Sea Leopard

by Craig Thomas

  Now, under the looming shadow of the long, high bank, she knew she could go no further. Hyde's weight had become intolerable. She could bully him no more, support him no longer. She was hungry, and cold, and impatient of Hyde's helplessness. His repeated groans of pain enraged her.

  She knelt by him because he would not quieten. She shook his head carefully, as if it fitted only loosely, her fingers holding his chin. His eyes flickered, but then closed again, as if he wished to exclude her and what she represented. She shook his head more violently. A great weariness possessed her, and she sat instead of squatting on her haunches.

  "For God's sake, wake up," she pleaded.

  "Uuh," he grunted. She looked at him. His eyes were open.

  "You're awake."

  "Oh, Christ?" he cried in a broken voice, his breath sobbing. "My bloody shoulder." He groaned again.

  "You're not delirious?"

  "My bloody shoulder won't let me. Where — where are we?"

  "Behind the rifle ranges. Are we going to stay here?"

  "I'm not going anywhere." Hyde looked at the stars. "I can't go anywhere, Tricia."

  "I know."

  "Have a quick look around. See if you can find some dense undergrowth, a ditch, a trench, a hole in the bank, anything. If we can get under cover, we — " He groaned again.

  "Where are the police?" she asked plaintively.

  "Searching Cheshire probably," he replied, coughing. She looked anxiously for signs of blood as he wiped his lips. There were none. "Trouble is, we're in Staffordshire. They'll get round to us. I hope."

  "They must be looking, surely?"

  "I bloody well hope so, darling. I pay my rates and taxes so they can pull me out of holes like this. I'll be writing to my bloody Pom MP if they don't turn up."

  She almost laughed at the pronounced accent and the sentiments it expressed. Something lifted from her; not her weariness, but something of her isolation. Hyde sounded more like a human being, less like a liability.

  "I'll look," she said, and got up. He turned his head slowly and watched her. He felt tears in his eyes which might simply have been the result of pain and weariness. He did not understand them, and for a few moments he could not prevent them. The pain in his shoulder subsided now that he was resting, but he felt his body could make no further effort, not even to defend itself or the girl. He needed to hide.

  The girl came back quickly, almost running.

  "No —" he protested, sensing her pursued.

  "What? No, it's all right, I" ve found a hollow, scooped out of the bank. It's almost masked by a bush. Can you come?"

  He sat up, rocked, then steadied himself. "Give us a hand, mate."

  She tottered, but pulled him to his feet. She hitched his arm across her aching shoulders again, and dragged him along the gully behind the bank, which loomed thirty feet or more above them.

  It was less than fifty yards, but she was staggering with tiredness when they reached the bush growing out of the bank. Hyde felt its stiff, resisting branches, the sharp ends and points of old thorns. It had spread and flourished for many years, but he could see behind its present leaflessness the outline of a hole in the bank.

  "How far in does it go, do you think?" she said, shivering as she realised she would have to investigate.

  "It's all right. No bears left, and no wolves. And no bloody snakes like we" ve got in Aussie biting your arse when you climb in. Go on, then." He sounded genuinely impatient.

  She heaved and struggled with the branches of the leafless bush, then went head-first into the hole. "It smells," he heard her call hollowly.

  His cackle degenerated into a cough. "It's those bloody rabbits from Watership Down," he said. "How big is it?"

  Her head emerged. "Just big enough for two, if you don't mind a crush."

  "You'll have to push me in," he said.

  She climbed out, snagging her jacket on thorns, then she helped get him to the bush, lifted some of the whippier branches aside like a curtain, then got her shoulder beneath his buttocks.

  "Ready?"

  "Yes."

  She heaved, and he disappeared into the hole.

  "Are you all right?"

  "Yes," he answered faintly. "Rearrange the bush when you climb in."

  She squeezed into the hole, then turned with difficulty, putting her foot into his back at one point, and reached out, tugging and pulling the bushes back into place as well as she could. Then she slithered backwards until she was bunched up against him.

  "Wait a minute," she said, and fumbled in the pockets of the donkey jacket. She rattled the box of matches, fumbled with it, then struck one. “There you are."

  Hyde's face looked grey and ill, but he managed to say, "Now I get you alone at last, some bloody Russian puts a contraceptive through my shoulder."

  "Yes," she said thoughtfully, already finding the light of the match much too bright and wanting to close her eyes. She shook it out and dropped it. "Are you all — right?" she asked faintly. The darkness closed satisfyingly around her. She was not certain whether his reply was positive or negative, and she did not really think it mattered. She heard him groan once before she fell asleep.

  * * *

  Clark closed the tiny hatch into the space between the outer and the pressure hulls, leaving his helical aerial attached to the surface of the outer hull. The darkness was sudden and intense after the hard lighting from the roof of the pen. He could not stand upright, but bent his head and hunched his back as he waited for his breathing to return to normal, or to an approximation of normality.

  He emerged from the aft escape chamber knowing that the new guards on either side of the submarine would be self-consciously, fearfully alert for any and every unexpected noise and movement. Their peripheral vision would be enhanced by the threats of the senior michman, and they had been on duty for only twenty minutes. Yet he had to risk it.

  When he recovered in the escape chamber, his arms full of cramp and pain, his whole body exhausted with the effort of abseiling down the hull and climbing it again, he first collected the second pack — left hand bad — from the electric motor room and took it into the chamber. He would have to take both complete packs with him. He was on the point of incarcerating himself between the twin hulls of the Proteus until he either repaired the back-up system or was forced to abort and plant the explosives which would melt it into a lump of useless metal.

  The hatch fitted to the Proteus which allowed access to the inner hull where the blister containing the back-up system was fitted lay thirty feet from the aft escape hatch. He had eased open the hatch a matter of inches, listening with his whole body. When the guards" footsteps moved out of range, precise and regular and unconcerned as clockwork, he opened it fully, climbed out, closed it again, and moved along the hull. He had opened the other hatch, and lowered the first pack in. Then he had closed it and returned, waiting until the next patrol of the pen took the two guards towards the bow before moving the second pack along the top of the hull, dragging it after him as he slithered on his belly, into the space between the hulls.

  In the darkness now, the two packs rested at his feet. He was aware, as his breathing calmed, of the way in which the pressure hull curved away on either side of him. He was on a narrow ledge, a metal bridge across a chasm, and he must never forget the fact.

  He paused for another moment, his bearings uncertain then assured, and then he hefted the two packs until they no longer dragged on the pressure hull before moving forward. He pushed his feet forward, disregarding the lamp for the moment because his hands were full and because it seemed necessary to establish some sense of mastery over his new and alien environment. Behind him, he paid out the wire from his transceiver to the aerial outside the hull. He felt the hull slope slightly upwards, in ridged steps. Unlike the smooth outer hull, the pressure hull of the Proteus did not follow exactly the same outline or shape. His shoulders bent lower as the two hulls narrowed the distance between themselves. Another three steps,
and he dropped lightly to his knees. The outer hull seemed to press down upon him in a moment of claustrophobia, and the pressure hull beneath his knees and toes seemed thin, uncertain, narrow. The chasm waited for him on either side.

  He switched on the lamp. Ahead of him, where the space between the hulls narrowed like a thin, deep shaft where a miner would have had to work on his back or his stomach to dig the coal, he could see, like the pit-props appropriate to the analogy his mind had discovered, the stanchions growing like grey metal trees between the two hulls, separating and binding them. He moved the torch around him, pressing back the thick, blind darkness. It smelt old, and damp, and empty. The sounds thrumming lightly and occasionally through the pressure hull, the murmur of machinery and air-pumps and filters and voices and electrics and ovens and toilets, seemed completely removed from him and not of human origin.

  The outer hull sloped away like the roof of a dome to either side, falling sheer out of sight. He could see the lip where the pressure hull followed its shape on either side. The ledge seemed narrow and fragile. He flicked the torch's thin beam deliberately forward again. A hump like a turtle shell or the scaled back of an armadillo hunched in the shadows beyond the stanchion trees. The sight of it relieved him. He fixed the packs to his belt by their clips once more, and lay flat. He began pushing the packs in front of him, slithering awkwardly forward, alarmed by the noise he seemed to be making.

  He began to weave through the stanchions, thrusting and pushing the packs in turn ahead of him, then using his elbows and knees to move his body forward behind them. Whenever he flicked on the limp — needing its light now as reassurance as well as a guide — the grey humped back of the turtle shell remained ahead of him in the shadows at the edge of the pool of light.

  Push. The left-hand pack was fumbled round the next stanchion. Push. The right-hand pack moved. He then moved his body forward. His cheek rested for a moment against the cold, wet-seeming metal of the stanchion, then he pushed the left-hand pack forward again. His lamp clanged against the pressure hull. He cursed the noise, momentarily distracted, and the left-hand pack slid away from him. He felt it tug at his body, urging it sideways. The pack slithered into the chasm. His right hand grabbed the stanchion, and his arm was almost jerked from its socket. He suppressed a cry of pain and held on, reeling in the heavy pack with his left hand. He gripped it to him, shaking.

  When he had swallowed the fear in his mouth, and his legs had seemed to recover some of their strength, he moved on, passing the last of the stanchions, slithering more quickly the last few feet to the shell of grey metal, the tumour on the pressure hull.

  He was able to kneel, just, with his back arched like a frightened cat's, and shine his lamp over the surface. His first task was to remove it. He placed the packs carefully beyond it, where he would not disturb them accidentally, and began removing the bolts from the sealing gasket of the grey carapace. He was aware that he was above the ceiling of the turbine room, crouching in shadow, alone and even ridiculous, taking his first steps to cure an illness he was unlikely to be able to diagnose. Below him, from what he had seen when aboard the Proteus, it was likely that engineers and technicians from the naval base would be inspecting the giant turbines. He had to presume that they were there, assume that the slightest carelessness with regard to noise would betray his presence to them.

  "I'm in the tunnel," he said softly, aware of the point on the relief map which Pasvik had pointed out and where he now hid. Pasvik was in the bushes with his dish aerials, the one fragile link between himself and Quin aboard the Nimrod.

  "Good." Aubrey's voice.

  "Beginning to remove the cowling," he said.

  He reached into a pocket of his immersion suit and removed a rubber suction cap. He fixed it to the lamp, and pressed the other side against the outer hull. He jiggled the lamp, but it remained fixed. The pool of light fell upon the grey metal shell.

  He loosened the final screw, pocketed it, and lifted the carapace away. Inside it were the carbon fibre braces to withstand pressure at depth. Beneath the carapace were a number of further box-like housings with neoprene seals. He half turned a spring-loaded catch, then lifted the first of the inner covers. What he saw, as he had suspected from the diagram but which still surprised and daunted him, resembled a dug-out, exposed telephone junction box he had once seen beneath the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. The telephone engineers had exposed a mass of bright, spiderish wiring, incomprehensible, baffling. He shook his head, and began to learn the nature of what he looked at, remembering Quin's voice guiding him through the wiring diagrams and the "Leopard" manual. Printed circuit boards, a sickly grey-white and green where the copper was coated with anti-corrosion varnish; on the boards, resistors with bright bands of colour in the lamplight, capacitors in tubes of various sizes, some sheathed in coloured plastic, some like sucked cough lozenges. He nodded to himself. His eyes recognised the number of small boxes set out as regularly and rigidly as units of some eighteenth-century army drawn up for battle. Pins like defences protruded from the boxes, glinting gold. Microprocessors.

  It was no longer mysterious. Merely a collection of components. He breathed easily, with satisfaction. He was now the telephone engineer, not the passer-by. The sheer mass of wiring, however, prevented complacency; all colour coded, lashed into ropes with fine cords. Each circuit board had a serial number, which he would read to Quin or Quin would instruct him to test, and each component, however tiny it might be, fitted in its place in company with a reference number.

  His finger traced across the bulk of large power transformers, mounted on blocks of metal and used to dissipate heat from the system. Then his eye began to register the miniature switches, labelled Self-Test Facility and the multi-pin sockets labelled Input Tester Socket Type 27 P3D. They were his heart of the matter, all he really needed to recognise.

  He hefted the carapace away from him, together with the inner cover, and placed them gingerly in the pressure hull beyond his packs, steadying them until he considered neither of them would slip into the chasm. Then he removed his special test kit from the pack, and clipped it to his belt. A bead of wetness ran down his cheek, then dropped from his jaw. It would take hours, just the checking. The thought made his hands almost nerveless and caused a cramp in his arched back and neck.

  "Okay," he said in a whisper.

  Quin was back almost immediately, the eagerness evident in his voice. "Begin with the Opto-Electric Converter," he said. "You can identify that?"

  Clark studied the exposed boards. "Yes, got it."

  "Good. Switch SW One off, and SW Two on."

  "Right."

  " Rotate SW One to Test."

  "Yes."

  "Look at the two rows of LEDs — describe the sequence of lights to me."

  Clark watched the two rows of light emitting diodes. The top row lit up one by one, accompanied by a low hum. As the last one illuminated, the first light of the lower row lit up, followed by its companions, the top row of lights going out immediately. When the second row was complete it, too, went out, and the first light of the top row lit up once more, repeating the sequence.

  When Clark had reached the end of the sequence in his description, Quin interrupted him.

  "Switch off. Everything's working properly there. The transducers, the wiring, the fibre-optics and the connectors are all working as they should."

  "Uh," Clark grunted, disappointed in a childish, impatient way. Nothing wrong. He sighed.

  * * *

  The Nimrod banked sharply to starboard. Eastoe was trying to come round on to the northern leg, across Varangerhalvoya, and two of the MiG-23s had crossed the nose of the aircraft as soon as he began to change course. Aubrey gripped the sides of his seat fiercely, but he did not allow any expression to appear on his face. He could hear the Russian flight leader, speaking in correct, unemotional English, demanding that Eastoe continue on his former course, west along the Norwegian coast towards North Cape. Eastoe re
mained silent.

  The Nimrod, however declared his intention. It dipped violently as the two MiGs banked up and away, flicking with the agility of flies across the darkness, illuminated by a flash of lightning only when they were already more than a mile away, and beginning a turn to bring them back alongside the Nimrod. Eastoe levelled the big aircraft below the flight level of the Russian interceptors.

  "Everyone all right — you, Mr Aubrey?"

  "Thank you, yes. No more than unsettled." The console in front of Aubrey crackled, and what might have been a voice tried unsuccessfully to communicate something to them. Quin had turned up the volume to maximum, and was leaning forward.

  "What did you say, Clark? Clark, I can't hear you."

  "What's the matter?" Aubrey snapped fearfully. "What's happening?" Quin shook his head and shrugged. "Eastoe — we can't hear Clark."

  "I'm at the limit, Mr Aubrey. Over a hundred miles out. I'm sorry, but I'm trying to shave the corner off the northbound leg. You'll have to bear with me." There was no satisfaction in the voice. Eastoe had suspended his personal feud with Aubrey.

  "Very well." The storm filled the empty ether that was being amplified by the console. A MiG popped into Aubrey's vision, below and almost beneath the port wing of the Nimrod. It had bobbed there like a cork tossed on rough water. There was only the one. Aubrey bent his head and stared through the starboard window opposite him. He could see two more of the Russian interceptors. They were close in, as if juggling for position in order to refuel from the Nimrod. Dangerously close.

  Drawn to what he suspected was happening, Aubrey left his seat and crossed to the starboard side of the Nimrod. The aircraft was sliding into a turn, banking slightly and nose-down so that the metal floop had tilted like the floor of some disorientating fairground tunnel. The closest MiG was edging into the Nimrod like a smaller animal ingratiating himself. Its speed had matched the Nimrod's and Aubrey could already see the helmeted head of the pilot within the bubble of the canopy. The flying was skilful even as it was threatening and dangerous. The Nimrod was being headed off, a sheep being directed by a sheepdog. A collision appeared inevitable as their paths converged. Aubrey could do nothing except watch with an appalled fascination. His old frail body trembled with its sense of mortality.