Sea Leopard

from some of his team. 'I' ve been in contact with Kiev and Karpaty. Ready when you are.'

'Okay. I'm clearing the slaves from the hull now. I'll get back to you.'

Balan took hold of his air hoses in one hand, checking that they did not snag anywhere and trailed away across the ledge to the pumps and the generator. Then he turned clumsily but surely, and began climbing down the light steel ladder that leant against the port hydroplane, attached by small magnets. He lowered his air lines gingerly to one side of him as he climbed tiredly down to the surface of the ledge. The crewman who had attached his lines came after him. They were the last to descend, and when they stood together at the bottom of the ladder, Balan and the other diver hefted the ladder between them, and they trudged through the restless, distressed silt to where the arc lamps had been re-sited near the generators and the sleds on which they had brought down their equipment. The small group of diving-suited figures who composed his team was gathered like nervous spectators beneath the bloom of the lights. Balan joined them, dropping the ladder on to one of the sleds and securing it before he spoke again to Ardenyev.

'Okay, chief— you can make your attempt on the world rate of ascent record now. We're safely out of the way!'

'Thanks, Lev. Don't forget our piss-up in Pechenga — if you're not all too tired, that is!'

There was a murmur of protest and abuse at the remark. Balan was almost prepared to admit his tiredness, but there were certain fictions that had to be preserved, whatever the cost; one of them being the indestructibility, the immortality of salvage men.

'We won't forget. You just bring your wallet.' The banter was required, expected, all of them were recruiting-poster figures, without separate identity, without reality. Living their own fictions; heroes. Silly, silly —

'I will. Okay, here we go.'

Balan studied the submarine, partly in shadow now, the light of the arc lamps casting deep gloomy patches over their repair work, rendering it somehow shabby and inadequate. The Proteus looked half-built, half-destroyed. He did not attend to Ardenyev's orders, still coming through the headset, presumably for his benefit, until he heard 'Blow tanks!' and the submarine — after a moment in which nothing seemed to happen — shifted under the discharge of sea water from her ballast tanks, and then the jellyfish bags began to bloom and roll and fold and inflate. Balan felt the new currents of the submarine's movement and the discharged water. They could feel the hull grinding against the ledge through their boots; the stern of the submarine seemed to be lifting slightly higher than the bow. It would need adjustment. The bow itself was in darkness, where the tow-lines were attached. They'd have to be inspected, too.

Someone cheered in his headset, making him wince. One of the younger men, he supposed. There were sighs of pleasure and relief, though, like a persistent breeze; noises that were their right.

The Proteus, still a little bow-heavy, drifted up and away from them, out of the boiling cloud of silt, becoming a great shadow overhead, just beyond the arc lamps, then a dimmer shape, then almost nothing as it ascended the twenty fathoms to the surface. The bags round its stern like nappies, he thought, Around its bum.

'Come on, you lot. The volume on those bags is going to have to be changed for a starter! Don't waste time, get organised!'

Theatrically, the arc lamps began flicking off, leaving them in a sudden darkness, where their helmet lamps and hand-lamps glowed like aquatic fireflies. Above them, as they began climbing on to their sleds, the Proteus stopped at snorkel depth and waited for them.

* * *

'Well done, Hyde— excellent work, excellent!' Aubrey effusive, his tiredness gone in a moment, if only briefly. Hyde had Quin, beyond all reasonable expectation, and at this critical moment. Their first real piece of luck— a change of luck? They needed it. 'Well done. Bring him directly to London. You'd better let me arrange for a helicopter from the Cumbria force to pick you up. I want Quin here as soon as possible— What? What do you mean?'

Hyde's voice had dropped to barely more than a whisper, something conspiratorial. Aubrey swivelled in his seat as if in response to its tone, turning his back on the underground room and its occupants. Pyott and Clark, attentive to his enthusiasm at the call that had been put through, now remained some yards away. Clark was making some point about the Proteus, his finger tracing across a large-scale cutaway plan of the submarine which Aubrey had had brought down from the second floor of the Admiralty.

'Back-up's here,' he heard Clark saying. 'Right out of the way — ' Then he was attending to Hyde's quiet voice.

'He's in a bad way, Mr Aubrey. Out in the garden now, blowing his nose a lot and upsetting his daughter. Can you hear me all right?'

'Yes, Hyde, yes,' Aubrey replied impatiently. 'What do you mean, a bad way?'

'One of those who can't take isolation, even if he is a loner,' Hyde replied flatly, without sympathy. 'He's been up here for weeks, almost a week on his own. And when the two of them were here together, I reckon they just wore each other down with mutual nerves. Quin's a neurotic bloke, anyway.'

'Spare me the psychology, Hyde.'

'You have to understand him,' Hyde said in exasperation. 'He doesn't want to come back, he's scared stiff of his own shadow, he doesn't seem to care about the Proteus— all our fault, apparently.'

'That, at least, is true.'

'I' ve spent hours talking to him. I can't get through to him. He'll come back because he's scared not to, and because he thinks the opposition may have followed us here —'

'Have they?'

'No. But now we' ve found him, he thinks it'll all start up again, and he wants to hide. I don't want him scared off by a helicopter. He'll come back with me, or not at all.'

'What about the girl?'

'She's the one who's just about persuaded him to trust me. I have to deliver him somewhere safe.'

'I didn't mean that. What will you do with her?'

'She'll stay here. Either that, or I'll put her on a train.'

'I haven't time to waste, Hyde. Is he fit to work?'

'No.'

'Then he'll have to work in an unfit state. Very well. Drive back to Manchester. You and he can fly down from there. I'll arrange it. You can hold his hand.'

'Yes, Mr Aubrey.'

'And— once again, well done. Keep him happy, promise him anything — but he must be here this evening, and ready to work!'

Aubrey put down the receiver, and stood up, the purposefulness of his movements keeping doubt at bay. He had dozed lightly and fitfully on the narrow camp bed in the adjoining cupboard-like room without windows. The darkness had seemed close and foetid, and the light and noise under the door had drawn him back into the underground operations room. Cold water had restored a semblance of wakefulness, and Hyde's message had completed the work of reinvigoration.

'Well?' Giles Pyott asked, turning from the chart pinned to a board, resting on an easel. 'What news?'

'Hyde has found Quin.'

Thank God! Where is he?'

'Lake District — near Coniston Water, I gather.'

'He's been there all the time?'

'Apparently. Rented a cottage through an agency.'

'Can he get here today?' Clark asked more purposefully.

'He can. Hyde says that the man is in a state close to nervous exhaustion.' Aubrey shrugged his shoulders. 'I don't know how that complicates matters. Better have a doctor to look at him, I suppose. It really is too bad —'

'Hell, can he work?