Sea Leopard

Lloyd returned his gaze to the ceiling, and Ardenyev went out, closing the door behind him. The guard outside Lloyd's door was stony-faced, and his Kalashnikov was held across his chest, stubby metal butt resting lightly against one hip. Ardenyev nodded to him, and passed into the control room, His own team should have been there, he reminded himself, then wished to quash the reminder immediately. The pills, damned pills, juicing up the emotions, making pain easy and evident and tears prick while they kept you awake —

They would have a steering crew brought down from the rescue ship once the repairs were complete. Under his command, they would raise the submarine in preparation for towing to Pechenga. Teplov looked up from monitoring the life-support systems, and merely nodded to him. Vanilov was slumped in a chair, his head on his arms next to a passive sonar screen. Teplov was evidently letting him rest.

Ardenyev went out of the control room and into the tunnel which passed through the reactor housing to the aft section of the Proteus. He ignored the windows into the reactor chamber, and passed into the manoeuvring room above the huge diesel generators. Empty. Then the turbine room, similarly empty. The silence of the submarine was evident in the huge aft section, despite the banging and scraping, setting his teeth on edge, that thrummed in the hull; the noises of the repairs under way. Empty, silent, to the imagination beginning to smell musty with disuse. He passed through the bulkhead door into the room housing the electric motors, where the aft escape hatch was located. His replenished tanks waited for him on the floor by the ladder up to the hatch.

He checked the air supply, then strapped the tanks on to his back. He adjusted his facemask, and fitted the mouthpiece. He breathed rapidly, re-checking the air supply. Then he climbed the ladder and opened the hatch. He closed it behind him, and turned the sea-cock to flood the chamber. Water rushed down the walls, covering his feet in a moment, mounting to his ankles and knees swiftly.

When the chamber was flooded and the pressure equalised with the depth and weight of water outside, he reached up and turned the wheel of the outside hatch. He pushed it open, and kicked upwards, drifting out into the sudden blind darkness of the sea, his eyes drawn by pinpricks of white light and the flashes of blue light at the stern of the submarine. He turned, swimming down the grey back of the submarine where streaks of turning, swirling small fish glided and winked in the passing light of his lamp. Slowly, he made out the tiny figures working on the damaged stern, outlined and silhouetted by the flare of their cutting and welding gear and by the arc lamps clamped to the hull.

He crouched on the hull of the Proteus, next to the underwater salvage chief from the Karpaty, a man he had trained with for the past three months, Lev Balan. Beyond them, the hydroplanes and the rudder were being patched. The force of the seawater against their damaged, thin steel skins as the Proteus moved on after being hit by both torpedoes had begun stripping the metal away from the ribbed skeleton of steel beneath. The effect, Ardenyev thought, was like exposing the struts and skeleton of an old biplane, where canvas had been stretched over a wooden frame, and doped. Or one of his old model aeroplanes, the ones that worked on a tightened elastic band. The repairs were crude, but sufficient to prevent further damage, and to make the minimal necessary use of rudder and hydroplanes now possible. The propeller would not be needed, but the evidence of the MIRV torpedo's steel serpents was being removed twenty fathoms down rather than in the submarine pen at Pechenga. The hull around the propeller and even forward of the rudder and hydroplanes was scarred and pocked and buckled by the effect of the whiplash action of the flailing steel cables as they were tightened and enmeshed by the turning of the propeller.

As Ardenyev watched, one length of cable, freed from the prop, drifted down through the light from the arc lamps in slow motion, sliding into the murk beneath the submarine. A slow cloud of silt boiled up, then settled.

'How much longer, Lev?'

'Two, three hours. In another hour we should be able to start attaching the tow lines.' Lev Balan was facing him. Within the helmet of the diving suit, his face was vivid with enjoyment and satisfaction. Airlines snaked away behind him, down to the huge portable tanks of air mixture that rested on the ledge near the submarine. 'We'll have to come in for a rest before that. Temperature's not comfortable, and my men are tired.'

'Okay — you make the decision. Is the docking prop damaged?' Balan shook his head. 'What about the ballast tanks?'

'When we get her up to towing depth, we might have to adjust the bags. We' ve repaired one of the tanks, but the others can't be done down here — not if we're sticking to your timetable!' Despite the distortion of the throat-mike; Balan's voice was strong, full of inflection and expression, as if he had learned to adapt his vocal chords to the limitations of underwater communication.

'Okay. Keep up the good work.'

'Sorry about your boys.'

Ardenyev shrugged helplessly. 'Don't they call it operational necessity?'

'Some shits do.'

'I'll get the galley operating ready for your men.'

Ardenyev registered the drama around him once more. Now that his eyes had adapted completely, the arc lamps threw a glow around the scene, so that figures appeared caught in shafting sunlight, the minute sea life like moths and insects in summer air. He patted Balan on the shoulder, and kicked away back towards the hatch. As he travelled just above the hull with an easy motion of his legs and flippers, a curious sensation of ownership made itself apparent. As if the submarine were, in some part, his own, his prize; and some kind of repayment for the deaths of Kuzin, Nikitin and Shadrin.

When he dropped through the inner hatch again, he passed through the compartments of the huge submarine as a prospective purchaser might have strolled through the rooms of a house that had taken his fancy.

Teplov was waiting for him in the control room. Vanilov was sheepishly awake, and seated at the communications console.

'Message from Murmansk. The admiral wants to talk to you, sir,' Teplov informed him. Obscure anger crossed Ardenyev's features.

'Weather and sea state up top?'

'It's no better,' Teplov answered, 'and then again, it's no worse. Forecast is for a slight increase in wind speed and a consequent slight worsening of sea state. The skipper of the Karpaty is still in favour of waiting the storm out.'

'He doesn't have the choice, Viktor. In three hours' time, we'll be on our way home. Very well, let's talk to Murmansk, and endure the admiral's congratulations.'

The feeling of possession and ownership had dissipated. The congratulations of the old man in Murmansk would be empty, meaningless. It wasn't about that, not at all. Not praise, not medals, not promotion. Just about the art of the possible, the art of making possible. And he'd done it, and Dolohov's words would make no difference, and would not bring back the dead.

* * *

'I see. Thank you, Giles. I'll tell the minister.'

Aubrey put down the telephone, nodded to the Foreign Secretary's Private Secretary, and was ushered into the minister's high ceilinged office. Long gold curtains were drawn against the late night, and lamps glowed in the corners of the room and on the Secretary of State's huge mahogany desk. It was a room familiar, yet still evocative, to Aubrey. The Private Secretary, who had been annoyed that Aubrey had paused to take the call from Pyott, and who had also informed him that His Excellency the Soviet Ambassador was waiting in another room — protocol first, last and all the time, Aubrey had remarked to himself, hiding his smile — closed the double doors behind him.

Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs rose and came forward to take Aubrey's hand. In his features, almost hidden by his tiredness and the strain imposed by events which brought him unpleasantly into collision with the covert realities of the intelligence service, was the omnipresent memory that he had been a junior boy at Aubrey's public school and, though titled and wealthy, had had to fag for the son of a verger who had come from a cathedral preparatory school on a music scholarship. It was as if the politician expected Aubrey, at any moment and with the full effect of surprise, to remind him of the distant past, in company and with the object of humiliation.

'Kenneth. You were delayed?'

'I'm sorry, Minister. I had to take a telephone call from Colonel Pyott. The Nimrod has been picking up signals from the Proteus, as have North Cape Monitoring.' The minister looked immediately relieved, and Aubrey was sorry he had chosen an optimistic syntax for what he wished to convey.