Sea Leopard

gusting thirty-two.'

'Roger, Kinloss tower. Kestrel One-six rolling.'

The controller picked up his binoculars, and stared into the gloom. At first, there were only the pinpricks of the lights, then a slate-grey and white moving shape began sliding down the corridor of high-intensity lights, the shape resolving itself into the familiar outline of the Nimrod. He imagined the pilot's struggle to hold the aircraft steady against the fierce cross-wind.

The nose wheel began to lift from the runway. The four huge Spey engines began acting like hoses, blasting sheets of water up from the runway beneath them. Fog flickered across the wings as the change in pressure condensed the water vapour. The Nimrod began to disappear almost immediately.

'Kestrel One-six, I'm aborting.'

'Roger —'

Too late, he thought, too late.

'I can't hold her — I'm off the left of the runway —'

The controller could see only one indication of the whereabouts and the danger of the Nimrod. The spray of water thrown up had changed colour, dyed with brown earth as the aircraft ploughed across the field alongside the runway.

'The port leg's giving way!'

'No.'

Then there was a silence that seemed interminable, he and the corporal staring frozenly at one another, until he managed to clear his throat and speak.

'Kestrel One-six, do you read, Kestrel One-six.'

No flame, no explosion, nothing. The corporal's finger touched the emergency button. He could hear the alarm through his headphones.

'Kestrel One-six —'

A bloom of orange through the rain and murk, like a distant bonfire or a beacon. The windows rattled with the explosion, which he heard dully. Irrelevantly, yet with intense hostility, he heard the voice he had earlier imagined. Sorry to hear that. Miss Smithers. All dead, I suppose. Is there any more tea?

It had been so easy, and so pointless. The dull orange glow enlarged and brightened.

Chapter Seven: FOUND

The helicopter dropped through the murk, and there were no longer rags of cloud and a sensation of unreality. The night was empty, blacker than the cloud and the wind squalled around the cramped cabin with a demented shrieking that Ardenyev simply could not accustom himself to accept or ignore. Only the momentary absence of the snow and sleet reduced the unnerving reality of the wind's strength and velocity, because he could no longer see the wind as a visible, flying whiteness against the dark.

Then he spotted the Karpaty, below and to port of them. Blazing with light like a North Sea oil platform, yet tiny and insubstantial, her lights revealing the pinprick flecks of wave-crests against the black sea. Beyond Karpaty, outlined like an incomplete puzzle-drawing by her navigation lights, was the bulk of the Kiev. Even at her greater distance, she seemed more secure, more a haven than the rescue ship.

The second MiL emerged beside them, dropping into view, an eggshell of faint light.

'Express One to Karpaty — Express One to Karpaty, over.'

The pilot's voice in his headphones startled Ardenyev with the immediacy of their attempt to land on the rescue ship's helipad. He strained his eyes forward, but could not even see the illuminated, circular platform. The Karpaty was a blur of lights seen through the still-running tears that streamed across the cockpit canopy and the windscreen of the MiL. The rescue ship was tiny, and they seemed to be making no visible progress towards it.

'Karpaty to Express One. We read you, and have you on radar. Range eight point five kilometres. Over.'

'Weather conditions, Karpaty?'

'Winds oh-five-oh, thirty-five knots, gusting to forty-five. Sea state five to six, waves varying ten to twenty feet. What are your intentions? Over.'

The pilot looked across at Ardenyev. He seemed satisfied by the glum, strained silence he observed. Ardenyev considered the shadow of the Kiev beyond the lights of the rescue ship. And rejected them.

'Well?' the pilot asked.

'Can you get down?'

'It's on the edge. I don't recommend trying —'

'Express Two to Express One, over.'

'Go ahead, Express Two.'

'Are we going down?'

'I don't like it.'

'We can make it. I'll go in first, if you like. Over.'

'You haven't got all night,' Ardenyev remarked, looking at his watch. They were running perhaps thirty minutes behind schedule already. A diversion to the Kiev, and then a sea transfer back to the Karpaty would delay them perhaps as much as two hours. Dolohov would find that delay unacceptable. The Proteus might be located at any moment, and Ardenyev had no wish to be still airborne when that happened. 'We're late.'

'I fly this crate, not you, Captain. My judgement is all that counts, and my judgement tells me to divert to the carrier.' The pilot was calm, irritated with his passenger but unafraid. He assumed his authority would carry the day.

'Hold on, Express One — I'll set down first. When Karpaty has filled my tanks, I'll get out of your way.' The other pilot sounded to Ardenyev to be less afraid, yet he wondered whether his own pilot might not be right.

'Express Two — I suggest we divert to Kiev.'

'I'm not putting my bollocks on the chopping-block with Dolohov, Andrei, even if you're prepared to. Just watch my technique!'

Ardenyev's pilot's face was tight with anger, resentment, and something deeper which might have been self-contempt. Ardenyev watched, in a new mood of satisfaction, as the second MiL surged ahead and below them, towards the Karpaty. His pilot was playing safe, they would get down now. It meant only that Orlov and Blue Section would be kitting out by the time they arrived, and amused at their superiority.

The second MiL banked, looking uncertain for a moment below them, as if turning towards the surface of the black ocean itself rather than to the Christmas tree of the ship. Then it appeared to steady and level, and began to nervously, cautiously approach the stern of the rescue ship. The helipad was now a white-lit dish, no bigger than a dinner plate from their altitude. The radio chatter between the pilot and the ship flicked back and forth in his headset, suggesting routine, orderliness, expertise.

Ardenyev's pilot brought his MiL almost to the hover, as if they were drifting with the wind's assistance, feather-like. Yet when Ardenyev glanced across at him, the man's knuckles were white. It did not indicate mental or emotional strain, merely made Ardenyev aware of the turbulence outside; its heaving against the fragile canopy of the helicopter. The pressure to move them, overturn them, crush them, was like a great depth of seawater. Once the image made contact with reality, a circuit was formed that alarmed him. The slow-motion below was fraught, dangerous now.

The fly-like MiL drifted towards the helipad. Ardenyev could see tiny figures on the deck, and their bent shapes, their clinging to rails and surfaces, indicated the force of the wind. Its volume seemed to increase