The Mandarin Cypher

'Got any questions?'

'Only general. What's the sea temperature?'

'The average for the past week was 82.'

'This oil rig.' I got up and peeled off the top half of the track suit and turned it inside out and spread it across one of the bunks. 'How close can anyone go, in international waters?'

'You feeling the heat?'

He was watching me with that quiet glitter in his eyes.

'Oh for Christ sake it's a hot night, isn't it?'

It brought more sweat out and I was duly warned: with only three and a half hours to go I'd better start shutting down the spleen. This access was about the most sensitive thing I'd ever had to handle: that was why London was sending in a reserve.

'Just wanted to know, old boy, that you're feeling on top form.' He looked at the teakwood dragon that held the bulkhead lamp in its jaws. 'In international waters maritime law prohibits uninvited vessels approaching nearer than five hundred metres. That's about what? Fifteen or sixteen hundred feet. Last year a Soviet ship sailed to within a hundred feet of an offshore rig in the North Sea and began taking photographs, and the Navy sent a destroyer out there to warn it off.'

'How close is the sub going?'

'Within a mile. That's well clear of the illegal limit.' He gave a giggle. 'Mustn't upset anybody.'

I asked him about stand-off, liaison, rendezvous patterns, so forth. Some of it hadn't been worked out yet because there hadn't been time. 'You know what their lordships are — you ask them to lend you a piddling little submarine and they think you're trying to scuttle the Fleet. But we got it in the end-she's in the harbour now, been rusting there for weeks. HMS Swordfish — you must have seen her when you came in from — '

'Yes.'

'No more questions?'

'Not really.'

He'd briefed me on night signals, rations, panic-button limits, the whole of the access routine.

'What've you got?' he asked me, lifting his wrist.

'21.54.'

'That thing waterproof?'

'Yes.'

'Okay.' He pulled the winder and reset and pushed it back. 'I'll be filling you in on the rendezvous patterns and that sort of thing after we've left harbour. The skipper's had to call up the Admiralty to get various permissions — aren't you glad you're not a bell-bottomed matelot?'

I said I was going to take ninety minutes' sleep and he seemed rather relieved and said he'd go for a little walk, by which he meant he'd take up station out there and vet anything that moved. He'd already fetched the scuba gear when he'd gone to the hotel for the track suit, and there wasn't anything else to do but wait 'Ferris.'

'Old boy?'

'Is London going to put any fresh tags on Nora Tewson?'

It was nothing to do with briefing, and I was a bit surprised at my own question. A touch of jealousy, I suppose: I didn't want anyone else to know what I knew of her, that strange double image of the innocent and the tigress, at least for a while. I didn't count Tewson, of course: he'd never known her like that.

'I very much doubt,' Ferris said, 'if they'd put any more tags on that girlie, considering the state of things out here. The Egg doesn't care at all for sending people on suicide stunts.'

We went aboard Swordfish at midnight.

Her lights resembled a fishing boat's and I didn't recognize her until the tender began slowing, then the configuration came up in silhouette against the lights of the Kowloon shoreline: radar mast, conning-tower, diving planes. The sea was glass calm.

The lifeline was still rigged on deck but a couple of hands started bringing it in as we went on board. There were two or three figures standing on the bridge and Ferris peered at them in the inadequate light.

'Wing,' he said, 'this is Bill Ackroyd, captain.'

We said hello and a seaman reached down and took my stuff from the man in the tender. One of the air bottles banged against a stanchion and someone said, 'Easy now…' I looked down.

'Careful with that bag there — it's fragile. 'Ay ay, sir.'

It was the short-wave Hammerlund transceiver Ferris had dug up for me and we'd put it in a waterproof bag along with the lamp and the rations.

People were speaking in low voices and I noticed the main bridge lights were shrouded: except for her riding lights Swordfish was in wartime' rig. The tender backed off and swung in a wide curve away from us, leaving a scimitar of iridescent light across the sea. I could feel the vibration of the diesels under my feet.

'What's that over there?' I asked Ferris. It looked like some kind of launch, standing off at a hundred yards.

'Escort,' the skipper said.

'For the whole trip?'

'Just out of harbour. Would you like a drink?'

He took us below.

There was gin set up in the wardroom and I asked for a straight tonic and Ferris wanted to know if they had any milk and Ackroyd began looking at us as if we were a couple of freak sea-anemones they'd dragged up with the anchor chain.

'Frank Topper,' he said close to the chest. 'Diving officer.'

We all said hello again and I wished to Christ we could cut out the garden party and get moving. Ferris had a nervous smile switched on against any doubts in his mind and I began feeling bloody annoyed because my left hand should have had some kind of treatment and I was still in mild aftershock from the station wagon thing and London was pitching us right into a crash-access operation and that meant something had come up on the board and they'd started to panic.

'Cheers,' one of the officers said.

There seemed to be a lot of noise from the fans and blowers but nobody took any notice. Then there was the slam of a steel hatch and two seamen came down and disappeared through a doorway and Ackroyd took us back into the control room. The helmsman was in his seat and there were needles crawling all over the dials and Ferris stood there watching everything with his bright glass eyes and a ruff of hair sticking out where he'd brushed his head on the companionway coming down. Everything had suddenly gone quiet.

'All right,' Ackroyd said. 'Slow ahead both.'

There wasn't any appreciable movement but the bug started glowing across the chart on the DRT and in ten minutes we were out of the harbour. Five minutes later there was another sudden period of inactivity and Ackroyd said:

'Pull out the plug and ease her down to periscope depth.'

The deck began sloping by degrees and I looked at the instruments.

Time 00.31. Course 220.

Ferris was watching me and I felt like kicking his teeth in because his stare was critical and I knew that if I showed any signs of nerves or fatigue or anxiety he'd have this ship turned about and taken back into harbour. I didn't like being assessed at this phase of a mission: if I felt incapable of going in or doing a decent job I'd say so, he knew that. Better than Loman, perhaps, or Porterfield: they'd send you into the target zone with your nerves in rags and your eyes out of focus from fatigue if they thought you could finish the course without dropping dead.

'We'll slope off,' Ferris said with a bright smile, 'and do some more chatting.' He led me into the wardroom and we sat down and went over the whole thing again. I got it right at the third go and then he filled me in about the liaison and rendezvous patterns, 'The routine rdv's will be prearranged by radio. Ackroyd says we can't risk coming in closer than a. mile from the rig, so if you can swim that distance you'll navigate by the north star and listen for the call of the sea swallow — I'll play you the tape in a minute. Swordfish will pick you up on the sonar and moved slowly to rendezvous.'

This was typical Ferris: in less than twenty-four hours he'd had the call of the sea swallow put on tape and dug up a radio from the American stores and pushed London to give us a ship through the Navy.