Sea Leopard

by Craig Thomas

  "North," Hyde said loudly when his breath returned and the hotel's bulk was between them and the station. His palms were damp on the steering wheel, and he was perspiring freely. "North."

  * * *

  "Come on, come on!" Ardenyev yelled, his voice already hoarse from its combat with the wind and the sea, his gloved hands seemingly frozen and incapable as he attempted, with Teplov and Nikitin, to drag the largest of the sleds across the deck of the launch to its side.

  The trough made them wallow as the helmsman steadied the launch. The young lieutenant watched them through the cabin window, his head flickering back and forth like a tennis spectator, towards them then towards the next peak, looming ahead of them.

  "One more, sir!" Teplov bellowed back at him, even though they were not more than three or four feet apart on either side of the sled and its mound of cylinders. Shadrin and Vanilov and Kuzin were already submerged, safe under the water, with the second sled and the welding and cutting gear. Their ten minutes already begun. There should have been four sleds, more communications equipment, more everything. Petrov was lying on a bunk, his leg broken and splinted in an inflatable plastic bag. Groaning and useless.

  The sled tilted on the side of the launch as the next wave reared up in the darkness and opened its jaws. Teplov glanced over his shoulder. Regret was useless, too. Ardenyev strained like someone demented or terrified as Nikitin, attached by a line, flipped over the side of the launch into the water, mask and mouth-piece in place, his ten minutes already beginning. One thought re-emerged from the panic of Ardenyev's mind. Unless they could get on to the Proteus within ten minutes, then they would have to spend hours coming back to the surface to avoid the bends, and no launch would be able to pick them up with ease — perhaps not at all — in this sea and at night. It was a one-way journey.

  Nikitin's barely discernible bobbing head was accompanied by a raised hand, and then he swam close to the side of the launch. Ardenyev felt the dead weight of the sled pull towards Nikitin, and saw Teplov's face grey with strain. He yelled at the senior michman, who nodded, and went over the side. The wave loomed over the launch, flecked, old, immense. Two black-capped heads bobbed in the water. Slowly, almost out of his control, the sled dipped into the water and sank immediately. Teplov and Nikitin struck down after it.

  Then the water, even as he turned his head to look and thought of time once more, lifted him and threw him across the deck of the launch. He glimpsed the lieutenant's appalled face, the rearing nose of the launch, then he was headfirst into the water, spun and tumbled like a leaf or twig in a stream's torrent, whirled down as he fitted his mouthpiece by instinct. His legs were above his head, just discernible; then blackness, and orientation returning. There were lights below him, two pale blobs like the eyes of a deep-ocean fish. He breathed as calmly as he could, then struck down towards the lights.

  He tapped Teplov on the shoulder, and signalled with upraised thumb. Teplov's relief sounded withdrawn and almost mechanical through his throat-mike. Teplov slid further back against Nikitin on the seat of the sled, and Ardenyev swung himself into the saddle, holding on to the steering column. Directly in front of him, the tiny sonar screen was switched on, and the bright spot of the British submarine!ay below and thirty degrees to port.

  "Shadrin?" Ardenyev enquired into his microphone. All formality, all wasted words and energy and air disappeared beneath the surface.

  "Skipper?"

  "Got her fixed?"

  "Yes, skipper."

  "Let's go."

  Ardenyev dipped the nose of the sled — a light, frail craft now that it was in its own element, not being manhandled across a sloping, slippery deck — towards the ledge on which the Proteus lay, not two hundred yards from them. The headlights of the sled picked out the winking, vanishing shoals of fish before they glanced across the silted ledge. Blackness beyond the ledge, but the lights turning the ledge itself almost sand-coloured, almost alive and three-dimensional. The cold seeped through the immersion suit, began to ring in his head like the absence of oxygen. Teplov clung to him, and Nikitin to Teplov. Without Petrov, Ardenyev had decided that two main sleds would suffice. He hadn't been thinking clearly on the launch, only swiftly, rapping out orders and decisions as if keeping a mounting, insidious sense of failure, of utter futility, at bay with the sound of his voice and the fence of quick thought.

  Grey, white numerals, then the blackness of the sea behind. Ardenyev, feeling Teplov's tap on his shoulder in response to what they both had seen, turned the sled slowly in a sweeping curve. He circled slightly above the British submarine like a gull in the wind, and watched as the headlights of Shadrin's sled slipped like a caress across the midships section of the submarine, then up and around her sail.

  They'd found her. He looked at his watch. Seven minutes remaining. He pushed the nose of the sled down towards the Proteus.

  * * *

  "There she is skipper!"

  "Infra-red cameras?"

  "Cameras running, skipper."

  "Can you see them, Terry?"

  "No — wait — there!"

  "What the hell is that?"

  "Looks like a sled. It's going, going over the side. They'll get caught by the wave, no, one of them has — he's going over!"

  "All fall down. Can we communicate with MoD yet?"

  "No, skipper."

  "Then you'd better send the pictures over the wire straight away. Even Aubrey ought to be able to work this one out!"

  * * *

  "I'm sorry, Mr Aubrey, it could take hours to analyse these pictures." Clark was holding irritation in check, his apology an exercise in calming his breathing and no more.

  "There's no way we can communicate with the Nimrod?"

  "I'm sorry, sir," Copeland replied lugubriously, shaking his head, folding down his lower lip to complete the mask of apology. "The jamming makes that impossible. Eastoe must have sent these by way of a substitute — and without sub-titles."

  "I am in no mood for cheap remarks, young man!" Aubrey snapped wearily.

  "Sorry, sir."

  Aubrey turned back to Clark. "How many men, would you say?"

  They were still clustered round the wireprint machine, and the grainy reproductions of the infra-red photographs that the Nimrod had transmitted, torn off the machine as each frame appeared, were in every hand, or lay scattered on the bench near the machine. The whole room seemed crowded, like boys urging on two unwilling combatants, around Aubrey and Clark.

  "This sled?"

  "What do you mean this sled?" Aubrey wanted, demanded information, answers to his question upon which he could base a decision. The desire to make a decision, to act, pressed upon him like a manhole-cover which would mask a trap. Failure, complete and abject and humiliating, stared up at him like a nightmare into which he was falling.

  "I mean there may be more than one sled. It looks like two, it's a two-man sled all right. Could be three —?" Clark was examining the photograph with a magnifying-glass. It seemed old-fashioned, inappropriate to the advanced technology that was their pressing concern. "Leopard" lying like junk on the floor of the Barents Sea.

  "That equipment, then?" Aubrey asked snappily, using his own magnifying-glass, making nothing of the shapes and bulky outlines of the underwater equipment that was strapped and secured on the back of the sled. Yes, he could see it was a two-man sled, there were two men, perhaps one of the grainy dots was another head bobbing in the water —? "You say this man Ardenyev would be in command here?"

  "That equipment — welding or cutting gear, oxygen, who knows? And yes, I guess it would be Valery Ardenyev."

  Clark was grinning.

  "You" ve met him, then."

  "We" ve been — observers, at the same oceanographic conferences, sure."

  "What is his field of expertise?*

  "Red Banner Special Operations — rescue, salvage, demolition, offence, defence, — you name it, they can do it."

  "The launch, Ethan — how many of the
se sleds could it hold?"

  "No more than two, three — why?"

  The numbers involved, my dear fellow." Aubrey was expansive again, confident. Clark was amazed at the brittle, transitory nature of the old man's emotions, whether optimistic or pessimistic. When he encountered the next obstacle, he would fall back into a trough of doubt and anxiety. "Can I assume that they would not attempt salvage — or anything more intrusive — with so few people?“

  "You might do. Inspection? Maybe."

  "Come, Ethan. Give me a best guess. Is this likely to be an inspection?"

  "They'll have little time down there, at that depth. Just enough time, maybe."

  "Then we have some little time available ourselves?"

  "To do what?" Clark turned on Aubrey angrily as it seemed self-satisfaction was the object, the sole purpose, of his questions. Feel good, put your mind to rest — and then you don't need to do any more. He almost voiced his thought.

  "I don't know. We are prevented from making any moves other than diplomatic and political, until tomorrow or the following day. Have we that much time?"

  "I don't know. Let's hope Eastoe goes down for another set of pictures when these divers return to the surface. Then we'll know it was only an inspection."

  Aubrey's face darkened. He wondered what madcap idea had sprung into Clark's mind, and whether, because he was younger and of the same experience and background, he might not have perceived something of what was in the man Ardenyev's mind. He did not, however, ask Clark his meaning.

  "Norway must make another protest about this incursion into her territorial waters," he said, and even to himself it sounded both too little and too late. He avoided looking at Clark as he pushed his way out of the circle of people around them, towards the telephones.

  * * *

  The Proteus's stern lay bathed in the headlights of the two sleds, parked side by side on the ledge. The silt which they and the submarine had disturbed had settled. There was a wide ugly furrow the Proteus had gouged before she finally stopped. Beyond it, the damaged stern was grey, twisted, scorched metal, flayed by the coils of steel the MIRV torpedo had released. Ardenyev saw, as he picked his way fly-like in the illumination of the lights, that the fifteen-blade propeller had been thrown out of alignment, or dragged so it became embroiled with the whipping tendrils of steel cable, and that three of the phosphor-bronze, boot-shaped blades had been sheared off. One or two of the others were distorted, but intact. Without the MIRV torpedo, the damage wreaked by the low-warhead hit would not have been sufficient to stop the submarine.

  Teplov's shoulder nudged against his as they clung to the port aft hydroplane. A steel cable twisted away from them like a great grey snake slithering towards the silt beneath the submarine. The hydroplane was buckled and torn beneath their hands and flippers, and its skin of metal had begun to unpeel like layers of an onion, having been damaged and then subjected to the pressure of the water before the Proteus slowed and halted. In front of them, the bulk of the submarine retreated into the darkness. Buckled plates, damaged ballast tanks, but there was no evidence that the pressure hull had been ruptured.

  "They made a bloody good job of it," Teplov's voice croaked in his earpiece. Ardenyev nodded.

  The rudders were misaligned, too, but not badly.

  "We can patch it — she'll have to be towed. We don't have time to repair the prop."

  It was Teplov's turn to nod. His eyes seemed to be grinning behind his facemask.

  "What next?"

  "Let's move amidships. Signal the others to start making a din in —" He looked at his watch, "one minute." Ardenyev pushed away from the damaged hydroplane. His watch informed him that four minutes had already passed for himself, and perhaps five for Shadrin, Vanilov and Kuzin. No time to waste. He had six minutes to get aboard. Teplov behind him instructed the others, his voice tinny in the earpiece as Ardenyev glided like a black fish along the whale-like back of the Proteus. Each man knew his job; they had performed a hundred time trials in the deep tanks at the Frunze Naval School, and off-shore in the same depth and sea conditions as now pertained. Ardenyev's hands touched the two canisters strapped to his chest, smaller imitations of the two air tanks on his back.

  They'd rehearsed it on submerged mock-ups, on the old "Whiskey"-class boat they'd commissioned for practice. After the first month's training the ten minutes had always been sufficient even with the adrenalin running lower than now. But Ardenyev could not help remembering one severe case of the bends he had suffered by going through the mock-up's escape chamber too quickly, which had incapacitated him and he could not forget the first full sea trial which had included the use of the MIRV torpedo. The steel cables had ripped open the hull of the old submarine they were using, killing its crew. He and his two teams had been in the launch, waiting to go down, when the wreckage and the released air and the oil had come to the surface.

  The great fin-like sail of the Proteus loomed out of the darkness. His lamp played on it. Below it, the officers and control room of the submarine. And "Leopard", his target. He hovered, and Teplov joined him. Ardenyev gave him the thumbs-up signal, and the senior michman swam down to the base of the sail, his shape becoming indistinct, the light of his lamp feeble, winking on and off, it seemed, as he moved away and sought his own objective. Teplov would begin communicating in morse on the hull of the Proteus, offering apology and assistance and reassurance in the name of the Red Banner Fleet, distracting the officers of the submarine and retarding suspicion and activity.

  Ardenyev kicked on, moving more swiftly now, dipping down to touch the hull once with his fingertips, then moving off again as soon as he sensed the vibration. The other four were using cutting gear and making as much noise as they could at the stern, a further distraction. Now, everything — the whole operation and its success — depended upon himself. The knowledge satisfied him as he urged his body through the water. He could just make out the forward hydroplanes. A shoal of fish, brief as a torch-signal, were caught in the light of his lamp. He glanced again at his watch, Four minutes fifty since he had reached bottom. Three-and-a-half minutes to decompress slowly enough not to be incapacitated. He kicked on more urgently gliding over the hull, his lamp playing upon it now with an almost frenzied movement, sweeping back and forth like a small searchlight. The diagram of the submarine was vivid in his mind, as if he possessed vision that allowed him to see beneath the skin of the double hull. He was passing over the officers" wardroom and the crew's quarters beneath them, towards the torpedo room. He reminded himself that the submarine would be silent, alert. He would be making noises almost next door to the wardroom, which would contain the off-duty officers, sitting in silence, nervous of moving. Would they be sufficiently distracted by the tapping, by the noises from the stern thrumming through the hull?

  His lamp washed across the hull, then swung back. He had found his objective, the forward escape hatch above the torpedo room. Even here, the British had made it easier for him. A Royal Navy fleet submarine had gone down in the North Sea two years before: The crew had died because the air purification system had suddenly failed, and the rescuers had taken too long to cut their way into the hull. Since that disaster, it had been specified that all nuclear submarines, as well as all the older diesel subs in the Royal Navy, be fitted with two-way hatches that could be opened without difficulty from the outside. The Red Navy had known that when it began to plan the abduction of "Leopard".

  He gripped the wheel of the flood control valve and began to twist it, wrenching at it violently, then turning it more easily. He looked at his watch. He had been under for six minutes, some of the others for seven. He had already lost them half a minute. It increased decompression time by the same amount. He began turning the wheel more rapidly. He could not account for the strange loss of time. How much time had he wasted looking at the damage, almost enjoying it, satisfied at the helplessness of the huge submarine? That must have been when he lost the forty seconds he was now behind schedule.


  "Viktor?" he whispered into his mouthpiece.

  "Sir?"

  "How is it?"

  They're demanding to know what we're doing, and how their submarine was damaged?"

  "Have you asked to come aboard?"

  "Yes, sir. They" ve refused a liaison officer. I'm giving them the fictitious damage report now."

  "I'm going in."

  "Good luck, sir."

  Ardenyev lifted the hatch slowly, sensing its great weight even under the water. A rush of bubbles enveloped him. He would have made a noise already that might have been heard. They'd rehearsed that, too. The other distracting noises had been sufficient to mask his entry — but were they now, when it mattered? He dropped slowly into the chamber, and pulled the hatch down on himself. Then the submarine lurched forward, and his head banged in surreal slow-motion against the side of the compartment. His lamp's light wobbled on the walls around him. He was in a cylinder like the inside of an artillery shell which felt as if it was being slid into the breech of a gun.

  The Proteus was moving, wriggling like an animal trying to rid itself of fleas. He pressed feet and back against the walls of the cylinder, simply hanging on because the buoyancy within the flooded chamber allowed him no weight, no steadiness. He could imagine, vividly, the control room where the decision has been taken; imagine, also, the hull of the submarine. Teplov might have been flung off — what about the others, the flail of cutting gear, the roll of tanks, the whip of the steel cables around the prop. He could sense the grinding as the submarine's prop struggled to turn against the restraint of the cables, his teeth grinding in his head, his whole head aching with the vibration. They must stop, must —

  A glimpse of his watch. Seven minutes and ten, eleven seconds. Then the lamp banged against his arm painfully. He squeezed himself flatter, taller, bigger, holding himself still. Welding gear, cutting torches, tanks, the whip of cables. He sensed like a medium that one of them, perhaps more, would be dead or injured. All of them were running out of time. Time. That was the calculation; they knew it in the Proteus. Twenty fathoms equalled ten minutes" working time, then the excess nitrogen in the blood slowed the body, hampered the mind, began to kill. He was killing them now —