Sea Leopard

Chapter Ten: RESCUE?

"What are they waiting for? Why don't they do something?" Quin's voice was plaintive, fearful; yet the words sounded strangely irritated, as if the men outside had disappointed him.

"You" ve seen the bloody cowboy films, haven't you?" Hyde replied, almost snarling, weary of Quin's unabated nerves. "The lynch-mob always waits for dark." The man seemed to possess an infinite capacity to remain on edge, and his emotions rubbed against Hyde's attempts to evolve a solution to their situation like sandpaper against skin.

"Why are they waiting?" Tricia Quin asked in studiedly calm tone, sitting near him on the floor beneath the cottage window.

Hyde turned to her. "Petrunin can't be here yet."

"Who?"

"The bloke who chased us — the big cheese. He's got a face everyone will have a copy of. Must be hard to get out of Manchester. They'll be waiting for orders."

"How many of them do you think there are?"

Hyde watched Quin as he listened to the girl. The man was sitting in a slumped, self-pitying posture with his back against the wall, near the settee with its stained stretch covers. Hyde disliked Quin intensely. The man got on his nerves. He was a pain in the backside. He was going to be useless to Aubrey, even if he delivered him.

"Two, maybe three."

"You don't think they might try something before dark?"

"Why? They'll assume I'm armed, they know I'm a professional, just like them. They're not going to volunteer to get their balls blown off. Your dad's here, and he isn't going anywhere."

She studied her father, then looked away from him.

"What about your people? This man Aubrey?"

"When we don't turn up in Manchester, he'll worry. He knows where we are."

"Will he worry in time?""

"That's what I'm worrying about." He smiled, and studied her face. "How are you?"

"I'm all right." She avoided looking at her father.

"What are you going to do?" Quin asked.

"For Christ's sake, stop moaning!"

"It's your fault — you brought them here! This is just what I tried to avoid — what I came here to get away from," Quin persisted. Hyde perceived deep and genuine and abiding fears, disguising themselves in self-pity. He could almost feel sorry for Quin; might have done so, had their situation at that moment been less acute. And had Quin's voice been less insistent, less whining. "I knew I couldn't be adequately protected, that no one took my fears seriously, and now look what's happened — they're out there, the very people I tried to avoid. And you — you brought them here. You" ve as good as handed me to them on a plate!"

"All right. So they stuck a bleeper under the car. Sorry."

That won't do us any good."

"Shut up! It's your bloody fault we're all stuck here."

"Leave him alone," Tricia Quin pleaded softly.

"All right. Look, once it's dark, I can try to get to a telephone that hasn't had its wires cut. But I'm not walking out there just at the moment. He'll have to sit it out, just like us."

"As long as nothing happens to him."

"It won't. Petrunin's in a corner himself. It's a stalemate. Nothing's going to happen to Dad — unless I break his bloody neck for him!"

Quin scowled like a child sulking. Hyde looked at his watch. Just after three. Patience, patience, he instructed himself. Aubrey has got to catch on soon.

He wondered, without letting the thought tinge the bland expression on his features, whether Petrunin's orders might not have changed because of the capture of the submarine by the Russians. The death of Quin, rather than his capture, might be a satisfactory conclusion to the operation.

It was hard to discard the thought, once he had admitted it. It was unlikely, but possible. Of his own death, he did not think. That, he had considered almost as he closed the cottage door behind him after he had run from the car, would be inevitable whether Petrunin wanted Quin alive or dead. He looked at his hand, wrapped in his handkerchief. His gun made an uncomfortable, pressing lump against the small of his back. It was not entirely a stalemate, it merely gave that impression. Petrunin wanted Quin badly. Petrunin was finished in the UK anyway, after this. When he went, he'd want Quin with him. As soon as it was dark, he'd come for him.

"Ethan, it is not an old man's vanity, or sense of hurt pride — or even senility. I am asking a serious question. Could someone get into Pechenga and destroy “Leopard” before the Russians can examine or dismantle it?"

"You're crazy, Mr Aubrey. In twenty-four hours the Russians will have that submarine turned around and on her way. There's no time to do anything."

"I'm not sure about that." Aubrey looked up from the narrow camp bed where he sat perched like a tired, dishevelled prisoner under the hard strip-lighting of the cupboard-like room. Clark leaned against the door, dressed like a golfer in sweater and slacks. Clark's increasing informality of dress during the past days had been a badge of defeat and of defeatism. Aubrey felt tired, directionless; yet at the same time he was possessed by the quick seductive glamour of a counter-operation. "I'm not sure about that," he repeated.

"You don't even know it's Pechenga," Clark persisted.

"Satellite and Nimrod suggest it might be. There are signs of what might be preparations for Proteus's arrival at Pechenga, but not at Murmansk." Aubrey rubbed his hands together in a washing motion. To Clark the activity suggested a pretended, mocking humility. The room was coffin-like, stale and dead, and pressed in on him uncomfortably.

"Maybe. Look, these quick-burn operations always look good on paper. Our intelligence is nil, Mr. Aubrey, and there's no time or capacity for back-up. Face facts — the Russians have Proteus on their ground, on their terms. They'll give her back."

"I realise that," Aubrey snapped, "but I am not prepared simply to wait until she is handed back like a toy that no longer works!"

"Listen, Mr Aubrey," Clark began angrily, turning from the door which he had been facing as Aubrey spoke, as if to hide the expression on his face, "I can't give you what you want. I don't know enough about “Leopard” to be able to tell you how to destroy it effectively without blowing up the damn boat, too! The Russians may have their superman in Ardenyev, but don't put the role on to me. I can't help you."

"Someone at Plessey, then," Aubrey murmured disparagingly.

"You need Quin."

"I realise that. If I get you Quin, can you do the job?"

"What?"

"I said — if I get you Quin, will you do the job? Can you do the job?"

"Job?"

"Don't be dense, dear boy. You would have to do it. You are familiar with the whole operation, you are familiar with the equipment, you are in naval intelligence, you have a great deal of field experience. Who else would I consider sending?"

"One man?"

"One particular man, yes."

"And all I have to do is get into Pechenga, board the Proteus, destroy the equipment, and get out again with no one any the wiser?" Clark raised his hands in the air. "You" ve really flipped, Mr Aubrey. It can't be done."

"It must be attempted."

"I'm not on your staff."

"I'm sure I can arrange your temporary assignment."

"There's no time."

"We must try!"

"So where's Quin? Your house of cards falls down without him."

Aubrey's face became saturnine. "I don't know. Hyde should have arrived at Manchester airport by now. He has not done so."

"Then he's in trouble."

"You think so?"

Clark paced the tiny cubicle. "You" ve spent all your time dreaming up this crazy scheme instead of worrying about realities. Your guy has to be in trouble, and you haven't even given him a thought!"

Aubrey's face registered an expression of rage, directed at Clark. Then, in admission, his look turned inwards. He had been taking an afternoon nap of the intellect. Clark was perfectly correct. He had ignored Hyde, and Hyde must now be in trouble. He clenched his fists in his lap, then got up and opened the door.

"OS map of the Coniston Water area!" he shouted into the underground room, directing the order at every one of its occupants. Pyott looked up, startled, and then reached for a telephone. "Quickly!" He slammed the door and looked steadily at Clark. "You are right. I have been foolishly, dangerously remiss. But if we get Quin here, we shall talk again. You are not off the hook, Ethan!"

"Neither are your guy and Quin."

The Proteus reached a moment of equilibrium after her seeming rush from snorkel depth to the surface, and then the motion of the waves began to affect her. Ardenyev watched as the hatch above them slid back. Water dripped on him and Lloyd and the armed guard, and then the platform of the bridge was raised electronically until their heads rose above the fin of the submarine. The Proteus rolled gently in the swell of the outer harbour of Pechenga, the adjusted buoyancy bags at the stern maintaining her at the correct depth but impairing her stability.

Ardenyev smiled, and waved an arm towards the low shoreline.

"Welcome to the Soviet Union, Commander Lloyd." Rain whipped into their faces, and fuzzy lights glowed through the dark late afternoon. Low submarine pens lay ahead of them, beyond the harbour wall with its guard towers and its anti-submarine net. The rain was chilly, mingled with sleet which numbed the side of Lloyd's face as he studied the scene with the hunched shoulders of a prisoner. The rescue ship Karpaty made cautious headway, still towing the Proteus. He turned to look back aft of the sail. Huge jellyfish bags surrounded the stern of the submarine like splints on a damaged limb. He could make out, through the white-edged spray and the driving rain, the scars and the rough repairs that had been affected beneath the surface by the rescue team. The bow of the Proteus was still angled slightly below the horizontal because of the crudity of measurement employed in inflating the bags. A bow-wave surged along the forward deck as Lloyd turned his gaze back towards Pechenga. The Karpaty had passed through the gap in the harbour wall where the net had been swung electronically away to allow her access, and Proteus was slipping, in an almost lurching, ungainly fashion between the towers on the wall. Lloyd could see faces looking from the towers; they all seemed to be grinning, and an arm waved. The sight created a sense of humiliation in him.

Ardenyev was speaking.

"I'm sorry — you were saying?" he said, indulging his sense of defeat and self-blame. He had made mistakes, fatal ones for "Leopard". Because the situation was so unreal, and its consequences dangerous only for a lump of inoperable equipment in the bowels of his vessel, his mind was more keenly aware of errors of judgement and tactics. He should not have been so slow in realising their danger, he should not have settled on the bottom. There seemed no limit to the catalogue of blame.

"I intrude upon your self-examination?" Ardenyev asked lightly. "But there is no danger. No cause for alarm."

"That's the most unreal thing of all, isn't it?" Lloyd replied.

Ardenyev ignored the reply. "As I was saying, we will have the submarine docked in two or three hours. Of course, we will not delay you more than is necessary. Your reactor will not be run down, you will be docked in a wet dock — we can manage the repairs quite adequately without a dry dock — and you will be ready to sail in no more than forty-eight hours. That I promise you."

"You would be able to make such a promise, of course," Lloyd replied acidly, "since the damage to my ship was quite precisely calculated, no doubt."

"I'm sorry—?"

"Forget it. It was all an accident, a most unfortunate accident."

"Of course."

The swell was hardly discernible inside the harbour wall. Lloyd was uncomfortably aware, however, of the forward motion of the submarine and of the other vessels in the harbour basin. Pechenga was unsubstantial still, masked by the murk and the flying rain and sleet and remained as unreal as the satellite pictures he had seen of it and of dozens of other Soviet naval ports, but the big ships were real, uncomfortably so. Two "Kara"-class cruisers at anchor, one half-repainted. Three or four destroyers, like a display of toys, small and grey and bristling with aerials and radar dishes and guns. Frigates, a big helicopter cruiser, two intelligence ships festooned with electronic detection and surveillance equipment. A submarine support ship, minesweepers, ocean tugs, tankers. The sight, the numbers, overawed him, ridiculing Portsmouth, Plymouth, Faslane, every naval port and dockyard in the UK. It was like going back into the past, except for the threatening, evident modernity of these vessels, to some great review of the fleet at Spithead between the two world wars, or before the Great War. The harbour at Pechenga, a satellite port for Murmansk, daunted Lloyd. He felt completely and utterly entrapped.

The submarine pens, mere nest-holes in the concrete at this distance, winked with lights ahead of the Karpaty. One of those small black holes would swallow his vessel, contain it until people like this Russian on his bridge said they could leave, gave them permission. He shrugged hopelessly.

"You're impressed?" Ardenyev asked.

"As long as they're not all cardboard mock-ups, yes."

They're not." Lloyd looked at Ardenyev. The man seemed unenthusiastic about the conversation he had begun.

"So familiar as to be boring?" he asked.

"What? Oh, this. I was just thinking what a dull town Pechenga is."

"I see."

"I doubt it." They slid beneath the lee of a cruiser. Crewmen leaned over the rails, looking down at the British submarine, waving their caps, yelling indistinguishable words and greetings. Ardenyev watched them as he might have observed the behaviour of monkeys at a zoo. "The brothels are quite dreadful," he continued. "All right for conscripts, but not for the likes of you and me. A good job you will not be allowed ashore. The casualty rate would be staggering. Quite unacceptable to the Admiralty."

"You seem to have run out of steam," Lloyd remarked.

"What? Oh, perhaps." Ardenyev brushed a hand through his wet hair, and assayed a tired grin. His waving arms indicated the whole bulk of the Proteus. "It's over for me. The dull time after excitement. I am feeling sorry for myself. Forgive my bad manners."

They were slowing now. Karpaty seemed to lag, and they began to overtake her in a snail-like pursuit, until the Proteus herself came to a stop. Tiny figures emerged from the forward hatch and scuttled along the slippery, gleaming deck, casting off the tow-lines swiftly and expertly. A hard-lit submarine pen gaped before them. Proteus began to edge, towards the open gates of the pen on her intact docking propeller, the "egg-beater" located forward of the main propeller and retracted when not in use. Lloyd shuddered.

"As soon as we dock, I must leave you to make my report," Ardenyev murmured. Lloyd ignored him, watching his vessel slide forward into the maw of the submarine pen. Down the line of pens, men had stopped work to watch. The sterns of Soviet submarines were visible through the open gates of other pens, but Lloyd, after one quick, self-concious glance, returned his gaze to the bow of the Proteus. She stopped again, and men scrambled over the deck, attaching the hawsers whereby she could be winched into the pen, An order was given, the deck was cleared again, and then the winches picked up the slack, measured the bulk of the submarine and began to pull her forward.

Each moment was marked by a further surrender to circumstances. Lloyd felt an emotional pain that was as acute as a physical injury. The hull of the Proteus seemed marked like a ruler, measuring off her entry into the pen. Hard lights gleamed in the roof. The pen contained the torpedo tubes, the forward hatch, the forward hydroplanes, then the fin itself. Proteus was half-swallowed.

There was cheering from the dockyard workers lining the concrete walks on either side of the water, which sickened and enraged him. Lloyd could see the first teams of men with the props that would support the hull, eager to begin berthing the Proteus.

Then Ardenyev's hand was on his shoulder, and he was shouting above the echo of the cheering bouncing back from steel and concrete.

"I'm sorry, my friend! You have lost!"

Lloyd shook his head, not to deny but to admit defeat. Proteus was slowing as orders were passed from the officer in charge of the docking procedure to the winch operators. Even the motion of his vessel was out of his control. He felt utterly humiliated. Strangely, there was an air of dejection about Ardenyev, too, amid the coarse cheers and their magnified, inhuman echoes.

A mist was beginning to rise in the dusk. The wind had dropped to an occasional breeze which stirred the tendrils and shrouds of grey. The landscape was subsiding into darkness, the hills already no more than smudges, the trees merely dark, crayon shadings. Hyde saw the mist as a final irony. It cloaked Petrunin now, not any attempt on his part to reach a telephone. Petrunin had arrived too early, just before six, announcing his presence with a deadline for Hyde's surrender. Yet in another sense he was belated. Hyde had already, slowly and reluctantly and with an inward fury, decided he could not leave the girl and her father exposed to capture, and there was no way the three of them could get safely away from the cottage. He had to make the difficult, even repellent assumption that they would be safer, if only because they would be alive and unharmed, in surrender than resistance. Hope springs eternal was a difficult, and unavoidable, consolation. He had admitted to himself that they were successfully trapped even before Petrunin reiterated that simple message through a loud-hailer.

Quin had rendered himself useless, like some piece of electrical equipment that possessed a safety circuit. He had switched himself off like a kettle boiling too long. He was slumped where he had sat for hours, staring at his lap, sulking in silence. Even his danger no longer pricked him to complaint. The girl, moving only occasionally to check on her father's condition, had remained near Hyde. Their conversation had been desultory. Hyde had hardly bothered to alleviate the girl's fears, possessed by his own self-recriminations. The bug on the car, the bloody bug —

Then Petrunin was talking again. "Why not attempt to reach a telephone, Mr Hyde?" his magnified, mechanical voice queried from behind a knoll a hundred yards or more from the cottage. Hyde was certain he could hear soft laughter from one of the others. "This mist should hide your movements quite successfully." Again the accompanying, sycophantic laughter, coarser now? Hyde could not be certain he was not mocking himself, imagining the amusement. Petrunin was enjoying himself. Was he covering an approach, distracting them? The problem is, your friends would not be safe while you were away. Can the girl use a gun? Can her father?"

"Fuck off," Hyde replied with a whispered intensity. The girl touched his arm, making him start.

"Give me the gun. Why don't you try to get out?"

"I gave that idea up hours ago, girlie. We're right in the shit, and bloody Lenin out there knows it."

"Won't your people be looking for us?"

"I bloody hope so! But, he knows that, too. He won't wait much longer now."

"Your time is up," Petrunin announced, as if on cue. Hyde grinned mirthlessly. "Please show yourselves at the door. Throw your gun out first, please. We have night-sights. No movements you make will be missed, I assure you."

"The trouble with bloody desk men when they get in the field is they're so bloody gabby." He looked at the shadowy outline of Quin across the room, then at the girl. His hand was clenched around the butt of the Heckler & Koch pistol, and it would take one movement to smash the window and open fire. Useless to try; but in another, more febrile way, satisfying to do so. Bang, bang, he recited to himself, pointing the gun into the room as if taking aim. Bloody bang, bang, and these two would be dead, or wounded. "Nowhere to go, nothing to do," he announced aloud.

"You can't — " the girl began.

"I'm bored with sitting on my bum," he said. "Besides, when the shooting starts, someone else always gets hurt. It's in the rules. Petrunin knows I won't risk your father or you, and I know I won't. Shitty, but true. Now, we have no chance. Later, who knows?" He stood up to one side of the window. It was open at the top, and he raised his voice to a shout. "All right, Trotsky — we're coming out. We" ve both seen this bloody film before!"

"No cavalry, I'm afraid. Only Apaches," Petrunin called back through the loud-hailer. Hyde tossed his head.

"I'll open the door and chuck my gun out. Then Mr Quin will come out first."

"Very well. Please do not delay."

Quin was sitting upright now, and seemed to have sidled towards one corner of the room. His white, featureless face seemed to accuse Hyde in the room's dusk. Hyde bumped the edge of the table as he moved towards him.

"No —" Quin said feebly, putting his hands up in front of him, warding off Hyde like an evil presence.

"Sorry, mate. We don't have any choice. They're not going to do you any harm now, are they?" He reached down and pulled Quin roughly to his feet, embracing him as the man struggled halfheartedly. There was a mutuality of hatred and blame between them. Hyde sensed it in the tremble of Quin's arms.

He studied Quin's face. The man appeared as if he had been confined in some prison, with no hope of release or escape, for a long time. The prison had been his own mind, of his own making. No, Hyde corrected himself. The KGB had done that, created the stifling sense of the trap closing on him. And perhaps the DS, and even SIS and himself, should have been quicker, smarter, more thorough.

"We may have a chance if we go out now," he said in a soothing, allaying voice. "In here, we have none. You get hurt, Tricia gets hurt. I'm sorry, mate, but it's our only chance."

"I don't want to —!" Quin almost wailed. "They'll take me with them. It's not you they want, it's me!"

"I know that. For God's sake, I'm trying to help you!"

"I can't spend the rest of my life in Russia, heaven help me!"

"Better Red than dead," Hyde offered, his shallow sympathy exhausted. Quin's fear and reluctance were now no more than irritants, slowing reaction, muddying thought. Quin would just have to accept his situation. Hyde no longer had time or energy to expend on his psychological condition.

"Now, as the patient said to the dentist as he grabbed his balls, “we're not going to hurt each other, are we?” Just wait until I give you the word, then walk slowly out of the door. Okay?" Quin slumped in resignation against Hyde. Hyde's mockery was expressed, incongruously, in a comforting tone of voice. "A nice little plane ride across the Channel, then another ride to Moscow. You might even like it there. They'll like you, anyway." He gripped Quin's arms as the man's body protested at his envisaged future. "Nothing bad's going to happen. Just do as they say."

He took Quin by one arm to the door, and opened it, keeping the scientist out of sight. He threw his gun in a high arc towards the knoll, away from his car so that it was easily visible.

"Excellent!" Petrunin confirmed. "No other little toys?"

"I left my bloody death-ray in the car!"

"Very well. Come out, one at a time. Mr Quin to lead."

"Right, off you go. Just walk straight towards the knoll, don't deviate, and don't run."

Quin moaned. Immediately, the girl was at his side, holding his other arm. She shouted through the door.

"My father's not well. We're coming out together." Without hesitation, she guided Quin through the open door. Hyde stood framed in the doorway for a moment, then he moved out into the dusk, his feet crunching on the gravel in front of the cottage. He raised his arms in the air, studying the knoll, waiting for the first head to appear. Unreality seized him, and he wanted to laugh. Captured by the KGB, in England! It was laughable, a joke for Queen Anne's Gate for years to come. Perhaps they'd use his urn on Aubrey's mantelpiece to knock their pipes out while they giggled at the story of his demise. As Aubrey would have said, It really was too bad—

Petrunin came down the slope of the grassy knoll towards them, a second man following him, carrying a rifle. Quin and Tricia stopped, awaiting him. A third man moved out of the shadow beneath a stand of firs towards Hyde, his rifle bearing on its target. Hyde felt weak, and sick. Petrunin stopped to examine Quin as carefully and as unemotionally as he might have done a consignment that had been delivered to his door. He ignored the girl. The third man had reached Hyde, studied him warily, and then moved in to touch-search him. When he had finished, he spoke to Petrunin.

"He's clean."

"Good." Petrunin approached Hyde. He was smiling with confidence and success. He was a bigger, taller man than the Australian, and this increased his confidence almost to a swagger. He paused before Hyde, hands on hips, appraising him.

"I know I don't look like much," Hyde offered, "but it's the public spending cuts. They're going in for smaller spies."

"Aubrey's man, of course? Mm, I don't think you are the cheerful colonial idiot you pretend. Not that it matters. Thank you for leading us to Mr Quin."

"Not my pleasure."

"Quite. Very well," he said, addressing his two companions, "let us not waste time." He looked at Hyde. "Just a wound, I think," he said with surgical precision and lack of concern. This incident is already too — significant. We mustn't create an international event from it." He stepped aside. "We don't want him going anywhere. Both legs, I think."

"No —!" the girl shouted, but one of the riflemen knocked her down, swiping the barrel of his gun sideways into her ribs. Hyde remained quite still, tensing himself to accept the pain. He lowered his hands to his sides. The marksman stepped forward — the third man had moved away, Petrunin was still appraising him with an intent curiosity — and raised the gun to his shoulder. Hyde felt the tremble begin in his left leg, and could not control it. Knee, shin, thigh, calf, foot, ankle —

His imagination made the skin on his legs crawl. Hyde tried to concentrate on only one of his legs, letting awareness of the other one become numb. The blood rushed in his ears like a howl of protest.

Then the helicopter. Loud enough at once in the silence to be apparent even to Hyde. Petrunin glanced up at the cool evening sky, then his head whipped round as he located the source of the noise. Red lights beneath a shadowy belly, the racket of the rotors yelling down into the hollow in which the cottage lay.

Hyde's thoughts came out of shock, out of their mesmerised concentration on his still quivering left leg, and prompted him towards Quin and the girl, who were huddled together. The girl was on her feet but almost doubled over with pain and fright. Then a pain wracked him, and he fell to his knees, groaning as if he had been shot. His whole body was trembling, and he could not move, merely grip his stomach and retch drily again and again.

The noise of the helicopter beat down on him, and he heard a voice through a loud-hailer, yelling the same kind of authoritative noises over and over. The helicopter's down-draught distressed his hair, inflated his windcheater, but he could not straighten up. He waited for the sound of firing, but there was none.

Eventually, he rolled over on to his side. He saw scattering figures running, and Quin and his daughter clinging together. Then he heard shots. One of the marksmen — he saw with a fierce delight that it was the one who had been ordered to maim him — crumpled near Quin and Tricia. Other figures moved into, merged with, the trees, and were gone. The police helicopter settled heavily on to the grass below the knoll, comfortingly large, noisily business-like. It was over.

The girl was kneeling over him, one hand pressed against her ribs.

"All right?"

He nodded. "Just scared stiff. You?"

"Bruised."

"How's your father?"

"Mr Hyde?" A shadow loomed over them. A policeman in denims and a combat jacket.

"Yes."

"Are you hurt?"

"Only my manly pride." Hyde stretched and sat up. He rubbed his hand almost without thinking through the girl's hair. She did not seem to resent his touch.

"We're to get you on a plane at Manchester as soon as we can," the police officer informed him.

"Right. What about my car?"

"One of my men will drive it down."

"I want to see my mother," Tricia Quin announced.

"Your father's to go straight to London, Miss. Mr Aubrey's instructions," he added by way of explanation to Hyde. "He'll want to see you, no doubt, at the same time."

"Get us to Manchester," Hyde replied. "We'll see, then."

"I'm not going to London."

"Okay, okay," Hyde conceded. "I'll take you to see Mummy as soon as we" ve got your dear old dad on the plane. All right?" The girl nodded firmly. "Christ, why you spend your time worrying so much about them, I don't know!" He looked up at the police officer. "Caught "em?"

"I doubt it. We haven't the time to waste. Leave that up to the Cumbria constabulary. Come on — let's get moving."

Hyde stood up. The girl immediately held his arm to steady him, unnecessarily.

"You're all bloody solicitation, Tricia," Hyde observed. "No wonder you get hurt all the time. People aren't worth it." She saw that he was looking at her father as he spoke, and a wince of pain crossed her face. Misinterpreting the expression, he added: "Your ribs okay?"

"Yes!" she snapped, and walked away from him. Hyde watched her go, and shrugged. Relief returned in a rush of emotions, and he exhaled noisily. It was over. The cavalry had arrived, with a loudhailer instead of a bugle. But they had arrived —

They allowed Quin five hours" sleep, under light sedation, before Aubrey had him woken. The doctor had examined him as soon as he had arrived at the Admiralty, and had pronounced him unfit for strain or effort, mental or physical. Aubrey had thanked the doctor and dismissed him. He pondered whether Quin should be prescribed stimulants, and then reluctantly decided against this course. Aubrey suspected drugs, except in their interrogational usefulness. He wanted Quin completely and reliably rational. Quin was the lynchpin of the scheme that was increasingly obsessing him, it had prevented him from taking any sleep himself, it had made him impatient of Quin's rest and impatient during his first conversation with the man, so much so that Ethan Clark had intruded upon their conversation and eventually commandeered it. Aubrey, seething at Quin's weariness, his retreat from reality, his reluctance to consider the plight of his own invention, had left the Admiralty to walk for half an hour on Horse Guards, but the military statues and the mobility of the buildings had made him flee to the more agreeable atmosphere of St James's Park.

The park, across which people hurried at the beginning of a bright, windy day, offered him little solace. From the bridge, he could see, in an almost gilded white clarity, Buckingham Palace in one direction, Whitehall in the other. If he followed the path from the bridge, it would bring him to Birdcage Walk and Queen Anne's Gate and his own office. Shelley would bring him coffee and soothing information of other parts of the world; not Pechenga, not the place on that blown-up aerial photograph propped on an easel. The parade of government officials and office workers passing him composed a race to which he did not belong. His office was barred to him until this business was resolved.

He skirted the lake, back towards Whitehall. The sun was gilding the roofs, providing an unremarked beauty. Aubrey was profoundly doubtful whether Quin would be of the least use to them. He seemed a poor specimen, physically, emotionally. He certainly seemed inadequate to the role in which Aubrey wished to cast him.

One man, who is a grocer. A Harrier jet. The AWACS Nimrod at Farnborough which was used to give Proteus her sea trials with the "Leopard" equipment. Eastoe and his crew, returned by now to RAF Kinloss, no more than two hours away by aircraft from Farnborough. And Clark.

And Quin. Miserable, whining, ungrateful, uncaring Quin. Aubrey clenched his hat more firmly, savagely in his hand, mis-shaping its brim with the rage he felt against Quin. It could work, but only with Quin. With Quin as he was, it was doomed.

Pyott and Clark were alone in what had once been the "Chessboard Counter" operations room. Aubrey had stood-down all RN personnel, who would be briefed to run what had become, in his mind, a rescue rather than a destruction operation. He intended that "Leopard" should be repaired and that Proteus make her escape, under cover of its anti-sonar, from Pechenga. The scheme seemed utterly unworkable to Clark and Pyott, and it had seemed so to him in the windy light of the park, between the gilded buildings. In this underground room, precisely because Quin had obviously been allowed to rest by Clark, it seemed only a little less ridiculous. An old man's fancy. He had code-named it "Plumber".

Clark's face expressed disappointment, beneath the surface of superiority. He had been proven right; Quin was a broken reed. Yet Clark evidently wished it had been otherwise. There was an undisguised disappointment on Pyott's handsome face as he stood with Clark in what had the appearance of a protective hedge of easels supporting mounted photographs and charts. The bric-a-brac of an operation that would never be allowed to run. The board would never be set up for it, the timetable never decided, the communications and the back-up never arranged. It was already dead.

The knowledge made Aubrey furious.

"I'm sorry, Mr Aubrey," Clark began, "but that guy's in no condition to cross the street. He's in bad shape, psychologically."

Pyott fiddled with his moustache, as if caricaturing his uniform and rank. "I'm afraid so, Kenneth. Nerves shot to bits, willingness to help nil. Bloody little man —"

"What are these?" Aubrey asked, pointing at the easels in turn. "Did we order these?"

"I did," Pyott admitted, "before we had a good chat with our friend Quin."

"Is this Proteus?" Aubrey had stopped in front of one of the grainy, enlarged monochrome pictures. A harbour, the slim, knife-like shape of vessels seen from the air.

"Yes." Clark sounded suddenly revived. He joined Aubrey, Pyott coming to the old man's other shoulder. Aubrey felt hemmed in by younger bone and muscle. "The quality's poor. Satellite picture in poor conditions. Getting dark down there, and the cloud cover obscured most of the shots. This is the inner harbour at Pechenga. That's her." His long, thick finger dabbed towards the top edge of the picture.

"What damage has she sustained?"

"Hard to tell. Look through this." Clark handed Aubrey a magnifying glass, and the old man bent to the photograph, moving the lens slowly over the scene, which threatened at any moment to dissolve into a collection of grey, black and white dots. "Those look like buoyancy bags at the stern. Must have been a low-warhead torpedo, maybe two. She's not under power, she's being towed by the rescue ship ahead of her."

Aubrey surrendered the magnifying glass. "How long?" he asked.

Clark shook his head. "Impossible to guess. One day, two. I don't know. No one could tell you from this shot, not even with computer enhancement."

"Show me where on the chart of Pechenga."

The three of them moved, in a tight little wedge, to another easel. Their voices were echoing drily in the empty room. There was a marble, sepulchral atmosphere about it. The huge map-board in the middle of the floor registered, frozen like something unfinished but preserved in ice, the conditions and dispositions at the time the Proteus was boarded. Even the dot of the relief Nimrod was frozen on station above the coast of Norway. The board had not been allowed to continue revealing the extent of their defeat.

"Here," Clark said. "These are the submarine pens."

"Well? Well? Is it only Quin we are worried about? I will take responsibility for him. We have discussed this operation for most of the night. Is there more than Quin to hold us back?"

"You never give up, do you?" Clark said.

"Would you drop out?"

"No."

"Giles?"

"Too risky — no, I'm not sounding like a granny just for the sake of it. Quin is crucial. If Clark can't get the right information, at the precise split-second he requires it, then everything could be lost — including Clark." Pyott shook his head, held his features in a gloomy, saturnine cast, to emphasise his words.

Aubrey was exasperated. He had seen the Proteus now. He had to act.

"You" ve talked to MoD air?"

"There's no problem there. A Harrier could get Clark across Finland and into the Pechenga area — yes. You have the authority to send it. The AWACS Nimrod that was rigged up especially for sea trials with Proteus is on standby at Farnborough. They could accommodate yourself and Quin. Eastoe and his crew are on stand-by to be flown down from Kinloss to Farnborough." Pyott's face now changed to an expression of exasperation; he was angry with Quin for wasting his time and his organisational talents.

"Communications?"

"Yes, we can do that. Between the Nimrod and Clark, with a range of a hundred miles, speaking in a whisper."

Aubrey had passed to the cutaway chart of the submarine. A multitude of hand-written labels had been appended, explaining and exposing each minute section and piece of equipment and function of the Proteus. Aubrey, by studying it, would know as much about the most secret of the Royal Navy's submarines in an hour as the Russians would know by the time Proteus sailed again from Pechenga.

"Damn," he said softly as the realisation sprung itself upon him like a bad dream. "Jamming or interception? Location?"

"Can be overcome," Pyott admitted reluctantly. His enthusiasm had dimmed again, with his own realisation. His eyes had strayed towards the door of the room where Aubrey had slept and which now contained a sedated Quin.

"Your equipment, Clark?"

"Portable — just. I could make it, with an infinite amount of luck, without drowning under the weight of what I need — would need, Mr Aubrey. It can't be done without Quin. I can't learn enough in time. He has to be there — in range of my transmitter — all the time, and able to talk me through whatever I find." He jabbed a finger at one section of the hull of the Proteus. "Hell, the back-up system's here! Not to mention that this stern section, where some of the sensors are, has been damaged by one, maybe two, torpedoes. I can't go climbing over the hull spot-welding alongside Russian dockyard workers! It's crazy."

"If it can't be done, you will abort “Plumber” and destroy the “Leopard” equipment with the maximum efficiency," Aubrey said in a tight, controlled voice. "But perhaps it can be done."

"What will you do with Quin? Twist his arm, Kenneth? Threaten to fling him out of the Nimrod if he doesn't answer Clark's questions correctly and without hesitation? I'm afraid that Clark and I agree on this occasion. It would be a complex, expensive, dangerous and ultimately wasteful operation. If Clark must go in, let him go in simply to destroy “Leopard”. Someone other than Quin could point him in the right direction there."

Aubrey was plucking at his bottom lip, staring at the chart of the submarine, its workings and innards exposed like a biological specimen or drawing. The ringing of the telephone was loud and startling in the room, and Pyott rushed to answer it as if he were afraid that its noise would waken Quin. Immediately he answered, he glanced at Aubrey, and beckoned him to the desk. It was Cunningham.

" “C”," Pyott whispered as he handed him the receiver.

"Richard?"

"Kenneth — how is our patient?"

"Not good. Uncooperative, unreliable, withdrawn, chronically suspicious and afraid."

"I see. No use to you, then?"

"Why? Has the operation been cleared?"

"Yes, it has. The Secretary of State has cleared it with the PM. She's enthusiastic, I gather."

"The Prime Minister obviously wasn't made aware of the difficulties," Aubrey said sarcastically. Cunningham had had to clear the proposed operation with the cabinet minister responsible for the SIS, the Foreign Secretary who, in his turn, had consulted the Prime Minister. The recruitment of another national, Clark being American, the incursion into Soviet territory, and the special circumstances pertaining to the submarine, had removed the operation beyond the sphere of the intelligence service acting alone and covertly.

"She has cleared the operation with the President, if it proves feasible in your judgement. NATO ministers will be informed under a Priority Two order. I have been successful on your behalf, but you now seem to imply that I" ve been wasting my time?"

"I hope not. I hoped not. It does seem rather hopeless, Richard."

"A great pity. Then Clark will have to go in just to get rid of “Leopard”?"

Aubrey listened to the silence at the other end of the line. Behind Cunningham, there was the enthusiasm, the permission, of the politicians. A chance to give the Russian Bear a black eye, a bloody nose, without risking more than one life. Turning the tables on the Kremlin. He did not despise or disregard the almost naïve way in which his operation had been greeted with enthusiasm in Downing Street and the White House. It was a pity that the seriousness of the operation's parameters and its possible repercussions had required the political sanction of the two leaders. The NATO ministers, with the exception of Norway, would be informed after the event. They did not matter. The naïvety, however, gave him cause to doubt the rationale of his scheme. To be praised by laymen is not the expert's desire. Aubrey now suspected his operation's feasibility.

Cunningham seemed to have no desire to add to what he had said, or to repeat his question. Whatever Aubrey now said, he would, with enthusiasm or reluctance, pass on to the Foreign Office and Downing Street.

"No, he will not," Aubrey heard himself say. The expression created an instant sense of lightness, of relief. It was a kind of self-affirmation, and he no longer cared for pros and cons, doubts and likelihoods. It would be attempted. "Captain Clark will be briefed to examine and, if possible, repair “Leopard”, and to instruct the commanding officer and crew of the Proteus to attempt to escape from the Soviet naval base at Pechenga."

Cunningham merely said, "I'll pass your message on. Good luck, Kenneth."

Aubrey put down the receiver quickly, as if Clark or Pyott might make some attempt to snatch it from him and reverse his instructions. He had spoken clearly, precisely, and with sufficient volume for them to hear him. When he looked at them, Pyott was fiddling with his moustache again, while Clark was perched on the edge of a foldaway table, arms folded across his chest. He was shaking his head. Then, unexpectedly, he grinned.

Pyott said, as Aubrey approached them, "You're taking a grave risk with this young man's life, Kenneth. And perhaps with Quin. Do you think it's worth it?"

"Of course he does," Clark interposed. He was still smiling. "He knows I won't refuse, on any count. Uh, Mr Aubrey?"

"Perhaps, Ethan, perhaps. I'm sorry you have to enact my romantic escapade, but your President is relying on you, too, I gather."

"That's the last time I vote for the guy."

Aubrey looked at his watch. Nine-fifteen.

"Giles, get Eastoe and his crew moved down to Farnborough immediately. Ethan, get Quin in here again. We have less than three hours. I want to be at Farnborough, and you must be on your way by this afternoon." Pyott was already on the telephone. "Get that Harrier put on immediate stand-by, and get Ethan's equipment details over to MoD Air."

"Very well, Kenneth."

There was no longer a sepulchral atmosphere in the room. Instead, a febrile, nervous excitement seemed to charge the air like static electricity forerunning a storm.

The grocer, Aubrey thought. My immediate task is the grocer. He must meet Clark tonight as near Pechenga as we can get him.

Unexpectedly, it had snowed lightly in the Midlands during the night, and Cannock Chase, where they had stopped at Tricia Quin's request, was still dusted with it. The sky was bright, dabs of white cloud pushed and buffeted across the blue expanse by a gusty, chill wind. Small puddles, some of them in hoofprints, were filmed with ice, like cataracted eyes. They walked slowly, Hyde with his hands in his pockets, relaxed even though he was cold. The girl huddled in her donkey jacket, the one in which she had tried to slip into the NEC unnoticed. She seemed concerned to explain why she had asked him to stop, to have requested him to leave the motorway at Stafford and drive across the Chase until they had passed through a sprawling housing estate on the outskirts of Rugeley and found themselves, suddenly and welcomely, amid firs and grazing land. It was early afternoon, and they were no more than fifteen miles from the girl's mother.

An occasional passing lorry, back on the road across that part of Cannock Chase, caused the girl to raise her voice as she spoke.

"I don't know why I always made their problems mine. They even used to argue whenever we came up here, when I was quite young, and I used to hate that especially."

"Rough," was Hyde's only comment, because he could not think of a suitable reply. He could not join the girl's post-mortem on her parents. His memories of Quin were too recent and too acerbic for him to consider the man either sympathetic or important. He allowed the girl, however, to analyse herself in a careful, half-aware manner. She, at least, had his sympathy.

"I suppose it always sprang from the fact that Dad was much brighter than Mum — much brighter than me, too," she added, smiling slightly, cracking the film of ice over one sunken hoofprint, hearing its sharp little report with evident pleasure, with a weight of association. "He was intolerant," she conceded, "and I don't think Mum appreciated what he was doing, after the firm got a bit bigger and she no longer did the bookwork or helped him out. I think they were happy in the early days." She looked at him suddenly, as if he had demurred. "Mum needs to feel useful. I'm like her, I suppose."

"You're a good girl, and you're wasting your time. It's their business, not yours. You can't do anything except be a football. Is that what you want?"

Her face was blanched, and not merely by the cold. He had intruded upon her version of reality, casting doubt upon its veracity.

"You're very hard," she said.

"I suppose so." He had enjoyed the drive down the crowded M6 in the borrowed car, after a night's stop which had refreshed him and which the girl had seemed to desperately require the moment her father's plane had left Manchester. Sutton Coldfield for dinner was an amusing prospect. He considered Mrs Quin's reaction to him as a guest. "Sorry. I'll shut up."

"You don't have to —"

"It's better. It isn't my business."

She paused and looked back. The fern was still brown and stiffly cramped into awkward, broken shapes and lumps by the frost. Birdsong. She wanted to see a deer, the quick flicker of grey, white hindquarters disappearing into the trees. In some unaccountable way, she believed that if she saw deer, things would be improved, would augur well. It would fuse the circuits that existed between present and past. She looked down the perspective of the bridle path, back towards the car park, unaware, while Hyde shivered at her side.

He heard the approach of the small, red and white helicopter first. Its noise intruded, and then it seemed to become a natural and expected part of the pale sky. Tricia Quin knew it would startle the deer, make them more difficult to find, over beyond the line of numbered targets against the high earth bank that composed the rifle range. She looked up, following Hyde's gaze. He was shielding his eyes with one hand. The tiny helicopter in its bright, hire-firm colours swung in the sky as if suspended from an invisible cable, a brightly daubed spider, and then it flicked down towards them.

Hyde's nerves came slowly awake. His other hand came out of his pocket, his body hunched slightly in expectation. The helicopter — a Bell Jetranger he perceived with one detached part of his awareness — was still moving towards them, skimming now just above the line of trees, down the track of the bridle path. The helicopter had hesitated above the car park, then seemed more certain of purpose, as if it had found what it sought. Hyde watched it accelerate towards them, the noise of its single turbo-shaft bellowing down into the track between the trees. Lower, and the trees were distressed by the down-draught and even the stiff, rimy ferns began buckling, attempting and imitating movement they might have possessed before death.

"Run!" he said. The girl's face crumpled into defeat, even agony, as he pushed her off the path towards the nearest trees. "Run!"

She stumbled through frozen grass, through the thin film of snow, through the creaking, dead ferns. Deliberately, he let her widen the distance between them — they wouldn't shoot at her, but he didn't want her killed when they tried to take him out — before he, too, began running.

The first shots were hardly audible above the noise of the rotors. The downdraught plucked at his clothing, his hair and body, as if restraining him. The girl ran without looking back, in utter panic.

Chapter Eleven: FLIGHTS

The jellyfish bags were gone, except on the port side of the Proteus. The starboard ballast tanks had been repaired, and the rudder fin had begun to look like the result of a half-completed, complex grafting operation; spars and struts of metal bone, much now covered with a sheen of new plates. One part of Lloyd, at least, welcomed the surgery. He paced the concrete wharf of the submarine pen, under the hard lights, his guard behind him, taking his midday exercise. The Red Navy had extended the farce even to giving each member of his crew a thorough medical check-up; routine exercise, as much as was permitted by the confines and security necessary to Pechenga as a military installation, had been prescribed. Also permission to use the crew cinema had been granted, alcohol had arrived, in limited and permissible amounts; and fresh food.

Lloyd held his hands behind his back, walking in unconscious imitation of a member of the Royal Family. The diplomat he had requested from Moscow had not arrived, unsurprisingly. Lloyd had made the required formal protests without enthusiasm realising their pointlessness. Better news lay in the gossip he and some of the crew had picked up from their guards. Everyone was waiting on the arrival of a Soviet expert, delayed in Novosibirsk by bad weather. He it was who would supervise the examination of "Leopard". It was the one element of optimism in Lloyd's situation.

The fitters and welders were having their lunch, sitting against the thick, slabbed concrete walls of the pen. They looked a species of prisoner themselves, wearing blue fatigue overalls, lounging in desultory conversation, eating hunks of thick dark bread and pickles and cold meat — in one instance, a cold potato. They watched him with an evident curiosity, but only as something belonging to the foreign submarine on which they were working and which was the real focus of their interest.

Lloyd stopped to gaze back down the two hundred and fifty feet of the Proteus's length. Nuclear-powered Fleet submarines possessed a menace not unlike that of the shark. They were long, shiny-sleek, but portly, massive. Three and a half thousand tons of vessel, well over twice the size of a Second World War ancestor. Backed like a whale, but a killer whale. It hurt Lloyd's pride as her captain to have watched, before the hooter sounded deafeningly in the pen to announce the lunch break, Russian fitters clambering and crawling over her; Lilliputians performing surgery on a helpless Gulliver. He turned away, looking over the gates of the pen, into the tunnel which led to the harbour. One o" clock. In the circle of light he could discern a Soviet destroyer moving almost primly across his field of vision. The view was like that through a periscope, and he wished, with clenched fists and an impotent rage, that it had been.

Pechenga harbour lowered under heavy grey cloud, and he resented the weather as an additional camouflage that aided the Red Navy.

He turned to look back at his submarine once more, and Ardenyev was standing in front of him, hands on his hips, a smile on his face. The smile, Lloyd saw, was calculated to encourage, to repel dislike rather than to sneer or mock. With a gesture, Ardenyev waved the guard away. The man retired. The stubby Kalashnikov still thrust against his hip, barrel outwards. The guard swaggered. A Soviet marine, entirely satisfied with the guard-prisoner relationship between them. Young, conscripted, dim. Ardenyev's amused eyes seemed to make the comment. Yet the wave of Ardenyev's hand had been that of the conjurer, the illusionist. There is nothing to fear, there are no guards, we are friends, abracadabra —

Lloyd suddenly both liked the man and resented him.

"Come to gloat?" he asked. For a moment, Ardenyev absorbed the word, then shook his head.

"No." There was a small satchel over his shoulder, which he now swung forward, and opened. "I have food, and wine," he said. "I hoped you would share lunch with me. I am sorry that I cannot invite you to the officers" mess, or to the only decent restaurant in Pechenga. It is not possible. Shall we sit down?" Ardenyev indicated two bollards, and immediately sat down himself. Reluctantly, Lloyd joined him, hitching his dark trousers to preserve their creases, brushing at the material as if removing a persistent spot. Then he looked up.

"What's for lunch?"

"Caviar, of course. Smoked fish. Georgian wine. Pancakes." He opened the plastic containers one by one, laying them like offerings at Lloyd's feet. He cut slices of bread from a narrow loaf. "Help yourself," he said. "No butter, I'm afraid. Even Red Navy officers" messes sometimes go without butter."

Lloyd ate hungrily, oblivious of the greedy eyes of the nearest fitters. He drank mouthfuls of the rough wine to unstick the bread from his palate, swigging it from the bottle Ardenyev uncorked for him.

Finally, he said, "Your people seem to be taking their time."

"Our workers are the best in the world," Ardenyev answered with a grin.

"I mean on the inside of the hull."

"Oh." Ardenyev studied for a moment, then shrugged. "You have heard rumours, it is obvious. Even Red Navy marines cannot keep anything to themselves." He chewed on a slice of loaf liberally smothered with black caviar. "Unfortunately, our leading expert in naval electronic counter-measures — the man designated to, shall we say, have a little peep at your pet — is delayed, in Siberia." He laughed. "No, not by his politics, merely by the weather. He was supposed to fly from his laboratory in Novosibirsk three days ago. He is snowed in."

"You're being very frank."

"Can you see the point of being otherwise?" Ardenyev asked pleasantly.

"It was a clever plan," Lloyd offered.

"Ah, you are trying to debrief me. Well, I don't mind what you collect on this operation. It has worked. We're not likely to use it again, are we?" His eyes were amused, bright. Lloyd could not help but respond to the man's charm. "It was clever, yes. It needed a great deal of luck, of course — but it worked."

"If your Siberian snowman arrives."

"Ah, yes, Comrade Professor Academician Panov. I have no doubt you will also be meeting Admiral of the Red Banner Fleet Dolohov at the same time. He is bound to come and see his prize."

"You sound disrespectful."

"Do I? Ah, perhaps I only feel annoyance at the fact that an old man with delusions of grandeur could dream up such a clever scheme in his dotage." He laughed, recovering his good humour. "Drink up. I have another bottle."

"They intend removing it, then?"

"What?"

"I'm obliged not to mention sensitive equipment. May I preserve protocol? Their Lordships will be most anxious to know — on my return — that I gave nothing away." Lloyd, too, was smiling by the time he finished his statement.

"Ah, of course." Ardenyev rubbed his nose. There were tiny raisins of caviar at one corner of his mouth. His tongue flicked out and removed them. "No. I doubt it will be necessary. I am not certain, of course. I have done my bit, the balls and bootstraps part of the operation."

"I'm sorry about your men."

Ardenyev looked at Lloyd. "I see that you are. It was not your fault. I would have done the same, in your place. Let us blame our separate masters, and leave it at that."

"When will they let us go?"

Ardenyev looked swiftly down the length of the Proteus, taking in the repairs, the fitters slowly getting up — the hooter had blasted across Lloyd's question, so that he had had to shout it, making it seem a desperate plea rather than a cool enquiry — the new plates, the buckled hull plates, the stripped rudder, the skeletal hydroplane below them in the water.

"Twenty-four hours, assuming it stops snowing in Novosibirsk," Ardenyev said, turning back to Lloyd.

Four days, Aubrey thought. It is four days — less than one hundred hours — since I became involved in this business. I have slept for perhaps fifteen of those hours. I have been out of that damned room beneath the Admiralty for even fewer hours. And now I am consigning myself to another box, something even more uncomfortable, something much more evidently tomb-like.

He took the crewman's hand, and allowed himself to be helped up the last steps of the passenger ladder into the fuselage of the AWACS Nimrod. He did not feel, despite his reflections on age, mortality, sleep and habitat, either tired or weary. True, the adrenalin was sufficient only to forestall such things rather than to invigorate him, but he was grateful, as he ducked his head through the crew door near the tail fin and directly adjacent to the huge RAF roundel on the fuselage. Then the bright, quick-clouding windy day was exchanged for a hollow, metallic interior. And Eastoe was waiting for Quin and himself.

"Here you are, Mr Aubrey. You and Mr Quin here, if you please." He indicated two seats, facing one another across a communications console from which thick wires and cables trailed away down the fuselage floor, in a channel that might have been a gutter in an abattoir, the way in which it riveted Quin's fearful gaze. Other swivel chairs, bolted to the floor and the curving sides of the fuselage, stretched away down the untidy, crowded interior of the Nimrod towards the flight deck. For Quin's benefit, Eastoe added as Aubrey seated himself, "You're wired into all our communications equipment, sir, and the principal sensors. We'll do a full test with Clark when we're airborne. Your equipment operates through this central console —"

"Yes, yes," Quin said impatiently, like someone interested only in the toilet facilities provided. Eastoe's face darkened. His patience was evidently running out. The door swung shut on a gleam of sunlight, and a hand clamped home the locks. Quin appeared physically startled, as if suddenly awoken, and he protested, "I can be of no use to you!" His voice was high-pitched. He held his hands out in front of him, demonstrating their incontrollable quiver. "I am no use to you!"

"Quin!" Aubrey barked. "Quin, sit down! Now! None of us is here to be self-indulgent, especially you. We all have a task to perform. Kindly see to it that you do yours, when the time comes."

Eastoe studied both civilians like a strange, newly-encountered species. There was an easy, adopted contempt around his mouth which Aubrey had met before in military officers. Pyott was an expert at it, when he chose. No doubt even Lloyd in his confinement was employing the sneer militaire. Aubrey almost smiled. The French, of course, had always been world champions. He remembered the young de Gaulle of London — exile days, when Aubrey had been at SOE. The nose had helped, of course.

Aubrey thrust aside the memory, almost with reluctance, and confronted Quin and the RAF Squadron Leader who, he well knew, considered his scheme to rescue Proteus wildly incapable of success. Quin slumped into his seat, swivelling in it instantly like a sulking child; there was a moment of debated defiance which only reached his hands as he clenched them into weak fists. He rubbed a nervy hand through his wiry, thinning hair which stood more comically on end as a result of the gesture. The inventor of "Leopard"; the machinery made of silicons, plastics, metal, the man constructed of straw. It was easy to feel contempt, hard to dismiss that emotion. For Eastoe, it was evidently impossible to remove that attitude from his calculations. Aubrey spent no time in conjecture as to Eastoe's more personal feelings towards him because of the crashed Nimrod and its dead aircrew.

"Squadron Leader Eastoe," Aubrey said levelly, "how long before we are ready to take off?"

Eastoe looked at his watch. "Fifteen minutes."

"You will make that ten, if you please," Aubrey said, treading with a delicate but grinding motion of his heel on all forms of civilian-military protocol. Eastoe's eyes widened in surprise. "As I said, Squadron Leader. Ten minutes. Please see to it."

"Mr Aubrey, I'm the skipper of this — "

"No, you are not. You are its pilot. In matters of flying, I shall consult you, even defer to you. But I am in command here. Please be certain you understand that fact."

Eastoe bit his lip, and choked back a retort. Instead, he nodded his head like a marionette, and went forward to the flight deck. Aubrey, controlling the tremor of weakness he felt in his frame, sat down again opposite Quin, who was looking at him with a new kind of fearful respect.

Aubrey calculated his next remarks, then observed: "It was MoD who originally cocked-up this operation," he said casually, confidentially. "I do not intend to let them do so again. Damn fools, playing war-games with “Leopard”. It simply showed little or no respectt for — or understanding of — your development."

Aubrey watched Quin's ego inflate. He had suspected a balloon of self-admiration in the man, and was not disappointed; except in the arcane sense that Quin was so readily comprehensible, so transparent in his inner self. Whether the ego would keep him going, make him sufficiently malleable and for long enough, remained to be seen. Quin had talked to no one except his daughter for weeks. He required the conversation and the admiration of intelligent men; of men rather than women, Aubrey suspected. A deal of chauvinism there, too; Mrs Quin would have been useful in the early days, but not a sufficient audience for the man's intellect and achievements. It cast a new light on why Quin had allowed the take-over of his small firm by the Plessey giant. It had enlarged his audience of admirers.

"You understand?" Quin asked, almost in surprise.

"Of course. Don't you think I get tired of dealing with these people, too?" Aubrey relaxed, offering Quin a cigarette. The man's right forefinger was stained brown. Quin reached for the cigarette case, taking one of the untipped cigarettes. He used his own lighter, and inhaled deeply, exhaled loudly. Confidence was altering his posture in his seat. He did not slump now, he relaxed.

"I see," Quin said. "I advised them against using “Leopard” so early, and relying on it so totally. They wouldn't listen." There was self-pity there, just below the surface of the words.

"Arrogant," Aubrey murmured. "They're all so arrogant. This time, however, they do as we say, Quin, my dear fellow. They do exactly as we instruct them."

It was six minutes later — Quin had just stubbed out his second cigarette — when the Nimrod reached the end of the taxiway, turned, then roared down the main Farnborough runway, lifting into the patchily cloudy sky, the ground shrinking away from them at a surprising speed. As the buildings and aircraft had sped past his porthole-like window, Aubrey had reminded himself of the delicacy, the weakness of his control over Quin. Leaving him with the oil of flattery; no grounds for confidence there, he remarked to himself, watching the man as his hands gripped the arms of his seat and he sat with closed eyes. No grounds for confidence at all.

The Harrier was a T.4 two-seater trainer, and it was unarmed because of the load it would have to carry and the extra fuel tanks, each of one hundred gallons, beneath its wings. There were no circumstances in which it would require cannon, bombs or missiles, for its mission would be aborted unless it could avoid all contact with Soviet aircraft or ground defences. Despite being a training aircraft, however, it was fitted with the latest type of laser range-finding equipment in the nose.

Ethan Clark was able to move only with difficulty in the pressure suit with which he had been supplied, because of the immersion suit he already wore beneath it. It made him waddle awkwardly, flying helmet under his arm, giving him the appearance of a circus clown imitating a pilot. The pilot of the Harrier, an experienced Squadron Leader whose response to his mission was shading to the cautious side of excitement, walked in front of him across the tarmac of Wittering RAF base, in Lincolnshire. Clark's packs of communications equipment, explosives, sensors, meters, spares and tools had been stowed beneath the wings in two pods where bombs might normally have hung.

Clark had been transported by helicopter to Wittering, and he had briefed the pilot, in the presence of the station commandant and Giles Pyott, who had provided the MoD authority appropriate to the commandeering of an aircraft and a pilot. Now Pyott strode alongside him, the wind plucking at his thick grey hair, his bearing upright, his form cloaked in the camel-coloured British warm.

The pilot clambered up the ladder, and swung himself into the cockpit, looking down immediately from behind the face panel of his helmet as Clark paused before his ascent. Pyott extended his hand at once, and Clark took his cool, tough grip.

"Good luck, Clark," Pyott said stiffly, as if avoiding the real subject of a conversation that was both necessary and important.

"Thanks, Colonel." Clark grinned, despite the gravity of the moment. "Here goes nothing, as they say."

"If you can't make it — if you can't repair, you must abort," Pyott warned solemnly. "Remember that. No heroics over and above the required minimum."

"I appreciate your concern, Colonel."

"Right. Get on with you. I think we're keeping your pilot waiting."

Clark glanced up. "Sure."

He released Pyott's grip, and began clambering awkwardly up the ladder. It was difficult to swing his unaccustomed weight and bulk over the lip of the cockpit, and hot and strenuous work to ease himself into the narrow rear seat. Eventually, he achieved a degree of comfort, strapped himself in and adjusted his flying helmet. The pilot reached up, and closed the cockpit cover. Instantly, nerves raised his temperature, and he felt a film of perspiration on his forehead. He looked down, and the ladder was being carried away by a member of the ground crew. Pyott was striding after it like a schoolmaster harrying someone for a breach of school rules, his walking-stick accompanying his strides like a younger limb. Clark had never noticed Pyott's limp before.

When he reached the grass margin of the taxiway, Giles Pyott turned, almost posing with the little knot of the ground crew.

"Fingers in your ears, sir," a flight-sergeant informed him.

"What? Oh, yes."

Pyott did as instructed. The Harrier was using the runway in a standard take off, instead of its unique vertical lift, because of the extra weight of fuel that it carried. Lights winked at wingtips and belly, suddenly brighter as a heavy cloud was pulled across the early afternoon sun by the wind. Then the aircraft was rolling, slowly for a moment, then with an accelerating rush, passing them — Pyott could see the helmeted blob that was Clark's head, turned towards him — and racing on down the runway. The heat of its single twenty-one and a half thousand pound thrust Pegasus 103 turbofan engine distorted its outline like a heat haze might have done, so that the aircraft appeared to have passed behind a veil, become removed from them. It sat back almost like an animal for an instant, then sprang at the sky and its low, scudding cloud and patches of gleaming brightness. The runway was still gauzy, but the Harrier was a sharply outlined silhouette as it rose then banked to the east.

Pyott took his hands from his ears, realising that the ground crew had already begun making their way towards the hangar area, leaving him a somewhat foolishly isolated figure in an overcoat, a retired officer out for a constitutional who had strolled by mistake into a military installation. He turned on his heel, and followed the others, his imperative now to return to the room beneath the Admiralty.

The Harrier had already climbed into the lowest of the cloud and was lost from sight.

The safety offered by the trees had come to seem a kind of privileged imprisonment, the further they ran. Hyde had seen figures, three of them, drop out of the helicopter into the buffet of the rotors" down-draught in the moment he had paused at the first trees, and knew they were cut off from the car. By now, someone would have driven it out of the car park and hidden it and removed the distributor. The trees masked them — they heard the helicopter roaming in search of them every few minutes — but they bordered a long, higher stretch of barren heathland where summer fires of a drought year had exposed the land even further. Dull, patchy with snow and fern, treeless, exposed. A minefield as far as they were concerned.

When they first stopped, he had held the frightened, shivering girl against him, but even before her breathing calmed and she had drawn any comfort from the embrace, he was asking her urgently, "How well do you know the area? Can you see it in your mind's eye? Where's the nearest road? How far? Can you run? What's the shape of this plantation? What do you know? Anything!"

Roads? No, she didn't know, she couldn't explain the shape of Cannock Chase, she'd never seen a map of it —

A childhood place, he understood even as he fumed silently. She remembered it as a series of snapshots, the sight of deer, high blue skies above whitened landscapes, the fall and rise of the land only as a viewer who wished the ability to paint would perceive and remember. Useless to them now.

They followed the edge of the plantation north for almost two miles, further and further from the road and the car park and the town of Rugeley. Then the girl announced that she did not know that part of the Chase. They were north-east of the rifle range, but it was hidden from them by the trees.

"The road from Stafford to Lichfield," the girl said, her face screwed up in thought, her chest still heaving with the effort of their last run.

"What?" he said.

"It runs through the Chase." She looked up into the dark trees, as if for inspiration. She was painfully trying to remember turns in the road, bearings from her childhood, signposts. "Past Shugborough Hall — Wolseley Bridge, turn right…" She shook her head while he slapped his hands against his thighs in exasperation. Then she was looking at him, a sense of failure evident in her eyes. She added, hesitantly, "I think if we continue north, we'll hit the main road."

"Trees all the way?" he snapped, unable to restrain the sense of entrapment that glided out of the dark trees and accompanied them at every step. They were like her precious deer, confined to the trees.

She shrugged hopelessly. "I don't know."

"Oh, Christ!" She looked as if he had struck her. He added, in a tone that aspired to more gentleness, "Any wardens", gamekeepers" houses around here?" Again, she shook her head.

Beyond the trees, the afternoon was bright, dazzling off the last paper-thin sheet of snow on the higher, open ground. The chilly wind soughed through the upper branches of the firs. To the north and west, the direction of the weather, there was heavier cloud. It was a weekday afternoon, and they had seen no other people since they left the car park, which had contained just one other car. Once, they had heard a dog bark, but they had seen neither it nor its owner. A distant vehicle's engine had sawn into the silence at another point, but again they had not seen it. Hyde had never realised before how isolated he could feel in a part of the cramped island that had become his home.

"I'm ready," Tricia Quin offered.

"Okay, let's go."

Their feet crackled on fallen twigs, or crunched through the long winter's frosty humus and leaf litter. An eerie, dark green, underwater light filtered through the firs, slanting on the grey and damp-green trunks. Hyde had time to think that he could not imagine how it had ever been a magic place for the girl, before he dragged her without sound off the narrow, foot-pressed, deer-run track they were following, behind the mossy trunk of a fir. Deep ravines in the bark, its hardness against his cheek, his hand over the girl's mouth, his breath hushing her before he released her; the movement of an insect over the terrain of the bark, almost so close as to be out of focus. He held the girl against him, pulled into his body. She was shivering, and her head was cocked listening. Her breath came and went, plucking at the air lightly yet fervently; an old lady dying. He dismissed the inappropriate image.

She reached her face up to him in a parody of intimacy, and whispered in his ear, "What is it? I can't even hear the helicopter."

He tossed his head, to indicate the track and the trees in the direction they had come.

"I heard something. I don't know what. Let's hope it's an old lady out for a brisk stroll." The girl tried to smile, nudging herself closer against him. He felt her body still. He listened.

Footstep. Crack, dry and flat as snapping a seaweed pod. Then silence, then another crack. Twigs. Footstep. The timing was wrong for an old lady, a young man, even a child. Wrong for anyone simply out for a walk, taking exercise. Sounds too careful, too slow, too spaced to be anything else than cautious, careful, alert. Stalking.

His heart began to interfere with his hearing as he stifled his breathing and the adrenalin began to surge. He should have moved further off the track. It was their tracks that were being followed, easy to do for a trained man, too much leaf-mould underfoot hot to imprison the evidence of their passage, along with the deer prints, the hoof prints, the dogs" pawmarks, the ridge'd patterns of stout walking shoes. —

Crack, then a soft cursing breath. Close, close. He pushed the girl slightly away and reached behind him, feeling the butt of the gun against his palm. She watched him, uninitiated into that kind of adulthood, looking very childlike and inadequate and requiring him to be responsible for her.

She pressed against the fir's trunk beside him. The tree was old enough, wide enough in the trunk, to mask them both. He nudged her when he could not bear the waiting any longer and substituted nerves for knowledge, and she shuffled two small paces around the trunk. He remained where he was, his hand still twisted, as if held by a bully, behind his back.

Breathing, heavier than the girl's, the sense of the weight of a heavy male body transferring from one foot to another, the glimmer of a hand holding something dark, the beginnings of a profile. Then they were staring at one another, each holding a gun, no more than seven yards apart, each knowing the stalemate for what it was, each understanding the other's marksmanship in the extended arms, the crouch of the body into a smaller target. Understanding completely and quickly, so that neither fired.

A heavy man in an anorak and dark slacks. Walking boots, the slacks tucked into heavy woollen socks. A Makarov pistol, because a rifle couldn't be hidden.

The man's eyes flickered, but did not look up, as the noise of the helicopter became apparent to both of them. A slow, confident smile spread on the man's face. Not long now. The stalemate would be broken. Hyde concentrated on watching the man's eyes and his hands. Perspiration trickled from beneath his arms, and his mouth was dry. His hand was beginning to quiver with the tension, beginning to make the gun unsteady. The noise of the helicopter grew louder, and the trees began to rustle in the down-draught. He could not kill without being killed, there was no advantage, not a micro-second of it —

A noise in the undergrowth, a small, sharp stamping pattern. The brushing aside of whippy low branches and twigs. High, springing steps. Then the deer was on them.

Hyde it was who fired, because it had to be another pursuer, even though the subconscious was already rejecting the idea. The Russian fired too, because he had been startled out of the confidence that it was a friend, another gun against Hyde. Tricia Quin screamed long before reaction-time should have allowed her to do so, as if she had foreseen the animal's death. The small, grey deer tumbled and skidded with cartoon-like, unsteady legs, its coat badged with dark new markings, then it was between them, veering off, then falling slowly, wobbling as when new-born, on to the crisp, rotting humus, where it kicked once, twice —

Reaction-time, reaction-time, Hyde screamed at himself, even as a wrench of pain and guilt hurt his chest. He swung his pistol, the Russian doing the same, a mirror-image. Reaction-time, reaction-time; he hadn't totally ignored the deer, kicking for a third, fourth time, then shuddering behind the Russian —

Hyde's gun roared, the split-second before that of the Russian. The man was knocked off balance, and his bullet whined past Hyde's left shoulder, buzzing insect-like into the trees. The man lay still instantly, unlike the deer which went on thrashing and twitching and seemed to be making the noise that in reality was coming from the girl, a high, helpless, violated scream.

He ran to the deer, placed the gun against its temple — the dark helpless eye watching him for a moment, the red tongue lolling — and pulled the trigger to shut out the girl's screams which went on even after the report of his gun died away.

"Shut up," he yelled at her, waving the gun as if in threat. "Shut up! Run, you stupid bitch — run!" He ran towards her, the noise of the helicopter deafening just above the treetops, and she fled from him.

Thirty thousand feet below them, through breaks in the carpet of white cloud, Aubrey could make out the chain of rocks that were the Lofoten islands off the north-west coast of Norway. Clark was perhaps a hundred miles away from them at that point, to the south and east, near Bod0, linking up with the RAF Victor in order to perform a midair refuelling of the Harrier. Until that point, both the Nimrod and the Harrier had maintained strict radio silence. Now, however, Aubrey could no longer delay the testing of the communications equipment that would link Clark and Quin together when the American reached the Proteus.

Quin was sweating nervously again, and a swift despisal of the man passed through Aubrey's mind, leaving him satisfied. The emotion removed doubt, even as it pandered to Aubrey's sense of authority in the situation he had created. The man was also chain-smoking and Aubrey, with the righteousness of someone forced by health to give up the habit, disliked Quin all the more intensely for the clouds of bluish smoke that hung perpetually around their heads, despite the air-conditioning of the Nimrod.

"Very well, Flight-Lieutenant," Aubrey instructed the radio operator assigned to monitor the communications console Quin would be using, "call up our friend for us, would you?" Aubrey could sense the dislike and irritation he created in the RAF officers who were crewing the Nimrod. However, having begun with Eastoe in a testy, authoritarian manner, he could not now relax into more congenial behaviour.

"Sir," the young officer murmured. He flicked a bank of switches, opening the channel. There was no call-sign. Clark's receiver would be alive with static in his earpiece. He would need no other signal. The maximum range of the transceivers was a little over one hundred miles, their range curtailed by the need to encode the conversation in highspeed transmission form. A tiny cassette tape in Clark's more portable equipment recorded his words, speeded them up, then they were transmitted to this console between Aubrey and Quin. As with the larger equipment in the room beneath the Admiralty, tapes in Quin's receiver slowed down the message, then replayed it as it had been spoken — whispered, Aubrey thought — by the American. And the reverse procedure would occur when Quin, or himself, spoke to Clark. Clumsy, with an unavoidable, built-in delay, but the only way the signals could not be intercepted, understood, and Clark's precise location thereby exposed.

"Yes?" Clark replied through a whistle of static, his voice distant and tired, almost foreboding in its disembodiment. Clark was a long way away, and alone.

Testing," Aubrey said, leaning forward. He spoke very quietly.

"Can't hear you," Clark replied. There had been a delay, as if old habits of call-sign and acknowledgement waited to pop into Clark's mind.

"This is a test," the flight-lieutenant said in a louder voice.

"That's too loud. Clark, I want you to speak quietly." The RAF radio operator evidently found the whole business amateurish and quite unacceptable. Even Aubrey found the conversation amusing, yet fraught with weaknesses. He would have liked to have taken refuge in established routines of communication, in batteries of call-signs and their endless repetition, in jargon and technicalities. Except that his communications network was simply about being able to communicate in a whisper over a distance of one; hundred miles, Clark lying on his back or his stomach in a dark, cramped space, out of breath and perspiring inside an immersion suit, working on a piece of incredibly complex equipment he did not understand, trying to locate a fault and repair it. Call-signs would not help him, even though they seemed, by their absence at that moment, to possess the power of spells and charms. "What?" Aubrey said, craning forward towards the console. "I didn't catch that." There was an open sneer on the flight-lieutenant's face. "Yes, I heard you clearly. Now, I'll hand you over to Mister Quin, and you can run through that technical vocabulary you worked out with him. Random order, please, groups of six."

Aubrey sat back, a deal of smugness of manner directed at the radio operator. Quin looked like a nervous, first-time broadcaster or interviewee. He cleared his throat and shuffled in his seat, a clipboard covered with his strange, minuscule, spidery writing in front of him. Then he swiftly wiped his spectacles and began reading — Aubrey motioned him to lower his voice.

For five minutes, as the Nimrod continued northwards towards North Cape and her eventual station inside Norwegian airspace off the coast near Kirkenes, Clark and Quin exchanged a complex vocabulary of technical terminology. Aubrey remembered occasions of impending French or Latin tests, and the last minute, feverish recital of vocab by himself and other boys, before the master walked in and all text books had to be put away. The dialogue had a comforting, lulling quality. When Quin indicated they had finished, he opened his eyes. Quin appeared drained, and Aubrey quailed at the prospect of keeping him up to the mark.

"Thank you, Clark. That will do. Maximum communication, minimum noise. Good luck. Out."

Aubrey cut the channel, and nodded his satisfaction to Quin and the flight-lieutenant. Out of the tiny round window, he could see the herringbone pattern of a ship sailing north through the Andfjord, inshore of one of the Vesteralen islands. The Nimrod was perhaps little more, than half an hour from North Cape, and the same time again from their taking up station on the Soviet border. In an hour, they would be committed. "Plumber" would really be running, then.

Clark flicked off the transceiver, and shook his head as if he doubted the reality of the voices he had heard. The Harrier was seemingly about to settle on to the carpet of white cloud beneath them, and the tanker, the old Victor bomber, was a dot ahead and to starboard of them. Below the cloud, where the weather had let in small, almost circular viewing ports, the grey water and the slabbed, cut, knife-carved coastline were already retreating into evening, north of the Arctic Circle. Half an hour before, he had looked down between clouds and seen the vast sheet of the Svartisen glacier, looking like a huge, intact slab of marble fallen on the land, tinged by the sun into pinks and greens and blues. The Harrier moved forward, overtaking the Victor tanker. The pilot changed his position until the tanker was slightly to port, then the probe that had needed to be specially fitted aligned with the long trailing fuel line from the wing of the Victor and its trumpet-bell mouth into which the pilot had to juggle the Harrier's probe. Bee and flower. Clark considered another, more human image, and smiled. Not like that. This was all too mechanical, and without passion.

The Victor's fuselage glowed silver in the sunlight from the west. The RAF roundel was evident on her side as the Harrier slid across the cloud carpet, and there seemed no motion except the slow, dance-like movements of possible combatants as the two aircraft matched speeds and height. The probe nudged forward towards the cone, the fuel-line lying on the air in a gentle, graceful curve. The probe nudged the cone, making it wobble, and then the Harrier dropped back slightly. Too high, too much to the left. Again, the probe slid forward towards the flower-mouth of the cone. Clark watched its insertion, felt the small, sharp jerk as it locked, then saw the glimmer of the three green locking lights on the instrument panel. The fuel began to surge down the fuel line.

Six and a half minutes later — it had become noticeably more evening-like, even at that altitude — the refuelling was complete, and the probe withdrew, the cone slipping forward and away as the speed of the two aircraft no longer matched. The gleaming, part-shadowed fuselage of the tanker slid up and away from them, the fuel-line retreating like a garden hose being reeled in. In a few more moments, the Victor had lost its silhouetted identity and was little more than a gleaming dot. The cloud brushed against the belly of the Harrier.

"Ready?" the pilot asked in his headset.

"Yes."

"Hang on, then. This is where it gets hairy. Don't look if you" ve got a weak stomach." The pilot chuckled.

"I can stand it."

Even before he finished speaking, the nose of the Harrier dipped into the cloud, and white turned grey and featureless and dark immediately. Clark felt the altitude of the Harrier alter steeply as she dived through the clouds, descending from thirty-five thousand feet.

They emerged into a twilit world, and the pilot levelled the Harrier and switched on the terrain-following radar and the auto-pilot which would together flick and twist them through the mountainous Norwegian hinterland.

Clark watched, as the dark water of the Skerstadfjord rose to meet them, then flashed beneath the belly of the aircraft. The pilot was flying the Harrier at five hundred miles an hour. The tiny lights of fishing hamlets flickered along the shore, and then were gone. Small boats returning from the day's fishing, the main north-south highway, then the dark, high, sharp peaks of the mountain range engulfed them. Clark winced, despite his experience, as the tiny insect of the Harrier flicked between two peaks, then followed the snail-like track of a narrow fjord, a smear of lighter grey in the gloom.

The aircraft lifted over the back of a line of hills, then dipped down to follow the terrain again. A huge glacier seemed to emerge suddenly from the darkness, gleaming with a ghostly, threatening light. The Harrier banked, and slipped as buoyantly and easily along its face as a helicopter might have done. Clark had never flown in one of the US Marine Harriers, built under licence by McDonnell Douglas, and it was the only means of comparison he could apply; a demented, speeded-up helicopter. Then the glacier was behind them, one eastern tip of it falling into a small, crater-like lake.

"Sweden," the pilot announced.

"Nice view," Clark replied drily.

"Want to go back for your stomach?"

"I'm okay." Clark noticed the change in his own voice, the subconscious attempt to discourage conversation. He had moved into another phase of "Plumber". Already, he was alone, already it was another, different border they had crossed.

There were lakes as the terrain slowly became less mountainous, the peaks less sharp against the still lighter clouds and the few patches of stars. Grey, almost black water, the jagged lillies of ice floes everywhere. A rounded space of mirror-like water, a few dotted lights, then two companion stretches which the Harrier skimmed across like a stone. Then a long ribbon of lake, almost like a river because he could not perceive, at that altitude, either end of it, which the Harrier followed as it thrust into the centre of Swedish Lapland.

A village, like one dim street lamp at their speed, even the momentary flicker of headlights, then the Harrier banked to port, and altered course, following the single road north through that part of Sweden, the Norbotten, towards the Finnish border. The sheer rock faces closed in again, and the darkness seemed complete, except where the swift glowworms of hamlets and isolated farms and the occasional gleams of car or lorry headlights exposed the whiteness of snow in the narrow valleys through which the road wound. Then, lower country, and a gleaming, humped plain of whiteness stretched before and beneath the aircraft.

"Finland," the pilot announced, but added nothing else.

Clark attempted repose, sensing like a man with a severely limited water supply, the waste of adrenalin his tension betokened. The shadow of the aircraft raced over the snow less then a hundred feet below them as the Harrier skimmed under the radar net. Bodø radar would have reported a loss of contact immediately they had finished refuelling, and the matter would not have been taken further. Neither neutral country, Sweden nor Finland, had been required to know of the passage of the Harrier, nor would they have sanctioned its incursion into their airspace.

A herd of reindeer, startled by the roar of the engine, scattered at the gallop beneath them. Then the darkness of trees, then whiteness again. The cloud cover above the cockpit was broken, mere rags now, and the moon gleamed. They were so close to the ground, it was like impossibly fast skiing rather than flying. It was a mere seventy minutes since they had ended their refuelling, and their flight was more than half completed. Clark glanced to port and starboard, and considered the packs in the two underwing pods. Right hand good, left hand bad, he told himself with a smile that did not come easily. Right-hand pack, repair equipment, meters, spares. Left-hand pack, explosives, detonators, the end of "Leopard". He believed that it was the left-hand pack that he would be forced to use. He did not consider his own fate. He would be arrested as a spy, naturally. Prison, interrogation, exchange for a Russian agent. It was a pattern of events that was predictable and not to be considered. The trick was, not to get caught, even when walking — swimming — into a Russian naval base; don't get caught.

The quick, easy toughness amused and comforted him. There was always a persistent sense of unreality about field operations, until the clock started ticking and the adrenelin became uncontrollable, and he knew, from experience and from training, that there was no alternative but to exist within that spacious immortality. It was the state of mind the CIA called "concussive readiness". It was the state of mind of the successful field agent.

Lake Inari, the sacred lake of Finnish Lapland, began to show beneath them, illuminated by moonlight, the town of Ivalo a smear of light, then a mild haze, then nothing. The occasional lights of boats, the carpet of ice-dotted water persisting for mile after mile, an unrelieved, gleaming expanse where only the few black humps and spots of islands relieved its unreflecting mirror.

Before they reached the north-eastern shore of Inari, the Harrier banked to starboard, altering course to the east and crossing the border into Norway, a tongue of NATO thrusting southwards from Kirkenes and the coast between Finland and the Soviet Union. A tidier, smoother landscape — though he wondered whether that was not simply illusion — well-dotted with lights, then within a mile they were skimming the treetops of well-forested country, and there was a sullen, hazy glow to starboard.

The pilot throttled back, and the blur of the landscape became a dark flowing movement. Clark could not see the trees themselves, not even small clearings in the forest, but the landscape now possessed a life of its own. It was no longer a relief map over which they passed, or a three-dimensional papier-maché model.

The lights to starboard were from the watch-towers and the rows of lights along the wire of the border fence separating Norway from the Soviet Union. Clark swallowed, then breathed consciously at a relaxed pace, spacing the intervals between each inhalation and exhalation exactly and precisely. Right hand good, left hand bad, his mind recited again.

He saw the lights of a string of hamlets along the one good road north to Kirkenes. Kirkenes itself was a dim glow on the horizon ahead of them. Then the Harrier flicked to starboard, altering course eastwards to run along the Norwegian border. Pechenga was eight miles beyond the border. Eight miles, and they were perhaps now twelve miles from the border as it swung north to the coast. The Harrier was at little more than one third speed and well below the radar net. Four miles per minute. Three minutes. No, already two minutes fifty. The landscape seemed to take on more vivacity, as if he were studying it in order to remember it. The ribbon of a road, dark patches of trees, vague lights, sheets of white snow. Lumpy, softened white hills. Then the sullen, ribbon-like glow, enlarging to a string of lights, decorating the darkness beyond. A gap in the trees, after a narrow strip of water no more than a pool at that speed, where the two fences and the lights marched north and south, and then the glow was behind them, fading.

He was inside the Soviet Union.

The pilot flicked off the auto-pilot and the terrain-following radar, and assumed manual control of the Harrier. The plane's airspeed dropped. Pechenga was a bright, hazy globe of light ahead. The Soviet Union. Fortress Russia. Clark had never taken part in a penetration operation before.

"Ready? It's coming up to port."

He saw the water of a lake and an uninhabited landscape of woods and open stretches of snow. The Harrier slowed even further, almost to a hover, above a tiny white space between the trees. The image of a helicopter came to Clark again. The sound of the Pegasus engine faded, and the pilot modulated the air brake. Then he increased the engine's thrust once more, directing it downwards through the four nozzles beneath the fuselage, putting the Harrier into a hover.

Snow blew up round the canopy, and the dark seemed to grow above them by some freak of fertilisation. More snow, obscuring the canopy, then the final wobble, the dying-away of the engine, and the heaviness of the aircraft settling into the snow and slush.

"Right. You're on your own. Don't waste time."

"See anything?"

"No."

Clark opened the canopy. Snow powdered his upturned face. He hefted himself upright, and then swung his body awkwardly over the high sill of the fuselage, beginning his burglary of the Soviet Union. He looked around him, the sudden chill of the early night and the wind making his teeth chatter. He scanned the area of trees around the clearing three times, then he saw the pale, easily missed wink of a torch signalling.

“Right. He's there," he said to the pilot.

"Good luck."

"Thanks." He placed his feet firmly in the foot-holds on the side of the fuselage, and climbed down. He moved beneath the port wing and snapped open the clips on the underwing pod. He lifted out the pack — left hand bad — and laid it on the snow. Then he unloaded the starboard pack.

He picked up the two packs and moved away from the Harrier, dragging the heavy packs through the snow, which was deeper outside the half-melted circle caused by the downthrust of the Pegasus engine. When he looked up, a small, bulky figure was hurrying towards him. There was the inevitable, electric moment of doubt, was it the right man, was it the KGB, almost bound to be the KGB? Then the man spoke.

"Welcome, my friend —"

The remainder of what he said, Clark could see his lips moving, was drowned by the increasing whine of the engine. Clark, still gripping the man's hand tightly, turned to watch as the Harrier rose above the level of the trees, lurched forward, then smoothly accelerated. He was inside the Soviet Union, a couple of miles from the naval base of Pechenga, and on his own, except for the help of a grocer. It was difficult not to feel a sense of hopelessness nibbling at the feeling of concussion which he required if he was to succeed.

The grocer picked up one of the packs, and hefted it on to his back.

"Come," he said. "Come."

Leper. The girl wanted to get up, talk to the two people passing twenty yards away below them, but he held her down, his hand now almost out of habit over her mouth. Fortunately, they didn't have a dog with them. The man wore an anorak and carried a camera, swinging by its strap, and the woman was wearing a fur coat that looked almost like camouflage, white with dark patches. Hyde listened to them talking, watched the man put his arm around the woman because she remarked on the cold of the evening, watched them, too, look up at the fading light and the gathering clouds; finally recognised that they were heading back towards the car park.

Two reasons. He didn't know them and therefore he distrusted them, and also he could not risk enlisting anyone on their behalf. He'd killed now. Anyone who came into contact with him was thereby endangered. Leper.

He released the girl, and she shuffled away from him, rubbing her arms, touching her mouth where his hand had been clamped.

"Why?" she almost wailed. "Why not?"

"Because you could get them killed, or us killed. Take your pick." The wetness of the ferns was soaking into him. He was hungry, his stomach hollow and rumbling. He was thirsty. He scooped up a thin film of half-melted snow, and pressed it into his mouth. Then he rubbed his wet hand over his face in an attempt to revive himself. The girl looked no fresher than he felt.

"They were out for a walk," she said sullenly.

"Maybe. Look, just let it rest, will you? We're on our own, and that's all there is to it."

"Why — why are they chasing us?" the girl asked, her face recovering earlier anxieties, past terrors.

Hyde studied her in disbelief. "What?"

"My father's safe — why do they want us?"

"Oh, Christ — don't you understand the simplest moves in the game?" Hyde shook his head. "Perhaps you don't. Obviously, Petrunin has had new orders. You're as valuable to them now as you were before. If they have you, they can trade you off for your dad. See?"

"How? You" ve got him, for Christ's sake!"

"He's not in prison. If he knew they had you, he'd take the first chance of walking out to join you. On a plane to Moscow."

The girl appeared about to ask another question, then she fell silent, watching her hands as if they belonged to someone else while they picked at the stiff, rimed grass.

"You ready?"

She looked helplessly, tiredly at him, then got slowly to her feet. "Yes."

"Come on, then."

After the death of the deer and the Russian, they had worked their way east across the Chase, assuming that other men on foot, and the helicopter, would pursue them north, towards the Stafford road. The helicopter, blinded by the shroud of firs through which they ran, drifted away northwards, its noise following it like a declining wall. They saw no other Russians.

Hyde waited until this moment, when it was almost dark and the thin, half-melted sheen of snow had begun to gleam like silver, before attempting to make the car park and the road where they had first stopped. The rifle range was behind them now, to the north.

They trod carefully down the slope of dead ferns, then began to ascend slowly along a tiny deer-track through the tightly growing, restraining heather. Almost dark. Perhaps they could risk this open slope —

The shout was alarming, but almost as unnoticed, except by Hyde's subconscious, as the bark of a dog. The girl looked round slowly, but only because he had stopped. A second shout brought him out of his lassitude. A figure on a rise, perhaps two hundred yards away, waving what might have been a stick. Rifles now. No easy-to-hide handguns. They had put them less than equal with him. His body protested at the effort required of it. The girl bumped into him, staggering as though ill or blind. He took her hand. A second figure rose over the edge of the rise, outlined against the pale last gleam of the day. Cloud pressed down on the open bowl of dead heather in which he had allowed them to be trapped.

The helicopter. Almost too dark to see them, too dark for them to make it out until it blurted over the rise and bore down on them, its noise deafening by its suddenness. He did not have to tell the girl to run. The deer track was not wide enough for both of them and he floundered through wet, calf-high heather keeping pace with her.

Shots, deadened by the noise of the rotors and the racing of his blood. Wild shooting. The helicopter overshot them, and began to bank round.

"Over there!"

The land folded into a deeper hollow. Deer scattered out of it as they approached it, startled by the helicopter. A hallucinatory moment as the grey, small, lithe, panicking forms were all around them, and Hyde remembered the pain-clouded eye into which he had looked that afternoon before he squeezed the trigger; then the deer were gone and the hollow was dark and wound away in a narrow trench which they followed. It led northwards, back towards the higher ground and the rifle range, but he had no alternative but to follow it. They ducked down, keeping below the level of the ground, then the trench petered out and they were left almost at the top of the rise.

Hyde threw himself flat and looked over the lip of the ground. Nothing. The light had gone. In no more than a few minutes, there was nothing. The noise of the helicopter was a furious, enraged buzzing on the edge of hearing, as if already miles away.

Couldn't be —? He turned on to his back, and groaned. Worse then he thought. He had imagined a flesh wound, a scratch, but it was throbbing. His whole arm was throbbing. He tried to sit up, and then lay back, another groan escaping him.

"What is it?"

"Nothing —"

"What's the matter?"

She touched his shoulder, and immediately the pain was intense, almost unbearable, and then he could not decipher her expression or even see the white blob of her face any longer. It rushed away from him at great speed, down a dark tunnel.

Chapter Twelve: ACCESS

"On station." Eastoe's communications with Aubrey were now of a single, close-lipped, unhelpful kind, the RAF officer providing only a grudging assistance. Aubrey, knowing it would not interfere with the pilot's efficiency, was prepared to allow the man his mood.

The Nimrod had begun flying a box pattern over an inshore area of the Barents Sea which would take her to within a few miles of the Soviet border at the end of each eastward leg of the pattern. Travelling westwards, the Nimrod would pass up the Varangerfjord, then turn north across the block of land jutting into the Barents Sea known as Varangerhalvoya, then turn on to her eastward leg which would again take her out over the Barents. A rigid rectangle of airspace, at any point of which the Nimrod was no more than seventy miles from Clark's transceiver in Pechenga.

Aubrey glanced once more through the window in the fuselage. A red, winking light to port of the Nimrod, a little behind and below. A Northrop F-5 of the Royal Norwegian Air Force, one of three somewhat outdated fighter aircraft that provided their screen. The arrangement had been considered necessary by MoD Air, and by the Norwegians, but Aubrey considered it mere window-dressing. He did not anticipate problems with Soviet aircraft, and if there were any such problems, the F-5s would be immediately recalled to the military airfield at Kirkenes.

Thank you, Squadron Leader," Aubrey replied to Eastoe.

"Would you come forward to the flight deck, Mr Aubrey?" Eastoe added, and Aubrey was immediately struck by the conspiratorial edge to the voice. He removed his headphones and stood up, not looking at Quin.

He moved down the aircraft gingerly, an old man moving down a bus or a train, hands ready to grab or fumble for support. He paused between the two pilots" chairs, and Eastoe turned to him. His face was grave, that of a messenger with bad news to impart; some battle lost.

"What is it, Squadron Leader?"

"This." He handed Aubrey a sheet torn from a message pad. "It's for you, Eyes Only. No good letting Quin hear the bad news."

The message was from Shelley, and it informed Aubrey — who felt his heart clutched by a cold, inescapable hand — that Hyde and the girl had disappeared somewhere between Manchester and Birmingham, without trace. Shelley had organised the search which was now proceeding. Aubrey looked up from the sheet, and found Eastoe's gaze intently fastened on him, as if demanding some human frailty from him by way of reaction.

Thank you, Squadron Leader," Aubrey said stiffly. "You were quite right to keep this from Mr Quin. You will continue to do so."

"Makes things a bit awkward, mm?" Eastoe sneered. "Any reply?"

"Nothing I could say would make the slightest difference," Aubrey snapped, and turned on his heel, retracing his steps down the tunnel of the aircraft, composing his features and silencing the flurry of thoughts and images in his mind. Now all that mattered was that Quin functioned like a machine, when the time came.

He regained his seat. Quin seemed uninterested in his reappearance. Aubrey studied him.

Quin, under scrutiny, became quickly and cunningly alert. His posture was totally self-defensive. Then he attempted to achieve the academic trick of distracting attention by vigorously polishing his spectacles. Aubrey's features wrinkled in impatience, and this seemed to further embolden Quin.

"Your man hasn't called in, not since he left the aircraft," he said.

Aubrey was incensed. "His name is Clark," he remarked icily.

"But, the time factor?" Quin persisted. Aubrey realised that the man's silence for the last hour had led to a consolidation of truculent fear. He had, as it were, husbanded his bloody-mindedness until they arrived on station. Every minute that Clark had not reported in satisfied Quin that there would be a premature, and not long delayed, end to his confinement aboard the Nimrod. Clark, in fact, because of the short range of his transceiver, had not signalled them since the, test. The Harrier pilot, making for Bardufoss to refuel had sent one brief, coded signal to inform Aubrey that Clark had landed safely and without trouble. That had been forty minutes before.

Aubrey looked at his watch. Eight-thirty. He knew that in two, at most three, hours, he would cancel the, operation. "Plumber" would be over unless they heard from Clark within that time. He would have been caught, or killed. Aubrey composed himself to wait, wishing that he could do it somewhere where he did not have to confront Quin across a silent communications console in the skeletal, untidy fuselage of a Nimrod. It was, he considered, rather too much like sitting inside a television set. At least, its screens and wiring and circuitry and sensors gave much the same impression as did the innards of his set, whenever the engineer from the rental company had to come to his flat to effect a repair.

But it was Quin, more than anyone, who angered and threw him into doubt. Clark had to depend upon this pompous, cowardly, indifferent man, and it seemed unfair.

Abandon that line of thought, Aubrey instructed himself. You will have to make the man helpful, when the time comes. He felt the Nimrod, at twenty thousand feet, make its turn on to the eastward leg of its flight pattern, out over the Barents and towards the Soviet border. Somewhere to the north of them, perhaps no more than twenty or thirty miles away, was the location of the attack on the Proteus and the ledge where she had rested until the Russians had raised her to the surface.

He found his fingers had adopted a drumming, impatient pattern of movement against one side of the console. Guiltily, he stopped the noise immediately. Quin seemed wreathed in self-satisfaction. He had evidently decided that Clark would fail, even had failed, to penetrate Pechenga. He was like a man sheltering from the rain. The shower would stop, soon, and he could make his way home.

"What about the air tanks?"

"Those I have stored for you with a friend. No, not one of us, but he can be trusted. It is lucky I had them still. I have not been asked to make a — what do you say, reconnaissance —?" Clark nodded, smiling. "Yes, a reconnaissance of the harbour for a long time. My old wetsuit — perished, alas. But the tanks are good, my friend, I assure you."

"And I believe you."

They were seated in the small, cramped room above the grocer's shop. The Pechenga agent-in-place for SIS was a short, rotund man with a stubble on his jaw. His eyes were small and black, like raisins folded into the sallow dough of his flesh. When he smiled, he showed remarkably white dentures. Clark trusted his ordinariness as much as his thoroughness. His name was Pasvik. Once, generations before, his family had been Norwegian. Whether that had been before the war, before the first war, before the Revolution, even Pasvik did not know.

Pasvik owned the grocery shop himself. His father had acquired the contract for supplying eggs and flour to the naval base, for use in preparing officers" meals. It was his patronage, his "By Appointment" that had enabled him to retain control of his shop, collect the naval intelligence London required and used, and which gave him freedom of movement and access. Also, it provided him with what Clark suspected was a thriving black-market business involving smuggling from Scandinavia and supplying to the naval base and Pechenga's Party officials modest but lucrative luxury goods. Pasvik had made only passing mention of these activities, as if he felt they qualified his status as an accredited agent of London, but for the American it only increased his awareness of the man's intelligence and nerve.

Clark studied the large-scale map that Pasvik had laid on the wooden table between them. A large brandy glass stood near Clark's right hand. The odour of the liquor mingled with the smell of bacon and flour and washing powder — one of the modest luxuries, Clark supposed, since he had seen the brand-name Persil on one shelf of the store-room behind the shop.

Much of the map was originally blank, but the censored, sensitive areas of the town and the naval base had been pencilled in, and labelled, by Pasvik. Pechenga lay at the neck of a narrow inlet in the coast where the river Pechenga reached the Barents Sea. It was a thriving northern fishing port as well as an important subsidiary base to Murmansk, headquarters of the Soviet Union's most important fleet. The fishing harbour lay on the northern outskirts of the town — Clark had smelt it on the wind, even locked in the back of Pasvik's delivery van — while the naval base, as if hiding behind the civilian port, seemed from the map to be entrenched across the neck of the inlet, behind its massive harbour wall. The submarine pens, his mission target, were arrayed and dug in along the southern flank of the base, furthest from the fishing harbour.

It was evident to Clark that Pasvik regarded himself with some reluctance but without evasion as expendable in the cause of "Plumber". Clark, however, realised that he could not efficiently exploit the man to the degree of endangering his life, and was pleased at that fact. Pasvik making a late, night-time delivery to the base would be a transparent pretext, and the man would undoubtedly be searched. Clark would have to go in by water, not with the groceries.

"We could easily do it," Pasvik said hesitantly, as if he had read Clark's thoughts. Clark shook his head.

"Uh-uh. That's the obvious way to get caught. The water is the only way."

Only then did Pasvik display his full fear and pleasure, in the same instant that exposed his dentures, creased up the dough around his eyes, and brought beads of perspiration to his forehead. These he wiped away with a red handkerchief.

"Thank you." he said.

"No problem. This," he added, dabbing his finger on the map, "the net?" Pasvik nodded. "Here, too?"

"Yes. You will need to go over, or beneath, two nets."

"Mines?"

Pasvik pulled a leather-bound, slim notebook from his pocket. It seemed misplaced about his person. It required an executive's breast-pocket, in a grey suit. Pasvik laughed at the expression on Clark's face.

"One of a consignment that I kept for myself,“ he explained. 'they are very popular with junior officers." He opened the book. 'this, you understand, is a digest of gossip and observation collected over some years." He fished in the breast pocket of his shirt, and hitched a pair of wire-framed spectacles over his ears. Then he cleared his throat. 'the mines are of different types — proximity detonated, trip-wired, acoustic, magnetic. They are set at various depths, and the pattern is very complicated. I do not have any details. Indiscretion in Red Navy officers goes only so far, you understand?"

"The mines I don't worry too much about. Except the contact stuff. Are they marked? Do you have any idea of their shape and size?"

"Ah, there I can help you, I think." He showed a page of the notebook to Clark. The sleeve of the old dressing-gown that he had borrowed from Pasvik brushed the brandy glass, spilling what remained of the drink across the map in a tobacco-coloured stain.

"Damn!" Clark exclaimed, soaking up the liquid with the sleeve of his dressing-gown. "Sorry." Some of the neatly written labelling on the map had smudged.

"No matter."

Clark studied the drawing. A small mine, probably, activated by direct contact with the horns. To deter and destroy small vessels venturing into the restricted waters of the inner harbour, even to kill a swimmer. He handed the notebook back to Pasvik. The stained map absorbed his attention like an omen.

"Okay. Where's the Proteus?"

"Here are the submarine pens. This one, as far as I can make out. Gossip, as you will imagine, has been rife." He tapped at one of the numbered pens. There were two dozen of them and Proteus was supposedly in the fifth one, measuring from the eastern end of the pens. "Many of them are empty, of course."

"Where will you be?" Clark asked.

"Ah — here," Pasvik replied, "you see, in a direct line. It is, or was, a favourite picnic spot in summer." He sighed.

Clark looked at his watch. "Nine-forty. Time to get going?"

"Yes."

"Will you be stopped on the road?"

"Yes, but it's not likely I will be searched. Not going in the direction of the fishing harbour. Anyone who knows me will assume I am making a pick-up of some smuggled goods from a freighter. On the way back, they may be more nosey. So I will have some of the old favourites — stockings, perfume, chocolate, cigarettes, even sex books from Sweden — in the back of the van. I make a habit of free gifts, once in a while. You are ready?"

Clark found Pasvik studying him. The raisin eyes were deep in their folds, but bright with assessment and observation. Eventually, Pasvik nodded and stood up. "You will make it," he announced, "of that I am reasonably sure."

Thanks."

Clark took off the dressing-gown and laid it on Pasvik's narrow, uncomfortable-looking bed. Then he donned the immersion suit again, heaving it up and around his body, finally pulling on the headcap.

"Another brandy?"

"No thanks."

As they went down the bare wooden stairs to the storeroom and the small, noisome yard where Pasvik had parked his van, the grocer said, "So, Mr Aubrey is not very far away at this moment, up in the sky, mm?"

"He is. At least, he ought to be. I'll signal him before I take to the water."

"I can do that."

"Better me than you." In the darkness, Clark patted the side of his head, then the tiny throat-mike beneath his chin. "This stuff has got to work. I don't want to find out it doesn't after I get aboard the Proteus."

Pasvik unbolted the door and they went out into a wind that skulked and whipped around the yard. Clark looked up at the sky. A few light grey clouds, huge patches of stars. The clouds seemed hardly to be moving. Almost a full moon, which he regretted. However, the improvement in the weather would mean a less choppy surface in the harbour, and he might need to conserve the air in Pasvik's tanks. Pasvik, he noticed as the man crossed to the van and opened the rear doors, moved with a leg-swinging shuffle.

Presumably the limp explained why he no longer carried out immersion-suited surveillance of the harbour.

Clark climbed into the rear of the van, and the doors slammed shut on him. He squatted in a tight, low crouch behind stacked wooden crates, near the partition separating the rear of the van from the driver. He watched as Pasvik clambered into the driving seat, slammed his door, and then turned to him.

"Okay?"

"Okay."

Pasvik started the engine, and ground the car into gear. A moment later, they were turning out of the narrow lane behind the row of shops into a poorly lit street on which a few cars and one or two lorries were the only traffic. Clark felt tension jump like sickness into his throat, and he swallowed hard. He squeezed his arms around his knees, which were drawn up under his chin. His two packs — right hand good, left hand bad — were near his feet. Without conscious thought, he reached out and unsealed one of the packs. He reached into one of the small side pockets and withdrew a polythene-wrapped package, undid the elastic bands, and removed the gun. A small, light.22 Heckler & Koch pistol with a ten-round magazine, effective stopping range less than thirty metres. He unzipped the neck of his immersion suit and placed the re-wrapped pistol inside. If he ever needed the gun, he was close to being finished.

The grocery van trailed a tarpaulin-shrouded lorry along the northbound road, through a dingy, industrialised suburb of Pechenga. Pasvik seemed to have no desire for conversation. Perhaps, Clark admitted, he thought talk would make his passenger more edgy. Pechenga was little more than a ghost town after dark. There were few pedestrians, fewer vehicles. The town seemed subdued, even oppressed, by the security that surrounded the naval installation. The place had a wartime look, a besieged, blacked-out, curfewed feeling and appearance which depressed and yet aggravated his awareness.

There was a haze of light to be seen over the low factory roofs from the naval base, a glow like that from the border lights as he had seen them from the Harrier. Then he felt the van slowing. The brake lights of the lorry in front of them were bright red. There was a squeal of air brakes.

"A checkpoint — outside the civilian harbour. Get down," Pasvik instructed him. "Cover yourself with the tarpaulin."

White light haloed the bulk of the lorry. Clark could hear voices, and the noise of heavy military boots, though he could see no one. He slid into a prone position, and tugged the tarpaulin over him, which smelt of cabbage and meal. Once underneath, he unzipped the neck of his immersion suit once more, though he was able consciously to prevent himself from unwrapping the gun. Nevertheless, through the polythene his finger half-curled around the trigger. His thumb rested against the safety catch. He could not prevent finger and thumb taking what seemed a necessary hold upon the pistol.

A voice, very close. Clark's Russian was good, but he reacted more to the interrogative tone. A guard leaning his head into the driver's window. Pasvik's voice seemed jocular, confiding in reply.

"Hello, Pasvik. Out and about again?"

Pasvik smiled, showing his dentures, opening his hands on the wheel in a shrugging gesture.

"You know how business is, Grigory."

"Keep your voice down, Pasvik — the officer'll hear you."

"Then you'll be in trouble, eh, my friend?"

"You want me to search your van, have everything out on the road, now and on the way back — eh, Pasvik?"

"Don't be irritable, my friend."

"Look, I" ve told you — I'm not your friend. Just keep your voice down."

"You want to see my papers?"

"Yes — quick, here's my officer. Bastard." Grigory uttered the last word almost under his breath.

"What's going on here?" the officer enquired above the noise of the lorry moving off and pulling into the docks. Beyond his short dapper figure Pasvik could see the outlines of cranes, the silhouettes of cargo and fishing vessels. "Are this man's papers in order?"

"Yes, sir."

The officer took them from Grigory, perused them in a showy, self-satisfied, cursory manner, then handed them back. He turned on his heel and strutted away. Grigory pulled a scowling face behind his back, then thrust the papers back at Pasvik. He bent near to the window again.

"I want some more," he whispered.

"More what?"

"Those books."

"You sell them off again, eh, Grigory?"

"No!" Grigory's face changed colour.

"I'll see what I can do. Stop me on the way back, get in the back of the van then. I'll leave some for you, under the tarpaulin. Okay?"

"Okay. I'm off duty at midnight, though."

"I'll be back before then."

Grigory stepped back, and waved Pasvik on. The red and white pole between the two guard huts swung up, and Pasvik drove the van into the civilian harbour. In his mirror, Pasvik could see the officer speaking to Grigory. The posture of his body and the bend of his head indicated a reprimand rather than an enquiry as to Pasvik's business. He would have to be careful when Grigory collected his sex books from the back of the van on the return journey. Perhaps he needed something for the officer, too?

He drove out of the string of white lights along the main thoroughfare of the docks, turning into a narrow, unlit alley between two long, low warehouses. Then he turned out on to a poorly illuminated wharf, driving slowly past the bulk of a Swedish freighter. Music from the ship, a drunk singing. A head peering over the side. Two armed guards patrolling, leaning towards each other in conversation, stultified by routine and uneventfulness. Pasvik stopped the car in the shadow of a warehouse, beneath the dark skeleton of a dockside crane.

"Very well, my friend. You can get out now."

Pasvik slipped out of the van, and opened the rear doors. The two guards, unconcerned at the noise of his engine, were walking away from him, into and then out of a pool of light. Clark sat on the edge of the van, stretching. Then he hefted the two packs on to the concrete of the wharf.

"Thanks," he said.

"You have everything in your mind?"

Clark nodded. "Yes. What about the tanks?"

"One moment." Pasvik limped off swiftly, towards the door of the warehouse. He appeared to possess a key, for Clark heard the door squeak open, then the intervening moments before the door squeaked again were filled with the singing of the Swedish drunk, who had become utterly maudlin. Clark heard, as the door closed again, the reassuring metallic bump as the tanks struck the concrete. Then Pasvik came scuttling out of the shadows, hefting the two air tanks over his shoulder. He placed them, like game retrieved, at Clark's feet. The American inspected and tested them. The hiss of air satisfied him. Both gauges registered full.

"Good."

"The patrol will be back in five minutes. By that time, I must be aboard the freighter and you must be in the water. Come."

Pasvik helped Clark strap the tanks to his back, lifting the mouthpiece and its twin hoses gently over his head like a ceremonial garland. Then they carried the packs across the wharf, slipping quickly through the one dim patch of light into the shadow of the freighter. Pasvik make a lugubrious face at the singing, still audible from above. The water was still and oily below them, against the side of the ship. Clark could smell fish on the windy air. He unwound short lengths of nylon rope from each pack, and clipped them on to his weighted belt. As he did so, he felt he was imprisoning himself. An anticipation of utter weariness overcame him for a moment, and then he shrugged it off. He would make it, even with that weight being towed or pushed, since the packs would become buoyant in the water.

"Okay," he said, about to slip the mouthpiece of his air supply between his lips. Thanks."

"Don't forget the landmarks I described — don't forget the patrol boats — don't forget the contact mines, some of them are small enough, sensitive enough…" Pasvik halted his litany when Clark held up his hand.

"Okay, okay." Clark grinned. "I'll take care, Mom."

Pasvik stifled a delighted laugh. "Goodbye, my friend. Good luck."

He lifted one of the packs as Clark moved to the iron ladder set in the side of the wharf, leading down to the water. Clark, holding the other pack, began to climb down, his back to the freighter's hull. Then he paused, his head just above the level of the concrete, and Pasvik handed him the second pack. Clark appeared almost to overbalance, then he stumbled the last few steps and slid into the water. Pasvik peered down at him. Clark waved, adjusted his mouthpiece and facemask, then began swimming out and around the bow of the freighter, pushing the two packs ahead of him, slowly and awkwardly.

Pasvik watched until the swimming man was hidden by the hull of the Swedish ship, then softly whistled and shook his head. Then he slapped his hands together, shrugging Clark away, and headed for the boarding ladder up to the deck of the freighter.

Clark swam easily, using his legs and fins, his arms around the two packs, guiding them through the water. Their buoyancy made them lighter, easier to handle in the water. After a few minutes, he trod water, and opened the channel of his transceiver. The ether hummed in his ear.

"All is well," he said.

Aubrey's voice, slowed down from the spit of sound on his earpiece, replied a few moments later. "Good luck."

Clark switched off, and began swimming again. Ahead of him, there was a rippling necklace of lights along the harbour wall, with one dark gap like a missing stone in the middle. The water was still calm, its surface only riffled like pages quickly turned by the wind. He headed for the dark gap in the lights, keeping the flash of the small lighthouse to his left, and the steering lights of a small cargo ship to his right, It was a matter of some seven or eight hundred yards — or so he had estimated from the map — to the harbour wall. He moved with an almost lazy stroke of his legs, using the buoyant packs like a child might use water wings. The mouthpiece of the air supply rested on the packs just in front of his face.

It was twenty minutes before he reached the choppier water of the inlet beyond the fish and cargo harbour. Suddenly, as he passed between the lights, the water confronted him instead of allowing him easy passage. The packs began to bob and move as if attempting to escape him. He checked his compass, took a sighting on the lights above the twin guard towers at the entrance to the naval installation, and rested for a few moments, accustoming his body and his breathing to the choppy sea. Then he swam on.

The wall of the harbour curved away from him, as if enclosing him, then it rose in height and the lights along it were brighter and closer together. He was paralleling the wall of the Pechenga naval base.

His awareness, despite his experience and his desire that it should not be so, began to retreat into the confines of his immediate surroundings and experience — the packs behind him like brakes moving sluggishly through the water, the choppy little wavelets dashing against his facemask, his arms moving out in front and then behind, even the tight cap of his suit seemed to contain his senses as well as his mind. Thus the patrol boat was a light before it was a noise, and a light he could not explain for a moment. And it was close, far too close.

A searchlight swept across the surface of the water. The boat, little larger than a motor yacht, was a hydrofoil. Clark, catching the high-bowed outline behind the searchlight as he was startled out of his dreamlike state, saw its forward and aft gun turrets, its depth charge racks. It was paralleling his course, moving along the harbour wall. Even though startled, he continued to observe the patrol boat move lazily across his vision. The searchlight swept back and forth, moved closer to the wall, swept back and forth again, moved closer…

Clark panicked into acute consciousness. He fumbled with the two packs, hauling them into his embrace. He ripped clumsily at the valve on the first one — the light moved towards him again — and failed to turn it at the first attempt, and his hand hovered towards the valve on the second pack — the light swung away, then began to swing back, the patrol boat was sliding past him sixty metres away — then he turned feverishly at the first valve, hearing above the panic of his breathing and blood in his ears, the hiss of air. The bag sank lower in the water, and he grabbed at the second valve, telling himself ineffectually to slow down — the light moved forward, closer, like lava flowing over the wrinkled water, almost illuminating the pack that remained afloat — he twisted the valve, heard the air, watched the light swing away, then back, then begin its arc that would reach his head. The pack slipped beneath the water, and he flicked himself into a dive — the light slid across the distressed water where he had been, hesitated, then moved on.

Clark thrust the mouthpiece between his teeth, bit on it as he inhaled, and drove downwards against the restraint of the two packs from which he had not released sufficient air. They pulled like parachute brakes against his movement. The twin diesel engines of the patrol boat thrummed through the black water. He looked up. Yes, he could see the light dancing across the surface, as if it still searched for him. Slowly, it faded. The vibration and hollow noise of the boat's engines moved away. He allowed the buoyancy of the two packs to slowly pull him back to the surface. When his head came out of the water, he saw the patrol boat some hundreds of yards away, its searchlight playing at the foot of the harbour wall.

He lay in the water, the packs bobbing just beneath the surface on either side of him, until his breathing and his heart rate had returned to normal. Then he embraced each of the packs in turn, pressing the button on each small cylinder of oxygen, refloating the packs on the surface. Having to drag them through the water would have exhausted him long before he reached the Proteus.

He swam on, still resting his frame on the packs as he clutched them to him. Ten minutes later, he reached the entrance to the harbour. The guard towers on either wall, apart from beacon lights, carried powerful searchlights which swept back and forth across the dark opening between them and swept, too, the water of the harbour and the basin beyond it. He trod water, absorbing the pattern of movement of the searchlights. He saw the silhouettes of armed guards, the barrels of anti-aircraft cannon pointing to the night sky. He felt cold, the chill of water seeping through his immersion suit. Thought seemed to come slowly, but not because of the cold; rather; because he already knew the dangers and the risks. There was no necessity to discover or analyse them. The submarine net stretched across the entrance to the harbour, perhaps fifteen feet above the water. He would have to climb it.

He edged with furtive strokes of his fins around the base of the harbour wall, touching its barnacled sliminess with his hand, reaching the steel net directly beneath one of the guard towers. The, packs had begun to resist him, he imagined, as if they had lost their buoyancy. He let them drift behind him as he clung to the mesh, watching the lights. Thirty seconds. He lowered his arm as his watch confirmed the gap of darkness between the passage of each light across the harbour entrance for the second time. He had thirty seconds in which to climb the net, mount it like a rider, drag his packs after him, and climb down again to the water. He could not wait for the chance of the net being opened on its boom to admit a vessel.

The light of the searchlight on the opposite wall slid down the concrete and swung away into the harbour. His fins hung round his neck, and his mouthpiece dangled between their strange necklace. He felt clumsy, burdened. He reached up, and began climbing. The heavy steel cords of the submarine net did not even vibrate with his effort.

Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven —

The seconds began racing away from him. His mind was blind and indifferent to the progress of the light, hearing only the moving numbers in his head. The numbers ran ahead of him, as his breathing did. Thirteen, fourteen. He felt the weight of the packs thrum lightly through the steel net.

Top. One leg, sixteen, other leg, packs holding him back, seventeen, swing the other leg over against the restraint of the two packs, eighteen, his stomach was stretched and pressed painfully along the steel boom, nineteen, stand up, twenty, five seconds behind already, lift the packs, lift the first one over, drop it, twenty-three, hold on, hold on, as the inertia of the pack tried to pull him from the net, arms full of pain as he resisted the pack's weight, twenty-five, other pack now, easier, drop it, hang on, pain again, twenty-seven, go now, go —

He scuttled down the net, feeling it vibrate now, his breath ragged, his body as tense as a spring, as vulnerable as an insect's. He was aware of the light on the opposite side of the entrance swinging back now, a hazy blur at the corner of his vision. Thirty-one. The light slid down the net, opening the shadow beneath the harbour wall, slipping across the small blur of bubbles his entrance into the water had made.

Clark clung to the net, forcing the mouthpiece back between his teeth, trying to calm his breathing, feeling the packs tugging him lazily back towards the surface. He held on to the net with one hand, and reduced their buoyancy with the other, his hand completing the task robotically. They bobbed beside him in the darkness, nudging him as if to remind him of their presence, or to ingratiate themselves because they had almost betrayed him.

He clung to the net until the searchlight's wavering globe of light had passed over his head another four times. Then he further adjusted the buoyancy of the packs so that they began to pull at him, drag him down. He fitted his fins, and let go of the net, moving smoothly down into the darkness.

The mines, now. Magnetic, electronic contact. Pasvik had been unable to provide the pattern. MoD had had some detail, but not enough. There did not seem to be channels through the minefield, since the mines would all be armed or disarmed by remote signal. If a Soviet vessel entered the harbour, the mines would be switched off. Simple. Effective. Clark reasoned that he must dive deep, almost to the bottom, to avoid the contact mines which would be set off by a touch, and which would have been laid at varying depths. He swam down, levelling off when his depth gauge registered a hundred feet. Time closed in on him immediately as decompression became a determining factor. He flicked on his lamp. The packs idled alongside him as he trod water. Compass direction checked, together with the time and the depth, he began swimming, moving rapidly now, ignoring the sense of isolation in his system like an antidote to adrenalin, and which assailed him for the first time since he had left the cockpit of the Harrier. The weak glow of the lamp illuminated the dull silver of fish and the strange forest of cables growing up from the harbour bed below. Above him, invisible, the mines sat at their determined depths. He jogged one cable, then another, and occasionally the packs snagged against them, operating like brakes. He had guessed correctly. He was too deep for the mines themselves.

He swung the lamp from side to side, however, in a precautionary swathe. The mine that came suddenly out of the darkness still surprised him. He flicked aside, remembering the two packs only as he did so. He stopped himself. The chill disappeared from his body. He flicked the light of his lamp behind him. One of the packs rubbed against the cable. It seemed to be sliding upwards towards the mine's old-fashioned, deadly horns. A small contact mine, almost too small to do any damage, but enough to pull a human frame into shreds. He moved slowly. The mine seemed to bob and weave like a fighting animal watching him. The water distressed it and wafted around the pack, moving it upwards. It was only inches from the mine.

He reached forward, trying to keep the light of the lamp steady. The mine bobbed, the pack imitated it. Inches. He reached forward, hardly moving his fins, feeling his body sinking away from the mine and the pack. He could not tread water any more violently. He reached forward along the short line which attached him to the pack. Touch. The buoyant pack crumpled then reshaped as he touched it. Inches. He swept at it, banging his hand down past the horns of the mine on to the pack. It bobbed away like a struck ball, and he reeled it in on its line, clutching it to him like a child who had avoided a road accident, feeling weakness envelope his body.

Eventually, he moved on, holding the packs closer to him by their lines, making slower progress but gradually sensing some kind of courage return. He ran up against the inner net, separating the outer basin of the harbour from the submarine pens, almost before he saw it in the light of his lamp. He clung to it with a kind of desperate relief which surprised him. He realised how much his nerves had been strained already. He released the net eventually, dropping down towards the bottom, dragging the unwilling packs with him. His lamp searched ahead of him. The mud and silt, its lightest elements disturbed and lifted by his movement, drifted up to meet him and almost obscured what he sought. The net ended some four or five feet from the bottom. He gripped it and slid under, pulling the packs after him.

He swam on immediately he had checked his bearings and the time. The mine cables were fewer, as if he had moved above the tree-line for these growths. Soon, they straggled out. The water became slightly warmer, and it appeared lighter. He checked his watch, then ascended twenty feet. Here, he waited, them climbed another twenty feet, waited again. Nerves began to plague him now, the need for action, for arrival, nudging at him, irritating him.

His head bobbed above the surface. The packs lay below him at the end of their lines. The row of concrete pens was in front of him. He counted. Fifth along. Lights, noise — no, no noise, just plenty of light. The gates of the pen were closed.

Proteus was in there. He had got to within fifty yards of his destination.

Pasvik the grocer studied the harbour through his night-glasses. He squatted on a blanket which protected his buttocks from the cold of the damp ground. Beneath the blanket he had spread a ground sheet. He had a hamper of food beside him, and he had his back to a tall, old tree.

He moved the glasses up, and the dim, night images blurred and smeared until they were lit with the glow of the submarine pens. He refocused, and he could see, with some degree of clarity, the lights in the fifth pen and a shadowy bulk beyond them that must be the British submarine behind the high gates. Good.

He lowered the glasses. No one would come up here in this weather, but he had a spare blanket to throw over the small dish aerials he had set up alongside him. Clark would be unable to communicate with the Nimrod from within the concrete pen without his messages, and those of the Nimrod, being relayed through the two aerials situated on a small knoll overlooking the harbour of Pechenga, the one with narrow beam facility directed towards Clark, the other, capable of handling broad-beam signals, directed towards the Nimrod.

Pasvik had no fear as he sat there, waiting for the first transmission. He was patient, warmly dressed, and he was engaged in a flatteringly important piece of espionage. However, a dim and long-past regret seemed to move sluggishly in his awareness like a tide coming slowly in. He realised it would be his companion while he remained on the knoll, hidden by the trees. He voiced it.

"Ah, Ivan, Ivan," he murmured, "remember the times we used to come here, eh? Remember?"

A chill, gusty wind plucked his sighs away and scattered them over the darkness of the harbour.

Clark bobbed in the water beneath the repaired propeller of the Proteus. He was exhausted after climbing the gate into the pen, exhausted in a subtler, more insidious way by the tension of waiting of absorbing the routine of the guards patrolling the pen, of choosing his moment to slip over the gate and down into the water. The good fortune that no one appeared to be working on the submarine did little to erase his weariness.

Despite their buoyancy, the packs were like leaden weights beneath the surface. His arms ached from them and from the deadweight of his own body. Now he had to climb the stern of the Proteus, to the aft escape hatch. He did not even want to try, could not entertain the idea of beginning. His air tanks and weighted belt he had left on the bottom of the pen. Yet it was the weight of the packs that unnerved him.

The repairs appeared almost complete. There were a number of scarred and buckled hull plates, but the propeller possessed new blades, the rudder fin and the hydroplanes gleamed with new metal. He looked up. The hull of the Proteus loomed above him. He groaned inwardly. His feet, flipperless again, rested on a rung beneath the surface, his hands had hold of another rung of the inspection track up the rudder. Tiny, separate pitons in the rock-face of the hull. He looked around him. A guard, bored and dulled by routine, turned at the end of his patrol, and walked back out of sight along the pen. Clark heaved his body out of the water and into the irregular rhythm of his ascent. His wet feet slipped, his hands wanted to let go, but he climbed up the rudder, level with the huge fifteen-bladed propeller, until he could clamber on to the hull, dragging the two packs behind him. There, he paused. Along the smoothness of the hull, on the whale's back, was the impression of the escape hatch, a circle cut in grey, shiny dough with a shaping knife. It was sixty feet from where he crouched.

He raised himself, pressing back against the high fin of the rudder, in its shadow to escape the white lights glaring down from the roof of the pen. The guard he had seen, on the starboard side of the Proteus, was half-way along its length, back to him. The other guard, on the port side, had almost reached the extent of his patrol, in the dimness of the other end of the pen. He would not make it to the hatch, open and close it after him, before that guard turned and was able to see him. He waited, the tension wearing at him immediately and violently. He felt inadequate to the demands made upon his physical strength, his nervous system.

A voice called out, and he believed for a long moment that a third guard, one he had not spotted, had seen him and was addressing him. But the voice was distant. He watched, heart pounding, as the port guard moved out of sight behind the bulk of the Proteus, presumably having been hailed by his companion on the starboard side. It was his chance, perhaps his only one. He weighed the two packs, one in either hand. An obstacle race. He remembered basic training from long ago; fatigues and punishment and discipline like a thin crust of ice over sadism. He gritted his teeth. He'd run up sand dunes carrying two packs then.

Then he began running, hunched up with fear and the weight of the packs, his feet threatening to slide on the smooth metal of the hull. Fifty feet, forty, thirty —

The packs began to slither on the hull, restraining him. His breath began to be difficult to draw, his heart made a hideous noise. Then he slid like a baseball player for the plate, legs extended and reached the hatch. Feverishly, he turned the wheel, unlocking it. Two turns, three, four. His head bobbed up and down like that of a feeding bird. No one. He raised the hatch, and slid into a sitting position on its edge. His feet fumbled the ladder, and he climbed into the hatch, packs pushed in first and almost dragging him with them; then he closed the hatch behind him, allowing his breath to roar and wheeze in the sudden and complete darkness. He slipped from the ladder and landed on the lower hatch of the chamber. He rubbed his arms, and his body remained doubled over as If in supplication. It was another five minutes before he could bring himself to move again. He unsealed one of the packs — right hand good — and rummaged in one of its pockets. He removed a bundle, and flicked on his lamp to inspect it. Blue, faded blue overalls. He stood up, unrolling the bundle, taking out the socks and boots and putting them on. Then he donned the overalls. His immersion suit was still damp, but the effect might look like sweat, with luck. He patted the breast pocket, feeling the ID there. If the repair and maintenance crew had a specially issued ID for this pen and this job, he still would not be blown as soon as he was challenged. Not with that ID.

He stowed the two packs in the chamber, deflating the second one, securing them to the ladder in the wall. If someone used the hatch, they would be found. He, however, dared not be seen carrying them inside the submarine. His watch showed twelve-fifty. He switched out the lamp, and stowed it with the packs. He would be back within an hour. They should be safe.

Cautiously, he turned the wheel of the lower hatch, then lifted it a couple of inches. He peered into the room housing the electric motors. It appeared empty. He pulled back the hatch and stepped on to the ladder — imagining for a moment Ardenyev or someone like him making his entry in the same manner — closing the hatch behind him and locking it.

He looked around the engine room, rubbing his hands tiredly through his short hair, untidying his appearance. He looked at his hands. They possessed that wrinkled, white, underwater deadness. He thrust them into his pockets as he stared down at the main turbine shaft running across the length of the room. There appeared to be little or no sign of damage. Proteus was almost ready to go. She could be taken out of Pechenga and into the Barents Sea on her turbines, even on the electric motors whose bulk surrounded him now. If "Leopard" worked —

He cautiously opened the bulkhead door into the turbine room. Empty. The submarine was silent around him, huge, cathedral-like, unmanned. Clark presumed the ratings were being kept in their accommodation under guard, and the officers in the wardroom. Lloyd would be in the control room, more likely in his cabin, also guarded. He looked down at his creased overalls. A uniform would have been an impossible disguise to have transported in one of the packs. A pity.

He entered the manoeuvring room, aft of the nuclear reactor. For a moment he thought it, too, was empty. Then a figure appeared from behind one section of the computer housing. He was short, almost bald, and dressed in a white laboratory coat. He carried a clipboard, and when he saw Clark, adjusted his glasses and studied him.

"What do you want?"

"Who are you?" Clark replied in Russian. There was an instant, well-learned wariness behind the thick spectacles. Clark continued, "What are you doing here?"

The man was already proffering the clipboard, but then resisted the craven instinct. He did not recognise Clark, and would, presumably, have known which ones to be wary of. Clark appeared officer-like, perhaps, but he did not suggest KGB. He lacked swagger, the birth-right.

"Who are you?" the man in the white coat insisted.

Clark reached into his breast pocket. Aubrey had insisted, pressing it upon him like a talisman. A red ID card. Clark tried to remove it insolently, and waved it briefly at the other man.

"Okay?" he said. "Or do you want my birth certificate as well?" He laughed as coarsely as he could. "Don't say you don't think I have one."

"I wasn't going to — " the man said. Clark took the clipboard. He understood enough to realise that the technician was from a naval laboratory or testing centre. He riffled the sheets of graph paper. He was checking to make certain that none of the machinery in the manoeuvring room was essential to, or part of, "Leopard". Perhaps — Clark suppressed a grin here — he was even trying to locate the back-up system. He handed the clipboard back to the technician.

"I don't understand all that bullshit, Comrade Doctor," he said in a belligerently unintelligent voice. The technician succeeded in quashing the sneer that tried to appear on his face. "See you."

Clark, hands in pockets, tried a swaggering, lazy, confident slouch out of the manoeuvring room into the tunnel through the reactor. Pausing only for a moment to register that the reactor had not been shut down, he opened the door into the control room. As he had expected, it was not empty. There was no sign of Lloyd or any of the British officers, but white-coated men and a handful of armed guards had occupied the control room, like terrorists in a foreign embassy. Undoubtedly, every piece of machinery and equipment was being tested and examined during the hours when the crew were confined to their quarters. Proteus would be a known, familiar thing by the time they had finished. A dog-eared book, a faded woman lacking all mystery. They would possess every secret, half-secret and secure piece of design, knowledge and equipment she had to yield. The computers would be drained, the sonars analysed, the inertial navigation system studied, the communications systems and codes learned by rote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lloyd appeared dumbfounded. "Rubbish —" he began.

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

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

"Ethan Clark, Navy Intelligence."

"Assigned to “Chessboard Counter”?"

"Right."

"We didn't meet."

"I don't think it matters — uh?"

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

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

"Okay. You begin, then."

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

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

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

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

"A— small party, sir."

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

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

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

"Yes, sir."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He flattened himself on the hull, bunching the nylon line beneath his body, feeling his whole frame quivering. Another malarial attack. He could not stop himself shaking.

"Progress report," he heard in his earpiece. The port guard was in sight again, meandering down the pen towards him. Then the starboard guard came into sight, chewing and cocking his head into the tinny noises of the transistor radio at his ear. "Progress report", Aubrey requested again in his ear, this time with more asperity. Clark wanted to howl into his throat mike for the crazy old man to shut up.

The guard passed beneath him on the port side, then the starboard guard was level with him again. The radio made tinny, scratchy noises. A Western pop station, beamed in from Norway or Sweden.

"Lend us your fucking radio," the port guard called across to his companion in a not unamiable manner. "Bored stiff."

"I'm not," his companion replied, facing him. "You bloody Ukrainians are all the same — scroungers."

"Clark — progress report." Shut up, shut up —

"Fuck off." Clark craned his neck. The port guard, the taller of the two with the cropped haircut and the stooping shoulders, had unslung his rifle, and was pointing it at the man on the starboard side. "Hand over your radio, or I'll fire," he demanded.

The man on the starboard side laughed. He wore spectacles and a thin, weak moustache and looked no more than fifteen. He, too, unslung his rifle, and pointed it across the water with one hand, the other still pressing the radio to his ear. "Bang, bang," he said, hooting with laughter when he had done so.

"Piss off."

"Progress report, Clark. Clark?" Shut up, shut up —

Clark knew what would happen next, and knew it would be audible. Sharp, painful bleeps of sound, like morse dashes, to attract his attention, then a continuous tone like that of a telephone that has been disconnected because the subscriber has moved. Both guards looked up. Clark squeezed himself flatter against the top of the hull, praying for the curvature to be sufficient, to hide him like high ground or a horizon.

"What's that?"

"Dunno. Fucking radio. Our lot trying to jam it." The starboard guard laughed again, a thin high cackle as if his voice had not yet broken.

"Race you to the other end, you skinny, underfed Ukrainian!"

"What about—?"

"Ready, set — go!"

The noise of their boots echoed off the concrete walls and roof of the pep. The tone stopped, and then began again in his head. Clark whispered intently into his throat-mike.

"For Chrissake, get off my back, Aubrey!" He went on quivering, his body seeming to jump with the detonations of their footsteps bouncing off the roof, until Aubrey replied.

"Clark — what is wrong?"

"I'm lying on the fucking hull, man, with two goons training for the Olympics right below me. I can't talk to you!"

A few seconds later — he could hear a thin, breathless cheer from the far end of the pen as the taller guard won the race — Aubrey replied stiffly and formally, "Very well. Report as soon as you can."

"Okay, okay."

"And again?" the shorter guard called angrily.

"You're on. Ten roubles on this one?"

Twenty, you Ukrainian bullshitter!"

"Ready, set — go! Hey, you jumped the gun, you cheating sod!"

Then the bootsteps rained down from the roof again as they charged towards the seaward end of the pen. Clark lay icily still now, his tension expended with his anger, his sense of time oblivious to anything but the slow passage of seconds on the watch-face he held in front of his eyes.

The starboard guard won, by virtue of a flying start, and crowed and pranced. His companion, now his deadly rival, challenged him to a return. They regained their breath, watched each other like combatants for a fortune in prize money, crouched into sprinting starts, and then began running on the call of the taller man. Clark got to his knees. Their row would bring someone, soon. He scuttled along the hull, careless of the noise he made, fixed the pad, and lowered himself feverishly down the nylon rope, checked the undamaged sensor, climbed the rope again, imagined the ragged breathing of the two runners, waited until he could hear them arguing with out-of-breath shouts, and swung down the port side of the hull. He was elated by the clownish behaviour and the stupidity of the two young guards; almost reckless with confidence. Undamaged. He climbed the line again.

They were still arguing, their voices coming from the far end of the pen. He could dimly discern them, shadows in shadow. He moved back along the hull, lowered himself on the port side again — the two men had moved slightly to starboard of the bow of the submarine — and checked another sensor. The titanium blister was dented, but undisturbed. Then the starboard side, his luck beginning to extend beyond the point at which it was simply acceptable and becoming instead a source of anxiety, where he checked two more sensors. He was almost level with rudder fin again, almost finished —

Another voice, a snarling petty-officer voice, and silence from the two guards. Berating, angry, loud. Their parentage was stripped from them, then their maturity, then their manhood. Layers of the onion, until they would be left with nothing but total humiliation and punishment duties. They would be replaced, the new guards would be fearfully alert, punctilious in their patrols. The crushing reprimand went on and on.

Clark lowered himself down the port side of the hull again. The plates were scarred, as if the metal had been lashed with a giant whip. He knew what he would find. A weal like a furrow lay along one hull plate, and whatever had caused it had crushed the wafer-thin titanium in upon the sensor beneath it. He reached into his belt, moving with feverish haste now as the michman's voice rose again, perhaps towards a peroration. He drew a smaller, stubbier screwdriver and jabbed it into the slot on the locking ring and heaved. It moved, and then turned. He lifted it clear and snapped it into a hook on his belt. As he prised out the transducer he could see the damage clearly. Shattered fragments fell from the transducer and rattled and slid down the hull to the water.

Bare wires. The sheathing was cut through, and half the wiring was severed. Dangling from the end was an ABS multipin plug. Half of it. Half a smashed multi-pin plug. He registered it with helpless fury. Silence. The michman had finished. Christ—

A door slammed, and then there was silence again, a heavy, ringing silence. He was alone in the pen for perhaps a few minutes at most. Perspiration drenched him. He wiped the back of one hand over his face.

"I got problems," he announced. "Stern sensor fourteen— one of the sonar signal nullifiers. The wiring behind the transducer's a hell of a mess."

He continued to lever at the wiring with the screwdriver while he waited for Quin to reply.

"What extent is the damage?"

The rest of the transducer slid away with a noise like the claws of a crab on metal. Then it plopped into the water. Clark hefted his lamp and shone it into the hole.

"Bad. Most of the wiring has been sheared; but there's worse. The connector's smashed."

"Can you check beyond the breaks?"

"Maybe."

"Can you see the socket and the box?"

"Yes."

Clark peered into the hole. He tidied the sheared and twisted wiring to one side and looked again. The wires reached the fibre optics converter box on the underside of the outer hull.

"Remove it complete," Quin instructed. "Fit a new one. And Clark—"

"Yes?"

There is a second plug, for the fibre optics. A bayonet fitting. Be careful. The first has forty pins, and it fits only one way."

"Right."

Clark looked at his watch. One minute since the door had slammed. He reached in, pressing his cheek against the hull, feeling the activity within the submarine as a slight vibration. His fingers flexed in the narrow space, snagged and cut on the exposed, shorn wires, and then his fingertips had hold of the upper section of the box. He pulled. Nothing happened. He pulled again, surprise on his face. The converter box would not budge.

"It's jammed," he said. "Jammed."

The door slammed. Marching boots, double time, the voice of the michman savagely drilling the two replacement guards. Clark clung to the nylon line and the converter box and prayed for the fifty-fifty chance to work in his favour.

The boots clattered down the starboard side of the Proteus. He had a moment or two yet —

"Have you got it? Can you see what's wrong?" Quin was frightened.

Clark heaved at it, curling his fingers round the edge of the converter box. Nothing moved. One finger touched the clip — clips, strap, he'd forgotten the clips and the strap securing the box — he flipped open the catch with his thumb, felt it loosen, and then gripped the box again. He gritted his teeth and strained. His arm shot out of the hole and he wriggled on the nylon line, holding on to the dangling wires and the box as the velocity with which he had jerked them free threatened to make him drop them. The michman's voice snapped out orders to the new guards. In a moment, they would appear on the port side —

He ripped open one of the two thick packs and drew out a replacement converter box already wired to the transducer. He fed the complete unit into the hole as carefully as he could. He pushed it forward. Then he let go of the rope, dangling by its tight, cutting hold on his armpits, and shone his lamp. The michman had stopped shouting. He was watching the two guards" doubling on the spot. Push — no, slight adjustment — push, get it into the clips — push home, feel for the strap ends, yes — hook them over, clamp the catch. He fitted the fibre optics plug, then fastened the transducer into place, and fitted the locking ring to holding it. The michman had ordered them to stop doubling.

Clark's arms felt lifeless and weak. He heaved at the nylon line, but his body hardly moved. His feet scrabbled on the smooth hull. The michman ordered the second new guard to follow him. It was like a yelled order to Clark. He clambered back up the line. Fifty feet to the hatch. Seconds only.

He ran. He heaved open the hatch, not caring any longer whether or not he had been seen, and tumbled into darkness, the hatch thudding softly shut on its rubber seals behind him. He lay breathless and aching and uncaring in the safe, warm darkness of the escape chamber, every part of his body exhausted.

"Well done, Quin," Aubrey offered, and watched the slow bloom of self-satisfaction on the man's face. He was difficult to like, but Aubrey had ceased to despise him. Quin was back in the land of the living, as it were. Flattery, cajolement, even threat had all played a part in his rehabilitation. Finally, however, Aubrey had seen the danger to his invention, his project, overcome and prompt Quin. The man would not surrender "Leopard" without some effort on his part.

Thank you," Quin returned. Then his face darkened, and he shook his head. "It's almost impossible," he added. "I don't know whether Clark has the necessary concentration to keep this up —"

"I understand the strain he must be under," Aubrey said, "but there's no other way."

"I'm — I'm sorry — stupid behaviour earlier — apologies —" Each word seemed wrenched from Quin, under duress. Aubrey respected the effort it was costing the cold, egotistical man to offer an explanation of himself.

"Quite all right."

"It's just that, well, now I don't want them to get their hands on it, you see —"

"Quite."

"It is the only thing of importance to me, you see." He looked down at his hands. "Shouldn't say that, but I'm afraid it's true." He looked up again, his eyes fierce. "Damn them, they mustn't have it!"

"Mr Aubrey?" There was something trying to force itself like a broken bone through Eastoe's frosty reserve.

"Yes, Squadron Leader?"

"We have some blips on the radar. Four of them."

"Yes?"

"Coming up rapidly from one of the airfields on the Kola Peninsula. Not missiles, the trace is wrong for that. Four aircraft."

"I see. Range?"

"Not more than thirty miles. They'll be with us in three minutes or even less."

"With us? I don't understand."

"They" ve already crossed into Norwegian airspace, Mr Aubrey. They didn't even hesitate."

Chapter Thirteen: CONCEALMENT

They were MiG-23s, code-named Flogger-B, single-seat, all-weather interceptors. Four of them. Even Aubrey could recognise them, in a moment of silhouette that removed him more than forty years to basic aircraft recognition tests at the beginning of the war. A vivid streak of lightning to the north, and the brassy light illuminating the night sky, outlined the nearest of the MiGs. Slim, grey, red-starred on its flank. One wing-tip rose as the aircraft banked slightly, and Aubrey could see the air-to-air missiles beneath the swing wing in its swept-back position.

Immediately, Eastoe was talking to him. "Mr Aubrey, they're MiG-23s, interceptors. The flight leader demands to know our mission and the reason for our invasion of sensitive airspace."

"What is their intention, would you say?" Quin was staring out of the window of the Nimrod, watching the slim, shark-like silhouette that had begun to shadow them.

"Shoo us away."

"What course of action do you —?"

"Just a minute, Mr Aubrey. I" ve got the Norwegian flight leader calling me. Do you want to listen into this?"

"I don't think so," Aubrey replied wearily. "I am sure I already know what he wishes to say."

"Very well."

The headset went dead, and Aubrey removed it. It clamped his temples and ears, and seemed to cramp and confine thought. He did not like wearing it. Quin did not seem disappointed at Aubrey's decision.

There was another flash of lightning, streaking like bright rain down a window towards the sea. The blare of unreal light revealed the closest of the Northrop F-5s turning to port, away from the Nimrod. Their Norwegian fighter escort had been recalled to Kirkenes. Norway's unwritten agreement, as a member of NATO, with the Soviet Union was that no military exercises or provocative military manoeuvres were undertaken within a hundred miles of the Soviet border. Evidently, the Russians had registered a protest, and their protest had been accepted.

Aubrey replaced his headset. "Has our Norwegian escort gone?"

"Yes, Mr Aubrey. We're on our own."

"Very well. Our signals cannot be intercepted, nor their origin traced so far as Clark is concerned?"

"No. Mr Aubrey, how long do we need to hang around?"

"For some hours yet."

"Very well." Eastoe sounded grim, but determined. "We'll do what we can. I'll try not to get shepherded out of range."

"If you would."

Aubrey stared at the console on the table between himself and Quin. The hull sensors had been inspected and repaired, yet the achievement of that task had been the completion of the easy and least dangerous element. Clark now had to inspect and, if necessary, repair the back-up system of "Leopard". Aubrey suddenly felt alone, and incompetent.

Eastoe spoke again in his ear. "They're demanding we leave the area. They'll see us off the property."

"You are on our eastbound leg at the moment?"

"Yes. But that won't fool them. They'll have been watching us on radar for a long time. They know we're flying a box pattern."

"But, for the moment, we're secure?"

"Yes —"

The window seemed filled with the belly of the MiG-23. The sight was gone in a moment, and might have begun to seem illusory, except that the nose of the Nimrod tilted violently as Eastoe put the aircraft into a dive.

"Shit — " the co-pilot's voice cried in Aubrey's ear. The Nimrod levelled, and steadied.

"They're not in the mood to waste time," Eastoe commented. "You saw that?"

Aubrey remembered the underbelly, almost white like that of a great hunting fish, and even the red-painted missiles beneath the wing.

"Yes," he said. "What happened?" He ignored Quin's worried face, the man was frightened but there was a determination in him now, replacing the former cunning that had sought only escape.

"One of them buzzed us — and, I mean buzzed. Crazy bastard!"

Aubrey paused for a moment. The aircraft is in your hands, Squadron Leader. All I ask is that we never pass out of range of Clark's transceiver. The rest is up to you."

"'thank you, Mr Aubrey."

The MiG — perhaps the one that had buzzed them — was back on their port wing, slightly above and behind. Shadowing them. It was, Aubrey considered, as unpredictable as a wild creature.

Tricia staggered under Hyde's weight, slipped, and fell against the long, high bank. Her breath roared in her ears, but she could feel it in her chest — ragged, loud, heaving. Hyde, unconscious, rolled away from her, slid until he lay at her feet looking sightlessly up at her and was still. Tricia was simply and utterly relieved that she was no longer bearing his weight against one side and across the back of her neck where she had placed his arm. She loathed and hated Hyde at that moment, and even feared him; as if he might wake and attack her himself. She blamed him totally, for every fragment and element of her predicament.

Her body was bathed in perspiration, and her limbs were shaking with weakness. Hyde continued groaning, like a murmured protest at his pain.

"Oh — shut up," she whispered fiercely. "Shut up." The repetition was bitten off, as if she admitted he was not to blame.

She had helped Hyde, often supporting his unconscious weight when he slipped once more from pain into stillness, as they moved north, then west. There had been no effective pursuit. The helicopter had lost sight of them after she had half-dragged, half-shouldered him away from the rise where he had first passed out, into a small copse of trees. A tiny dell, where the dead ferns were long and curving, like the roofs of native huts, had concealed them. Terrified, she had heard legs brushing through heather and ferns, voices near and more distant, the crackle of R/Ts. She had kept her hand over Hyde's mouth, in case he babbled in delirium.

The wound had been ugly, and she knew nothing of medicine or nursing. It had bled a great deal. It seemed that the bullet had not lodged in Hyde's shoulder or chest because there was a small hole near his shoulder blade and a larger hole near his collar-bone. She had seen sufficient television wounds to assume that the bullet had passed straight through. Her knowledge of anatomy was sketchy, and she watched anxiously for blood to appear around his lips. When it did not, she assumed the lungs were undamaged. She did not know what other bones, muscles or organs might reside in the area of the wound. She bound the wound with a torn length of Hyde's own shirt.

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

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

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

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

"You're awake."

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

"You're not delirious?"

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

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

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

"I know."

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

"Where are the police?" she asked plaintively.

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

"They must be looking, surely?"

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

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

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

The girl came back quickly, almost running.

"No —" he protested, sensing her pursued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ready?"

"Yes."

She heaved, and he disappeared into the hole.

"Are you all right?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good." Aubrey's voice.

"Beginning to remove the cowling," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Okay," he said in a whisper.

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

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

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

"Right."

" Rotate SW One to Test."

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Everyone all right — you, Mr Aubrey?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

He dimly heard the Nimrod's four Spey engines increase their power, and he felt the nose tilt upwards suddenly. He hung on to a bracket like a straphanger in a tube train, his. body wanting to lurch towards the tail of the aircraft. The MiG-23 appeared, then, whisked away from the window, like a fly that had been swatted. Even as the Nimrod climbed it began to bank to starboard, pushing Aubrey against the fuselage and his face into the double window port. He felt the glass against his cheek, and his arm aching from its hold on the bracket. The MiG was below them, the other Russian interceptor above, at a distance that implied respect or nerves. Aubrey felt himself hanging over the chasm of thirty thousand feet, imagined the rocks and the landscape below them.

He heard Clark's voice bellow behind him, reporting a stage of his inspection. Then two hands moved his small, frail body, and he was able to let go his hold on the bracket. He looked round into the face of the young flight-lieutenant who was in charge of communications.

"Please don't leave your seat again, Mr Aubrey."

Aubrey shrugged his clothing to greater tidiness on his form. "I'm sorry," he said. "What did Clark want, Quin?" Aubrey sat down heavily.

Quin shook his head. "Nothing so far," he said.

"He is performing the check correctly?"

"He is."

A livid flash of lightning in the distance. The storm was behind and to the north of them now.

"Mr Aubrey?" It was Eastoe in his headphones.

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry, Mr Aubrey. I'm not going to be allowed to fly the eastbound leg. They won't stand for that."

"What can you do?" Aubrey asked in utter exasperation.

"Fly a north-south course, over and over — if we can get away with it."

"You're not hopeful."

"No, I'm not. Our time here is strictly limited, I'm afraid, they're determined to get rid of us, one way or another."

"Section completed. All readings positive," Clark's voice announced ominously from the console.

"Damn," Aubrey whispered. "Damn."

They were all drunk now, yelling, bellowing, fighting drunk. Falling down and laughing drunk, too. Disrespectful, abusive, coarse, uproarious. Ardenyev enjoyed the noise, the swirl and shudder of the vodka in his veins and head, while one still sober, cold part of his awareness perceived where their laughter and taunts were leading, and anticipated with nothing more than a shudder of self-consciousness the nature of leadership and what he would now have to do to fulfil their expectations and to maintain his grip on their affection and respect.

And also, he concluded, the drinking party had to end with buffoonery, with the game of the ego and the shallowly physical prowess they required to perform their duties. After the death of Blue Section and the others of his own team, the three survivors had been absorbed and ingested as they drank and ate into the cameraderie of the men from the rescue ship Karpaty. Balan had understood the necessity of the merger. So Balan's challenge now to him to demonstrate how he boarded the Proteus was that of a shrewd drunk. His men wanted it, a boast and valediction. He had survived, become more than ever a necessary figurehead, even to the salvage men. In the absence of an athlete, a football star, an actress, he had to submit himself to their fuddled worship, their drunken amusement.

He was drunk, though. He knew that as soon as he stood up, and swayed as if the vodka had punched him in the temple. Teplov was watching him, he could see, as if weighing whether he should let his officer proceed. Viktor Teplov appeared sober, as ever.

Ardenyev looked up, the two images of the wall and the ceiling of the officers" mess coming together, as if he had correctly, though slowly, adjusted a pair of binoculars. He held the new and single image with an effort of concentration. Teplov nodded at the fuzzy corner of his vision. He was prepared to extricate his officer from whatever situation he found himself in.

"Come on, then!" Lev Balan roared, pointing up at the air-conditioning grille. "From that one, right round the room to that one!" His arm swept round the officers" mess, now deserted save for their own noisy group. The two grilles were on opposite walls. Ardenyev was being challenged to clamber and push his way through the duct until he could emerge with honour. Two of Balan's team were busy, balancing with difficulty on chairs, unscrewing the two grilles. Ardenyev looked at Balan, and then at Teplov, and Vanilov. All that remained of the Special Underwater Operations Unit. Teplov had the face of a stoical peasant in which his eyes gleamed with memory and with a strange amusement, perhaps even with approval. Vanilov looked as if he had drunk too much to forget. He wanted Ardenyev to prove something, perhaps only to be the adult coming into his child's bedroom, easing away the threatening shadows that had gathered around the cot.

"Okay. You're on. Two hundred roubles it is."

"One hundred —!" Balan protested.

"Two."

"All right, two. That means a time limit. Okay?"

Ardenyev hesitated for a moment, then he nodded. Balan's man stepped down off his chair, the grille in his hand. Ardenyev flicked the remainder of his drink into his open mouth, feeling it burn the back of his throat, then he reached up and took hold of the rough plaster edges of the square hole where the grille had been. He felt mouse droppings under his fingers.

"One minute," Balan called. "You" ve got one minute to get at least your head out of that other hole. Five, four, three, two, one — go!"

The cheering was deafening. Ardenyev pushed himself up level with the hole, ducked his head into it, and then heaved himself half into the duct, which bent immediately to the left. His shoulders rubbed against the plaster, and he found he had to angle his body in order to be able to move at all. The cheering behind him was muffled by the bulk of his body and by the plaster wall and the metal. He kicked, and his legs followed him into the duct. Immediately, Balan's voice came from behind him, counting.

"Eleven, twelve, thirteen…"

Ardenyev shook his head to clear it. Then he began scrambling, leaning to his left, his body rubbing along the metal channel. The cheering was dim and wordless now, falling away into silence. He reached the corner of the room. The duct was a severe right-angle. He squeezed his head and shoulders around the angle, then tried to bring his thighs and knees after his upper torso. He found himself wedged immovably. He struggled as if panicking, and sweat broke out all over his body. He cursed in a yell, and then lay still. Balan's head appeared further down the duct, in a shadowy patch of light. There was a noise that no longer interested Ardenyev coming from behind him.

"Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine…"

"Piss off!" Ardenyev yelled, not even attempting to move again. "I'm bloody stuck!"

Balan's head disappeared with a shriek of laughter. Teplov's head appeared in its place. At the same moment, a huge cheer went up as the minute ran out. "All right, sir?"

"Yes, thank you, Viktor."

"Bloody silly game, sir."

"Yes, Viktor."

"I'll come in the other side and give you a shove, sir."

Thank you, Viktor."

Ardenyev smiled, then relaxed. It didn't matter. Nothing did. The air conditioning duct enclosed him more surely and tightly than the aft escape chamber of the Proteus, but there was similarity of darkness and confinement that pressed itself upon him. He allowed a congratulatory sense of memory its place in his fuddled awareness. He'd done it, he'd done it —

No one else, he told himself. No one else could have done it. Then, more sharply, he thought, if I could, someone else could. Most of the team, the dead team —

His thoughts had swung towards a maudlin, drunken horizon. He heard Teplov moving along the duct behind him, grunting with effort. He giggled drunkenly. Anyone could have done it, he affirmed in a mood of quick and sudden self-deprecation as he imagined those who had died. It wasn't anything. Then, through a connection of which he was not aware, he wondered: why is that Nimrod hanging around? What is it doing?

Teplov's hand tapped his calf. He called back to the michman: "What's that Nimrod doing up there, Viktor?"

"Beg pardon, sir?"

"That Nimrod — they were talking about it earlier."

"Oh, that one," Teplov said indulgently. "I wouldn't know, sir."

If I could do it, he thought, anyone could. That Nimrod —

He was aware of himself, stretched out on the pressure hull, held there by the mesh of nerves that covered his body. He had heard the footsteps clattering along the hull from the stern. The boots had stamped to a halt directly over the hatch through which he had entered the space between the two hulls. He had immediately switched off the lamp, as if the outer hull had been no more opaque than a curtain, and he had turned on to his back, He seemed to himself to be less vulnerable, facing the direction of the noises. Evidence, evidence? he asked himself repeatedly. Why? Why now? Noise, suspicion, evidence!

He stared up at the outer hull as if he could really see it, almost as if he could see the armed man whose boots had clattered up on him. He listened. Tiny noises now, almost mouse-like. The irresolute shuffling of feet, the claw-like scratching of nails and metal heel-tips. The darkness pressed in, unwelcome, bringing its unexpected and disturbing claustrophobia with it. He reached up and flicked on the lamp. It shone in his eyes. He inspected his watch. Six o" clock, almost. He had been working on the back-up system for over two hours. And he had found nothing. Every circuit, every resistor, every capacitor and microprocessor and wire and pin worked—

There was nothing wrong with it, at least not with the sixty-five per cent of the back-up system that he had checked. There was something less, or something more mysteriously, wrong with the complex lump of junk near his head than was the matter with the Nimrod. Sure, Aubrey kept reassuring him, but the communications black-outs and the poor reception and the constant re-requests and repeats of instructions told him everything.

The boots shuffled, then moved, on the hull. They were over his face now, only a couple of feet from stamping on it.

The Nimrod was at the fringes of, and at times beyond, the communications range. Which meant that the aircraft had company, Soviet company. MiGs were shadowing the Nimrod, maybe even playing shepherd games with her —

As he rehearsed the conclusion once more, a chill coldness seized him. They suspected, even knew, about him. The boots on the hull, and the silence which he had noticed from the turbine room beneath him. They were listening, too. Everyone was listening for him, waiting for the mouse behind the wainscot to move again. He held his breath, one part of his mind explaining with a weary patience that he was behaving ridiculously, the remainder of his consciousness believing that the hull above him and beneath his back and head and legs was no more than a sounding-board, a corridor of whispers eager to betray his whereabouts.

The boots moved away, forward along the hull towards the sail. Almost immediately, Lloyd was speaking in a voice muffled by the pocket of his immersion suit, through the tiny R/T Clark had left with him. Relief overcame Clark, and he felt the renewed perspiration cool almost at once on his skin, making his flesh shudder.

He removed the R/T from his pocket and pressed it to his cheek.

"Yes?"

"I" ve seen Hayter and Thurston. They know what to do."

"Good."

"Any luck?"

"None."

"It's six now."

"I know."

"Is it still on?"

"Eight o" clock, on the button."

"I heard my guard and another talking. The man from Novosibirsk has arrived in Murmansk."

"Damn. Is he on his way?"

"I don't know."

"Okay — I'll call you."

Clark replaced the R/T set in his breast pocket, and zipped the pocket closed with a real and savage anger. He rolled on to his stomach, and the turtle without its shell was humped on the edge of the pool of light from the lamp, still baffling him, still apparently undamaged.

"You heard that?" he whispered. There were noises now from the turbine room. He had imagined the silence.

"Yes," Aubrey replied. His voice was gauzy and faint, a smear of distant sound. Flying on the limit again.

"What trouble are you in?"

"None."

Tell me."

"Four MiG-23s. They're keeping us as far away from Soviet airspace as possible —" The voice blacked out, then Clark heard an additional smear of sound some seconds later which he could not decipher. Then two more spits of sound which the cassette recorder slowed down and replayed. He could understand neither of them. The cool part of his brain suggested a storm might be adding to the difficulties, but the remainder of his awareness was raging with the same kind of helpless, impotent fury his body felt. He was shaking as he knelt in front of the "Leopard" backup system. He was in a mood to break, damage, throw. The rational part of him understood, and mocked at, the emotions he felt and his desire for their expression, and gradually he calmed himself. Then, suddenly, Aubrey was speaking again, clearly.

"Can you hear me now?"

"Yes."

"Eastoe has dodged them, ducked inside," Aubrey said. Clark could even pick out the irony of the old man's tone.

"Quin suggests it will take only hours to dismantle “Leopard”, if that is what they intend, and the same amount of time for a full analysis, with the resources they have available. Once they begin the work, they will be searching for the back-up system. You must not be where you are when that happens. “Leopard” must not be intact when this expert steps aboard. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes."

"It will take an hour from Murmansk by helicopter."

"All right, all right. I'm moving on — what next?"

"Very well. You have both packs with you?"

Clark looked up and into the gloom beyond the lamplight. "Yes," he replied with a sense of defeat. "Both of them."

"Keep me informed."

"Clark?" It was Quin's voice now, not so irritating, not so pessimistic as that of Aubrey. Quin allowed the fiction of success to be entertained. "You should move on to the spectrum analyser, noise generator and phase reverser unit."

"Right."

"You need the special test kit."

"Sure." Clark unclipped it from his belt. A dial, various scales, a rotary switch, buttons, a small grille. Quin had to instruct every step of the way: every switch, every light, every reading. "All right, I'm ready." He studied the exposed maze of wiring, microprocessors and circuits in front of him. For a moment, his mind was a blank and the system before him was a puzzle to which he had no clue. Then, sighing, he shrugged off his numbing reluctance, and reached out and waited for Quin's instructions.

It was six o-five.

"It's almost six, Admiral — perhaps we can now be leaving for Pechenga. Too much time has already been wasted."

"Comrade Academician, you say it will take a matter of no more than three or four hours to complete your work on “Leopard”. What is your hurry? You waited at the airport in Novosibirsk for almost three days." Dolohov was expansive, and mocking. He was almost drunk, Panov decided, and had abandoned most of his dignity. Panov did not like the military, especially the older representatives, the officer caste. As a man who was an honoured member of another elite, one without the stain of imitating those that existed before the Revolution, Panov disliked, even loathed, the upper echelons of the military.

Panov glanced again at his gold Swiss watch. He had purchased it in Paris, while attending a scientific congress, and that had added to its potency as a reminder of his identity. The large-faced clock on the wall behind Dolohov, which Panov would hardly have admitted to his wife's kitchen in Novosibirsk, jerked its hand past another minute. The drunken old fool remained in his chair.

"Admiral — I must insist that we leave for Pechenga at once. My colleagues will be waiting for me. I must study their preliminary findings before I can specify what needs to be done." Panov stopped at this point, feeling the asperity in his tone raising his voice beyond the point of acceptable masculinity. He despised his own too-high voice. The admiral growled and huffed like a bear.

"I see. You insist?"

Panov cleared his throat. "I do."

Dolohov reached across his desk and flicked the switch of his intercom.

"Get my car to the door at once, and warn the tower I shall want an immediate take-off." He switched off, and stood up, his arms extended in a bear-like embrace. The image made Panov suppress a shudder, and smooth dislike from his bland features. "Come, Comrade Academician Panov — your carriage awaits." Then Dolohov laughed. Panov had to endure a large hand slapping him on the shoulder, and the log-like fall of an arm across his neck, as he was ushered to the door. Dolohov's voice was like a caress when he added: "Don't you think I am anxious to see our prize, too?" Then he laughed again.

The hand of the clock on the wall clicked again. Six o-five.

Clark moved the rotary switch on the test kit for the final time, the needle on the dial flickered away from zero, and he cursed as he unclipped the kit's leads from the last of the test pins on the power supply units. Each and every one of them worked, gave a positive reading, had nothing wrong with them.

"Okay, that's it," he said, glancing at his watch. Seven o-two. Another hour had passed, and he was still at the moment before beginning. Everything he had done during the past three hours had been necessary, and pointless.

"Very well, Clark, you'd better run a check on the power lines, from TP Seventeen, Eighteen and Twenty-Four, using the cable adaptor with the yellow sleeve, marked BFP 6016—"

"I got that," Clark snapped, wiping his forehead, then letting his hand stray to his eyes. He rubbed at them. They felt gritty with tiredness and concentration. He squeezed them shut and opened them again. He wanted another perspective. "Hold it, I want to talk to Lloyd again."

He took the R/T from his pocket, and pressed its call button.

"Yes?" Lloyd said quietly a moment later. Clark pressed the R/T to his cheek.

"What's happening?"

"I" ve just been on my rounds," Lloyd almost chuckled. There was a crackling, electric excitement in the man. He had swung away from the helpless depression of the prisoner. Now he was the schoolboy escapee. "I managed to brief one of my chief petty officers while I was doing it."

"What about the gates?"

There's a minimal guard outside, always has been. The repair crew won't be here before eight. The gates can be opened by two men, one to throw the switches, the other to guard him. I'll detail men as soon as we free the wardroom. Then they can smash the switches so the gates can't be closed again."

"I agree."

"Clark — can you give me “Leopard”? I can't risk my men and my vessel unless you do."

"Can you kill the first guard, Lloyd, the one outside your door?" Clark snapped back at him. "Because if you can't, then Proteus goes nowhere!" Clark, in the silence which followed, imagined Lloyd reaching under his pillow for the tiny Astra pistol he had left with him. Everything depended on Lloyd being able to kill the guard outside his cabin, retrieve the man's Kalashnikov, and release his officers from the wardroom along the corridor from his cabin.

"I — think I can," Lloyd replied eventually. "I'll have to, won't I?"

"And I have to repair “Leopard”, don't I?"

"Very well. Rumour has it that Panov, the scientist, is expected at any moment. The technicians on board have been informed to that effect. No later than eight o" clock."

"It's all coming right down to the wire, uh?" When Lloyd did not reply, Clark merely added, "I'll call you." He replaced the R/T in his pocket. Even as he did so, he heard Aubrey's voice in his ear.

"Clark, you must begin preparing to abort “Leopard”. It will take you at least thirty to forty minutes to place the charges. You must begin at once."

"No, dammit!"

"Clark, do as you are ordered."

"Mister Quin gave me a job to do — maybe after that."

"Now!"

"Not a chance."

Rapidly, he fitted the cable adaptor to the first of the power lines Quin had designated. Positive. He cursed under, his breath. Then the second. Positive. Then the third. Positive. He sighed loudly, in anger and frustration.

"Fit the charges, Clark — please begin at once," Aubrey commanded with icy malice.

Ardenyev watched the MiL-8 transport helicopter sag down towards the landing pad. The down-draught, exceeding the wind's force, stirred the dust on the concrete. Behind it, the sky was beginning to lighten, a thin-grey blue streak above the hills, almost illusory beyond the hard white lighting of the helicopter base. Ardenyev glanced at his watch. Seven-ten. The admiral and Panov were almost an hour early. Viktor Teplov — face-saving, loyal Teplov — had picked up the information somewhere that Dolohov was on his way, and revived his officer with coffee and one large vodka, which Ardenyev had felt was like swallowing hot oil. Then he had commandeered a staff car and driver and accompanied Ardenyev to the helicopter base. The MiL-8 hovered like an ungainly wasp, then dropped on to its wheels. Immediately, ducking ground crew placed the chocks against the wheels, even as the noise of the rotors descended through the scale and the rotor dish dissolved from its shimmering, circular form into flashes of darker grey in the rush of air. Then they were individual blades, then the door opened as the rotors sagged into stillness. Dolohov's foot was on the ladder as soon as it was pushed into place for him. He descended with a light, firm step, inheriting a kingdom. Men snapped to attention, saluting. A smaller, more rotund figure in a fur-collared coat stepped more gingerly down behind him. Panov. Dolohov waited for the scientist, then ushered him towards Ardenyev.

Ardenyev sucked spit from his cheeks and moistened his dry throat. He saluted crisply, then Dolohov extended his hand and shook Ardenyev's warmly.

"May I introduce Captain Valery Ardenyev," he said, turning to Panov. The scientist appeared intrigued, his face pale, almost tinged with blue, in the cold lighting. He shook Ardenyev's hand limply.

"Ah — our hero of the Soviet Union," he said with evident irony. Dolohov's face clouded with the insult to Ardenyev.

"Thank you, Comrade Academician Professor Panov," Ardenyev replied woodenly. He was enjoying fulfilling Panov's prejudices, meeting one of his stereotypes. "It was nothing."

Dolohov appeared bemused. "Shall we go?" he remarked. "Directly to the submarine pen, I think?"

"If you please," Panov said primly.

"This way, Admiral — Professor. The car is waiting."

"I'm sorry you lost so many men," Dolohov murmured confidentially as they walked towards the car. Panov, who was intended to overhear the remark, appeared at a loss, even embarrassed.

"So am I, sir — so am I." Teplov came to attention, then opened the rear door of the Zil. Ardenyev smiled wearily. "A ten minute drive, sir, and you'll be able to see her. HMS Proteus, pride of the fleet!"

Dolohov laughed uproariously, slapping Ardenyev on the back before getting into the car.

Chapter Fourteen: RUNNING

Hyde woke, and reacted instantly to the cold air that had insinuated itself into their burrow. It was damp. He knew there was a fog or heavy mist outside, even though he could not see beyond the bush. There was greyness there, which might have been the dawn. He felt his shoulder protest with a sharp pain as he tried to rub his cold arms, and he stifled his groan as he remembered what had roused him. The running feet of deer along the track behind the rifle range, past the bush and the entrance into their hole. He looked immediately at the girl. She was soundly asleep.

He listened. And tested his shoulder, moving fingers and wrist and elbow and forearm. Slightly better. He touched the crude, dirty bandage. Dry and stiff. He investigated his resources. His body felt small, shrunken, empty and weak. But not leaden, as the previous night. His head felt more solid, too, less like a gathering of threads or misty tendrils. There was some clarity of thought, some speed of comprehension. He would have to do as he was. He was all he had, all they had.

The hoofbeats of the three or four deer who had fled past their hiding place died away, swallowed by what he was now convinced was a heavy mist. He listened to the silence, slow and thick outside the hole. He stretched his legs carefully, not disturbing the girl, felt the expected cramp, eased it away, rotated his pelvis as well as he could while hunched in a seated position. His back ached. He flexed his fingers once more, aware of the small of his back where the gun had been. Having completed his inventory, he pronounced himself incapable, with a slight smile. Some stubbornness had returned during the few hours" sleep he had had.

Noises. Slow, regular, cautious footsteps outside. He reached up and pressed his palm flat against the roof of the hole. The sand was damp. He levered himself out of his sitting position, and stepped over the girl's drawn-up knees. Her head rested on her chest, and her blonde hair, dirty and hanging in stiff, greasy tails, was draped like strands of cloth over her knees. He leaned forward, then slid towards the entrance to the hole. The branches of the bush became clear, as if he had focused an inward lens on them, and beyond them the heavy mist was grey and impenetrable. One chance. Don't wake up, darling —

The figure of a man emerged from the mist, bent low to study the track, the slim, pencil-like barrel of the rifle he carried protruding beyond the bulk of his form. He was little more than a dark shadow in the first light seeping into the mist. Then he saw the bush, and might have been staring into Hyde's eyes, though he registered no sign of having seen him. The gun moved away from his body, and Hyde recognised it, with a chill of danger and a strange greediness, as a Kalashnikov. Stubby, with a folding steel stock and plastic grip and the curving thirty-round ammunition box beneath the magazine. It was infinitely desirable, and deadly. The small R/T set clipped to the pocket of the man's anorak was similarly desirable and dangerous. Hyde coveted them both.

He held his breath as he felt one of the girl's feet touch his shin. Don't let her wake up, not now —

The man moved closer to the bush, the Kalashnikov prodding out in front of his body. Hyde flexed his fingers, keeping his head as close to the lip of the hole as he could, watching the man intently. The girl's foot stirred again, and Hyde prayed she would not make a noise in the last moments of her sleep. He felt her foot shiver. The cold was beginning to wake her. The stubby barrel of the rifle moved among the leafless branches, disturbing them, brushing them to one side. He squashed himself flat against the damp sand. He felt, through her foot, the girl's whole body stir, then he heard her yawn. Immediately the man's head snapped up, alert, cocked on one side as he listened, attempting to gauge the direction of the sound, waiting for its repetition. His eyes glanced over the bank, the rifle's barrel wavered in the bush, pointing above the hole. The girl groaned with stiffness. Hyde reached out, grabbed the stubby rifle, one hand on the barrel the other on the magazine. The man jerked backwards in surprise and defence, and Hyde pushed with his feet and used the man's response to pull him out of the hole and through the bush. He cried out with the sudden, searing pain in his arm and shoulder, but he held on, twisting the barrel of the rifle away from him, rolling down the sand to the track, pulling the man off balance.

The man almost toppled, then jerked at the rifle. Hyde had to release the grip of his left hand because the pain was so intense, but he had rolled almost to the man's feet. He kicked out, using his grip on the rifle as a pivot, and the man overbalanced as Hyde's shins caught him at the back of the legs. The Russian held on to the rifle, and Hyde felt the heat before he heard the sound of the explosion as a round was fired. Hyde used the rifle like a stick, an old man assisting himself to rise from a deep armchair, and as the man made to turn on to his side and get up, Hyde kicked him in the side of the head. The grip on the Kalashnikov did not loosen. Hyde, enraged and elated, kicked the man once more in the temple, with all the force he could muster. The man rolled away, his head seemingly loose on his shoulders, and lay still. Hyde could see the man's chest pumping. He reached down for the R/T, and a hand grabbed at the rifle again as Hyde held it still by the barrel. The man's eyes were glazed and intent. Hyde staggered away, taking the rifle with him. He had no strength, he should have killed the man with one of the kicks, it was pathetic —

The man was sitting up. He heard Tricia Quin gasp audibly. He fumbled the rifle until it pointed at the man, who was withdrawing his hand from his anorak and the hand contained a pistol, heavy and black and coming to a bead. Hyde fired, twice. The noise of the shots seemed more efficiently swallowed by the mist than the cries of rooks startled by the gunfire. The man's pistol discharged into the earth, and he twitched like a wired rabbit. Hyde, angry and in haste, moved to the body. He swore. One bullet had passed through the R/T set, smashing it. Tricia Quin's appalled groan was superfluous, irrelevant.

Hyde knelt by the man's body, searching it quickly with one hand. He had had to lay the rifle down. His left arm was on fire, and useless to him. He hunched it into his side, as if he could protect it or lessen its pain by doing so. He unzipped the anorak. No papers. The man didn't even look Slavic. He could have been anybody. He patted the pockets of the anorak. Yes —

Triumphantly, he produced a flask of something, and a wrapped package of sandwiches.

"Food!" he announced. "Bloody food!"

The girl's face was washed clean of resentment and fear and revulsion. She grabbed the package eagerly. The sandwiches had some kind of sausage in them. She swallowed a lump of bread and sausage greedily, then tried to speak through the food.

"What —?" was all he heard.

Hyde looked around him. "Help me get this poor sod into the hole. It might hide him for a bit. Come on — stop stuffing your face, girlie!"

Tricia put the sandwiches reverently, and with much regret, on the track, roughly rewrapped. He took hold of one arm, she the other, averting her eyes from the man's face, which stared up into the mist in a bolting, surprised way. They dragged the body to the bank, hoisted it — Tricia would not put her shoulder or body beneath the weight of the man — and Hyde with a cry of pain and effort tumbled the body into the hole.

"His foot," the girl said as Hyde stood trembling from his exertions. Hyde looked up. The man's walking boot was protruding over the lip of the hole.

"You see to it."

Reluctantly, the girl reached up, and pushed. The man's knee seemed locked by an instant rigor mortis. The girl obtained a purchase for her feet, and heaved. The foot did not move. She cried with exasperation, and wriggled and thrust until the foot disappeared.

"Bloody, bloody thing!" There was a crack from inside the hole. She covered her mouth, appalled. She turned accusing eyes on Hyde.

"We can all be shitty when we try hard," he said, eating one of the sandwiches. Then he added, "Okay, pick the rest of them up — " He thrust the Makarov pistol into his waistband, and hefted the rifle in his good hand. The girl pocketed the sandwiches, looking furtively sidelong at him as she ate a second one. "Come on, then." He looked around him. "Bad luck and good luck. No one's going to find us in this."

They walked up the track behind the bank. The girl looked guiltily back once, still chewing the last lump of the second sandwich.

Clark ground his teeth in frustration, and clenched his hands into claws again and again as if to rid them of a severe cramp. The sight of what he had done enraged and depressed him. The plastic charges were taped and moulded to the back-up system, lying across the wiring and the circuitry like slugs, the detonator wires like the strands of a net that had dredged up the equipment from beneath the sea. He had done as Aubrey asked — commanded — and then he had requested Quin to set him another task, like an over-eager schoolboy. More power lines, and still nothing.

"Clark?" For a moment, he was tempted to curse Aubrey aloud. Part of him, however, admitted the correctness of Aubrey's decision.

"Yes?"

"It's time for you to rig the main “Leopard” system. Good luck." There was no sense of possible argument or disobedience. Aubrey assumed he would behave like the automaton he was intended to be.

The bleeper on the R/T in his pocket sounded. He pulled the set out and pressed the transmit button. "Yes?"

"Clark? I think Panov's about to make an appearance. The technical team are streaming out of the Proteus, lining up like a guard of honour. I" ve just seen them."

"Where are you?"

"Hurry, Clark. You do not have much time — " Aubrey said in his ear.

The officers" bathroom."

"Your guard?"

"Clark listen to me —"

"Outside."

"Mood?"

"Pretty sloppy. He's waiting for his relief at eight."

"Clark, you will abort “Plumber” immediately and proceed to destroy “Leopard”. Do you understand me?"

"Well?" Lloyd asked with a nervous edge to his voice.

"Get as close to him as you can, preferably the side of his head or under the jaw, and squeeze the trigger twice."

"Clark, you will rescind that instruction to Lloyd —"

"What about “Leopard”?" Lloyd asked.

"I'll give you “Leopard” in working order!" Clark snapped. "Where is Thurston, where's Hayter?"

The First-Lieutenant's in the cabin next to mine, Hayter's in the wardroom with the others."

Then —"

"Clark —!"

"Time for Quin to earn his money!" Clark almost shouted, with nerves and relief and the adrenalin that suddenly coursed through his system. "Help me get this fucking back-up working, Quin!"

"Clark — Clark!"

"Go or no go?" Lloyd asked.

"Go — GO! Kill the bastard!"

"I'll be in touch."

"Clark — you are insane. You will never get out of Pechenga without “Leopard”. You have not, you cannot repair it. You have just sentenced Commander Lloyd and his crew to imprisonment, possibly even death. You are insane." The last word was hissed in Clark's ear, serpentine and venomous.

Clark felt a heady, dangerous relief, and a pressing, violent anxiety. "For Chrissake, Quin — help me get this fucking thing to work! Help me!"

Aubrey stared at Quin. He could not believe in what Clark had put in motion, could not apprehend the violent and dangerous half-motives that had prompted him. In its final stage, the Proteus business was escaping him again, running on its own headlong flight unhindered by reason or caution or good sense. In a split-second over which he had. had no control, Clark had made the decision not to abort. Now, everyone would face the consequences of that decision.

"Quin? Quin?" he snapped at his companion. The scientist tossed his head as if startled from sleep.

"What?"

"Can you help him?"

Quin shrugged. "We" ve tried everything we can. There's nothing wrong —"

There must be, dammit!""

"I don't know what it is!" Quin almost wailed.

Aubrey leaned towards him. "That bloody American has set the seal on this affair, Quin. Lloyd will either kill his guard, or be killed. If the former, then they will kill others, picking up weapons at each death, until they can open the gates and sail Proteus out of Pechenga. Without “Leopard” in an operational condition, they will be a target for every naval unit in the port. I would not wish to assume that the Russians will be prepared to let her sail away scot free! What can you do? Think of something!"

Quin began flipping through the "Leopard" manual, most of which he had written himself. Aubrey recognised an unseeing, desperate gesture. Quin knew the manual, nothing would come from it. The man's hands were shaking. He had collided with a brute reality. Aubrey shook his head with weariness. Tiredness, the sense of being utterly spent, seemed the only feeling left to him. Clark had reneged on reason, on authority. He could understand how it had happened. The American had simply refused to acknowledge defeat.

He heard Eastoe's voice tinnily in the headphones resting around his neck. He placed the set over his head. The microphone bobbed in front of his mouth.

"Yes, Squadron Leader?" He had not meant his voice to sound so waspish and dismissive.

"Mr Aubrey. We're out of range again. I can try to get back, but I won't be able to hold station for very much longer. I can give you a couple of minutes, perhaps."

Aubrey wanted to rage at the pilot, but he acknowledged the weariness in the man's voice. The MiGs — there was one on the port wing again, turning silver in the beginning of the day — were making patterned flying impossible. Slowly, inexorably, the Nimrod was being shepherded away from the Soviet border.

"Do what you can, Squadron Leader. We're in your hands."

"Very well, Mr Aubrey. I'll give you as long as I can."

The nose of the Nimrod dipped, and then when Eastoe judged he had lost sufficient height, the aircraft banked savagely, rolling away towards the east and the sun. The porthole in the fuselage became a blaze of gold, blinding

Aubrey. He felt as old and thin and stretched as a ghost. Transparent in the sudden light.

"Quin, come on, man — suggest something. We don't have much time."

Quin groaned aloud, and rubbed his face with his hands, washing off his present circumstances. He looked Wearily at Aubrey, and shook his head.

"There is nothing."

"There must be. Some faulty system, something you disagreed with Plessey about, something you" ve always suspected or disliked about the system — anything!" Aubrey spread his hands around the communications console, which hissed at him. It was as if he were about to jettison it as useless cargo. A MiG, gold-bright, popped into his view, just off the port wing. Craning his neck, Aubrey could see the grey sea, the misted coast below them. The MiG ducked beneath the Nimrod, and Aubrey saw it bob like a cork into the starboard porthole opposite him. "Something —please!"

The console crackled. Clark's voice was faint. The coast and sea below moved, and Aubrey could hear the Spey engines more loudly. Eastoe was running for the border with the Soviet Union in a straight, desperate line.

"You must help —"

"For Chrissake, Quin — say something!" Clark bellowed from the receiver.

Quin's face was an agony of doubt.

"Come on, Quin, come on, come on," Aubrey heard himself repeating.

"I can hear shooting!" Clark yelled. Aubrey knew it was a lie, but a clever one. And perhaps it only described events that had already occurred. Lloyd dead, a guard dead, two guards, three?

"Change-over — automatic change-over," Quin murmured.

"What's that?" Clark snapped.

The MiG on the starboard wing — two of them now, one above the other, moving on a course to head off the Nimrod. There was a slim shadow taking and changing shape on the port wing. One of the MiGs was above them, appearing almost as if it might be lowering itself on to the wing, to snap it in half. Eastoe dropped the nose of the Nimrod again, dropping towards the sea and the rocky coast that seemed to lurch up to meet them. The port wing and the starboard window were swept clean for a moment. Aubrey felt Eastoe begin to turn the aircraft. He'd given up. They were on their way back, and out of range.

"The automatic change-over from the main system to the back-up. I argued time and again, with the Admiralty. No trust in completely automatic systems. They insisted —"

"Tell him!"

Quin leant towards the console. "Clark," he began, "you must check the automatic change-over on the power supply from the main system to the back-up. Locate the power supply box…"

Aubrey ceased to listen. The Nimrod had completed its turn, through the brief blinding sunlight on the porthole, and was now heading west once more. Eastoe had dropped the aircraft's speed, but it was a matter of mere minutes until they would no longer be able to talk to Clark.

And, in Pechenga, with whatever outcome, the killing had undoubtedly begun.

One of the MiGs bobbed back into view, off the port wing. The Russian interceptor appeared to be flying a little further off, as if its pilot, too, knew that the game was up.

Lloyd hesitated for a moment, on the threshold of the bathroom, straddling the body of the guard who had only had time to half-turn before the small Astra, pressed against his side, had exploded twice. Lloyd had had to take him into an embrace, feel the man's final shudder against him, and lower him to the deck. One guard only in the corridor. Lloyd had been surprised at the small, muffled sound the gun had made when pressed into the spare flesh the man was carrying. It was as if the pistol had been fitted with a silencer.

He saw the guard outside the wardroom door at the end of the corridor, and hoped, as he studied the man's movements and saw the Kalashnikov turn in the guard's hands and draw a bead on himself, that Thurston would not blunder into the line of fire out of the cabin next door to his own. Then he prayed his hands would move more swiftly to bring the small pistol up to the level of the guard's trunk.

He could not believe that he would move more quickly than the trained marine, but some realisation that the clock was ticking away precious seconds only for him, came to him as he fired. He had moved inches faster, reaction had been milliseconds quicker, because he had an imperative the Russian did not share. The guard thudded back against the wardroom door, and slid down, feet out, to a sitting position with his head lolling. The pistol now made much more noise, and would have attracted attention.

"Come on, come on!" he yelled, banging on Thurston's door as he passed it. Then he was stooping to retrieve the Kalashnikov, which felt immediately bulky and menacing in his grip. He flung open the wardroom door. Surprised faces, half a dozen of them, mostly unshaven, were grouped around the table above mugs of steaming coffee. Thurston was behind him now. He passed the Astra back to his first-lieutenant. "Get the others out — now!" he snapped, feeling the dangerous, elating adrenalin running wildly through his body.

Seven twenty-one. Clark had recognised, almost subliminally, the two shots, then the third after a slight delay. He imagined that the same small Astra pistol had made all three reports, but he could not quite believe it, until Lloyd's voice could be heard plainly, coming from the R/T which was clipped to the breast of his immersion suit, ordering his officers to remain in the wardroom until the control room had been recaptured. Then there was the awful, cloth-ripping stutter of the Kalashnikov on automatic — Clark presumed feverishly that it was the one Lloyd had taken from the wardroom guard. It was. Lloyd yelled at Hayter to recover the gun of the man he had just killed. Clark nodded to himself. Lloyd would go on now until he became exhausted or until someone shot him. He was high on escape, even on death.

Clark lifted the lid of the power supply box, as Quin had instructed him. LIFT HERE ONLY. He had undamped the lid, and obeyed its command, stencilled in yellow.

"Clark?"

"Yes. The box is open," he told Quin. Communications were already weakening as the Nimrod moved towards the fringes of reception. Aubrey had told him what was happening, then patched in Eastoe. The pilot did not enjoy admitting his weariness, his loss of nerve, his failure, but he had done so. The Nimrod was shot, finished. It was on its way home. Eastoe had dropped the airspeed as much as he could, but they were gradually moving out of range, taking Quin with his manual, his diagrams and his knowledge with them. He had, at the Nimrod's present speed, no more then five minutes. Seven twenty-two.

"Switch SW-Eight-R should be off." Clark followed Quin's instruction. Lloyd's breathing was audible to him in the confined, lamplit darkness from the R/T against the submarine captain's chest. Running —? Cries, yells —? Come on, Quin —

"Okay."

"Press the yellow button marked PRESS TO TEST. Have you got that?" A faint, weak voice, like a man dying in the next room.

"Okay?"

Firing.

"Lloyd, what's happening?" He knew he should not have called, that it might be fatal to distract Lloyd now. Yet the sounds tormented him, made his body writhe with an uncontrollable tension and anxiety.

Firing.

Quin said something he did not catch. He prayed it was only his inattention."… through top… cover?"

"Repeat, please," he requested loudly, holding his breath. Lloyd's breathing roared on his chest like an illness he had contracted.

"… contacts move… clear top…?"

"Repeat, repeat!" Clark shouted, almost as a relief for the hours of whispering and silence he had endured and partly because he was panicking. The irreversible had begun. Lloyd had killed, the officers were armed with two Russian Kalashnikovs and were in the control room of the Proteus. He had begun it — he had. "Repeat. I say again, repeat your message." The words were formal, the voice running out of control.

"Right. Hold them over there — no, get them off my ship, now!" Lloyd's elation, his success, drummed in the cramped space between the two hulls. "Clark?"

"Yes?"

"What's wrong?" Even in his excitement, Lloyd was responsive to tone, to nuance.

"Nothing."

"We have the control room in our hands again."

"Good —" Clark paused. There was a spit of sound, but when the tape had been slowed, there was only the ether, mocking him. A gauzy, sad, distant voice mumbled behind it. Christ, what have I done? "Outside?"

"Thurston's taking a look. I" ve despatched three men, two of them armed, to the control booth for the gates. A couple of minutes now —?" the statement ended as a question. Another spit of sound, Clark's heart pounding as he waited for it to replay more slowly in his earpiece, Quin's voice broken and racked by the interference.

"Can you see… through top… moving?"

Contacts, contacts, he recalled. Can you see the contacts moving through the clear top of the cover?

"Got you!" Then, immediately, he cried, "They're not moving!"

"Clark, what the devil's wrong?"

"I can't —!" Clark cried despairingly. "I don't know what's wrong!"

"For God's sake… " Lloyd breathed. "Oh my God!" Clark stared desperately at the contacts, which remained unmoving. Then he jabbed his finger on the test button again and again.

Spit of sound in his ear. What is wrong? What is the matter?

"Examine the relays," he heard Quin say quite clearly in a calm, detached voice. Then the interference rushed in to fill the small silence after he had spoken.

Relays, relays —

"What do I do?" Lloyd asked peremptorily, a sense of betrayal in his voice.

"Open the fucking gates!" Clark snarled. "You got nowhere else to go!" Relays, relays —

One of them is undamped, one of them is undamped.

"Chief — get the men to their stations, immediately. Engine room?"

"Sir, we're clear down here. "

"Run up electric power. Well done, Chief!"

"Thank you sir."

"Sandy, clear the ship of all Soviet personnel — all of them, mind you."

"One of them is unclamped!" Clark yelled into his throat-mike, as if he expected Quin to be able to hear him in an identical freak reception spot.

"What?" Lloyd asked.

"You do your thing, Lloyd — let me do mine!"

"Is it go?"

"It was go a long time past! Let's get out of here!"

"What about “Leopard”?"

"I'll give you “Leopard”, dammit!"

"What about you? You can't be outside the pressure hull when we dive."

"You worry about your business, I'll worry about mine."

"Very well. Thurston's opening the gates now."

"Get with it."

Faulty fitting, he told himself. The relay, one single fucking relay, lying there on the base of the case. His fingers trembled as he reached down to it, touched it almost reverently, fearfully. His fingers stroked, embraced, lifted it. The vibration caused by the torpedo damage had shaken it out of place, disabling the back-up system, preventing the automatic change-over from working.

There was another spit of sound in his ear, but he ignored the slowed-down, true-speed voice of the storm and the air. Quin was invisible, inaudible somewhere behind it, but he no longer mattered.

Clark pressed home the detached relay, flipped over the retaining clamp, then removed his fingers from it. They came away clammily. The electric motors of the Proteus thrummed through the pressure hull.

His back ached. He groaned with the sudden awareness of it and of his cramped and twisted body and the rivulets of perspiration running down his sides and back.

Lloyd's stream of orders continued, murmuring on his chest like the steady ticking of his heart, slower and calmer and younger then his heart felt.

"Slow astern."

"Slow astern, sir." Thurston's voice was distant, but Clark could still hear it repeating the captain's instructions. They'd got the gates to the pen open, they'd cast off their moorings at bow and stern. How many men had they lost, just doing that?

"Clark?"

"Yes."

"Have you finished?"

"Yes. I hope to God, yes."

"Get back in here — now."

"Aye, aye, sir."

Clark turned, still on his knees. He could hear a siren through the outer hull of the Proteus. "Leopard" had to work —

He turned to look at the back-up system — the grey carapace lay behind it. He tore at the wiring and at the wads of explosive, huddling them into his chest then thrusting them back into the pack in pure elation. Then he lifted the grey metal casing, fitted it, fidgeted in his pocket for the screws, fixed them one at a time, feeling the submarine moving slowly backwards on her batteries, out of the pen. Yes, yes.

Pack, pack — left hand bad. The other could stay. Whatever happened, he would not be coming back. He took hold of the pack, and turned once more to make his way back to the hatch following the wire of his aerial. He shunted the pack and his lamp in front of him, hurrying now, winding through the tree-like stanchions like an obstacle course.

The Proteus lurched forward, as if freed from some constraint.

Clark slipped, and began to slide into the abyss, into the dark. His lamp slid away, wobbling its light back at him for a moment before leaving him in entire darkness, his body weighted by the pack in his right hand — left hand bad — beginning to pursue the fallen lamp. He crooked an arm round one of the stanchion trees, heaving his body into stillness, into a quiver that was devoid of downward movement. He felt sick. He felt exhausted.

"Clark — Clark, where are you, man?"

Clark groaned. He swung the pack until it rested on the level top of the pressure hull, then grabbed the stanchion with his right hand, changing the agonising hold of his crooked arm for a two-handed grip. He heaved at his leaden body, feeling the revolutions of the motors rise in speed. Proteus must be almost out of the pen.

He pulled himself up, aided by scrabbling feet and knees, and lumbered along the top of the pressure hull, reached the hatch and thrust it open. He hefted the explosives through, and let them roll away down the outer hull. Then he clambered after them, closing the hatch and locking it behind him.

The stern of the submarine had already passed into the concrete tunnel leading to the harbour. On her docking prop, Proteus was sliding through the tunnel, out to sea.

He watched as the sail of the submarine slid into the shadow of the tunnel. Above the bellow of the siren, he could hear shooting in the distance, like the pinging of flies against a windscreen. Then he ran crouching along the hull, almost slipping twice, until he reached the aft escape hatch, lifted it, stepped on to the ladder inside the chamber, closed the hatch and locked it. Then he felt his legs go watery and he stumbled to the bottom of the escape chamber, bent double with effort and relief.

"Prepare to dive," he heard Lloyd saying, then: "Clark? Clark, where are you?"

"Inside."

Thank God. Well, does it work?"

"Switch on, and pray."

"You don't sound too hopeful —"

"Switch the damn thing on!" Clark bellowed with rage and relief and tiredness.

Valery Ardenyev instinctively placed himself in front of Dolohov and Panov. The scene in the pen had no precise focus, nor did it possess a great deal of movement — certainly not sufficient to suggest panic — yet Ardenyev knew what was happening. One guard was firing, the technicians who must have been lining up like an honour guard to await Panov's arrival were shuffling like a herd smelling the first smoke of the grass fire. Also, there was someone clambering up the side of the Proteus's sail, making his way back into the submarine. Ardenyev had the immediate sense that events were already minutes old, even though the white-coated group of figures seemed only now to be reacting to them. Yes. The gates were wide open, and there were two uniformed bodies lying dead on the concrete, alongside the Proteus.

He heard Dolohov say, in a strangled old voice, "No —!", and then he ushered them back through the door by which they had entered the pen, pushing them against the officers who had accompanied them, then had stood deferentially aside so that the three of them might be the first of the party to see the captured British vessel.

"Close the door — give the alarm!" he snapped, then he was pushing through the jostle of technicians towards the submarine.

The Proteus slid away from him. As he passed the huddled bodies he believed he recognised the face of the guard on Lloyd's cabin, the man who had patrolled behind the British officer when he had brought Lloyd lunch and told him about Panov.

He ran faster. The Proteus shuddered against the side of the pen, then was free. The bow was still moving away from him as he raced to overtake it. He could not believe the panic appearance of the breakout. There had to have been help, and hope. Lloyd or someone else had been given a gun. He knew "Leopard" must have been repaired. Lloyd would not have risked lives, and his submarine, without knowing he could rely on the protection of the anti-sonar equipment.

The bow was behind him now. He ran closer to the hull. It rose smoothly above him. He was half-way down the pen, the only moving figure. There was rifle fire behind him, pointless but noisy. The pitons of a ladder climbed away from him. He reached for the lowest one, felt his feet lifted and dragged, his stride extending to great lunar bounds as his arms protested. Then he was pressing himself against the side of the submarine, watching the concrete wall of the tunnel approaching. He might have been half-jammed into the door of a metro train, watching the end of the platform racing at him.

He clambered up the hull, feet slipping, hands sweaty, on to its upper section. He climbed the last few pitons and stood on top of the hull as it slid into the tunnel. He ran to the forward escape hatch, unlocked it, lifted it, and clambered down into the chamber, closing the hatch behind him.

"Did he hear you, man? Did he?"

Quin shook his head. "I don't know," he admitted. "I really don't know."

Aubrey looked at his watch. Seven twenty-seven. They were out of range. The link between Clark and the Nimrod had been broken as certainly as if Pasvik had been shot, and his dish aerials smashed. There was nothing more to be done. As if he saw clearly into Aubrey's mind, Eastoe's voice sounded in the headset.

"That's it, Mr Aubrey. Sorry."

Aubrey looked through the porthole, out beyond the sun-tipped port wing. Ahead of the Nimrod, the sky was darker, and the land below them was tumbled and cracked in shadow. Cloud and mist wound like white, unsubstantial rivers through the peaks and the fjords. The MiG-23 on the port wing waggled its body like an athletic silver insect, dipping its wings in turn, and then it dropped away and out of sight. The Nimrod was more than a hundred and fifty miles from the Soviet border, making for North Cape.

Aubrey groaned with disappointment.

"I'm sorry," Quin said.

"Do you think he would have found anything?"

"There seemed no other place to look —" Quin shook his head and stared at the still-open manual in front of him. He closed the wirebound book. "I don't know. I could think of nothing else."

Behind them, Proteus and her crew would be breaking out — to what purpose? With what reprisals? There was blood now, instead of diplomacy or an intelligence game. People had been killed, Soviet citizens. It did not bear consideration. Aubrey surrendered instead to his utter and complete weariness of mind and body; a comforting numbness.

Seven twenty-nine.

Then the signal, in clear, that he no longer believed to be possible.

"Mr Aubrey?"

"Yes?"

"A signal from Proteus, in clear."

"No —"

"It reads — “At one stride comes the dark” — end of message. Do you understand it? Shall I ask for a repeat?"

"No, thank you, Squadron Leader. Let us go home."

"Very well, sir."

A beatific smile wreathed Aubrey's features, inflating his grey cheeks, forming his lips, screwing up his eyes. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. "At one stride comes the dark". The signal he had told Clark to make in a moment of amusement, a moment of looking for the right, witty, portentous thing for Clark to say if and when he repaired "Leopard". Somehow, he had done it.

"What is it?" Quin asked.

"It's all right. It's all right," Aubrey repeated, opening his eyes, slouching back in his seat, almost asleep already. "Clark has done it."

"Thank God," Quin breathed.

The man's daughter, Aubrey thought, his body immediately chilled. Tricia Quin and Hyde. What of them? Alive, or dead? If the latter, how would he tell Quin?"

"Admiral, we have no units capable of detecting and stopping the British submarine — not in the inner harbour," the officer commanding the defences of Pechenga explained to Dolohov, nervously standing to attention before the older, more senior man. Inwardly, he wished himself a great distance from the defence control room, set beneath thick concrete and lit by strip-lighting, but he struggled to preserve a form of dignity and an impassive expression on his face. Dolohov was evidently beside himself with rage.

"Nothing? Nothing?" Turning, Dolohov waved at the sheet of perspex marked in a grid, displaying coloured lights and chinagraph markings. The two anti-submarine nets were bright red strings of beads, the mines, represented by colours according to type, were like the knots in a fine skein, ready to be drawn about the Proteus. Beyond the first net, the units of the Red Banner Fleet at present in Pechenga appeared as a host of bright lights.

"Everything is cold, Admiral — reactors, diesels, turbines all need time to run up to operational readiness. We have been caught flatfooted — " He cut off his explanation as Dolohov turned to him again.

"Where is she? Where is the submarine?" he bellowed.

"She disappeared from our screens two minutes ago — here." The defences commandant hurried to the perspex screen in the centre of the operations room and gathered up a pointer that rested against its base. The perspex flexed and dimpled as he tapped with enthusiasm at it. A chinagraphed dotted line ran from the fifth of the submarine pens to a point marked with a circled cross, in the inner harbour. "We think she was already turning at this point —" A junior officer beside the perspex screen nodded in agreement.

"What do you intend to do about it?"

There are two patrol boats in the inner harbour now — the mines, of course, are all activated. However, the inertial navigator memory aboard the submarine may have tracked their course when they entered the harbour, if it had been left on. Even so, it is unlikely they will be able to avoid the mines with any degree of success —"

"Switch them off! Switch off all your mines, at once!"

"But Admiral —"

"Do as as I order! That submarine must be stopped, not destroyed. We cannot take the risk of doing permanent or irreparable damage to her." Dolohov paused. The political consequences would be enormous, and possibly violent, he considered. In making that judgement, he gave no thought to London or Washington or Brussels, only to the Kremlin. His political masters would not forgive the international repercussions of the destruction of the British submarine in Soviet territorial waters. That had been made clear to him, from the outset.

The commandant nodded to one of his juniors, and the order was given. Almost immediately, the fine skein of lights blinked off, leaving great areas of the perspex screen blank and grey. Every mine in the inner harbour and in the outer basin was now disarmed. The fleet vessels which had before glowed in tiny pockets of greyness, their safe anchorages clear of the mines, now beamed out in isolation; single, unmoving lights. Dolohov hated the blank areas of the screen, like areas on a map still to be explored.

"Now," he said heavily, "I want every unit in the outer basin to be prepared. You have a minelayer in port?"

"Yes, Admiral."

"With low power mines?"

"Yes, Admiral."

“Then they must be instructed to sow fresh mines along the seaward side of the inner net. Proximity fuses, or magnetic. But they must be of sufficient strength only to cripple, not destroy. Understand?"

"The inner net, Admiral, will not be opened?" The man evidently did not understand.

"You will lay the mines, by aircraft if you have to, and you will do it at once," Dolohov said with a passionate calmness. "The British captain has torpedoes, wire-guided with television cameras. He can blow a hole in the inner net. If there are mines waiting for him when he escapes through his own hole, he will go to the bottom, or be slowed down, or be forced to the surface. Now do you understand?"

"Yes, Admiral. I will issue the orders at once."

"Good." Dolohov thought once, and briefly, of the fact that Ardenyev was aboard the Proteus, and then dismissed his image in favour of self-congratulation. In the midst of his fierce rage and disappointment, there was room for satisfaction. He had anticipated what the British captain would do to escape, and he might already have made the move that would frustrate his efforts.

He studied the perspex screen intently.

"Torpedo room— stand by."

"Aye, aye, sir. Standing by."

Lloyd studied the sonar screen in front of him. As its arm circled the screen, washing the light-pattern behind it, the bright spots and lines of the submarine net appeared on the screen. It was, as Clark had originally outlined, the only way out— through both nets.

"Range?" he said.

"Eight hundred, sir."

Torpedo room— load number one tube."

"Number one tube loaded, sir."

The Tigerfish wire-guided torpedo was ready to be fired. Lloyd looked at his watch. Four minutes and thirty-six seconds since they had cleared the pen. Speed was the essence, Clark had said. Just like killing the two guards, he reminded himself with a sick feeling in the pit of the stomach. Speed, surprise. And the gamble that Pechenga would switch off and disarm its minefield in order to preserve "Leopard".

"Range seven-fifty, sir."

"Torpedo room — fire one!"

"One away, sir."

Lloyd crossed the control room to where Thurston was studying the tiny, blank television screen set alongside the fire control console's other screens and panels of lights. The screen flickered on. Both men ignored the voice over the intercom calling the range and speed and functions of the wire-guided Tigerfish. They seemed mesmerised by the stir and rush and billow of grey water illuminated weakly by the light on the torpedo. Lloyd's wrist with its curling, dark hairs was at the edge of his eyesight. He saw, conjointly with the image on the screen, the second-hand ticking round, moving up the face of the watch, a red spider-leg.

The flash of something, like a curtain or a net though it might only have been an illusion created by the moving water. Then the screen blanked out as the torpedo operator registered the correct and chosen proximity to target and detonated the warhead of the Tigerfish. The shock-wave was a dim, rumbling shudder along the outer hull a few moments later. Lloyd grinned at Thurston.

"Let's see if you can find the hole, John, mm?"

Aye, aye, sir."

The mist had lifted, remaining in small, thin pockets only in hollows and folds of the ground. The sun had resolved itself into a hard, bright circle, and the sky was palely blue. Hyde was sweating with effort and the rise in temperature as he pulled the girl up the steep bank behind him. When they stood together on the top of the bank, Hyde could see the Chase sloping away from them. He pulled the girl down beside him, and they lay on the wet, dead ferns, staring down through the silver-boled, bare birches towards the tiny figures making their way with laborious effort up towards them. The rifle ranges were behind them, the line of huge, numbered targets perhaps six hundred yards away.

Three of them — no, four. Somehow, Hyde knew there were no others. He checked the magazine, weighing it. Perhaps ten rounds left of the thirty it had originally contained. He thrust the folding double-strut stock against his good shoulder, and looked through the tangent rear sight and the protected post foresight. The action gave him confidence. The mist had been their patron, then their betrayer. Now, the clear air and the bright, warming sun were on their side. Hyde held the high ground. The effective range of the AK-47 was three hundred metres. The four men were at twice that range. He was required to wait.

"You all right?"

"Yes."

The situation became increasingly unreal the more he considered it, the closer the Russians drew. He was in the middle of Staffordshire, these men were either accredited diplomats of the Soviet embassy or they were casuals called out from the woodwork to assist Petrunin. They were the ones on alien ground, and only now that he looked down on them, armed with one of their rifles and with the mist evaporated, could he perceive the situation in those terms. He had already won. The men down there pushed other men under buses, poisoned them with tiny metal pellets in the tips of umbrellas, pushed them on to the live rail of the underground. Maybe in the north of Scotland they could go on playing this hunting game, but not here. In a minute, a portly matron would appear, exercising a small dog, or someone from the Forestry Commission would pass them in a Land-Rover.

Stop it, stop it, he instructed himself. It was still four to one, and the police would be out in force on the M6, but not necessarily on Cannock Chase. Perhaps four hundred yards now. The four men had spread out, but until they reached the trees on the slope below they had no cover. They moved more cautiously now, probably afraid.

"Not long now," he offered to Tricia Quin.

"What isn't? What won't be?" she asked in a sullen, tired voice. "Christ, I'm tired and scared and hungry."

"That's two of us." He opened his squinting eye, and removed the gaze of his other eye from the sights of the Kalashnikov, He studied her. She had become girlish again, and his attitude to her hardened. The rest of it, anything warmer, belonged in the burrow where they had hidden and in his disordered imagination as he half slept. Now, he could not say that he even liked her particularly. She, evidently, disliked him. Their former attitudes had re-emerged, as if they both understood that they were already on the. other side of their experience. "We" ve got the advantage now."

She shook her head, staring at the rifle. It alienated her from him. He accepted her distance. She was about to climb back into the feckless skin which he had forced her to shed. She already resented the sloughing of her past self for the last few days.

He looked back. Still the four men, clambering through the wet ferns and the dead heather. A Land-Rover passed along a distant, open track behind them, and he grinned. He put down the rifle and cupped his hands.

"Petrunin! Can you hear me, Petrunin?" he bellowed. The men stopped immediately.

"Yes," came the faint reply. Petrunin remained just out of effective range of the Kalashnikov. And he knew he was out of range.

"I" ve won, you stupid joker!"

"Not yet."

"Admit it. You're finished. You'd better start making arrangements to fly out before they catch you. You're finished in England, mate!"

The four men remained standing, like an irresolute group of hikers. Just over three hundred yards away. There was nothing they could do, no way in which they could move forward into the trees without coming into range. Stalemate. Stand off.

"I think not. We are four to one." Petrunin's voice was faint, unthreatening. The Forestry Commission Land-Rover had turned into a wide, sunlit ride, and was moving away. The normality it represented did not, however, diminish. Petrunin was bluffing, his words empty.

"Piss off!" Hyde yelled with a quick, sharp delight. "You're beaten and you know it! Go home to Mother — "

The girl's gasp was inaudible, the begging of her scream merely scratched at his attention, far below the volume of his own voice, but the slump of her body at the corner of his vision attracted him, caused him to turn, his hands reaching instinctively for the rifle. It was kicked away from him, and then a second kick thudded into his wounded shoulder as it came between the walking boot and the side of his head. Tricia Quin, he had time to see, had been struck by the man's rifle stock on the temple, and her head was bleeding. He heard himself scream with pain, his whole body enveloped in the fire which ran from his shoulder. He raised one hand feebly as the man kicked again, them drove the wooden stock of his ARM rifle down at Hyde's face, an action as unemotional as stepping on an insect. Hyde attempted to roll away, but the stock of the rifle caught him between the shoulder blades, winding him, forcing all the air from his lungs so that he fell transfixed to the ground.

He went on rolling, and the man who must have doubled around behind them before they had reached the top of the slope came after him, rifle still pointed stock-first towards the Australian. There was a set, fixed smile on the man's face. The man wasn't going to shoot him, he was going to beat and club him to death. Petrunin and the others would already have started running, reaching the bottom of the slope, beginning now perhaps to labour up it to the top, through the birch trees.

Hyde kicked out, struck the rifle but not the man, who stepped nimbly aside and then came forward again. Hyde tried to get to his knees, aware of himself offering his back and neck for more blows, for execution. He could not catch his breath, which made a hollow, indigestible noise in his throat. The rifle swung to one side, then the stock swung back. Hyde fell away from it, and kicked out, catching the man on the shin, making him exclaim with the unexpected pain. The rifle stock sought his head. He pushed himself half upright on one arm, and dived inside the intended blow. His head snapped up into the man's groin, making the man's breath explode, his body weakly tumble backwards. Hyde grabbed the man's legs, squeezing them together, aware of his back exposed to the next blow. Broken back, his imagination yelled at him. Broken back, lifelong cripple in a chair. He heaved at the man's thighs against his shoulder, and they tottered in that supplicatory embrace until the ground dipped and the Russian lost his balance and fell on to his back. Hyde clambered along the man's body, aware of the shadow of the rifle and the man's arm moving to his right, holding his belt, then his shirt, then his throat as if he might have been ascending a sheer slope. He raised himself above the man, blocking the swing of the rifle with his shoulder and back, pressing down as he levered himself up on the man's windpipe. Then he released his grip, bunched his fist, and punched the man in the throat. The man's tongue came out, his eyes rolled, and there was a choking, gagging sound from his open mouth. His body writhed as if at some separate pain.

Hyde scrambled back to the lip of the slope, dragging the man's AKM behind him by its strap. He fumbled it into his hands, and flicked the mechanism to automatic. He knelt, unable to climb to his feet, and squeezed the trigger. The noise deafened him. Bark flashed from the scarred birches, ferns whipped aside, one man fell just as he emerged from the trees, twenty yards from Hyde; a second man was halted, then turned away.

Hyde released the trigger, and inhaled. His breath sobbed and rattled, but it entered his lungs, expanded them, made him cough. He swallowed phlegm, and crouched down breathing quickly as if to reassure himself that the mechanism of his lungs now operated efficiently. When he could, he yelled at the hidden Petrunin.

"Tough shit, mate! Nice try!"

Silence. He waited. The man behind him was making a hideous noise that somehow parodied snoring, or noisy eating. Otherwise, silence. He looked at the girl, and thought he could see her breasts rising and falling in a regular rhythm. He hoped it was not an illusion, but he could not, as yet, summon the strength or the detachment to investigate. Silence.

Eventually, he raised his head. Beyond the trees, three tiny figures were moving away. One of the dots supported a second dot. The one in the lead, striding ahead, Hyde took to be Petrunin, his mind already filled with images of his skin-saving passage out of the country. A small airfield in Kent, after he had arranged to be picked up by car and driven down the M1. Hop across the Channel, then Aeroflot to Moscow direct.

Hyde lay back exhausted, staring up at the bright sun in the almost cloudless, pale sky. He began laughing, weakly at first, then uncontrollably, until his eyes watered and his back and ribs were sore and his shoulder ached.

He heard a noise, and sat up. The girl was wiping her head with a dirty handkerchief, pulling grimacing faces, seeming surprised at the blood that stained the handkerchief. Hyde wiped his eyes, and lay back again. The sky was empty, except for the sun. He waited — he decided he would wait until he heard a dog bark, and then raise his head and check whether it was indeed a portly matron out exercising a runt-sized, pink-bowed dog in a tartan overcoat.

Clark looked up at the ceiling of the wardroom pantry with an involuntary reaction. A forkful of scrambled eggs remained poised an inch or so from his lips. The cook had disliked his insistence on eating in the pantry rather than the wardroom proper, but the rating now seemed almost pleased at his company. What was it Copeland had said? They "ll have to be careful, like small boys scrambling under a barbed wire fence into an orchard. Lloyd could get his trousers caught. Clark smiled. Evidently, they had found the hole they had blown in the net, but not its exact centre. The starboard side of the Proteus had dragged for perhaps a hundred feet or more against some obstacle, some bent and twisted and sharp-edged remnant of the net, and then the fin had clanged dully against the net, jolting the submarine, which had then altered its attitude and slipped beneath the obstruction.

Clark registered the scrambled egg on his fork, and opened his mouth. He chewed and swallowed. The food was good, and it entirely absorbed his attention and his energies. He picked up his mug of coffee, and washed down the mouthful of egg. He was eating quickly and greedily and with an almost sublime satisfaction. The responsibility was no longer his. "Leopard" worked. Immediately, his concussive readiness had drained from him while he lay slumped in the aft escape chamber, and he had gone into a doped and simple-minded superficiality of awareness and sensation. He realised how dirty he was, how much he smelt inside the immersion suit, how hungry and thirsty he was, how tired he was. A junior officer had escorted him to the wardroom. By that time, food had become the absolute priority, after removing his immersion suit. They gave him the disguise of his overalls to wear until he had taken a shower.

What was happening, in the control room and outside the submarine, was of no interest to him. He could not, any longer, have recited the instructions he had given Lloyd when he first boarded the Proteus. Some tape in his mind had been wiped. He could not have seen the loose relay in the back-up system now, without having it pointed out to him.

"Like some more, sir?" the cook offered, holding the saucepan out towards him.

Clark grinned, and patted his stomach. That'll do, I think, don't you? Very good."

"Thank you, sir. More coffee, sir?"

"Please."

The senior rating brought the jug of coffee towards the table where Clark sat. Then he seemed to wobble sideways and lurch against the stove. A stream of dark coffee flew from the jug, cascading down one of the walls — at least, Clark knew that would be what the coffee would do, but the lights went out before he could observe it happen, and he was flung off his chair and bundled into one corner of the pantry. His head banged sickeningly against some jutting piece of kitchen furniture, and he rolled away from it, groaning. He sat up, rubbing his head, his ears ringing with the concussion and the noise that had accompanied the shudder of the submarine, as the emergency lights flickered on, then the main lights came back almost immediately after.

"All right?" he asked.

The cook was wiping coffee from his apron, and rubbing his arm. He still had the empty jug in his hand.

"What happened, sir?"

The Proteus was maintaining course and speed, as far as Clark could apprehend.

"Mine." Someone in Pechenga was thinking fast. He got to his knees, head aching, and the second mine threw him forward as the submarine rolled to starboard with the impact of the explosion. Darkness, slithering, the clatter of utensils, the groan of the hull, the terrible ringing in his ears, the thud of the cook's body on top of him, winding him, then the lights coming back on. He felt the Proteus right herself through his fingertips and the rest of his prone body. Over the intercom, Lloyd requested an all-stations damage report immediately. The senior rating rolled off Clark and apologised.

"Okay, okay. I think I'll just go see what's happening." The cook appeared disappointed at his departure. "You okay?"

"Yes, thank you, sir."

Clark left the wardroom pantry, his body tensed, awaiting a further explosion. He entered the control room at the end of the short corridor from the living quarters, and immediately sensed the mood of congratulation. Proteus had not been seriously, hamperingly damaged.

"Contact at green three-six closing, sir." Someone had got the Soviet ships moving in double-quick time.

"Increase speed — nine knots," he heard Lloyd say.

"Nine knots, sir."

"Net at two thousand yards."

"Contact at red seven-zero also moving. Range one thousand."

"Contact at green eight-two closing, sir."

The hornet's nest had been poked with a stick. Clark realised that the Russians needed less luck in the confined space of the harbour than they needed out in the Barents Sea, and then they had found a crippled Proteus.

"Contact at red seven-zero making for the net, sir."

"Contact at green three-six closing, sir. Range seven hundred."

Lloyd saw Clark from the corner of his eye. Clark waved to him, and grinned. Lloyd returned his attention at once to the bank of sonar screens in front of him. Moved by an impulse to see the equipment he had repaired actually functioning, Clark crossed the control room softly, and exited through the aft door. The "Leopard" room was directly behind the control room.

As he closed the door, he. heard Lloyd speak to the torpedo room after ordering a further increase in speed.

Torpedo room — load number two tube."

They would make it. Just, but they would make it.

The door to the small, cramped "Leopard" room was open. Clark, as he reached the doorway, was instantly aware of the rating lying on the floor, and the officer slumped against one of the cabinets containing the main system. And he recognised the dark-jerseyed man who turned towards the noise he had made, knocking on the door-frame in the moment before he had taken in the scene in the room.

Valery Ardenyev. It was him. Clark knew he had killed Hayter and the rating.

Seven forty-three. He saw the clock above Ardenyev's head as he took his first step into the room and the Russian turned to him, a smile of recognition on his face. Ardenyev's hand moved out, and threw the switch he had been searching for before Clark disturbed him. As the switch moved, Clark knew that "Leopard" had been deactivated. The Proteus moved through the outer harbour of Pechenga, registering on every sonar screen of every Soviet ship and submarine.

"I knew it had to be you," Clark said in a surprisingly conversational tone, warily skirting the rating's body near the door. Ardenyev had apparently killed both of them without a weapon.

"I didn't reach the same conclusion about you." Ardenyev's back was to the control console of the "Leopard" equipment, protecting the switch he had thrown. "Perhaps I should have done." The Russian shrugged, then grinned. "It won't take long. I only have to keep this stuff—" he tossed his head to indicate "Leopard", — "out of action for a few minutes."

"Sure." Clark shook his head, smiling. "You're beaten. We're on our way out, you're alone on an enemy submarine. What chance do you have?"

"Every chance, my friend. That's the Soviet Union a few hundred yards behind you —"

Clark sprang at Ardenyev, who stepped neatly and swiftly to one side, bringing his forearm round sharply across Clark's back. The American grunted and collapsed across the console, his hand reaching instinctively for the switch above him. Ardenyev chopped the heel of his hand across Clark's wrist, deadening it, making the hand hang limply from his forearm. Then Ardenyev punched Clark in the kidneys, making him fall backwards and away from the control console, doubling him up on the floor. Ardenyev leaned casually against the console, watching Clark get groggily to his knees, winded. "You're tired, my friend," Ardenyev observed. Mistily, Clark saw the red second-hand of the clock moving jerkily downwards. Fourteen seconds since Ardenyev had thrown the switch. He staggered, then tried to lean his weight against the Russian and hold on to him. Ardenyev rammed his knee into Clark's groin, and then punched him in the face. Clark fell backwards again, groaning. He did not want to get up, and did not feel he had the strength to do so. The clock just above Ardenyev's head obsessed him. Twenty-two seconds. Proteus must almost have reached the net.

He seemed to feel the submarine hesitate, and saw the attentiveness on Ardenyev's face. He heard a noise scrape down the hull. The net—

The mine exploded beneath the hull, rocking the submarine, blinking out the lights. In the darkness, Clark struggled to his feet and groped for the Russian, feeling his woollen jersey, grabbing it, striking his hand at where the Russian's face would be. He felt the edge of his hand catch the man's nose, below the bridge, felt Ardenyev's breath expelled hotly against his cheek as he cried out in pain, and grabbed the Russian to him in the dark. The room settled around them.

Ardenyev thrust himself and Clark against one of the cabinets. A sharp handle dug into Clark's back, but he hooked his leg behind Ardenyev's calf and pushed. The lights came on as they rolled on the floor together. Clark drove his head down into the Russian's face, but the man did not let go of his neck. Clark felt his throat constrict, and he could no longer breathe. He tried to pull away from the grip, but it did not lessen. Blood ran into Ardenyev's mouth and over his chin, but he held on. The fin of the submarine scraped beneath the holed outer net, the submarine jerked like a hooked fish, shuddering, and then Proteus was free.

Clark's thoughts clouded. Ardenyev was interested only in killing him. Nothing else mattered. He beat at Ardenyev's face and neck and shoulders, his punches weak and unaimed and desperate. Consciousness became more and more fugged and insubstantial, then Ardenyev's grip on his throat seemed to slacken. Clark pulled away, and the hands fell back on to Ardenyev's chest, lying there, curled like sleeping animals.

Clark looked at his own hands, covered with blood, bruised, shaking. In one of them he held something that only slowly resolved in his watery vision until he was able to recognise it as the R/T set from his overalls pocket, the one he had used to communicate with Lloyd. He leaned down over Ardenyev's chest, listening. He avoided looking at the man's battered face. He had slapped the R/T set against Ardenyev's face and head time after time with all his remaining strength, as if the movement of his arm would pump air into his lungs.

Ardenyev was dead.

Clark clambered up the cabinet, then lurched to the control console, flicking the switch back to "On". "Leopard" was activated. It was seven forty-five. "Leopard" had been switched off for almost two minutes. Long enough for Proteus to have been spotted, not long enough for her to be attacked.

He sensed the increased speed of the Proteus through the deck, as she headed for the open sea. He avoided looking at Ardenyev's body. He dropped the blood-slippery R/T to the floor and hunched over the console, wanting to vomit with weakness and disgust and relief. He rubbed at his throat with one hand, easing its soreness. He closed his eyes. Now, he wanted only to sleep, for a long time.