Sea Leopard

by Craig Thomas

  "It's a cottage, off the road between Ambleside and Coniston. Less than half an hour in the car. I'm ready to take you there now."

  The noise of the car startled him, appearing round a bend in the road that had masked its noise until it was almost upon them. His reaction was instinctive, but it revealed also the stretched state of his nerves. Before he assimilated the Renault and its trailing white-and-brown caravan and the two mild faces behind the windscreen, the pistol was in his hand, and beginning to move up and out into a straight-arm firing position. A moment later, it was behind his back again, being thrust back into the waistband of his corduroy trousers. But not before the girl, at least, had witnessed the tiny incident. She appeared terrified, hands picking around her face like pale bats.

  "Don't be bloody stupid," he told her, his hands shaking as he thrust them into his pockets, an inward voice cursing his jumpiness. "What do you think it is, a bloody game?"

  She hurried past him towards the car.

  * * *

  "What's the time?"

  "Eight-thirty."

  The blip's stopped moving and the signal strength is growing. Listen."

  "All right, turn it down. That means the car's stopped somewhere, less than a couple of miles up the road."

  "Great. Stop at the next phone box, and we can call Petrunin."

  "And sit around all day waiting for him to get out of Manchester, I suppose? Marvellous!"

  "Don't grumble. With a bit of luck we" ve got Hyde, the girl, and her father. Ah, there's a phone box. Pull off the road."

  * * *

  "Yes?" Ardenyev prevented an anticipatory grin from appearing on his lips, until Lev Balan nodded and rubbed his hand through his thick dark hair with tiredness and relief. "Great!" Ardenyev hugged Balan, laughing, feeling the man's helmet digging painfully into his ribs as Balan held it under his arm. "Great! We can go?"

  "Any time you like. My boys are knackered, by the way — not that it'll worry you." Balan's answering grin was like a weather crack opening in seamed grey rock. Only then did Ardenyev really look at him, and fully perceive the man's weariness.

  "Sorry. Tell them — tell them when we get back to Pechenga, we'll have the biggest piss-up they" ve ever seen. On me!"

  "You" ve done it now. You're on."

  "Tow lines, too?" Ardenyev asked eagerly, surprised at his own child-like enthusiasm. Again, Balan nodded, his cigarette now pressed between his lips, in the corner of his mouth. He looked dishevelled, unkempt, and rather disreputable. Insubordinate, too. "Great. What about buoyancy?"

  "We" ve got the bags on. Just sufficient to keep you at snorkel depth for towing. Any fine adjustments we'll make when you take her up. Then we'll do some more fine-tuning in the outer basin at Pechenga, before you dock. Assuming you can drive this bloody thing, of course!"

  Ardenyev indicated the skeleton crew of Soviet ratings in the control room. "All volunteers," he said wryly. "They can drive it, I'm quite sure."

  "Just in case, I'm on my way back outside — to watch the disaster from there. Good luck."

  "And you. See you in Pechenga. Take care."

  Balan walked wearily back through the aft section of the Proteus to the stern escape chamber. He strapped his auxiliary air tank to his back, requiring it until he could be recoupled to the hoses outside, and climbed through the lower hatch. He flooded the chamber, and opened the upper hatch, climbed the ladder and floated out into the darkness. His legs felt heavy, not merely because of his boots but because of the surpassing weariness that had invested itself in every part of his body. He waddled slowly and clumsily down the whale's back of the submarine, arms waving like some celluloid ghoul, or as if in imitation of one of the cosmonauts space-walking. He was bone-weary, he decided. Another half-hour's working and one of them might have made some small, fatal mistake. Any one of the cables, the jagged edges, the cutters could have injured or killed any of them.

  Another underwater cosmonaut, looking ridiculous in a way that never failed to amuse Balan, came towards him from the upright aircraft's tailplane of the rudder, almost staggering with the resistance of the heavy air hoses. The two men patted each other and clung together like the automatons on a musical box, then Balan turned his back and the hoses were fitted. A moment of breath-holding, then the rush of the air mixture, putting pressure on his ears and face, then the auxiliary tank was in his hands. He looked at it, grinned, and heaved it over the side of the submarine. It floated away down into the darkness.

  Balan inspected his work once more. The stern of the Proteus, in the hard light of the lamps, was a mess, but it was a mess of which he felt justifiably proud. The rudder and the hydroplanes had been patched with a skin of metal, or their plates twisted back into shape and form by use of the hammer, the rivet-gun, the welding and cutting torches. Scarred, twisted, cracked metal, blackened and buckled. The propeller had not been repaired, merely cleared of the entangling, choking seaweed of the steel cables from the MIRV torpedo. Balan thought the shaft might be out of true, but that was Pechenga's worry, not his. Then, masking the operation scars along the side of the hull, where the ballast tanks had been ruptured and the outer hull of the Proteus damaged, a lazily flapping, transparent growth idled in the currents moving across the ledge, like the attachment of a giant, translucent jellyfish to the submarine. Buoyancy bags, ready to be inflated when Ardenyev gave the order to blow tanks, they would serve in place of the unrepaired ballast tanks at the stern of the submarine, giving it a workable approximation to its normal buoyancy control.

  Balan was proud of what amounted to almost ten hours" work on the British submarine. The work had been as dispassionately carried out as always by himself and his team. Unlike Ardenyev, there was no pleasure at the meaning of the task and its completion. It was merely a job well done, a task completed successfully. The nature of the submarine, its nationality, had no meaning for Balan.

  He spoke into his headset. "Right, you lot, clear away. Our gallant, heroic captain is going to take this tub to the top, and I don't want anyone hurt in the process!"

  "I heard that," Ardenyev said in his ear, slightly more distant than the laughter that soughed in his helmet from some of his team. "I" ve been in contact with Kiev and Karpaty. Ready when you are."

  "Okay. I'm clearing the slaves from the hull now. I'll get back to you."

  Balan took hold of his air hoses in one hand, checking that they did not snag anywhere and trailed away across the ledge to the pumps and the generator. Then he turned clumsily but surely, and began climbing down the light steel ladder that leant against the port hydroplane, attached by small magnets. He lowered his air lines gingerly to one side of him as he climbed tiredly down to the surface of the ledge. The crewman who had attached his lines came after him. They were the last to descend, and when they stood together at the bottom of the ladder, Balan and the other diver hefted the ladder between them, and they trudged through the restless, distressed silt to where the arc lamps had been re-sited near the generators and the sleds on which they had brought down their equipment. The small group of diving-suited figures who composed his team was gathered like nervous spectators beneath the bloom of the lights. Balan joined them, dropping the ladder on to one of the sleds and securing it before he spoke again to Ardenyev.

  "Okay, chief— you can make your attempt on the world rate of ascent record now. We're safely out of the way!"

  "Thanks, Lev. Don't forget our piss-up in Pechenga — if you're not all too tired, that is!"

  There was a murmur of protest and abuse at the remark. Balan was almost prepared to admit his tiredness, but there were certain fictions that had to be preserved, whatever the cost; one of them being the indestructibility, the immortality of salvage men.

  "We won't forget. You just bring your wallet." The banter was required, expected, all of them were recruiting-poster figures, without separate identity, without reality. Living their own fictions; heroes. Silly, silly —

  "I will. Okay, here we go."
r />   Balan studied the submarine, partly in shadow now, the light of the arc lamps casting deep gloomy patches over their repair work, rendering it somehow shabby and inadequate. The Proteus looked half-built, half-destroyed. He did not attend to Ardenyev's orders, still coming through the headset, presumably for his benefit, until he heard "Blow tanks!" and the submarine — after a moment in which nothing seemed to happen — shifted under the discharge of sea water from her ballast tanks, and then the jellyfish bags began to bloom and roll and fold and inflate. Balan felt the new currents of the submarine's movement and the discharged water. They could feel the hull grinding against the ledge through their boots; the stern of the submarine seemed to be lifting slightly higher than the bow. It would need adjustment. The bow itself was in darkness, where the tow-lines were attached. They'd have to be inspected, too.

  Someone cheered in his headset, making him wince. One of the younger men, he supposed. There were sighs of pleasure and relief, though, like a persistent breeze; noises that were their right.

  The Proteus, still a little bow-heavy, drifted up and away from them, out of the boiling cloud of silt, becoming a great shadow overhead, just beyond the arc lamps, then a dimmer shape, then almost nothing as it ascended the twenty fathoms to the surface. The bags round its stern like nappies, he thought, Around its bum.

  "Come on, you lot. The volume on those bags is going to have to be changed for a starter! Don't waste time, get organised!"

  Theatrically, the arc lamps began flicking off, leaving them in a sudden darkness, where their helmet lamps and hand-lamps glowed like aquatic fireflies. Above them, as they began climbing on to their sleds, the Proteus stopped at snorkel depth and waited for them.

  * * *

  "Well done, Hyde— excellent work, excellent!" Aubrey effusive, his tiredness gone in a moment, if only briefly. Hyde had Quin, beyond all reasonable expectation, and at this critical moment. Their first real piece of luck— a change of luck? They needed it. "Well done. Bring him directly to London. You'd better let me arrange for a helicopter from the Cumbria force to pick you up. I want Quin here as soon as possible— What? What do you mean?"

  Hyde's voice had dropped to barely more than a whisper, something conspiratorial. Aubrey swivelled in his seat as if in response to its tone, turning his back on the underground room and its occupants. Pyott and Clark, attentive to his enthusiasm at the call that had been put through, now remained some yards away. Clark was making some point about the Proteus, his finger tracing across a large-scale cutaway plan of the submarine which Aubrey had had brought down from the second floor of the Admiralty.

  "Back-up's here," he heard Clark saying. "Right out of the way — " Then he was attending to Hyde's quiet voice.

  "He's in a bad way, Mr Aubrey. Out in the garden now, blowing his nose a lot and upsetting his daughter. Can you hear me all right?"

  "Yes, Hyde, yes," Aubrey replied impatiently. "What do you mean, a bad way?"

  "One of those who can't take isolation, even if he is a loner," Hyde replied flatly, without sympathy. "He's been up here for weeks, almost a week on his own. And when the two of them were here together, I reckon they just wore each other down with mutual nerves. Quin's a neurotic bloke, anyway."

  "Spare me the psychology, Hyde."

  "You have to understand him," Hyde said in exasperation. "He doesn't want to come back, he's scared stiff of his own shadow, he doesn't seem to care about the Proteus— all our fault, apparently."

  "That, at least, is true."

  "I" ve spent hours talking to him. I can't get through to him. He'll come back because he's scared not to, and because he thinks the opposition may have followed us here —"

  "Have they?"

  "No. But now we" ve found him, he thinks it'll all start up again, and he wants to hide. I don't want him scared off by a helicopter. He'll come back with me, or not at all."

  "What about the girl?"

  "She's the one who's just about persuaded him to trust me. I have to deliver him somewhere safe."

  "I didn't mean that. What will you do with her?"

  "She'll stay here. Either that, or I'll put her on a train."

  "I haven't time to waste, Hyde. Is he fit to work?"

  "No."

  "Then he'll have to work in an unfit state. Very well. Drive back to Manchester. You and he can fly down from there. I'll arrange it. You can hold his hand."

  "Yes, Mr Aubrey."

  "And— once again, well done. Keep him happy, promise him anything — but he must be here this evening, and ready to work!"

  Aubrey put down the receiver, and stood up, the purposefulness of his movements keeping doubt at bay. He had dozed lightly and fitfully on the narrow camp bed in the adjoining cupboard-like room without windows. The darkness had seemed close and foetid, and the light and noise under the door had drawn him back into the underground operations room. Cold water had restored a semblance of wakefulness, and Hyde's message had completed the work of reinvigoration.

  "Well?" Giles Pyott asked, turning from the chart pinned to a board, resting on an easel. "What news?"

  "Hyde has found Quin."

  Thank God! Where is he?"

  "Lake District — near Coniston Water, I gather."

  "He's been there all the time?"

  "Apparently. Rented a cottage through an agency."

  "Can he get here today?" Clark asked more purposefully.

  "He can. Hyde says that the man is in a state close to nervous exhaustion." Aubrey shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know how that complicates matters. Better have a doctor to look at him, I suppose. It really is too bad —"

  "Hell, can he work?

  "Whether or not, he will work." He indicated the drawing of the Proteus. "He has to do something about this, after all. Doesn't he?"

  It was almost three before Quin was finally ready to depart. His luggage, which consisted of one small suitcase and an overcoat, had been a means of delaying his departure. He had driven Hyde to the edge of rage again and again, and then capitulated, afraid of the Australian in a more immediate way than of the other figures and dangers that crowded his imagination. Aubrey had telephoned the cottage at noon, and had been frustrated and angered at the further delay. After that, Hyde had handled Quin like unstable explosive; cajolement and masked threat had eventually subdued him.

  He stood now at the door of the whitewashed cottage, hesitant while Hyde carried the suitcase to the TR7. Tricia Quin was at his side like a crutch, touching his arm, trying to smile him into complacency. In some obscure and unexpected way, she had strengthened during the day, adopting much of Hyde's attitude and many of his arguments. It was as if she had adopted the plight of the Proteus as a charitable cause worthy of contribution; or perhaps she sensed her father needed help, that the greatest danger to his health lay in his present solitary surroundings. Hyde wondered what Quin would have made of the Outback, even the dead centre of Australia. The unnerving silence was audible there. The Lake District hummed and buzzed with life, by comparison.

  He looked away from Quin and his daughter, towards the stretch of water that was The Tarns, and then at the road and the land falling away, down from Black Fell behind him through the firs towards Coniston Water two miles away. The land pressed in upon the cottage, and Hyde admitted a claustrophobic isolation so different from the Australian hinterland. Perhaps it wasn't surprising Quin couldn't take it after all, staying in that cottage and its garden for a week without seeing another soul after his daughter left. They'd quarrelled about her going to see her mother, apparently. That might have set him off, created his sense of abandonment amid danger.

  Hyde shrugged, and opened the boot. The weather was windier now, moving the low cloud but breaking it up, too. Gleams, fitful and unoptimistic, of blue sky; a hazy light through the clouds. It had, at least, stopped drizzling.

  The bullet whined away off the yellow boot before the noise of the gunshot reached him. He stared at his hand. The bullet had furrowed across the
back of it, exposing the flesh. An open-lipped graze which still had not begun to hurt, matching the furrowed scar on the boot lid. He looked stupidly around him.

  A second shot then, chipping pebble-dash from the wall of the cottage two feet or so from Quin's head. His frightened, agape features, the girl's quicker, more alert panic, her hands dragging at her father's arm, the shrouded hills, the distant dark trees — he took in each distinct impression in the moment that he heard the heavy report of the rifle, and then the pain in his hand began, prompting him like a signal. He began running for the door of the cottage.

  Part Three

  Plumber

  Chapter Ten: RESCUE?

  "What are they waiting for? Why don't they do something?" Quin's voice was plaintive, fearful; yet the words sounded strangely irritated, as if the men outside had disappointed him.

  "You" ve seen the bloody cowboy films, haven't you?" Hyde replied, almost snarling, weary of Quin's unabated nerves. "The lynch-mob always waits for dark." The man seemed to possess an infinite capacity to remain on edge, and his emotions rubbed against Hyde's attempts to evolve a solution to their situation like sandpaper against skin.

  "Why are they waiting?" Tricia Quin asked in studiedly calm tone, sitting near him on the floor beneath the cottage window.

  Hyde turned to her. "Petrunin can't be here yet."

  "Who?"

  "The bloke who chased us — the big cheese. He's got a face everyone will have a copy of. Must be hard to get out of Manchester. They'll be waiting for orders."

  "How many of them do you think there are?"

  Hyde watched Quin as he listened to the girl. The man was sitting in a slumped, self-pitying posture with his back against the wall, near the settee with its stained stretch covers. Hyde disliked Quin intensely. The man got on his nerves. He was a pain in the backside. He was going to be useless to Aubrey, even if he delivered him.