Sea Leopard

move sluggishly in his awareness like a tide coming slowly in. He realised it would be his companion while he remained on the knoll, hidden by the trees. He voiced it.

'Ah, Ivan, Ivan,' he murmured, 'remember the times we used to come here, eh? Remember?'

A chill, gusty wind plucked his sighs away and scattered them over the darkness of the harbour.

* * *

Clark bobbed in the water beneath the repaired propeller of the Proteus. He was exhausted after climbing the gate into the pen, exhausted in a subtler, more insidious way by the tension of waiting of absorbing the routine of the guards patrolling the pen, of choosing his moment to slip over the gate and down into the water. The good fortune that no one appeared to be working on the submarine did little to erase his weariness.

Despite their buoyancy, the packs were like leaden weights beneath the surface. His arms ached from them and from the deadweight of his own body. Now he had to climb the stern of the Proteus, to the aft escape hatch. He did not even want to try, could not entertain the idea of beginning. His air tanks and weighted belt he had left on the bottom of the pen. Yet it was the weight of the packs that unnerved him.

The repairs appeared almost complete. There were a number of scarred and buckled hull plates, but the propeller possessed new blades, the rudder fin and the hydroplanes gleamed with new metal. He looked up. The hull of the Proteus loomed above him. He groaned inwardly. His feet, flipperless again, rested on a rung beneath the surface, his hands had hold of another rung of the inspection track up the rudder. Tiny, separate pitons in the rock-face of the hull. He looked around him. A guard, bored and dulled by routine, turned at the end of his patrol, and walked back out of sight along the pen. Clark heaved his body out of the water and into the irregular rhythm of his ascent. His wet feet slipped, his hands wanted to let go, but he climbed up the rudder, level with the huge fifteen-bladed propeller, until he could clamber on to the hull, dragging the two packs behind him. There, he paused. Along the smoothness of the hull, on the whale's back, was the impression of the escape hatch, a circle cut in grey, shiny dough with a shaping knife. It was sixty feet from where he crouched.

He raised himself, pressing back against the high fin of the rudder, in its shadow to escape the white lights glaring down from the roof of the pen. The guard he had seen, on the starboard side of the Proteus, was half-way along its length, back to him. The other guard, on the port side, had almost reached the extent of his patrol, in the dimness of the other end of the pen. He would not make it to the hatch, open and close it after him, before that guard turned and was able to see him. He waited, the tension wearing at him immediately and violently. He felt inadequate to the demands made upon his physical strength, his nervous system.

A voice called out, and he believed for a long moment that a third guard, one he had not spotted, had seen him and was addressing him. But the voice was distant. He watched, heart pounding, as the port guard moved out of sight behind the bulk of the Proteus, presumably having been hailed by his companion on the starboard side. It was his chance, perhaps his only one. He weighed the two packs, one in either hand. An obstacle race. He remembered basic training from long ago; fatigues and punishment and discipline like a thin crust of ice over sadism. He gritted his teeth. He'd run up sand dunes carrying two packs then.

Then he began running, hunched up with fear and the weight of the packs, his feet threatening to slide on the smooth metal of the hull. Fifty feet, forty, thirty —

The packs began to slither on the hull, restraining him. His breath began to be difficult to draw, his heart made a hideous noise. Then he slid like a baseball player for the plate, legs extended and reached the hatch. Feverishly, he turned the wheel, unlocking it. Two turns, three, four. His head bobbed up and down like that of a feeding bird. No one. He raised the hatch, and slid into a sitting position on its edge. His feet fumbled the ladder, and he climbed into the hatch, packs pushed in first and almost dragging him with them; then he closed the hatch behind him, allowing his breath to roar and wheeze in the sudden and complete darkness. He slipped from the ladder and landed on the lower hatch of the chamber. He rubbed his arms, and his body remained doubled over as If in supplication. It was another five minutes before he could bring himself to move again. He unsealed one of the packs — right hand good — and rummaged in one of its pockets. He removed a bundle, and flicked on his lamp to inspect it. Blue, faded blue overalls. He stood up, unrolling the bundle, taking out the socks and boots and putting them on. Then he donned the overalls. His immersion suit was still damp, but the effect might look like sweat, with luck. He patted the breast pocket, feeling the ID there. If the repair and maintenance crew had a specially issued ID for this pen and this job, he still would not be blown as soon as he was challenged. Not with that ID.

He stowed the two packs in the chamber, deflating the second one, securing them to the ladder in the wall. If someone used the hatch, they would be found. He, however, dared not be seen carrying them inside the submarine. His watch showed twelve-fifty. He switched out the lamp, and stowed it with the packs. He would be back within an hour. They should be safe.

Cautiously, he turned the wheel of the lower hatch, then lifted it a couple of inches. He peered into the room housing the electric motors. It appeared empty. He pulled back the hatch and stepped on to the ladder — imagining for a moment Ardenyev or someone like him making his entry in the same manner — closing the hatch behind him and locking it.

He looked around the engine room, rubbing his hands tiredly through his short hair, untidying his appearance. He looked at his hands. They possessed that wrinkled, white, underwater deadness. He thrust them into his pockets as he stared down at the main turbine shaft running across the length of the room. There appeared to be little or no sign of damage. Proteus was almost ready to go. She could be taken out of Pechenga and into the Barents Sea on her turbines, even on the electric motors whose bulk surrounded him now. If 'Leopard' worked —

He cautiously opened the bulkhead door into the turbine room. Empty. The submarine was silent around him, huge, cathedral-like, unmanned. Clark presumed the ratings were being kept in their accommodation under guard, and the officers in the wardroom. Lloyd would be in the control room, more likely in his cabin, also guarded. He looked down at his creased overalls. A uniform would have been an impossible disguise to have transported in one of the packs. A pity.

He entered the manoeuvring room, aft of the nuclear reactor. For a moment he thought it, too, was empty. Then a figure appeared from behind one section of the computer housing. He was short, almost bald, and dressed in a white laboratory coat. He carried a clipboard, and when he saw Clark, adjusted his glasses and studied him.

'What do you want?'

'Who are you?' Clark replied in Russian. There was an instant, well-learned wariness behind the thick spectacles. Clark continued, 'What are you doing here?'

The man was already proffering the clipboard, but then resisted the craven instinct. He did not recognise Clark, and would, presumably, have known which ones to be wary of. Clark appeared officer-like, perhaps, but he did not suggest KGB. He lacked swagger, the birth-right.

'Who are you?' the man in the white coat insisted.

Clark reached into his breast pocket. Aubrey had insisted, pressing it upon him like a talisman. A red ID card. Clark tried to remove it insolently, and waved it briefly at the other man.

'Okay?' he said. 'Or do you want my birth certificate as well?' He laughed as coarsely as he could. 'Don't say you don't think I have one.'

'I wasn't going to — ' the man said. Clark took the clipboard. He understood enough to realise that the technician was from a naval laboratory or testing centre. He riffled the sheets of graph paper. He was checking to make certain that none of the machinery in the manoeuvring room was essential to, or part of, 'Leopard'. Perhaps — Clark suppressed a grin here — he was even trying to locate the back-up system. He handed the clipboard back to the technician.

'I don't understand all that bullshit, Comrade Doctor,' he said in a belligerently unintelligent voice. The technician succeeded in quashing the sneer that tried to appear on his face. 'See you.'

Clark, hands in pockets, tried a swaggering, lazy, confident slouch out of the manoeuvring room into the tunnel through the reactor. Pausing only for a moment to register that the reactor had not been shut down, he opened the door into the control room. As he had expected, it was not empty. There was no sign of Lloyd or any of the British officers, but white-coated men and a handful of armed guards had occupied the control room, like terrorists in a foreign embassy. Undoubtedly, every piece of machinery and equipment was being tested and examined during the hours when the crew were confined to their quarters. Proteus would