Sea Leopard

by Craig Thomas

Clark did not believe that Aubrey had envisaged how much and how valuable would be the information gained from the temporary imprisonment of the Proteus. However, Aubrey was right to believe that "Leopard" was the cherry on the cake. This was the present, "Leopard" was the future. He slouched his way across the control room. No one paid him more attention then to look up, and glance down once more. He had acquired the swagger. Exaggerate it, Aubrey had said, fingering the red ID card. However ridiculous and opera buffo, you think it is, it will work. You are an immortal. And then Aubrey had smiled, cat-like and with venom. The red ID card claimed he was a KGB officer.

  Clark stepped out of the control room into the corridor. There was a single guard opposite a door, no more than a few yards from him. The guard turned to him. Clark waved the red ID and the guard relaxed at once. He was a young, conscripted marine.

  "I want a word with our gallant British captain," Clark drawled. "See we're not disturbed, okay?" The marine nodded. He had probably never met a KGB man of any rank in his life. He had an entire and trusting awe of the red card. Aubrey had been right. Clark opened the door without knocking, and closed it behind him.

  Lloyd had been reading, and had dropped off to sleep with the light above his bunk left on. He awoke, startled, fuzzy-eyed.

  "Who are you —?" The book resting on his chest slipped to the floor as he stood up. Clark bolted the door, then leaned against it. "Who are you?" Lloyd repeated, more irate than disturbed.

  "The Seventh Cavalry," Clark said softly, then put his finger to his lips.

  "What? You're an American —" Lloyd studied Clark, his manner, features and dress. His face went from shock to hope to suspicion. "What is this?" he asked with surprising bitterness. To Clark, the man looked tired, dull, captive.

  "No trick." Clark sat on the end of Lloyd's bunk. The captain of the Proteus hunched away from him. Clark said, in a louder voice and in very accented English, "Just a few simple question about your sailing orders." Lloyd looked as if Clark had proved something to his satisfaction. "I'm here — " Clark grinned, despite himself, — "to repair “Leopard” and help you get out of here."

  Lloyd appeared dumbfounded. "Rubbish —" he began.

  "No kidding. Look, I can spend hours trying to convince you who I am. How about one simple thing, to prove my credentials?" He paused, but Lloyd remained blank-faced. "Your daughter has a pet tortoiseshell cat called Penelope and a white rabbit called Dylan."

  Lloyd's mouth dropped open, then he smiled and tears prompted by relief and remembered domesticity welled in his eyes. He took Clark's hand. "Who are you?" he asked.

  "Ethan Clark, Navy Intelligence."

  "Assigned to “Chessboard Counter”?"

  "Right."

  "We didn't meet."

  "I don't think it matters — uh?"

  "No. How the devil can you repair “Leopard”? Alone? In these surroundings?"

  "First, I talk and you listen. Then you tell me everything that happened and everything your people think might have gone wrong. Okay?"

  "Okay. You begin, then."

  "Just a moment." Clark raised his voice, and again produced the heavy accent. "Your sailing orders. We already know a great deal. Just fill in a few details, okay?" He smiled and tossed his head in the direction of the locked door. "Now listen," he said.

  * * *

  "We will be with you before first light, Valery. I want you to conduct me around your prize." Dolohov was in a mood that Ardenyev could not match and which did not interest him. Behind him, through the glass doors into the mess, Balan and Teplov and the others were raucously into a round of obscene songs and another crate of vodka. The drink and the noise whirled in his head, separating him as surely as static would have done from the admiral's voice.

  "Yes, sir," he said as enthusiastically as he could.

  "Panov's weather has improved. He's reached Moscow. He'll be here in a few hours" time. Then we'll fly up to you by chopper." The old man might have been a relative reciting his holiday travel arrangements. Ardenyev almost giggled at the thought, and the image it evoked. Old thin legs wrapped in a travelling-blanket, back bent under the weight of a suitcase, and the admiral's mind full of worries about the toilets, obtaining food in transit and would he be there to meet him with the car. "What's all that noise?"

  "A— small party, sir."

  "Excellent, excellent. Polish vodka, I presume."

  "Yes, sir." The old man's voice sounded boringly full of reminiscence. Ardenyev hoped it was not so.

  "Good, good." Dolohov sounded offended. Ardenyev cursed the casualness of his tone of voice, his lack of control. Even when half drunk, he should be able to pretend respect. "Make sure you're sober by the time I arrive, Valery. Understand?" The question was a slap across the face.

  "Yes, sir."

  "See you in, say, seven hours" time? Enjoy your party."

  The receiver purred in Ardenyev's ear. His mood was suddenly, inexplicably deflated. He felt sober and dry-mouthed. He looked at his watch. One o" clock. Dolohov and his scientist from Novosibirsk would be here by eight. Shrugging, he pushed open the door to the officers" mess, to be greeted by a roar of welcome and insult.

  * * *

  The two packs were still in the aft escape chamber. He removed his overalls, rolled them into a bundle, and stowed them in the pack containing the explosives. This he took with him as he climbed back through the hatch into the room below. He hid the pack in a steel cupboard containing repair equipment. Then, he once more closed himself into the darkness of the chamber. He flicked on his lamp, and checked the second pack. He removed a tool-kit already clipped to a belt, and two bulky packages which he strapped to his thighs. He had an image, for a moment, of his ridiculous appearance if he were seen and caught on top of the hull of the Proteus, and then it vanished in a rush of nerves and tension. He had trembled, and the pool of light cast on the floor of the chamber wobbled.

  He turned the wheel of the hatch, and lifted it. The hard light of the pen poured in and he felt exposed and vulnerable. His legs felt weak, despite the reviving swallow of rum Lloyd had given him, and the coffee he had ordered from the galley in his KGB persona. He waited, but the nerves did not seem to abate. He cursed them silently. He wanted to drop from the ladder to the floor of the chamber. He held on, grinding his teeth audibly, his eyes squeezed tight shut. It was like a malarial illness. His whole body was shaking, revolting against the idea of leaving the dark in order to climb into the spotlit brightness of the submarine pen.

  Then the mood passed. The illness retreated, and he was able to swallow the phlegm in his throat, and to feel strength returning to his legs. He lifted the hatch once more, and raised his head above it. The curve of the Proteus's hull prevented him from being able to see either of the guards, and he waited. Two minutes later, the port guard appeared, his head bobbing along the horizon of the hull. He was smoking a cigarette. Clark waited until he had turned in his patrol, with hardly a glance at the submarine, and the starboard guard had come into view, making for the seaward end of the pen. Still only two of them. He was able to diminish what opposed and endangered him to these two men. Two against one, that's all it was. He felt calmed.

  He waited, but without the bout of nerves returning, until the two men had passed out of sight, and returned. Each patrol, from the point opposite the escape hatch back towards the bow of the submarine and returning to the escape hatch, took three minutes and a few seconds. The time, however, when they both had their backs to him was less, since they were not on identical courses. Two and a half minutes of running or working time.

  He watched them, heads down, one of them whistling tunelessly and the other slouching with both hands in his pockets, Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, until they passed out of his vision towards the bow of the Proteus. Then he climbed out of the hatch on to the smooth curve of the hull, crouching like a sprinter on his blocks for a moment as he looked over his shoulder. Neither man had turned, and he straightened and ran for the rudder
fin sixty feet away.

  He hid in its shadow, hardly breathing more rapidly than normal, then climbed swiftly down the pitons in its smoothed, repaired surface to the water. He held one of the propeller blades and trod water gently.

  Lloyd had given him Hayter's assessment of the damage to "Leopard". The submarine officer had said, in simpler and clearer terms, what had sprung instantly to Quin's mind when he heard the estimate of damage the submarine must have sustained. Clark, by seeing for himself the repairs and hearing Lloyd's account of his experiences and his conversations with Ardenyev, agreed with Hayter and Quin. At least one, and possibly as many as three or four, of the hull sensors must have been damaged. In themselves, Clark knew with a heavy sensation in his stomach, they would not account for the manner and degree of "Leopard's malfunction, but without their being repaired the equipment would never work effectively. Before investigating the back-up system which had never cut in, Clark had to inspect and repair the sensors on the outer hull.

  When Lloyd had described his conversations with Valery Ardenyev, Clark had sat listening with a faint smile on his lips. He had known it, all along. It had to be Ardenyev. Even the wine and the caviar would have been in character, just as would killing Lloyd if it had proven necessary.

  Clark watched the two guards approach the seaward end of the pen once more. The whistler was now being echoed by his companion, who provided a shrill descant or counter-melody as the fit took him. They laughed at their musical antics frequently, the noise having a hollow quality under the bright roof. Lloyd had confirmed that work on Proteus had stopped early the previous evening, as a delaying tactic. The repair crew might return at any moment, just as the man from Novosibirsk might also arrive in minutes or hours. Clark felt the weakness pass through him once more, like the debilitation of a stomach infection, and he realised that it was Lloyd's report of Panov's expected arrival, learned from Ardenyev, that had struck him more forcibly than anything else. It all hinged on the weather in Siberia; everything. It was that random, uncontrollable element that had thrown him.

  One guard began telling a joke. The two men loitered at the seaward end of the pen, giggling at each other across the stretch of imprisoned water. Clark ducked further into the shadow of the propeller, only his head out of the water. Clark's impatience began to mount. Then some vestigial fear of a michman or even an officer arriving seemed to prompt the storyteller, and they began to move again, the storyteller's voice rising in volume as the bulk of the Proteus interposed itself between himself and his audience of one.

  Clark ducked beneath the surface of the water, and switched on his lamp. Its weak beam would probably not be noticed, reflecting through the water, unless someone looked very hard. The two guards wouldn't. He swam along the hull, only a few feet below the surface, holding in his mind as clearly as a slide projected upon a screen a diagram of the hull showing the locations of the numerous sensor-plates. His left hand smoothed its way along the hull, and his lamp flickered and wavered over the metal. Eventually, as his breath began to sing in his head and his eardrums seemed to be swelling to fill his head and mouth, he touched against one of them. A shallow tear-drop dome of thin metal protected the sensor beneath. It was intact, undamaged.

  He rose to the surface, breathed in deeply three times, then ducked beneath the surface again. He began to locate the sensors more quickly now, as if he had found the thread that would lead him through the maze. Surprisingly, and to his relief, the wafer-thin titanium domes over the sensors seemed to have withstood damage from both the torpedoes. Beneath each dome lay either sonar or magnetic or thermal signal detectors and, within the domes, baffles like those in a stereo loudspeaker guided and channelled any signals, whether from enemy sonar or other detection equipment, into a transducer. The signals were then fed via fibre optics into "Leopard", where they were analysed, reverse phased and then returned to the transducer. The process was virtually instantaneous. The effect of this was to nullify or deflect any enemy's detection transmissions. The signals returned to the enemy vessel unaltered, thereby confirming that they had not registered or been deflected off another vessel. In addition, some of the hull sensors worked to damp the noise emissions from the Proteus's propellers and hydroplanes, rendering the submarine ninety-eight per cent immune to detection. Clark had to assume that some sensors, at least, would be damaged.

  Four of them undamaged, then five. It had taken him almost thirty minutes, working on the starboard side of the hull and avoiding the patrol of the guard, who now had a tiny transistor radio clasped to his ear. Clark had heard a sliver of pop music once as he ducked beneath the surface. When the man had gone again, Clark dived and swam down, following the curve of the hull until he surfaced on the port side. Checking the sensors on that side took him twenty minutes. He worked with greater and greater confidence and speed. He moved towards the stern of the submarine, where the damage was more evident to the lamp and to his fingertips. Then he found the first damaged sensor-cowl. The titanium skin had been torn away, whether during the attack or the subsequent repairs he could not guess, and beneath it the delicate transducer had been torn, smashed, rendered useless. In the light of his lamp, he saw the tangled mess of wiring within; it looked like a ruined eye. He cursed, bobbed to the surface, exhaled and drew a new breath, then flipped down towards the bottom, his lamp flickering over the rust-stained, oil-smeared concrete until he saw, to his left, the huddled bulk of his air tanks.

  He strapped on the weighted belt, then the tanks, and began swimming back towards the surface. As soon as the short helical antenna clamped to the side of his head broke surface, he spoke into the throat microphone. He described the damage to the hull sensor and its location, and only moments later Quin began speaking excitedly in his ear, sounding very distant and obscured by static.

  "You'll have to replace the transducer unit, of course — that will be quickest. You have three of those units with you. As to the cowl, you'll have to do without that. It should be okay. The domes are normally water filled."

  Clark acknowledged the instructions, and swam down again to the damaged sensor. Immediately, he began to clear the mass of loose wiring and circuitry and fragmented glass and metal out of the hole, which was no more than a foot in diameter at its widest point. A small shell-hole.

  The cleared depression in the hull looked merely empty, of no purpose. He released the locking ring and prised the transducer from its seat. Once he had to surface and request Quin to repeat part of the procedure, but he worked swiftly and with a keen and sharp satisfaction. The new unit plugged directly into the box of the signal converter. It took him no more than ten minutes to complete the task. He swam back to the stern of the Proteus and rose slowly and cautiously to the surface, once more in the shadow of the propeller.

  The guard was looking at him, looking directly at him. He had to be able to see him.

  Clark waited, his hand holding the zipper of his immersion suit, ready to reach for the Heckler & Koch.22. Then the guard blew out his cheeks and spat into the water. The noise was sufficient for Clark to grip the handle of the small pistol tightly, and almost draw it from his suit. The guard seemed to watch the small blob of spittle intently, then he began his desultory walk back to the other end of the pen. He had been staring absently at some point on the hull, some part of the stern, and had not seen Clark's head bob to the surface. Clark zipped up his suit once more, as quickly as his nerveless hands would allow, then he removed the air tanks from his back. They clanged softly, like a sounding bell, against one of the propeller blades, and he held his breath. There was no sound from the guards, and he hooked the webbing of the tanks over one of the propeller blades so that they hung below the surface.

  He looked up, then at his watch. Two-fifty-seven. Shaking away the tiredness that seemed to have insinuated itself behind his eyes while he studied his watch — an intent, staring moment which seemed hypnotic, sleep-inducing — he began climbing the hull again, ascending the rudder fin until he could see
both guards, backs to him. He had perhaps a minute before the port side guard reached the limit of his patrol. He scuttled out along the hull, unreeling a fine nylon line from around his waist. He had to check every sensor on the stern of the hull in full view. One head had only to turn, one figure emerge from the sail of the Proteus, one officer or michman come into the pen to check on the guards, Panov to arrive, eager to inspect "Leopard" —

  He placed the magnetic pad at the end of the nylon line against the hull, jerked hard on the line, then abseiled down the curving hull, watching the port side guard continually. The sensor was beneath one of his feet, then level with his eyes. He ran one hand over the titanium tear-drop. Undamaged. He looked at the guard, almost out of sight behind the swelling midships section of the submarine, then clambered back up the line to the top of the hull. One.

  He saw the starboard guard little more than half-way up the pen, his feet jigging unconsciously to the noise coming from the tiny radio. He swung down on the starboard side until he was level with the tear-drop dome. It was loose, and he cursed silently. He pulled a screwdriver from his kit, and prised at the thin titanium. Beneath it, the sensor appeared undamaged. He juggled his lamp in his hand, and switched it on. He checked, feeling the arm that gripped the line begin to quiver with nerves — guards nearly at the end of the pen, moving into the shadows beyond the hard lights — and his body heating with the tension. Undamaged — yes, undamaged. He loosened his grip on the lamp, and it dangled from his wrist again on its thick strap. He made to replace the screwdriver in his belt, and it slipped from his fingers — the guard was out of sight behind the swell of the midships, and in the shadow — and slid down the hull with a rattling noise that sounded deafening in the intense silence. It plopped like a large fish into the water. They must have heard it. He clambered, feet slipping, then able to grip, body hunched, almost jerking upwards on the line as if he were a fish and was hooked, waiting for the challenge, the shout of recognition at any moment.