Sea Leopard

An occasional passing lorry, back on the road across that part of Cannock Chase, caused the girl to raise her voice as she spoke.

'I don't know why I always made their problems mine. They even used to argue whenever we came up here, when I was quite young, and I used to hate that especially.'

'Rough,' was Hyde's only comment, because he could not think of a suitable reply. He could not join the girl's post-mortem on her parents. His memories of Quin were too recent and too acerbic for him to consider the man either sympathetic or important. He allowed the girl, however, to analyse herself in a careful, half-aware manner. She, at least, had his sympathy.

'I suppose it always sprang from the fact that Dad was much brighter than Mum — much brighter than me, too,' she added, smiling slightly, cracking the film of ice over one sunken hoofprint, hearing its sharp little report with evident pleasure, with a weight of association. 'He was intolerant,' she conceded, 'and I don't think Mum appreciated what he was doing, after the firm got a bit bigger and she no longer did the bookwork or helped him out. I think they were happy in the early days.' She looked at him suddenly, as if he had demurred. 'Mum needs to feel useful. I'm like her, I suppose.'

'You're a good girl, and you're wasting your time. It's their business, not yours. You can't do anything except be a football. Is that what you want?'

Her face was blanched, and not merely by the cold. He had intruded upon her version of reality, casting doubt upon its veracity.

'You're very hard,' she said.

'I suppose so.' He had enjoyed the drive down the crowded M6 in the borrowed car, after a night's stop which had refreshed him and which the girl had seemed to desperately require the moment her father's plane had left Manchester. Sutton Coldfield for dinner was an amusing prospect. He considered Mrs Quin's reaction to him as a guest. 'Sorry. I'll shut up.'

'You don't have to —'

'It's better. It isn't my business.'

She paused and looked back. The fern was still brown and stiffly cramped into awkward, broken shapes and lumps by the frost. Birdsong. She wanted to see a deer, the quick flicker of grey, white hindquarters disappearing into the trees. In some unaccountable way, she believed that if she saw deer, things would be improved, would augur well. It would fuse the circuits that existed between present and past. She looked down the perspective of the bridle path, back towards the car park, unaware, while Hyde shivered at her side.

He heard the approach of the small, red and white helicopter first. Its noise intruded, and then it seemed to become a natural and expected part of the pale sky. Tricia Quin knew it would startle the deer, make them more difficult to find, over beyond the line of numbered targets against the high earth bank that composed the rifle range. She looked up, following Hyde's gaze. He was shielding his eyes with one hand. The tiny helicopter in its bright, hire-firm colours swung in the sky as if suspended from an invisible cable, a brightly daubed spider, and then it flicked down towards them.

Hyde's nerves came slowly awake. His other hand came out of his pocket, his body hunched slightly in expectation. The helicopter — a Bell Jetranger he perceived with one detached part of his awareness — was still moving towards them, skimming now just above the line of trees, down the track of the bridle path. The helicopter had hesitated above the car park, then seemed more certain of purpose, as if it had found what it sought. Hyde watched it accelerate towards them, the noise of its single turbo-shaft bellowing down into the track between the trees. Lower, and the trees were distressed by the down-draught and even the stiff, rimy ferns began buckling, attempting and imitating movement they might have possessed before death.

'Run!' he said. The girl's face crumpled into defeat, even agony, as he pushed her off the path towards the nearest trees. 'Run!'

She stumbled through frozen grass, through the thin film of snow, through the creaking, dead ferns. Deliberately, he let her widen the distance between them — they wouldn't shoot at her, but he didn't want her killed when they tried to take him out — before he, too, began running.

The first shots were hardly audible above the noise of the rotors. The downdraught plucked at his clothing, his hair and body, as if restraining him. The girl ran without looking back, in utter panic.

Chapter Eleven: FLIGHTS

The jellyfish bags were gone, except on the port side of the Proteus. The starboard ballast tanks had been repaired, and the rudder fin had begun to look like the result of a half-completed, complex grafting operation; spars and struts of metal bone, much now covered with a sheen of new plates. One part of Lloyd, at least, welcomed the surgery. He paced the concrete wharf of the submarine pen, under the hard lights, his guard behind him, taking his midday exercise. The Red Navy had extended the farce even to giving each member of his crew a thorough medical check-up; routine exercise, as much as was permitted by the confines and security necessary to Pechenga as a military installation, had been prescribed. Also permission to use the crew cinema had been granted, alcohol had arrived, in limited and permissible amounts; and fresh food.

Lloyd held his hands behind his back, walking in unconscious imitation of a member of the Royal Family. The diplomat he had requested from Moscow had not arrived, unsurprisingly. Lloyd had made the required formal protests without enthusiasm realising their pointlessness. Better news lay in the gossip he and some of the crew had picked up from their guards. Everyone was waiting on the arrival of a Soviet expert, delayed in Novosibirsk by bad weather. He it was who would supervise the examination of 'Leopard'. It was the one element of optimism in Lloyd's situation.

The fitters and welders were having their lunch, sitting against the thick, slabbed concrete walls of the pen. They looked a species of prisoner themselves, wearing blue fatigue overalls, lounging in desultory conversation, eating hunks of thick dark bread and pickles and cold meat — in one instance, a cold potato. They watched him with an evident curiosity, but only as something belonging to the foreign submarine on which they were working and which was the real focus of their interest.

Lloyd stopped to gaze back down the two hundred and fifty feet of the Proteus's length. Nuclear-powered Fleet submarines possessed a menace not unlike that of the shark. They were long, shiny-sleek, but portly, massive. Three and a half thousand tons of vessel, well over twice the size of a Second World War ancestor. Backed like a whale, but a killer whale. It hurt Lloyd's pride as her captain to have watched, before the hooter sounded deafeningly in the pen to announce the lunch break, Russian fitters clambering and crawling over her; Lilliputians performing surgery on a helpless Gulliver. He turned away, looking over the gates of the pen, into the tunnel which led to the harbour. One o' clock. In the circle of light he could discern a Soviet destroyer moving almost primly across his field of vision. The view was like that through a periscope, and he wished, with clenched fists and an impotent rage, that it had been.

Pechenga harbour lowered under heavy grey cloud, and he resented the weather as an additional camouflage that aided the Red Navy.

He turned to look back at his submarine once more, and Ardenyev was standing in front of him, hands on his hips, a smile on his face. The smile, Lloyd saw, was calculated to encourage, to repel dislike rather than to sneer or mock. With a gesture, Ardenyev waved the guard away. The man retired. The stubby Kalashnikov still thrust against his hip, barrel outwards. The guard swaggered. A Soviet marine, entirely satisfied with the guard-prisoner relationship between them. Young, conscripted, dim. Ardenyev's amused eyes seemed to make the comment. Yet the wave of Ardenyev's hand had been that of the conjurer, the illusionist. There is nothing to fear, there are no guards, we are friends, abracadabra —

Lloyd suddenly both liked the man and resented him.

'Come to gloat?' he asked. For a moment, Ardenyev absorbed the word, then shook his head.

'No.' There was a small satchel over his shoulder, which he now swung forward, and opened. 'I have food, and wine,' he said. 'I hoped you would share lunch with me. I am sorry that I cannot invite you to the officers' mess, or to the only decent restaurant in Pechenga. It is not possible. Shall we sit down?' Ardenyev indicated two bollards, and immediately sat down himself. Reluctantly, Lloyd joined him, hitching his dark trousers to preserve their creases, brushing at the material as if removing a persistent spot. Then he looked up.