Sea Leopard

discreet cover, from the Branch up there, and then let me try to get to the girl. If she isn't in Manchester, and they won't tell me where she is, then you can take over. Okay?'

'All right,' Shelley said after another lengthy pause. 'All right. We'll do it your way, for the moment.'

'At least I'm a familiar face.'

'You won't be if you get knocked about any more.' He glanced at the telephone on a folding table, next to a black medical bag. 'I'll try to talk to Aubrey, though. I want him to be fully informed.'

* * *

It was a tableau of activity, a frozen still-life of tension, fear close to panic, routine and emergency procedures. In other parts of the submarine, men lay in their bunks or sat on the floor. No one moved unless movement was unavoidable and essential to the survival of the Proteus. In the control room, men stood or sat as their functions dictated, and when they moved — which was rarely, and with Lloyd's express permission — it was with an exaggerated, burglar-like stealth. All unnecessary electrics had been switched off, and the control room was made eerie by the emergency lighting. Only Lloyd stalked the control room like a hunter, like an escapee.

The sonars, in passive mode, their screens illuminating the faces of their operators from beneath, making arms and chins and cheeks blue or green or red, a ghastly imitation of disco strobe-lights, revealed the Proteus's danger. Under the cloak of 'Leopard' the submarine lay on the ledge almost fifty fathoms down, while Soviet submarines moved back and forth around, below and above them like prowling sharks outside a diver's cage. As Lloyd watched over the shoulder of one of the sonar operators, a bright trail on the screen slid slowly to the port like the hand of a clock, mere hundreds of yards from their position. Noise — any noise — would be like blood to that shark, and bring others.

Lloyd left the screen and stood beneath one of the emergency lights. Once more, he scanned the damage report that his chief engineer had compiled in silence and semi-darkness. They had not dared send a diver outside the hull, outside the cloak of the anti-sonar. Much of it was guesswork, or deduced from the instruments and the computer. The damage was relatively slight, but almost totally disabling. Thurston and the chief engineer had guessed at a low-charge torpedo — wake-homing, as they had known in those last seconds before it struck — which had damaged the propeller blades and the port aft hydroplane. It left the Proteus with no effective propulsion, and little ability to maintain course and depth. She needed repairs before she could go anywhere. And in that conclusion, Lloyd perceived the Russian objective.

He was calm. It was partly an act for the benefit of the crew, and yet it was genuine too. He had not known he would react in this way, in harm's way. It had little to do with the fact that the pressure hull remained undamaged, or with the invisibility bestowed by 'Leopard'. It was, simply, him. He had no inclination to curse MoD or to blame himself for not aborting the mission hours earlier. The past, even as recently as two hours before, was dead to him. The Russians did not know where they were and, eventually, help must come — diplomatic, military, civilian, mechanical, political.

Thurston left the navigator and Hayter, who was taking a much needed break from monitoring the functioning of 'Leopard', and crossed the control room. In his hand he had a notebook and pen. He held it up to Lloyd.

Thurston had written: What do we do? Lloyd merely shook his head. Thurston was puzzled, then scribbled furiously on a fresh sheet of the notebook: We have to tell someone. Lloyd took a pen from his breast pocket, and borrowed Thurston's notebook. He scribbled: And tell them where we are? Thurston — Lloyd could not help being amused by the pantomime they were enacting — wrote: Must be Nimrod in area by now.

We can't transmit. Too risky. Lloyd scribbled.

They want 'Leopard' — but how? Thurston wrote.

Salvage?

They couldn't, Thurston began writing, then his hand trailed off to the edge of the sheet. Savagely, he crossed out what he had written. Defiantly, he wrote: Have to find us first. Lloyd patted his shoulder, then wrote: Only a few days.

The sudden noise was deafening, literally terrifying to every man in the control room. It was more than two seconds before the rating at the code-signals console cut the amplification with a hand that dabbed out, as if electrified, at the switch. He stared at Lloyd guiltily, afraid, his youthful face behind his ginger beard blushing. Lloyd tiptoed across to him, his whole body shaking with reaction. The chatter of a high-speed coded signal, incoming. The rating removed his headphones, offering them like a propitiation to Lloyd, something to avert his wrath. Lloyd pressed him, firmly but not unkindly, on the shoulder, and held the headphones to one ear. He nodded, as if deciphering the signal for himself, or hearing an instruction in plain language. The rating flicked switches, and waited. His screen remained blank. Lloyd watched it, looking into a mirror, a crystal ball. Thurston arrived behind him, his breath ragged and only now slowing down. Lloyd felt the tension in the control room of the shrilling chatter of the signal, and the awareness of the Russians beyond the hull, and the knowledge that the signal was continuing. It crawled on his skin like St Elmo's Fire, or a disturbed nest of ants.

The screen displayed a line of white print. A message buoy. Thurston nudged Lloyd, and mouthed Nimrod, and Lloyd nodded. The code identification then appeared, deciphered. MoD, then the placing of the security level of the instructions. ETNA. Lloyd looked startled. A civilian override by the intelligence service. The comprehension of their danger by some outside authority made him feel weak. They had known, had tried —

The message unreeled on the screen, line by line, then began to repeat itself. Abort the mission, return to home waters immediate. ETNA. ETNA. Acknowledge, code 6F, soonest. Compliance immediate —

Compliance impossible. Someone had known, someone in SIS or the Directorate of Security or the CIA, or the Norwegians, the Germans, the Dutch — someone somewhere had known, or suspected, and had tried to warn them, recall them. The knowledge was like a debilitating illness.

There was a Nimrod in the area, on-station. It would, perhaps, wait for an acknowledgement. It would, doubtless remain on-station to monitor Soviet naval activity. Such would be its orders. It was up there, somewhere.

Signal, Lloyd wrote on Thurston's pad. The rating watched the screen. The message began repeating for the third time. Lloyd reached out, flicked a switch angrily, and the screen darkened. The rating's shoulders hunched as if against a blow from behind.

You can't, Thurston had written by the time Lloyd looked back at the pad. The two men stared at one another, their faces seeming agonised in the dimness of the emergency lights.

Lloyd crossed the control room. Four trails of light, not one of them more than a mile-and-a-half from the ledge on which they lay. Four hunter-killer submarines, waiting for the blood that would spur them, fix the position of Proteus. That blood might be any noise, even the sonar shadow of the aerial buoy they would have to send to the surface to contact the Nimrod.

You can't.

Lloyd realised he still had Thurston's pad in his hand. He dare not, in his anger, tear out the sheet or throw down the pad. It would not make a detectable noise. Yet he did not dare.

* * *

In how many rooms had he waited, on how many occasions? Clocks. How many clocks? So many of them with large, plain faces and a red sweeping second hand. Arms that clicked on to the next minute. Clocks. The persistence of memory. Even now, there was no clarity to his thoughts, no cleanness. Only the many other occasions on which he had endured the same, endless waiting.

Aubrey sighed. He had not been aware of the number of clocks in the underground room until all the protocol had been observed and Brussels and Washington and MoD had agreed to his assumption of complete authority over the safe return of the Proteus. Furious telephone and signal activity, followed by a post- coital lassitude, restlessness. Waiting for the Nimrod's report, waiting then for the first safe occasion when the submarine could send an aerial buoy to the surface and answer their peremptory summons home. Until a certain time had passed — the remainder of that night, perhaps the next day, too — they could make no assumptions. Nor would they be able to prevent dread from flourishing like a noxious weed in each of their minds.

Aubrey knew it, understood the Soviet scheme in its entirety. Daring, almost foolhardy, reckless, extreme.