"Right, off you go." Ardenyev held the man's shoulders for a moment, and then propelled him through the doorway. He spun on the wire for a moment, then straightened and dropped slowly and smoothly towards the deck. Uniformed and oilskinned men waited in the downdraught, arms reaching up to him. His legs were held, he was lowered like a child or cat from a tree, then Teplov was recalling the winch harness. Ardenyev looked at him, and nodded. "Next."
Shadrin, the explosives expert, was at his shoulder in a moment, grinning. "Let's get out of this bloody tin box, skipper," he said. There was a shadow in his eyes, but Ardenyev was thankful for the man's attempt at normality. A small re-establishment of cameraderie, teamwork. Sinkingly, Ardenyev realised that when he got them safely aboard the carrier, he had to rebuild them in his own image; an image in which he felt uncomfortable, even treacherous, at that moment.
He strapped the harness around Shadrin, and slapped him on the shoulder. As Shadrin sat down, then dropped out of the MiL, Ardenyev recollected broiling flames and ignited, spilled fuel and a spider, and prayed that they would locate the British submarine soon. Very soon.
Aerial buoy, Lloyd scribbled on his pad. It rested on the chart table, beneath a dim emergency light. The temperature of the control room seemed higher, and could not be entirely discounted as illusion, which he knew it to be. Silence was humming in his ears.
We can't, Thurston scrawled in ugly, misshapen capitals, and added two exclamation marks for additional emphasis.
You were right — we must.
Lloyd and his first-lieutenant stared at one another. The pads between them on the chart table were like scraps of food each of them envied the other. Thurston was now confirmed in Lloyd's original opinion that they must do nothing more that sit and wait out the vessels that searched for them. Lloyd — his calm eroded by the dead, limping passage of time, the slowness of clocks, and the sense that the forces mobilised against them could not indefinitely go on seeking and not finding — had now succumbed to the desire for action.
There was an RAF Nimrod above them — twenty, thirty, forty thousand feet it did not matter — on station, not knowing where they were, what condition they were in. MoD had to be told they needed rescuing, otherwise the Russians would inevitably get to them first. Lloyd was utterly convinced that the Russians wanted "Leopard". He could not envisage how they intended obtaining it, or conceive the recklessness that must have led them to this course of action, but he understood their objective. MoD had to be told; there was no time to be lost.
He scribbled again on a fresh sheet of the pad. It's an order. A helpless, obedient malevolence crossed Thurston's features for a moment, then it was gone. His face was blank of all expression as he nodded his acquiescence.
They crossed silently to the bank of sonar screens. Two only in closest proximity, the other submarines further off, nudging their sensors into other corners of the box in which they had contained the Proteus. Lloyd read off distance and bearing. Both of the nearest submarines were, for the moment, moving away from the ledge on which they rested. Lloyd glanced at Thurston, and whispered: "Now."
Thurston moved away, and Lloyd found the control room crew, almost every one of them, and Carr the navigator, looking in his direction. He nodded meaningfully, miming the sending up of the aerial buoy. Thurston, at the encoding console, gave the thumbs up — temperature of the control room suddenly jumping — and his hands played over the bank of switches which would release and direct the aerial buoy to the surface. Its journey would take it perhaps a whole minute. Depth figures unreeled on a tiny display unit near Thurston's hand.
Breathing. Ragged, stifled, louder. The control room was full of nervous men trying to control their breathing. Lloyd, his arm draped around the periscope in the centre of the control room, felt hotter, less sure, supremely aware of the aerial buoy bobbing up through the layers of water to the surface.
A small object, a tiny pinprick. Capable of receiving and bouncing back a sonar signal. Something solid that betrayed their location. A flare they had sent up — we're over here, can't you see us?
Lloyd clamped down on the thought, and crossed to Thurston. He gestured for the first-lieutenant's pad and then wrote quickly, in block letters, the message he wished encoded and transmitted to the Nimrod. Thurston nodded reluctantly when he read it, and turned in his chair. The console operator beside him began typing at the keyboard, and the code-of-the-day card was automatically fed in. The operator added the transmission instructions — high-speed, frequency-agile. Lloyd watched the depth figures unreeling near Thurston's elbow. The aerial buoy was still twenty fathoms from the surface, almost twenty seconds still to run until it bobbed up into the waves.
Sweating, now. Cold sweat, surprising in the heat of the control room. Lloyd tried to control it, to calm his body. Ten fathoms. Nine —
Someone clearing his throat, the noise of someone else scratching the cotton of his shirt. Six fathoms, five, four. Almost a minute since they had released the aerial buoy. Three fathoms.
Lloyd broke away from the encoding console and crossed to the passive sonars. Pinpricks, distances, bearings. Still moving away. One moving back, one moving back —
Bearing green nine-five, almost amidships, range two thousand yards. Speed eleven point two five knots. Lloyd looked over his shoulder. Thurston saw him, raised his thumb. The aerial buoy was transmitting the message, a split-second blurt of sound, repeated and repeated. They would have to repeat at least fifty times to be anywhere near certain their message had been picked up by the Nimrod. Ten seconds, no more.
Speed twelve point three knots, bearing unchanged, range closing. Lloyd stared in disbelief. Twelve point seven knots and rising. Dead amidships, a Russian submarine. The buoy, or the message, untranslatable but audible to the Russians, had pinpointed them. Lloyd waggled his hand at Thurston, and the first-lieutenant ceased the transmission and began recalling the aerial buoy.
Thirteen point six knots. Closing.
Lloyd crossed to Thurston, and indicated in savage mime that he must release the buoy, a chopping motion of his hand, again and again. Thurston paused for a moment, then his hands flickered over the console's keyboard. The figures near his knuckles on the digital read-out slowed, then stopped. The buoy was gone, up to the surface again where it would be swept away from their position by the current. Lloyd wiped his forehead with his handkerchief in undisguised relief, not even beginning to think that they had now only the back-up aerial buoy.
He hurried back to the sonars. Speed fifteen point nine knots, bearing unchanged, closing amidships. Range little more than a thousand yards. He realised he had been standing mopping his brow for almost a minute after they released the buoy. Speed fifteen point seven, fifteen point five.
He sighed audibly, a ragged sound from an old man's asthmatic chest. Speed fourteen knots and dropping, bearing green eight-four. Change of course, uncertainty setting in, scent lost.
Scent lost.
The Russian navy had sea-bed maps they could feed into their computers, superimposing them on their sonars and infra-red. It couldn't last for much longer. "Leopard" would be defeated by likelihood and by the concentration of vessels in their immediate area.