Blue Blood

by Peter Tonkin

  And these were not your average Yokohama fenders either, fine though those pieces of kit were. For the specialized work that Sissy undertook, Yokohama had produced a specialized fender. It was twice the usual size and therefore of greatly enhanced capacity. Enhanced capacity, of course, meant enhanced buoyancy. It was just a case of deploying it.

  Richard pulled his headpiece into place and adjusted the setting on his compressed-air tank. Here we go again, he thought. ‘ Right! ’ he said to his buddy Herbert - and to anyone else who was listening. ‘Let’s go!’

  Richard had not come empty handed, for he needed to do some measuring if his plans were going to have a realistic chance of fitting in with the calculator-generated accuracy of Herbert’s mates in Sissy’s engineering section. He hung against the starboard side of the still vessel, therefore, and took the forward edge of the net-wrapped hydroplane as his first point of reference. Here he anchored a waterproof measure and took out the first of his waterproof pencils and his diver’s pad. He had swapped his beloved Rolex for a digital diver’s watch which promised to keep going long after he sank without trace and drowned in the depths. It also had a calculator function chunky enough to be workable with gloved or numbed fingers.

  With Herbert’s help Richard quickly established that it was just less than six metres from the leading edge of the hydroplane to the open jaw of the damaged bow. A few more minutes’ activity established that it was fractionally less on the port side. Here, Richard extended his examination aft to include the width of the hydroplane itself in his calculations. And that gave him another metre to play with, say seven in all - and near enough the same from the bottom of the hydroplane to the foredeck.

  The fenders would crowd together at the surface, but they could be expected to sit two deep if need be, thought Richard, increasingly consumed by his plans and calculations. If he anchored the first one at the very edge of the damage, then it would sit one metre in front of the central anchor point and one metre behind. He could start with four two-metre fenders against the side itself, therefore, anchoring them two metres apart, each anchor-point halfway along the fender’s length. There would be some extra room around the hydroplane perhaps, but that would be all to the good. And the two anchorage points initially would be seven metres apart vertically. He saw no reason why he should not plan for three more anchorage points at seven and a half metres down, placed precisely between the first ones, like seats in a cinema or theatre. Seven fenders a side - that should exert several tons of upward pressure. Enough to make all the difference, surely. But the vision he had so recently entertained of his visits to Goodman Richard made him think of something else as well...

  ‘Right, Herbert,’ he said decisively. ‘Let’s get the chief into the Zodiac, shall we?’

  Chief Christian Jaeger insisted on checking all of Richard’s proposals with a minuteness that could only be described as Teutonic. But at least it had the considerable benefit of carrying a great deal of weight when he announced himself satisfied. As though Richard had had a design accepted by BMW or Mercedes-Benz; to be a part of his beloved if less than perfectly British Bentley Continental or of the 400+kph Bugatti Veyron that Volkswagen made.

  Once Chief Jaeger said, ‘Yes,’ then it really was full steam ahead. And the first thing Richard did was to relinquish his suit to a real working diver and go and have a shower. The retaining lines were rigged on the sub’s sides precisely on Richard’s marks between the aft edge of the hydroplane and the rear of the damaged section by lunchtime - four at seven metres vertical, three between at seven and a half on the port and the same on the starboard.

  Threaded on each rope was a stainless-steel ring that would slide easily up and down it and to which the ring attached to the fender would clip. At the bottom of each vertical rope was the pulley through which the line would lead in from the towing bar and up to the ring on the fender when it was in place. And it was here that Richard became involved so directly once again. He threw himself back in the Zodiac and powered across for a further talk with the chief. Then the number-crunching began again. For Richard had remembered that on the Goodman Richard the rigging had employed a range of blocks and pulleys. He and the chief agreed that they could place a single block on each fender and a double block on the bottom of the guide rope. Then the line from the fender could run directly down to the first section of the double block, back up to the single block then down to the second section of the double block before running away to the tow bar. This would at least double the pull of each fender for the investment of an extra fourteen or fifteen metres of line. They might have used double blocks top and bottom - or triple or quadruple - but Sissy was not a cargo vessel and she did not have more than a dozen double blocks in her stores. Still, thought Richard, the little he had managed to add to his original idea meant that they were going to rig the equivalent of twenty-eight fenders.

  By the time the first of the Yokohama fenders arrived, all rigged and ready to go, Sparks had completed his work on the fin and Mark Robertson had a two-way contact with the world. Richard stood back on Sissy's stem, busily overseeing the ropework, and talked the disbelieving submariner through the plans that were being put in place on Quebec's bow sections. Then he handed the handset over to Bob Hudson so that the sub’s first officer could confirm what he had said and then add the news from Halifax and MARLANT. Then they cleared the air for Mark to get through to those vital contact points and talk the thing through himself with his superiors. Richard wandered off immediately after his own brief contact, all too well aware that if he stayed he would start demanding to talk to Robin and that, under the circumstances, would be inappropriate. Almost as inappropriate as it was natural.

  He still had not had a chance to talk to her when the chief and his men returned, having attached all the fenders to the sides and secured all their lines to the tow bar. ‘OK,’ said Tom. ‘Let’s get under way. Chief, I’ll be calling for power at your earliest convenience. Just the tow at first, though you’ll want to take up any slack in the Yokohama line, Gus.’

  The winchmaster nodded as the chief and his engineers disappeared below.

  Tom took a deep breath, inflating his lungs to their fullest. Then he exhaled luxuriously, turned and said, ‘Let’s go up on the bridge and get this show on the road, shall we, gentlemen?’

  Richard was included in the invitation and went up with the others. He stood at the rear of the bridge-house looking away aft through the window there, thinking that the last time he had done that - a little more than twenty-four hours earlier - the huge rogue wave had been poised to fall on them. Then the water had been like a mountainside made of glass. It had been hurling towards them with unimaginable speed, ferocity and destructive power. Now the sea was calm. The three lines stretched back from Sissy’s stem to Quebec’s, stem. Two of them were thick, bright and beginning to straighten out of their dejected droop. The third, the Yokohama line, was beginning to pull the tow bar towards them and the fourteen fat black balloons of the Yokohama fenders were beginning to come alive above the green-glazed shadow of the sinking submarine’s foredeck.

  The radio buzzed with an incoming message. Sparks stuck his head out of the radio room. ‘That’s Captain Robertson for you, Captain Hollander,’ he said. ‘Told you he’d get off the line to Halifax the moment he felt us moving.’

  ‘Put it through on private, Sparks,’ said Tom decisively. ‘I want a quick chat with him person to person before we go for open broadcast.’

  Richard dismissed the conversation from his mind and concentrated on the view again. The dripping towlines were out of the water now. The fin of the sub was beginning to generate a tiny white bow wave of its own. The tow bar suddenly broke through the waves and skidded unhandily along the surface, fourteen lines spreading out behind it like strings to some enormous puppet. Any moment now the fender lines would feel the strain and begin the delicate task of bringing the front of the sub to the surface.

  A line from one of his favourite
scary films came into his head out of the blue. He put on his best Robert Shaw voice paraphrasing Quint the shark-hunter from Jaws. ‘She can’t stay down with fourteen barrels in her. Not with fourteen she can’t!’ he whispered. And, as in the movie, the words were almost a prayer.

  The scene now could hardly have been more different from yesterday’s or from the terrifying one in the film he was thinking of, but the tension Richard felt was, if anything, more acute.

  Twenty-Two

  Air

  Mark Robertson had assumed that things would be easier once he was back on the air, but he could see all too clearly that he had been terribly mistaken. He had supposed that a call to Halifax, MARLANT, Admiral Pike, or whoever accepted such distress calls, would get him sorted out. Or if not sorted out then well on the road to being sorted out.

  But even with the warning Bob Hudson had been able to send them from Sissy, Halifax had been slow to offer anything like the guidance that Mark needed. Perhaps because the situation was so unusual, financially complex and fraught with political bear-traps. And, of course there was also the combination of fatally uncalculated factors - the existence of a major naval exercise that involved many of the main decision-makers likely to be of use to him and the simple - so far unremarked - fact that it was the weekend.

  In many ways, Quebec's situation itself was hardly unprecedented because of the Chicoutimi incident in October 2004. But it seemed that Halifax even had several problems with using that incident as an exemplar for their actions and advice on this occasion. The first problem was that the help so swiftly offered to Chicoutimi had all been almost ‘in house’. It had been offered at almost a moment’s notice by the Royal Navy, the US Navy, the British Coastguard. Ministry had talked to ministry, service to service. Now someone somewhere had to make decisions about commercial towage rates. Lloyds Open Form insurance agreements. With whom, indeed, Canadian naval vessels were insured in the first place. And who in the legal department might know that. Who in the legal department, indeed, might be available at all. Failing the legal department, they needed to look for guidance from someone in the Treasury if not in the navy. And either legal or Treasury meant someone in Ottawa, not someone in Halifax.

  And whoever was responsible in Ottawa when they finally tracked him down, it seemed, put them all on hold again and went for further consultation, needing to spread a little responsibility for when the news hounds at home and abroad got the scent of this.

  MARLANT, the Canadian Atlantic Fleet, was in any case focused on the Operation Storm exercise in the Labrador Sea and Admiral Pike was a part of that. Although he was currently aboard the flagship, Athabascan, the admiral was now out of contact because Operation Storm included a twenty-four-hour dead-air simulation to prepare the fleet for the effects of a nuclear strike on communications across the North American continent. They were four hours in with twenty to go, and even if a real nuclear attack occurred, the admiral had decreed that the simulation should not be breached.

  Not that it could have been, thought Mark grimly. Because if there was a real nuclear strike then communications really would be down in any case - just as the simulation suggested - and Admiral Pike would still be unobtainable. No. To get to Pike now, Mark would need to go through the Secretary of State or the Prime Minister, and neither of them was available to him. In theory, he thought grimly, he could have asked the Queen for help - she was as likely to listen to him as anybody else. It was lucky indeed that the admiral had agreed to send a rescue squadron to meet Quebec off Cape Farewell in the last few moments before the dead-air simulation started.

  But in actual fact, unknown to them all, things had just begun to get even more complicated still. While the craft involved in Operation Storm, seaborne and airborne, were tracing their courses over the waters of the Labrador Sea, so the air up high to the west of Baffin Bay was beginning to twist and turn. Global warming was attacking more than just the ice cap on Greenland itself. The steady settled high-pressure chill that usually covered Victoria, Somerset and Baffin Islands was beginning to break down. An unseasonable tongue of warm air span eastwards out of the Aleutians, carrying Arctic albatrosses before it, to skim over hunting grounds that even now were warmer than in the highest high summer. Such an anomaly would normally have bounced south to plague the desert vastness of the sub-Arctic Canadian tundra. But instead it gathered force up here, speeded by the unseasonable warmth. And what should have been a snow tiger that lost its way in the limitless pine forests that are home to the moose, the wolf and the Wendigo, began to grow into a dragon that would come thundering out over the Davis Strait in little more than twenty-four hours’ time.

  In the meantime, Mark was at least able to begin his detailed incident report, but he soon found himself frustrated by the fact that the incident was still ongoing. He reported how they had experienced the surge beneath the rogue wave and the effect it had had on his command. He described the collision as best he could and how that - and its effects - had been handled. He summarized the surfacing and the attempt to complete the rescue of two people from the water. He recapitulated his realization that the sub was wrapped in nets and the results of that when the nets’ lines got wrapped in the propeller. He was just about to start outlining the actions of Psycho Bob when he realized that he actually knew so little about the man that there was almost no point in going on.

  Instead, Mark simply said, ‘Is there a Fleet psychiatric consultant I can talk to? I have a situation here that could use the advice of a good psychiatrist.’

  The man on the other end of the phone was the duty officer in the emergency room at Fleet Headquarters. He had been on duty all day and he had been the recipient of Bob Hudson’s first contacts nearly six hours earlier. Since that time he had briefly raised Admiral Pike and tried to get hold of a wide range of people who were supposed to be on twenty-four- hour alert for matters such as this. Names in legal, names in Treasury, names in MARLANT itself, including the senior officer in charge of the submarine section, Chief of Staff, Submarine Operations, Commodore Hubert Hickey. And he had had no success at all. But he knew that when the commodore found out what had been going on, then somehow it would be his head on the platter.

  ‘Look, Captain,’ he answered wearily now, ‘I don’t know what time of what day it is with you out at Cape Farewell, but here in Halifax it’s sixteen hundred on a sunny Saturday afternoon. And if you think you’re going to find any kind of a doctor anywhere other than on a golf course, then you really do need a psychiatrist.’

  The man the crew of Quebec had christened Psycho Bob woke up with a start. There was no light, but there was sound. All around him the angels were talking. No, not talking - calling. He could hear their fingers tapping on the outside of the hull. He could hear their voices echoing up and down the fin beside him. But he did not quite understand what they were telling him to do. He was very clear in what was left of his conscious mind, however, that he was still trapped down here and he had to find a way out or he would die - whether the angels helped him or not. Though such rational and reasoned thought was just a tiny glimmer of light like a match flame lost in the massive, yawning chasm of his feral, uncontrollable animal terror.

  He rolled over, muttering to himself almost silently. The light on the SIG-Sauer flickered on again - very nearly at the end of its power. But it gave enough brightness to focus on the dull glow coming up through the hole in the corridor deck-head that he was using as a trapdoor into his hiding place. He shook the gun and the beam brightened, then he began to worm towards the hole. He carried his chopper and his flickering torch but he forgot the towels he had been using as his pillows. This meant that when he dropped into the corridor aft of the command area he was no longer able to disguise himself.

  And, to make things worse for him, the crew through which he had moved almost like a ghost last night were much more alert now. Alert and jumpy. Alert, jumpy and - although the biggest Sabatier knife was floating in the flooded crew’s berth, tapping on the
deck-head with the rest of the rubbish there - most of them were armed. The galley staff, trying to make some kind of meals as Mark insisted on standard watch routines, were almost in despair - even the butter knives were gone. Down in engineering, Chief La Barbe was reduced almost to inarticulate rage as he catalogued the lack or absence of almost every large, long or heavy tool. Lieutenant Pellier, now responsible as acting first officer, was by no means alone in thanking God that the arms locker was tightly secured, or all the guns would have been gone as well.

  Or, he was glad of it up until the shocking moment that Psycho Bob dropped out of a hole in the corridor deck-head in front of him and leaped towards him like a rabid tiger waving a SIG-Sauer P226 sidearm and a meat cleaver.

  Luc Pellier had just been at a brief meeting with the irate and snappish captain, where he had been made vividly aware of a series of shortcomings in Quebec's handling of the situation so far. In the manner in which they had all seemed to stagger from crisis to crisis - each one worse than the last. In the less than perfect efforts being made at local level to get her up on the surface and off to somewhere safe and secure. But most of all and most especially, in the simply jaw-dropping manner in which they were being helped and advised by Fleet and Defence at home.

  ‘Sort it out yourself, Quebec,’ Mark summed it all up stormily. ‘And Long John Pike may send a pair of water-wings when he comes back on the air. Air! That’s all we’ve had so far! Hot air.’