Sea Leopard

'What's for lunch?'

'Caviar, of course. Smoked fish. Georgian wine. Pancakes.' He opened the plastic containers one by one, laying them like offerings at Lloyd's feet. He cut slices of bread from a narrow loaf. 'Help yourself,' he said. 'No butter, I'm afraid. Even Red Navy officers' messes sometimes go without butter.'

Lloyd ate hungrily, oblivious of the greedy eyes of the nearest fitters. He drank mouthfuls of the rough wine to unstick the bread from his palate, swigging it from the bottle Ardenyev uncorked for him.

Finally, he said, 'Your people seem to be taking their time.'

'Our workers are the best in the world,' Ardenyev answered with a grin.

'I mean on the inside of the hull.'

'Oh.' Ardenyev studied for a moment, then shrugged. 'You have heard rumours, it is obvious. Even Red Navy marines cannot keep anything to themselves.' He chewed on a slice of loaf liberally smothered with black caviar. 'Unfortunately, our leading expert in naval electronic counter-measures — the man designated to, shall we say, have a little peep at your pet — is delayed, in Siberia.' He laughed. 'No, not by his politics, merely by the weather. He was supposed to fly from his laboratory in Novosibirsk three days ago. He is snowed in.'

'You're being very frank.'

'Can you see the point of being otherwise?' Ardenyev asked pleasantly.

'It was a clever plan,' Lloyd offered.

'Ah, you are trying to debrief me. Well, I don't mind what you collect on this operation. It has worked. We're not likely to use it again, are we?' His eyes were amused, bright. Lloyd could not help but respond to the man's charm. 'It was clever, yes. It needed a great deal of luck, of course — but it worked.'

'If your Siberian snowman arrives.'

'Ah, yes, Comrade Professor Academician Panov. I have no doubt you will also be meeting Admiral of the Red Banner Fleet Dolohov at the same time. He is bound to come and see his prize.'

'You sound disrespectful.'

'Do I? Ah, perhaps I only feel annoyance at the fact that an old man with delusions of grandeur could dream up such a clever scheme in his dotage.' He laughed, recovering his good humour. 'Drink up. I have another bottle.'

'They intend removing it, then?'

'What?'

'I'm obliged not to mention sensitive equipment. May I preserve protocol? Their Lordships will be most anxious to know — on my return — that I gave nothing away.' Lloyd, too, was smiling by the time he finished his statement.

'Ah, of course.' Ardenyev rubbed his nose. There were tiny raisins of caviar at one corner of his mouth. His tongue flicked out and removed them. 'No. I doubt it will be necessary. I am not certain, of course. I have done my bit, the balls and bootstraps part of the operation.'

'I'm sorry about your men.'

Ardenyev looked at Lloyd. 'I see that you are. It was not your fault. I would have done the same, in your place. Let us blame our separate masters, and leave it at that.'

'When will they let us go?'

Ardenyev looked swiftly down the length of the Proteus, taking in the repairs, the fitters slowly getting up — the hooter had blasted across Lloyd's question, so that he had had to shout it, making it seem a desperate plea rather than a cool enquiry — the new plates, the buckled hull plates, the stripped rudder, the skeletal hydroplane below them in the water.

'Twenty-four hours, assuming it stops snowing in Novosibirsk,' Ardenyev said, turning back to Lloyd.

* * *

Four days, Aubrey thought. It is four days — less than one hundred hours — since I became involved in this business. I have slept for perhaps fifteen of those hours. I have been out of that damned room beneath the Admiralty for even fewer hours. And now I am consigning myself to another box, something even more uncomfortable, something much more evidently tomb-like.

He took the crewman's hand, and allowed himself to be helped up the last steps of the passenger ladder into the fuselage of the AWACS Nimrod. He did not feel, despite his reflections on age, mortality, sleep and habitat, either tired or weary. True, the adrenalin was sufficient only to forestall such things rather than to invigorate him, but he was grateful, as he ducked his head through the crew door near the tail fin and directly adjacent to the huge RAF roundel on the fuselage. Then the bright, quick-clouding windy day was exchanged for a hollow, metallic interior. And Eastoe was waiting for Quin and himself.

'Here you are, Mr Aubrey. You and Mr Quin here, if you please.' He indicated two seats, facing one another across a communications console from which thick wires and cables trailed away down the fuselage floor, in a channel that might have been a gutter in an abattoir, the way in which it riveted Quin's fearful gaze. Other swivel chairs, bolted to the floor and the curving sides of the fuselage, stretched away down the untidy, crowded interior of the Nimrod towards the flight deck. For Quin's benefit, Eastoe added as Aubrey seated himself, 'You're wired into all our communications equipment, sir, and the principal sensors. We'll do a full test with Clark when we're airborne. Your equipment operates through this central console —'

'Yes, yes,' Quin said impatiently, like someone interested only in the toilet facilities provided. Eastoe's face darkened. His patience was evidently running out. The door swung shut on a gleam of sunlight, and a hand clamped home the locks. Quin appeared physically startled, as if suddenly awoken, and he protested, 'I can be of no use to you!' His voice was high-pitched. He held his hands out in front of him, demonstrating their incontrollable quiver. 'I am no use to you!'

'Quin!' Aubrey barked. 'Quin, sit down! Now! None of us is here to be self-indulgent, especially you. We all have a task to perform. Kindly see to it that you do yours, when the time comes.'

Eastoe studied both civilians like a strange, newly-encountered species. There was an easy, adopted contempt around his mouth which Aubrey had met before in military officers. Pyott was an expert at it, when he chose. No doubt even Lloyd in his confinement was employing the sneer militaire. Aubrey almost smiled. The French, of course, had always been world champions. He remembered the young de Gaulle of London — exile days, when Aubrey had been at SOE. The nose had helped, of course.

Aubrey thrust aside the memory, almost with reluctance, and confronted Quin and the RAF Squadron Leader who, he well knew, considered his scheme to rescue Proteus wildly incapable of success. Quin slumped into his seat, swivelling in it instantly like a sulking child; there was a moment of debated defiance which only reached his hands as he clenched them into weak fists. He rubbed a nervy hand through his wiry, thinning hair which stood more comically on end as a result of the gesture. The inventor of 'Leopard'; the machinery made of silicons, plastics, metal, the man constructed of straw. It was easy to feel contempt, hard to dismiss that emotion. For Eastoe, it was evidently impossible to remove that attitude from his calculations. Aubrey spent no time in conjecture as to Eastoe's more personal feelings towards him because of the crashed Nimrod and its dead aircrew.

'Squadron Leader Eastoe,' Aubrey said levelly, 'how long before we are ready to take off?'

Eastoe looked at his watch. 'Fifteen minutes.'

'You will make that ten, if you please,' Aubrey said, treading with a delicate but grinding motion of his heel on all forms of civilian-military protocol. Eastoe's eyes widened in surprise. 'As I said, Squadron Leader. Ten minutes. Please see to it.'

'Mr Aubrey, I'm the skipper of this — '

'No, you are not. You are its pilot. In matters of flying, I shall consult you, even defer to you. But I am in command here. Please be certain you understand that fact.'

Eastoe bit his lip, and choked back a retort. Instead, he nodded his head like a marionette, and went forward to the flight deck. Aubrey, controlling the tremor of weakness he felt in his frame, sat down again opposite Quin, who was looking at him with a new kind of fearful respect.

Aubrey calculated his next remarks, then observed: 'It was MoD who originally cocked-up this operation,' he said casually, confidentially. 'I do not intend to let them do so again. Damn fools, playing war-games with “Leopard”. It simply showed little or no respectt for — or understanding of — your development.'

Aubrey watched Quin's ego inflate. He had suspected a balloon of self-admiration in the man, and was not