Blue Blood

by Peter Tonkin

  The other stranger, out of place and getting bored with following the captain around, was the one most likely to empathize with Paolo. And Robin certainly had the intelligence and insight. And perhaps, on an almost spiritual level, she was beginning to do so, for she too was seeking tight spaces that might lead to a quick way out. One of the things that had struck her most about Lieutenant Hunter was his size. And the team he had taken hunting with him - soul-mates all - were not small men. Looking around the crew as Captain Robertson had been addressing them, she had been struck by the fact that, for the crew of a submarine, there was a surprising lack of short and slight people here. She was certainly the slimmest and one of the shortest here - though she stood a solid five foot eight inches. Narrow-eyed, she looked for someone of her own build. And, as the captain dismissed his less than cheery command, she found what she was looking for. He was clearly of an Asiatic background - Filipino at a guess. He had a mature face but the body of a boy. He would have made an excellent jockey, she thought. He would certainly make a good companion for someone planning to worm her way as far up the fin above the conning tower as she could get, opening whatever hatches she could reach. For whoever was outside the vessel now, prowling around on the decks and tapping randomly, would be bound to check the main hatch there - especially if, as Robin acutely suspected, all the hatches in the main hull were awash.

  ‘Excuse me, sailor, my name is Captain Robin Mariner, British merchant marine and Heritage Mariner shipping. May I ask your name and rank, please?’

  The long eyes looked at her askance. But she had come in at the captain’s shoulder and she had explained there was a tug probably coming. Perhaps even here now. She was much more attractive than any of the other women aboard. He was willing to be civil at the least. Particularly as the brusque manner in which she shook his hand made her chest move in an appealingly liquid and unsupported manner. Especially as she had managed to acquire that badge of truly elevated status - a torch. ‘Leading Seaman Li, Captain. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Who is your commanding officer?’

  ‘Lieutenant Pellier, sonar.’

  ‘I see. You don’t have immediate sonar duties?’

  ‘No, Captain. My section is assigned to guard duty, I believe.’

  ‘Excellent. With your permission, Leading Seaman Li, I will ask Lieutenant Pellier if he can assign you to guard me. Then we’ll explain to the captain exactly what I propose to do with you. And we’ll see if we can scare up an extra torch to help you.’ Once she promised a torch, he was hers body and soul - and would have been, even had she been built like the back end of a pot-bellied pig.

  And so Leading Seaman Li found himself following Robin up through the vertical shaft above the conning tower so lately vacated by Lieutenant Hunter as she eased herself through the constriction that had excluded the large lieutenant. But she only achieved this at the cost of receiving some discomfort to her bosom and, unconsciously, of giving some pleasure - and the first of many intimately lewd thoughts - to Leading Seaman Li.

  Like Hunter, Robin went first. She pushed the torch up through the narrow section, followed by her arms, extended upwards as though she were performing some kind of a dive. Her shoulders slipped through as her legs pushed her body up the ladder. Li placed her feet safely on the rungs she could no longer see, and this was particularly welcome when her breasts, unsupported by any underwear but elevated by the reaching of her arms, became crushed against the rungs that she was facing. The metal at her back seemed to be pushing tighter, as though she was caught in a massive pair of pliers. But sheer bloody-minded badness, as her mother used to say, forced her onward and upward. While Li, below, shone his torch up at the straining seat of her overalls, suddenly made all too clearly - and pleasurably - aware that she was not wearing any more underwear below than she was wearing above.

  Immediately above the constriction was a hatchway. As Robin reached up to spin the handle that opened it, Seaman Li came up close behind her, sliding through the narrowness like a snake exploring a rat hole. The deck above was strangely tilted, almost folded. Had it been made of anything other than metal, it would have cracked or split. But it was metal - so it had folded. The hatch sat in it at a crazy angle and Robin suspected that all that was holding it closed were the bolts operated by the circular handle in the centre of its slightly domed shape. And she was right. As soon as she span it, the bolts grated back out of their sockets and the round portal began to creak open.

  The hatch was heavy but at least it was counterweighted and designed to open slowly even when the power was off, so Robin was able to push it until it swung wide. Then she pulled herself up through it with a strange kind of a twisting motion, well suited to the strange environment they were moving through. For, instead of pulling herself directly upwards, Robin had to bend - as the deck head above her had bent - through the better part of fifty degrees.

  Seaman Li followed suit, his mind full of appreciative memories of the effect her sinuous movement had had on the tightness of her clothing. He found Robin sitting hunched in a strangely twisted area, better suited to an old-fashioned fairground than a modem submarine. The hatch itself hung wide and one glance warned the experienced submariner that it would never close again without the employment of levers or pulleys. For the full weight of the metal hatch was hanging directly from its hinge, and what should have been a flat deck for it to sit upon was a kind of metal wave frozen in the act of breaking. But what had gone up had also gone down. The metal floor had folded away from the forward wall of the room, and had torn the ladder away with it. The upper hatch into the cockpit seemed square and undamaged but neither of them stood any hope of reaching it, even had either been able to stand upon the hatch-handle of the solid little escape pod whose movement forward - levered by the snorkel or the periscope within the fin - had done much of this damage. Even had she stood upon his shoulders - which she was most welcome indeed to do - or had he stood on hers, the hatch would still have been well out of their reach. So that, regretfully, was that.

  ‘We should go back now,’ Li observed quietly. ‘We can go no further. There is no point in just waiting on the chance someone will open the hatch above.’

  ‘You’re right, Mr Li,’ she answered, her voice a little deadened. They had seemingly achieved so little. They may even had made things worse; certainly that hatch was never going to close again. Robin took a deep breath and thankfully failed to notice the added sparkle that this brought to her companion’s eyes.

  ‘I’ll go first, then,’ said Seaman Li with an unexpected cheeriness that she was utterly at a loss to explain.

  But, even as Li was standing beneath the constricted section looking upward almost ecstatically at Robin’s attempts to wriggle down without doing further damage to her chest, a strange unearthly screaming rang through the entire vessel. And all of a sudden it became obvious that her whole attitude and motion were undergoing some kind of a change.

  The creature that had once been Paolo Ursini had followed the footsteps along the deck, almost oozing from place to place immediately below the casing. As Robin twisted her hips above the appreciative Li, preoccupied with the twin discomforts of a snagged button at chest level and a cuttingly invasive - not to say divisive - seam somewhat further down, so Paolo reached the point at which the deck just forward of the main access hatch joined the aft of the fin. With his face touching the underside of the casing deck and his head touching the foundation of the tower wall, the effect of the metallic screaming was doubly intensified in his already spinning skull. And, at the moment the screaming started, Paolo’s torch beam flickered and rapidly began to die.

  It was only the sound of Sissy's metal guttering sliding home as the messenger pulled the towline into place, but to Paolo it was the Heavenly Choir and the voice of God all rolled into one. With feverish speed, he followed the fast-fading beam of his torch across to the sharp-etched telltale pattern of a grille. The grille was solid and by no means designed for people t
o come or go through. But then again, neither was it designed to stand against Solingen-steel meat cleavers. Moments later Paolo was down in the passageways immediately behind the conning tower itself. As he landed in the blackness of the passageway his torch beam died at last. He threw the dead thing aside with no thought and swung round, searching, his eyes as wide as his drooling, gasping mouth in the suffocating darkness. He was actually at a kind of crossroads. The passage he was in led forward past the control room and back towards the engine room. Lateral passageways also led into the AMS section and into the control area itself. It was, in fact, one of the busiest sections of the vessel, even under these circumstances. Had Paolo waited long enough, almost everyone aboard would have come past him. It must have been blind chance, therefore, which dictated that it was Leif Hunter first. And, in the utter blackness of that lightless place, Leif’s tactical light was a telltale giveaway that warned Paolo someone was approaching long before the little hunting patrol was anywhere near him. With the cunning of a wounded tiger, Paolo stepped noiselessly back into the pitch black of the cross-passage, and watched as the brightness silently approached. If he was actually thinking anything, it was that there was a torch coming. And he wanted a torch. Of course he could not know that the bright beam originated just in front of a trigger-guard and immediately below the barrel of a SIG-Sauer P226 automatic pistol.

  If Leif Hunter made any mistakes, then they were the opposite of the errors his father and grandfather had spent so much time and effort warning him against. He did not allow his concentration to falter, even though he and his team had been from one end of the vessel to the other three times now without seeing hide nor hair of their quarry. He did not vary his pace, but proceeded slowly and with the maximum care.

  He did not allow himself or his men to become sloppy in spite of the tedium of the hunt. On the contrary, he kept the concept of his quarry very vividly in his mind. And if there was an error, then this was it. For, during the seeming eternity of the hunt, that mental picture had indeed began to assume the power, the presence, the physical size, the almost human cunning and unlooked-for reasoning ability of the most dangerous grizzly bear. As Leif approached the crossroads in the tunnel, therefore, he unconsciously set his sights high and planned for some deviously cunning trap.

  So that when this scrawny little bald guy, more like a chimp than a bear, just stepped out of the utter blackness round a comer, grabbed hold of the gun and chopped off his hand to get it, it was absolutely and utterly the last thing Leif was expecting.

  Paolo, on the other hand, had no idea what he had really done. He whirled and ran away forward into the darkness past the control room under the conning tower towards the heads and showers there and the weapons-storage area beyond. His head was filled with the need to answer that heavenly, screaming summons. As he scurried forward, he fumbled with the strangely clumsy torch that he had found, consumed simply with following the brightness of its beam. Utterly oblivious of the facts that behind the torch lay an extremely deadly and powerful gun, fully loaded with fifteen 9mm bullets. Or that, still maintaining the tightest possible grip upon the gun, was the severed hand of Lieutenant Leif Hunter.

  Fifteen

  Power

  News of what had happened to Lieutenant Hunter went through Quebec as fast as the Atlantic water would have if the forward bulkheads had failed, as fast as the realization that the submarine was under some kind of control and beginning to move more purposely forward. But the relief brought by one piece of news was utterly undermined by the other. Especially as Quebec was not yet moving under her own power, could not yet start the pumps needed to ensure the Atlantic did not in fact break in and remained in total darkness except for the torches. And this was especially worrying as there was now no way to distinguish a torch beam from a flashlight in the hands of a friend from a tactical light on a 9mm automatic in the hands of a madman.

  Not until it was too late, at any rate.

  Robin received the news as she and the strangely attentive Seaman Li were making her report to Captain Robertson. He of course received the news directly on his walkie-talkie from two separate sources. From Hunter’s understandably shocked right-hand man, who reported the instant the incident had happened, to say, among other things, that his position was now redundant. And five minutes later from Doc Watson to report that he believed he could save the lieutenant’s life in spite of the shock and blood-loss. But saving his hand, even if they could find it, was beyond his capability or indeed any likelihood that he could see.

  Cometh the hour, cometh the man, thought Robin as she saw the steely glint appear in Mark Robertson’s eye, and the commanding squaring of his chin. Suddenly he looked a lot less like Santa Claus. ‘Right,’ said Quebec's captain. ‘The priorities have to stay the same. We’ll have to hope the guards will at least give warning if this madman shows up, but we cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by anything - no matter how disturbing. The only way out of this that I can see is to restore light and power. Even if we’re somehow coming under way so that the likelihood of losing the vessel is lessened, we still have to secure the safety of our people.’ ‘If you’re under tow, you’d better start planning what you’re going to say to the first man that speaks to you,’ said Robin. ‘With any luck at all it’ll be my husband Richard Mariner and his tug Sissy will have got her line aboard you first. But I warn you, if it is Richard, he’ll be looking to drive a hard bargain with you or your masters in Halifax. He’s a man who’s used to power and he likes to get what he thinks he deserves. You’d better be clear in your mind just exactly what you’re going to say to him.’

  ‘I’m going to say thanks a bunch but stay the hell out of my submarine until it’s all secure,’ said Mark decisively. ‘No one comes aboard to muddy up the water until Psycho Bob is under guard or ready to go underground. Not even your husband, Captain: even if we do owe him our lives.’

  ‘Wise enough. But then?’

  ‘I’m going to say he’s talking to the wrong end of the pecking order. He likes power? Then he needs to talk to someone with some power to make decisions - or at least to someone who has some clear and relevant orders from someone who has made some decisions. So there’s no use talking salvage to me till I’ve had a good long chat to Navy Ops in Halifax - who will then refer me on to MARLANT HQ and they’ll tell me to chew the good old fat with Admiral John Julius Pike. And they don’t call him “Long John” Pike behind his back because he’s missing a leg. Pike would as soon part with the navy’s money as a pirate would part with Flint’s treasure. So for once I won’t be the only sorry bastard caught between a rock and a hard place.’

  ‘Looks like the fun and games are only just beginning, then,’ said Robin drily.

  ‘You’d better believe it, lady,’ answered Mark.

  And as he spoke, the power came back on.

  The first thing they were aware of was the light. One moment it was remarkable by its utter absence. The next it was there, all through the entire submarine, as though somewhere God Himself had spoken. Well, perhaps whispered rather than spoken - for the light was only at about twenty per cent power and was spectrally pale and thin. But it was light. It was there. It was, in fact, almost everywhere.

  Then the air-con started breathing, blowing the stench and the smell of burning all around the vessel in draughts and breezes that brought neither freshness nor - as yet - warmth. Then, as the last metallic scream from the foredeck announced the 80mm tow rope bedding home, the pumps grumbled into life and the big old frame began to throb. The tilt on the deck grew noticeably shallower at once. The rolling of the hull became more noticeable as she sat higher in the water - but the pitching remained nonexistent as her bow was no longer at liberty to rise and fall. And indeed, thought Robin cheerfully, it would not have any play to do so until the submarine’s hull began to move more easily through the water as the tow got properly under way.

  Mark Robertson gave a grin that flashed with almost piratical grimness. ‘Ri
ght,’ he said. ‘That’s more like it. Now we can really get to work!’ He crossed to the communications area and depressed the All Hail. The NOW HEAR THIS rang through the vessel and he spoke. ‘This is the Captain. Thanks to Commander La Barbe and his people for a job well done. Chief, I know you won’t want to rest on your laurels and you’ll have a list of priorities as long as your arm, but can you release Lieutenant Chen to me, please? I need the communications fixed because I have to talk to Halifax. If Captain Mariner’s right - and she’s been bang on the money so far - then someone’s going to be knocking on the door at any moment now demanding to know how much this old tub is worth! And it’ll likely as not be her husband, who by all accounts is a power to be reckoned with.’

  * * *

  Robin felt oddly excluded from the sudden upsurge in everyone’s spirits. Now there really was nothing obvious for her to do. Now, suddenly, she had leisure to wonder whether or not it really was Richard who had taken Quebec under tow - or whether there was some other tug out there off Cape Farewell and Richard, with everyone else on Sissy, was actually at the bottom of the sea. Preoccupied, and for once lacking that almost mystical link that allowed her to read Richard’s mind and surmise his intentions and whereabouts, she drifted away from the conning tower at precisely the same time as he was climbing the fin outside. By the time he had reached the cockpit she was halfway back to the infirmary, unable to think of anywhere she would be of more immediate use than there. By the time he was opening the uppermost hatch, she was lingering in the infirmary doorway. And when Richard started his conversation with the forewarned Captain Robertson, she was deep in conversation with Doc Watson, offering to help him with Lieutenant Hunter’s arm.

  Paolo sat in the dim twenty per cent brightness of the weapons-storage space looking down at Lieutenant Hunter’s hand. Or rather, what the hand was holding. Just as the returning of the light had brought hope to everyone else on the vessel, it had brought a change to Paolo as well. He now realized why the torch he had taken had felt so strange. And, gripped by psychopathic hysteria though he still might be, he wasn’t so mad that he couldn’t recognize a gun. The booming of the captain’s voice came and went throughout the boat. It didn’t impact on Paolo at all because it came from inside, from below. He was only interested - fixated, still - by what was above. By what was outside. He slowly released the lieutenant’s marble-white fingers and replaced their cold grasp on the grip with his own. He hefted the cleaver in his left hand and he began to retrace his steps to the bulkhead door into the place. So heavy and stiff that Leif, unknown to Paolo, had thought he could never open it on his own. So heavy and stiff that the last of Leif’s patrol - unknown to either hunter or hunted - had failed to secure it again. A chargeable - almost a court-martial - offence.