by Peter Tonkin
The submarine was nearby and surprisingly massive. Her long grey hull - grey webbed over grey paintwork - was imposing even though she was riding low in the water, her foredeck and after sections awash. Up on the bridge wings the lookouts could see over everything except her conning tower but down here she blocked out half the ocean. ‘Let’s get the Zodiac in the water and go for a closer look,’ demanded Richard, his patience running out at last.
No sooner had he spoken than Tom’s walkie-talkie buzzed. He put it to his ear. ‘The lookouts say there’s what’s left of a life raft round on the other side. It’s awash and mostly deflated. But there could be someone in it.’
‘Let’s go!’ said Richard again and within a very few minutes the Zodiac was powering across the restless ocean, round the low fin of the submarine’s sinking tail. As they sped over the sub’s propeller towards the life raft, Richard looked down and winced. The grey strands of the trawl lines seemed to have fused around the great bullet-shaped screw. Set, as though molten steel had been poured over the propulsion unit and then plunged in liquid nitrogen to set in a solid, unbreakable carapace.
But then Richard’s attention was distracted by a shout. The life raft was in sight at last - and surprisingly close at hand. He pushed into the bow-seat, where the hard plastic sides met in a blunt point above the super-strengthened plastic of the hull itself. The crewman in control of the big Johnson Seahorse outboards gunned them to full power and the twelve-man vessel skimmed in at full speed.
The life raft was in a sorry state. The tent section was torn and deflated. The top level of the three-part hull was flaccid. The waves washed over it as the weight of the waterlogged canvas and whoever - whatever - lay aboard pulled it dangerously down. But then Richard’s heart leaped agonizingly. In the water just beside the life raft, tangled in the lines just as he said she would be, there was Robin. He knew instinctively because of the brightness of the sea-washed curls. He reached forward, reckless of the danger, to grab her at once. She was floating face down and that was terrifyingly bad. No one aboard the Zodiac said anything as the sleek black vessel powered in. Richard leant further out, straining as the two men nearest held him on his seat by main force. The wash of their arrival lifted the life raft and pushed it away, taking the bright-haired body with it. Then his fingers brushed her shoulder. He grasped and pulled, hope welling to replace the pain of terror in his chest. He pulled, rearing back, to lift her into the Zodiac.
And she came, but all too easily. Came up and out of the water in his arms. A torso only, chopped off roughly at the waist. ‘NO!’ he screamed, overcome at last. ‘ROBIN, NO!’
But Tom was there, and this time he saw more than Richard did. ‘Richard! It’s all right. This isn’t Robin; it’s some other guy. Some man with yellow hair, that’s all. This isn’t Robin! Do you understand?’
Richard mechanically put the dead man down and what was left of submariner Faure lay on the Zodiac’s slatted deck like the victim of a shark attack.
But the shock and horror made Richard almost febrile. No sooner had he put the torso down than he swung round to the life raft once again. For there, below the deflated tent, lay the outline of a body - as unmistakable as someone sleeping beneath a sheet. Richard hurled himself forward once again, catching at the tangle of ropes. He pulled the half-deflated life raft against the Zodiac’s tough bow with superhuman strength. ‘Get her out,’ he shouted. ‘Someone get her out!’
And, obedient to his command, Tom and one of the crewmen pulled the flaccid, fainting body aboard. But once again Richard was disappointed. Instead of Robin, they had rescued a man in his late thirties, his unconscious face white as marble, marked with horror and caked about the chin with vomit.
Richard snapped then. He had been so absolutely certain. Now it seemed he was so terribly mistaken. His nightmare had come true. None of this was anything to do with Robin. She was somewhere back in the Denmark Strait, dead of exposure and hating him for failing her in the end. He took the young man by his shoulders and shook him, as a terrier shakes a rat. The marble paleness folded into a frown of gathering consciousness. The dark-ringed eyes fluttered open.
‘Where is she?’ demanded Richard. ‘Where’s the woman from the life raft?’
Bob Hudson blinked, twice, as his mind came briefly back on line.
‘Where is the woman from the life raft?’ asked the wild-eyed stranger once again.
‘I put her aboard Quebec,’ Bob answered quite distinctly.
‘You put her where?’ The wild-eyed face was transformed with hope.
Bob’s head rolled over until he was pointing, French fashion, with his chin. And his chin was pointing over his right shoulder at the net-wrapped, hull-holed, slowly sinking submarine. ‘God help me,’ he whispered. ‘I put her aboard her...’
Then his eyes rolled up, he shuddered once and fell back. He was so utterly dead to the world that Richard thought he had actually died until he felt the fleeting flicker of a pulse at his icy throat. Then he left him lying beside the top half of his shipmate in the bottom of the Zodiac and turned to look at the sinking submarine, his haggard face full of the grimmest speculation.
Nine
Catch
The storm had moderated to a dead calm. The sea was settling too, although a swell still ran south-westwards down to Cape Farewell peaking at more than a metre. A swell steepened and sharpened by the counter-flow of the northernmost reach of the Gulf Stream, which was running lazily counter, bringing warmer water with it. Warmer water that betrayed its presence to Richard’s wise eyes in the slightest of steamy hazes as well as in the sharpening waves. But not even Richard, yet, could see the more sinister significance that the warmer water might bring to their situation here.
The sun was setting westward towards Canada dead ahead in a cloudless prairie sky, while dead astern in the evening-blue east above the Denmark Strait it was beginning to promise a star or two. There should have been a timeless silence broken only by occasional lapping and hissing from the sea below and the calls of gulls above as they gathered for their evening feed on the fishy riches coming up from the hot, rich south.
Richard, his legs widely astride as he rode Quebec's narrow foredeck, bellowed over the industrial clangour of Sissy hard at work. ‘How’s it coming, Chief? Over.’ The taller waves were breaking over his boot-toes now. And, in a kind of Catch-22, just as the slowing of Sissy's wild drive down here had meant that the last five minutes before her arrival seemed to stretch out longer and longer, so the moderating seas simply served to emphasize how the stricken submarine was steadily settling lower and lower in the water. Even the smaller waves had started washing over her now. The teams they had sent swarming all over her, clinging to the nets like families of spiders, were beginning to complain of cold and wet and grow nervous of the rising water level.
But at least they had established, by tapping, that there was life somewhere within the hull - though more formal and complex communication was currently awaiting Sparks and his team on top of the conning tower.
‘What? Over,’ came the chief’s reply, almost lost in the rhythmic hammering and clanging all around him. He sounded to Richard like a blacksmith whispering in his smithy.
Even though both men were using walkie-talkies, and were on vessels sitting as close together as seemed safe under the circumstances, they still had to yell loudly and listen carefully.
‘Tom wants to know how long now? Over.’
‘Tell him ten minutes; fifteen tops. Unless he keeps calling in and slowing us down, of course. Chief Engineer out.’
‘Thanks, Chief. Out. Ten minutes, Tom. Then I guess another five to get it in the Zodiac and another five to get it here. I know we’re nearly ready to receive it but it’ll still take us a good fifteen minutes, on top of everything else, to get it in place. And that’s if all goes well. Say forty minutes, to be on the safe side, before we transfer the messenger. An hour before the tow-line comes aboard, if everything goes according to plan. Eigh
ty to ninety minutes before we can start the tow. A couple of hours before we get up enough speed to make much difference. Assuming that the whole Heath Robinson contraption holds together in the first place, of course. That’ll be after sunset. Darkness will slow things down into the bargain, I should think.’
‘I think you’re right. One way or another, it’ll be close.’ Tom turned and looked up at the conning tower standing shrouded in heavy grey netting up above them. ‘How’s Sparks doing up there? I could really use some good news right about now.’
‘Tell me about it!’ Richard put the walkie-talkie to his lips and thumbed the Transmit button. But then he hesitated, side-tracked and released the button after all. Something worrying was stirring at the back of his mind as he gazed away into the pink haze of the evening dead ahead and the waves as sharp as sharks’ fins moving through it. But still he did not connect the haze with anything relevant to their current situation.
Instead, Richard’s dark thoughts took another turn instead. For Tom was right - not only in what he had said but in what he’d left unsaid. They were in the middle of a situation here with enough legal ramifications to feed a parliament of lawyers. They should not bring a line aboard without permission of the owners - to wit the Canadian Admiralty, or whatever they called themselves. The Canadians’ most immediate and accessible representative was the captain and they really needed to talk to him before they proceeded. And he in turn should check with his superiors. Someone should be talking Lloyds’ Open Form, or daily rate for the salvage of the submarine. Or something else that gave Sissy some kind of recovery rights over the expensive hull that they were rescuing and gave them some kind of insurance for the risks that they were running.
But of course, reasoned Richard grimly, if they were forced to wait much longer for a decision from on high, the stricken vessel would settle so low in the water that they would never be able to retrieve her in any case. Then they would not only lose all that money but - far more importantly - all those lives. And, like a stranger stopping at a traffic accident, they were assuming a whole range of legal duties. Certainly under English law - with which Richard was all too intimately acquainted these days - now that they had stepped aboard the stricken vessel they had assumed legal responsibility for all those endangered lives. Unless they could prove that they were doing everything that was reasonable in the circumstances, then they would be facing lawsuit after lawsuit from the relatives of anyone who died from here on in.
Worse than that, in the absence of any help and advice – or knowledge about the construction of the submarine - the best they could come up with was a kind of makeshift cradle to feed the tow rope though the netting itself and keep the sub afloat that way. Until they could get the officer they had rescued themselves back into the land of the living, that was the only hope that they could see.
This plan, however, did mean that they were having to be very careful which bits of the net they cut away. It would be absolutely fatal to get the towline aboard and properly secured, then to set Sissy moving slow ahead merely to pull the nets off Quebec as though they were skinning an eel - and watch helplessly as the sub went down anyway.
With Robin aboard, alongside all the rest.
And that was something Richard was simply not going to allow to happen.
Tom called down the deck to the two teams with bolt cutters, ‘The chief says ten more minutes to finish the cradle so we reckon maybe fifteen to get it over here. Will you be ready then?’
‘We’re ready now, Captain,’ answered one of the teams.
‘As ready as we’ll ever be ...’ added the other.
While Sissy was a focus of activity, bustle, light and noise, the submarine was still sitting dead in the water, as motionless as a hunting crocodile. They had managed no meaningful communication with her and had no idea how things inside the net-wrapped hull actually were. They did not know who was alive and who was dead. Whether the crew had anyone left in charge. Whether there were any plans afoot to get the crippled vessel back under functioning control. It seemed plain to all of them that the primary power systems must have gone down with the destruction of the motors, but there should have been emergency backup from the huge batteries that occupied most of the bottom of the hull. There should have been temporary power enough to support communications, pumps, some sign of life. But there was nothing, other than the tapping that the teams had heard in reply to their own. But nothing more than the most basic communication had been achieved so far.
So Richard had suggested to Tom that they should send Sissy’s radio officer up the fin with a team of engineers and a power source of their own. Just to see if they could maybe patch into the wires on the stump of the communications mast and send a message down. Otherwise they were going to have to rely on tapping Morse code on the submarine’s hull and hoping someone would start tapping Morse code back. At least, now the seas were moderating, that was becoming a feasible possibility. And it would remain so until the hull itself settled under the water.
On that less than cheery thought, Richard recalled what he was supposed to be doing here. He depressed the Transmit button once again. ‘Sparks! The captain wants a progress report. Over.’
‘We’d make more progress if we could cut the top off this net and use the cockpit as a base. Then we could get a generator up here instead of a battery maybe. Perhaps we could even find a way of opening the hatch and getting inside, you know? Over.’
‘We’ve discussed that. We’ll keep it under advisement. But our main priority at the moment has to be to keep her afloat at all costs. That’s our focus down here. In the meantime, do what you can with what you’ve got from where you are. Over.’
‘OK. We see the logic. But there’s not a lot to report at this precise moment in time. This is quite a mess up here. Over.’
But Richard wasn’t listening any more. The Zodiac was on its way over from Sissy with the big curving metal cradle aboard. That was a good step forward. The teams further down the foredeck had cut holes in the netting to accommodate the curved steel gutter the chief had just designed and made. They were planning on finding enough slack in the netting to feed the thing through, then lie it down on its side with the curve of the gutter facing towards the fin and the open ends towards Sissy. Then, when it was securely in place, they would feed a light messenger though it, take the end of this back to Sissy and, feeding out from one huge winch, gather it in at the other until they had pulled the tug’s huge 80mm woven monofilament towing line aboard. Not just aboard, in fact, but round through the steel channel in the netting and back to the second winch on Sissy. This huge loop would sit in the cradle - hopefully without chafing. When Sissy began the tow, the cradle would pass the pressure evenly to the netting and all the strain would be distributed around the web-wrapped hull allowing them to move the vessel forward without tearing the netting open - or pulling it right off.
Once the sub was safely and steadily afloat, the rescuers could proceed to Phase Two of their plan. When they had decided what, precisely, Phase Two was going to be.
Tom’s experience in towing - supported by Richard’s in general shiphandling - suggested that once her hull was moving, the submarine would gain sufficient buoyancy to keep her on the surface, using exactly the same physical laws that keep kites aloft in steady winds. Just so long as none of the other more negative variables - such as any damage to the battered hull - was compounded by what they were doing. If they had a Phase Two to their plan, then that was it. Once the submarine was securely afloat, someone was going to have to get in a diving suit and check the hull for damaged areas where the forward motion might raise the water pressure and exacerbate any leaks.
But as the Zodiac bumped against the submarine’s hull and the chief began to unload the big steel cradle he had made, the game underwent a radical change. For the first man off and on to the deck was the submarine officer from the life raft. Because he recognized Richard as the man who rescued him, the pale young survivor crosse
d to him at once. ‘Bob Hudson,’ he introduced himself. ‘First Officer of the Quebec. I think I owe you a considerable vote of thanks.’
‘Call it even,’ answered Richard. ‘That, was my wife you saved and put safely aboard. Did she seem all right to you?’
‘She seemed OK. She stirred as we transferred her and opened her eyes. But it’s good of you to say I saved her. You’re going to save her all over again yourself by the look of things.’
‘Looks like it,’ agreed Richard shortly. He had no intention of being rude, but his mind was whirling with the implications of Bob Hudson’s arrival. Even though he was first officer, Bob would not be able to take any of the captain’s decisions about rescue and salvage unless the captain himself was dead. So his presence didn’t loosen things up on that level. On the other hand, here was someone who would have a good idea of what was going on within the all too secretive hull. Who might very easily be able to explain conundrums that had puzzled them all so far. And if he could do that, then he might well be able to advance the rescue very rapidly indeed.
Typically, Richard went straight to the heart of things. ‘Looks like Quebec's lost all power,’ he observed. ‘There’s no life in the hull. We’ve picked up a signal or two by tapping on the hull so we know there are people alive down there. But there’s been no spoken contact - by shouting or using the radio. And no one’s tried to open the hatches and talk to us.’
‘Power and light went down when the screw got caught in the nets. I saw it happen just before... Well, you saw poor old Faure… No; I was looking down the hatch when it all went dark. I can’t say I’m surprised. The system wasn’t running right. The chief’s main gripe was the way the power system kept giving him grief. It was a new system, isolated for work under the ice, but like most of these things it was borderline experimental, always running just a little bit beyond its design specifications. Never really reliable. Like those Formula One racing cars that keep breaking down in a way your average family roadster never should.’