Sea Leopard

by Craig Thomas

  A rush of thoughts then. Quin might be in the country after all — the girl, how had she got in last night, how had Lane missed her? — comfortable thought, that. Lane's fault — where was Quin? Door opening and closing in the empty house with its For Sale notice, the one he'd suggested using but permission had been denied, too much paperwork to take it over — door closing, the girl further away down the hill, oblivious of him.

  Or of the squat-featured, heavy-looking man in the grey double-breasted suit coming down the path of the empty house, a taller, thinner man running behind him. Both of them running, no more than twenty yards away from him now, and perhaps a hundred or so from the girl. KGB, so obvious he wanted to laugh, so sudden their appearance he could not move and was aware only of their numerical superiority.

  "Wait a minute —" he managed to say, stepping round the Escort on to the pavement. The one in the grey suit ran with his thick arm extended, palm outwards, to fend him off like a rugby player; the thinner man dodged round the offside of Sugden's car. They were going to get past him, no doubt of it. "Wait!"

  He ducked outside the extended hand, felt it heave at his shoulder, then got a hold on the arm behind it, ripping the grey sleeve of the suit immediately. A heavy fist swung at the edge of his vision and caught him on the temple. He was immediately dizzy.

  The heavy man said something in Russian. Mrs Quin was coming out of the shop. Sugden could see her over the roof of the car as the heavy man lurched him against it. The thinner man was galloping down the middle of the road, no athlete but certain to overtake the still unaware girl.

  Sugden opened his mouth and bellowed her name. The heavy man struck upwards into Sugden's groin with his knee. Sugden doubled up, retching and groaning, his head turned sideways. The girl had become instantly alert, then had begun to run. The heavy man cursed, and moved away after aiming a foot at Sugden's head and connecting with his shoulder. Both men were running off. Sugden, groaning, his eyes wet with the latest wave of pain, knew he had to concentrate. They would want everything in his report.

  Three hundred yards away, still just identifiable, Tricia Quin boarded a cream and blue bus as it pulled away, heading into the centre of Sutton Coldfield. The two Russians were just short of her, and the traffic lights were in the bus's favour. She was gone; they'd lost her, just as he had.

  He rolled on to his back, still clutching his genitals, and listened to the tattoo of Mrs Quin's high heels on the pavement as she ran towards him.

  * * *

  Patrick Hyde hurried through the rooms of the empty house, as if their last, impermanent occupants might yet be overtaken and restrained, just so long as he displayed sufficient haste. Two camp beds in one of the bedrooms, spare linen in the airing cupboard on the landing, food still in cardboard boxes, mostly tinned stuff, the refrigerator half-full, six-packs of lager, bottles of vodka. The two KGB men must have arrived before Birmingham Special Branch began its surveillance. The almost full dustbins at the side of the house suggested they had moved in almost as soon as Quin first disappeared.

  Hyde snorted with self-derision and with an anger that included himself, Kenneth Aubrey, the DS, Special Branch, everyone. Quin had simply panicked, hidden himself. Or had he —? He could even be dead, and they might want the girl for some other reason…

  Quin is alive, and well, and living somewhere in England, he reminded himself.

  He turned to the police inspector who had followed at his heels through the house. "No sign of them now, sport?" He dropped immediately into a strengthened accent, one he had never himself possessed but which he used always to remind others of his Australian origins — because he knew it irritated them, and it served in some way to dissociate him from their incompetence. The only person secure from its mockery was Kenneth Aubrey. "A right bloody cock-up, mate. Wouldn't you say?"

  The police inspector controlled his features. He disliked having to deal with someone from Intelligence rather than from what he would have considered the "proper channels", counter-intelligence. He could see no reason why Hyde, as SIS operative, should be officially functioning inside the United Kingdom, and displaying his superiority so evidently. A bloody Aussie…

  "You'd like to speak with Sugden now, I suppose, Mr Hyde?" he said through thinned lips, hardly opening his teeth to emit the sounds.

  Hyde scowled. "Too bloody right, Blue. Where is he?"

  The inspector pointed to the lounge window, across at the Quin house. "Mrs Quin looked after him, then he radioed in. He's still there. The doctor's taken a look at him."

  "Bruised balls. He's lucky they were only playing with him, okay let's have a word with him." The inspector made as if to precede Hyde from the room. He was taller, thicker set, in uniform. Hyde's voice and manner seemed to dismiss all of it. Hyde wagged a finger at him, bringing two points of colour to the policeman's cheekbones. "And you called the Branch?"

  "Sugden is their man."

  "You were instructed to call me — not the Branch, or the DS, or the Home Secretary or Her Majesty the Queen Mum — me. Next time, call me direct. Reverse the charges if you have to, but call me. Quin is mine." Hyde made Quin sound like part of his diet. The inspector seethed in silence, allowing Hyde to leave the room in front of him, just in case the Australian saw his eyes and their clear message. "It's a bloody cock-up!" Hyde called back over his shoulder. "Too much bloody time has gone by!"

  Hyde banged open the front door and went down the path, the same urgency possessing his slight frame. His denims and pale windcheater over a check shirt did nothing to endear or recommend him to the inspector, who nevertheless dutifully followed him across the road and up the path to Mrs Quin's door. Hyde rang the bell repeatedly.

  “The woman's had a shock, you know," the inspector cautioned.

  Hyde turned on him. "She bloody well knew we wanted her husband and her daughter. Did she ring? No bloody fear. She almost got her precious daughter nobbled by the KGB —"

  Mrs Quin opened the door on its safety-chain. Her hair had freed itself from the restraint of lacquer, and two separate locks fell across her left eye. She brushed at them. Hyde showed her no identification, but she studied the uniformed inspector behind him, then released the chain on the door. Hyde walked past her into the cool, dim hall. Mrs Quin caught up with him. Her mouth trembling. The inspector closed the door softly.

  "Where is he, Mrs Quin?"

  "In the lounge, lying down." Her tone was apologetic. She offered Sugden's comfort as a token of her good intentions. "Poor man."

  "I'll talk to him. Then I'll want to have a word with you, Mrs Quin."

  "Mr Hyde —" the inspector began.

  Hyde turned to look at him. Too late for that."

  Hyde went into the lounge and closed the door behind him. Sugden was lying on a chaise longue, his face still pale, his tie askew, jacket draped over the arm of an easy-chair. His face arranged itself into a memory of pain, through which guilt thrust itself like the outbreak of some malady.

  "Mr Hyde —" he began.

  "Don't apologise, sonny, it's too late for that," Hyde pulled an armchair in front of the chaise.

  "But I am sorry, Mr Hyde. I just didn't know they were there."

  "You cocked it up, son. You didn't expect the girl, you didn't expect the heavy mob — what did you expect?"

  Sugden tried to sit up, to make himself feel at less of a disadvantage. Hyde waved him back, and he slumped on the chaise, his hand gently seeking his genitals. He winced. Hyde grinned mirthlessly.

  "I don't know."

  Hyde took out a notebook and passed it to Sugden. "These are your descriptions of the two men?" Sugden nodded. “They don't ring any bells with me. They could have been brought in for this. The KGB has trouble travelling. They didn't get the girl?" Sugden shook his head vehemently. "Neither did we. When did she arrive?"

  "Mrs Quin didn't say."

  "She will. You know what it means, mm?"

  "They haven't got Quin?"

  "Too true they hav
en't. Shit, we should have guessed they didn't have him!" Hyde slapped his hands on his thighs. "Why the bloody hell did we assume they did? Too many post-Imperial hang-ups in Whitehall, sport — that's the bloody answer. Quin's gone, we're so incompetent and wet, they must have him. It's what we British deserve." He saw Sugden staring at him, and grinned. The expression seemed to open his face, smooth its hard edges. It surprised Sugden as much as his words had done. "My hobby-horse. I race it around the track once in a while. Trouble is, I fell for it this time."

  "You don't think much of us, do you?"

  "Too right. Not a lot. You're all a lot more sophisticated than us Aussies, but it doesn't get you anywhere, especially with the KGB. Bloody Russians wouldn't last five minutes in Brisbane." Hyde stood up "OK, sport, interrogation's over for now. I'm going to have a word with Mum. She has a lot of explaining to do."

  He found Mrs Quin and the inspector sitting in the breakfast kitchen, sipping tea from dark blue and gold cups.

  "Mr Hyde —"

  "Very cosy," Hyde sneered, and the inspector coloured. Mrs Quin looked guilty, and defiant, and Hyde was brought to admire the manner in which she stared into his eyes. She was afraid, but more for her daughter than herself.

  "Tea, Mr Hyde?" she offered.

  Hyde felt pressed, even ridiculed, by the scene; by the pine furniture, the split-level cooker, the pale green kitchen units. Only he expressed urgency, was in haste.

  "No time." He stood over the woman. The inspector played with his gloves on the table. "Will you check with the bulletin on Miss Quin, Inspector?" The policeman seemed reluctant to leave, but only momentarily. Hyde remained standing after he had left. "You weren't going to tell us, were you, Mrs Quin?" She shook her head, still holding his gaze. "Why not, for Christ's sake?"

  "Tricia asked me not to."

  "We'd have looked after her."

  "She said you couldn't, I don't know why not. She didn't explain." Her hand shook slightly as she lifted the cup to her lips. They quivered, smudging pink lipstick on to the gold rim of the cup.

  "She knows where her father is, doesn't she?" Mrs Quin nodded, minimising the betrayal. There was nothing in her eyes but concern. She cared for her daughter, it was evident, but regarding her husband she was composed, perhaps indifferent. "Did she say where?"

  "No."

  "Has she gone back to him now?"

  "I don't know." The exchanges had achieved a more satisfying momentum which disguised the emptiness behind the answers. The woman knew little, perhaps nothing.

  "Where has she gone?"

  "She wasn't supposed to be going out." Mrs Quin waved her hands limply. They were as inanimate as gloves at the ends of her plump arms. "I don't know where she is." The voice cracked, the mouth quivered.

  "She came to put your mind at rest, is that it?" Mrs Quin nodded. "And she said nothing about your husband — her father?" Mrs Quin shook her head. Her face was averted from Hyde's eyes now. But she was concealing nothing, except perhaps inadequacies that belonged to her past. She was keeping only herself from him, not information. "She gave you no clue?"

  "No, Mr Hyde. Except that he's well, and is in hiding. I think she hoped I would be pleased at the news. I tried to show I was." The confession stuck into their conversation like a fracture through skin.

  "She's been with him?"

  "Yes."

  "Since his disappearance? She disappeared with him?"

  "Yes, Mr Hyde. And then she came back here. She's always bounced between us, ever since the divorce." Mrs Quin tried to smile. "She is a trier, even if she's a failure." Assumed cynicism was an attempt to shut him out, he realised.

  "Where might she be now, Mrs Quin?"

  "I have no idea whatsoever. Back with him, I suppose. But I have no idea where that might be."

  Hyde breathed out noisily. He looked at the ceiling, his hands on his hips. The texture of their conversation had become thickened, clogged with personalities. There might be clues there as to the girl's character, behaviour, whereabouts, but such enquiries possessed no volition, no urgency. Hyde was impatient for action. The girl was vital now, and he and the KGB both understood that. She'd been shown to them like some tempting prize which would be awarded to the swiftest, the strongest, the most ruthless.

  Thank you, Mrs Quin. I may be back. I just have to use your telephone —"

  Mrs Quin dismissed him with a slight motion of one hand. The other rubbed at the edge of the pine table, erasing memories. Hyde went out into the hall.

  Aubrey had to know. The Deputy Director of SIS had been with the Foreign Secretary when the call from Birmingham had finally been routed through to Queen Anne's Gate. Hyde had left a message, but now Aubrey had to know the extent of their problem, and their hope — or lack of it.

  He was dialling the number when the front door opened, and the inspector reappeared. Hyde ignored him and went on dialling.

  "Whoever you're reporting to," the policeman remarked with evident, hostile sarcasm, "you'd better mention the car that just drove past. I'd say it contained the two men who worked Sugden over."

  "What —?" The telephone was already ringing in Aubrey's offic even as Hyde examined a residual sense that he had once more blundered into, and through, a private world. Mrs Quin hadn't deserved the way he had treated her. Yet, had he altered his manner, even though he might not have bludgeoned there would have been little gentleness, almost no sensitivity. He took the receiver from his cheek. "You" ve got them?"

  The inspector shook his head. "Foot down and away, as soon as they saw my lads. The registration number won't be of any use either, I shouldn't wonder —"

  "Shit!"

  "I beg your pardon!" Aubrey's secretary demanded frostily at the other end of the line.

  * * *

  Ethan Clark, of the US Naval Intelligence Command (ASW/Ocean Surveillance), had been made to feel, throughout the week since he had joined the "Chessboard Counter" team in the Admiralty, very much like an executive of some parent company visiting a recently taken over small firm. He was present in both his USN and NATO capacities, but these men of the Royal Navy — of, more precisely, the Office of Naval Intelligence (Submarine Warfare) — exuded a silent, undemonstrative resentment of him. Which, he well knew, made any doubts and hesitations he had concerning the mission of HMS Proteus seem no more to them than American carping. The commodore and his team in this long, low room in the basement of the Old Admiralty Building in Whitehall were dry-land sailors playing a war-game, and thoroughly and blithely enjoying themselves.

  Clark supposed it had its basis in a buried sense of inferiority. For years, the contracting Royal Navy had belied its great history, and now, quite suddenly, they had developed "Leopard" and installed it in a nuclear-powered fleet submarine and were engaged in mapping the "Chessboard" sonar grid in the Barents Sea. Their high summer had returned. NATO needed them as never before, and the USN wanted greedily to get its hands, and its development budgets, on the British anti-sonar system.

  Nevertheless, he told himself again as he sipped coffee from a plastic cup and observed the British officers waiting for the ritual serving of afternoon tea, "Chessboard" should have waited. NATO and the Navy Department had required of the Royal Navy that they install the only operationally-functioning "Leopard" unit in a submarine, rush their sea trials, then send it racing north to the Arctic Circle. The British had responded like a child doing everything at top speed to show its willingness and its virtue. Even before they had paid Plessey the bill for what they had, and before they had ordered any more "Leopard" units. With that kind of haste, things often got smashed, plates got dropped. Boats had been lost before. It would be a great pity if "Leopard" was lost; a tragedy if anyone else found it.

  The long room, with its officers seated at computer terminals in front of their screens, its maps, wires, cables, fold-away tables, was dominated by a huge edge-lit perspex screen which stood upright in the middle of the room. The perspex secreted a multitude of optic fibres wh
ich registered the input of the computers that controlled the screen. The lighting at the edges of the perspex allowed the team to use chinagraph for temporary handwork additions to the computer-fed information. At that moment, much as it had done for the last week, the screen displayed a projection of the fjordal north coast of Norway, from North Cape to Murmansk. The coast was green and brown, the sea a deepening shade of blue as it reached northward. A fine grid of red lights, no larger than dots, was shown off the coast, as if some current in the screen were knitting, or marking a school register. Other lights moved slowly or remained stationary, units of the Red Banner Northern Fleet, ships and submarines. One or two NATO units. The Commodore's team seemed to scuttle round the base of the perspex screen as if propitiating some idol.

  The room was now quiet, orderly. An hour before, Proteus had come up to periscope depth for one of her periodic, random but pre-determined transmissions. The transmission, using RABFITS (Random Bit Frequency Intelligence Transmission System) and via a satellite link, had contained every detail of the mapping work of the submarine since the previous message. This had been fed into the map-board's computers, updating the network of red spots which marked the "Chessboard" sonar grid.

  Clark could not but admire, and envy, the "Leopard" equipment. He had been aboard Proteus as an observer during some of the sea trials, and he had also been aloft in the RAF Nimrod as the specially equipped plane tried to find the submarine. The Nimrod had been unable to locate, fix or identify the submarine, not even once, either in the Channel, the North Sea, or the north Atlantic. Not even in conjunction with the US-laid sonar carpet in the north Atlantic. No sonar trace, little and poor infra-red, nothing. It worked. Even pitted against surveillance satellites, it worked.

  Perhaps, he told himself, his concern arose — like smoke, unformed but dense and obscuring — solely from the fact that when he had lunched with Kenneth Aubrey at his club at the beginning of the week, he'd learned that the man who had developed "Leopard" at Plessey had gone missing, presumed lost to the Russians. "Leopard" was both useless and unique, if that were so.