Sea Leopard

by Craig Thomas

  "And tomorrow never comes," Clark remarked, "by tomorrow, they may have a fix on Proteus, and then you'll find — what'll you find?" He looked at Aubrey. Clark in shirtsleeves and without his tie seemed more American; less sophisticated, stronger. Perhaps a hard-boiled newspaper editor, or a policeman. Yes, without the formality imposed by his suit, he looked more like Patrick Hyde; of the same type or species.

  "What will we find, Ethan?"

  "My guess is a salvage operation — if they can pinpoint the sub."

  "You're serious, aren't you?" Clark nodded. "Why so certain?"

  There's no other way. They have to salvage Proteus if they're to save “Leopard”. At least, I think so."

  "And Lloyd may not destroy “Leopard” now, if we order him to do so — I agree with Giles there. Then we are on the horns of a dilemma, gentlemen."

  "Kenneth, we're left relying on “Leopard” itself. At the moment it protects Proteus and itself. It must continue to do so for at least another twenty-four hours."

  "The rescue ship from Tromsø will take longer than that," Aubrey remarked gloomily, staring at his liver-spotted hand caressing the edge of the commodore's desk. "All we will have in the area tomorrow is one American submarine and a Norwegian “Oslo”-class frigate. The day after, more, I agree. But, too late. We have to have surface ships engaged in any rescue operation, a counter to the Soviet concentration. They will, hopefully, go away when we arrive. I did not want to escalate our presence, but there is no alternative. We have nothing there now, that is our problem." His hand slapped the wood of the desk.

  "Sorry to be the bad-news boy," Clark said, "but you're ignoring the latest movements of the rescue ship the Soviets have on-station, and those helicopters that arrived last night."

  "Yes?" Aubrey snapped impatiently. Then: "Sorry — go on.

  "The boarding party?" Pyott queried, and Clark nodded. "Damnation! What do we do! Tell me that. What do we do?"

  "Send Eastoe down on the deck to look over the rescue ship and the immediate area — and continue our orisons, I should think," Pyott drawled. Aubrey looked venomously at him, and Pyott blushed slightly with the memory of his culpability. "Sorry," he said softly.

  "It's escaping from us," Aubrey sighed. "I feel it. It is too far ahead of us to be overtaken."

  * * *

  Lloyd paused for a moment at the door of the computer room, aft of the control room. Don Hayter's summons — a rating tapping his captain on the arm, beckoning him theatrically — had been peremptory and urgent, and Lloyd's sense of bodily temperature had leapt. Yet he could not bring himself to move through the door, not for a moment. The rating's face had been worried, pale and disturbed in the red lighting. It had seemed, immediately and without embroidery by Lloyd's jumpy imagination, to indicate disaster. Then Hayter saw him, and urgently waved him in. Hayter was bent over one of the “Leopard” screens. The noise he was making tapping a pencil against his teeth shocked Lloyd.

  Hayter grabbed Lloyd's arm as he reached the panel, and tapped at the screen with the pencil, underlining the computer-print words the screen displayed. He tapped again and again at one phrase.

  FAULT NOT IDENTIFIED.

  Then he looked up at Lloyd, who concentrated on reading the rest of the computer's assessment of the situation.

  "Leopard" had developed a fault.

  "What is it?" Lloyd asked, then repeated his question in a whisper that was not clogged with phlegm. "What is it?"

  Hayter shrugged. "It's been happening for four minutes now. We" ve checked— " he nodded at the rating who had brought Lloyd to the computer room, and the sublieutenant who was Hayter's second-in-command, " — everything, so has the computer."

  "What— what is the fault doing? What effect is it having?" Lloyd almost wanted to smile at the exaggerated seriousness of Hayter's expression. Lugubrious.

  "It's blinking. On, off, on, off. Sometimes, they can see us, sometimes they can't."

  “What?

  "Whatever the malfunction is, it's intermittent."

  "And now— at this moment?"

  "Invisible. A moment before you came in, it came back on, full strength, fully operational. Before that, for eleven seconds, nothing, nothing at all."

  "Christ."

  The sub-lieutenant, Lloyd now perceived, was removing the front panel of the main container housing the "Leopard" equipment, a metal box little bigger or taller than a large filing cabinet.

  "We're going to have to do a manual, if the computer can't tell us."

  "How long?"

  "No idea."

  "Could it have happened when we were attacked — the damage to the prop and hydroplanes?"

  "Possible. The sensors and dampers at the stern could have been damaged. If they have been — and the fault's outside — then we can't do a bloody thing down here without divers."

  "Complete failure?" Hayter nodded. "What about the back-up system?"

  Hayter's face became more lugubrious than ever; not a painted clown's downturned mouth but a human expression of concern and fear. His fingers played over the keyboard beneath the display screen, and the message vanished. Then he typed in a new set of instructions, and the response from the computer was almost instantaneous.

  MALFUNCTIONAL.

  Hayter opened his palms in a gesture of helplessness.

  "The back-up system won't cut in."

  "It doesn't work at all?"

  "At the last check, it worked. Now, it doesn't. I don't understand it. Immediately after the attack, we checked everything through on the computer. It registered no malfunction in either the main or back-up systems. Then we start winking at the Russians, and the computer doesn't know why. At the same moment, the back-up system is u/s. We'll do our best — that's all I can tell you."

  The message vanished from the screen before Lloyd had finished reading it. More words came spilling across the screen, line after line in block letters.

  MALFUNCTION IN

  MAIN SYSTEM UNIDENTIFIED

  "Is it —?"

  Hayter nodded. "It's gone again. “Leopard” isn't working. Anyone who cares to look in our direction can see a British submarine lying on her belly."

  Lloyd looked at his watch. The second hand crept across the face like a red spider's leg, ugly, jerking, uncoordinated. Eight, nine, ten, eleven —

  "Longer this time," Hayter murmured.

  Twelve, thirteen, fourteen —

  "Come on, come on, — " Lloyd heard himself saying a long way below his mind. "Come on — "

  Sixteen, seventeen —

  There were four submarines within a radius of six miles of the Proteus. He had been studying the sonars just before he was summoned by Hayter.

  Twenty-one, two, three, twenty-four, almost half a minute —

  "I think she's gone," Hayter whispered, flicking switches on the console in an almost demented fashion. The movements of his hands appeared all the more frenzied because of the expressionless lines and planes in which his face seemed to have coalesced. The message on the screen blinked out, then returned with a status report on the backup system.

  MALFUNCTION.

  Thirty-two, three, four —

  Lloyd could not remove his gaze from the second hand of his watch. Hayter's hands still played across the banks of switches as he attempted to coax life back into "Leopard" or to rouse its back-up system. Complete failure.

  MALFUNCTION.

  The word seemed to wink on and off the screen at a touch of a key or switch; as if the whole system had failed in each of its thousands of parts and circuits and microprocessors and transistors and coils.

  Forty-two. Lloyd knew he ought to be in the control room, knew that they would be picking up changes of course and bearing, changes of speed. Forty-four.

  The word vanished from the screen. A status report replaced it. Hayter sighed, perspiration standing out on his forehead, which he wiped with the back of his hand. He grinned shakily.

  "We're back in business — for the t
ime being," he said.

  "Everything's working?"

  "As normal. The main system. Back-up's still dead."

  "Get working on the back-up system." Then Lloyd almost ran from the room, down the companion-way to the control room, anticipating what he would see on the sonar screens.

  * * *

  "Skipper, I'm getting a reading from one of our sonar buoys — it's Proteus.“

  "What? Bob, are you certain?"

  "Skipper — I picked up a trace. It disappeared after about ten seconds, so I assumed it was a shoal of fish or something of the sort, or a false reading. Then a couple of minutes later, the same reading on the same bearing, for almost a minute. Now it's gone again."

  "What's happening?"

  "Could be a malfunction in their equipment?"

  "I don't know. Have you got a fix on her position?"

  "Not the first time. The second time she came in on two of the buoys. Yes, I" ve got her."

  "Well done. Where is she?"

  "What looks like a ledge. Shall I bring the chart through?"

  "No. Not until I" ve decided what message to send to MoD. Have the Russians picked her up?"

  "I don't know. Perhaps not —"

  "You hope. Keep looking. The moment anything moves closer to Proteus's position, let me know. You're sure it's her?"

  "What else could it be? I don't understand “Leopard”, even after the briefing, but I know what it's supposed to do. We couldn't see her, now we can. Correction, we did see her."

  "Okay, Okay, I believe you. Pass her position to John and tell him to stand by to transmit a Flash signal to Aubrey."

  "I'm already standing by, skipper."

  "Good. We'll take her down for a look-see first."

  Eastoe turned to his co-pilot, and nodded. The cloud cover beneath the nose and the wings of the Nimrod gleamed with sunlight, innocent; yet it extended downwards almost to sea level and it was moved by gale-force winds. Their calm was illusory, achieved only by altitude.

  "Give me a bearing on the carrier," Eastoe requested into his microphone. Almost immediately, the navigator supplied the coordinates and the course change that would take them over the Kiev.

  Eastoe dipped the Nimrod's nose towards the clouds. Sunlight, the dense, smoothed roof of the cloud-forest, then a creeping greyness, the first rags and twigs of mist, the darkening of the flightdeck, then the cloud rushing past, swallowing them as they moved into it. The co-pilot switched on the wipers, and water streamed away from their furious beat. Eastoe felt the tremor of the winds through the control column as he watched the altimeter unwind. Down through twenty thousand feet, nineteen, eighteen.

  Turbulence buffeted the Nimrod as the aircraft dropped towards the sea. Eastoe sensed for a brief moment the fragility of the airframe around him, imagined the last moments of the Nimrod that had crashed on take-off, remembered the pilot and the crew who had died, and then they broke through the lowest fringes of the cloud, into squalling rain and a headwind. He levelled the Nimrod no more than a hundred and fifty feet above the whitecapped water. The carrier was a fuzzy, bulky shape through the rain, less than a mile ahead of them.

  In his headphones, the senior Nav/Attack officer began calling out the readings from his screens and sensors, describing the movements of the surface and sub-surface vessels during the time they were descending. The carrier seemed to leap towards them like a huge stone across the stormy water.

  The subs were altering, or had altered, course, and all were closing on the same bearing. The carrier appeared to be lumbering on to a new course. All units closing on the fixed position of the Proteus. They'd found her. Maybe foxed for the moment, but they had her now.

  Eastoe throttled back the four Rolls-Royce engines, and the Nimrod appeared merely to float above the deck of the Kiev. No activity, launches stowed on both the port and starboard boat-decks — the co-pilot calling out confirmation of what Eastoe had seen for himself— and then the rescue ship was ahead as the Kiev passed out of sight beneath them. The Karpaty was making slow headway and, as Bob called out her course, Eastoe realised that the rescue ship was on a heading that would take her over the Proteus.

  He realised, too, the significance of the rescue ship. He, throttled back once more, and they drifted towards the Karpaty.

  "See it?" he said.

  "Yes, skipper. They're trying to launch a boat from the starboard side, looks like."

  The Nimrod crept towards the rescue ship. Tiny figures, moving with what seemed hopeless and defeated slowness around the starboard launch on its davits. Eastoe strained forward in his seat. The co-pilot increased the beat of the wipers. Shiny, oil-skinned crewmen — no, not ail of them, surely?

  "What in hell —?"

  "Divers."

  "Divers! Shit and hell!"

  The Nimrod floated over the dipping bow of the Karpaty. A chaos of water flung up over her deck, the surge of an animal as the wave released her into, the next trough. Men in shiny, tight-fitting suits, face-masked, oxygen cylinders on their backs. They were pinpricks, tiny matchstick men, but they were divers, climbing into the launch.

  "How far is she from the Proteus?"

  "Less than a mile," he heard the navigator reply as the nose of the aircraft blotted out the scene directly below them.

  "I'm going round for another look and some more pictures," Eastoe said, "and then we'd better send Aubrey the bad news — they're going down to the Proteus, for God's sake!"

  Chapter Eight: SEIZURE

  Aubrey stared at the note he had scribbled, the small, neat handwriting suddenly expressive of powerlessness, and realised that they had lost. "Leopard" had malfunctioned, betraying the position of the Proteus to the Russian submarines in the immediate area. The rescue ship Karpaty was preparing to launch a small boat on which were a team of divers. They had received photographic proof of that over the wireprint. Opposite his note, Clark had scrawled in his strangely confident, large hand RB Spec Ops Unit — Ardenyev. Aubrey presumed it was no more than an informed guess, and it had no significance. The identity of the divers did not matter, only that they existed and were less than a mile from the reported position of the British submarine.

  It was dark outside now. Perhaps not quite. A drizzling, gusty dusk. Aubrey had taken a short afternoon walk in St James's Park, but he had been unable to shake off the claustrophobic, tense gravity of the underground room beneath the Admiralty, and had soon returned to it.

  Lost. Found by others. The Russians evidently intended that Proteus should be salvaged, perhaps even boarded, and the "Leopard" equipment inspected before it was presumably returned, together with the submarine and her crew. An accident, not quite an international incident, no real cause for alarm, no ultimate harm done. He could hear the platitudes unroll in the days ahead, perceive the diplomatic games that would be played. He knew the Russians would take Proteus to one of their closest ports — Pechenga, Poliarnyi, even Murmansk — and there they would effect apologetic repairs, even allowing the American consul from Leningrad or a nominated member of the British embassy staff from Moscow to talk to the crew, make the noises of protest, send their London ambassador to call on the foreign secretary and the PM, heap assurance upon assurance that it was an accident, that all would be well, that this indicated the willingness for peace of the Soviet Union — look, we are even repairing your submarine, send experts to inspect our work, why are you so suspicious, so belligerent, you will have your submarine back as good as new —

  The diplomatic support for the operation sprang fully-envisaged into Aubrey's awareness, like a childhood or youthful moment of extreme humiliation that haunted him still in old age. It did not matter that it was all a blatant lie; it would work. It would give them enough time to photograph, X-ray, dismantle "Leopard", and learn its secrets.

  And, at the same time, they might obtain its designer, Quin, who would help them to build more. In the moment of the loss of "Leopard", Aubrey feared Hyde's failure and the girl's capture.


  "What do we do, Kenneth?" Pyott asked at his shoulder. The channel to Eastoe in the Nimrod was still open, the tapes waiting for his orders. Aubrey waved a hand feebly, and the operator cut the communications link.

  Aubrey looked up into Pyott's face, turning slightly in his chair. "I do not know, Giles — I really do not know."

  "You have to order Lloyd to destroy “Leopard” —I mean literally smash it and grind the pieces into powder," Ethan Clark remarked, his face pale and determined. "It's the only way. The guy must know by now that's what they're after, and how close they are to getting it. He has to get rid of “Leopard”."

  "Just like that? I seem to remember the Pueblo made a monumental cock-up of a similar procedure some years ago," Pyott observed haughtily. "It won't be easy. “Leopard” isn't in a throwaway wrapper, Clark."

  "You British," Clark sneered. "Man, you're so good at inertia, you make me sick."

  "There has to be something else we can do — besides which, “Leopard” is working again."

  "For the moment."

  "Gentlemen," Aubrey said heavily, wearily, "let's not squabble amongst ourselves. Ethan, is there anything else we can do?"

  "You're not able to rescue Proteus, Mr Aubrey."

  "Then perhaps we should warn her what to expect."

  Aubrey got up from the chair at the communications console, and crossed the room to the map-board. He seemed, even to himself, to be shrunken and purposeless beneath it. Proteus — white light — had been repositioned, closer inshore, and the updated courses and positions of the carrier, the rescue ship, the destroyers and the submarines created a dense mass of light around one thin neck of the Norwegian coast. The sight depressed Aubrey, even as it galvanised him to an action of desperation. He had lost the game, therefore he must damage and make worthless the prize.

  "Encode the following," he called across the room, "and transmit it to Eastoe at once, for relay to Proteus. Mission aborted, destroy, repeat destroy “Leopard”. Priority most absolute. Append my signature."