Sea Leopard

Proteus. with the new LEOPARD equipment. The submarine, if your reports on her sea trials are accurate, should remain undetected throughout the time she is in the area of the Barents Sea.

Your brief is liaison and observation, both for the Navy Department and for NATO. Don't overstep your mission orders, but get back to this office immediate and direct through the embassy if anything happens you don't like. Neither the Director nor myself are really happy about risking this LEOPARD equipment, if it't as good as they say. But, we don't have much choice.

Adml. J. K. Vandenburg, USN.

Deputy Director,

US Navy Intelligence.

TAPE TRANSCRIPTIONS

FILE REF SIS/26S54/3A— PH/Aubrey

TAPE NO B/163487/82/4/2S

DATE

REFERS QUIN — DISAPPEARANCE

…Continued

furthermore, none of his personal effects appear to have been removed from the flat. There was still mail behind the door, dating back more than three weeks. There have been no subsequent sightings.

In conclusion, I think the bird has flown. On the other hand, I don't believe it was his decision. There was no pre-planning. Coupled with the information regarding the 'trade Mission' arrivals and departures at the Soviet embassy during the relevant period. I am certain that Quin was snatched and is now in Moscow.

I am inclined to believe that his daughter is with him, Since Birmingham Special Branch haven't had a peep from her since the time of Quin't disappearance.

I have ordered the continuance of 24-hour surveillance on the flat Quin occupied in Bracknell and on his estranged wife't home in Sutton Coldfield.

Patrick Hyde

Part One A Game At Chess

Chapter One: BAIT

The office of Tamas Petrunin, Trade Attache at the Soviet embassy in London, looked out upon Kensington Palace Gardens, across the lawns of the embassy grounds. The straight lines of bare plane trees marked the boundary between himself and the western city he both despised and coveted. A fierce early spring wind searched for, and found, the remains of last autumn’s leaves, and hurried them along the road and beneath the wrought-iron gates into the drive of the embassy, finally scattering them like burnt secret messages and papers over the gravel and the grass. The sky was unrelievedly grey, and had been threatening rain all morning. Tamas Petrunin had leisure to reflect, as he listened angrily to the tape cassette from the duty room and its recorded conversation, that London irritated him particularly at that time of year. There was no snow. Wind, and rain — an umbrella threatening to turn inside out carried by an old man passing the gate, unceremoniously jostled by the wind — wind and rain, but little snow. Only sleet in the evening air sometimes, turning instantly to slush in the gutters, like a promise broken. In Moscow, there would be inches of snow, and everyone rotund and animalised in fur coats and hats.

The Scotsman’s recorded voice enraged him. Almost always it did. Now nasality and meaning combined to grip his stomach with an indigestion of rage.

'We have been trying to contact you for two days,' the authoritative Russian voice insisted. Ruban, the Naval Attache who worked under the auspices of Petrunin and the KGB at the embassy. 'You fully understand how difficult movement outside London is for our people here. Why have you not contacted us on schedule? Now you say the submarine has sailed.'

There was an additional nasality, and a promoted, cultivated cough in the Scot’s voice when he replied. 'I’ve been in bed with the flu. It’s no’ my fault. I havena been to work all week. I’ve been in my bed, y’understand?' The whine was almost rebellious.

'We do not pay you to be ill, MacFarlane.'

'I couldna help it. I still feel lousy. I got up to come to the phone. There's fog, too.' A small, projected bout of coughing followed the weather bulletin. Petrunin, in spite of his anger, could not suppress a smile.

'When did the submarine sail from Faslane?'

'Three nights ago, early hours.'

'What? Three nights? What else did you learn?'

'I couldna ask, could I? Just that she sailed three nights ago.'

'You are useless to us!' stormed Ruban on the tape behind Petrunin. One of the embassy chauffeurs was walking, leaning against the wind, towards a parked black Mercedes saloon. His black uniform trousers were flapping around his legs, and he was holding his peaked cap firmly on his head.

'I couldna help it — it was no' my fault if I caught the damn flu, was it?'

'Was the equipment on board? Do you know that much for certain?'

'I heard it was.'

'You don't know?'

'Yes, dammit, it was on board!' The Scot sniffled on the tape. Petrunin pictured him. Pale, rat-faced, unshaven, untrustworthy. Trash. He was poor material with which to start a blaze. Ruban thought so too, by the sound of his voice. Ruban would have to report to Murmansk, via himself, and they would have to decide, on MacFarlane's word alone, whether the British submarine Proteus was carrying the 'Leopard' equipment or not when she slipped out of Faslane into the Atlantic three nights before.

'You're guessing,' Ruban said after a pause. 'You can't know for certain.'

'I'm sure, dammit! Nothing was taken off the ship after she returned from sea trials with this “Leopard” stuff!' MacFarlane had forgotten his habitual ingratiating manner. 'I found out that much. Nothing came off the ship.'

'And where is she now?'

'I dinna know.' MacFarlane retreated from anger into surliness.

'And that ends your report?'

In the silence that followed, Petrunin moved to his desk and switched off the cassette player. Then he returned to the window of his office, rubbing his chin. In no more than thirty minutes, he would have to summon Ruban, and they would have to make a decision before five or five-thirty as to the nature of the signal they would send to Moscow Centre and to Red Banner Northern Fleet HQ, Murmansk, EYES ONLY Admiral Dolohov. Damn MacFarlane and his attack of influenza.

'Leopard'. Was it on board? If so, then the likelihood that Proteus was on her way to map the location and extent of the newest Soviet sonar-grid across the Barents Sea from North Cape to Murmansk was transmuted into a virtual certainty. The only way to do that was by means of a submarine indetectable by sonar; which would mean Proteus using the 'Leopard' equipment. Ethan Clark, the American expert, was in London on liaison work, Proteus had sailed on secret orders to an unknown destination as soon as her sea trials were complete. It was a likelihood — was it a certainty?

Petrunin paced the room carefully, keeping to the border of the patterned Turkish carpet, studying his footsteps with apparent intentness, rubbing his chin lightly with thumb and forefinger in a ceaseless motion of his