Sea Leopard

* * *

Ardenyev watched Vanilov's feet begin to slip, saw the white face surmounted by the facemask and half- obscured by the bobbing mouthpiece of his breathing apparatus, and felt the wave surge round his own ankles and calves. His hands gripped the rail of the launch, but Vanilov's grabbed for a handhold like clumsy artificial claws he had not learned to operate. Ardenyev reached out and gripped the younger man's elbow, almost as if he were about to twist Vanilov's arm painfully behind his back. He pulled the frightened, off-balanced man to him, hugged him upright, then pushed at his back and buttocks until Vanilov was over the rail of the launch and into it, a look of fearful gratitude on his face. They were all in.

The sea flung itself against the Karpaty more ferociously than had been apparent on the carrier, as if encouraged by its success in making the rescue ship bob and duck and sway in the water. Amidships, where they were boarding the launch that would then be swung out on its davits, the sea boiled across the deck as each succeeding wave caught them in the trough behind its predecessor. Ardenyev watched a grey, white-fringed, boiling wall of water rise level with and above the deck, and tightened his grip on the launch's rail and widened his stance. Teplov offered his hand, and Ardenyev shook his head.

'Get below!' he yelled.

The wave smashed against the side of the hull, then flung its broken peak across the deck, drenching Ardenyev. He was deafened and blinded by the water, and he thought the thin, inhuman noise he heard distantly was merely illusion. When he opened his eyes again, there was one yellow-oilskinned figure less than before, gathered around the boat station— and other men were looking blankly and fixedly towards the boat's side. Ardenyev realised, as he shivered and tried to control his chattering teeth, the fragility of their enterprise, even its lunacy; resented to the point of hatred an old man ensconced in the non-climatic, antiseptic surroundings of the Red Banner headquarters in Murmansk. He wanted to open his mouth and yell his anger as the Karpaty wallowed her way into the trough behind the wave that had killed one of her crew.

He swung himself up and over the rail, and hurried into the shelter of the launch's cabin, seeking the determination to order the officer in command of the frail little boat to issue his own orders for the launching of the vessel. A tiny yellow blob for a second, out there in the water—?

Ardenyev shook his head, clearing the last of the water from his face and eyes with his hands. The air tanks were heavy on his back. He'd insisted— despite the discomfort and the loss of agility— that they don their full equipment, everything except flippers, in the comparative calm of the Karpaty, while the ratings of the rescue ship struggled to load their special equipment into the launch.

The lieutenant in command of the launch watched him, immediately he entered the cabin, with a thin-lipped, colourless expression. His face reflected Ardenyev's thoughts, with its sense of the threadbare rationality of Dolohov's scheme that now made the old man seem mad. Dolohov appeared to have cobbled this operation together in a fit of lunacy.

'Gone again, sir,' the michman on the launch's sonar called out, and the lieutenant appeared to take this as a final condemnation of what they were doing, the last bitter irony of forces he could hardly comprehend but which controlled him.

Ardenyev crossed the cabin to the sonar. 'Show me,' he said.

The michman indicated a line across the screen with his finger, as if slicing the perspex surface of the sonar. 'That bearing,' he said. 'Range six hundred.'

Six hundred metres from them, the British submarine lay on a ledge, less than fifty fathoms down. The invisible Norwegian coast had thrust out a hand, a fingertip, to aid her. Her anti-sonar was flicking on and off like a signalling torch.

'That's it — let's go.'

Teplov's head appeared at the door at the rear of the cabin.

'It's all in good shape, sir.'

'What about the men?' Teplov paused for a moment, then he nodded slowly. 'Good,' Ardenyev added. 'Make sure everything's secure. Tell them to hang on tight, and be ready to move fast when I give the order.' Teplov nodded again, and his head then disappeared as the door closed.

The launch lurched off its blocks, swung fragilely outwards above the deck and then the grey water — they were in another trough between great waves — and the winches with their tiny, yellow-garbed figures working furiously at them, trundled them downwards towards the water. Speed seemed to lend stability and cancel the force of the wind, even still the water as it rushed up towards them. The rusty plates again of the hull, the thin wires above them, then the launch's keel smacking into the water, screw churning, its whine in air disappearing and its power failing to move the launch. Ardenyev grabbed a handhold and braced himself as the launch was lifted towards the grey-white peak of the next wave. It teetered there for a moment, deck awash, windows blind and running with water, the coxswain spinning the wheel feverishly and without apparent effect, then it began falling.

Ardenyev heard someone cry out just after he registered a metallic, screeching slither from beyond the closed door at his back, then he was aware only of the ugly frightening sensation of being swallowed by a huge grey-fleshed, open mouth. Then they were in a trough and the rudder and the screw began taking effect and the boat moved with some of its own volition rather than that of the sea. A sense of stability returned to his legs and feet, the illusion of a firm surface, a level world.

The warble of the sonar again, then, as if hearing were just returning.

'She's there again, sir!' the michman called out.

'Has she changed position?' Ardenyev asked.

The michman calculated swiftly. 'No, sir. Bearing now red one-five, range five- seven-eight.'

'Helmsman — port one-five.'

'Port one-five, sir.'

Teplov's face, white and drained and old, appeared at the door again.

'Sir, it's Petrov — his leg. The hose broke loose, sir, wrapped itself around his leg — think it's broken, sir.'

'God,' Ardenyev breathed, closing his eyes. Six of them now. Dolohov was a fucking lunatic —

'Will you come, sir?'

'It should have been stowed properly!' Ardenyev yelled in his enraged frustration.

The launch teetered, then the bow fell drunkenly down and forward, the noise of the screw disappearing, sinking into the throb of the labouring engine. Six of them had to get themselves, their sleds, hoses and canisters, welding equipment and communications over the side of the launch, below the surface, down to the Proteus. There should have been thirteen of them. Impossible now.

'I'll come,' he said, suddenly weary and cold.

* * *

'One minute ten seconds, eleven, twelve, thirteen —' Lloyd whispered the lowering of his voice an act of mockery, pointless. 'Sixteen, seventeen — twenty.'

Hayter and the sub-lieutenant were examining the mass of wiring and circuitry and microprocessors inside the main metal cabinet housing 'Leopard'. Hayter and the sublieutenant were checking the efficiency of each component manually, with multi-meters. The rating was removing the panelling of the second box, kneeling like a safecracker against the metal.

Hayter looked up desperately, shaking his head. 'It's no good, sir. We could be doing this for hours yet. Unless it switches itself back on, we're finished. It's no good pretending we're not. Everything here appears to be working, dammit!'

'Get to work on the back-up system, will you?' One minute forty-two seconds. It wasn't going to come on again.

'You know where that's housed. We can't work in there with the space and freedom we' ve got here. It'll take even longer —'

'Christ, Don — what are you going to do, then?'

'I don't know, sir!'

One minute forty-nine, two minutes of visibility on any and every sonar screen in the area. On the