"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.