Sea Leopard

by Craig Thomas

  "You can't — " the girl began.

  "I'm bored with sitting on my bum," he said. "Besides, when the shooting starts, someone else always gets hurt. It's in the rules. Petrunin knows I won't risk your father or you, and I know I won't. Shitty, but true. Now, we have no chance. Later, who knows?" He stood up to one side of the window. It was open at the top, and he raised his voice to a shout. "All right, Trotsky — we're coming out. We" ve both seen this bloody film before!"

  "No cavalry, I'm afraid. Only Apaches," Petrunin called back through the loud-hailer. Hyde tossed his head.

  "I'll open the door and chuck my gun out. Then Mr Quin will come out first."

  "Very well. Please do not delay."

  Quin was sitting upright now, and seemed to have sidled towards one corner of the room. His white, featureless face seemed to accuse Hyde in the room's dusk. Hyde bumped the edge of the table as he moved towards him.

  "No —" Quin said feebly, putting his hands up in front of him, warding off Hyde like an evil presence.

  "Sorry, mate. We don't have any choice. They're not going to do you any harm now, are they?" He reached down and pulled Quin roughly to his feet, embracing him as the man struggled halfheartedly. There was a mutuality of hatred and blame between them. Hyde sensed it in the tremble of Quin's arms.

  He studied Quin's face. The man appeared as if he had been confined in some prison, with no hope of release or escape, for a long time. The prison had been his own mind, of his own making. No, Hyde corrected himself. The KGB had done that, created the stifling sense of the trap closing on him. And perhaps the DS, and even SIS and himself, should have been quicker, smarter, more thorough.

  "We may have a chance if we go out now," he said in a soothing, allaying voice. "In here, we have none. You get hurt, Tricia gets hurt. I'm sorry, mate, but it's our only chance."

  "I don't want to —!" Quin almost wailed. "They'll take me with them. It's not you they want, it's me!"

  "I know that. For God's sake, I'm trying to help you!"

  "I can't spend the rest of my life in Russia, heaven help me!"

  "Better Red than dead," Hyde offered, his shallow sympathy exhausted. Quin's fear and reluctance were now no more than irritants, slowing reaction, muddying thought. Quin would just have to accept his situation. Hyde no longer had time or energy to expend on his psychological condition.

  "Now, as the patient said to the dentist as he grabbed his balls, “we're not going to hurt each other, are we?” Just wait until I give you the word, then walk slowly out of the door. Okay?" Quin slumped in resignation against Hyde. Hyde's mockery was expressed, incongruously, in a comforting tone of voice. "A nice little plane ride across the Channel, then another ride to Moscow. You might even like it there. They'll like you, anyway." He gripped Quin's arms as the man's body protested at his envisaged future. "Nothing bad's going to happen. Just do as they say."

  He took Quin by one arm to the door, and opened it, keeping the scientist out of sight. He threw his gun in a high arc towards the knoll, away from his car so that it was easily visible.

  "Excellent!" Petrunin confirmed. "No other little toys?"

  "I left my bloody death-ray in the car!"

  "Very well. Come out, one at a time. Mr Quin to lead."

  "Right, off you go. Just walk straight towards the knoll, don't deviate, and don't run."

  Quin moaned. Immediately, the girl was at his side, holding his other arm. She shouted through the door.

  "My father's not well. We're coming out together." Without hesitation, she guided Quin through the open door. Hyde stood framed in the doorway for a moment, then he moved out into the dusk, his feet crunching on the gravel in front of the cottage. He raised his arms in the air, studying the knoll, waiting for the first head to appear. Unreality seized him, and he wanted to laugh. Captured by the KGB, in England! It was laughable, a joke for Queen Anne's Gate for years to come. Perhaps they'd use his urn on Aubrey's mantelpiece to knock their pipes out while they giggled at the story of his demise. As Aubrey would have said, It really was too bad—

  Petrunin came down the slope of the grassy knoll towards them, a second man following him, carrying a rifle. Quin and Tricia stopped, awaiting him. A third man moved out of the shadow beneath a stand of firs towards Hyde, his rifle bearing on its target. Hyde felt weak, and sick. Petrunin stopped to examine Quin as carefully and as unemotionally as he might have done a consignment that had been delivered to his door. He ignored the girl. The third man had reached Hyde, studied him warily, and then moved in to touch-search him. When he had finished, he spoke to Petrunin.

  "He's clean."

  "Good." Petrunin approached Hyde. He was smiling with confidence and success. He was a bigger, taller man than the Australian, and this increased his confidence almost to a swagger. He paused before Hyde, hands on hips, appraising him.

  "I know I don't look like much," Hyde offered, "but it's the public spending cuts. They're going in for smaller spies."

  "Aubrey's man, of course? Mm, I don't think you are the cheerful colonial idiot you pretend. Not that it matters. Thank you for leading us to Mr Quin."

  "Not my pleasure."

  "Quite. Very well," he said, addressing his two companions, "let us not waste time." He looked at Hyde. "Just a wound, I think," he said with surgical precision and lack of concern. This incident is already too — significant. We mustn't create an international event from it." He stepped aside. "We don't want him going anywhere. Both legs, I think."

  "No —!" the girl shouted, but one of the riflemen knocked her down, swiping the barrel of his gun sideways into her ribs. Hyde remained quite still, tensing himself to accept the pain. He lowered his hands to his sides. The marksman stepped forward — the third man had moved away, Petrunin was still appraising him with an intent curiosity — and raised the gun to his shoulder. Hyde felt the tremble begin in his left leg, and could not control it. Knee, shin, thigh, calf, foot, ankle —

  His imagination made the skin on his legs crawl. Hyde tried to concentrate on only one of his legs, letting awareness of the other one become numb. The blood rushed in his ears like a howl of protest.

  Then the helicopter. Loud enough at once in the silence to be apparent even to Hyde. Petrunin glanced up at the cool evening sky, then his head whipped round as he located the source of the noise. Red lights beneath a shadowy belly, the racket of the rotors yelling down into the hollow in which the cottage lay.

  Hyde's thoughts came out of shock, out of their mesmerised concentration on his still quivering left leg, and prompted him towards Quin and the girl, who were huddled together. The girl was on her feet but almost doubled over with pain and fright. Then a pain wracked him, and he fell to his knees, groaning as if he had been shot. His whole body was trembling, and he could not move, merely grip his stomach and retch drily again and again.

  The noise of the helicopter beat down on him, and he heard a voice through a loud-hailer, yelling the same kind of authoritative noises over and over. The helicopter's down-draught distressed his hair, inflated his windcheater, but he could not straighten up. He waited for the sound of firing, but there was none.

  Eventually, he rolled over on to his side. He saw scattering figures running, and Quin and his daughter clinging together. Then he heard shots. One of the marksmen — he saw with a fierce delight that it was the one who had been ordered to maim him — crumpled near Quin and Tricia. Other figures moved into, merged with, the trees, and were gone. The police helicopter settled heavily on to the grass below the knoll, comfortingly large, noisily business-like. It was over.

  The girl was kneeling over him, one hand pressed against her ribs.

  "All right?"

  He nodded. "Just scared stiff. You?"

  "Bruised."

  "How's your father?"

  "Mr Hyde?" A shadow loomed over them. A policeman in denims and a combat jacket.

  "Yes."

  "Are you hurt?"

  "Only my manly pride." Hyde stre
tched and sat up. He rubbed his hand almost without thinking through the girl's hair. She did not seem to resent his touch.

  "We're to get you on a plane at Manchester as soon as we can," the police officer informed him.

  "Right. What about my car?"

  "One of my men will drive it down."

  "I want to see my mother," Tricia Quin announced.

  "Your father's to go straight to London, Miss. Mr Aubrey's instructions," he added by way of explanation to Hyde. "He'll want to see you, no doubt, at the same time."

  "Get us to Manchester," Hyde replied. "We'll see, then."

  "I'm not going to London."

  "Okay, okay," Hyde conceded. "I'll take you to see Mummy as soon as we" ve got your dear old dad on the plane. All right?" The girl nodded firmly. "Christ, why you spend your time worrying so much about them, I don't know!" He looked up at the police officer. "Caught "em?"

  "I doubt it. We haven't the time to waste. Leave that up to the Cumbria constabulary. Come on — let's get moving."

  Hyde stood up. The girl immediately held his arm to steady him, unnecessarily.

  "You're all bloody solicitation, Tricia," Hyde observed. "No wonder you get hurt all the time. People aren't worth it." She saw that he was looking at her father as he spoke, and a wince of pain crossed her face. Misinterpreting the expression, he added: "Your ribs okay?"

  "Yes!" she snapped, and walked away from him. Hyde watched her go, and shrugged. Relief returned in a rush of emotions, and he exhaled noisily. It was over. The cavalry had arrived, with a loudhailer instead of a bugle. But they had arrived —

  * * *

  They allowed Quin five hours" sleep, under light sedation, before Aubrey had him woken. The doctor had examined him as soon as he had arrived at the Admiralty, and had pronounced him unfit for strain or effort, mental or physical. Aubrey had thanked the doctor and dismissed him. He pondered whether Quin should be prescribed stimulants, and then reluctantly decided against this course. Aubrey suspected drugs, except in their interrogational usefulness. He wanted Quin completely and reliably rational. Quin was the lynchpin of the scheme that was increasingly obsessing him, it had prevented him from taking any sleep himself, it had made him impatient of Quin's rest and impatient during his first conversation with the man, so much so that Ethan Clark had intruded upon their conversation and eventually commandeered it. Aubrey, seething at Quin's weariness, his retreat from reality, his reluctance to consider the plight of his own invention, had left the Admiralty to walk for half an hour on Horse Guards, but the military statues and the mobility of the buildings had made him flee to the more agreeable atmosphere of St James's Park.

  The park, across which people hurried at the beginning of a bright, windy day, offered him little solace. From the bridge, he could see, in an almost gilded white clarity, Buckingham Palace in one direction, Whitehall in the other. If he followed the path from the bridge, it would bring him to Birdcage Walk and Queen Anne's Gate and his own office. Shelley would bring him coffee and soothing information of other parts of the world; not Pechenga, not the place on that blown-up aerial photograph propped on an easel. The parade of government officials and office workers passing him composed a race to which he did not belong. His office was barred to him until this business was resolved.

  He skirted the lake, back towards Whitehall. The sun was gilding the roofs, providing an unremarked beauty. Aubrey was profoundly doubtful whether Quin would be of the least use to them. He seemed a poor specimen, physically, emotionally. He certainly seemed inadequate to the role in which Aubrey wished to cast him.

  One man, who is a grocer. A Harrier jet. The AWACS Nimrod at Farnborough which was used to give Proteus her sea trials with the "Leopard" equipment. Eastoe and his crew, returned by now to RAF Kinloss, no more than two hours away by aircraft from Farnborough. And Clark.

  And Quin. Miserable, whining, ungrateful, uncaring Quin. Aubrey clenched his hat more firmly, savagely in his hand, mis-shaping its brim with the rage he felt against Quin. It could work, but only with Quin. With Quin as he was, it was doomed.

  Pyott and Clark were alone in what had once been the "Chessboard Counter" operations room. Aubrey had stood-down all RN personnel, who would be briefed to run what had become, in his mind, a rescue rather than a destruction operation. He intended that "Leopard" should be repaired and that Proteus make her escape, under cover of its anti-sonar, from Pechenga. The scheme seemed utterly unworkable to Clark and Pyott, and it had seemed so to him in the windy light of the park, between the gilded buildings. In this underground room, precisely because Quin had obviously been allowed to rest by Clark, it seemed only a little less ridiculous. An old man's fancy. He had code-named it "Plumber".

  Clark's face expressed disappointment, beneath the surface of superiority. He had been proven right; Quin was a broken reed. Yet Clark evidently wished it had been otherwise. There was an undisguised disappointment on Pyott's handsome face as he stood with Clark in what had the appearance of a protective hedge of easels supporting mounted photographs and charts. The bric-a-brac of an operation that would never be allowed to run. The board would never be set up for it, the timetable never decided, the communications and the back-up never arranged. It was already dead.

  The knowledge made Aubrey furious.

  "I'm sorry, Mr Aubrey," Clark began, "but that guy's in no condition to cross the street. He's in bad shape, psychologically."

  Pyott fiddled with his moustache, as if caricaturing his uniform and rank. "I'm afraid so, Kenneth. Nerves shot to bits, willingness to help nil. Bloody little man —"

  "What are these?" Aubrey asked, pointing at the easels in turn. "Did we order these?"

  "I did," Pyott admitted, "before we had a good chat with our friend Quin."

  "Is this Proteus?" Aubrey had stopped in front of one of the grainy, enlarged monochrome pictures. A harbour, the slim, knife-like shape of vessels seen from the air.

  "Yes." Clark sounded suddenly revived. He joined Aubrey, Pyott coming to the old man's other shoulder. Aubrey felt hemmed in by younger bone and muscle. "The quality's poor. Satellite picture in poor conditions. Getting dark down there, and the cloud cover obscured most of the shots. This is the inner harbour at Pechenga. That's her." His long, thick finger dabbed towards the top edge of the picture.

  "What damage has she sustained?"

  "Hard to tell. Look through this." Clark handed Aubrey a magnifying glass, and the old man bent to the photograph, moving the lens slowly over the scene, which threatened at any moment to dissolve into a collection of grey, black and white dots. "Those look like buoyancy bags at the stern. Must have been a low-warhead torpedo, maybe two. She's not under power, she's being towed by the rescue ship ahead of her."

  Aubrey surrendered the magnifying glass. "How long?" he asked.

  Clark shook his head. "Impossible to guess. One day, two. I don't know. No one could tell you from this shot, not even with computer enhancement."

  "Show me where on the chart of Pechenga."

  The three of them moved, in a tight little wedge, to another easel. Their voices were echoing drily in the empty room. There was a marble, sepulchral atmosphere about it. The huge map-board in the middle of the floor registered, frozen like something unfinished but preserved in ice, the conditions and dispositions at the time the Proteus was boarded. Even the dot of the relief Nimrod was frozen on station above the coast of Norway. The board had not been allowed to continue revealing the extent of their defeat.

  "Here," Clark said. "These are the submarine pens."

  "Well? Well? Is it only Quin we are worried about? I will take responsibility for him. We have discussed this operation for most of the night. Is there more than Quin to hold us back?"

  "You never give up, do you?" Clark said.

  "Would you drop out?"

  "No."

  "Giles?"

  "Too risky — no, I'm not sounding like a granny just for the sake of it. Quin is crucial. If Clark can't get the right infor
mation, at the precise split-second he requires it, then everything could be lost — including Clark." Pyott shook his head, held his features in a gloomy, saturnine cast, to emphasise his words.

  Aubrey was exasperated. He had seen the Proteus now. He had to act.

  "You" ve talked to MoD air?"

  "There's no problem there. A Harrier could get Clark across Finland and into the Pechenga area — yes. You have the authority to send it. The AWACS Nimrod that was rigged up especially for sea trials with Proteus is on standby at Farnborough. They could accommodate yourself and Quin. Eastoe and his crew are on stand-by to be flown down from Kinloss to Farnborough." Pyott's face now changed to an expression of exasperation; he was angry with Quin for wasting his time and his organisational talents.

  "Communications?"

  "Yes, we can do that. Between the Nimrod and Clark, with a range of a hundred miles, speaking in a whisper."

  Aubrey had passed to the cutaway chart of the submarine. A multitude of hand-written labels had been appended, explaining and exposing each minute section and piece of equipment and function of the Proteus. Aubrey, by studying it, would know as much about the most secret of the Royal Navy's submarines in an hour as the Russians would know by the time Proteus sailed again from Pechenga.

  "Damn," he said softly as the realisation sprung itself upon him like a bad dream. "Jamming or interception? Location?"

  "Can be overcome," Pyott admitted reluctantly. His enthusiasm had dimmed again, with his own realisation. His eyes had strayed towards the door of the room where Aubrey had slept and which now contained a sedated Quin.

  "Your equipment, Clark?"

  "Portable — just. I could make it, with an infinite amount of luck, without drowning under the weight of what I need — would need, Mr Aubrey. It can't be done without Quin. I can't learn enough in time. He has to be there — in range of my transmitter — all the time, and able to talk me through whatever I find." He jabbed a finger at one section of the hull of the Proteus. "Hell, the back-up system's here! Not to mention that this stern section, where some of the sensors are, has been damaged by one, maybe two, torpedoes. I can't go climbing over the hull spot-welding alongside Russian dockyard workers! It's crazy."