistakable. Spoken by someone who had commanded supertankers. Given by a woman to a man she had discovered in flagrante delicto - or obviously experiencing illicit pleasure - as the law will have it.
And he obeyed.
Robin and Li pounded into the command area almost side by side. ‘What is going on?’ demanded Mark. ‘First Hunter Robin paused, her rage subsumed for a second, by suspicion. Pellier had moved. He was right over by the door leading back towards engineering, as though he had followed Hunter there on his mad dash through. Her eye fell on the lieutenant’s hand. It no longer held the big SIG-Sauer. ‘We’ve left someone aboard, Captain,’ she said, shortly.
