by Craig Thomas
"If it can't be done, you will abort “Plumber” and destroy the “Leopard” equipment with the maximum efficiency," Aubrey said in a tight, controlled voice. "But perhaps it can be done."
"What will you do with Quin? Twist his arm, Kenneth? Threaten to fling him out of the Nimrod if he doesn't answer Clark's questions correctly and without hesitation? I'm afraid that Clark and I agree on this occasion. It would be a complex, expensive, dangerous and ultimately wasteful operation. If Clark must go in, let him go in simply to destroy “Leopard”. Someone other than Quin could point him in the right direction there."
Aubrey was plucking at his bottom lip, staring at the chart of the submarine, its workings and innards exposed like a biological specimen or drawing. The ringing of the telephone was loud and startling in the room, and Pyott rushed to answer it as if he were afraid that its noise would waken Quin. Immediately he answered, he glanced at Aubrey, and beckoned him to the desk. It was Cunningham.
" “C”," Pyott whispered as he handed him the receiver.
"Richard?"
"Kenneth — how is our patient?"
"Not good. Uncooperative, unreliable, withdrawn, chronically suspicious and afraid."
"I see. No use to you, then?"
"Why? Has the operation been cleared?"
"Yes, it has. The Secretary of State has cleared it with the PM. She's enthusiastic, I gather."
"The Prime Minister obviously wasn't made aware of the difficulties," Aubrey said sarcastically. Cunningham had had to clear the proposed operation with the cabinet minister responsible for the SIS, the Foreign Secretary who, in his turn, had consulted the Prime Minister. The recruitment of another national, Clark being American, the incursion into Soviet territory, and the special circumstances pertaining to the submarine, had removed the operation beyond the sphere of the intelligence service acting alone and covertly.
"She has cleared the operation with the President, if it proves feasible in your judgement. NATO ministers will be informed under a Priority Two order. I have been successful on your behalf, but you now seem to imply that I" ve been wasting my time?"
"I hope not. I hoped not. It does seem rather hopeless, Richard."
"A great pity. Then Clark will have to go in just to get rid of “Leopard”?"
Aubrey listened to the silence at the other end of the line. Behind Cunningham, there was the enthusiasm, the permission, of the politicians. A chance to give the Russian Bear a black eye, a bloody nose, without risking more than one life. Turning the tables on the Kremlin. He did not despise or disregard the almost naïve way in which his operation had been greeted with enthusiasm in Downing Street and the White House. It was a pity that the seriousness of the operation's parameters and its possible repercussions had required the political sanction of the two leaders. The NATO ministers, with the exception of Norway, would be informed after the event. They did not matter. The naïvety, however, gave him cause to doubt the rationale of his scheme. To be praised by laymen is not the expert's desire. Aubrey now suspected his operation's feasibility.
Cunningham seemed to have no desire to add to what he had said, or to repeat his question. Whatever Aubrey now said, he would, with enthusiasm or reluctance, pass on to the Foreign Office and Downing Street.
"No, he will not," Aubrey heard himself say. The expression created an instant sense of lightness, of relief. It was a kind of self-affirmation, and he no longer cared for pros and cons, doubts and likelihoods. It would be attempted. "Captain Clark will be briefed to examine and, if possible, repair “Leopard”, and to instruct the commanding officer and crew of the Proteus to attempt to escape from the Soviet naval base at Pechenga."
Cunningham merely said, "I'll pass your message on. Good luck, Kenneth."
Aubrey put down the receiver quickly, as if Clark or Pyott might make some attempt to snatch it from him and reverse his instructions. He had spoken clearly, precisely, and with sufficient volume for them to hear him. When he looked at them, Pyott was fiddling with his moustache again, while Clark was perched on the edge of a foldaway table, arms folded across his chest. He was shaking his head. Then, unexpectedly, he grinned.
Pyott said, as Aubrey approached them, "You're taking a grave risk with this young man's life, Kenneth. And perhaps with Quin. Do you think it's worth it?"
"Of course he does," Clark interposed. He was still smiling. "He knows I won't refuse, on any count. Uh, Mr Aubrey?"
"Perhaps, Ethan, perhaps. I'm sorry you have to enact my romantic escapade, but your President is relying on you, too, I gather."
"That's the last time I vote for the guy."
Aubrey looked at his watch. Nine-fifteen.
"Giles, get Eastoe and his crew moved down to Farnborough immediately. Ethan, get Quin in here again. We have less than three hours. I want to be at Farnborough, and you must be on your way by this afternoon." Pyott was already on the telephone. "Get that Harrier put on immediate stand-by, and get Ethan's equipment details over to MoD Air."
"Very well, Kenneth."
There was no longer a sepulchral atmosphere in the room. Instead, a febrile, nervous excitement seemed to charge the air like static electricity forerunning a storm.
The grocer, Aubrey thought. My immediate task is the grocer. He must meet Clark tonight as near Pechenga as we can get him.
* * *
Unexpectedly, it had snowed lightly in the Midlands during the night, and Cannock Chase, where they had stopped at Tricia Quin's request, was still dusted with it. The sky was bright, dabs of white cloud pushed and buffeted across the blue expanse by a gusty, chill wind. Small puddles, some of them in hoofprints, were filmed with ice, like cataracted eyes. They walked slowly, Hyde with his hands in his pockets, relaxed even though he was cold. The girl huddled in her donkey jacket, the one in which she had tried to slip into the NEC unnoticed. She seemed concerned to explain why she had asked him to stop, to have requested him to leave the motorway at Stafford and drive across the Chase until they had passed through a sprawling housing estate on the outskirts of Rugeley and found themselves, suddenly and welcomely, amid firs and grazing land. It was early afternoon, and they were no more than fifteen miles from the girl's mother.
An occasional passing lorry, back on the road across that part of Cannock Chase, caused the girl to raise her voice as she spoke.
"I don't know why I always made their problems mine. They even used to argue whenever we came up here, when I was quite young, and I used to hate that especially."
"Rough," was Hyde's only comment, because he could not think of a suitable reply. He could not join the girl's post-mortem on her parents. His memories of Quin were too recent and too acerbic for him to consider the man either sympathetic or important. He allowed the girl, however, to analyse herself in a careful, half-aware manner. She, at least, had his sympathy.
"I suppose it always sprang from the fact that Dad was much brighter than Mum — much brighter than me, too," she added, smiling slightly, cracking the film of ice over one sunken hoofprint, hearing its sharp little report with evident pleasure, with a weight of association. "He was intolerant," she conceded, "and I don't think Mum appreciated what he was doing, after the firm got a bit bigger and she no longer did the bookwork or helped him out. I think they were happy in the early days." She looked at him suddenly, as if he had demurred. "Mum needs to feel useful. I'm like her, I suppose."
"You're a good girl, and you're wasting your time. It's their business, not yours. You can't do anything except be a football. Is that what you want?"
Her face was blanched, and not merely by the cold. He had intruded upon her version of reality, casting doubt upon its veracity.
"You're very hard," she said.
"I suppose so." He had enjoyed the drive down the crowded M6 in the borrowed car, after a night's stop which had refreshed him and which the girl had seemed to desperately require the moment her father's plane had left Manchester. Sutton Coldfield for dinner was an amusing prospect. He considered
Mrs Quin's reaction to him as a guest. "Sorry. I'll shut up."
"You don't have to —"
"It's better. It isn't my business."
She paused and looked back. The fern was still brown and stiffly cramped into awkward, broken shapes and lumps by the frost. Birdsong. She wanted to see a deer, the quick flicker of grey, white hindquarters disappearing into the trees. In some unaccountable way, she believed that if she saw deer, things would be improved, would augur well. It would fuse the circuits that existed between present and past. She looked down the perspective of the bridle path, back towards the car park, unaware, while Hyde shivered at her side.
He heard the approach of the small, red and white helicopter first. Its noise intruded, and then it seemed to become a natural and expected part of the pale sky. Tricia Quin knew it would startle the deer, make them more difficult to find, over beyond the line of numbered targets against the high earth bank that composed the rifle range. She looked up, following Hyde's gaze. He was shielding his eyes with one hand. The tiny helicopter in its bright, hire-firm colours swung in the sky as if suspended from an invisible cable, a brightly daubed spider, and then it flicked down towards them.
Hyde's nerves came slowly awake. His other hand came out of his pocket, his body hunched slightly in expectation. The helicopter — a Bell Jetranger he perceived with one detached part of his awareness — was still moving towards them, skimming now just above the line of trees, down the track of the bridle path. The helicopter had hesitated above the car park, then seemed more certain of purpose, as if it had found what it sought. Hyde watched it accelerate towards them, the noise of its single turbo-shaft bellowing down into the track between the trees. Lower, and the trees were distressed by the down-draught and even the stiff, rimy ferns began buckling, attempting and imitating movement they might have possessed before death.
"Run!" he said. The girl's face crumpled into defeat, even agony, as he pushed her off the path towards the nearest trees. "Run!"
She stumbled through frozen grass, through the thin film of snow, through the creaking, dead ferns. Deliberately, he let her widen the distance between them — they wouldn't shoot at her, but he didn't want her killed when they tried to take him out — before he, too, began running.
The first shots were hardly audible above the noise of the rotors. The downdraught plucked at his clothing, his hair and body, as if restraining him. The girl ran without looking back, in utter panic.
Chapter Eleven: FLIGHTS
The jellyfish bags were gone, except on the port side of the Proteus. The starboard ballast tanks had been repaired, and the rudder fin had begun to look like the result of a half-completed, complex grafting operation; spars and struts of metal bone, much now covered with a sheen of new plates. One part of Lloyd, at least, welcomed the surgery. He paced the concrete wharf of the submarine pen, under the hard lights, his guard behind him, taking his midday exercise. The Red Navy had extended the farce even to giving each member of his crew a thorough medical check-up; routine exercise, as much as was permitted by the confines and security necessary to Pechenga as a military installation, had been prescribed. Also permission to use the crew cinema had been granted, alcohol had arrived, in limited and permissible amounts; and fresh food.
Lloyd held his hands behind his back, walking in unconscious imitation of a member of the Royal Family. The diplomat he had requested from Moscow had not arrived, unsurprisingly. Lloyd had made the required formal protests without enthusiasm realising their pointlessness. Better news lay in the gossip he and some of the crew had picked up from their guards. Everyone was waiting on the arrival of a Soviet expert, delayed in Novosibirsk by bad weather. He it was who would supervise the examination of "Leopard". It was the one element of optimism in Lloyd's situation.
The fitters and welders were having their lunch, sitting against the thick, slabbed concrete walls of the pen. They looked a species of prisoner themselves, wearing blue fatigue overalls, lounging in desultory conversation, eating hunks of thick dark bread and pickles and cold meat — in one instance, a cold potato. They watched him with an evident curiosity, but only as something belonging to the foreign submarine on which they were working and which was the real focus of their interest.
Lloyd stopped to gaze back down the two hundred and fifty feet of the Proteus's length. Nuclear-powered Fleet submarines possessed a menace not unlike that of the shark. They were long, shiny-sleek, but portly, massive. Three and a half thousand tons of vessel, well over twice the size of a Second World War ancestor. Backed like a whale, but a killer whale. It hurt Lloyd's pride as her captain to have watched, before the hooter sounded deafeningly in the pen to announce the lunch break, Russian fitters clambering and crawling over her; Lilliputians performing surgery on a helpless Gulliver. He turned away, looking over the gates of the pen, into the tunnel which led to the harbour. One o" clock. In the circle of light he could discern a Soviet destroyer moving almost primly across his field of vision. The view was like that through a periscope, and he wished, with clenched fists and an impotent rage, that it had been.
Pechenga harbour lowered under heavy grey cloud, and he resented the weather as an additional camouflage that aided the Red Navy.
He turned to look back at his submarine once more, and Ardenyev was standing in front of him, hands on his hips, a smile on his face. The smile, Lloyd saw, was calculated to encourage, to repel dislike rather than to sneer or mock. With a gesture, Ardenyev waved the guard away. The man retired. The stubby Kalashnikov still thrust against his hip, barrel outwards. The guard swaggered. A Soviet marine, entirely satisfied with the guard-prisoner relationship between them. Young, conscripted, dim. Ardenyev's amused eyes seemed to make the comment. Yet the wave of Ardenyev's hand had been that of the conjurer, the illusionist. There is nothing to fear, there are no guards, we are friends, abracadabra —
Lloyd suddenly both liked the man and resented him.
"Come to gloat?" he asked. For a moment, Ardenyev absorbed the word, then shook his head.
"No." There was a small satchel over his shoulder, which he now swung forward, and opened. "I have food, and wine," he said. "I hoped you would share lunch with me. I am sorry that I cannot invite you to the officers" mess, or to the only decent restaurant in Pechenga. It is not possible. Shall we sit down?" Ardenyev indicated two bollards, and immediately sat down himself. Reluctantly, Lloyd joined him, hitching his dark trousers to preserve their creases, brushing at the material as if removing a persistent spot. Then he looked up.
"What's for lunch?"
"Caviar, of course. Smoked fish. Georgian wine. Pancakes." He opened the plastic containers one by one, laying them like offerings at Lloyd's feet. He cut slices of bread from a narrow loaf. "Help yourself," he said. "No butter, I'm afraid. Even Red Navy officers" messes sometimes go without butter."
Lloyd ate hungrily, oblivious of the greedy eyes of the nearest fitters. He drank mouthfuls of the rough wine to unstick the bread from his palate, swigging it from the bottle Ardenyev uncorked for him.
Finally, he said, "Your people seem to be taking their time."
"Our workers are the best in the world," Ardenyev answered with a grin.
"I mean on the inside of the hull."
"Oh." Ardenyev studied for a moment, then shrugged. "You have heard rumours, it is obvious. Even Red Navy marines cannot keep anything to themselves." He chewed on a slice of loaf liberally smothered with black caviar. "Unfortunately, our leading expert in naval electronic counter-measures — the man designated to, shall we say, have a little peep at your pet — is delayed, in Siberia." He laughed. "No, not by his politics, merely by the weather. He was supposed to fly from his laboratory in Novosibirsk three days ago. He is snowed in."
"You're being very frank."
"Can you see the point of being otherwise?" Ardenyev asked pleasantly.
"It was a clever plan," Lloyd offered.
"Ah, you are trying to debrief me. Well, I don't mind what you collect on t
his operation. It has worked. We're not likely to use it again, are we?" His eyes were amused, bright. Lloyd could not help but respond to the man's charm. "It was clever, yes. It needed a great deal of luck, of course — but it worked."
"If your Siberian snowman arrives."
"Ah, yes, Comrade Professor Academician Panov. I have no doubt you will also be meeting Admiral of the Red Banner Fleet Dolohov at the same time. He is bound to come and see his prize."
"You sound disrespectful."
"Do I? Ah, perhaps I only feel annoyance at the fact that an old man with delusions of grandeur could dream up such a clever scheme in his dotage." He laughed, recovering his good humour. "Drink up. I have another bottle."
"They intend removing it, then?"
"What?"
"I'm obliged not to mention sensitive equipment. May I preserve protocol? Their Lordships will be most anxious to know — on my return — that I gave nothing away." Lloyd, too, was smiling by the time he finished his statement.
"Ah, of course." Ardenyev rubbed his nose. There were tiny raisins of caviar at one corner of his mouth. His tongue flicked out and removed them. "No. I doubt it will be necessary. I am not certain, of course. I have done my bit, the balls and bootstraps part of the operation."
"I'm sorry about your men."
Ardenyev looked at Lloyd. "I see that you are. It was not your fault. I would have done the same, in your place. Let us blame our separate masters, and leave it at that."
"When will they let us go?"
Ardenyev looked swiftly down the length of the Proteus, taking in the repairs, the fitters slowly getting up — the hooter had blasted across Lloyd's question, so that he had had to shout it, making it seem a desperate plea rather than a cool enquiry — the new plates, the buckled hull plates, the stripped rudder, the skeletal hydroplane below them in the water.
