by Peter Tonkin
‘Well, I can see how propulsion would have gone down when the screw got tangled up, but they should have had emergency power from the batteries at once, surely. And then they should have been able to isolate the power systems, shouldn’t they? Keep the alternators charging up the batteries even if the shaft’s not turning. Running the thing in neutral, so to speak. They should have been able to get things back on line by now, surely.’
‘Yes. You’d think so. That’s all part of the design, of course.’
‘And in any case, even with all that down, the fail-safe or default should ensure that the emergency battery power comes on automatically,’ insisted Richard.
‘Jesus, yes! I mean, without even auxiliary power, they really would be stuck. No bilge pumps to clear the water out of her. No air-con pumps to circulate the atmosphere. Not even any power to the hatch auxiliaries. God! Do you think that’s what’s happened? With backup power down they wouldn’t even be able to open and close the hatchways.’
‘But you said you saw the after hatch close after the power went down.’
‘That’s right. That’s the fail-safe. Power down: hatches close. Hatch auxiliary motors shut off. Safety bolts go home.’
‘Trapping everyone aboard? That doesn’t seem like very good design ...’
‘The escape route is through the conning tower and up the fin. The hatches there should still operate, even without power.’
‘Then why hasn’t anyone come up that way to contact us, I wonder.’
Bob Hudson glanced up at the top of the fin. ‘Well, I’m not what you’d call a betting man,’ he said slowly. ‘But I’d lay pretty good odds that when the periscope and everything else up there was chopped off, cut down and ripped out by the roots it somehow smashed up a lot of the stuff on the inside of the fin as well. And I mean, if the escape pod in there has been knocked askew, or the passages and shafts in there are blocked off or twisted up, then there really is no way out. Especially if they haven’t got light and power to see and solve their problems.’
‘We really do need to get in there and take a look if we possibly can,’ mused Richard, speaking as much to himself as to Bob.
‘Well, I guess if we’re going to try, then now is the time to do it,’ agreed Bob. ‘It’ll be dark soon and that could well make things much more complicated.’
‘If power’s down then it’s going to be dark in there in any case,’ said Richard grimly. ‘But you’re right. Let’s go up and talk to Sparks.’
At the base of the fin Richard thumbed the Transmit on his walkie-talkie once again. ‘Tom? It’s Richard, Over.’
‘Yes, Richard?’
‘Just checking in. Quebec's First Officer and I are going up to see if we can release the main escape hatch and get a look inside. Bob knows where the emergency catch is located and says the system is fail-safe to open. There may be damage to the internal structure of the conning tower that we should know about as soon as possible. Over.’
‘Sorry, Richard, that’ll have to wait. Time’s caught up with you. I’m clearing everyone off Quebec now except for a small team to oversee the tow. I’m just about to run the messenger back and take up the tow. I don’t want anyone aboard Quebec who doesn’t have to be here until we see what happens as the tow gets under way. Over.’
Richard went as cold as if he had been plunged into the icy sea. The thought of going back aboard Sissy now that he knew Robin was on Quebec and needing his help simply robbed him of breath. He paused for a moment, as the loud- hailers aboard the tug boomed out with the captain’s order to return. He breathed in deeply as the crewmen hurried past him, slopping through water already ankle deep, all too keen to get safely off and away. He noted almost idly, such was his preoccupation, that Sparks and his little crew were returning empty-handed. In too much of a hurry to bring the bulky battery, electrical equipment and bolt-cutters with them. Tom was going to be a very unhappy man when he found out about that.
‘Point taken, Tom. But Bob and I will attach ourselves to the tow party on the bow, if that’s all right with you. Then we’ll be in a good position to take any emergency action if we need to. Over.’
‘OK Richard.’ Tom’s voice was dry and almost disapproving. He was clearly less than happy already. At the very least he suspected Richard had unspoken motives for his near-refusal to follow the captain’s orders. ‘It’s your call. This time. See you back on Sissy later. If everything goes according to plan. Captain out.’
Ten
Calm
Richard and Bob stood a little back from the team Tom had ordered to stay aboard and oversee matters until Quebec got under way. Sissy's crewmen accepted the messenger line from the crew of the Zodiac and fed it through the curved gutter that lay wedged tightly beneath the net wrapped around the foredeck, the forward curve wedged tightly against a little protuberance standing solidly out of the foredeck itself.
Feeding the messenger through was less easy than it looked. Although the messenger was light and all the men had to do was to put their hands through the squares of net as they passed it from one side of the deck to the other, the gutter itself was under water now and only the very top of the feature it was wedged against stood solidly above the water level.
The team was cold and soaked and a great deal less than contented with their lot by the time they passed the end back to the crew of the Zodiac. Then all of them stood silently, uncertainly, watching the Zodiac pull the messenger back to the brightly lit stem of the tug. As soon as it was aboard, the tug’s motors gave an extra cough and Sissy started moving slowly away.
Richard at once became caught up in the simple seamanship of the process. Bob, too, was fascinated and they fell into an almost monosyllabic conversation which - at the very least - served to cover their gathering nervousness. Quebec remained effectively at rest while the Zodiac was pulling the messenger back to her larger mother ship, but once the big tug had it and the massive winches were employed, the net beneath their feet began to stir and tauten.
‘Watch your footing,’ said Richard, redundantly.
‘Why is he beginning to pull away?’ Bob replied irrelevantly.
‘I’d guess that if he doesn’t, then the simple physics of threading the big towline through the cradle will pull both the vessels together. Once you’re afloat there’s nothing much to stand between you and Newton’s laws of motion.’
‘So for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Yes, I see.’
The cradle screamed as the strain moved it forward a couple of centimetres across the metal of Quebec's foredeck, settling it more tightly against the upright under the steady pull of Sissy's simple refusal to drift back and close the gap the rope was being pulled across. It was a strange sound for it came through almost a metre of restless water. The net flexed further. The churning water behind Sissy's high, square stern gathered into foaming hillocks. The big red towline splashed down into the water beside them and began to snake towards them like an enormous serpent hunting the little messenger as it fled before it. The cradle screamed another centimetre or two forward, but the sound and movement were different - for it was only the outer ends that flexed. The net itself flexed further, like the fur on a shivering animal.
‘You want to go and check things further back?’ asked Richard. ‘See how well the net’s holding in place towards the stern.’
‘Yeah. I guess,’ answered Bob uncertainly. But he took the length of safety line that Richard handed him as he spoke.
And when Richard turned and started slopping back along the submarine’s length, he was quick to follow. They stopped at the conning tower and looked upwards. In the brightness of the sunset, they could see the drum-skin tautness of the net against the massive fin seem to flex and billow as the towline heaved itself up out of the water, following the messenger into the guttering like a ferret following a rabbit down a hole. On the last of the foredeck they paused, then used the line Richard had brought to tie themselves together like mountaineers ta
ckling a particularly dangerous ascent.
Richard actually took hold of the net on the side of the conning tower and used the vertical web to hold himself erect as he went round on to the afterdeck, pulling the much less confident Bob behind him. Here at first things were easier, for the deck behind the fin was flatter, squarer, wider. But then, from about three-quarters of the way down, the final quarter of the submarine sloped away down to the tangled propeller and the steering gear around it. Richard was almost up to his waist in water - and very glad of his drysuit - when he at last reached the upright fin and peered down past the after aquaplane to check on the state of the screw. The light was dying rapidly now and the whole area aft of the main fin was ghosted with shadows, just as it was chillier in its feel and haunted with strange stirrings and sea sounds. But there was enough light to see the tangle around the screw and feel with his feet how the net was solidly anchored here - as though it was a pattern on the icy hull. And he was able to make Bob up on the last square section of the afterdeck hear him when he called up the length of the safety line, ‘It’s all solid here. This lot’s never going to tear loose.’
And no sooner had he spoken than, as though to prove his words were true, the first counter-wave slapped up into his chest. He looked down, frowning with concentration as this first wave was followed by another, and a third. And then the water settled until a line of ripples started spreading away on either side into the restless sea behind him. His breastbone was creating a bow wave just about level with his heart. And he heard Bob begin to cheer as he too understood what was going on. Quebec was beginning to move.
In the last of the light, Richard hesitated at the base of Quebec's fin once again, with Bob Hudson standing at his shoulder. Both men were looking up at the ragged outline of the tower-top. Richard had hesitated in the first instance, remembering, suddenly and apropos of nothing at all, the equipment that the radio officer and his team had left up there in their hurry to return to Sissy. He and Bob might as well shin up and get what they could, he thought. The electrical stuff at the very least should not be left out here where it could get wet. As he hesitated, his walkie-talkie buzzed. It was Tom. ‘You want me to send the Zodiac back for you? Or are you going to stay with the team on the deck overseeing the tow until the end of the watch?’
‘I don’t want to come back over quite yet. I’ll call in again in half an hour or so. Are you going to leave men here all night?’
‘I haven’t decided yet. We’ll see how things go as I come up to towing speed. We’re hardly making any progress at all at the moment. I will need to talk things over with you, though.’
‘I bet you will! We have to decide where we’re actually going to tow this thing to Over.’
‘That’s easy, Richard. I’ll tow it to the man who’s paying. Over.’
‘Or to wherever the man who’s paying wants it taken. I know. Over.’
‘So, all we need to do now ...’
‘... Is find out who the hell is paying. Out.’
The climb up the fin was not as difficult as Richard had feared it might be. The netting was tight against the sub’s side but there was still purchase for fingers and toes, especially where the nets were pressed up against each other instead of the conning tower. It was hardly more difficult than climbing a long ladder. And if you didn’t look down, not too vertiginous either.
The top of the fin was surprisingly wide and seemed better lit than the main hull some three metres below. The pair then had gone up the forward edge where the hand- and foot-holds were easiest, and so the first thing they discovered was that the radio officer might well be riding for a greater fall than even Richard had suspected. The net had been cut in the very place that Tom had forbidden. It was held in place by the backward-sloping metal that had once contained a glass windscreen - now shattered and gone. Behind this, enough of the strands had been cut to allow easy access to the safe, secure, steady and most of all dry little cockpit. Here, clearly, the radio officer and his team had gathered to work on the dead radio lines reaching down into the shadowed mystery of the conning tower below. The missing equipment was piled on the sole of the cockpit. There was quite a bit of it, though it made a neat little tower and left the majority of the area free.
Richard was in the lead so he shinned over the edge and dropped into the cockpit first. He crossed to the equipment at once and by the time Bob joined him he had pulled out a huge flashlight and was shining it around. The first thing he did was to shine it down to see if he could make out whether Quebec was moving rapidly enough to be coming back up to the surface once again. If it was, then there was the possibility of getting her people out through the deck hatches once power was restored. But no: the waves were still breaking over her. Power or no power, the instant a deck hatch opened, the Atlantic would pour in and fill the submarine long before anyone could escape. Richard paused for an instant, fascinated as always by the physics he was dealing with. The water level was only a few centimetres above the hatch level. But it was the water level of the whole Atlantic Ocean, North and South: from Cape Farewell to Hope Bay. From Greenland to Antarctica. And those few tiny centimetres represented sufficient volume to fill a million or so Quebecs.
And then as always, Richard’s grasshopper mind skipped once again to an arcane piece of knowledge only very distantly related to his original thought. What was it that film producers Lew Grade or Dino de Laurentiis had said of the movie Raise the Titanic! ‘Raise the Titanic? It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic . ..’ An observation unfortunately accurate now. If they couldn’t raise Quebec by twenty centimetres or so, then they would indeed begin to lower the Atlantic the moment they opened the hatches.
But, now he thought of it, there was something else that had been niggling at the back of his mind. Now what was that?......?
‘Have you tried the hatch?’ asked Bob with unconscious relevance as he too scrambled into the cockpit.
‘No,’ answered Richard, abruptly swinging the bright beam of the powerful torch inboard. ‘Where is it?’
‘Here.’ Bob was on one knee, his fingers threading themselves through a deceptively tiny handle in the deck. It flipped up, lifting a larger section which in turn revealed a larger handle immediately beneath. ‘Stand back,’ ordered Bob and Richard saw in the brightness of the beam the black lines that defined the edges of a hatch. Bob took the second handle and began to turn it. There was a hiss of releasing pressure and the hatch lifted up.
The first thing Richard was aware of was the stench. It was a deeply disturbing - distressing - amalgam of human waste and sickness, chemical effluent, engine oil, smoke and fire. But beyond that, there was something else mixed into it as well. Something more difficult to define. Next, he became aware of the absolute blackness within the throat of the hatch itself. The cockpit contained some brightness still from the darkening dome of the stained-glass sky. But that black square contained no light. Seemed to soak up light, indeed, like the uncharted vastness of interstellar space. Like black holes. Richard shone the torch beam down as much in a sense of self-protection as in one of natural enquiry. And the bright halogen beam chopped through the shadows to show that Bob’s fears had been all too accurate. There were half a dozen vertical rungs below the hatch standing white and regimented in the light. Then the shaft down which they reached twisted out of line. Folded in on itself. Bent. Closed. It would need a closer inspection to be certain, but it looked at first glance to Richard as though they would need some serious kit to get into the submarine that way.
Or, come to that, to get anyone trapped down there out.
But no sooner had the thought come into Richard’s head than the whole fabric of the vessel around him seemed to stir. He staggered a little and flashed the torch beam over the side to see if the net was slipping. But no. It all seemed securely in place.
It was only when he glanced back, his quick eyes moving faster than the torch itself, that he understood. For the shaft down into the conning tower was
no longer utterly black. There was light down there. Distant and insubstantial, perhaps - a spectral thing rather than a strong beam. But it was there. And, with it, a pulsing grumble of power restored. A sighing hiss of air circulation breathing once more.
And Richard, almost entranced by the complex of experiences and emotions he was feeling, did the most obvious thing of all. ‘Hello, Quebec!’ he called. ‘Can anybody down there hear me?’ He had no sense of doing anything momentous at that moment. No thought that he might be a messenger of hope in a desperately dangerous situation. ‘Hello, Quebec,' he called again.
‘Hello yourself,’ came the distant reply. ‘Are you the guy who’s been tapping on my hull?’
‘One of them,’ answered Richard. ‘There’s quite a few of us out here trying to help you.’
‘Well, that’s fine and dandy,’ came the distant reply. ‘And very welcome under the circumstances. Especially if you are Richard Mariner and you have come aboard from Sissy.'
There was an infinitesimal pause as Richard assimilated all the implications of the stranger’s words, formulated his reply and inserted the next piece of good news of his own, his voice trembling with relief and simple joy. ‘I am Richard Mariner and Sissy has a line aboard you that seems to be all that’s keeping you afloat. I assume you have my wife Robin down there with you. I have your first officer here with me. We’re trying to find a way in...’
‘No!’ came the instant reply. ‘Whatever else you’re doing, you’d best stay out of here! Bob, you hear me, this is Mark and that’s an order. You tell them to stay out of Quebec! I’ve a bad situation down here that I want to keep the lid on. And I mean keep the lid on tight!’