Spy Story (28 page)

I heard the pen scrape again. ‘More head room, skipper.'

He made a sound to show that he was unimpressed with the extra couple of feet clearance. But his eyes were on the sonar and the lagoon beyond the floe. ‘Close all watertight doors and bulkheads.'

I heard the metal thump closed and the locks tightened. A few of the crewmen exchanged blank stares. The phone rang. The Captain took it. He listened to the Exec for a moment. And then he looked at Schlegel. ‘OK, Charlie. Then let's do that thing.' He replaced the phone. ‘Here we go, Colonel,' he said to Schlegel. Schlegel gave him a smile no thicker than a razor blade.

There was another soft scraping noise on the hull. We heard it clearly because everyone was holding their breath. The ship wriggled as the contact slowed one side of the hull and turned us a degree or two. The revolutions thrashed a little as the prop lost its hold and then gripped the water and went back to normal. Again the same thing happened, but suddenly we lurched forward and the pen scratched a near-vertical line that represented fifty feet or more. The pen came down again, but only made fifteen feet, and then was a steady corrugation on the polar pack no more than ten feet deep.

‘Can't see that damned lagoon, Colonel.'

‘If we don't pick up a suitable break in the ice inside thirty minutes I'm going to ask you to put a couple of fish into the underside of that polar pack.'

‘That doesn't sound healthy,' said the Captain. ‘We'd be only three ship-lengths away.'

‘Ever hear of Polaris subs, Captain?' Schlegel asked.

The Captain said nothing.

‘I don't know what kind of money that fleet of pig-boats costs, but you don't think they built those contraptions without finding out how to knock a hole in the ice, do you?'

‘We've got thirty minutes yet,' said the Captain.

‘Right,' said Schlegel, and he threw a finger at the Captain. ‘Cool your kids off a little, huh?'

‘Attention all hands. This is the Captain. We're under the polar pack. Resume normal activity but keep the juke box off.'

We found a suitably large polynya – which is the proper name for a lagoon in the ice – and, with careful attention to the sonar, the Captain began surfacing procedures.

We were all in the electronics room with the operators that were assigned to this watch. ‘I've got every permutation of message he can send on call in my head,' said Schlegel.

‘Maybe he won't call,' said Ferdy.

‘We'll give him two hours and then we'll send the negative contact.'

‘Will the Captain hold her on the surface for two hours?'

‘He'll do what I tell him,' said Schlegel, with one of his special scowl-like smiles. ‘Anyway, it'll take his deck party an hour or more to paint the sail white.'

‘That won't prevent us being picked up on the radar or
MAD
,' said Ferdy.

‘Do me a favour and don't tell that Captain,' said Schlegel harshly. ‘He's scared gutless already.'

‘He probably knows the radar chain better than you do, Colonel,' said Ferdy.

‘That's why the Colonel's not scared,' I added.

‘You guys!' said Schlegel in disgust.

The radio call came through on time. It was coded in Norwegian, but any Russian monitoring crew would have to be unusually stupid to believe that there were a couple of Norwegian fishing trawlers out there in the deep freeze.

‘Bring number four net,' came through in morse as clear as a bell and was followed by four five-figure cipher groups.

Schlegel looked over the operator's shoulder as he deciphered and stabbed a group in the code book. He said, ‘Send that code for “market steady on today's catches – no change expected tomorrow”. And then wait for them to close.'

Our operator released the key after the signature and there was the bleat of an acknowledgement. Schlegel smiled.

When we were back in the lounge Ferdy sank into an armchair, but Schlegel fiddled with the writing-desk light over the doctor's one-man bridge game. ‘Our boy made it,' Schlegel said.

‘Our boy with the suitcase radio set came in five by five. A powerful signal, and clear enough to compare with the Northern Fleet operational transmitter,' I said.

Schlegel bared his teeth in a way that most people do only for the dentist. I was beginning to recognize it as a sign that he was on the defensive. ‘It was an official transmitter,' he admitted. ‘Confirming the rendezvous with the helicopter.'

I stared at him. It seemed a lot of words for such a simple message, and why wasn't it in high speed morse. ‘A Russian transmitter?' I said. ‘So we are going bare-arse into a lagoon of their choosing?'

‘You don't like the idea of it?'

‘With a Russkie egg-beater overhead? They could come down with a feather and tickle us to death.'

Schlegel nodded agreement and then studied the doc's bridge game. Schlegel looked at all the hands and then checked the dealer. He didn't cheat the cards; he just liked to know where they all were. Without looking up he said, ‘No sweat for the sub, Patrick. Save all your prayers for us. The sub won't be there: it will arrive early, deposit us and then make itself scarce until we bleep it up. For all we know the RV won't be a lagoon. We'll have to make it on foot.'

‘Make it on foot?' I said. ‘Across that big vanilla-flavoured ice-cream sundae? Are you out of your mind?'

‘You'll do as you're told,' said Schlegel in the same voice he'd used on the Captain.

‘Or what? You'll tell weight-watchers anonymous about my extra cinnamon toast?'

‘Ferdy!' said Schlegel.

Ferdy had been watching the exchange with interest but now he got to his feet hurriedly, murmured goodnights, and departed. When we were alone Schlegel moved round the lounge, switching lights on and off, and testing the fans.

‘You don't think Rear-Admiral Remoziva will deliver?'

‘I've been fed a rich diet of fairy stories all the way through this business,' I complained. ‘But based upon the kind of lies I've heard, what I know, and a couple of far-out guesses, I'd say there isn't a chance in hell.'

‘Suppose I said I agree.' He looked round anxiously to be sure we were not overheard. ‘Suppose I told you that that radio signal obliges us to continue with the pick-up, even if we were certain that it's phoney? What would you say to that?'

‘I'd need a book of diagrams.'

‘And that's what I can't give you.' He ran his open hand down his face, tugging at the corners of his mouth as if afraid he might give way to an hysterical bout of merriment. ‘I can only tell you that if we all get gunned down out there tomorrow, and there's no Remoziva, it will still be worthwhile.'

‘Not to me, it won't.' I said. ‘Stay perplexed, feller,' he said, ‘because if the Russkies pull something fancy out there tomorrow, it won't matter if they take you alive.'

I smiled. I was trying to master that grim smile of Schlegel's. I am never too proud to learn, and I had a lot of uses for a smile like that.

‘I'm serious, Pat. There are security aspects of this job that mean that I must be killed rather than captured alive. And the same with Ferdy.'

‘And are there security aspects of this job that cause you to run along now to Ferdy, and tell him that it doesn't matter if
he
goes into the bag but
I
mustn't get taken alive?'

‘Your mind is like a sewer, pal. How do people get that way?' He shook his head to indicate disgust, but he didn't deny the allegation.

‘By surviving, Colonel,' I said. ‘It's what they call natural selection.'

It is in the nature of the war game that problems arise that cannot be resolved by the rules. For this reason
CONTROL
should be regarded as consultative. It is not recommended that
CONTROL
resolves such problems until adequate exploration of the problem has taken place between all players.

‘
NOTES FOR WARGAMERS
'.
STUDIES CENTRE
.
LONDON

We stood around in the Control Room, wearing kapok-lined white snow-suits, incongruous amongst the shirt-sleeved officers. Above us, the overhead sonar showed the open lagoon, but the Captain hesitated and held the ship level and still against the currents.

‘Look at this, Colonel.' The Captain was at the periscope. His tone was deferential. Whether this was due to Schlegel's blast, the letter from the Pentagon, or because the Captain expected us not to return from the mission, was not clear.

Schlegel needed the periscope lowered a fraction. It was sighted vertically. Schlegel looked for a moment, nodded, and then offered the place at the eyepieces to me. I could see only a blurred shape of pale blue.

‘This is with the light intensifier?' I asked.

‘That's without it,' someone said, and the sight went almost black.

‘I don't know,' I said finally.

Ferdy looked too. ‘It's moonlight,' he said. He laughed mockingly. ‘You think the Russians have rigged a battery of lights for us?'

It broke the tension and even Schlegel smiled.

‘Is it ice?' said the Captain. ‘I don't give a damn about the light, but is it ice?'

‘It's not on the sonar?' I asked.

‘A thin sheet of ice might not show,' said the Conning Officer.

‘Take her up, skipper,' Schlegel said.

The Captain nodded. ‘Down periscope. Flood negative.'

The ship wobbled as the buoyancy control tank echoed, and the ascent began; The crash came like a sledgehammer pounded against the hollow steel of the pressure hull. The Captain bit his lip. All eyes were on him. Obviously some dire damage had been done to the submarine, and just as obviously there was no stopping the ascent just a few feet from the surface. We floated, rocking in the swirl of the disturbed water. Already the Captain was halfway up the ladder. I followed. Whatever was waiting up there, I wanted to see it.

After the bright glare of the submarine's fluorescent lighting, I'd half-expected a limitless landscape of gleaming ice. But we emerged into Arctic darkness, lit only by diffused moonlight and walled-around with grey mists. The icy wind cut into me like a rusty scalpel.

Only when my eyes became accustomed to the gloom was I able to see the far side of the lagoon, where the dark waters became ash-coloured ridges of ice. The Captain was examining the dents in the periscope casing, and now he looked down and cursed the great sheet of ice that we'd broken into pieces and scattered on our waves.

‘What are the chances, Dave?' the Captain asked the Engineering Officer, who was expected to know how to fix everything, from nuclear reactor to juke box.

‘It's vacuum packed. It would be a long job, skipper.'

‘Take a look at it anyway.'

‘Sure thing.'

Schlegel took the Captain by the arm. He said, ‘And since I've told you the authorized version, let's make sure you know what the score really is.'

The Captain bent his head, as if to listen more attentively.

‘Never mind your goddamned pig-boat, sonny. And never mind those orders. If you sail off into the sunset, leaving any one of us out there, I'll get back. Me, personally! I'll get back and tear your balls off. That's the real score, so just make sure you understand it.'

‘Just don't start anything the navy will have to finish,' said the Captain. Schlegel grinned broadly. The Captain had taken less time to understand Schlegel than I had. Schlegel played noisy barbarian to examine the reactions of his fellow men. I wondered if I'd come out of it as well as the Captain had.

‘Your boys ready to go, Colonel?'

‘On our way, Captain.' It was easier said than done. The high freeboard and streamlined shape of the nuclear subs makes it difficult to land from them, except to a properly constructed jetty or mother boat. We clambered down the collapsible ladders, dirtied by the hull and breathless from the exertion.

There was the corpse too. We slid it out of the metal cylinder that breathed the grey smoke of dry ice. He was sitting on a crude wooden seat, which we took from the body and sent back to the sub. Then the body was clipped on two runners and we began to plod across the ice.

We had left the permanent fluorescent day of the submarine for the long winter of Arctic night. The cloud was low, but thin enough for moonlight to glow pale blue, like a TV left on in a deserted warehouse. The cold air and hard ground made the sound travel with unexpected clarity, so that even after we were a mile away from the lagoon we could hear the whispered conversation of the welders inspecting the damaged periscope.

Another mile saw all three of us beginning to feel the exertion. We stopped and deposited the radio bleeper that had been modified to operate on the Russian Fleet Emergency wavelength. We looked back to the submarine as the deck party disappeared back into the hull.

‘Looks like they can't fix it,' said Schlegel.

‘That's what it looks like,' I agreed.

For a moment it was very still and then, slowly, the black shiny hull slid down into the dark Arctic water. I've never felt so lonely.

We were alone on a continent composed solely of ice, floating on the northern waters.

‘Let's move over a little,' I said. ‘They could home an anti-personnel missile on to that bleeper.'

‘Good thinking,' said Schlegel. ‘And bring the incredible hulk.' He pointed to the frozen corpse. It lay on its side, rolled into a ball as if someone had just floored it with a low punch. We moved two hundred yards and settled down to wait. There was still nearly an hour to go until RV time. We buttoned up the anoraks across the nose, and pulled down the snow goggles to stop the icicles forming on our lashes.

The low cloud, and the hard flat ice, trapped the sound and cast it back and forth between them so that the noise of the helicopter seemed to be everywhere at once. It was a Ka-26, with two coaxial rotors that beat the air loudly enough almost to eclipse the sound of its engines. It hovered over the radio bleeper, dipping its nose to improve the pilot's view. Still with its nose drooping, it slewed round, searching the land until it saw us.