Sea Leopard

bare-sided, long-backed hills, scalily wet and monstrously slumbering. Ambleside was shiny in its hollow between the hills and the grey water.

He pulled into a lay-by overlooking the northern end of the lake, just south of the town, and turned to the girl.

'Where to now, sweetheart? I' ve driven as far as Ambleside on trust, now where?'

She got out of the car without replying, and walked to the edge of the lay-by. Hyde followed her. She turned and looked up at him. She appeared to be entertaining another bout of distrust, even fear of him. She shook her head, and looked away towards the perspective of the long lake stretching away south. Water and sky merged no more than a couple of miles: from them into a non-existence. Hyde found the scene extraordinarily depressing. He touched her shoulder, but she shook his hand away.

'You have to trust me,' he said.

'I know!' she almost wailed, so that he wondered whether she might not be psychologically disturbed. She certainly seemed neurotically suspicious. 'I — can't…'

Anger welled up in him. Stupid little bitch. He bellowed at her: 'You're wasting my bloody time, girlie! I don't know what's the bloody matter with you, or what the hell the world could have done to make you act like this — but I'm interested in what happens to a hundred blokes at the bottom of the sea relying on your old man's invention!'

In the silence that followed, he heard the water lapping gently out of sight below the verge of the lay-by, some water bird calling, the hum of a generator from somewhere behind them, the noise of the chain-saw from the trees on the far shore, and her quiet sobbing. Then she spoke without turning to him.

'You're a bloody shit, you are.' Then, as if intending to be both more precise and younger, she added, 'A bully.'

'Sorry.' He began to consider that Mrs Quin was the strongest member of the family, and felt a preconceived anxiety about the girl's father, and his similarity to his daughter. He found her, at that moment at least, too helpless to be a sympathetic figure.

'It's a cottage, off the road between Ambleside and Coniston. Less than half an hour in the car. I'm ready to take you there now.'

The noise of the car startled him, appearing round a bend in the road that had masked its noise until it was almost upon them. His reaction was instinctive, but it revealed also the stretched state of his nerves. Before he assimilated the Renault and its trailing white-and-brown caravan and the two mild faces behind the windscreen, the pistol was in his hand, and beginning to move up and out into a straight-arm firing position. A moment later, it was behind his back again, being thrust back into the waistband of his corduroy trousers. But not before the girl, at least, had witnessed the tiny incident. She appeared terrified, hands picking around her face like pale bats.

'Don't be bloody stupid,' he told her, his hands shaking as he thrust them into his pockets, an inward voice cursing his jumpiness. 'What do you think it is, a bloody game?'

She hurried past him towards the car.

* * *

'What's the time?'

'Eight-thirty.'

The blip's stopped moving and the signal strength is growing. Listen.'

'All right, turn it down. That means the car's stopped somewhere, less than a couple of miles up the road.'

'Great. Stop at the next phone box, and we can call Petrunin.'

'And sit around all day waiting for him to get out of Manchester, I suppose? Marvellous!'

'Don't grumble. With a bit of luck we' ve got Hyde, the girl, and her father. Ah, there's a phone box. Pull off the road.'

* * *

'Yes?' Ardenyev prevented an anticipatory grin from appearing on his lips, until Lev Balan nodded and rubbed his hand through his thick dark hair with tiredness and relief. 'Great!' Ardenyev hugged Balan, laughing, feeling the man's helmet digging painfully into his ribs as Balan held it under his arm. 'Great! We can go?'

'Any time you like. My boys are knackered, by the way — not that it'll worry you.' Balan's answering grin was like a weather crack opening in seamed grey rock. Only then did Ardenyev really look at him, and fully perceive the man's weariness.

'Sorry. Tell them — tell them when we get back to Pechenga, we'll have the biggest piss-up they' ve ever seen. On me!'

'You' ve done it now. You're on.'

'Tow lines, too?' Ardenyev asked eagerly, surprised at his own child-like enthusiasm. Again, Balan nodded, his cigarette now pressed between his lips, in the corner of his mouth. He looked dishevelled, unkempt, and rather disreputable. Insubordinate, too. 'Great. What about buoyancy?'

'We' ve got the bags on. Just sufficient to keep you at snorkel depth for towing. Any fine adjustments we'll make when you take her up. Then we'll do some more fine-tuning in the outer basin at Pechenga, before you dock. Assuming you can drive this bloody thing, of course!'

Ardenyev indicated the skeleton crew of Soviet ratings in the control room. 'All volunteers,' he said wryly. 'They can drive it, I'm quite sure.'

'Just in case, I'm on my way back outside — to watch the disaster from there. Good luck.'

'And you. See you in Pechenga. Take care.'

Balan walked wearily back through the aft section of the Proteus to the stern escape chamber. He strapped his auxiliary air tank to his back, requiring it until he could be recoupled to the hoses outside, and climbed through the lower hatch. He flooded the chamber, and opened the upper hatch, climbed the ladder and floated out into the darkness. His legs felt heavy, not merely because of his boots but because of the surpassing weariness that had invested itself in every part of his body. He waddled slowly and clumsily down the whale's back of the submarine, arms waving like some celluloid ghoul, or as if in imitation of one of the cosmonauts space-walking. He was bone-weary, he decided. Another half-hour's working and one of them might have made some small, fatal mistake. Any one of the cables, the jagged edges, the cutters could have injured or killed any of them.

Another underwater cosmonaut, looking ridiculous in a way that never failed to amuse Balan, came towards him from the upright aircraft's tailplane of the rudder, almost staggering with the resistance of the heavy air hoses. The two men patted each other and clung together like the automatons on a musical box, then Balan turned his back and the hoses were fitted. A moment of breath-holding, then the rush of the air mixture, putting pressure on his ears and face, then the auxiliary tank was in his hands. He looked at it, grinned, and heaved it over the side of the submarine. It floated away down into the darkness.

Balan inspected his work once more. The stern of the Proteus, in the hard light of the lamps, was a mess, but it was a mess of which he felt justifiably proud. The rudder and the hydroplanes had been patched with a skin of metal, or their plates twisted back into shape and form by use of the hammer, the rivet-gun, the welding and cutting torches. Scarred, twisted, cracked metal, blackened and buckled. The propeller had not been repaired, merely cleared of the entangling, choking seaweed of the steel cables from the MIRV torpedo. Balan thought the shaft might be out of true, but that was Pechenga's worry, not his. Then, masking the operation scars along the side of the hull, where the ballast tanks had been ruptured and the outer hull of the Proteus damaged, a lazily flapping, transparent growth idled in the currents moving across the ledge, like the attachment of a giant, translucent jellyfish to the submarine. Buoyancy bags, ready to be inflated when Ardenyev gave the order to blow tanks, they would serve in place of the unrepaired ballast tanks at the stern of the submarine, giving it a workable approximation to its normal buoyancy control.

Balan was proud of what amounted to almost ten hours' work on the British submarine. The work had been as dispassionately carried out as always by himself and his team. Unlike Ardenyev, there was no pleasure at the meaning of the task and its completion. It was merely a job well done, a task completed successfully. The nature of the submarine, its nationality, had no meaning for Balan.

He spoke into his headset. 'Right, you lot, clear away. Our gallant, heroic captain is going to take this tub to the top, and I don't want anyone hurt in the process!'

'I heard that,' Ardenyev said in his ear, slightly more distant than the laughter that soughed in his helmet