by Peter Tonkin
‘Fifty metres, Captain.’
‘We must have dropped damn near thirty metres in about ten seconds. No wonder the old girl was creaking and groaning. God alone knows what that must have been like up on the surface. How are we coming up?’
‘Slowly, Captain. Fifty metres ... Forty-five metres ...’
But at least they were beginning to come up again. What was the name of that old book? Eric, or Little by Little. Something like that. Little by little certainly seemed to be the way they were coming up now ...
‘Forty metres, Captain ...’
Captain Robertson wiped his face with his right palm and looked around, smearing thick blood thoughtlessly on his uniform trousers as he rubbed it clean. About half of the bridge watch were back at their posts. Most of the rest were beginning to pick themselves up. One or two would need medical attention, and the machines for which they were responsible would need some attention as well, by the look of things. And the sound of things, given the number of alarms that were sounding once again.
As soon as they surfaced, decided Captain Robertson, he had better get up and into the outside world and put a call through to Commodore Pike at the Canadian Fleet’s Atlantic headquarters on the secure cellphone. MARLANT Command were not going to see the funny side of this at all. And if he had to put out a general mayday, then the last few months of his service would be spent facing the enquiry into this mess.
‘Thirty-five metres ...’
The enquiry - or, Heaven forfend - the court martial.
‘Thirty metres ...’
The first lieutenant arrived then, shaken and limping but still functional. ‘Commander La Barbe sends his apologies, Captain. He cannot leave his machinery control room or spare anyone from the engineering sections at the moment. It will take him some moments to check for further damage after that...’
‘Twenty metres ...’
‘There is some good news, however,’ continued the first lieutenant. ‘The waste disposals are no longer blocked. The heads are now clear.’
‘Fifteen metres ...’
‘That’ll be convenient,’ said Captain Robertson, stepping away from the periscope as it hissed into life now that they were coming to the correct depth again. ‘Any more shocks like that one and we’ll all need the head as a matter of some urgency.’
But no sooner did Captain Robertson speak than the bow of his command smashed into something. The impact was glancing, throwing the forward sections of the submarine abruptly upwards. The bridge watch went down like ninepins once again. The sound of the collision exploded back from the big bulbous bow of her teardrop shape, and Mark Robertson, bouncing off the periscope and opening up the other side of his forehead as he did so, thanked God, MARLANT and Commodore Pike - in that order - that they were running unarmed at the moment. For Heaven alone knew what that unthinkable impact would have done to a full complement of eighteen Gould Mk 48 Mod 4 heavyweight torpedoes.
This time the lights did not flicker and there was not even the most fleeting loss of power. So that Captain Robertson, as he bounced erect yet again, was able to bellow at the sonar officer, ‘Lieutenant Pellier, what in the name of Christ...’
But then he saw the state of the officer in question. And the equipment he was in charge of.
‘We’re taking water in the forward sections, Captain,’ called the first lieutenant.
So the hull was ruptured. High-tensile steel ripped open and elastometric acoustic tiles showering the ocean floor like big black snowflakes, likely as not. ‘Very well, Bob. Seal all forward sections off at once, please.’ At least Robertson could give the order without a second thought - the torpedo rooms were empty and no one would have any reason to be down in them. And, thank Christ, all of the electrics down there should be on standby or off altogether. But his next command decision might be less easy - for he had to start estimating the need to abandon ship, and the practicalities of doing so under the circumstances. Now that really would be life-and-death, he thought, glancing up into the conning tower above him with its lock-out chamber and escape equipment. The ancient sailor’s adage that you only stepped aboard your lifeboat as the waves closed over your command could hardly carry much weight in the submarine service, after all. ‘How are we proceeding? What’s our depth?’
‘Still at fifteen metres, Captain.’
‘Angle of the hull is up at twenty degrees, Captain.’
The men had to shout over the sound of the equipment alarms. Robertson glanced over at Lieutenant Pellier. He was beginning to stir but his sonar didn’t look as though it would be any more use in the immediate future than it had been in the immediate past.
‘Forward sections still taking water, Captain.’
‘Thanks, Bob. Keep an eye on that. Any changes in the rate of flow.’ Any falling away of that blessed twenty-degree angle. Any further hesitation in their upward motion. Any sign that they were beginning to slip into the black depth beneath ... Captain Robertson literally held his breath. ‘Still taking water for’rard ...’
‘Still at twenty degrees ...’
‘Still at fifteen metres, Captain ...’
Still he held his breath. The steady throbbing of the diesels was all that kept him from abandoning even then. For it was their steady forward propulsion that would keep Quebec's head up and give her that one last chance of making it to the surface ...
‘Ten metres and rising ...’ shouted the crewman watching the depth gauge, and his voice cracked with relief.
The impact of that one blessed cry galvanized Mark Robertson into action once again. ‘Get the periscope up immediately, and prepare to surface on my command.’ The steel cylinder that had whacked him so hard so recently hissed into blessed life.
Robertson’s knees went weak on him then, though he would never know whether this came from relief or latent concussion. But now was not the time for weakness. He tucked the crosspieces of the periscope under his arms therefore, and used the whole thing to hold him solidly upright as he looked up and out through the optical illusion of the prisms into the stormy afternoon apparently immediately ahead.
And the first thing that he saw was a big four-person life raft with the body of a woman lashed to the bright orange bulge of its inflatable side like the corpse of Captain Ahab tangled in the harpoon lines on the great white flank of Moby Dick.
Five
Raft
Robin Mariner stood on Sissy's outer starboard bridge wing, looking back along her wake as the brave little vessel hesitated on the crest of the massive rogue like a suicide on a cliff-top. The last of the storm wind battered both the woman and the tug almost brutally, armed with stinging slingshots of foam. It roared gustily, like an angry monster. The topmost reach of the huge wave hissed like a chorus of serpents. Sissy see-sawed, and Robin clung to the after safety rail, with her right hand - making assurance doubly sure - tightly over the clip that secured her lifeline. Every fibre of her seaman’s being felt the tug’s increasingly dangerous hesitation, her suicidal desire to plunge back forward down the precipitous slope which she had just climbed to within a heartbeat of safety. There was nothing more to be done, however; nothing but to watch and pray.
The back of the wave stretched down and away from Robin’s toe-tips like a hillside in the rolling Sussex down-lands near her home, it was so huge, so seemingly solid and so green. She half expected to see a little river valley at its foot, shaded with trees, dappled with pools, calling to the freshwater fly-fishermen in her family. But no. Instead there were the next massed ranks of waves, seven to ten metres high from trough to crest, marching in rank after rank out of the heart of the Denmark Strait. All too eager to march right over the top of them if Sissy slid suicidally forward now, instead of settling safely back.
And it was in that moment, while everything hung so literally in the balance, that the inflatable life raft exploded open and rapidly began to inflate.
The life raft sat in a bright orange capsule suspended from a pair of little da
vits at the outer end of the bridge wing. It was designed to take eight, so it was quite a substantial item.
It was self-inflating, made to react to immersion in salt water. No one had ever considered that there would ever be enough salt water to make it inflate this high above the weather deck - unless Sissy were sinking, in which case the raft would be needed anyway. But circumstances had transpired to make the safety equipment unutterably dangerous to the men and women it was supposed to be protecting.
The almost indestructible plastic sections burst apart and tumbled away down the wind. Cylinders full of compressed gas began to inflate the tightly folded circular body as though it were some massive carnation coming into blossom. Robin knew what would happen next: inflatable spokes would unfurl and raise the wind - and waterproof canopy, like the wing of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. And it was already beginning to take flight. The super-strengthened lines reaching back through the pulleys at the davits’ outer ends to the little hand-winches at their feet would hold the whole thing against Sissy’s side as it blossomed. In seconds it would go from a neat, tight, aerodynamic capsule maybe a metre and a half in length to a huge round kite with a diameter of more than four metres and a volume of many more.
Still growing rapidly, the life raft leaped off the crest of the wave into the teeth of the wind. Robin felt Sissy shudder as the gale took firm hold and began to wrench the tug forward down the precipice of the leading edge and to her doom. Within moments the life raft would be fully inflated and, unless it burst under the strain, the pressure on the finely balanced hull would be irresistible.
Robin was in action without a second thought. Without any thought at all, in fact, other than that she must cast it loose before it pulled them all over the edge. When her safety line brought her up short, she simply punched herself in the midriff, opening the quick-release of her harness. Then she was at the outer edge, her hands busy with the tangled cordage there. But the sudden movement of the still-swelling life raft, the fact that it had gone up instead of down, the fact that it was flying now, straining at its tether like a wild thing, all conspired to make an impenetrable mess of all the carefully designed lowering and release systems. The line through the forward davit was hopelessly snarled. The line through the aft one whipped about like an irritated anaconda while the winch- handle span like a windmill.
Robin whirled and ran back along the bridge wing. On the outer wall of the bridge-house, just outside the bulkhead door into the bridge itself, there was an emergency point that contained in its glass-fronted box, among other things, an axe. Robin’s education had hardly been classical in nature, but she knew as well as Alexander the Great how to deal with Gordian knots. She hit the release, tore the red-headed weapon free and turned again in an instant, so caught up in the action that she didn’t even consider telling Richard or Tom Hollander what was going on.
Robin swung the axe high as she reached the tangle of cordage. It was at the winch point at the davit’s base, fortunately, not out at its outer pulley end. Her attention was focused exclusively on the bright orange mare’s nest. She didn’t even spare a glance to the fully inflated life raft, which hung above her like a dangerous orange moon. She brought the blade down with the accuracy of a medieval executioner and the knot simply shattered, as though the bright orange fibres were made of spun sugar or glass. The life raft tore away, ripping the short-cut line out of the forward davit in a nanosecond, moving with such overwhelming speed that the line through the after davit leaped up into the air. The bright orange length of it, out through the pulley already, reared back inboard and wrapped itself round Robin. Fortunately for her, it coiled itself around her hips, buttocks and upper thighs where her body was at its strongest and most supple. A little higher and it would have broken her back. Higher still and it would have snapped her neck. Any lower and her legs would have gone, like a couple of brittle breadsticks. But as it was, the intrepid woman had an instantaneous impression that someone of gigantic power had simply booted her in the behind. And up she sailed like a rugby ball heading for a conversion as Sissy, behind and below her, settled safely on to the long back of the wave.
The life raft welcomed Robin aboard with a slap in the face that broke her nose and loosened a couple of teeth. And switched out her consciousness like a power cut. The fully inflated side, further puffed out by the wind, was more like a brick than a balloon. And the weight of the insensible woman strapped in a cat’s cradle of cordage to the outside of the waterproof canopy put paid to any notions the raft might have had to emulating a kite any more. The whole lot slammed down on to the crest of the wave so recently vacated by Sissy with enough force to compound the damage to Robin’s face and deepen her unconsciousness to near oblivion. But where the tug had four fully-pitched propellers, a weighty hull and superstructure - not to mention the law of gravity - all pulling her back and down, Robin’s vessel did not. If it could not be a kite, the raft seemingly decided that it would be a surfboard. Though there was - blessedly - no actual surf as yet, the bright little vessel settled on the crest of the wave, swung round so that the windproof canopy could take the wind like a sail, and surged away forward into the stormy North Atlantic.
As it did, so, however, several other things happened. The windproof sail of the inflated tent, as it caught the moderating gale, swung round so that the weight of the deeply insensible woman settled on its forward side - well protected from the breeze and the foam it carried. Chance dictated that Robin was lying half across the entrance to the solid tent-section, so her weight and position meant that the dangerous over-inflation of the raft itself was lessened. And so, therefore, was its uncontrolled, wind-fuelled buoyancy. The tent-side sank back and some of Robin’s weight was taken by the side of the inflated raft which stood high and solid, like a pile of huge fully inflated red inner tubes sitting exactly on top of each other. Still face down, Robin’s body folded until she was almost kneeling on the topmost tube. It was by no means comfortable - but at least she wouldn’t choke or strangle now. Though she still stood a very good chance indeed of drowning or dying of exposure.
For a few more moments the raft bobbed on the very storm-tom crest, like a cork caught in a mill-race, powering forward at an incredible speed. Then it settled back, almost regretfully, and the peak of the wave slipped slowly forward from under it, as the foundations of the watery mountain began to shake the submarine Quebec nearly fifty metres below. The little vessel’s forward speed moderated, but, still in the grip of the wind, it headed westwards almost as swiftly as the submarine. It settled more sedately into the water. And its automatic distress signal started its urgent, vital broadcast.
But no sooner did it do so than very much more powerful distress calls choked the airwaves and drowned the frail little signal out. La Carihuela, a couple of hundred metres west, and twenty metres down below the leading edge of the wave, her nets out, her stem open and her defences down, was stamped helplessly under by the monster upon whose shoulders Robin bobbed. And as the Spanish trawler went, she let out one brief but overpowering cry - like Carmen, as jealous Don Jose’s knife slides home in her heart.
The back of the wave, as smooth as a great green dolphin, suddenly erupted in a huge hill of foam, as though some new volcanic island was being born out of the depths so far below. The life raft’s steady progress faltered. It slid back a little eastwards and north towards the distant Greenland coast as cross-waves surfed towards her. The geysering of La Carihuela's life went on and on relentlessly, as every tiny bubble of air was crushed out of every space - and soul - within her; and then it began to settle.
As it did so, the head and shoulders of a lone man in a life jacket burst up like the last, most substantial bubble of all. The sleek head of the Italian engineer looked around, disorientated by lingering terror and by the vastness at whose heart he now found himself adrift. Then he saw the life raft and began to make his clumsy way towards it. And while he did so, as though it had finished its God-given task now too, t
he wind stopped gusting abruptly and the seas began to moderate. By the time that something akin to calm returned the wave itself was long gone, vanished silently beneath the last of the storm that caused it, away beyond Cape Farewell.
And up into that sudden silence between the lone survivor and the life raft thrust Quebec's periscope. It cut through the water like a shark’s fin, kicking up a tiny bow wave and spitting spray up into the glare, heading straight for the slowly spinning life raft with the unconscious Robin kneeling face down, lashed to its side. No sooner did it appear than Paolo Ursini started shouting at it, as though it could hear as well as see. He redoubled his efforts and thrashed across the heaving water towards the convergence of the two things that looked so much like salvation to him. For how could he begin to imagine how much damage his long-dead companions and their long-lost boat had done?
Six
Rescue
Captain Mark Robertson brought Quebec to the surface with all the delicacy that his vast experience and the restrictive situation allowed. For, in spite of the sorry state of his vessel, he had absolutely no intention of letting any unconsidered or abrupt action by his crew or his command add to the very clear and potent danger that the woman on the life raft faced. Delicacy in any case would have been the order of the day - given what the battered and shaken submarine had already been through on this watch alone. And that, as it turned out, was providential.
Quebec came up straight ahead, with her propeller turning at little more than idle. The eye of the periscope remained fixed firmly on the bright blood-orange life raft as the foredeck broke water and began to shrug the Atlantic billows aside like the head of a breaching whale. The life raft slid sideways as the round snout surfaced, pushed sluggishly away by the outwash. Mark swung the periscope round to the right, trying to keep the bright raft in sight as the forward motion of the submarine, slow though it was, whirled the circular coracle down the side below the rising fin. But it was a hopeless task, of course.