by Peter Tonkin
Paolo lingered at the doorway with the cunning of a beast, sniffing the air and panting silently. All he could hear were water noises and pumps. But then, carried by the strange acoustics of the twisted mess within the fin above the conning tower, came a voice. A voice from on high. A voice from outside.
‘Hello, Quebec! Can anybody down there hear me? Hello, Quebec!
Paolo could certainly hear him. He looked up with wild, almost worshipping eyes. And there, immediately above his head, was a shaft leading directly upwards to the forward escape hatch. Paolo dropped the gun and the cleaver. He leaped on to the rungs and swarmed up them in an instant. The hatch cover, like the one that Robin had opened, was a domed circle with a round release handle at its centre. Paolo twisted it open, gasping and grunting like the animal he had become. He heard the bolts sliding back. He heaved with all his might. The hatch began to open.
And the cascade of water that resulted knocked the stunned man off his perch. Head over heels he tumbled downwards, and only by the grace of God did he manage to catch at one of the lower rungs to slow his descent. So that, in the centre of a wild cascade of water, he landed safely on the deck of weapons stowage. In a panic, he grabbed the cleaver and the gun and hurled himself through the heavy bulkhead door. Slipping and sliding wildly on the wet deck, he nevertheless managed to close the door behind him and secure it. Then he picked up his weapons once again and ran for the nearest refuge.
Paolo burst into the head and shower area. It was empty and silent. There were stalls along one wall. Beyond these there were several showers - uncharacteristically roomy - uniquely aboard the submarine. There were towels on rails opposite their doors. Paolo hesitated. He simply did not know where to ran next. Strangely, the brightness - such as it was - seemed to have robbed him of the certainty, the initiative he had been able to access in the darkness. He was in any case lost and a little confused. He had come so near to freeing himself - only to be so cruelly hurled back down into his nightmare once again. The voices had betrayed him - though in his current state he hardly understood the concept of betrayal. All he felt under the bewilderment was a seething volcano of rage and hatred, companion to the uncontrollable animal panic. He took a step or two nearer to the shower stall. He hesitated once again, for some reason looking upwards.
The door behind Paolo opened. He walked forward once again, grabbing a towel as he stepped into the nearest hiding place. He needed the towel to hide what he was carrying. The nearest hideout was a shower stall.
So that Engineering Sub-Lieutenant Gupta, coming into the head for a much-needed leak on his way to check the forward pumps, saw only what one might expect to see in such a place: a naked man holding a bath towel going into a shower stall. The illusion was made yet more credible for the moment by the thunder of cascading water that was echoing through the place. Gupta kicked the three-quarter- length stall door wide and spread his legs against the slope of the deck. He unbuttoned the lower buttons of his overall and called to the man in the shower next door. ‘Hey, you in the shower...’ He hoisted himself out and added to the sounds of falling water as he continued his one-sided conversation. ‘You’ll be lucky if that water’s hot,’ he bellowed cheerfully. ‘We’ve only just got twenty per cent of power to the lights, pumps, air-con and life support - hatches and so forth. And lucky to get that. There won’t be anything other than lukewarm water anywhere outside the galley until we get into dock and do some serious repairs.’
As last words went, they were neither insightful nor memorable, but that was all Gupta got. He was looking down to tuck himself away and so he failed to see Paolo’s shadow. Under the sounds of the pumps and the cascading water, he never heard the naked footfall.
The blunt side of Paolo’s meat cleaver broke his neck in almost exactly the same place as Paolo’s elbow had broken Annie Blackfeather’s neck at the start. But from the opposite side, of course. The effect was just the same, though. Gupta went down like a felled tree. But there the similarity in the incidents ended. For Paolo had grown more cunning if no less desperate in the interim. This time he did not need to batter anyone’s face in. This time he had a plan. And the plan had come with the realization that, like Adam in Eden, he was naked.
Paolo put down the gun and the cleaver. He pulled the flaccid body out on to the floor. Here he stripped off Gupta’s overalls and footwear, dressing himself with feverish haste. Then, grunting with the effort, he sat the dead engineer on the toilet and locked them both in the cubicle. Then he dropped to his knees and wriggled out from under the three- quarter-length door. He picked up the gun and the cleaver and took a towel that would cover them. He hesitated for just an instant, then he took another towel and slung it casually, unremarkably, round his neck - so that, almost by coincidence, it covered his face from the eyes down, exactly like a mask.
Sixteen
Wait
Had Richard not waited in the cockpit, trying to inveigle Mark Robertson into something like a decision on the matter of towage terms, then the tow would have ended a great deal sooner than either of them calculated. But he did wait, insisting that he should be at least made fully conversant with every possible detail of the situation aboard. Making absolutely certain that Captain Robertson was ensuring one hundred per cent the safety of Robin - even if no one else could be protected to the same degree.
Then Richard waited a little longer, allowing Bob Hudson a word or two with his commanding officer in the certainty that Captain Robertson would want his first officer to contact Halifax from Sissy and begin some kind of negotiation in the face of his own temporary inability to do so.
As Bob and Mark requested some perfectly reasonable privacy, Richard looked back over the gaping ruin of the fin-top as the night fell properly, and he thought. At first, he thought how he would be surprised if even Sissy's radio officer could do much to fix that lot. Immediately, he decided that he must make arrangements to bring a big transmitter over, if Sissy had a portable one aboard. Then they could drop the microphone on a long lead down the hole that Bob and his commander were talking through. But that would do for the morning, he thought. If he didn’t get some sleep soon he would doze off where he stood. What a day! One way or another it seemed to have exhausted him so thoroughly that even Robin’s doubly dangerous situation would hardly have him awake and worrying.
Mind you, he thought, almost dreamily, that was a situation that shouldn’t be beyond Robin to keep under some kind of control. She had faced down many a deadly danger in the past - from the Russian Mafia smuggling women across the Great Lakes to assassins who blew her up in London. He realized with something of a start that, surprised - overwhelmed - as he had been by her sudden disappearance from Sissy, he had never actually believed that she was gone for ever. That she could ever actually be dead and gone. He guessed that must always be the way of it - until bitter experience came and taught you the terrible truth. Eventually there would come a situation that one or other of them couldn’t handle. There would come a day when one or other didn’t come back at all. There would come a night - first of many, perhaps, when the bed would be half empty and far too big. When the huge old house at Amberley would have too many rooms and too many memories - unless the twins were home. When the days and the nights would be forever far, far too long. For one of them or the other.
But then, suddenly Bob broke into his exhausted and uncharacteristically depressing train of thought. ‘The captain says your wife can have a place in any command of his at any time, Richard. She’s the perfect lieutenant - a damn sight better than me!’ He gave a wry laugh. ‘I guess the old boy’s getting tired and stressed out over this. Hardly surprising, really! He says he’s had enough for one day, anyway.’
‘Haven’t we all!’ laughed Richard.
But then, as he and Bob finally gave up and let the harassed captain return to his crisis management, Richard paused one last time and waited a moment longer to elicit the gruff and hurried promise that he would be able to speak to his wife first
thing in the morning - or even sooner in the unlikely event that Quebec got her communications back up. That was the best that even he could manage under the circumstances. It was by no means satisfactory, but, as with the tow, Mark Robertson’s hands were tied by powers far beyond his control. In this case, circumstances, thought Richard wryly - which effectively bound them all. Then he straightened, turned and prepared to climb down the netting on to the benighted foredeck.
The foredeck was literally benighted now, and should have been almost as dark as the inner areas of the sub had been for most of today. But Sissy was shining her big aft-mounted arc lights on her tow. It was usual procedure - certainly on Tom Hollander’s commands; especially if he had people over there.
The forward watch had gone now that the tow was bedded home in the guttering and pulling effectively. The officers on the bridge would keep an eye out of that conveniently aft-facing window as part of their formal watches; all they needed was light enough to see by.
And the effect of the lights was of crucial importance. For they were low enough to seem almost parallel to the surface of the sea. This made the dazzling blades of their beams delineate every whorl and ripple, every web of foam and spindrift, on the surfaces of the waves that were sluggishly washing over the submarine’s still half-submerged hull. They also showed something that had been coming and going on and off all afternoon. Under the icy breath of the fitful breeze swinging northward now the sun was down, the water was gently steaming. There was not enough to make a fog bank yet, but it might well thicken up before morning, especially under light airs. It might have been thick enough even now to conceal what was going on. But, because of his position, Richard could see what the lights revealed almost as though he were looking down upon the lines on a living chart.
He half caught the first sign out of the corner of his eye. Where another man - especially one as physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted as he - would have shrugged it away, Richard paused. Bob Hudson collided with him, not a lot more compos mentis than Richard himself. ‘What?’ he demanded, as grumpy as a teenager roused early.
‘That’s what I was wondering,’ said Richard. ‘What is that down there?’
A wave washed up like oil, slow, black and gleaming in the arc lights. It rolled across the deck immediately in front of the fin, and as it did so - just as it reached the very apex of its sluggish passage over the boat, so it gave a strange kind of twist. The sleek black back was suddenly marked with a rash of white. The rash assumed a circular shape as though the water had developed ringworm or meningitis. A circle of lines appeared abruptly, seeming to contain the whiteness, controlling it into more compact roundness as they slid inwards with some strange and sinister purpose of their own.
‘What’s that?’ asked Bob, befuddled.
‘What’s there!' asked Richard more forcefully, a cold finger seeming to trace itself down his spine.
‘What? What d’you mean?’
‘What’s there? On the hull? What is underneath that disturbance, Bob?’
‘The forward escape hatch. Oh dear God! The forward escape hatch! It must be open! Christ!’
‘It can’t be wide open or the water would be going down there like Niagara Falls. We may have time to put things right. You tell the captain. I’ll go down and see if I can shut it. Then you get down and help me if need be.’
‘Aye aye!’ answered Bob sincerely, snapped into full wakefulness by something in Richard’s tone as effectively as if he had just been given a cold shower.
A cold shower was the last thing in the world that Richard wanted, but of course that was what he was effectively going to get. He swung down the front of the fin as swiftly as he was able and slopped across the deck. A couple of big steps were sufficient. Then he was on his knees, with the blackness of the ocean washing almost to his waist. He pushed his hands elbow-deep into the back of the next wave, groping through the weave of the net for the hatch cover and the mechanism that would allow him to close it.
Bubbles ticked distractingly up the arms of his suit, on the inside above the flaring cuffs, warning that his pullover was soaking almost to the shoulder already. The strange lines of the micro-currents, swirling like tap water down a plughole, sought to pull his fingers into the jaws of the partly open hatch. His hands became almost as difficult to control as a beach-ball in seaside surf. And even when they found what they were looking for, they could not force the cover closed.
‘Is there some kind of a trick to this?’ demanded Richard hoarsely as Bob slopped up beside him, sending a wall of foam into his face.
‘From what the captain says, the trick needs to be restoring a hundred per cent power.’ Bob splashed down beside Richard. More water in his face, much of it down his neck - to meet the bubbling surface under the waterproof sleeves somewhere near his biceps. Everything underneath the suit was absolutely wringing wet now. He had an instantaneous thought that he could hardly have got wetter if he had just gone in for a swim. Then Bob’s hands were beside his own, and the young first officer added a little explanation to this cryptic opening. ‘The hatches are controlled by servo motors meant to balance the weight. Smaller and lighter than actual counter-weights, of course. But with power at only twenty per cent, we have to do eighty per cent of the work ourselves. And that may just be more than we can handle.’
‘We need someone down there helping from the other side,’ said Richard tersely. ‘We’ll never get it closed on our own from up here.’
‘We do indeed. And if the areas below aren’t almost fully flooded already, then we need them there before they are.’
‘Someone strong and quick thinking,’ said Richard.
‘Someone up for a cold shower,’ added Bob.
And the words came like a revelation to Richard. For cold as the water was, it was nowhere near as icy as it should have been. That was what the little wisps of mist had been trying to tell him all afternoon - but he had simply been too preoccupied to see their message. And it might be a crucially important message too. Warmer water meant they were out of the Arctic flow for the moment - where the water was icy, below freezing in some areas, only kept liquid by the salt and a great deal thicker than the average for the Atlantic as a whole. Instead they were in the out-wash of the Gulf Stream, where the water was warmer and a good deal thinner. Quebec should have been sitting high, like a swimmer in the Dead Sea, supported by the element sufficiently strongly to be able to read a paper while he floated. Instead she was like a child in a municipal swimming pool looking for some water-wings. How much difference could the two types of water make to Quebec's chances of survival? Until they had a definite destination for this tow, perhaps they had better set a course up towards Cape Farewell and search out some thicker Arctic water that would make the sinking submarine just a little more buoyant for a while. He had better check with Tom Hollander as soon as he got back to Sissy ...
But then he realized ruefully that worrying about salinity, water temperature and specific gravity was all almost obscurely theoretical. Not to mention considering setting a course for anywhere, let alone for Cape Farewell. Because, unless they got the hatch cover closed at once, Quebec would be lost long before he even got back to Sissy. And, he realized for the first time and with a considerable shock, there was an outside chance that the sinking sub would pull the tug down with it unless they were very quick-thinking indeed with their cable-handling.
But then he put all such abstruse speculation firmly out of his mind and concentrated on the task that was all too literally in hand.
Seventeen
Love
With Bob Hudson off the boat and Leif Hunter in the sickbay, Lieutenant Luc Pellier was effectively first officer. Furthermore, as the vessel was under tow, his duties as sonar officer were effectively surplus to requirement. It was Luc Pellier, therefore, who was ordered by his increasingly harassed captain to take the biggest, strongest team that he could find and go and close the forward escape hatch. To do it bloody quickly bef
ore it was too late - if it wasn’t too late already. And then to try and find out which lunatic son of a bitch had opened the thing in the first place.
Though as far as Luc was concerned, the way the captain phrased the final order almost certainly contained the identity of the guilty party - or the captain’s strong suspicion as to what it was. All the way up to the bulkhead door, the nervous officer kept his hands in his pockets, just in case. Though he was himself half convinced that the lunatic stowaway might still be in weapons stowage too far gone in his madness to remember how to open doors.
Although Luc’s orders were specific - take the biggest and the strongest - they were not absolutely clear in one important regard. They didn’t say take only the biggest and the strongest. So that when the other stranger, the one who called herself Captain Robin Mariner, decided to attach herself to the group that he was leading, bringing the useful, resourceful and reliable Leading Seaman Li with her, Luc was content to let her have her way.