'I'm serious, Pat. There are security aspects of this job that mean that I must be killed rather than captured alive. And the same with Ferdy.'
'And are there security aspects of this job that cause you to run along now to Ferdy, and tell him that it doesn't matter if
'Your mind is like a sewer, pal. How do people get that way?' He shook his head to indicate disgust, but he didn't deny the allegation.
'By surviving, Colonel,' I said. 'It's what they call natural selection.'
Chapter Twenty
It is in the nature of the war game that problems arise that cannot be resolved by the rules. For this reason control should be regarded as consultative. It is not recommended that control resolves such problems until adequate exploration of the problem has taken place between all players.
We stood around in the Control Room, wearing kapok-lined white snow-suits, incongruous amongst the shirt-sleeved officers. Above us, the overhead sonar showed the open lagoon, but the Captain hesitated and held the ship level and still against the currents.
'Look at this, Colonel.' The Captain was at the periscope. His tone was deferential. Whether this was due to Schlegel's blast, the letter from the Pentagon, or because the Captain expected us not to return from the mission, was not clear.
Schlegel needed the periscope lowered a fraction. It was sighted vertically. Schlegel looked for a moment, nodded, and then offered the place at the eyepieces to me. I could see only a blurred shape of pale blue.
'This is with the light intensifier?' I asked.
'That's without it,' someone said, and the sight went almost black.
'I don't know,' I said finally.
Ferdy looked too. 'It's moonlight,' he said. He laughed mockingly. 'You think the Russians have rigged a battery of lights for us?'
It broke the tension and even Schlegel smiled.
'Is it ice?' said the Captain. 'I don't give a damn about the light, but is it ice?'
'It's not on the sonar?' I asked.
'A thin sheet of ice might not show,' said the Conning Officer.
Take her up, skipper,' Schlegel said.
The Captain nodded, 'Down periscope. Flood negative.'
The ship wobbled as the buoyancy control tank echoed, and the ascent began. The crash came like a sledgehammer pounded against the hollow steel of the pressure hull. The Captain bit his lip. All eyes were on him. Obviously some dire damage had been done to the submarine, and just as obviously there was no stopping the ascent just a few feet from the surface. We floated, rocking in the swirl of the disturbed water. Already the Captain was halfway up the ladder. I followed. Whatever was waiting up there, I wanted to see it.
After the bright glare of the submarine's fluorescent lighting, I'd half-expected a limitless landscape of gleaming ice. But we emerged into Arctic darkness, lit only by diffused moonlight and walled-around with grey mists. The icy wind cut into me like a rusty scalpel.
Only when my eyes became accustomed to the gloom was I able to see the far side of the lagoon, where the dark waters became ash-coloured ridges of ice. The Captain was examining the dents in the periscope casing, and now he looked down and cursed the great sheet of ice that we'd broken into pieces and scattered on our waves.
'What are the chances, Dave?' the Captain asked the Engineering Officer, who was expected to know how to fix everything, from nuclear reactor to juke box.
'It's vacuum packed. It would be a long job, skipper.'
'Take a look at it anyway.
'Sure thing.'
Schlegel took the Captain by the arm. He said,
The Captain bent his head, as if to listen more attentively.
'Never mind your goddamned pig-boat, sonny. And never mind those orders. If you sail off into the sunset, leaving any one of us out there, I'll get back. Me, personally! I'll get back and tear your balls oft. That's the real score, so just make sure you understand it.'
'Just don't start anything the navy will have to finish,' said the Captain. Schlegel grinned broadly. The Captain had taken less time to understand Schlegel than I had. Schlegel played noisy barbarian to examine the reactions of his fellow men. I wondered if I'd come out of it as well as the Captain had.
'Your boys ready to go, Colonel?'
'On our way, Captain.' It was easier said than done. The high freeboard, and streamlined shape, of the nuclear subs, makes it difficult to land from them, except to a properly constructed jetty or mother boat. We clambered down the collapsible ladders, dirtied by the hull and breathless from the exertion.
There was the corpse too. We slid it out of the metal cylinder that breathed the grey smoke of dry ice. He was sitting on a crude wooden seat, which we took from the body and sent back to the sub. Then the body was clipped on two runners and we began to plod across the ice.
We had left the permanent fluorescent day of the submarine for the long winter of Arctic night. The cloud was low, but thin enough for moonlight to glow pale blue, like a TV left on in a deserted warehouse. The cold air and hard ground made the sound travel with unexpected clarity, so that even after we were a mile away from the lagoon we could hear the whispered conversation of the welders inspecting the damaged periscope.
Another mile saw all three of us beginning to feel the exertion. We stopped and deposited the radio bleeper that had been modified to operate on the Russian Fleet Emergency wavelength. We looked back to the submarine as the deck party disappeared back into the hull.
'Looks like they can't fix it,' said Schlegel.
'That's what it looks like,' I agreed.
For a moment it was very still and then, slowly, the black shiny hull slid down into the dark Arctic water. I've never felt so lonely.
We were alone on a continent composed solely of ice, floating on the northern waters.
'Let's move over a little,' I said. 'They could home an antipersonnel missile on to that bleeper.'
'Good thinking,' said Schlegel. 'And bring the incredible hulk.' He pointed to the frozen corpse. It lay on its side, rolled into a ball as if someone had just floored it with a low punch. We moved two hundred yards and settled down to wait. There was still nearly an hour to go until RV time. We buttoned up the anoraks across the nose, and pulled down the snow goggles to stop the icicles forming on our lashes.
The low cloud, and the hard flat ice, trapped the sound and cast it back and forth between them so that the noise of the helicopter seemed to be everywhere at once. It was a Ka-26, with two coaxial rotors that beat the air loudly enough almost to eclipse the sound of its engines. It hovered over the radio bleeper, dipping its nose to improve the pilot's view. Still with its nose drooping, it slewed round, searching the land until it saw us.
'Search and Rescue livery,' said Ferdy.
'Ship based,' said Schlegel. 'It could still work out.'
'Remoziva, you mean?' Ferdy said.
Schlegel shot me a quick glance. 'Yes, it could be,' said Schlegel. 'It could be.'
The chopper settled in the great cloud of powdered snow that was lifted by its blades. Only when the snow settled could we see it, sitting a hundred yards from us. It was slab-sided, with twin-boom tailplane. The cabin was no more than a box, with two huge engine pods mounted high on each side. The exhausts glowed red in the
