The alternative to getting out was going in.
Egerton wouldn't like that either.
But he'd never know, because there's always a phase in the mission when you're suddenly and critically in need of Control direction on a major issue and can't get it or don't want to. There's nothing London can do about it. They can plan the whole operation from initial briefing and access down to the final support liaison that's designed to get the executive into the target zone and out again with a clear exit path and a whole skin and the merchandise they're buying with what they pay him to do it. But you can't always stick to the blueprint and unless you're lucky you're going to find yourself cut off in a red sector one fine day with the access blocked or the radio jammed or someone treading all over your face because you opened the wrong door and then you're going to want field direction or something from Control and you're not going to get it.
They can bust a gut designing a set-up that'll get you past all the pins without flashing a light but there's nearly always a time when you've got to go it alone. We know that. It's why we're in this thing, most of us: the ferrets have got their motivations too. We don't go looking for trouble but if we get it we think we can deal with it and that's when we try very hard because if we fail we're going to have to live with ourselves forever afterwards and that's tough because we're vain.
So when we get close to the edge we don't go back: we look over. It's just another way of getting rid of infantile aggression and if you don't like it you can do the other thing.
There wasn't any real problem. If I let that stuff go on drifting it'd either blow a mine or move free and wallow around in daylight tomorrow and attract attention and if either of those things happened it'd finish the mission and that wasn't the object of what I was doing here. I was here to complete Mandarin according to plan. It didn't look as if I had a chance in hell of coming out alive but that wasn't a reason for not going in at alclass="underline" it was gut-think.
Immediately around me was an area of dim light and beyond it was a soft gathering wall of dark and somewhere on the other side that stuff was drifting in the current: two steel cylinders, each of them charged at a pressure of two thousand pounds a square inch and capable of smashing through the wall of a building and flying three streets away and going through the side of a bus and that was just if the valve broke. They could do better than that if they went the wrong way through a minefield.
The one factor that had any value for me was that of time: the longer that stuff went on drifting the less chance I'd have of finding it before it hit one of those bloody things and blew the sea apart. So I thought I'd better start now.
Chapter Thirteen: DIRECTIVE
The water was grey-green, growing lighter and darker as I rose and fell, gliding through the grey-green world, going my way in silence.
Three minutes.
They drifted past me in the shifting light and shadow, their steel spheres glowing as they caught a gleam of light from above, their copper horns thrust outwards from them, naked and quiet.
Two minutes.
I threaded my way between the cables, sinuous and slow and taking care. Nothing lived here and nothing moved except this black rubber creature as it passed through the cloudy avenues of spheres, but a presence was here, of a kind so different from my own that I felt its hostility: the blind trapped presence of a thing unborn, a thing that once free would hurl the sea apart. I made my slow way through it.
One minute.
Sometimes a bubble rose from the sea bed, turning dull silver and then shimmering past my face, vanishing above me. One of them passed close to a mine not far from where I moved: it touched and broke against the tip of a copper horn and for an instant sent me mad as the firestorm roared raging through my head. Then it was over: the sound died away and the seas subsided and hollowed echoes of my breathing slowed again. The potential packed inside these deadly fingers had grown too much on my mind and I wanted nothing to touch them: not even a bubble.
Zero.
02.30.
Break-off point. I'd been searching for half an hour and hadn't seen anything and this was the time when I must break off and let the stuff go on drifting. Beyond this limit I'd start using the air that was reserved for taking me as far as Heng-kang Chou if I had to get out of the target zone and go to ground. I'd covered most of the minefield and drawn blank: in daylight I would have seen the loose gear long before this but I'd been working in near darkness and without a hope of using the lamp because the mines were cabled on outriggers below the surface, well clear of the rig's substructure, and if there were look-outs posted on deck they'd pick up the glow of the light.
Twice I'd doubled back on my tracks without knowing it until I'd seen the faint image of a pontoon leg on the wrong side, a hundred feet below, and realized I must have turned too far where the mines made a right angle. Once I'd wasted time going down to fifty feet, seeing a patch of shadow that had turned out to be a mass of drifting weed.
I turned obliquely and dived in a long curve, coming up inside the minefield and heading for the great trellis of girders, hearing the sound when I was almost halfway across the open space. It was the sound of a ship's bell, cracked and muted, its rhythm irregular. In five minutes I had the direction worked out, turning full circle to orientate aurally and then moving across the slow southerly current and through the network of girders to the far side, reaching the minefield again.
I didn't have to search far, once I'd got there. The stuff was looming in front of my faceplate, stationary except for the slight tug of the current. The nylon cord had fouled one of the cables and was wrapped around it, and the sound of the ship's bell was being set up by the valve of one of the reserve tanks as it kept hitting against the mine.
I stood off, watching it, my hands fanning gently to keep me upright. The waterproof bag containing the radio and the rations was creating resistance against the current: part of it had caught around the cable, leaving one of the tanks to swing against the mine. It wasn't any good trying to make an estimate and work on its findings because there were too many unknown factors but it didn't look as though I had long because the shoulder of the cylinder was nudging one of the detonation horns and it was a strictly shut-ended situation so I kicked with the fins and moved in, freeing the cord first and then working higher up, keeping my head back and the faceplate clear of the horns as I pulled the reserve tank clear. It wasn't easy because the mine was fixed to its cable with a turnbuckle and cotter pin and the pin kept catching against the valve-guard.
Normal thought process had ceded to a form of specialized attention: the conscious field had narrowed to contain only the essentials I needed to work with — the shape and size of the valve-guard and the cotter pin and the horn of the mine, the angles and direction in which the manipulation had to proceed, the forces against it and the means of combating them. But somewhere in my head there was panic trying to get loose, like an area of pain the anaesthetic hasn't quite reached.
Ignore.
This thing wasn't long out of the armament factory: the steel had a satin sheen and the copper of the horn was catching the glow of the flare pilot burning above the rig. The cotter pin was bright and a blob of grease still clung to the thread of the turnbuckle. There were Roman characters indented around the rim of the mine itself: they weren't clear in this light but it looked like Hitachi, Japan.