by Peter Tonkin
Revelation seemed to come to Mark and his lieutenant both at once. ‘Psycho Bob!’ breathed Pellier. He looked down at his empty hand almost in mime, thinking too obviously and articulating too slowly, like a bad actor. ‘That’s why Leif took…’
‘Thanks a bunch, Lieutenant,’ snarled Robin. ‘Well, we’ll just have to hope we can beat your left-handed Wyatt Earp to his gunfight at the OK Corral. At least we know exactly where we’re going.’
‘You see these people off, Luc,’ ordered Mark. ‘Then you abandon. I’ll go with Captain Mariner.’
‘No, Captain,’ Robin said decisively. ‘Three’s a crowd as it is. You wait here and keep things clear for us. Warn the navy boys up there that there might be a short wait. And if push comes to shove you get off yourself. We’ll be back with our unwanted guest as quickly as we can. And I meant what I said to Pellier - Hunter will be looking all over the place while we go straight in and out. Shouldn’t take more than five or so minutes. And Hunter will certainly come back as soon as he realizes his quarry has already gone. He’s out for revenge, not suicide. I’ll bet you can still see all of us up the ladder first. Captain’s privilege and all...’
‘Oh and Captain,’ added Li. ‘Is there another P226 handy? The tactical light could come in useful, if nothing else..
‘Do you have the key?’ asked Robin as the pair of them pounded along the corridor past the infirmary. She glanced at her watch. ‘We don’t want to be standing around when we actually get to the door...’
‘We’re almost there anyway,’ Li answered her. ‘Just round the comer here. And the key’s...’
Li was clearly about to tell her that the key was in the lock, thought Robin, suddenly ablaze with rage and frustration once again. Because the information was redundant. The door stood open now - with the key still there. And the tiny little store room behind it was empty - except for the blood splattered liberally all over the place.
The pair of them froze, side by side, staring into the red-smeared vacancy of the place. ‘How did he do that?’ screamed Robin. ‘How did Hunter find him?’
Li’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly. He was in more than enough trouble with this delicious woman already without admitting that they left Psycho Bob locked up in there, bound, in the dark, howling like a rabid wolf. But the situation saved him, for as he searched for an answer in the sudden echoing quiet after their wild rash and half-shouted conversation, the strangest noise filled the air all around them. It was a slow tearing sound, as though the whole of Quebec's long hull were suddenly made out of canvas and something was inexorably ripping it apart.
The deck on which they were standing - no, staggering - was abruptly at a decided angle. The downward slope steepened until, within a heartbeat, they were both sliding backwards down towards the galleys under the control room itself. The ripping sound stopped - or, if it did not then it was lost beneath the roaring.
‘Nets have torn. Sea’s coming in. We need to get to the conning tower then up into the emergency pod or we’ll go straight down with her,’ bellowed Robin in her quarterdeck voice. The one she had used to Chen only a quarter of an hour ago in almost exactly the same place. But it relieved none of the twisting anger and frustration now. And she did not see whether Li understood what she was saying or not. Because then the lights went out.
Li switched on the tactical light under his SIG-Sauer P226 and the pair of them pulled themselves to their feet, beginning the near-impossible task of getting themselves up into the command area. The time for anything other than immediate action was long past. There was hardly even time for the incandescent rage with which Robin considered the near certainty of her own death. And the destruction of the lives of everyone who loved her, parents, husband, children...
Li led to begin with because he had the light and the local knowledge. But Robin crowded him relentlessly for she was more decisive, quicker thinking and had experienced disaster not unlike this before. So simple odds dictated that she wasn’t likely to be so lucky twice.
They had ended up at the T-junction ending the passageway just forward of the galley. The wall they slid into and the deck down which they had slid were at a near-forty-degree angle. They walked with their shoulders sliding along the wall, therefore, until the opening of the companionway gaped before them. Water was pouring down this already, but with a little ingenuity they pulled themselves up out of the worst of it, and climbed upwards hanging from the banister. The movement of the air being pumped through the passageways by the relentless pressure of the water was almost at gale force now, and it made things nearly as difficult for them as the water itself. Certainly, the hissing roar that it made - combined with pockets of increasing pressure high enough to hurt their eardrums, made communication effectively impossible.
They fell out into the passage leading to the control area and would have slid helplessly down again - except for the fact that it was seemingly just about to flood full of water. Here Li froze, for all he could see below him was an apparently bottomless black well framed in the open doorway down into the command area. He flashed the torch under the SIG up the slope towards engineering. The passage was clear and seemingly full of air. He started to climb at once, but Robin caught him and pulled him back with all her wiry strength. ‘The pod!’ she screamed. ‘It’s our only hope!’ Side by side they slid down into the black maw of the flooding well beneath.
The surface was covered with debris but none of it proved heavy enough to hurt them when they tumbled into it. The lake of black water was deep enough to break their fall - deep enough indeed, to make them half swim, half flounder over to the mess at the bottom of the fin. And it was getting deeper every second, courtesy of the foaming fountain that stood immediately above the forward door whose gape now led down into the weapons-storage area where the forward escape hatch still stood securely open, letting in the ocean at an unimaginable rate. Here they were able to use the fallen column of the broken periscope to guide their feet past the whirling currents unleashed by the open hatch. Robin was even able to reach the handset on the spiral wire which still hung there, although it had been useless since well before Richard had slammed the upper hatchway.
The coil of cable was strong enough and secure enough to let Robin pull herself forward. As she moved, her fickle, adrenaline-fuelled mood began to change a little. Here was something practical that Richard had left her - and it was helping her towards a safe haven. Even the water seemed to be trying to help her now, for it had broken her fall if nothing else. On the other hand, Li’s tactical light flashed over her shoulder as he fought to follow her, sometimes showing her where she was going, more often disorientating her with unexpected shadows.
But then another, steady, light came on.
Robin looked up at it at once, simply stunned - and Li did the same, flashing the SIG’s light upward where he looked. And there, in the doorway above them was Hunter. And his presence shocked Robin out of her near-catatonic preoccupation. How Hunter remained there was a mystery, for he was holding his SIG in his left hand and waving the stump of his right while blood cascaded out of him almost as swiftly as water was foaming into the sub. Robin was so surprised that she lost her footing and slid back into the icy water. Only Richard’s trusty phone cord allowed her to keep her head above water. Whether Hunter really saw her she never knew. She only saw him because of Li’s light and that must have dazzled the man.
But Robin was of the same build as the hunter’s quarry, except for her chest. And even her riot of hair had been slicked back into a sleek skull-cap now. Hunter opened fire at her at once, believing she was Psycho Bob. The water little more than a metre in front of Robin exploded in a pattern of shots and she flinched, knowing that the trajectory would follow the light-beam shining through the heaving liquid on to her chest. On to her heart, in fact. But there was no impact. Hunter’s face screamed with mad frustration - though she heard nothing but the mayhem around her. He fired again. Even the gun was seemingly silent, though her
ears were really beginning to hurt her now. And breathing was hard because of the throbbing of the air. Again the water exploded as the pattern of bullets hit home little more than a metre away from her. But, magically, nothing happened. And it seemed to her at last that she understood. The water was her friend. The water might be consuming the submarine around her, but the water would not let her die. Certainly not while she held on to Richard’s blessed cable. She was so full of internally generated drugs now, so far up the natural high of action at the edge of death, that she never really considered the simple science that was normally so dear to her. The hydraulic requirement that water, which cannot be compressed, should react to the impact of the speeding bullet as though it were steel.
Then Robin did hear a shot. It seemed to come from some distance, but its effect was close enough. Hunter’s face slammed back as though someone had kicked him in the forehead. And indeed, when he looked down at her again, his eyes wide with simple amazement, he seemed to have developed quite a bruise on the white skin above the bridge of his nose. About two centimetres above where his eyebrows joined. He nodded at her wisely and folded forward, tumbling down into the room. The confusion of his landing swamped Li and came near to washing Robin away. She threw herself over to the fallen man, however, and tried to tug him also to safety. Li squeezed past her as she did so, with a shake of his head that she only saw in the submerged light of the two lost guns as it shone up from under the surface. There was just enough brightness for her to see that it wasn’t a braise on Hunter’s forehead and that she was wasting her time with him now as surely as if he had been Blackfeather, Monks, Gupta or Faure. She turned and followed Li to the last, faint hope of survival, pulling herself up along Richard’s twisting telephone line, madly convinced that the cable and the water were actually on her side.
The ladder up into the fin was almost impossible for Robin to climb now, for all her weight was thrown forward by the angle of the sinking submarine. The whole weight of the vessel - with the Atlantic up above it - seemed to press on her back and crash her breast down on to the constricting rungs. Worse than that, she was climbing away from the last lingering glimmer of light into a simply sepulchral darkness. Under any other circumstances, she would never have made it. But as she lingered there for a moment, agonized and terrified, feeling the water beginning to flood past beneath her into the last safe sanctuary aboard, she seemed to hear Richard calling his last wild promise down to her. And that fact made her so flaming angry that she simply had to go on no matter what.
I’ll never give up. I’ll never stop looking.’
She couldn’t have him wasting the rest of his life looking for a stupid bloody woman who couldn’t even climb a ladder in the dark, she thought grimly. She couldn’t have her father mourning a daughter dead before himself. She couldn’t let her children down. And so, screaming with rage and frustration, she heaved herself on upwards after all.
Until someone from the real world kicked her in the head.
They kicked her in the head so hard that her vision was dazzled with brightness. But then she realized that the brightness was real. And no sooner had that registered on her reeling mind than a face thrust down out of the light towards her. It was battered, cut and bleeding, blood-bedabbled. Eyes gaping. Screaming mouth literally foaming. Great white teeth outlined in red. It was there, scant inches from her own, just long enough for her to see that it was Psycho Bob.
To see and to scream in return, thrown nearly as deep into mad panic as he by simple shock. Then the face was gone, and in its place two bodies locked in mortal combat. This time she saw the foot coming and jerked back out of its way. Then she steeled herself and pulled herself up the last few centimetres into the strange-shaped little room that was hardly big enough to contain three bodies - and two of them fighting wildly. She reached back behind her, wrenching up Richard’s phone on its spiral of flex. Then she reached down for the last time and swung closed one of the only three hatches left aboard that would work now that the power was down.
No sooner had she done this than she was looking for some kind of a weapon. The brightness was coming from the open entrance to the emergency escape pod and she knew that there were useful items in here - compressed-air canisters at the least. One of those would make a very effective cosh. Under the circumstances, probably a fatal one. But she was really beginning to run out of patience here, she thought grimly. She reached in to heft out one of these, noting distantly that her hands were shaking as though she had advanced palsy. A sudden close encounter with Psycho Bob could do that to a girl, she decided. She had probably wet herself into the bargain but who would ever know?
She pulled out a canister and a whole mess of kit came with it - face mask, mouth-piece, regulator, Mae West, locator beacon, the lot. She was still dreamily trying to separate her murder weapon from the life-saving tackle when the need for it abruptly ceased. The two heads of the wildly wrestling men smacked together with a meaty sound loud enough to register on her cringing ears. Forehead to forehead they gave each other the Glasgow kiss goodnight and then, like two ball-bearings out of a Newton’s cradle, they bounced apart to hit the echoing metal behind them just as hard. The little room was, suddenly, full of peace and quiet. And utterly unconscious bodies.
Robin didn’t hesitate. She reached over for the first one.
It was Psycho Bob. His wiry frame was easy to move because his wrists were still firmly tied together - in spite of the work his teeth had done on the knots, the cords and a good deal of the flesh and bone nearby. That explained a great deal of the blood, she thought, as she dumped him in the pod and settled him comfortably, like a mother tucking a child into its cot. Then, a little less easily, she did the same for Li. She slapped them both quite hard - Li, of course, the hardest and for all sorts of reasons - but neither showed the faintest sign of coming to.
Robin hesitated, then. Of course she did. For there was only room for two aboard the pod. But the leader who came back down for a missing man, even though she knew nothing about him except that he was murderously, madly terrified, could not desert him now. And Li, secret lecher or not, had proved a good man in the end. A good man and a good friend. After all, had saved her life not once but twice. He too deserved the best chance she could give him. And she was awake and could fight for life. To leave either of the others would be simple murder.
And she simply could never live with that.
‘That’s it, then,’ she told them. ‘Time’s up, boys.’
And time really was up, too, for she could feel water deepening all around her and that meant that the hatches were beginning to fail again.
She swung the door into the escape pod shut on the two men whose insensible bodies filled it absolutely to capacity. She picked up the canister she had selected as her weapon of choice and strapped it on - she just had room to do so now that she was oh so alone in the tiny room. She settled the mask in place and adjusted the regulator. She had a final burst of inspiration and tugged the spiral phone-flex free. She lashed one end of it to the nearest handle on the capsule and the other to the webbing of her canister harness. She tied it to the back, still, miraculously, thinking ahead. Then she was ready. She hit the release button and she closed her eyes.
The top of the fin blew off in sections, controlling the influx of water. This was designed to safeguard the release-sequence of the pod but it did enough to protect the body of the woman clinging grimly to it into the bargain. The movement of the pod, which had done so much damage to the inside of the fin, also had one more hidden effect. It meant that the little missile, instead of being launched towards the surface like a rocket leaving Cape Canaveral, eased out almost delicately. So that it was not until it was well free of the sunken submarine and heading upwards past the tethered, falling Yokohama fenders with all the buoyant joy of a balloon escaping on a windy day, that she finally lost her grip.
And even then, the flex stayed true and all the knots held good, allowing her body to fold, face d
own, with her strong back heading for the surface and her tender bits all folded around the life-giving air bottle. Like a plant breaking through concrete.
So that when Quebec's escape pod burst through the stormy surface and settled, riding the swells like an indestructible cork, the body of the fainting woman bobbed up less than ten metres away from it, supported by the auto-inflated lifejacket. And both of their emergency locator beacons began to broadcast in unison.
Tom Hollander had met some focused people since he had assumed command of Sissy, but he had never met anyone even faintly like Richard Mariner. Long after everyone else had given up hope, Richard remained on the command bridge, looking out over the grave of the sunken submarine. And it was his absolute and unremitting faith that held the others there with him, like some kind of magic spell. Tom, at his shoulder, glaring out with him into the stormy murk. The helmsman holding the heaving vessel steady so that they could continue to search ahead. Alan, Sissy's first officer, and Bob Hudson, who was still aboard, both poring over the radar, side by side. Chief Jaeger down in engine control and Sparks in his eyrie up here.
It was Sparks who found her first. ‘I have a standard emergency beacon,’ he sang out all of a sudden. ‘No! Two standard emergency beacons ...’
‘They’re Quebec's, according to the automatic radar readout,’ confirmed Bob with simple wonder. ‘That’s the escape pod by the look of things. And one of the survival kits. Dead ahead and less than four kilometres distant! Jesus. Who’d have thought it was possible?’
And Tom Hollander’s first lieutenant jerked his tousled blond head sideways to shoot a glance across at the quiet man who stood towering beside Sissy's wiry captain. ‘He did,’ he answered quietly. ‘He knew it was possible.’
‘We will proceed to recover the beacons and whoever is with them, please Tom,’ said Richard Mariner quietly, his voice gravelly, rumbling with strain, fatigue - and hope. ‘And we go to the top of the green.’
