Sea Leopard

Chapter Six: LOST

Part of him, immediately he left the warmth of the headquarters building, wanted to respond to the driving sleet and the howling wind and the lights of the port of Pechenga gleaming fitfully like small, brave candles in the white-curtained darkness. He wanted the weather not to be critical, merely something to be endured, even enjoyed. Instead, there was the immediate sense of danger, as if a palpable, armed enemy was closing at his back. He turned up the collar of his heavy jacket, and crossed the gleaming concrete, slippery already, to the waiting car.

His driver was a michman — petty officer — from Pechenga base security, and he saluted despite the fact that Ardenyev was not in uniform. His face was cold and washed-out and expressionless in the purpling light of the lamps. Ardenyev had the strange and unsettling impression of death. Then the driver opened the rear door of the Zil staff car, and the momentary feeling evaporated.

The car wound swiftly down from the hump of higher ground on which the Red Banner Fleet's headquarters in Pechenga stood, towards the port and the naval helicopter base. Lights out in the roads, the glare of the arc-lamps from the repair yards, the few commercial and pleasure streets sodium-lit and neon-garish, like the stilled arms of light from a lighthouse.

Ardenyev was disturbed by Dolohov's manic desire for success. The admiral had never been careless of risks before. This adventure with the British submarine obsessed him. He knew the details of the met. reports as well as anyone, and yet he ignored them. Ardenyev had, on his own authority, delayed his departure for the rescue ship out in the darkness of the Barents because of the worsening conditions. Delayed, that is, until further postponement would have meant running behind the schedule of the operation; and that he was not prepared to do. Instead, he nursed his conviction that Dolohov was unjustified in ordering them out.

It was cold in the back of the staff car despite the powerful, dusty-smelling heater. Ardenyev rubbed his hands together to warm them. Then the staff car slid under the canopy of white light of the helicopter base and the driver wound down the window to present his pass to the naval guard at the gate. The guard took one swift look at Ardenyev, the cold air blanching his face from the open window, more out of curiosity than to identify him. Then the heavy wire-mesh gates swung open, and the driver wound up the window as they pulled forward. The car turned left, and they were passing hangars and repair shops where warmer light gleamed through open doors. Then a patch of darkness, then the sleet rushing at the windscreen again. Through it, Ardenyev could see the two helicopters, red lights winking at tail and belly. Two MiL-2 light transport helicopters, the only naval helicopters in current service small enough to land on the seemingly fragile, circular helicopter pad of the rescue ship Karpaty.

The car stopped almost in the shadow of one of the small helicopters. Snub-nosed, insect-like, frail. Ardenyev thanked the driver abstractedly, and got out of the car. The sudden wind and cold sleet did not drive out the unwelcome, crowding impressions that seemed to have taken possession of his imagination, leading into the rational part of his mind, polluting clear thought. The Zil staff car pulled away behind him.

"You changed your mind then, skipper — decided to come?" came a voice from the door of the MiL. A grinning, cold-pinched face, blown fair hair above a dark naval jersey. Senior-Lieutenant Andrei Orlov, Ardenyev's second-in-command and leader of Blue section of the special operations unit. Ardenyev summoned a wave he hoped was optimistic, then looked up at the sky, wrinkling his face.

"The pilot's moaning about the weather, skipper," Orlov added. "It's just having to turn out in this muck, I reckon."

Orlov took Ardenyev's arm, and he swung up into the hollow, ribbed interior of the helicopter. The door slammed shut behind him. Someone groaned with the cold. Young faces, five others besides Orlov. Blue section. Ardenyev nodded at them, business-like. Then he clambered through into the helicopter's cabin. The pilot nodded to him. His face was disgruntled.

"Get your clearance — we're on our way," Ardenyev told him, "just as soon as I get aboard your pal's chopper. Take care." Already, the inertia of the mission had affected him, sweeping him along like a current growing stronger each moment. An easy and familiar adrenalin invested his body. His mind was clear now. He clambered back into the passenger compartment. "OK, you lot?" Each man nodded. Most of them grinned, nerves flickering like small electric shocks in their faces and arms. "Good. See you on the Karpaty. Open the door, Andrei."

The door slid back, and Ardenyev dropped lightly to the ground. He crossed the patch of wet, slippery concrete to the next pad, and the door to the second MiL opened with a screech. The senior michman who was his deputy leader in Red section hauled him aboard, wiping sleet from his jacket even as he slammed the door shut behind Ardenyev.

"Thought you weren't coming, sir," he offered. His face was bony and angular beneath the cropped hair. Viktor Teplov.

"Thanks Viktor. Lieutenant Orlov thought just the same." He looked round at the other five men, grinning. One or two older faces. Red section was the senior team in the unit. The faces were as they should be. A couple of good youngsters, too. "Everyone keeping warm?"

"With difficulty, sir," Teplov answered.

"Let's get going, then." He clambered through to the passenger seat beside the pilot. "Very well, Lieutenant, shall we proceed?" he said as he strapped himself into the seat.

"You're going to be very lucky, Captain, to get down on to the Karpaty. The weather out there is worse than this."

"I have implicit faith in your skills, Lieutenant." He gestured towards the windscreen of the helicopter where two huge wiper blades and the de-icing equipment struggled with the sleet. "Shall we go? I take it you're cleared for take-off?"

"We are. We" ve been waiting an hour, fully cleared."

"What's the matter, Lieutenant?"

"I" ve told my superiors — I" ve told anyone who will listen."

"Told them what?"

The wind is force four plus. What if we can't get down, just can't make it?"

"The Kiev, I suppose. Why?"

"Let's hope it's not too bad for the Kiev, then. The range of this chopper means that once we get out there, we haven't enough fuel to get back. You should be in a MiL-8, one of the big boys, all of you. They shouldn't have assigned this—"

"Shouldn't have assigned you, you mean? Two small, light helicopters were requested. The rescue ship contains all our equipment. The Kiev's no good to us. MiL-8s can't land on the Karpaty. Now, we can go?"

"All right. Just wanted you to know."

"I'm grateful."

The pilot lieutenant cleared with the tower. Ardenyev settled himself more comfortably in his narrow seat. The two Isotov turbo-shafts began to whine, and above his head the rotor blades quickened, cutting through the sleet, swirling until they were transformed into a shimmering dish. The lieutenant altered the angle of the rotor blades, the engine pitch changed to a higher note, and the helicopter moved off its chocks. The pilot paused, checking his instruments, the wheels of the MiL were just in contact with the ground. The pilot's knuckle was white on the stick.

"The wind," the pilot observed gloomily.

"Yes."

The MiL lifted, with seeming reluctance, from the patch of concrete. The sleet whirled round them in the downdraught. A fist of wind swung at them, made contact, knocked them sideways. The pilot shuffled his feet on the rudder bar, juggled the stick and they steadied, drifted, steadied again, and rose above the lights of the helicopter base. A white dish beneath them, darkness above.

"See what I mean?" the pilot offered. "We're right on the edge of possible flying conditions." The wind buffeted them. It seemed a physical strain on the pilot to maintain course. It had seemed a struggle to alter the stick and head the MiL out to sea, as if the helicopter was some reluctant, untamed animal.

"Yes, I see," Ardenyev replied thoughtfully. "Is our fellow traveller with us?"

The pilot looked in his mirror, then spoke into his throat-mike. The other pilot's voice was a pinched, unreal sound.

"He's there."

A shudder ran through the fuselage, as if it had received a powerful blow, some direct hit with a weapon.

Hyde opened his eyes. For a moment, Shelley's features were unfamiliar. Then he recognised Aubrey's aide, and attempted to sit up. Pain shot through his ribs, and his back, and he groaned. Hands pushed him back down on the hard bed. He could feel the thin, hard, uncomfortable blanket beneath his fingers, and he wiggled his toes, eyes very tightly shut for a moment until he opened them in relief.

"You're all right," Shelley said. "God knows how, but you're just bruised pretty badly."

His neck and shoulder ached more than his back and ribs. "One of them hit me," he complained.

"We assumed that was the case. It's why you" ve been out so long."

"How long?"

"Almost four hours."

"Christ." He covered his face with his hands, as if the light hurt him or he was ashamed. "Jesus, my head."

"I caught the end of the concert. Mine feels much the same."

"Very funny."

"Who was it — Petrunin?"

Hyde's eyes snapped open. "How did you know?"

"Routine surveillance report on the embassy. Unauthorised trip north by the Resident. It had to be you and the girl."

"I saw him." Hyde saw Shelley motioning towards another part of the narrow, cream-painted room. A door closed. Shelley's face appeared above his own again, and then he was being helped to sit up. Shelley proffered a mug of tea. Hyde sipped the sweet, scalding liquid, hands clasped round the mug as if to warm them. "I almost had her." They were alone in the room now. "I'm all right?"

Shelley nodded. "You're all right — just a bit crook."

"I feel it. The girl panicked. She's like something high on LSD. Seems to think they're coming out of the woodwork for her."

"She's right."

"That bloody rock band. They got in the way."

"Where do you think she is? Do you think they" ve got her?"

"I don't know. She could be anywhere." Hyde concentrated. "I got the impression Petrunin had gone back off the platform — the bloke who clobbered me was being pushed towards the steps — the girl was down the other end of the platform. One of them went after her. He might have made it."

"By the time I got here, they'd all disappeared. No one saw the girl."

"Shit."

"I know."

"What does Aubrey want us to do?"

"He's otherwise occupied. He's taken control of the submarine business. He seems to think it's in a hell of a mess."

"He's got the set now, then. It's all a bloody mess."

"Where is she, Patrick? If she isn't at the embassy or one of their safe houses? I" ve got everything I can screened. They won't be able to get her out — I hope. If they want to, that is. But if she's free, where is she?"

"Why not Heat of the Day? It's where she ran for help and cover in the first place? She might have nowhere else to go."

The group?"

"Yes."

"Where are they?"

Hyde groaned as he swung his legs off the bed and sat up. He touched his ribs gingerly. "Are they sure nothing's broken?"

"Quite sure."

"Free Trade Hall, Manchester, is their next venue. Where they're staying tonight, I" ve no idea. Maybe here?"

Shelley shook his head. "Not here. Some country hotel in Cheshire. I'm having it checked out."

"You won't find the girl. She won't stick her neck out again. They could even have hidden her somewhere. She'll go to ground for the duration if the Branch trample all over the garden in their big boots."

"You can't do it yourself."

Hyde rubbed his neck and shoulder, groaning softly. Then he looked into Shelley's face. "I'll accept discreet cover, but nothing more. The girl doesn't believe me as it is. If I go in mob-handed, she'll never tell us where Dad is. You can see that, can't you?"

"Aubrey wouldn't like it."

"He might. The girl is frightened. She knows one mob is after her, one mob and me on my own. Give me until tomorrow night, and if I can find her and talk to her, she might come in. I won't lose her again."

"Petrunin won't let go of you."

"All right. But the girl's more important. It won't be any good arresting a rock band and sweating the lot of them. She has to be coaxed. She's near panic. Her father must be a mistrusting bastard. She's neurotic about us."

Shelley paced the room, one hand rubbing his chin, the other thrust into the pocket of his overcoat. He glanced at Hyde from time to time. Indecision blossomed on his face. Eventually, he said: "I don't know — I just don't know."

"Look, you work on the assumption that Petrunin has her, and I'll work on the assumption he hasn't. Get back to London and mobilise the troops. I'll go up to Manchester, and sit on my arse and wait. Get me cover, discreet cover, from the Branch up there, and then let me try to get to the girl. If she isn't in Manchester, and they won't tell me where she is, then you can take over. Okay?"

"All right," Shelley said after another lengthy pause. "All right. We'll do it your way, for the moment."

"At least I'm a familiar face."

"You won't be if you get knocked about any more." He glanced at the telephone on a folding table, next to a black medical bag. "I'll try to talk to Aubrey, though. I want him to be fully informed."

It was a tableau of activity, a frozen still-life of tension, fear close to panic, routine and emergency procedures. In other parts of the submarine, men lay in their bunks or sat on the floor. No one moved unless movement was unavoidable and essential to the survival of the Proteus. In the control room, men stood or sat as their functions dictated, and when they moved — which was rarely, and with Lloyd's express permission — it was with an exaggerated, burglar-like stealth. All unnecessary electrics had been switched off, and the control room was made eerie by the emergency lighting. Only Lloyd stalked the control room like a hunter, like an escapee.

The sonars, in passive mode, their screens illuminating the faces of their operators from beneath, making arms and chins and cheeks blue or green or red, a ghastly imitation of disco strobe-lights, revealed the Proteus's danger. Under the cloak of "Leopard" the submarine lay on the ledge almost fifty fathoms down, while Soviet submarines moved back and forth around, below and above them like prowling sharks outside a diver's cage. As Lloyd watched over the shoulder of one of the sonar operators, a bright trail on the screen slid slowly to the port like the hand of a clock, mere hundreds of yards from their position. Noise — any noise — would be like blood to that shark, and bring others.

Lloyd left the screen and stood beneath one of the emergency lights. Once more, he scanned the damage report that his chief engineer had compiled in silence and semi-darkness. They had not dared send a diver outside the hull, outside the cloak of the anti-sonar. Much of it was guesswork, or deduced from the instruments and the computer. The damage was relatively slight, but almost totally disabling. Thurston and the chief engineer had guessed at a low-charge torpedo — wake-homing, as they had known in those last seconds before it struck — which had damaged the propeller blades and the port aft hydroplane. It left the Proteus with no effective propulsion, and little ability to maintain course and depth. She needed repairs before she could go anywhere. And in that conclusion, Lloyd perceived the Russian objective.

He was calm. It was partly an act for the benefit of the crew, and yet it was genuine too. He had not known he would react in this way, in harm's way. It had little to do with the fact that the pressure hull remained undamaged, or with the invisibility bestowed by "Leopard". It was, simply, him. He had no inclination to curse MoD or to blame himself for not aborting the mission hours earlier. The past, even as recently as two hours before, was dead to him. The Russians did not know where they were and, eventually, help must come — diplomatic, military, civilian, mechanical, political.

Thurston left the navigator and Hayter, who was taking a much needed break from monitoring the functioning of "Leopard", and crossed the control room. In his hand he had a notebook and pen. He held it up to Lloyd.

Thurston had written: What do we do? Lloyd merely shook his head. Thurston was puzzled, then scribbled furiously on a fresh sheet of the notebook: We have to tell someone. Lloyd took a pen from his breast pocket, and borrowed Thurston's notebook. He scribbled: And tell them where we are? Thurston — Lloyd could not help being amused by the pantomime they were enacting — wrote: Must be Nimrod in area by now.

We can't transmit. Too risky. Lloyd scribbled.

They want "Leopard" — but how? Thurston wrote.

Salvage?

They couldn't, Thurston began writing, then his hand trailed off to the edge of the sheet. Savagely, he crossed out what he had written. Defiantly, he wrote: Have to find us first. Lloyd patted his shoulder, then wrote: Only a few days.

The sudden noise was deafening, literally terrifying to every man in the control room. It was more than two seconds before the rating at the code-signals console cut the amplification with a hand that dabbed out, as if electrified, at the switch. He stared at Lloyd guiltily, afraid, his youthful face behind his ginger beard blushing. Lloyd tiptoed across to him, his whole body shaking with reaction. The chatter of a high-speed coded signal, incoming. The rating removed his headphones, offering them like a propitiation to Lloyd, something to avert his wrath. Lloyd pressed him, firmly but not unkindly, on the shoulder, and held the headphones to one ear. He nodded, as if deciphering the signal for himself, or hearing an instruction in plain language. The rating flicked switches, and waited. His screen remained blank. Lloyd watched it, looking into a mirror, a crystal ball. Thurston arrived behind him, his breath ragged and only now slowing down. Lloyd felt the tension in the control room of the shrilling chatter of the signal, and the awareness of the Russians beyond the hull, and the knowledge that the signal was continuing. It crawled on his skin like St Elmo's Fire, or a disturbed nest of ants.

The screen displayed a line of white print. A message buoy. Thurston nudged Lloyd, and mouthed Nimrod, and Lloyd nodded. The code identification then appeared, deciphered. MoD, then the placing of the security level of the instructions. ETNA. Lloyd looked startled. A civilian override by the intelligence service. The comprehension of their danger by some outside authority made him feel weak. They had known, had tried —

The message unreeled on the screen, line by line, then began to repeat itself. Abort the mission, return to home waters immediate. ETNA. ETNA. Acknowledge, code 6F, soonest. Compliance immediate —

Compliance impossible. Someone had known, someone in SIS or the Directorate of Security or the CIA, or the Norwegians, the Germans, the Dutch — someone somewhere had known, or suspected, and had tried to warn them, recall them. The knowledge was like a debilitating illness.

There was a Nimrod in the area, on-station. It would, perhaps, wait for an acknowledgement. It would, doubtless remain on-station to monitor Soviet naval activity. Such would be its orders. It was up there, somewhere.

Signal, Lloyd wrote on Thurston's pad. The rating watched the screen. The message began repeating for the third time. Lloyd reached out, flicked a switch angrily, and the screen darkened. The rating's shoulders hunched as if against a blow from behind.

You can't, Thurston had written by the time Lloyd looked back at the pad. The two men stared at one another, their faces seeming agonised in the dimness of the emergency lights.

Lloyd crossed the control room. Four trails of light, not one of them more than a mile-and-a-half from the ledge on which they lay. Four hunter-killer submarines, waiting for the blood that would spur them, fix the position of Proteus. That blood might be any noise, even the sonar shadow of the aerial buoy they would have to send to the surface to contact the Nimrod.

You can't.

Lloyd realised he still had Thurston's pad in his hand. He dare not, in his anger, tear out the sheet or throw down the pad. It would not make a detectable noise. Yet he did not dare.

In how many rooms had he waited, on how many occasions? Clocks. How many clocks? So many of them with large, plain faces and a red sweeping second hand. Arms that clicked on to the next minute. Clocks. The persistence of memory. Even now, there was no clarity to his thoughts, no cleanness. Only the many other occasions on which he had endured the same, endless waiting.

Aubrey sighed. He had not been aware of the number of clocks in the underground room until all the protocol had been observed and Brussels and Washington and MoD had agreed to his assumption of complete authority over the safe return of the Proteus. Furious telephone and signal activity, followed by a post-coital lassitude, restlessness. Waiting for the Nimrod's report, waiting then for the first safe occasion when the submarine could send an aerial buoy to the surface and answer their peremptory summons home. Until a certain time had passed — the remainder of that night, perhaps the next day, too — they could make no assumptions. Nor would they be able to prevent dread from flourishing like a noxious weed in each of their minds.

Aubrey knew it, understood the Soviet scheme in its entirety. Daring, almost foolhardy, reckless, extreme. But impossible of fulfilment. "Leopard" as the prize. Clark, too, he knew agreed with his insight. He had not asked the American; he had asked no one. He stared at the cup of coffee in his hand, and found its surface grey. His watch peeped like a rising, ominous sun over the curve of his wrist, from beneath his shirt-cuff. He ignored it.

He had never been interested in seconds, in the sweep of the quick hand. Blister or burn operations that relied on that kind of exactitude had never been his forte. Yet he had waited longer, and more often. Back rooms of empty buildings near the Wall, with the rats scampering behind the skirting-board and the peeling wallpaper; or beneath the slowly revolving ceiling-fans, in hotel rooms with geckos chasing insects up the walls or places where, with the fan less effective against even hotter nights, crickets chorused outside; or with windows fogged by the warmth of wood-burning stoves, and wooden walls; and so many embassy basements and signals rooms, and so many rooms like this, in London and a dozen other cities. Memory's persistence, its retained vivacity, wearied and oppressed him.

Shelley's telephone call was, perhaps, the worst moment; the small, personal act of spite or neglect amid a more general ruin. Of course Hyde was correct — he must reach the girl himself, if they were not only to possess her, but to possess her confidence also. Manchester. Aubrey was doubtful that the girl had returned to the pop group; and at the same moment wondered whether his disdain towards their kind of music made him think that. He could not, he found, identify in any way with a modern girl of twenty-plus. An alien species. And Shelley's background was probably wrong. Hyde might know more than either of them.

With great reluctance, Aubrey looked at the clock on the wall opposite his chair. Another minute clicked away. Twelve twenty-four. Another six minutes, with good fortune and communications, before the Nimrod transmitted a status report on Soviet activity in the area of the Tanafjord.

And, despite the weariness of the waiting, he felt no desire to receive that report.

"No trace of them? After almost three hours, no trace of them?" Dolohov raged at the rear-admiral, who blanched with a suppressed indignation of his own, and the sense of humiliation at once more being berated in front of junior officers, his own and those who had come with Dolohov. "It is not good enough, Admiral. It is very bad. We knew it would come to this, we knew it! They found her, crippled her so they say, and now they have lost her. It is not good enough!"

"I — can only repeat, sir, that everyone, every unit on station, is using every means to locate the submarine. We have reduced the search area to a matter of fifty or so square miles of the seabed. The British submarine is inside that square. It is only a matter of time."

Dolohov stared through the window of the control room, down at the map table. A cluster of glowing lights, now merely the decoration for the fir-tree. He dismissed the childhood image, but he could no longer believe in the symbolic importance of those lights. They were strung together for no reason. The rear-admiral's voice seemed to whine in his ear, and his own breath whistled in and out of the spaces under his ribcage.

"They could stay down there for weeks, unless the hull has been damaged, which evidently it has not." As he spoke, his exhalations clouded a little circle of glass in front of his face, as if he were attempting to obscure the signals of temporary failure that glowed below him. "It will be wearying for them, but not uncomfortable or dangerous, while we listen for the whispers of their breathing, the sound of their feet." He turned on the rear-admiral. "We should not have lost contact when the submarine was hit. Grishka's captain should not have lost contact."

"Admiral, he had poor target acquisition, just a trace of the submarine's wake. The torpedo had to be launched, or held, and he made his decision. I–I happen to think he made the right decision."

"You do?" Dolohov's face was bleak with contempt and affront. Then it altered; not softened, but it became more introspective. His voice was softer when he continued. "Perhaps. Perhaps. If they don't find her soon, then we shall pass from the realm of action into that of diplomacy, achieve an international situation. She is in Norwegian waters, and they will attempt to rescue her. Already, they have made contact. You have no idea what that message contained?"

The rear-admiral shook his head. "A one-time code. We would need all their computer cards, and then know which one."

"Very well. It was probably a recall signal. What of the aircraft?"

"A British Nimrod. It will be watching us."

"You see my point, Admiral? Once they understand what we are doing, they will attempt to intervene. There will be evidence, photographs, computer print-outs. It will all serve to complicate matters."

"Yes, sir."

"Temperature sensors, sonar, infra-red — all useless." Dolohov rubbed his chin, staring at the ceiling above his head. In a quiet voice, he said, "Likelihood. Likelihood. If there was some element of choice open to the British captain — eh?" He turned to the rear-admiral. "If he was able to decide, at least to some extent, his final location, where would it be? A ledge, a cleft, a depression? Feed into the computers every detail of every chart and every sounding we have of your fifty square miles. If necessary, we can send down divers — before Ardenyev's team are let loose. Or we can use submersibles with searchlights — " Dolohov was elated again. He controlled, he contributed, he conceived. "Yes, yes. We must be prepared." Then, seeing that the rear-admiral had not moved, he motioned him away. "Get on with it, get on with it!"

Twelve twenty-nine. Clark had joined him, together with Copeland, one of the less reluctant members of the "Chessboard Counter" team. He had requested a conversation with Eastoe, the pilot and captain of the Nimrod. The high-speed, frequency-agile transmissions would delay question and answer but not prevent it. When Eastoe spoke, his words would be recorded on the Nimrod, speeded up to a spitting blur of sound transmitted on frequencies that changed more than a hundred times a second, re-recorded in MoD, slowed and amplified for Aubrey. Then his words would take the same few seconds to reach Eastoe in comprehensible form.

"What's she doing now, Ethan?" he asked suddenly. "Proteus, I mean?"

"Getting the hell out, if her captain's got any sense," Clark replied gloomily.

"You really think they're on to her, don't you?" Copeland challenged Clark. Clark nodded, his face saturnine with experience, even prescience. "I can't believe that — " Copeland turned to Aubrey and added: "Nor should you, sir. “Leopard” is undetectable, and they'll have taken no action against her."

"Ah," Aubrey said. "Would they not?" Copeland shook his head vigorously. "I wish I shared your faith, young man."

The communications officer approached them. Transmission time, Mr Aubrey." He was punctiliously polite, but here was little respect. As if Aubrey had somehow, by some underhand trick, succeeded to the commodore's job and salary and pension..

"Thank you — we'll come over."

Aubrey ushered Clark and Copeland towards the communications console with its banks of switches and reels of tape. Almost as they arrived, a red light blinked on, and a tape began to whirl at near impossible speed. A spit of noise like static.

"The Nimrod's transmitting," Copeland explained offhandedly.

"Thank you."

The communications console operator typed on the bank of switches like a competent secretary. Another tape began to turn, slowly. After more than a minute-and-a-half it stopped and the operator rewound it. Aubrey was aware of the other people gathered behind him, much as men might have gathered around a radio for the cricket Scoreboard.

Eastoe's voice, a man Aubrey did not know. Nevertheless, informed of the ETNA order and aware of its significance, Eastoe addressed his words to Aubrey.

Call sign. Identification. Then: "We have concluded a square search of the area, dropping patterns of sonar buoys while surveying the area by means of infra-red and radar. There is a great deal of Soviet naval activity, surface and sub-surface — " Clark scribbled the co-ordinates, even though they were already being fed into the map's computer. "We have identified by sonar at least four hunter-killer submarines in the immediate area, and the VTOL carrier Kiev and the rescue ship ident is confirmed.

There are other surface units of the Northern Fleet engaged in what appear to be sonar searches of the area. Infra-red and radar is also being extensively and intensively used by all surface and sub-surface vessels — "

"They're looking for her," Clark remarked unnecessarily.

"We conclude an intensive search of a very small area of the seabed, especially inshore. Two Tupolev “Bear”-Cs function exactly similar to our own, are also on station in the immediate area. All units are aware of us, we conclude. Over."

Aubrey glanced around at Clark, then at Copeland.

"You can speak to Squadron Leader Eastoe now," Copeland informed him.

"I realise that, young man. I am merely considering my reply." Aubrey remarked frostily. He paused. The open channel hummed in the silence.

"Squadron Leader," he began without introduction, "you evidently have no trace of the Proteus. Is it your opinion, your considered opinion, that the submarine has received your message and is acting upon it? Over."

The fast tape whirled, and again there was the little asthmatic cough of sound. Then the humming silence again, into which Pyott's drawl dropped theatrically, startling Aubrey.

"Not quite as easy as you thought, Kenneth?"

Aubrey did not turn round. Pyott had entered the room without his noticing. Aubrey sensed a lofty acquiescence in his tone.

"Ah, Giles," he said, "I'm afraid things don't look awfully sunny, just at the moment." Aubrey's own voice was similarly affected, announcing the draw, the honourable compromise. Pyott pushed past Clark and arrived at his shoulder.

"Have they got her?" he asked. Genuine guilt, concern.

"We don't know. I" ve asked the captain of the Nimrod to make a guess."

Tape whirl, then the slow tape, then Eastoe's unemotional voice.

"My guess is she's on the bottom, not moving." A pause, then, as Eastoe realised that Aubrey could not comment immediately, he continued: The submarines and surface ships are concentrating in a very, very small area. Either they" ve lost contact altogether, or they have a pretty good idea where they'll find her. Over."

Immediately, Aubrey said, "In your estimation, is the Proteus damaged?"

"You're not serious, Kenneth?" Pyott asked while they waited for Eastoe's reply.

Aubrey looked at him. "The possibility has to be considered. If they are searching a very small area, it may be because they suspect, even know, she can't move out of that area."

"God," Pyott breathed, and his face was slack and grey, much older. His mouth was slightly open, and he looked very unintelligent.

"I don't think we could raise Him on this set," Clark observed, having overheard Pyott's admission of negligence, culpability. Pyott glanced at the American malevolently. Clark raised his hands, palms outwards. "OK, I'm not crowing, Pyott." Giles Pyott nodded.

Then Eastoe's voice, as naturally, it seemed, as if he was in the room with them. "It's possible, sir." Aubrey's astuteness had won Eastoe's respect, at least for the moment. The search appears to be concentrated well inshore, but it isn't being extended outside a certain radius. They're refining the search all the time, they're not widening it. I think she's in there somewhere. Over."

Aubrey looked at Clark. "Could they have damaged her, Ethan?"

"It's possible."

"How?"

Clark considered the problem. "Wire-guided torpedo, maybe. If they got a temperature trace —" Hidden fear now made itself apparent on his face. "Wake-homing — yes." He shook his head. Copeland's face was lengthened with realisation, complicity in fear. Clark cleared his throat. "If they got some kind of heat trace, and then used a wake-homing torpedo, maybe with a proximity fuse, then the torpedo would follow the Proteus's wake like a hound. Yes, it could be done."

"Do we accept that it has been done, and act accordingly?"

"I — guess so," Clark replied.

"No," Copeland said softly.

"What action, Kenneth?" Pyott asked.

"Diplomatic, of course, through the Norwegians. And practical. What other vessels do we have in the area?"

"Not much — and far away. Maybe the closest is a day's sailing from the Tanafjord."

"I see. I wouldn't like to escalate NATO activity in the area, anyway, with the present Soviet concentration of vessels." He paused. "I shall instruct Eastoe to monitor and report continuously. It would seem that, at the moment, the Red Banner Fleet cannot find our elusive submarine. That situation may not exist for much longer. There is a rescue ship in the area — Eastoe must monitor its activities with particular care. Meanwhile, gentlemen, we must consider all possible scenarios for the prevention of the loss of the “Leopard” equipment to the Russians. Even at the expense of the Proteus herself."

Aubrey turned back to the communications console. It was a few seconds before his audience realised the implications of his statement and the uproar prevented him from completing his instructions to Eastoe and the Nimrod.

The sand dunes on the northern side of the airfield at Kinloss appeared momentarily through the lashing rain, and then vanished again. Tendrils of low cloud were pulled and dragged like bundles of worn grey cloth across the higher ground. Glimpses of hills and mountains were just discernible between the heavier squalls. Three RAF Nimrods gleamed in the rain, their nose sections shielded under protective covers, and the only colour in the scene was the brilliant red of a lone Hawk trainer. All four aircraft were lifeless, abandoned like exhibits in some open-air museum.

The controller watched, from the fuggy warmth of the control tower, a khaki-coloured crew bus returning across the concrete, its lights fuzzily globed by the rain, its whole appearance hunched, its roof shining like a snail's shell. Beyond it, two red anti-collision lights winked rhythmically, and a fourth Nimrod was just discernible. A fuel bowser edged cautiously away from it. Because of his headset, the scene had no sound for the controller, not even that of the incessant rain beating on the control tower roof and windows.

"Kinloss tower — Kestrel One-six requesting taxi clearance."

"Roger, Kestrel One-six. You're cleared to the holding point, runway Zero Eight."

Take-off conditions were bordering on the critical. A decision taken on the station would have resulted in the Nimrod's flight being cancelled. The controller disliked the interference of civilians with all the habitual ferocity of the long-serving officer. Eastoe was over the Barents Sea, waiting for his relief Nimrod. This crew were going to take off in distinctly risky conditions at the order of the same civilian, a little old man from the intelligence service. The controller had not been present at the crew's briefing, and the station commander had not seen fit to inform him either of Eastoe's mission or of the origin of their orders from Whitehall. That small resentment flickered through the controller's mind like one of the anti-collision lights out there in the murk.

If he kept quite still, he could line up the nearest Nimrod's fin with a joint in the concrete. He could see the shudders through the airframe as the wind buffeted it. Someone in a nice warm Whitehall office — ah, tea Miss Smithers, excellent, is it still raining outside? — giving easy orders with his mouth full of digestive biscuit and risking other people's lives —

The Nimrod Kestrel One-six was almost invisible now, tail-on to him, its winking red lights accompanied by white strobe lights. They alone announced its presence and movement.

"Kestrel One-six — Kinloss tower. You have your clearance."

"Affirmative."

"Roger. One-six. You are cleared for a left-hand turn out above five hundred feet."

The lighting board showed all the lights on the taxiway and the runway to be on. A telephone near him blinked its light, and the duty corporal picked it up, interrupting his making out of the movements slip. The controller lifted one headphone, and caught the information that Flying Officer Harris was sick and would not be reporting for the first shift the next day. He replaced the headphone.

"Kestrel One-six ready to line up."

"Kestrel One-six, you are cleared to line up, runway Zero Eight, for immediate take off. Wind zero-two-zero, gusting thirty-two."

"Roger, Kinloss tower. Kestrel One-six rolling."

The controller picked up his binoculars, and stared into the gloom. At first, there were only the pinpricks of the lights, then a slate-grey and white moving shape began sliding down the corridor of high-intensity lights, the shape resolving itself into the familiar outline of the Nimrod. He imagined the pilot's struggle to hold the aircraft steady against the fierce cross-wind.

The nose wheel began to lift from the runway. The four huge Spey engines began acting like hoses, blasting sheets of water up from the runway beneath them. Fog flickered across the wings as the change in pressure condensed the water vapour. The Nimrod began to disappear almost immediately.

"Kestrel One-six, I'm aborting."

"Roger —"

Too late, he thought, too late.

"I can't hold her — I'm off the left of the runway —"

The controller could see only one indication of the whereabouts and the danger of the Nimrod. The spray of water thrown up had changed colour, dyed with brown earth as the aircraft ploughed across the field alongside the runway.

"The port leg's giving way!"

"No."

Then there was a silence that seemed interminable, he and the corporal staring frozenly at one another, until he managed to clear his throat and speak.

"Kestrel One-six, do you read, Kestrel One-six."

No flame, no explosion, nothing. The corporal's finger touched the emergency button. He could hear the alarm through his headphones.

"Kestrel One-six —"

A bloom of orange through the rain and murk, like a distant bonfire or a beacon. The windows rattled with the explosion, which he heard dully. Irrelevantly, yet with intense hostility, he heard the voice he had earlier imagined. Sorry to hear that. Miss Smithers. All dead, I suppose. Is there any more tea?

It had been so easy, and so pointless. The dull orange glow enlarged and brightened.

Chapter Seven: FOUND

The helicopter dropped through the murk, and there were no longer rags of cloud and a sensation of unreality. The night was empty, blacker than the cloud and the wind squalled around the cramped cabin with a demented shrieking that Ardenyev simply could not accustom himself to accept or ignore. Only the momentary absence of the snow and sleet reduced the unnerving reality of the wind's strength and velocity, because he could no longer see the wind as a visible, flying whiteness against the dark.

Then he spotted the Karpaty, below and to port of them. Blazing with light like a North Sea oil platform, yet tiny and insubstantial, her lights revealing the pinprick flecks of wave-crests against the black sea. Beyond Karpaty, outlined like an incomplete puzzle-drawing by her navigation lights, was the bulk of the Kiev. Even at her greater distance, she seemed more secure, more a haven than the rescue ship.

The second MiL emerged beside them, dropping into view, an eggshell of faint light.

"Express One to Karpaty — Express One to Karpaty, over."

The pilot's voice in his headphones startled Ardenyev with the immediacy of their attempt to land on the rescue ship's helipad. He strained his eyes forward, but could not even see the illuminated, circular platform. The Karpaty was a blur of lights seen through the still-running tears that streamed across the cockpit canopy and the windscreen of the MiL. The rescue ship was tiny, and they seemed to be making no visible progress towards it.

"Karpaty to Express One. We read you, and have you on radar. Range eight point five kilometres. Over."

"Weather conditions, Karpaty?"

"Winds oh-five-oh, thirty-five knots, gusting to forty-five. Sea state five to six, waves varying ten to twenty feet. What are your intentions? Over."

The pilot looked across at Ardenyev. He seemed satisfied by the glum, strained silence he observed. Ardenyev considered the shadow of the Kiev beyond the lights of the rescue ship. And rejected them.

"Well?" the pilot asked.

"Can you get down?"

"It's on the edge. I don't recommend trying —"

"Express Two to Express One, over."

"Go ahead, Express Two."

"Are we going down?"

"I don't like it."

"We can make it. I'll go in first, if you like. Over."

"You haven't got all night," Ardenyev remarked, looking at his watch. They were running perhaps thirty minutes behind schedule already. A diversion to the Kiev, and then a sea transfer back to the Karpaty would delay them perhaps as much as two hours. Dolohov would find that delay unacceptable. The Proteus might be located at any moment, and Ardenyev had no wish to be still airborne when that happened. "We're late."

"I fly this crate, not you, Captain. My judgement is all that counts, and my judgement tells me to divert to the carrier." The pilot was calm, irritated with his passenger but unafraid. He assumed his authority would carry the day.

"Hold on, Express One — I'll set down first. When Karpaty has filled my tanks, I'll get out of your way." The other pilot sounded to Ardenyev to be less afraid, yet he wondered whether his own pilot might not be right.

"Express Two — I suggest we divert to Kiev."

"I'm not putting my bollocks on the chopping-block with Dolohov, Andrei, even if you're prepared to. Just watch my technique!"

Ardenyev's pilot's face was tight with anger, resentment, and something deeper which might have been self-contempt. Ardenyev watched, in a new mood of satisfaction, as the second MiL surged ahead and below them, towards the Karpaty. His pilot was playing safe, they would get down now. It meant only that Orlov and Blue Section would be kitting out by the time they arrived, and amused at their superiority.

The second MiL banked, looking uncertain for a moment below them, as if turning towards the surface of the black ocean itself rather than to the Christmas tree of the ship. Then it appeared to steady and level, and began to nervously, cautiously approach the stern of the rescue ship. The helipad was now a white-lit dish, no bigger than a dinner plate from their altitude. The radio chatter between the pilot and the ship flicked back and forth in his headset, suggesting routine, orderliness, expertise.

Ardenyev's pilot brought his MiL almost to the hover, as if they were drifting with the wind's assistance, feather-like. Yet when Ardenyev glanced across at him, the man's knuckles were white. It did not indicate mental or emotional strain, merely made Ardenyev aware of the turbulence outside; its heaving against the fragile canopy of the helicopter. The pressure to move them, overturn them, crush them, was like a great depth of seawater. Once the image made contact with reality, a circuit was formed that alarmed him. The slow-motion below was fraught, dangerous now.

The fly-like MiL drifted towards the helipad. Ardenyev could see tiny figures on the deck, and their bent shapes, their clinging to rails and surfaces, indicated the force of the wind. Its volume seemed to increase outside.

The deck of the rescue ship heaved, and the light seemed to spill like liquid over the ship's side on to the surface of the water. The whitecaps opened like teeth in a huge black jaw. The sight of the water's distress and power was sudden, making the rescue ship fragile and the helicopter approaching it more insect-like than ever. It was a fly hovering above a motorway, awaiting an encounter with a windscreen.

The helicopter flicked away, much like a gull caught by a gust of wind, and the pilot's voice was high-pitched, his relieved laughter unreal and forced.

"Mishka, get away from there! We'll divert to the Kiev and winch them down. You'll never be able to use auto-hover, the deck's pitching too much."

"Don't worry, Grandad," the voice of Orlov's pilot came back. "Just a temporary hitch. Watch this."

The words now seemed to Ardenyev to have an empty bravado which he despised and which frightened him. Yet the rescue ship seemed to have settled again, the whitecapped waves to have subsided, slipping back into the shadows beneath the deck of the Karpaty. The MiL began to sidle towards the helipad again. Tiny figures crouched, as if at its approach, ready to secure the helicopter the moment its wheels touched.

The pilot instructed the Karpaty's captain that he would switch to auto-hover just above the deck, which would allow the helicopter to automatically move with the pitching of the ship, so that the deck would always remain at the same level beneath the MiL. Ardenyev saw his own pilot shaking his head.

"What's wrong?"

"What?"

"I said, what's wrong? You're shaking your head."

"The deck's pitching and rolling too much, and I think he's out of the limits for auto-hover and height hold." The pilot shrugged. "Perhaps it isn't from where he is. I don't know." He glanced at Ardenyev as if daring him to comment, or inviting personal insult.

"If there's any real danger, order him to divert — or I will."

Creeping whiteness appeared at the edges of their canopy, like some cataract or a detached retina beginning to float. The sleet had returned. Ardenyev's pilot increased the beat of the wipers, and they watched, oblivious of everything else, even of attempting to interfere, as the MiL below them banked, levelled, sidled forward, moved above the white dish of the helipad. There was a long moment of stillness, accompanied by the breathy whispering of Ardenyev's pilot: "Go on, go on, my son, go on, go on —"

The noise irritated and disturbed Ardenyev. The MiL was above the deck now, and lowering towards it. Stillness. A white-knuckled hand at the corner of his eye, whiteness creeping around the canopy, flying between them and the garishly-lit scene below. The navigation lights of the carrier, outlining a huge, safe bulk, in the distance. Ardenyev held his breath. They were going to make it. When they, too, had landed, Orlov would study his face; there'd better be no trace left of anxiety or doubt, or the young man would burst out laughing —

Dropping slowly like a spider coming down its thread; very slowly. Ardenyev could see himself, years before, watching such a spider in his bedroom, coming slowly down its thread, confident, small, agile, an acrobat. And slowly he had begun to blow upwards, making the spider swing, making it uncertain, vulnerable, that tiny creature who had abseiled from the ceiling with such arrogance. It had crawled, scuttling upside-down, back up its rope of thread, then dropped again with slightly more caution. Blow again. He had blown again.

The MiL hopped away from the deck as if electrocuted. Then it began to drop slowly, more slowly than before, towards the deck as it once more became level. The glimpse of the whitecaps vanished into the night.

The spider had scuttled away, dropped again, but its weight now could not deaden or steady the swing of the thread to which it clung. It had been descending from the lampshade, like a small black god climbing out of the sun. Swinging, unable to control the motion.

Ardenyev's hand touched his throat, feeling for the transmitter switch of his microphone. The spider was swinging across the ceiling above his bed, interestingly, helplessly. The helicopter shifted in a grumble of the wind, and the deck of the Karpaty shifted, too. Pitching towards the MiL, which hopped out of its way, then moved back down, drawn by magnetism, it seemed. The deck steadied. The spider swung across the ceiling, flying the landscape of cracks and damp patches, swinging to almost touch the shadows in the corners of the room. And nearing his face all the time as fear or instinct or helplessness made it pay out more of the rope of thread.

Six feet. Stillness now. White knuckles, his own fingers dead as he fumbled with the microphone, tried to think what to say, why he was going to speak. Appalled and fascinated. Five feet, four —

The spider just above his face. Cheeks puffed out, he waited to catch it at the optimum moment, blow it across the bedroom, perhaps at his younger brother's bed and his sleeping form. Cupping his hands round his mouth to direct the breath when he expelled it.

Three feet, two —

"Auto-hover — come on, come on —"

A foot, then two feet, three, four — the deck of the Karpaty pitched again, the lights spilling across the angry sea. Five feet — spin, flick, twist upside-down, turning like a top. The MiL staggered with the blow of the helipad, and then the repeated punching of the wind. The spider flew through the air, into shadow, its rope of thread loose, wafting in the air's current he had disturbed.

The MiL hung upside-down for a second or more, then drove back towards the port side of the ship, breaking its rotors then its back on the side of the Karpaty, just forward of the helipad. A billow of flame, incandescent and paling the ship's lights, a tiny figure struck like a match falling into the sea, the MiL's wreckage pursuing him into the whitecaps. Flame flickered over the wild water for a second, then the MiL was doused like a torch — and gone.

Ardenyev came to himself, yelling into his microphone that the pilot should abandon his attempt and divert to the carrier. His words were clipped, orderly, syntactically correct, but he was hoarsely yelling them at the top of his voice. He must have begun shouting even before the MiL crashed.

"Shut up, shut up —!"

Ardenyev's mouth remained open, his throat dry and raw. There was nothing. On the pitching deck of the rescue ship, fire-extinguishers were playing over spilled fuel that travelled like lava along the deck and down the side of the ship. Slowly, the flames flickered and disappeared.

"My God," Ardenyev breathed finally. Teplov was at his shoulder.

"All right, sir?"

"No, Viktor, it is not all right," he said in a small voice. "Tell the team that Blue Section have crashed and that we are diverting to the Kiev."

"Sir." Teplov offered nothing more in reply. Ardenyev was aware of his departure to the passage compartment. Ardenyev looked at the pilot.

There was a silence in which each man registered the other's pain, and guilt, then the pilot cleared his throat and spoke into his microphone.

"Express One to Kiev — permission to land."

"Permission granted." An older voice, senior. A commiseration of rank. The same voice went on to supply velocity and the effect of the sea and wind on the pitch of the Kiev's deck. As he acknowledged, the pilot continually shook his head. Then he looked at Ardenyev.

"I was right — for fuck's sake, I was right!"

"We can get down?" The pilot nodded. "Christ —"

"Express One to Kiev — message received. We're on our way."

Ardenyev sat in a misery of grief as the MiL increased speed and the Karpaty slipped beneath its belly. He was appalled at the deaths of Orlov and the others, his men, his people, his responsibility. And he was shaken and anguished at the ease with which it had happened and with which he had allowed it to happen. Distance, slowness, lights — it had all become innocuous, something for spectators, cardboard danger. He had meant to issue the order to divert, but he had not. He had not believed it would happen. A child stepping from a pavement, behind a milk-float, crushed like an eggshell by the car it had not seen. But the distance between the front gate and the road is so small, it cannot signify danger —

He wiped savagely at his eyes. Through the blur as he blinked, the shadowy bulk of the Kiev drew closer, then lights sprang out on her starboard after-deck. The superstructure bulked beyond these lights. Tiny pinprick men moved on the deck, bent and huddled to display the ominous force of the wind. Ardenyev wiped his eyes again. The pilot and the carrier were in constant contact, as if instruction and counter-instruction, speed, distance, altitude, pitch, wind velocity would all render the collision of the two objects safe.

Ardenyev felt Orlov and the others in the burning MiL go away and his own fear for himself emerge, invading his stomach and chest and consciousness. The floor of the cabin under his feet was thin, so thin he could sense the buffeting air streaming beneath it, and anticipate the deck of the Kiev rushing up to meet them.

The MiL drifted towards the Kiev, so like Express Two just before it collided with the Karpaty. The deck did not, to Ardenyev's comprehension, enlarge with proximity. It was a grey strip, angled across the substance of the carrier, all the lower decks between them and the sea.

The pilot turned to him. "You'll winch down while the chopper's on auto-hover."

"Can't you land?" There was a strange relief amid the surprise.

“Yes — but I'm not risking it with you lot on board. You'll winch down. OK?"

Ardenyev nodded. "We haven't got a winchman on board."

"Can you do it?"

"Yes."

"Get back there and get on with it. I'll clear it with the bridge."

Ardenyev paused for a moment, and then forced himself out of his seat and climbed over it into the passenger compartment. The imperatives of Dolohov's orders were insinuating themselves again, until he saw the blank, automaton faces of his team. Stunned into emptiness of mind, except where their own fears peered over their shoulders or crawled like indigestion in their stomachs. A sharp pain of fear, a bilious taste in their throats.

"Viktor, we're winching down. Get the door open." Teplov looked up at him, acknowledging the necessity of the snapped order, resenting it, too. The offices for the dead, their mates, their importance to the operation; all clear in Teplov's eyes. Then he got up and went aft, unlocking the door and sliding it open. The wind howled amongst them as if Teplov had admitted an enemy already triumphing. "Get ready — one at a time." The helicopter lurched, one man getting to his feet was flung back against the fuselage, and his face revealed no pain, only a concentration of fear.

Ardenyev lifted him to his feet and shuffled him to the door. They clung to the straps, watching the lighted deck beneath them edge closer, shifting as the sea willed. The young man looked into Ardenyev's face, and seemed to discover something he could trust there. A habit of obedience, it might have been. He allowed Ardenyev to slip the winch harness beneath his arms, and to guide him to the open door. His hair was blown back from his white forehead, and his hands gripped the edges of the doorway Ardenyev placed his hand against his back, and nodded to Teplov. The motor of the winch started up, and the man sat down, dangling his legs over the deck. He looked up as it swung away from the chopper, and then suddenly the MiL was moving with the deck, perhaps thirty or forty feet above it, swaying as in a breeze by virtue of the auto-hover matching its movements to the pitch of the carrier's deck.

"Right, off you go." Ardenyev held the man's shoulders for a moment, and then propelled him through the doorway. He spun on the wire for a moment, then straightened and dropped slowly and smoothly towards the deck. Uniformed and oilskinned men waited in the downdraught, arms reaching up to him. His legs were held, he was lowered like a child or cat from a tree, then Teplov was recalling the winch harness. Ardenyev looked at him, and nodded. "Next."

Shadrin, the explosives expert, was at his shoulder in a moment, grinning. "Let's get out of this bloody tin box, skipper," he said. There was a shadow in his eyes, but Ardenyev was thankful for the man's attempt at normality. A small re-establishment of cameraderie, teamwork. Sinkingly, Ardenyev realised that when he got them safely aboard the carrier, he had to rebuild them in his own image; an image in which he felt uncomfortable, even treacherous, at that moment.

He strapped the harness around Shadrin, and slapped him on the shoulder. As Shadrin sat down, then dropped out of the MiL, Ardenyev recollected broiling flames and ignited, spilled fuel and a spider, and prayed that they would locate the British submarine soon. Very soon.

Aerial buoy, Lloyd scribbled on his pad. It rested on the chart table, beneath a dim emergency light. The temperature of the control room seemed higher, and could not be entirely discounted as illusion, which he knew it to be. Silence was humming in his ears.

We can't, Thurston scrawled in ugly, misshapen capitals, and added two exclamation marks for additional emphasis.

You were right — we must.

Lloyd and his first-lieutenant stared at one another. The pads between them on the chart table were like scraps of food each of them envied the other. Thurston was now confirmed in Lloyd's original opinion that they must do nothing more that sit and wait out the vessels that searched for them. Lloyd — his calm eroded by the dead, limping passage of time, the slowness of clocks, and the sense that the forces mobilised against them could not indefinitely go on seeking and not finding — had now succumbed to the desire for action.

There was an RAF Nimrod above them — twenty, thirty, forty thousand feet it did not matter — on station, not knowing where they were, what condition they were in. MoD had to be told they needed rescuing, otherwise the Russians would inevitably get to them first. Lloyd was utterly convinced that the Russians wanted "Leopard". He could not envisage how they intended obtaining it, or conceive the recklessness that must have led them to this course of action, but he understood their objective. MoD had to be told; there was no time to be lost.

He scribbled again on a fresh sheet of the pad. It's an order. A helpless, obedient malevolence crossed Thurston's features for a moment, then it was gone. His face was blank of all expression as he nodded his acquiescence.

They crossed silently to the bank of sonar screens. Two only in closest proximity, the other submarines further off, nudging their sensors into other corners of the box in which they had contained the Proteus. Lloyd read off distance and bearing. Both of the nearest submarines were, for the moment, moving away from the ledge on which they rested. Lloyd glanced at Thurston, and whispered: "Now."

Thurston moved away, and Lloyd found the control room crew, almost every one of them, and Carr the navigator, looking in his direction. He nodded meaningfully, miming the sending up of the aerial buoy. Thurston, at the encoding console, gave the thumbs up — temperature of the control room suddenly jumping — and his hands played over the bank of switches which would release and direct the aerial buoy to the surface. Its journey would take it perhaps a whole minute. Depth figures unreeled on a tiny display unit near Thurston's hand.

Breathing. Ragged, stifled, louder. The control room was full of nervous men trying to control their breathing. Lloyd, his arm draped around the periscope in the centre of the control room, felt hotter, less sure, supremely aware of the aerial buoy bobbing up through the layers of water to the surface.

A small object, a tiny pinprick. Capable of receiving and bouncing back a sonar signal. Something solid that betrayed their location. A flare they had sent up — we're over here, can't you see us?

Lloyd clamped down on the thought, and crossed to Thurston. He gestured for the first-lieutenant's pad and then wrote quickly, in block letters, the message he wished encoded and transmitted to the Nimrod. Thurston nodded reluctantly when he read it, and turned in his chair. The console operator beside him began typing at the keyboard, and the code-of-the-day card was automatically fed in. The operator added the transmission instructions — high-speed, frequency-agile. Lloyd watched the depth figures unreeling near Thurston's elbow. The aerial buoy was still twenty fathoms from the surface, almost twenty seconds still to run until it bobbed up into the waves.

Sweating, now. Cold sweat, surprising in the heat of the control room. Lloyd tried to control it, to calm his body. Ten fathoms. Nine —

Someone clearing his throat, the noise of someone else scratching the cotton of his shirt. Six fathoms, five, four. Almost a minute since they had released the aerial buoy. Three fathoms.

Lloyd broke away from the encoding console and crossed to the passive sonars. Pinpricks, distances, bearings. Still moving away. One moving back, one moving back —

Bearing green nine-five, almost amidships, range two thousand yards. Speed eleven point two five knots. Lloyd looked over his shoulder. Thurston saw him, raised his thumb. The aerial buoy was transmitting the message, a split-second blurt of sound, repeated and repeated. They would have to repeat at least fifty times to be anywhere near certain their message had been picked up by the Nimrod. Ten seconds, no more.

Speed twelve point three knots, bearing unchanged, range closing. Lloyd stared in disbelief. Twelve point seven knots and rising. Dead amidships, a Russian submarine. The buoy, or the message, untranslatable but audible to the Russians, had pinpointed them. Lloyd waggled his hand at Thurston, and the first-lieutenant ceased the transmission and began recalling the aerial buoy.

Thirteen point six knots. Closing.

Lloyd crossed to Thurston, and indicated in savage mime that he must release the buoy, a chopping motion of his hand, again and again. Thurston paused for a moment, then his hands flickered over the console's keyboard. The figures near his knuckles on the digital read-out slowed, then stopped. The buoy was gone, up to the surface again where it would be swept away from their position by the current. Lloyd wiped his forehead with his handkerchief in undisguised relief, not even beginning to think that they had now only the back-up aerial buoy.

He hurried back to the sonars. Speed fifteen point nine knots, bearing unchanged, closing amidships. Range little more than a thousand yards. He realised he had been standing mopping his brow for almost a minute after they released the buoy. Speed fifteen point seven, fifteen point five.

He sighed audibly, a ragged sound from an old man's asthmatic chest. Speed fourteen knots and dropping, bearing green eight-four. Change of course, uncertainty setting in, scent lost.

Scent lost.

The Russian navy had sea-bed maps they could feed into their computers, superimposing them on their sonars and infra-red. It couldn't last for much longer. "Leopard" would be defeated by likelihood and by the concentration of vessels in their immediate area.

It couldn't last long. Lloyd felt weary, and depressed. It was hard to believe that the Nimrod had heard them, knew where they were and what had happened. No one knew. No one at all.

The decoded message from the Proteus unrolled on the screen of the Nimrod's display unit with the kind of stutter given to the pages of a book when they are riffled quickly. Squadron Leader Eastoe bent over the shoulder of his communications officer, and sensed the man's shoulder adopt the quiver of excitement that was evident in his own body. Like an audience of two. they were experiencing the same emotions, the gamut of surprise, shock, satisfaction, hope, and anxiety that the words had little apparent power to evoke.

When the message began repeating on the screen, Eastoe straightened and rubbed his cheeks with his hands. He yawned, surprising himself, then realised it was a ploy of the mind to gain time; time for consideration. Proteus on the seabed, position unknown, immobilised by a reduced warhead torpedo, surrounded by Russian vessels, surface and sub-surface. It did not bear consideration.

"Inform MoD immediately — Flash, code of the day. Poor sods."

"Skipper — " A voice behind him, the Nav/Attack officer in his niche in the fuselage of the Nimrod.

Eastoe crossed to him. Beyond the man's head the porthole-type window revealed the late slow grey dawn beginning outside; only at their altitude, and above the cloud cover. Below them, the Kiev and other surface vessels would be moving through darkness still, and beneath them Proteus lay in the permanent darkness of the seabed, where hunter-killers attempted to sniff her out.

"What is it, Bob?"

"Something's happening down there, on the rescue ship."

"You mean in connection with last night's little party?"

""Karpaty is changing course, moving closer to the Kiev."

"I wonder why. You think one of those two choppers crashed on landing, mm?"

"Yes, skipper, surface wind would have made a landing very dicey. There was that quick infra-red reading, and I'm almost sure only one chopper eventually moved off in the direction of the carrier."

"Then what did they deliver, or try to deliver, to the rescue ship?" Eastoe considered, staring out of the tiny window, down at the roof of the cloud cover, lightening in its greyness, but thick and solid as the roof of a forest. Eastoe felt a detachment he did not enjoy, and which somehow interfered with his thinking. Being on-station, just watching, for so many hours had deadened the reality of what they could only see by means of radar and sonar and infra-red. Detachment; making thought and decision unimportant, without urgency. "Some sort of team? Experts? People important enough to be ferried out in this weather, anyway. Now you think they're going to transfer to the rescue ship?"

"I do."

"Okay, Bob, I'll tell Aubrey. Leave it up to him. We'll be off duty in a couple of hours, anyway. Someone else's problem, then."

Eastoe went forward again, into the cockpit of the Nimrod.

"Anything, skipper?"

"Signal from Proteus," Eastoe replied glumly.

"Bad?"

"She's been hit, Terry."

"Christ — they're all right?"

"At the moment. But she can't move."

"He was taking a chance, sending up a buoy."

"Wouldn't you want someone to know?" Eastoe paused. "Now who the hell was in those two Russian choppers, and why do they need to get aboard the Karpaty so desperately?"

"Skipper —?"

"Doesn't matter. It's Aubrey's problem, not ours." Eastoe got out of his seat again. "Call up Bardufoss — tell them we're off-watch in an hour, and we'll need to refuel. Meanwhile, I'll tell Mr Aubrey straight away. He might need time to think."

"You saw what happened last night, Captain Ardenyev. I can't guarantee any greater degree of success this morning." The captain of the carrier Kiev studied his hands, folded together on the table in his cabin. To Ardenyev he appeared carved, unyielding, even unsympathetic. Yet he was right. A helicopter transfer to the Karpaty could not be risked. He even wondered whether his team, Red Section, would board another helicopter. When they reached the Karpaty by whatever means, Ardenyev was uncertain of their reaction. The scorched plates, the damaged, twisted rail — he'd seen them through binoculars from the bridge as the grey, pallid light filtered through the heavy cloud — would be too potent, too evident a reminder of their mates, their rivals.

Then it will have to be by launch, sir."

The captain of the carrier looked up. "I'm not unsympathetic, Captain. I am as concerned for the success of this operation as you are. Which is why I must minimise the risks with regard to your — depleted forces."

Dolohov had signalled the carrier during the night, when he had been informed of the MiL's crash and the loss of Blue Section. His message had been terse, steely, anxious. It had not been humane. He had asked, principally, whether the mission could now be completed. He had not expected a reply in the negative, and Ardenyev had not given him such an answer. Instead, he had assured the admiral that the Proteus could still be boarded by Red Section working alone, as soon as they found her.

For Ardenyev, it seemed the only answer he could give, the only possible outcome of his mission. His team wasn't ready, perhaps it never would be. He could only attempt to purge them of fear and shock and grief through action. Desperation might prove effective.

"I understand, sir. I'll assemble my men on the boat deck immediately."

"Very good, Captain. And good luck."

"Sir."

Ten minutes later, Ardenyev was forced to admit that Teplov had done his best with them, and the older men — Shadrin, Petrov and Nikitin — would do, but the two younger members of the team, Vanilov and Kuzin, were unnaturally pale; cold so that they shivered beneath their immersion suits. It was really their mates who had died, all the younger ones. They seemed hunched and aged, standing amid the others in the companion-way to the aft starboard boatdeck. The movement of the carrier in the waves, slow and sliding and almost rhythmical, seemed to unsettle them even though they were experienced sailors.

"Very well," Ardenyev said, "as soon as we" ve transferred to Karpaty, I'll want a very thorough equipment check. It could take hours, I'll want it done in one. If a signal is picked up from that sub again, we'll be going straight down to her. Okay?"

He scrutinised them in turn, not especially selecting the two younger men, but with his eyes upon each face until there was a nod of acquiescence. In one or two gestures, there seemed almost to be a quiet enthusiasm. Not from Vanilov or Kuzin, perhaps, but from Teplov and Shadrin certainly. It would have to do.

He turned to the watertight door, and swung the handle. The wind seemed to howl through the slight gap he had opened. He pushed against a resistance as heavy as a human body, and they were assailed by flying spray. They were below the flight deck, on a narrow, railed ledge on the starboard side of the carrier where two of the ship's four big launches were positioned on their davits. A sailor waved them forward, towards the launch allocated to them and which had been manned in readiness. White-faced, white-handed sailors fussed around the davits, ready to swing the launch out over the water and lower it into the waves.

"Come on, come on," Ardenyev said, hurrying them aboard, clapping each of them on the shoulder as they passed him, climbing the ladder into the launch. Ardenyev followed them, then leapt down again on to the boatdeck as one sailor lost his footing as the deck pitched. He grabbed the man's arm and hoisted him to his feet. He grinned at the sailor, who nodded his thanks. Ardenyev understood how everything except the activities of the moment had gone a long distance from him, and prayed that their mission would begin soon and would have the same numbing, enclosing effect on Red Section. He climbed the ladder again, ducked through the doorway, and joined the officer in charge of the launch, a junior lieutenant, in the wheelhouse.

Karpaty lay a matter of a few hundred yards to starboard of the carrier. In daylight, however gloomy and unreal, the sea raged. Ardenyev was chilled already through his suit from the wash of icy water on to the boatdeck.

"Captain," the young officer acknowledged.

"Lieutenant. We're ready?"

"As we'll ever be. I don't think we ought to make the attempt, Captain — to put it bluntly."

"Forget your thoughts, Lieutenant. We're going. Give the orders."

The junior lieutenant appeared reluctant, disliking his own junior status and the obedience it required him to express. He nodded, stiff-lipped, and spoke into his microphone, adjusting the headphones and the speaker to comfort, or as an expression of disagreement. The launch shifted on its blocks, then began to swing free, moving out over the boatdeck as the davits swung it away from the hull of the carrier. The launch oscillated alarmingly on its davit wires, demonstrating its frailty. Then they began to slide down the side of the Kiev the fifty feet or more to the water. The hull of the carrier moved in Ardenyev's vision. It was almost easier to imagine that they were the still point, and that the carrier moved with the wind and swell.

Rivets, rust, sea-life, spillage marking the plates of the hull. Then a grey sheen acquired by distance, then rivets and rust again. A constant chatter of instruction and comment from the lieutenant into his headset, then a shudder as the sea leapt up to meet them. The windscreen of the launch obscured by water for a moment, the hull of the Kiev splashed white and grey before the swell let them hang over a trough. The lieutenant spoke rapidly, and the rate of descent increased. Then they were wallowing, and the davit wires came free, and the engine of the launch coughed into life, just as the next peak of the swell broke over the bow and side of the craft, obscuring everything. The screw whined as it was lifted out of the water for an instant, then a trough released them, and the lieutenant ordered full speed and a change of course, towards the rescue ship Karpaty.

They butted and rose and dipped their passage across the few hundred yards of sea towards the Karpaty. Movement, however violent and uncertain, deadened thought, promised action. The coxswain's hands were white like those of the helicopter pilot the previous night, holding the vessel to her course. Everything was immediate, physical or sensuous.

It took fifteen minutes to make the crossing. Then Karpaty was above them, rusty-plated, grey, grubby with use, expressing a kind of toughness that comforted. Less than half the height above them of the carrier, nevertheless the rescue ship was one of the biggest of its type in the fleet. The scorched, blackened plates came into view, the sea working at them as if to scour off the evidence of disaster. The twisted rail, buckled plates at the stern, the damaged helipad, one edge broken as cleanly away as the snapped edge of a biscuit or a dinner plate. Simply missing.

The launch bucked and rode in the swell. The lieutenant was chattering into his microphone. Ardenyev heard the voice of the tiny, black-clothed, gleaming figure on the port side amidships, beneath the archway of the rescue ship's central gantry, where the cargo deck was located. The boom swung across, and a specially rigged harness was slowly lowered towards them. Teplov appeared, as if by some instinct, at Ardenyev's elbow.

"You first this time, sir," he said. "Just in case."

Ardenyev was about to reply when the lieutenant broke in.

"I have the captain of Karpaty, sir. He'd like you aboard without delay. Apparently, one of the submarines has picked up a trace and he's been ordered to alter position."

Teplov grinned. "Come on, sir — get moving."

Patrick Hyde studied the facade of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. He was sheltering from the rain in a shop doorway in Peter Street, almost directly opposite the home of the Halle Orchestra, which now displayed, like some unbecomingly young dress on an ageing aunt, the banners and streamers and posters that bellowed the appearance that evening of Heat of the Day. The KGB man on the opposite pavement appeared uninterested in the announcement as he walked down the serpentine, bunching queue of people that stretched almost as far as the Midland Hotel. Hyde did not know whether the man had been detailed to look for the girl or for himself, but he kept the collar of his raincoat turned up and his cap pulled down over his eyes. If one of them was in the immediate vicinity, then he would not be alone.

Two. The other one was coming along the pavement on Hyde's side of Peter Street, walking slowly, conspicuous because he carried no umbrella. Umbrellas handicapped surveillance. There were a couple of young, denimed Special Branch officers in the queue for the rock concert, and plain-clothes police in cars parked at the junction with Watson Street and in the square at the other end of Peter Street. A presence inside the Free Trade Hall, too.

Hyde had spoken to Aubrey — the second KGB man he recognised was drawing level with the doorway in which he sheltered — at the Admiralty and persuaded him that Petrunin and the others should not be approached. Most of them were "unofficials", agents not attached to the Soviet embassy or to trade missions or cultural organisations. They could not be certain how many there were. Removing Petrunin would be a false security. Free, Petrunin was a focal point. Hyde turned to the window. Transistor radios, stereo equipment, TV sets. The KGB man paused, but his inspection of Hyde was cursory, and he moved on. Petrunin running free would never be far from the action, and those under his control would gather round him, magnetised by his rank. They needed Petrunin and the few they knew from the files in order to identify the others.

Hyde moved out of the doorway. The KGB man inspecting the queue was returning to the main entrance of the Free Trade Hall, the second man was crossing Peter Street to meet him. Hyde nor the police had seen any sign of Petrunin during the morning.

Aubrey had been very clear about the risks, and the responsibility. It rested with Hyde. The girl must be found that day, that night, otherwise alternative methods would have to be employed. The girl would be taken in, regardless, and persuaded to co-operate. Hyde had one chance. Shelley's enquiries at the country hotel where Heat of the Day had stayed the night had proved fruitless. The girl had gone to earth. Shelley was inclined to the opinion that she had abandoned Alletson and the band. Hyde disagreed. There was nowhere else for her to run. Evidently, she was staying clear of her father, desperate not to lead anyone to him.

The two KGB men strolled together towards Watson Street. An Austin Allegro drew level with them, and they bent to the window as it opened, becoming instantly engaged in a voluble conversation with the driver of the car. Then the lights changed, and the green Austin turned into Peter Street. As it passed him, Hyde saw that the driver was Petrunin. There was no one else in the car, which drew in and parked in the square. Petrunin did not get out.

Hyde felt hunger expand as a sharp, griping pain in his stomach. Nerves were making him hungry. He had probably another seven or eight hours to wait. This time, he would not go in until the band was on stage.

He crossed Peter Street to speak to the Special Branch men in the queue. If he was going to wait that long, no one was going in before him.

Aubrey, Clark and Pyott had become, with the passage of the night and morning, an uneasy, indecisive cabal inside the organisation of the underground room and the parameters of the rescue operation.

"Kinloss have another Nimrod standing by, with a fresh crew," Pyott argued. "They can be on-station in two or three hours. They won't resent the job, they won't be tired."

Aubrey shook his head. "Get them to contact Eastoe at Bardufoss. He and his crew must go back on-station immediately. I cannot afford to have that area unsighted for that long — no, not even with satellite surveillance. The cloud cover is making things difficult. Eastoe will have to go down to sea level if necessary. I must have eyes there, Giles."

"They'll be dog-weary, Mr Aubrey," Clark offered.

"I have slept for three hours in the last twenty-four, Ethan. We must all make sacrifices." Clark grinned at the waspish remark. "Very well, when the relief Nimrod is on-station, Eastoe and his crew will be recalled — for the moment. Let us discuss ways and means to preserve the security of “Leopard”. That is our real priority."

"We're to take it you have abandoned any notion of destroying the Proteus?" Pyott asked with a mocking lightness.

"That was never my intention — you misconstrued. We may have to expose Proteus, however, by ordering Lloyd to destroy the “Leopard” equipment."

Pyott nodded. "We may have to. We can, however, run it extremely fine. No need as yet. I'm not sure you'd get Lloyd to do it, anyway."

"He would disobey a direct order?" Aubrey asked in surprise.

"For the sake of his vessel and his crew, he would be entitled to do so."

"Very well, Giles. What can we do — before tomorrow, when the first NATO vessel arrives in the area? We must do something."

"Diplomacy?"

Aubrey snorted in derision. "I'm afraid the Foreign Office is running its head against a brick wall of denials. The Soviet ambassador has denied all knowledge of the matter. Soviet vessels are engaged in bad-weather exercises in the Barents Sea. He confirmed that, apparently with Red Banner headquarters in Murmansk. It will take too long, I'm afraid, to unstick this matter through the proper channels." Aubrey looked drawn, thinner, older. He had slept in a cramped cupboard-like room off the main operations room, on a thin, hard bed that seemed to imprison him. It had not improved his temper, or his patience. He wondered at his frenetic desire for action, and at the inertia of events which seemed to be bearing him with them like a great tide. Yet he could not retreat into the dim, cool, shadowed walks of military sang-froid as Pyott did. "It will take too long," he repeated. "Far too long."

"And tomorrow never comes," Clark remarked, "by tomorrow, they may have a fix on Proteus, and then you'll find — what'll you find?" He looked at Aubrey. Clark in shirtsleeves and without his tie seemed more American; less sophisticated, stronger. Perhaps a hard-boiled newspaper editor, or a policeman. Yes, without the formality imposed by his suit, he looked more like Patrick Hyde; of the same type or species.

"What will we find, Ethan?"

"My guess is a salvage operation — if they can pinpoint the sub."

"You're serious, aren't you?" Clark nodded. "Why so certain?"

There's no other way. They have to salvage Proteus if they're to save “Leopard”. At least, I think so."

"And Lloyd may not destroy “Leopard” now, if we order him to do so — I agree with Giles there. Then we are on the horns of a dilemma, gentlemen."

"Kenneth, we're left relying on “Leopard” itself. At the moment it protects Proteus and itself. It must continue to do so for at least another twenty-four hours."

"The rescue ship from Tromsø will take longer than that," Aubrey remarked gloomily, staring at his liver-spotted hand caressing the edge of the commodore's desk. "All we will have in the area tomorrow is one American submarine and a Norwegian “Oslo”-class frigate. The day after, more, I agree. But, too late. We have to have surface ships engaged in any rescue operation, a counter to the Soviet concentration. They will, hopefully, go away when we arrive. I did not want to escalate our presence, but there is no alternative. We have nothing there now, that is our problem." His hand slapped the wood of the desk.

"Sorry to be the bad-news boy," Clark said, "but you're ignoring the latest movements of the rescue ship the Soviets have on-station, and those helicopters that arrived last night."

"Yes?" Aubrey snapped impatiently. Then: "Sorry — go on.

"The boarding party?" Pyott queried, and Clark nodded. "Damnation! What do we do! Tell me that. What do we do?"

"Send Eastoe down on the deck to look over the rescue ship and the immediate area — and continue our orisons, I should think," Pyott drawled. Aubrey looked venomously at him, and Pyott blushed slightly with the memory of his culpability. "Sorry," he said softly.

"It's escaping from us," Aubrey sighed. "I feel it. It is too far ahead of us to be overtaken."

Lloyd paused for a moment at the door of the computer room, aft of the control room. Don Hayter's summons — a rating tapping his captain on the arm, beckoning him theatrically — had been peremptory and urgent, and Lloyd's sense of bodily temperature had leapt. Yet he could not bring himself to move through the door, not for a moment. The rating's face had been worried, pale and disturbed in the red lighting. It had seemed, immediately and without embroidery by Lloyd's jumpy imagination, to indicate disaster. Then Hayter saw him, and urgently waved him in. Hayter was bent over one of the “Leopard” screens. The noise he was making tapping a pencil against his teeth shocked Lloyd.

Hayter grabbed Lloyd's arm as he reached the panel, and tapped at the screen with the pencil, underlining the computer-print words the screen displayed. He tapped again and again at one phrase.

Then he looked up at Lloyd, who concentrated on reading the rest of the computer's assessment of the situation.

"Leopard" had developed a fault.

"What is it?" Lloyd asked, then repeated his question in a whisper that was not clogged with phlegm. "What is it?"

Hayter shrugged. "It's been happening for four minutes now. We" ve checked— " he nodded at the rating who had brought Lloyd to the computer room, and the sublieutenant who was Hayter's second-in-command, " — everything, so has the computer."

"What— what is the fault doing? What effect is it having?" Lloyd almost wanted to smile at the exaggerated seriousness of Hayter's expression. Lugubrious.

"It's blinking. On, off, on, off. Sometimes, they can see us, sometimes they can't."

“What?

"Whatever the malfunction is, it's intermittent."

"And now— at this moment?"

"Invisible. A moment before you came in, it came back on, full strength, fully operational. Before that, for eleven seconds, nothing, nothing at all."

"Christ."

The sub-lieutenant, Lloyd now perceived, was removing the front panel of the main container housing the "Leopard" equipment, a metal box little bigger or taller than a large filing cabinet.

"We're going to have to do a manual, if the computer can't tell us."

"How long?"

"No idea."

"Could it have happened when we were attacked — the damage to the prop and hydroplanes?"

"Possible. The sensors and dampers at the stern could have been damaged. If they have been — and the fault's outside — then we can't do a bloody thing down here without divers."

"Complete failure?" Hayter nodded. "What about the back-up system?"

Hayter's face became more lugubrious than ever; not a painted clown's downturned mouth but a human expression of concern and fear. His fingers played over the keyboard beneath the display screen, and the message vanished. Then he typed in a new set of instructions, and the response from the computer was almost instantaneous.

Hayter opened his palms in a gesture of helplessness.

"The back-up system won't cut in."

"It doesn't work at all?"

"At the last check, it worked. Now, it doesn't. I don't understand it. Immediately after the attack, we checked everything through on the computer. It registered no malfunction in either the main or back-up systems. Then we start winking at the Russians, and the computer doesn't know why. At the same moment, the back-up system is u/s. We'll do our best — that's all I can tell you."

The message vanished from the screen before Lloyd had finished reading it. More words came spilling across the screen, line after line in block letters.

"Is it —?"

Hayter nodded. "It's gone again. “Leopard” isn't working. Anyone who cares to look in our direction can see a British submarine lying on her belly."

Lloyd looked at his watch. The second hand crept across the face like a red spider's leg, ugly, jerking, uncoordinated. Eight, nine, ten, eleven —

"Longer this time," Hayter murmured.

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen —

"Come on, come on, — " Lloyd heard himself saying a long way below his mind. "Come on — "

Sixteen, seventeen —

There were four submarines within a radius of six miles of the Proteus. He had been studying the sonars just before he was summoned by Hayter.

Twenty-one, two, three, twenty-four, almost half a minute —

"I think she's gone," Hayter whispered, flicking switches on the console in an almost demented fashion. The movements of his hands appeared all the more frenzied because of the expressionless lines and planes in which his face seemed to have coalesced. The message on the screen blinked out, then returned with a status report on the backup system.

Thirty-two, three, four —

Lloyd could not remove his gaze from the second hand of his watch. Hayter's hands still played across the banks of switches as he attempted to coax life back into "Leopard" or to rouse its back-up system. Complete failure.

The word seemed to wink on and off the screen at a touch of a key or switch; as if the whole system had failed in each of its thousands of parts and circuits and microprocessors and transistors and coils.

Forty-two. Lloyd knew he ought to be in the control room, knew that they would be picking up changes of course and bearing, changes of speed. Forty-four.

The word vanished from the screen. A status report replaced it. Hayter sighed, perspiration standing out on his forehead, which he wiped with the back of his hand. He grinned shakily.

"We're back in business — for the time being," he said.

"Everything's working?"

"As normal. The main system. Back-up's still dead."

"Get working on the back-up system." Then Lloyd almost ran from the room, down the companion-way to the control room, anticipating what he would see on the sonar screens.

"Skipper, I'm getting a reading from one of our sonar buoys — it's Proteus.“

"What? Bob, are you certain?"

"Skipper — I picked up a trace. It disappeared after about ten seconds, so I assumed it was a shoal of fish or something of the sort, or a false reading. Then a couple of minutes later, the same reading on the same bearing, for almost a minute. Now it's gone again."

"What's happening?"

"Could be a malfunction in their equipment?"

"I don't know. Have you got a fix on her position?"

"Not the first time. The second time she came in on two of the buoys. Yes, I" ve got her."

"Well done. Where is she?"

"What looks like a ledge. Shall I bring the chart through?"

"No. Not until I" ve decided what message to send to MoD. Have the Russians picked her up?"

"I don't know. Perhaps not —"

"You hope. Keep looking. The moment anything moves closer to Proteus's position, let me know. You're sure it's her?"

"What else could it be? I don't understand “Leopard”, even after the briefing, but I know what it's supposed to do. We couldn't see her, now we can. Correction, we did see her."

"Okay, Okay, I believe you. Pass her position to John and tell him to stand by to transmit a Flash signal to Aubrey."

"I'm already standing by, skipper."

"Good. We'll take her down for a look-see first."

Eastoe turned to his co-pilot, and nodded. The cloud cover beneath the nose and the wings of the Nimrod gleamed with sunlight, innocent; yet it extended downwards almost to sea level and it was moved by gale-force winds. Their calm was illusory, achieved only by altitude.

"Give me a bearing on the carrier," Eastoe requested into his microphone. Almost immediately, the navigator supplied the coordinates and the course change that would take them over the Kiev.

Eastoe dipped the Nimrod's nose towards the clouds. Sunlight, the dense, smoothed roof of the cloud-forest, then a creeping greyness, the first rags and twigs of mist, the darkening of the flightdeck, then the cloud rushing past, swallowing them as they moved into it. The co-pilot switched on the wipers, and water streamed away from their furious beat. Eastoe felt the tremor of the winds through the control column as he watched the altimeter unwind. Down through twenty thousand feet, nineteen, eighteen.

Turbulence buffeted the Nimrod as the aircraft dropped towards the sea. Eastoe sensed for a brief moment the fragility of the airframe around him, imagined the last moments of the Nimrod that had crashed on take-off, remembered the pilot and the crew who had died, and then they broke through the lowest fringes of the cloud, into squalling rain and a headwind. He levelled the Nimrod no more than a hundred and fifty feet above the whitecapped water. The carrier was a fuzzy, bulky shape through the rain, less than a mile ahead of them.

In his headphones, the senior Nav/Attack officer began calling out the readings from his screens and sensors, describing the movements of the surface and sub-surface vessels during the time they were descending. The carrier seemed to leap towards them like a huge stone across the stormy water.

The subs were altering, or had altered, course, and all were closing on the same bearing. The carrier appeared to be lumbering on to a new course. All units closing on the fixed position of the Proteus. They'd found her. Maybe foxed for the moment, but they had her now.

Eastoe throttled back the four Rolls-Royce engines, and the Nimrod appeared merely to float above the deck of the Kiev. No activity, launches stowed on both the port and starboard boat-decks — the co-pilot calling out confirmation of what Eastoe had seen for himself— and then the rescue ship was ahead as the Kiev passed out of sight beneath them. The Karpaty was making slow headway and, as Bob called out her course, Eastoe realised that the rescue ship was on a heading that would take her over the Proteus.

He realised, too, the significance of the rescue ship. He, throttled back once more, and they drifted towards the Karpaty.

"See it?" he said.

"Yes, skipper. They're trying to launch a boat from the starboard side, looks like."

The Nimrod crept towards the rescue ship. Tiny figures, moving with what seemed hopeless and defeated slowness around the starboard launch on its davits. Eastoe strained forward in his seat. The co-pilot increased the beat of the wipers. Shiny, oil-skinned crewmen — no, not ail of them, surely?

"What in hell —?"

"Divers."

"Divers! Shit and hell!"

The Nimrod floated over the dipping bow of the Karpaty. A chaos of water flung up over her deck, the surge of an animal as the wave released her into, the next trough. Men in shiny, tight-fitting suits, face-masked, oxygen cylinders on their backs. They were pinpricks, tiny matchstick men, but they were divers, climbing into the launch.

"How far is she from the Proteus?"

"Less than a mile," he heard the navigator reply as the nose of the aircraft blotted out the scene directly below them.

"I'm going round for another look and some more pictures," Eastoe said, "and then we'd better send Aubrey the bad news — they're going down to the Proteus, for God's sake!"

Chapter Eight: SEIZURE

Aubrey stared at the note he had scribbled, the small, neat handwriting suddenly expressive of powerlessness, and realised that they had lost. "Leopard" had malfunctioned, betraying the position of the Proteus to the Russian submarines in the immediate area. The rescue ship Karpaty was preparing to launch a small boat on which were a team of divers. They had received photographic proof of that over the wireprint. Opposite his note, Clark had scrawled in his strangely confident, large hand RB Spec Ops Unit — Ardenyev. Aubrey presumed it was no more than an informed guess, and it had no significance. The identity of the divers did not matter, only that they existed and were less than a mile from the reported position of the British submarine.

It was dark outside now. Perhaps not quite. A drizzling, gusty dusk. Aubrey had taken a short afternoon walk in St James's Park, but he had been unable to shake off the claustrophobic, tense gravity of the underground room beneath the Admiralty, and had soon returned to it.

Lost. Found by others. The Russians evidently intended that Proteus should be salvaged, perhaps even boarded, and the "Leopard" equipment inspected before it was presumably returned, together with the submarine and her crew. An accident, not quite an international incident, no real cause for alarm, no ultimate harm done. He could hear the platitudes unroll in the days ahead, perceive the diplomatic games that would be played. He knew the Russians would take Proteus to one of their closest ports — Pechenga, Poliarnyi, even Murmansk — and there they would effect apologetic repairs, even allowing the American consul from Leningrad or a nominated member of the British embassy staff from Moscow to talk to the crew, make the noises of protest, send their London ambassador to call on the foreign secretary and the PM, heap assurance upon assurance that it was an accident, that all would be well, that this indicated the willingness for peace of the Soviet Union — look, we are even repairing your submarine, send experts to inspect our work, why are you so suspicious, so belligerent, you will have your submarine back as good as new —

The diplomatic support for the operation sprang fully-envisaged into Aubrey's awareness, like a childhood or youthful moment of extreme humiliation that haunted him still in old age. It did not matter that it was all a blatant lie; it would work. It would give them enough time to photograph, X-ray, dismantle "Leopard", and learn its secrets.

And, at the same time, they might obtain its designer, Quin, who would help them to build more. In the moment of the loss of "Leopard", Aubrey feared Hyde's failure and the girl's capture.

"What do we do, Kenneth?" Pyott asked at his shoulder. The channel to Eastoe in the Nimrod was still open, the tapes waiting for his orders. Aubrey waved a hand feebly, and the operator cut the communications link.

Aubrey looked up into Pyott's face, turning slightly in his chair. "I do not know, Giles — I really do not know."

"You have to order Lloyd to destroy “Leopard” —I mean literally smash it and grind the pieces into powder," Ethan Clark remarked, his face pale and determined. "It's the only way. The guy must know by now that's what they're after, and how close they are to getting it. He has to get rid of “Leopard”."

"Just like that? I seem to remember the Pueblo made a monumental cock-up of a similar procedure some years ago," Pyott observed haughtily. "It won't be easy. “Leopard” isn't in a throwaway wrapper, Clark."

"You British," Clark sneered. "Man, you're so good at inertia, you make me sick."

"There has to be something else we can do — besides which, “Leopard” is working again."

"For the moment."

"Gentlemen," Aubrey said heavily, wearily, "let's not squabble amongst ourselves. Ethan, is there anything else we can do?"

"You're not able to rescue Proteus, Mr Aubrey."

"Then perhaps we should warn her what to expect."

Aubrey got up from the chair at the communications console, and crossed the room to the map-board. He seemed, even to himself, to be shrunken and purposeless beneath it. Proteus — white light — had been repositioned, closer inshore, and the updated courses and positions of the carrier, the rescue ship, the destroyers and the submarines created a dense mass of light around one thin neck of the Norwegian coast. The sight depressed Aubrey, even as it galvanised him to an action of desperation. He had lost the game, therefore he must damage and make worthless the prize.

"Encode the following," he called across the room, "and transmit it to Eastoe at once, for relay to Proteus. Mission aborted, destroy, repeat destroy “Leopard”. Priority most absolute. Append my signature."

Every man in the room listened to him in silence, and the silence continued after he had finished speaking. A heavy, final silence punctuated only by the clicking of the keys of the encoding machine.

Ardenyev watched Vanilov's feet begin to slip, saw the white face surmounted by the facemask and half-obscured by the bobbing mouthpiece of his breathing apparatus, and felt the wave surge round his own ankles and calves. His hands gripped the rail of the launch, but Vanilov's grabbed for a handhold like clumsy artificial claws he had not learned to operate. Ardenyev reached out and gripped the younger man's elbow, almost as if he were about to twist Vanilov's arm painfully behind his back. He pulled the frightened, off-balanced man to him, hugged him upright, then pushed at his back and buttocks until Vanilov was over the rail of the launch and into it, a look of fearful gratitude on his face. They were all in.

The sea flung itself against the Karpaty more ferociously than had been apparent on the carrier, as if encouraged by its success in making the rescue ship bob and duck and sway in the water. Amidships, where they were boarding the launch that would then be swung out on its davits, the sea boiled across the deck as each succeeding wave caught them in the trough behind its predecessor. Ardenyev watched a grey, white-fringed, boiling wall of water rise level with and above the deck, and tightened his grip on the launch's rail and widened his stance. Teplov offered his hand, and Ardenyev shook his head.

"Get below!" he yelled.

The wave smashed against the side of the hull, then flung its broken peak across the deck, drenching Ardenyev. He was deafened and blinded by the water, and he thought the thin, inhuman noise he heard distantly was merely illusion. When he opened his eyes again, there was one yellow-oilskinned figure less than before, gathered around the boat station— and other men were looking blankly and fixedly towards the boat's side. Ardenyev realised, as he shivered and tried to control his chattering teeth, the fragility of their enterprise, even its lunacy; resented to the point of hatred an old man ensconced in the non-climatic, antiseptic surroundings of the Red Banner headquarters in Murmansk. He wanted to open his mouth and yell his anger as the Karpaty wallowed her way into the trough behind the wave that had killed one of her crew.

He swung himself up and over the rail, and hurried into the shelter of the launch's cabin, seeking the determination to order the officer in command of the frail little boat to issue his own orders for the launching of the vessel. A tiny yellow blob for a second, out there in the water—?

Ardenyev shook his head, clearing the last of the water from his face and eyes with his hands. The air tanks were heavy on his back. He'd insisted— despite the discomfort and the loss of agility— that they don their full equipment, everything except flippers, in the comparative calm of the Karpaty, while the ratings of the rescue ship struggled to load their special equipment into the launch.

The lieutenant in command of the launch watched him, immediately he entered the cabin, with a thin-lipped, colourless expression. His face reflected Ardenyev's thoughts, with its sense of the threadbare rationality of Dolohov's scheme that now made the old man seem mad. Dolohov appeared to have cobbled this operation together in a fit of lunacy.

"Gone again, sir," the michman on the launch's sonar called out, and the lieutenant appeared to take this as a final condemnation of what they were doing, the last bitter irony of forces he could hardly comprehend but which controlled him.

Ardenyev crossed the cabin to the sonar. "Show me," he said.

The michman indicated a line across the screen with his finger, as if slicing the perspex surface of the sonar. "That bearing," he said. "Range six hundred."

Six hundred metres from them, the British submarine lay on a ledge, less than fifty fathoms down. The invisible Norwegian coast had thrust out a hand, a fingertip, to aid her. Her anti-sonar was flicking on and off like a signalling torch.

"That's it — let's go."

Teplov's head appeared at the door at the rear of the cabin.

"It's all in good shape, sir."

"What about the men?" Teplov paused for a moment, then he nodded slowly. "Good," Ardenyev added. "Make sure everything's secure. Tell them to hang on tight, and be ready to move fast when I give the order." Teplov nodded again, and his head then disappeared as the door closed.

The launch lurched off its blocks, swung fragilely outwards above the deck and then the grey water — they were in another trough between great waves — and the winches with their tiny, yellow-garbed figures working furiously at them, trundled them downwards towards the water. Speed seemed to lend stability and cancel the force of the wind, even still the water as it rushed up towards them. The rusty plates again of the hull, the thin wires above them, then the launch's keel smacking into the water, screw churning, its whine in air disappearing and its power failing to move the launch. Ardenyev grabbed a handhold and braced himself as the launch was lifted towards the grey-white peak of the next wave. It teetered there for a moment, deck awash, windows blind and running with water, the coxswain spinning the wheel feverishly and without apparent effect, then it began falling.

Ardenyev heard someone cry out just after he registered a metallic, screeching slither from beyond the closed door at his back, then he was aware only of the ugly frightening sensation of being swallowed by a huge grey-fleshed, open mouth. Then they were in a trough and the rudder and the screw began taking effect and the boat moved with some of its own volition rather than that of the sea. A sense of stability returned to his legs and feet, the illusion of a firm surface, a level world.

The warble of the sonar again, then, as if hearing were just returning.

"She's there again, sir!" the michman called out.

"Has she changed position?" Ardenyev asked.

The michman calculated swiftly. "No, sir. Bearing now red one-five, range five-seven-eight."

"Helmsman — port one-five."

"Port one-five, sir."

Teplov's face, white and drained and old, appeared at the door again.

"Sir, it's Petrov — his leg. The hose broke loose, sir, wrapped itself around his leg — think it's broken, sir."

"God," Ardenyev breathed, closing his eyes. Six of them now. Dolohov was a fucking lunatic —

"Will you come, sir?"

"It should have been stowed properly!" Ardenyev yelled in his enraged frustration.

The launch teetered, then the bow fell drunkenly down and forward, the noise of the screw disappearing, sinking into the throb of the labouring engine. Six of them had to get themselves, their sleds, hoses and canisters, welding equipment and communications over the side of the launch, below the surface, down to the Proteus. There should have been thirteen of them. Impossible now.

"I'll come," he said, suddenly weary and cold.

"One minute ten seconds, eleven, twelve, thirteen —" Lloyd whispered the lowering of his voice an act of mockery, pointless. "Sixteen, seventeen — twenty."

Hayter and the sub-lieutenant were examining the mass of wiring and circuitry and microprocessors inside the main metal cabinet housing "Leopard". Hayter and the sublieutenant were checking the efficiency of each component manually, with multi-meters. The rating was removing the panelling of the second box, kneeling like a safecracker against the metal.

Hayter looked up desperately, shaking his head. "It's no good, sir. We could be doing this for hours yet. Unless it switches itself back on, we're finished. It's no good pretending we're not. Everything here appears to be working, dammit!"

"Get to work on the back-up system, will you?" One minute forty-two seconds. It wasn't going to come on again.

"You know where that's housed. We can't work in there with the space and freedom we" ve got here. It'll take even longer —"

"Christ, Don — what are you going to do, then?"

"I don't know, sir!"

One minute forty-nine, two minutes of visibility on any and every sonar screen in the area. On the Kiev, the rescue ship, the subs, the destroyer, the aircraft overhead. Everyone could see them.

The subs were holding off, not coming in for the kill. But then, they wanted "Leopard", not blood. And they were jamming every radio frequency they could. Proteus couldn't talk or receive. In a corner, beaten, defenceless —

Two minutes ten. Hayter was back at his orisons in front of the exposed innards of "Leopard", kneeling in what might have been a prayer of desperation. If he could get it functioning again, if it would only switch itself back on, then he would risk the ship by moving her, limping off into another dark corner. At least he'd try to play hide-and-seek with them as long as he could, if only "Leopard" would work.

Hayter looked at him again, shaking his head. Two minutes twenty-four. It wasn't going to work.

Carr, the navigator, appeared at the door of the cabin. "Sir, sonar's picked up a very small vessel moving away from the rescue ship." As if there had been a public admission of failure, Carr spoke in his normal tone, normal volume. "Ship's launch, we think."

"What does the First-Lieutenant think?"

"Divers, sir. Some attempt to inspect our damage."

"Very well." Two minutes fifty. It wasn't going to come on, now. Now it was too late. The rescue ship was less than half-a-mile away. They'd fixed her position by now. Lloyd looked with helpless vehemence at the exposed, purposeless interior of the "Leopard" cabinets. "Tell the First-Lieutenant I'm on my way." Carr disappeared. There was no attempt to modify the noise of his footsteps now. It was an admission of defeat, a surrender. "Keep me informed, Don— for Christ's sake keep on trying!"

As he headed for the control room, the image of the opened useless cabinets remained with him, like a sudden, shocking glimpse of a body undergoing surgery. Hideously expensive, sophisticated almost beyond comprehension, impossible to repair. So much junk—

A team of divers. A threat that somehow diminished even as it presented itself. Perhaps a dozen men, outside the twin hulls of the Proteus. His own crew numbered one hundred.

The control room reasserted Lloyd's sense of authority, supplying also a fugitive sense of security. They were almost fifty fathoms down. He must consider moving Proteus, when the critical moment arrived. Thurston looked up from one of the sonar screens, and Lloyd unexpectedly grinned at him.

"Sorry, skipper — nothing. Just the howl of the jamming."

"Make a guess— did Proteus pick up Aubrey's order?" Eastoe demanded.

"Doubtful. Almost impossible."

"So Lloyd doesn't know he must destroy the equipment?"

"Don't you think he's done so, skipper? She's been on sonar for over four minutes now."

"That could be the malfunction. Can we contact MoD?"

"No."

"Okay everybody. I'm taking her down again, for a look-see. It's almost dark down there. Keep your eyes wide open. Cameras ready. We might as well get any gen we can."

Hyde looked at his watch. A minute before eight. He got out of the unmarked police car parked in Watson Street, then looked back in at the Special Branch inspector before closing the door.

"Half an hour. Just keep clear of the place for half an hour, okay?"

"You're taking an unnecessary risk, Mr Hyde," the policeman offered without inflection. "Yours is a face they know. They'll pick you up on your way in, and bingo — "

"Maybe. And if your lot go in, the girl will panic and either run off or refuse to talk when we" ve got her. Sorry, sport, we have to take the risk." He looked at his watch again. "Thirty minutes from now, you can come running blowing whistles, anything you like. But not till I" ve talked to the girl."

"Have it your own way.“

"I will. Look —" Hyde felt a sudden need for reassurance, a desire to ameliorate the police resentment of him. "The girl's almost paranoid about us. We 're the enemy, not the Russians. Christ knows how she came by that idea, but it's what she believes. I have to talk her out."

"Okay. You" ve got thirty minutes."

Hyde shut the car door softly. It was almost dark, and the shadows were black pools between the street lamps. Shop windows lighted, and a few pedestrians scuttling ahead of the wind. According to reports, there was one man at the back of the Free Trade Hall — but only one. Hyde thrust his hands into his pockets, and began slouching up the narrow street leading to the rear of the concert hall.

The cars were parked and empty, the street lamps betrayed no pedestrians or loiterers. The weak strains of a country-and-western song came from a slightly open upstairs window of a flat above a shop. The pervasive odour of fish and chips fluttered on the wind, then was gone. It made Hyde feel hungry. He felt small, and alone.

Dim, unlit shop windows. Dust in his eyes. Bookshop, sex shop, barber's. Then Hyde saw him, on the other side of the street, no more than a shadow that moved, perhaps a bored man shifting his weight on tired, aching feet. Hyde stopped, staring into the unlit window of a tiny record shop. Garish LP covers, posters, price cuts daubed in white. The language English but the place no longer Manchester. Some foreign place where he was outnumbered, known, sought. He shivered. If he passed the man, presumably his presence would be noted and reported. They would conclude it was him, even if he hadn't been recognized. On the other hand, if he removed the man from the board, his failure to contact Petrunin — still reported to be sitting in his car in the square — might similarly prove Hyde's presence in the area.

The man had emerged from the doorway of a baker's shop, and was standing on the pavement. As Hyde turned slowly to face him, it was evident that the man was staring directly at him, aware of who he was. Hyde, hands still in his pockets of his corduroy trousers, shoulders hunched, feet apart, was helpless. A Volvo was awkwardly parked, pulled right up bumper-to-bumper against the rear of a Ford Escort directly in front of him. Between him and the man across the street.

One hand of the bulky figure in a raincoat and a hat was moving towards his face, as if to feed himself the tiny R/T set. They hadn't picked up any transmissions all afternoon, Hyde thought, and had discounted R/T. In a moment, two or three paces of time, Petrunin would know that Hyde was about to enter the Free Trade Hall. The hand was moving, Hyde's foot was on the Volvo's bumper, his left foot on the bonnet of the car, the man's hand stopped moving — Hyde could not see the finger press the transceiver button — one step on the bonnet, then down half-way across the street. The man was surprised, the hand moved away from his face, his other hand fumbled in his raincoat, two strides, one more, collision —

The man staggered back into the darkened doorway of the shop. Old mosaiced threshold, the man's mouth opening in a groan as the ornate, polished brass doorknocker thrust into his back. Hyde, one hand scrabbling at his side, reached for the transceiver in the Russian's hand, and punched at the face that had opened in pain. The Russian's head ducked to one side as if he had avoided the blow, but the knees were going, and the body sagged. Hyde felt the hand surrender the transceiver, and hit the Russian again, behind the ear. Then he lowered him in his arms on to the mosaic of the threshold. The Russian was breathing as if asleep, on the verge of snoring.

Hyde dropped the transceiver, and was about to grind it beneath his shoe. Then he picked it up and put it into the pocket of his windcheater. If Petrunin tried to contact the man in the doorway, then at least he would know; know, too, that he would have only minutes after that.

He hurried now, shaking from the brief violence, the surge of adrenalin.

There were double gates at the rear of the hall. A uniformed constable opened a small judas-door to him, and closed it behind him. Hyde debated for a moment whether to tell the young policeman of the Russian in the doorway, or the others that might come looking for him, then decided against so doing.

The Edwin Shirley trucks were drawn up in convoy, as if the Free Trade Hall were some cargo terminal. Hyde skirted them, searching in the almost complete darkness for the rear entrance that the Special Branch inspector had pointed out on a plan of the building. He climbed three steps, his hand resting for a moment on a cold metal railing, then tried the door. It had been left unlocked by one of the plainclothes detectives who had been inside the building all day. Hyde went in and closed the door behind him. A lighted passage in need of a fresh coat of cream paint. Dark brown doors. Cramped, uncomfortable, draughty, strip-lighting the only modernism. There was no one in the corridor.

Heat of the Day — Hyde paused to listen, Alletson's high, clear voice riding over the keyboards and guitar, part of the suite of pieces "No Way Back" — could be heard mutedly but plainly. He would have to hurry. Normally the band followed the suite with a keyboard display by Whiteman, the other four leaving the stage to him. He had only a few minutes, he realised, becoming aware at the same moment of the small transceiver in his pocket. He opened a dressing-room door. The room was empty and in darkness.

The second room was locked and he saw, looking down, that there was a light on, gleaming beneath the door. Then it went out. He fished for the stiff little rectangle of mica in his pocket, and inserted it in the door jamb. He paused, listening. The noise of an opening window?

Alletson's voice silent, the slow keyboard section of the suite, building to the ensemble climax. Three, four minutes. A window opening?

He sprang the Yale lock and opened the door. In the light that entered the room from the corridor, he could see a small, slim figure at the dressing-room window, balanced on the sill. He crossed the room in three strides, knocking over a chair, hearing the slight, rustling twang of a guitar he had disturbed, then he had his arms around the figure, keeping his head back from the fingernails that instantly sought his face. He pulled Tricia Quin back into the room, clamping one hand over her mouth, pressing her against him with his other arm. Her body wriggled in his embrace, small, slippery. She backheeled his shins, and he winced with pain but did not let go. He felt the door behind him, raised his elbow, found the light switch, and held her against him after the light came on, but more gently. Eventually, he turned her head so that she could see his face. She stopped wriggling and struggling for a moment, then tried to tear away from him.

"Listen to me," he whispered, "just listen to me without struggling, will you?" His voice was almost petulant rather than threatening, and it's tone struck her. Her eyes widened, and he took his hand from her mouth carefully. "Okay, will you listen? You'd have broken your bloody neck if you'd jumped from that window."

"We're on the ground floor," she remarked in a superior tone. "What do you want?" she pulled down her T-shirt — a pointing hand in white, black background, the legend Keep your eyes on the face, sonny — and then tugged her cardigan straight on her narrow shoulders. She looked vulnerable, intelligent, arrogant, and somehow old-fashioned, out of date. A flower-child who had wandered into the wrong decade. "Well, what do you want? Or was it all for a quick feel in the dark?"

Hyde studied his hands, then looked up. Slowly, slowly, he instructed himself. In his broadest Strine he drawled, "I like "em with bigger tits, girlie."

Her face narrowed in anger, then she seemed more puzzled than anything else. "You're very persistent, aren't you?"

"And you're very elusive." He stepped forward, hands raised in a signal of harmlessness, and righted the chair he had knocked over. He sat down. "Give me five minutes of your time — just listen to me. I'll try to make you an offer you can't refuse."

"You don't have anything with which to trade, do you?"

"Maybe not. Sit down, anyway."

Tricia Quin slumped untidily, sullenly into a sagging armchair. "All right. Talk."

"I know your mates will be back in a couple of minutes — they're almost finished with “No Way Back” —" The girl's eyes narrowed with cunning. "So, I'll be brief. There are Russian agents — no don't sneer and don't laugh and don't get clever — outside. The real McCoy. They're interested in contacting your father, and they're sure you know where he is."

"They're just like you."

"No." Hyde bit down on his rising temper. The band murmured beyond the door, close to the climax of the suite. Perhaps no more than a minute. "At this moment, there are a hundred lives at risk under the Barents Sea because of your dad."

"What?"

"The submarine, girlie. Shit, the little old submarine with your old man's wonderful piece of machinery on board, the one everyone wants to know all about." Hyde's voice was scornful, carefully modulated. The band sounded louder, closer to the finish. "Only it isn't working so bloody well at the moment. The Russians have damaged our side's submarine, and your father's bloody expensive equipment isn't working properly. Keeps going on and off like Radio Caroline in the old days."

"I — what am I supposed to do about it?" She was attempting to regain her composure, and she was listening to the sounds from beyond the door.

"Let me talk to your dad — tell him what's what." The girl was already shaking her head. "A telephone number —you ring him, I won't watch." Tricia Quin examined the offer for its concealed booby-trap. "No trick," Hyde added.

Alletson walked into their intent silence. Whiteman's tumultuous keyboard playing could be heard through the open door. Alletson's tight-curled hair was wet with perspiration, his damp shirt open to the waist.

"What the hell do you want?" he asked.

"What's up, Jon?" Hyde heard someone in the corridor ask. The lead guitarist, Howarth, pushed into the room carrying two cans of lager. "Who's he?"

"The secret agent I told you about." Tricia Quin explained with laden sarcasm. "The spy."

"What's he want — you?"

"If you're coming in, close the bloody door," Hyde said lightly, "there's a bloody draught."

Howarth closed the door, and leant against it, still holding the cans of lager. He studied the guitar lying near Hyde's feet with a silent malevolence. Hyde turned on his chair and looked up at Alletson.

"Jon-boy," he said, "tell her to piss off, tell her you don't love her any more, tell her she's a bloody nuisance who could ruin the tour — tell her anything, but persuade her to come with me."

"Why should I do that? She's afraid of you."

"You should see the other side, mate. They frighten me." Alletson grinned despite himself. "See, I'm not such a bad bloke after all." He stopped smiling. "I" ve told her why I have to find her father — "

"You're probably lying." she remarked.

Hyde turned back to her. "I'm not as it happens. Your father's bloody marvellous invention has dropped a hundred blokes in the shit! Now, will you call him and let me tell him?"

It was evident the girl was on the point of shaking her head, when Alletson said quietly, "Why not, Trish?" She stared at him, at first in disbelief then with a narrow, bright vehemence, sharp as a knife. "Look, Trish," Alletson persisted, "go and call him; we'll keep James Bond —" Hyde laughed aloud — "here while you do it. Ask your father if he wants to talk to Don Bradman."

The girl screwed up her face in concentration. She looked very young, indecisive; an air of failure, inability, lack of capacity emanated from her. She irritated Hyde as he watched her.

"All right," she said finally, resenting Alletson for making the suggestion, the capitulation, in the first place. Hyde also noticed that in a more obscure way she accepted the role forced upon her. Perhaps she was tired of running, tired of keeping her father's secrets. Alletson had made a decision for her that she could not entirely resent. "Make sure he stays here," she added. Hyde controlled his sudden fear, and made no effort to follow her. She pushed past Howarth, and closed the door behind her.

Hyde studied Alletson. The man was nervous of him now, had accepted that he could do no more to protect Tricia Quin.

"Sorry — about last night," Alletson. said eventually.

Hyde shrugged. "I don't blame you, mate," he said, raised palms facing outwards. "Pax. I will help her," he added.

"I told you, Jon, we ought to dump her — " Howarth began but Alletson. turned on him.

"Piss off. For old times" sake. It was for old times" sake."

"How's the tour going so far?" Hyde asked pleasantly, wondering whether Tricia Quin had taken the opportunity to bolt again. He did not think she had, but the closed door at Howarth's back troubled him.

"You're interested?" Howarth asked in disbelief.

"I'm old enough to remember your first album."

"Thanks."

"Why is she running?" Alletson asked, looking almost guilty.

"Her father's paranoid about security. She's caught the infection."

"It is all real, then?"

Hyde nodded. "Oh, yes. Silly, but real. The Russians want her dad, or her, or both, because he's invented a purple deathray which will give world domination to whoever possesses its deadly secret. I'm Flash Gordon, no less."

"That's about what we thought," Alletson admitted, grinning in a puzzled way. Then he looked at his watch. "We're back on. You — you'll take care of her?" Hyde nodded.

Alletson and Howarth left the room, Howarth picking up the acoustic guitar lying on the floor at Hyde's feet before he went. Then Tricia Quin was standing in the open doorway as Whiteman's final keyboard crescendo echoed down the corridor. Her face was white. She looked guilty and afraid.

"Okay?"

She nodded. "Yes. Yes, he's very tired. He'll talk to you, but only to you. I think he's got a gun." He words were a warning, and an attempt to excuse her own and her father's capitulation. "He's been worried about me."

"He's still safe?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"I'll tell you when we" ve left here."

"Luggage?" She shook her head. "Let's go, then." She looked up sharply at the tone of his voice. Hyde had remembered the KGB irregular lying unconscious in a windy shop doorway on mosaic tiles. He hadn't reported in—

His hand patted the pocket of his windcheater in which he had placed the tiny transceiver. As if he had triggered it, it began bleeping. Tricia Quin's face blanched, her hand flew to her mouth. Hyde cursed.

"It's one of their radios," he explained, getting up quickly. His chair clattered over, and she began to back into the corner of the room, as if he had threatened her with violence. The transceiver continued to bleep, its volume seeming to increase. Her eyes darted between Hyde's face and the door she had left defencelessly open. "Come on, let's get moving!" She was opening her mouth, all capitulation forgotten, betrayal seeping into her features. Hyde bellowed at her. "It's no time to change your mind, you stupid, mixed-up cow! Shift your bloody arse!" She reached for her jacket.

He grabbed her arm and propelled her towards the door. The corridor was empty. At the back of his mind, Hyde could see the Russians fitfully on a dim screen; wondering, worrying, beginning to move, guessing, knowing —

He could hand her over now to the police, to the Branch, and she would be safe. If he did, they'd spend days trying to find out where Quin was hiding. She'd be in a catatonic suspicion, comatosed with her secret. If he went with her, alone —

"You're hurting — " she said meekly as he bundled her down the corridor through the door. He released her arm, and paused to listen, holding his hand in front of her face, indicating silence. He could hear her ragged breathing, like the last ineffectual plucking of his mother's lungs at the hot Sydney air in the darkened room. The day she died.

"Shut up!" he whispered fiercely.

"Sorry—"

He strained to hear. Nothing. The dim music from inside, the murmur of a radio in one of the trucks, traffic muted in the distance.

"Come on." He propelled her down the steps, reached for her hand — she allowed him to hold it, it was inanimate and cold in his grip — and they moved swiftly across the yard. The transceiver in his pocket became silent. Moving; fearful, angry, quick, closing in —

The same police constable was on the gate, and he acknowledged their appearance with a nod. He did not seem surprised to see the girl.

"Everything all right, sir?"

Tricia Quin seemed reassured by the manner of his addressing Hyde.

"I think so, constable " Nothing in the narrow, dimly-lit street, but he could not see the baker's shop from the gate. They could be there already. Petrunin might already be out of his car, his minions much closer than that. There was little point in the constable being involved. "Nip inside, constable. Now I" ve got her, we can start sniffing them out."

"Very good, sir. I'll just report in."

"When you get inside." He realised he was still holding the girl's hand, and he squeezed it. "Come on. My car's only round the corner." Probably with someone very unfriendly in it, he added to himself.

A curious but unfamiliar elation seized him. His chest seemed expanded with some lighter-than-air gas like helium, and his head was very clear. One of his Vick moments, as he had once described them. Every thing clear, cold, sharp. The TR7 was behind the Midland Hotel, in the old railway station that had become, without redecoration or conversion, a huge car park. He jiggled her arm, and they began running up the narrow street, away from the rear of the Free Trade Hall and the baker's doorway. Sensuous information flooded in, his brain sifting it swiftly, unerringly.

Light from around the corner — Peter Street. Their footsteps, the girl's padding lighter in flat, crepe-soled shoes, the rubbing of her arm against her borrowed, too-big jacket, the spillage of music — Brahms — from an upstairs window, the splash of one foot in a puddle, the gun cold and noticeable in the small of his back, thrust into his waistband. The emptiness of the end of the street, no shadow against the lights of Peter Street. He was grateful.

The Midland Hotel was across the bright, traffic-filled street. It was a moment before Hyde remembered that Petrunin's car was parked in the square in front of the hotel.

"Okay?" he asked the girl. She was gulping air, but she nodded and tried to smile shakily. "Keep going, then, shall we?"

Pavement. Pedestrians crossing. Normality. Red man, traffic swooping past them and round into the square or into Oxford Street or Moseley Street. Central Library, Midland Hotel. Forget it, don't turn your head, stop searching for them. You either fully pretend or not at all —

Red man. Green man, traffic stopping. Walk. He tugged at her hand. One pace, two, you can hurry a little here, people always do on zebra crossings.

They were almost across the street before he heard the first shout, the answering call, and sensed the acceleration of the pursuit. On the pavement, he turned. A man waved to him, as if to call him back over a matter of a dropped book or wallet, or an unpaid bill. He stepped off the opposite pavement. Petrunin himself. He'd been the closest, most experienced, sharpest mind. He'd guessed and just strolled round the square from his car, and seen them emerge. Petrunin, who knew him, knew the girl's face, no mistake —

"Is that one of them?" the girl asked, as if facing some extremely difficult task of recollection or recognition.

That's him." Petrunin was almost smiling. Green man still. Two others, running put into Peter Street from the rear of the Free Trade Hall. Not the man in the doorway, two others who had found him and come running. 'ready?" Hyde asked.

"Yes." Her hand trembled in his.

Red man. Petrunin, three paces on to the zebra crossing, paused so that the others could catch up with him. The sound of an impatient horn, then the blare of another and revving engines. Petrunin skipped back on to the opposite pavement.

'Now!'

They raced down the shadowy side-street alongside the bulk of the Midland Hotel. The illuminated facade of the old railway station was ahead of them, the car park barrier like a border to be crossed into a safe country. Hyde pulled at the girl's arm, urging her on, sensing that she was flagging.

The squeal of brakes behind them, the bellow of a car horn. Petrunin wasn't waiting for the green light. They ran together across the road, up the slope to the barrier. A black face was behind the glass of the booth. Hyde looked behind him. All three men were across Peter Street and running towards them. Hyde inwardly cursed the bravado of his isolation with the girl. There were police in the square, in Peter Street, Watson Street, in the Free Trade Hall, and he had chosen to run with the girl, making Manchester as alien and dangerous as Prague or Warsaw or Moscow. He slapped notes and change on to the counter of the booth, together with his ticket.

He swallowed saliva, said 'I'm in a hurry. Keep the change. Open the barrier when I drive out — yellow TR7. Got it?' Then his hand was in his pocket and he was waving the shorthand of the CID warrant card. The Indian nodded.

Hyde ran on, the girl ahead of him now, but slowing because there seemed no safety amid the cars under the cracked, glassless station roof.

'Where?' she said.

'Over there,' he said, pointing.

One or two weak lights revealed the massed, hunched, beetle-like shells of car bonnets and roofs. The girl stared around her wildly. Hyde glanced back. Petrunin and the other two had slowed their pace, almost strolling past the barrier, confident but wary, imitating legitimacy. Seconds between them. Hyde ran out on to the platform with the girl. Dully gleaming, crustaceous cars; silence. The wind soughing thinly in the shell of the station. The three Russians were past the barrier and had paused on the threshold of the station itself. Hyde ducked down, pulling the girl into a crouch, and began weaving awkwardly between parked cars.

He paused, listened, then moved on. They came to the edge of the platform, and he dropped down. He reached up and the girl surrendered to his grasp on her waist. He lifted her down. A row of cars, one of them yellow.

'Mr Hyde?'

He thought for the moment it was the girl speaking, because of the light, interrogative tone. But it was Petrunin — accent and authority seeping into Hyde's awareness just behind the words. He gestured to the girl to remain silent, and they moved, crouching, along the rear bumpers of cars until they were leaning against the TR7. He heard the girl's ragged breathing again, but not like his mother's now; too alive for that, too much wanting to live. Hyde fished the car keys from his pocket and reached up to unlock the door.

'Mr Hyde?' Then whispered instructions above the girl's breathing, the shuffle of footsteps as the three men spread out. Petrunin was confident. He hadn't left anyone at the barrier. 'Mr Hyde.' A sharper tone, impatient.

Hyde eased open the door of the TR7, and indicated that the girl should climb in. They'd be looking for the yellow car. He crept round to the driver's door, unlocked it, clambered into the low hard seat. He eased the door shut on the footsteps that were coming closer. Steel-tipped heels to the heavy shoes. He slipped the key into the ignition, and pulled out the choke. He looked at Tricia Quin. Hair damp on her forehead, face pale, cheeks quivering.

'Which way?'

'North,' she said, hugging herself as if to keep warm; trying to retreat from her danger.

Hyde breathed in deeply, then turned the key. Cough, chatter of the ignition, cough, firing of the engine, drowning a surprised and delighted cry from up on the platform. He thrust the gears into reverse, screeched out of his parking place, heaving on the wheel. The TR7 skidded, almost stalled, and then the car was bucking over the uneven ground.

He reached the end of the platform, and swung the car left, across the hard-packed earth where the tracks had once been, until he mounted the platform ramp at the other side of the station. He had heard no gunfire, nothing after that shout of discovery. The engine whined, the tyres screeched as he roared along the platform, then turned again on to what had been the concourse, heading for the entrance.

One man, stepping out from behind a car, gun levelled. Hesitation, a slight turning of his head — a cry of protest from Petrunin? Then the TR7 was almost on top of him, a spit of flame from the shadowy bulk of the man before he flicked aside like a matador, between two cars. The bullet's path was a groove in the thin metal of the roof, directly above Hyde's head. He screeched the car round and through the entrance to the station, and the barrier was going up, very slowly. Another man was entering the booth alongside the barrier — barrier going up, making a chopping motion as it reached the peak of its swing, beginning to descend almost immediately. The TR7 raced beneath it, bounced over cobbles, and squealed into the road behind the Midland Hotel.

"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 these 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 —

The scraping, the cries of metal as the crippled submarine dipped time and again to the bottom of the ledge, dragging her belly across silt and mud and rock, the grating, thrumming noise and vibration of the captive prop as it tried to turn, the smaller vibration — almost normality — of the small docking propeller being used. It seemed endless, unbearable.

He turned in the chamber, banged against the wall of the cylinder, gripped the lower hatch venting wheel, turned again, banged, was thrown off, his lamp flickering wildly against the flooded metal of his prison, gripped again, braced himself— the vibration and movement slowing now?

— and turned a third time. The water began to seep slowly from the hatch into the torpedo room. Three-and-a-half minutes. He had practised the number of turns to allow the pressure to alter at the necessary rate, the precise amount of water to release per second, perhaps two hundred times. But not when it really mattered. He remained gripping the wheel of the lower hatch, the light of his lamp playing on his watch.

Ten, eleven, twelve seconds. Almost eight minutes of time gone, and another three minutes fifteen before the water had drained away and he had safely depressurised. A total of more than eleven minutes. And where were they? Had they hung on? Were they alive?

Slowing, vibration bearable. Scraping on its belly, lurching to starboard, a cry of rent metal, the main prop not being used, docking prop dying away. The Proteus was stopping again. He had waited too long. He should have acted earlier, when the noise and vibration were at their height. Now the water dripped on to the empty torpedo room floor in the sudden silence as men's hearing returned. Thirty-seven seconds, thirty-eight, nine, forty —

Silence. He stood upright in the chamber. The water was at shoulder-height. He ducked back beneath its surface. Fifty-five seconds. He couldn't wait, had to wait. Perhaps the great bulk of the submarine had rolled on one or more of them? Teplov? Nikitin? The others? If they were alive, could they find the Proteus again in time in the forest of silt that must now obscure her? They would swim through an unending, almost solid grey curtain of silt, looking for the submarine that was their only hope. It was already too late to begin slowly ascending to the surface. Now he was safely decompressing, no one could enter the torpedo room escape chamber until he had left it. If any of them were still alive. He thought of the whip of a loosened steel cable across an immersion-suited body —

One minute twenty seconds. He was crouching against the floor of the chamber as the water drained slowly into the torpedo room below. Not a trickle, not a drip, but a slow, steady fall, noisy. The wardroom next door, normality returning, things being righted again, objects picked up from the floor, bruises rubbed, hearing returning, awareness of surroundings increasing. What's that noise? Sprung a leak? Better go and take a look —

Ardenyev was on his own. He remembered the helicopter going down in flames, then Petrov's broken leg, then the hellish noise and vibration of the Proteus. Dolohov, he was able to consider distinctly, might have killed every member of the special Underwater Operations Unit, his unit. For a box of tricks to make a submarine invisible.

Two minutes five. The compartment was less then half full of water. He was squatting in a retreating tide, as he might have done at Tallinn or Odessa as a child, watching the mysterious, fascinating water rush away from him, leaving the froth of foam around him and the stretch of newly exposed wet sand in which shells sat up in little hollows. Two minutes twenty.

Noise, they must hear the noise, no they won't, they're too disorientated, they'll be listening for water, the dangerous water of a leak, a buckled or damaged plate, they'll hear it —

Two minutes thirty-two. Fifty-eight seconds remaining. He pulled at the hatch, and it swung up, emptying the chamber in an instant. His hands had been locked on the wheel, turning it slowly though the forebrain had decided to wait. The pressure of imagination as to what might have happened outside the submarine was greater than any other, pressing down and in on him like the ocean. He dropped through the hatch into the torpedo room, the water already draining away, leaving the cold, clinical place merely damp. Instantly, he felt dizzy, and sick. Too soon, too soon, he told himself. He had never tried to get through decompression at this depth in less than two minutes fifty. He'd been prepared to cope with the dizziness and sickness, the blood pounding in his head, that would have assailed him only half-a-minute early. This was worse, much worse. He staggered against the bulkhead, his vision unable to focus, his surroundings wobbling like a room in a nightmare. The noise in his ears was a hard pounding, beneath which he could almost hear the accelerating blood rushing with a dry whisper. His heart ached. Pain in his head, making thought impossible. His hands were clutched round the two canisters on his chest as if holding some talisman or icon of profound significance and efficacy. His legs were weak, and when he tried to move he lurched forward, almost spilling on to his face like a baby trying to walk for the first time.

He leaned against the bulkhead then, dragging in great lungfuls of the mixture in his air tanks, trying desperately to right his vision, and to focus on the door into the torpedo room. It was closed, but its outline shimmered, and threatened to dissolve. It was no barrier. Around him lay the sleek shapes of the torpedoes. Cold, clinical place, the floor already almost dry, except for the puddle that still lingered at his feet from his immersion suit. He tried to look at his watch, could not focus, strained and blinked and stretched his eyes, pressing the face of the watch almost against his facemask. Three minutes fifty, almost four minutes. He could have — should have — waited. He was further behind now. He snapped the lock on the weighted belt around his waist. It thudded to the floor.

He looked up. Close the hatch, close the hatch. Moving as if still under water, with the diver's weighted feet and restraining suit, he reached up and closed the hatch, turning the handle with aching, frosty, weak limbs. If they were alive — he felt tears which were no longer simply another symptom of decompression prick helplessly behind his eyes — then now they could open the outer hatch.

Door opening. Refocus. Slowly refocus. He had been about to focus on the port and starboard air purifiers on either side of the torpedo room when the door began opening. But it still ran like a rain-filled window-pane, the image distorted. A figure that might have been reflected in a fairground mirror came through the door, stopped, yelled something indistinct above the rush and ache in his ears, then came towards him.

Quick, quick, useless instincts prompted. He pushed away from the bulkhead. He could make out the port purifier clearly, then it dissolved behind rain again for a moment, then his vision cleared. He could hear the words, the question and challenge shouted. Another figure came through the open bulkhead door. Two of them. Ardenyev moved through a thicker element than air, and hands grabbed him from behind, causing him to stagger near one of the torpedoes. Slowly, aquatically, he tried to turn and lash out. His other hand cradled one of the two canisters on his chest, and the young face seemed riveted by his hand and what it held. Ardenyev could distinguish expression on the face now — knowledge, realisation. The young man enclosed him in a bear-hug, but Ardenyev heaved at the thin, light arms, pushing the man away by his very bulk.

He bent, opening the inspection plate; then his hand was pulled away, and another, larger hand clamped on his own as it held the first canister. The second canister was torn from its strap and rolled across the floor, beneath one of the torpedo trestles. All three of them watched it roll. The two British officers feared it might be a bomb after all.

Ardenyev chopped out with the lamp attached still to his wrist, catching the smaller officer on the side of the head, knocking him aside. He flipped over one of the torpedoes, and subsided to the floor, a vague redness staining the side of his face. Then Ardenyev was hit in the stomach and he doubled up. Another blow against the side of his facemask, then he lunged upwards with his upper torso, catching his attacker in the chest with his head. A soft exhalation of air, the man staggering backwards —

He turned, twisted the canister in both hands, releasing the incapacitating gas, then jammed the canister into the air purifier, closing the inspection plate immediately. Then he was punched in the small of the back, just below his air tanks, then hands were round his shoulders and face, and his mask was coming off. He felt the mouthpiece ripped out of his mouth, and he inhaled the warm, sterile air of the submarine. He staggered across the torpedo room, still held by the second man, lurching against the trestles, his eyes searching the floor for the second canister, oblivious even of the need to re-insert his mouthpiece before the gas passed the length of the submarine down the air ducts and returned to them in the torpedo room.

He dropped to one knee in a feint, then heaved with his shoulders. The second man, the heavier, bearded officer, rolled up and over his neck and shoulders, falling in front of him, winded by the metal floor of the room. Ardenyev scrabbled under a torpedo trestle, his fingers closing over its damp coldness, gripping it. He got to his feet, clutched the canister to his chest, which was heaving with effort, and staggered clumsily across the torpedo room in his flippers, to the starboard air purifier.

Other men were coming in now. He opened the inspection plate, twisted the canister, and jammed it into the purifier, closing the plate after it. He was grabbed, then. The room was full of noise, an alarm sounded somewhere, while he tried to jam his mouthpiece back into his mouth. They wanted to stop him. It was as if the hands that reached for him had only that one minor object, to prevent him regaining the safety of the air mixture in his tanks while the gas moved swiftly through the submarine. He felt himself hit, but his attention could not be spared for his torso, arms and legs, kidneys, stomach, chest. He went on trying to force the mouthpiece back into place.

One breath, two, three, doubling over on the floor, not resisting now, hoping they would assume he was beaten, even unconscious. Someone turned him over; he saw through slitted lids a hand reach for the mouthpiece and mask again — the mask askew, obscuring much of the scene — then the hand lunged past him, a body toppled down beside him, subsiding with a peculiar, slow-motion grace, mimicking death. He opened his eyes now, knowing he had nothing to fear. Others fell like skittles, ninepins, but in the same seeming slow-motion.

Ardenyev closed his eyes. He alone was conscious on board the British submarine. There was no hurry, no hurry at all. They would be out for an hour, perhaps longer. There were no noises from the escape chamber, and therefore there was no hurry whatsoever. He had captured the Proteus and "Leopard", and he was entirely alone. A sad, even vile heroism. He surrendered to the exhaustion that assailed him, as if he, too, had inhaled the incapacitating gas.

Chapter Nine: RETRIEVAL

From their identification papers, Ardenyev knew them to be Thurston, the first-lieutenant of the submarine, and Hayter, the officer responsible for "Leopard". Because of their importance, he had allowed them to remain with Lloyd in the control room of the Proteus after the remaining officers and ratings had been confined to the wardroom and crew quarters "for security reasons".

Ardenyev had watched Lloyd come round, come to an almost instant wakefulness, and he had immediately warmed to the man and granted him his respect and his wariness. Lloyd would now sabotage "Leopard" in a moment, if he could. Ardenyev stood before the captain of the submarine and his two senior officers at attention, like a junior officer presenting his compliments. It was part of the charade he was now required to play.

"As I was saying, Captain," he began again, having been interrupted by an expletive from Thurston, "we very much apologise for the manner in which we were required to board your vessel. However, it is lucky that we did. Your purification system had developed a fault that would almost certainly have proved fatal had we not arrived." He said it without a flicker of amusement or self-mockery. The truth did not matter.

His men, his team were missing, presumed dead. Vanilov, brokenly, had told him he had seen Kuzin catch a whipping, freed tendril of steel cable across his back, and he had seen him flung away into the dark, his body tumbled and twisted in a way that would have been impossible had it been unbroken. Nikitin had fallen beneath the weight of the Proteus, forgetting in surprise to loosen his hold on the cutting gear. Stabs of blue flame had come from the cutting-pipes as the silt had boiled round, and swallowed, Nikitin. Shadrin he had not seen at all. Teplov and Vanilov alone had clung to the submarine, been dragged through the water and the boiling mist of silt and mud, rested dazed and exhausted and were slowly being poisoned by nitrogen in the blood until Teplov had trawled back to the stern and found Vanilov and boarded the Proteus through the aft escape hatch, into the electric-motor room. They had waited in the slowly-draining compartment for five minutes, until it was safe to emerge into the submarine. Dizziness and exhaustion, yes, but not the bends. Teplov had put the neutralising agent through the aft purifiers, and then come seeking his commanding officer.

Ardenyev felt his left cheek adopt a tic, the last, fading tremors of weariness and shock. These men in front of him had killed three of his men, indirectly killed Blue Section. The knowledge that he would have done precisely the same, threatened as they had felt they were, intruded upon his anger, dimming it. Lloyd, the captain, was watching him carefully, weighing him, the expression on his face like a suspicion that they had met before, or always been intended to meet.

"Fucking piracy, that's what it is," Thurston offered into the silence, and Hayter rumbled his agreement. "How do you explain the guns if you're here to help us?"

Ardenyev smiled innocently. “We understand your concern with security. We would not wish to be blamed for any — mistakes you might make, any damage you might cause to sensitive equipment. It is merely a precaution."

"Locking up my crew is just another precaution, I presume?" Lloyd asked sardonically, sitting in a relaxed manner in one of the sonar operators" chairs, which he swung to and fro slowly, almost as if he intended mesmerising the Russian. A relaxed, diffident, confident child. Ardenyev was pricked by his seeming indifference to the fate of Nikitin and the others.

"Captain, I would understand, even expect, some reaction such as that of Commander Thurston translated into action, either from one of your officers, or some of your men. That would only complicate an already complicated situation. We are here to help you — " Here, sincerity seeped into his voice in a measured, precise dose —"because it is our fault that you are in this situation."

"You admit it, then?"

"What else can we do? The captain and officers of the submarine Grishka will be severely disciplined for their provocative action."

"This is unreal —!" Thurston exploded.

"Not at all — is it, Captain?" Ardenyev said with a smirk. "It will be the agreed version of events."

"How do you explain the cuts and bruises on two of my officers?" Lloyd enquired. "The air purifiers struck them, I suppose?"

"Falling to the deck, I suppose," Ardenyev replied, "overcome by the lack of oxygen. I came aboard when your signals from inside stopped — you tapped out one word, HELP, before that happened. You don't remember?"

Lloyd shook his head. "No, I don't. Oxygen starvation plays tricks with memory, obviously."

Ardenyev sighed with pleasure. "I see we understand each other. Captain."

"What happens now?"

"From the damage report, there will be some repairs, to your buoyancy and to your hydroplanes. Then you will be towed back to Pechenga, our nearest naval base, for sufficient repairs to allow you to return to Faslane under your own power." He spread his hands innocently in front of him. "It is the least we can do, apart from the sincerest diplomatic apologies, of course. It will take little more than a day or two before you are on your way home." He beamed.

"If your mission is so humanitarian, why is your petty-officer carrying a Kalashnikov with the safety-catch in the “Off” position?" Thurston remarked sourly.

"Security." Ardenyev sighed again. He was tiring of the charade. It was not important. Everyone knew the truth. "Now, I will have to contact the rescue ship Karpaty and arrange for divers and equipment to be sent down to us."

"I'm sure you're reasonably familiar with our communications?" Lloyd remarked with forced lightness, as if his situation had come home to him in a more bitter, starker way.

"Thank you, yes." Ardenyev's hand released the butt of the Makarov pistol thrust into the belt of his immersion suit. He tousled his hair in an attempt to retain the mocking, false lightness of his conversation with the British officers. He wanted to clamber back into the fiction of a terrible accident, a life-saving boarding-party, apologetic repairs in Pachenga, as into a child's tree-house. But he could not. Whipping steel cables, boiling flame from a crashed helicopter, accompanied him vividly to the communications console.

As if admitting that the fiction could not be sustained, he drew the Makarov and motioned the three British officers to the far side of the control room before he seated himself in front of the console.

"These pictures were taken forty minutes after the previous set," Aubrey remarked. "You are telling me, Captain Clark —" the excessive politeness seemed designed to stave off any admission of disaster — "that since no divers have resurfaced, they must be on board Proteus"?

"Right."

"Why?"

"They couldn't stay down more than ten minutes at that depth. Then they'd come back up slowly, but by now they'd be back on board the launch. Sure, the launch has returned to take station on the port beam of Karpaty —" Here Clark nodded in Copeland's direction — "but as far as I can make out, they're loading heavy cutting gear from the rescue ship. And these men on deck. More divers. In full rig, not scuba gear. They're going down. Therefore, you can bet Ardenyev's men are on board."

"But why and how would Lloyd have allowed him on board?" Aubrey asked in exasperation. He was baffled and plagued by the murky high-resolution and light-intensified photographs transmitted from the Nimrod. Clark seemed to be reading tea leaves. The whole matter seemed like a fairy tale.

"He wouldn't need to —"

"The escape hatches," Copeland blurted out. "After Phaeton went down a couple of years ago, all the hatches had to open two-way. They'd know that, dammit!"

"Exactly," Clark said drily. "Ardenyev would have let himself in."

"Eastoe reports a change in position of Proteus."

"Lloyd trying to get rid of his guests," Clark commented acidly. "Someone's in there, you can bet on it."

"Then none of our messages got through?" Aubrey asked forlornly. “Leopard” will not have been destroyed."

"I'm afraid not."

"Clark — what will they do now, for heaven's sake?" Aubrey's eye rested on Giles Pyott's expressionless face with a glance of pure malevolence. Pyott's implacability refuted the accusation of the gaze. Clark cleared his throat, breaking the tension between the soldier and the intelligence agent. Aubrey shrugged.

"Raise her — depending on the damage, or simply take what they want down there. The situation's complicated by the fact that “Leopard” isn't operational at present. I guess they'll raise her and tow her into port."

"What?" Pyott asked in disbelief. "That would be piracy. The international repercussions would be — enormous."

"You'd declare war?" Clark asked ironically.

"Don't be stupid."

"Then the shit hitting the fan will have been worth it. What will you do? All of you. You won't go to war, we won't go to war on your behalf, you won't tell anyone because it's all too embarrassing — so nothing will happen. “Leopard” will belong to both sides or to none. That'll be the only outcome."

"What can we do, Clark?" Aubrey demanded with the impatient emphasis of a frustrated child on a wet day. He was almost shaking with rage and frustration.

"You" ve been outboxed, Mr. Aubrey."

"Don't be so damned American," Pyott drawled. "So insufferably smug and patronising."

"Sorry, Colonel Pyott," Clark apologised. He could not mask his grin completely, even though he sensed the gravity of the situation as completely as anyone else in the room beneath the Admiralty. It was so — so caricatured, this panic in the dovecote. The new shiny toy was missing. There was an absence of concern for the crew of the Proteus that Clark resented on their behalf, even in Aubrey. He also felt, and admitted, a sneaking admiration for the man he felt must have masterminded the boarding of the submarine, Valery Ardenyev. He could remember the man's face and build now, and he could entirely believe in the Russian's ability to successfully surprise and overcome a crew of over one hundred.

Everything depended upon the degree to which Proteus was damaged. The nearest NATO units were twenty hours" sailing from the present position of the submarine, except for certain small Norwegian units which the government in Oslo would not deploy in the Barents Sea. They could watch, by radar, sonar and aircraft, but they could not intervene. If it took more than twenty hours to raise and tow the Proteus, then the full five acts of the disaster might not be performed. Unless Ardenyev and his men simply unplugged "Leopard" and took it away with them. Clark was inclined to doubt this. The Russians would preserve, at some effort, the bland, apologetic face they had begun to present via the Soviet Ambassador in London.

"Can we rescue it — them?" Aubrey asked. "Can we get out of the elephant trap that has been dug for us?" he insisted, worrying at the insuperable problem as at a bone. There had to be some hope within the situation, surely?

"Rescue?" Copeland blurted in disbelief.

"I can't see how," Clark said more carefully as Aubrey glared at the young Royal Navy officer. The map-board loomed over them all, all its lights gleaming and unmoving, except for the plotted course of the Nimrod on-station as it was updated every few minutes. A fly buzzing above the scene, a carrion bird over a kill.

"I don't see why they need to raise the sub," Pyott said. They're interested in only one thing, surely?"

"Ardenyev's done maybe a half-dozen of these rescues on Russian boats in his career. Board and raise operations. He's an expert at it. They needed him to get on board, sure — but they maybe want his expertise at raising boats, too."

"I must talk to “C” at once," Aubrey remarked. "Our talking is pointless at the moment. We must establish what the Soviet authorities intend."

Clark shrugged, unoffended that Aubrey doubted his prognosis. His respect for Aubrey had seemed to waver during the past twenty-four hours, like a light revealed and obscured by the movement of clouds. Yet the American, despite the clarity of his own mind, realised he still expected a solution to occur to Aubrey; even a successful solution.

Aubrey made no distinction of security between himself and the "Chessboard Counter" team, and used one of the battery of telephones in the underground room. Cunningham, he knew, was with the Foreign Secretary, having been summoned to a second meeting with the Soviet Ambassador. He heard Cunningham at the other end of the line within half a minute of placing the call to the Foreign Office.

"Yes, Kenneth? What news?" Cunningham sounded breathless. Aubrey supposed it stemmed from events rather than exertion.

"Expert opinion — " Aubrey could not suppress an involuntary glance towards Clark and the tight-knit group around and beneath the map-board — "has it here that the Russians may have boarded Proteus.""

"Good God, that's outrageous!"

"The Ambassador hasn't confirmed as much?"

"He's talking of rescue, of course — but not of boarding. Not directly. Not as yet, that is."

"How does he explain the incident?"

There was a chilly chuckle in Cunningham's voice, the laugh of a man succeeding, just, in appreciating a joke against himself. "The captain of the Russian submarine suffered a nervous breakdown. He ordered the firing of the torpedo in question before he could be relieved of his command by the usual heroic young officer, loyal to the Party and the cause of world peace."

"That is perhaps the unkindest cut of all, that they can get away with such a ridiculous tale, knowing we can do nothing to refute it. And nothing to rescue our submarine."

"The Foreign Secretary has informed the PM, Kenneth. She's monitoring the situation. Every effort is being made to pressurise the Soviet Union into leaving the area and leaving Proteus to us."

"And—?"

"Very little. They insist, absolutely insist, on making amends. For the lunacy of one of their naval officers, as the Ambassador put it."

"Washington?"

"The President is gravely concerned — "

"And will do nothing?"

"Is prepared to accept the Russian story at face value, for the sake of international tension, despite what his military advisers tell him. I don't think he quite grasps the importance of “Leopard”."

"I see. We are getting nowhere?"

"Nowhere. What of this man Quin?"

"Nothing. The girl is the key. I'm waiting for a report from Hyde."

"Would it help if we recovered him, at least?"

"We might then destroy “Leopard”, I suppose."

"The PM will not risk the lives of the crew," Cunningham warned sternly. "The Foreign Secretary and I were informed of that in the most unequivocal manner."

"I meant only that we could attempt sabotage, or Lloyd could if Quin was in our hands again."

"Quite. You don't think “Leopard” had been damaged by Lloyd or his crew?"

"It is possible, but I think unlikely. None of our signals reached the Proteus.""

"Very well. Kenneth, I think you'd better come over here at once. You may have to brief the Foreign Secretary before he sees the PM again. Leave Pyott in command there."

"Very well. In fifteen minutes."

Aubrey replaced the receiver. The room was quiet with failure. Clark watched him steadily, some of the younger men regarded him with hope. Pyott appeared resigned. It was, he admitted, a complete and utter intelligence disaster — precisely the kind he could not tolerate or accept.

"Giles," he called, and then thought: where the devil is Hyde?

Quin beckoned like a light at the end of a dark tunnel. A false, beguiling gleam, perhaps, but he had no other point of reference or hope.

Hyde wished he could call Aubrey from the row of telephones with their huge plastic hair-dryer hoods that he could see through the glass doors of the cafeteria. He was afraid, however, of leaving the girl for a moment. He was afraid of letting her out of his sight for any length of time, however short, and afraid, too, that she was beginning to regret her earlier decision. And he was also wary, treading delicately on the fragile, thin-ice crust of the trust she meagrely afforded him, of reminding her that there were other, more faceless, more powerful people behind him. The kind of people her father had fled from originally.

The telephones remained at the edge of his eyesight, in the centre of cognition, as he sipped his coffee and watched her eagerly devouring a plate of thin, overcooked steak and mushrooms and chips. For himself, beans on toast had been as much as he could eat. Tension wore at him, devouring appetite as well as energy. Quin was somewhere in the north of England — the girl had said nothing more than that, and he refrained from pumping her further for fear of recreating the drama of obsessive suspicion in her mind. He behaved, as far as he was able, as a driver who was giving her a lift north. The adrenalin refused to slow in his veins. He was nervous of pursuit — though he had seen no evidence of it — and he was suffering the stimulant effects of their escape from Petrunin.

"How's the tour going?" he asked conversationally.

She looked at him, a forkful of chips poised at her lips, which were shiny with eating. Her face was amused, and somehow obscurely contemptuous.

"I didn't have time to notice."

Hyde shrugged. "I thought you might have heard. I hope they do well."

"You expect me to believe that's all that's on your mind — the profits of an over-thirties rock band?" she sneered, chewing on the mouthful of chips, already slicing again at the thin steak. The cafeteria of the motorway service station was early-hours quiet around them. One or two lorry drivers wading through mountainous plates of food, a carload of caravanners avoiding the traffic of the day by travelling by night, smuggling their way to their holiday destination, the two waitresses leaning at the cash register, grumbling. Just south of Lancaster. Hyde hoped that Quin was somewhere in the Lake District. The sooner he got to him, the better.

He shrugged. "No, I don't think you're that stupid. Just filling in time, trying to lull you into a false sense of security." He grinned in what he hoped was an unsuspicious, engaging manner.

She studied him narrowly. Her plate was empty. "You're odd," she said eventually. "And too bloody clever by half. Don't pull the dumb ocker stunt with me."

She was still in control of their situation, leading him by the hand to her father, only because her father had agreed. She would tell him nothing until the last minute, to retain control.

"Thank you. Tell me, why did your father up and away like that? He wasn't really frightened of us, was he?"

She screwed her face up in thought, then released the skin into clear, youthful planes and curves again. With a bit of make-up, Hyde thought, she wouldn't look bad. They all wear a sneer these days.

"He was frightened of them — people like the ones tonight," she said. "And he didn't believe people like you —" An old and easy emphasis lay on the words like a mist. Pigs, Fascists, cops, the fuzz. The necessary vocabulary of her age and her education. The silence after the emphatic last word was strained, and she looked down, suddenly younger, more easily embarrassed.

"I see," he said. "We would have looked after him, you know."

"No you wouldn't!" she snapped, looking up again. "They watched him all the time. Your people took time off for meals, and the pub, and to go for a piss — they didn't! They were there all the time. Dad said there were a hundred times he could have been kidnapped while your lot weren't there or weren't looking!" She was leaning forward, whispering intently, a breathy shout. "You wouldn't have taken care of him — he took care of himself."

"I agree we're not as efficient as the KGB," Hyde said evenly. "But he wasn't in any real danger." Immediately, he was sorry he had uttered the words. The girl's features were rich in contempt, and he had no business defending the DS. Quin had been right, in a way. The KGB might have lifted him, any time. "Sorry," he added. "No doubt he was right. Sloppy buggers, some of them." Her face relaxed. "But he's safe now?" Her eyes narrowed, and he added: "Do you want coffee?" She shook her head.

"You?"

"No." He hesitated, then said, "Look, you have to trust me. No, I don't mean because you realise I'm trying to save you and your old man from the baddies — you have to believe I can do it. I'm not tooling around Britain waiting for you to make up your mind."

She thought for a moment, then said, "You'll have to turn off the motorway at the exit for Kendal." She watched his face, and he suppressed any sign of satisfaction.

It was the importance of it, he decided. That explained her almost fanatical care for her father. She was the key, even to herself. Importantly useful for the first time in her parents" lives. Crucial to her father's safety. She clung to her role as much as she clung to her father. "Ready? Let's go, then."

The man near the telephone booth in the car park watched them approach the yellow TR7, get in, and drive off down the slip-road to the M6. There was just time for the brief telephone call to Petrunin before they set off in pursuit. Once clear of Manchester and on to the motorway, Hyde had not driven at more than sixty or sixty-five. If he kept to that speed, there would be enough time to catch him before the next exit. He dialled the number, then pressed the coin into the box. Petrunin's voice sounded hollow and distant.

"I may have some trouble getting away. A slight delay. Keep me informed."

"Trouble?"

"No. I must, however, be careful leaving Manchester. I am known by sight. Don't lose them."

The man left the booth, and ran across the car park to the hired Rover and its two occupants. They were less than a minute behind the yellow TR7.

Lloyd was still angry. The effort to keep his appearance calm, to portray acquiescence to the inevitable, seemed only to make the hidden anger grow, like a damped fire. His father, encouraging the first fire of the autumn by holding the opened copy of The Times across the fireplace in the morning room. He smiled inwardly, and the memory calmed him. His stomach and chest felt less tight and hot. It was worse, of course, when the Russian was there — even when Thurston with his impotent raging and coarse vocabulary was in the same room.

There was nothing he could do. With his crew confined to their quarters and one guard on the bulkhead door, and his officers similarly confined to the wardroom, three men had held them captive until a relief, augmented guard had arrived from the rescue ship and the damage repair team with their heavy equipment had begun their work on the stern of the Proteus. Ardenyev forced one to admire him, and that rankled like a raging, worsening toothache. The effort of three weary, strained men to drag unconscious bodies through the submarine to monitor the essential, life-supporting systems, to inspect "Leopard", and only then to call for help, surprised him. Enraged him afresh, also.

There was a knock at his cabin door. Presumably the guard.

"Yes?"

Ardenyev was looking tired, yet there was some artificial brightness about his eyes. He was obviously keeping going on stimulants. Lloyd tried to adopt a lofty expression, feeling himself at a disadvantage just because he was lying on his bunk. Yet he could not get up without some admission of subordination. He remained where he lay, hands clasped round his head, eyes on the ceiling.

"Ah, Captain. I am about to make an inspection of repairs. I am informed that they are proceeding satisfactorily."

"Very well, Captain Ardenyev. So kind of you to inform me."

"Yes, that is irony. I detect it," Ardenyev replied pleasantly. "I learned much of my English in America, as a student. Their use of irony is much broader, of course, than the English — I beg your pardon, the British."

"You cocky bastard. What the hell are you doing with my ship?"

"Repairing her, Captain." Ardenyev seemed disappointed that Lloyd had descended to mere insult. "I am sorry for much of what has happened. I am also sorry that you killed three members of my team. I think that your score is higher than mine at the moment, don't you?"

Lloyd was about to reply angrily, and then he simply shrugged. "Yes. You haven't —?"

"One body, yes. The youngest man. But that is usually the way, is it not? The others? No doubt they will be awarded posthumous medals. If I deliver your submarine to Pechenga."

"What happened to the fraternal greetings bullshit?"

"For public consumption, Captain. That is what our ambassador will be telling your foreign secretary, over and over again. I'm sorry, but your inconvenience will be shortlived and as comfortable as possible. My interest in the affair ends when we dock. Now, if you will excuse me — "

Lloyd returned his gaze to the ceiling, and Ardenyev went out, closing the door behind him. The guard outside Lloyd's door was stony-faced, and his Kalashnikov was held across his chest, stubby metal butt resting lightly against one hip. Ardenyev nodded to him, and passed into the control room, His own team should have been there, he reminded himself, then wished to quash the reminder immediately. The pills, damned pills, juicing up the emotions, making pain easy and evident and tears prick while they kept you awake —

They would have a steering crew brought down from the rescue ship once the repairs were complete. Under his command, they would raise the submarine in preparation for towing to Pechenga. Teplov looked up from monitoring the life-support systems, and merely nodded to him. Vanilov was slumped in a chair, his head on his arms next to a passive sonar screen. Teplov was evidently letting him rest.

Ardenyev went out of the control room and into the tunnel which passed through the reactor housing to the aft section of the Proteus. He ignored the windows into the reactor chamber, and passed into the manoeuvring room above the huge diesel generators. Empty. Then the turbine room, similarly empty. The silence of the submarine was evident in the huge aft section, despite the banging and scraping, setting his teeth on edge, that thrummed in the hull; the noises of the repairs under way. Empty, silent, to the imagination beginning to smell musty with disuse. He passed through the bulkhead door into the room housing the electric motors, where the aft escape hatch was located. His replenished tanks waited for him on the floor by the ladder up to the hatch.

He checked the air supply, then strapped the tanks on to his back. He adjusted his facemask, and fitted the mouthpiece. He breathed rapidly, re-checking the air supply. Then he climbed the ladder and opened the hatch. He closed it behind him, and turned the sea-cock to flood the chamber. Water rushed down the walls, covering his feet in a moment, mounting to his ankles and knees swiftly.

When the chamber was flooded and the pressure equalised with the depth and weight of water outside, he reached up and turned the wheel of the outside hatch. He pushed it open, and kicked upwards, drifting out into the sudden blind darkness of the sea, his eyes drawn by pinpricks of white light and the flashes of blue light at the stern of the submarine. He turned, swimming down the grey back of the submarine where streaks of turning, swirling small fish glided and winked in the passing light of his lamp. Slowly, he made out the tiny figures working on the damaged stern, outlined and silhouetted by the flare of their cutting and welding gear and by the arc lamps clamped to the hull.

He crouched on the hull of the Proteus, next to the underwater salvage chief from the Karpaty, a man he had trained with for the past three months, Lev Balan. Beyond them, the hydroplanes and the rudder were being patched. The force of the seawater against their damaged, thin steel skins as the Proteus moved on after being hit by both torpedoes had begun stripping the metal away from the ribbed skeleton of steel beneath. The effect, Ardenyev thought, was like exposing the struts and skeleton of an old biplane, where canvas had been stretched over a wooden frame, and doped. Or one of his old model aeroplanes, the ones that worked on a tightened elastic band. The repairs were crude, but sufficient to prevent further damage, and to make the minimal necessary use of rudder and hydroplanes now possible. The propeller would not be needed, but the evidence of the MIRV torpedo's steel serpents was being removed twenty fathoms down rather than in the submarine pen at Pechenga. The hull around the propeller and even forward of the rudder and hydroplanes was scarred and pocked and buckled by the effect of the whiplash action of the flailing steel cables as they were tightened and enmeshed by the turning of the propeller.

As Ardenyev watched, one length of cable, freed from the prop, drifted down through the light from the arc lamps in slow motion, sliding into the murk beneath the submarine. A slow cloud of silt boiled up, then settled.

"How much longer, Lev?"

"Two, three hours. In another hour we should be able to start attaching the tow lines." Lev Balan was facing him. Within the helmet of the diving suit, his face was vivid with enjoyment and satisfaction. Airlines snaked away behind him, down to the huge portable tanks of air mixture that rested on the ledge near the submarine. "We'll have to come in for a rest before that. Temperature's not comfortable, and my men are tired."

"Okay — you make the decision. Is the docking prop damaged?" Balan shook his head. "What about the ballast tanks?"

"When we get her up to towing depth, we might have to adjust the bags. We" ve repaired one of the tanks, but the others can't be done down here — not if we're sticking to your timetable!" Despite the distortion of the throat-mike; Balan's voice was strong, full of inflection and expression, as if he had learned to adapt his vocal chords to the limitations of underwater communication.

"Okay. Keep up the good work."

"Sorry about your boys."

Ardenyev shrugged helplessly. "Don't they call it operational necessity?"

"Some shits do."

"I'll get the galley operating ready for your men."

Ardenyev registered the drama around him once more. Now that his eyes had adapted completely, the arc lamps threw a glow around the scene, so that figures appeared caught in shafting sunlight, the minute sea life like moths and insects in summer air. He patted Balan on the shoulder, and kicked away back towards the hatch. As he travelled just above the hull with an easy motion of his legs and flippers, a curious sensation of ownership made itself apparent. As if the submarine were, in some part, his own, his prize; and some kind of repayment for the deaths of Kuzin, Nikitin and Shadrin.

When he dropped through the inner hatch again, he passed through the compartments of the huge submarine as a prospective purchaser might have strolled through the rooms of a house that had taken his fancy.

Teplov was waiting for him in the control room. Vanilov was sheepishly awake, and seated at the communications console.

"Message from Murmansk. The admiral wants to talk to you, sir," Teplov informed him. Obscure anger crossed Ardenyev's features.

"Weather and sea state up top?"

"It's no better," Teplov answered, "and then again, it's no worse. Forecast is for a slight increase in wind speed and a consequent slight worsening of sea state. The skipper of the Karpaty is still in favour of waiting the storm out."

"He doesn't have the choice, Viktor. In three hours" time, we'll be on our way home. Very well, let's talk to Murmansk, and endure the admiral's congratulations."

The feeling of possession and ownership had dissipated. The congratulations of the old man in Murmansk would be empty, meaningless. It wasn't about that, not at all. Not praise, not medals, not promotion. Just about the art of the possible, the art of making possible. And he'd done it, and Dolohov's words would make no difference, and would not bring back the dead.

"I see. Thank you, Giles. I'll tell the minister."

Aubrey put down the telephone, nodded to the Foreign Secretary's Private Secretary, and was ushered into the minister's high ceilinged office. Long gold curtains were drawn against the late night, and lamps glowed in the corners of the room and on the Secretary of State's huge mahogany desk. It was a room familiar, yet still evocative, to Aubrey. The Private Secretary, who had been annoyed that Aubrey had paused to take the call from Pyott, and who had also informed him that His Excellency the Soviet Ambassador was waiting in another room — protocol first, last and all the time, Aubrey had remarked to himself, hiding his smile — closed the double doors behind him.

Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs rose and came forward to take Aubrey's hand. In his features, almost hidden by his tiredness and the strain imposed by events which brought him unpleasantly into collision with the covert realities of the intelligence service, was the omnipresent memory that he had been a junior boy at Aubrey's public school and, though titled and wealthy, had had to fag for the son of a verger who had come from a cathedral preparatory school on a music scholarship. It was as if the politician expected Aubrey, at any moment and with the full effect of surprise, to remind him of the distant past, in company and with the object of humiliation.

"Kenneth. You were delayed?"

"I'm sorry, Minister. I had to take a telephone call from Colonel Pyott. The Nimrod has been picking up signals from the Proteus, as have North Cape Monitoring." The minister looked immediately relieved, and Aubrey was sorry he had chosen an optimistic syntax for what he wished to convey. "Russian signals, I'm afraid," he hurried on. "We can't break the code, but it is evident that the Soviets are in command of the submarine."

"Damnation!" Cunningham offered from the depth of the Chesterfield on which he was sitting. The Foreign Secretary's face dropped into lines of misery.

The PM must be informed at once," he said, returning to his desk. "Find yourself a seat, Kenneth." He waved a hand loosely, and Aubrey perched himself on a Louis Quinze armchair, intricately carved, hideously patterned. Cunningham looked at Aubrey, and shook his head. The Foreign Secretary picked up one of the battery of telephones on his desk, then hesitated before dialling the number. "Is there anything you can suggest, Kenneth? Anything at all?" He put down the receiver, as if to display optimism.

"Minister — I'm sorry that this incident has had to spill over into legitimate diplomacy. I can only recommend that all diplomatic efforts be maintained. There is nothing else we can do. We must press for details, of course, and demand that one of our people in Moscow is in Pechenga when the Proteus docks. He must be allowed immediate access, and there must be every attempt to preserve — by complaint, fuss, bother, noise, whatever you will — to preserve the security of “Leopard”." Aubrey spread his hands on his knees.

"Pechenga?"

"The nearest naval base. Murmansk if you prefer — or wherever?"

"One of your people?"

Cunningham did not reply, but looked towards Aubrey.

"If you wish, Minister," Aubrey answered. "But I would prefer someone rather senior on the embassy staff, and someone legitimate."

"Very well. I'll put that in motion."

"I think, however," Aubrey pursued, "that the Russians will delay the travel permits, and that sort of thing, so that by the time our people are on the scene, they will have done whatever they wish and be waving Proteus goodbye from the quayside."

"I'm inclined to agree," Cunningham murmured.

"Then there is absolutely nothing we can do!" the Foreign Secretary fumed, slapping his hand repeatedly on the surface of his desk. He looked towards Aubrey as if he were to blame for the situation. Aubrey's features were impassive. "This really is not the way to play the game. The Russians have disobeyed every rule of international behaviour. It really is not good enough." There was a peculiarly old-fashioned inflection to the voice, to accompany the outdated sentiments.

"They are inclined to do that," Aubrey observed mockingly and received a warning glance from Cunningham. "I agree, Minister. Obviously, the Kremlin has fully involved itself with, and sanctioned, this covert operation. Because they have done so, they place us at a considerable disadvantage. It is, indeed, a mixing of the legitimate and the covert which is both improper and very difficult to counter. And it has worked. This sort of mixed marriage usually flops badly — like the Bay of Pigs. The Russians seem to have more success than we do."

"You imply that any remedy is strictly the concern of the intelligence service?"

"I have no answer."

"The PM will give her blessing to any counter-operation, I'm quite sure of that. Our hands are tied, as you say. We do not even wish to become involved. Our people are in no danger, they will be released within the next couple of days. Our submarine will be repaired. Only “Leopard” will no longer be our property. Therefore, if you can prevent the loss of “Leopard”, do so. But it must be— and the PM would wish me to stress this, even at the same time as she gives you her blessing— it must be an intelligence operation. It will be disowned, it must not endanger the crew of the submarine or any non-intelligence personnel, and it must be done immediately." The Foreign Secretary smiled glumly, though there was a snuff-pinch of pleasure in his gloom because he considered he must have discomforted Aubrey. "Is there anything, anything at all?"

Aubrey cleared his throat. "NATO naval units are too far from the area to intercept. The Soviet government wish to apologise to us by repairing the damage they have inflicted. I have one agent-in-place in the Pechenga district. He is a grocer. I do not have a satellite-mounted laser beam whereby I can secretly and silently destroy half of the Red Banner Fleet— therefore, Minister, I am inclined to conclude that there is very little I can effectively do to secure the secrecy of “Leopard” and the remainder of the sensitive equipment aboard HMS Proteus."

"Very well," the Secretary of State said tightly, "I will inform the PM of the state of play, and recommend that we have only the diplomatic alternative." Again, he picked up the receiver and placed it to his ear.

"Unless," Aubrey began, amazed at his empty temerity and observing his own words as if spoken by another; and that other a pompous ass without sincerity or resolution. "Unless we can get one man into the naval dockyard at Pechenga or wherever, with a brief to destroy the “Leopard” equipment before the Soviets have time to inspect it."

Aubrey was intensely aware of the eager, then disbelieving gazes of Cunningham and the Foreign Secretary. But, he told himself, attempting to justify what some obscure part of his mind or imagination had prompted him to utter, the whole capture of Proteus was the work of little more than one man, in the final analysis. Why not the reverse, then? The question echoed in his mind, but no answer appeared. Not so much as the first whisper of an answer. He asked himself a second, perhaps more pressing question.

Where the blazes was Hyde, and where the devil was Quin?

Kendal was asleep and windy. At one set of traffic lights, a board advertising ice cream outside a newsagent's shop, where the lights were on within as the proprietor marked up the morning editions for delivery, blew over in a gust, noisily startling the girl who was dozing in the passenger seat. Hyde had watched her face in repose from time to time since they left the M6. Her lips pouted, still greasy from her meal, and her features were pale, small and colourless. Obscurely, he felt responsible for her. She had passed from being the object of a search, the key to a security problem, into a chrysalis stage where she was almost a person, with human rights and human demands upon his time and energies. She hovered, waiting to be born into his emotional world. He did not welcome the change. It complicated matters. It was a pity he seemed to understand her. It would have been easier had she been a replica of her Left-wing, feminist friend Sara, whom he could have comfortably disliked.

He paused on the outskirts of Kendal and waited, but no cars approached in his mirror or passed him. He relaxed until they passed through Staveley and turned west on the main Windermere road. Headlights followed him out of the village, keeping behind him for almost two miles before turning off down a narrow track. He discovered himself sweating with relief the instant the headlights disappeared. Like a cat being woken by a tension in its owner, the girl stirred and sat up.

"Anything wrong?"

"Nothing. Go back to sleep."

"I'm not tired any more."

"Great. Pity you can't drive."

The girl subsided into a sullen silence. There were people on the streets of Windermere, standing at bus stops, walking with bent heads beneath black hoods of umbrellas in the misty drizzle that clung to the town. The roof of a train gleamed darkly in the lights of the station, which lay below the main road.

By the time they were on the outskirts of Windermere again, the dog-leg of the long ribbon of the lake lay to their left, its further shore tree-clad, wreathed with a chill mist, its steep sides buttressing the low cloud that was just turning from black to grey. It was a slow, wintry, unwelcome dawn as they crossed Trout Beck, heading for Ambleside.

"I reckon Wordsworth lived in Croydon and made it all up," he remarked. "He never said it was always pissing with rain while he was having his visions of nature."

"You have no soul," the girl replied lightly. She seemed to warm herself at humour as at a small fire. He looked at her. She glanced away.

"It's all right," he offered, "I'm not about to pull the car into the side and take advantage of you."

The girl did not reply. A tinge of colour in her cheeks, but no other reaction. He glanced at her from time to time, but she continued to gaze out of the side window, watching the far shore of Windermere slide past, the cramped, heavy firs crowding down to the water like a herd or an army, then giving way to damp, grassy outcrops, almost colourless under the low cloud cover. The land climbed away on his side of the car above the tree-line to bare-sided, long-backed hills, scalily wet and monstrously slumbering. Ambleside was shiny in its hollow between the hills and the grey water.

He pulled into a lay-by overlooking the northern end of the lake, just south of the town, and turned to the girl.

"Where to now, sweetheart? I" ve driven as far as Ambleside on trust, now where?"

She got out of the car without replying, and walked to the edge of the lay-by. Hyde followed her. She turned and looked up at him. She appeared to be entertaining another bout of distrust, even fear of him. She shook her head, and looked away towards the perspective of the long lake stretching away south. Water and sky merged no more than a couple of miles: from them into a non-existence. Hyde found the scene extraordinarily depressing. He touched her shoulder, but she shook his hand away.

"You have to trust me," he said.

"I know!" she almost wailed, so that he wondered whether she might not be psychologically disturbed. She certainly seemed neurotically suspicious. "I — can't…"

Anger welled up in him. Stupid little bitch. He bellowed at her: "You're wasting my bloody time, girlie! I don't know what's the bloody matter with you, or what the hell the world could have done to make you act like this — but I'm interested in what happens to a hundred blokes at the bottom of the sea relying on your old man's invention!"

In the silence that followed, he heard the water lapping gently out of sight below the verge of the lay-by, some water bird calling, the hum of a generator from somewhere behind them, the noise of the chain-saw from the trees on the far shore, and her quiet sobbing. Then she spoke without turning to him.

"You're a bloody shit, you are." Then, as if intending to be both more precise and younger, she added, "A bully."

"Sorry." He began to consider that Mrs Quin was the strongest member of the family, and felt a preconceived anxiety about the girl's father, and his similarity to his daughter. He found her, at that moment at least, too helpless to be a sympathetic figure.

"It's a cottage, off the road between Ambleside and Coniston. Less than half an hour in the car. I'm ready to take you there now."

The noise of the car startled him, appearing round a bend in the road that had masked its noise until it was almost upon them. His reaction was instinctive, but it revealed also the stretched state of his nerves. Before he assimilated the Renault and its trailing white-and-brown caravan and the two mild faces behind the windscreen, the pistol was in his hand, and beginning to move up and out into a straight-arm firing position. A moment later, it was behind his back again, being thrust back into the waistband of his corduroy trousers. But not before the girl, at least, had witnessed the tiny incident. She appeared terrified, hands picking around her face like pale bats.

"Don't be bloody stupid," he told her, his hands shaking as he thrust them into his pockets, an inward voice cursing his jumpiness. "What do you think it is, a bloody game?"

She hurried past him towards the car.

"What's the time?"

"Eight-thirty."

The blip's stopped moving and the signal strength is growing. Listen."

"All right, turn it down. That means the car's stopped somewhere, less than a couple of miles up the road."

"Great. Stop at the next phone box, and we can call Petrunin."

"And sit around all day waiting for him to get out of Manchester, I suppose? Marvellous!"

"Don't grumble. With a bit of luck we" ve got Hyde, the girl, and her father. Ah, there's a phone box. Pull off the road."

"Yes?" Ardenyev prevented an anticipatory grin from appearing on his lips, until Lev Balan nodded and rubbed his hand through his thick dark hair with tiredness and relief. "Great!" Ardenyev hugged Balan, laughing, feeling the man's helmet digging painfully into his ribs as Balan held it under his arm. "Great! We can go?"

"Any time you like. My boys are knackered, by the way — not that it'll worry you." Balan's answering grin was like a weather crack opening in seamed grey rock. Only then did Ardenyev really look at him, and fully perceive the man's weariness.

"Sorry. Tell them — tell them when we get back to Pechenga, we'll have the biggest piss-up they" ve ever seen. On me!"

"You" ve done it now. You're on."

"Tow lines, too?" Ardenyev asked eagerly, surprised at his own child-like enthusiasm. Again, Balan nodded, his cigarette now pressed between his lips, in the corner of his mouth. He looked dishevelled, unkempt, and rather disreputable. Insubordinate, too. "Great. What about buoyancy?"

"We" ve got the bags on. Just sufficient to keep you at snorkel depth for towing. Any fine adjustments we'll make when you take her up. Then we'll do some more fine-tuning in the outer basin at Pechenga, before you dock. Assuming you can drive this bloody thing, of course!"

Ardenyev indicated the skeleton crew of Soviet ratings in the control room. "All volunteers," he said wryly. "They can drive it, I'm quite sure."

"Just in case, I'm on my way back outside — to watch the disaster from there. Good luck."

"And you. See you in Pechenga. Take care."

Balan walked wearily back through the aft section of the Proteus to the stern escape chamber. He strapped his auxiliary air tank to his back, requiring it until he could be recoupled to the hoses outside, and climbed through the lower hatch. He flooded the chamber, and opened the upper hatch, climbed the ladder and floated out into the darkness. His legs felt heavy, not merely because of his boots but because of the surpassing weariness that had invested itself in every part of his body. He waddled slowly and clumsily down the whale's back of the submarine, arms waving like some celluloid ghoul, or as if in imitation of one of the cosmonauts space-walking. He was bone-weary, he decided. Another half-hour's working and one of them might have made some small, fatal mistake. Any one of the cables, the jagged edges, the cutters could have injured or killed any of them.

Another underwater cosmonaut, looking ridiculous in a way that never failed to amuse Balan, came towards him from the upright aircraft's tailplane of the rudder, almost staggering with the resistance of the heavy air hoses. The two men patted each other and clung together like the automatons on a musical box, then Balan turned his back and the hoses were fitted. A moment of breath-holding, then the rush of the air mixture, putting pressure on his ears and face, then the auxiliary tank was in his hands. He looked at it, grinned, and heaved it over the side of the submarine. It floated away down into the darkness.

Balan inspected his work once more. The stern of the Proteus, in the hard light of the lamps, was a mess, but it was a mess of which he felt justifiably proud. The rudder and the hydroplanes had been patched with a skin of metal, or their plates twisted back into shape and form by use of the hammer, the rivet-gun, the welding and cutting torches. Scarred, twisted, cracked metal, blackened and buckled. The propeller had not been repaired, merely cleared of the entangling, choking seaweed of the steel cables from the MIRV torpedo. Balan thought the shaft might be out of true, but that was Pechenga's worry, not his. Then, masking the operation scars along the side of the hull, where the ballast tanks had been ruptured and the outer hull of the Proteus damaged, a lazily flapping, transparent growth idled in the currents moving across the ledge, like the attachment of a giant, translucent jellyfish to the submarine. Buoyancy bags, ready to be inflated when Ardenyev gave the order to blow tanks, they would serve in place of the unrepaired ballast tanks at the stern of the submarine, giving it a workable approximation to its normal buoyancy control.

Balan was proud of what amounted to almost ten hours" work on the British submarine. The work had been as dispassionately carried out as always by himself and his team. Unlike Ardenyev, there was no pleasure at the meaning of the task and its completion. It was merely a job well done, a task completed successfully. The nature of the submarine, its nationality, had no meaning for Balan.

He spoke into his headset. "Right, you lot, clear away. Our gallant, heroic captain is going to take this tub to the top, and I don't want anyone hurt in the process!"

"I heard that," Ardenyev said in his ear, slightly more distant than the laughter that soughed in his helmet from some of his team. "I" ve been in contact with Kiev and Karpaty. Ready when you are."

"Okay. I'm clearing the slaves from the hull now. I'll get back to you."

Balan took hold of his air hoses in one hand, checking that they did not snag anywhere and trailed away across the ledge to the pumps and the generator. Then he turned clumsily but surely, and began climbing down the light steel ladder that leant against the port hydroplane, attached by small magnets. He lowered his air lines gingerly to one side of him as he climbed tiredly down to the surface of the ledge. The crewman who had attached his lines came after him. They were the last to descend, and when they stood together at the bottom of the ladder, Balan and the other diver hefted the ladder between them, and they trudged through the restless, distressed silt to where the arc lamps had been re-sited near the generators and the sleds on which they had brought down their equipment. The small group of diving-suited figures who composed his team was gathered like nervous spectators beneath the bloom of the lights. Balan joined them, dropping the ladder on to one of the sleds and securing it before he spoke again to Ardenyev.

"Okay, chief— you can make your attempt on the world rate of ascent record now. We're safely out of the way!"

"Thanks, Lev. Don't forget our piss-up in Pechenga — if you're not all too tired, that is!"

There was a murmur of protest and abuse at the remark. Balan was almost prepared to admit his tiredness, but there were certain fictions that had to be preserved, whatever the cost; one of them being the indestructibility, the immortality of salvage men.

"We won't forget. You just bring your wallet." The banter was required, expected, all of them were recruiting-poster figures, without separate identity, without reality. Living their own fictions; heroes. Silly, silly —

"I will. Okay, here we go."

Balan studied the submarine, partly in shadow now, the light of the arc lamps casting deep gloomy patches over their repair work, rendering it somehow shabby and inadequate. The Proteus looked half-built, half-destroyed. He did not attend to Ardenyev's orders, still coming through the headset, presumably for his benefit, until he heard "Blow tanks!" and the submarine — after a moment in which nothing seemed to happen — shifted under the discharge of sea water from her ballast tanks, and then the jellyfish bags began to bloom and roll and fold and inflate. Balan felt the new currents of the submarine's movement and the discharged water. They could feel the hull grinding against the ledge through their boots; the stern of the submarine seemed to be lifting slightly higher than the bow. It would need adjustment. The bow itself was in darkness, where the tow-lines were attached. They'd have to be inspected, too.

Someone cheered in his headset, making him wince. One of the younger men, he supposed. There were sighs of pleasure and relief, though, like a persistent breeze; noises that were their right.

The Proteus, still a little bow-heavy, drifted up and away from them, out of the boiling cloud of silt, becoming a great shadow overhead, just beyond the arc lamps, then a dimmer shape, then almost nothing as it ascended the twenty fathoms to the surface. The bags round its stern like nappies, he thought, Around its bum.

"Come on, you lot. The volume on those bags is going to have to be changed for a starter! Don't waste time, get organised!"

Theatrically, the arc lamps began flicking off, leaving them in a sudden darkness, where their helmet lamps and hand-lamps glowed like aquatic fireflies. Above them, as they began climbing on to their sleds, the Proteus stopped at snorkel depth and waited for them.

"Well done, Hyde— excellent work, excellent!" Aubrey effusive, his tiredness gone in a moment, if only briefly. Hyde had Quin, beyond all reasonable expectation, and at this critical moment. Their first real piece of luck— a change of luck? They needed it. "Well done. Bring him directly to London. You'd better let me arrange for a helicopter from the Cumbria force to pick you up. I want Quin here as soon as possible— What? What do you mean?"

Hyde's voice had dropped to barely more than a whisper, something conspiratorial. Aubrey swivelled in his seat as if in response to its tone, turning his back on the underground room and its occupants. Pyott and Clark, attentive to his enthusiasm at the call that had been put through, now remained some yards away. Clark was making some point about the Proteus, his finger tracing across a large-scale cutaway plan of the submarine which Aubrey had had brought down from the second floor of the Admiralty.

"Back-up's here," he heard Clark saying. "Right out of the way — " Then he was attending to Hyde's quiet voice.

"He's in a bad way, Mr Aubrey. Out in the garden now, blowing his nose a lot and upsetting his daughter. Can you hear me all right?"

"Yes, Hyde, yes," Aubrey replied impatiently. "What do you mean, a bad way?"

"One of those who can't take isolation, even if he is a loner," Hyde replied flatly, without sympathy. "He's been up here for weeks, almost a week on his own. And when the two of them were here together, I reckon they just wore each other down with mutual nerves. Quin's a neurotic bloke, anyway."

"Spare me the psychology, Hyde."

"You have to understand him," Hyde said in exasperation. "He doesn't want to come back, he's scared stiff of his own shadow, he doesn't seem to care about the Proteus— all our fault, apparently."

"That, at least, is true."

"I" ve spent hours talking to him. I can't get through to him. He'll come back because he's scared not to, and because he thinks the opposition may have followed us here —"

"Have they?"

"No. But now we" ve found him, he thinks it'll all start up again, and he wants to hide. I don't want him scared off by a helicopter. He'll come back with me, or not at all."

"What about the girl?"

"She's the one who's just about persuaded him to trust me. I have to deliver him somewhere safe."

"I didn't mean that. What will you do with her?"

"She'll stay here. Either that, or I'll put her on a train."

"I haven't time to waste, Hyde. Is he fit to work?"

"No."

"Then he'll have to work in an unfit state. Very well. Drive back to Manchester. You and he can fly down from there. I'll arrange it. You can hold his hand."

"Yes, Mr Aubrey."

"And— once again, well done. Keep him happy, promise him anything — but he must be here this evening, and ready to work!"

Aubrey put down the receiver, and stood up, the purposefulness of his movements keeping doubt at bay. He had dozed lightly and fitfully on the narrow camp bed in the adjoining cupboard-like room without windows. The darkness had seemed close and foetid, and the light and noise under the door had drawn him back into the underground operations room. Cold water had restored a semblance of wakefulness, and Hyde's message had completed the work of reinvigoration.

"Well?" Giles Pyott asked, turning from the chart pinned to a board, resting on an easel. "What news?"

"Hyde has found Quin."

Thank God! Where is he?"

"Lake District — near Coniston Water, I gather."

"He's been there all the time?"

"Apparently. Rented a cottage through an agency."

"Can he get here today?" Clark asked more purposefully.

"He can. Hyde says that the man is in a state close to nervous exhaustion." Aubrey shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know how that complicates matters. Better have a doctor to look at him, I suppose. It really is too bad —"

"Hell, can he work?

"Whether or not, he will work." He indicated the drawing of the Proteus. "He has to do something about this, after all. Doesn't he?"

It was almost three before Quin was finally ready to depart. His luggage, which consisted of one small suitcase and an overcoat, had been a means of delaying his departure. He had driven Hyde to the edge of rage again and again, and then capitulated, afraid of the Australian in a more immediate way than of the other figures and dangers that crowded his imagination. Aubrey had telephoned the cottage at noon, and had been frustrated and angered at the further delay. After that, Hyde had handled Quin like unstable explosive; cajolement and masked threat had eventually subdued him.

He stood now at the door of the whitewashed cottage, hesitant while Hyde carried the suitcase to the TR7. Tricia Quin was at his side like a crutch, touching his arm, trying to smile him into complacency. In some obscure and unexpected way, she had strengthened during the day, adopting much of Hyde's attitude and many of his arguments. It was as if she had adopted the plight of the Proteus as a charitable cause worthy of contribution; or perhaps she sensed her father needed help, that the greatest danger to his health lay in his present solitary surroundings. Hyde wondered what Quin would have made of the Outback, even the dead centre of Australia. The unnerving silence was audible there. The Lake District hummed and buzzed with life, by comparison.

He looked away from Quin and his daughter, towards the stretch of water that was The Tarns, and then at the road and the land falling away, down from Black Fell behind him through the firs towards Coniston Water two miles away. The land pressed in upon the cottage, and Hyde admitted a claustrophobic isolation so different from the Australian hinterland. Perhaps it wasn't surprising Quin couldn't take it after all, staying in that cottage and its garden for a week without seeing another soul after his daughter left. They'd quarrelled about her going to see her mother, apparently. That might have set him off, created his sense of abandonment amid danger.

Hyde shrugged, and opened the boot. The weather was windier now, moving the low cloud but breaking it up, too. Gleams, fitful and unoptimistic, of blue sky; a hazy light through the clouds. It had, at least, stopped drizzling.

The bullet whined away off the yellow boot before the noise of the gunshot reached him. He stared at his hand. The bullet had furrowed across the back of it, exposing the flesh. An open-lipped graze which still had not begun to hurt, matching the furrowed scar on the boot lid. He looked stupidly around him.

A second shot then, chipping pebble-dash from the wall of the cottage two feet or so from Quin's head. His frightened, agape features, the girl's quicker, more alert panic, her hands dragging at her father's arm, the shrouded hills, the distant dark trees — he took in each distinct impression in the moment that he heard the heavy report of the rifle, and then the pain in his hand began, prompting him like a signal. He began running for the door of the cottage.