Cover of Darkness Read online

Now he was chilled and tiring and running against the clock. The dark moving water muttered against him fretfully as he made his way down the humming cable to the wreck, ill at ease and out of sorts.

  He was irritated, for no good reason, by the orange glare of the infrared lights. He felt short of breath, and realized he was experiencing nervous symptoms similar to oxygen deprivation. Checking his descent, McElroy hooked a leg over the cable, gulped a lungful of air, and passed the hoses and mouthpiece over his head. He shucked one arm out of the tank harness to swing the tanks past his shoulder and tapped the regulator gently. Air streamed through the hoses at a steady pressure. He shrugged the tanks back into place between his shoulderblades and took the mouthpiece in his teeth again. These second thoughts told him next to nothing about the condition of his equipment but said a good deal about his state of mind. He resumed his slide down the line into deeper water. The fear that had touched him briefly took up silent watch in his colon. His nerves steadied as he settled feet-first at the ruptured bow of the wreck.

  The broken nose of the aircraft looked like a radish rose. The rivets and retaining bolts had been burned through and the framing sprung and pried apart. McElroy recovered the dangling reel and snugged up the cable, playing it free of snags as he unwound it from around the hull, kicking up and over the wreck and riding the line centrifugally like a rock on a string. He worked his cleat loose from the wing and took in more line, pulling himself back even with the opening in the nose section. He hitched a loop in the cable and felt into the cavity, looking for a purchase point on the radar casing. He took a bight around the antenna pins, drew the knot tight, and tied it off. Giving himself a little slack, he looped the cable a second time and then a third, like trussing a roast. He hooked the reel to the towline and retreated up the cable some ten meters, giving it room to bind. If the line parted or came loose under the strain, it would snap back on itself like a whip, which could take off a couple of fingers or even a hand.

  The towline traveled back upriver a thousand meters to a winch on shore. BRINE was waiting in the shallow water for signals. They’d rigged a basic comm link, two switches at either end of the low-impedance static line in the cable, to buzz each other back and forth. There wasn’t enough current in the circuit to give either one of them a shock, just a faint tingle when the switch was depressed, once to warp cable onto the drum, twice for full stop, and three for slack line.

  McElroy squeezed the rubber bulb with the switch inside. The line shivered in his grip and began to twist as it came under the pull of the winch ashore. The length of cable stiffened out under load. The crank of the winch paused, but the vibration of power in the line was still there. The cable strummed against the heel of his hand.

  He squeezed the switch again and held the beam of his torch fixed on the jagged crack in the fuselage. The winch began to pull again. The radar housing ground forward between the ribs. McElroy quickly squeezed the switch bulb twice. He slipped down the cable to check the clearance.

  There wasn’t much play, but the radar seemed to be sliding straight ahead without shifting its weight. McElroy backpedaled up the cable and squeezed the switch bulb again. The winch operator picked up the strain. The heavy casing shrieked against the frame, inching along. The towline was as tight as a bowstring.

  The front end of the radar worked its way free of the fuselage, jarring against it slightly. McElroy tensed. The radar wobbled and dug forward. The back end pitched to one side, binding against a strut.

  He pinched the switch bulb twice, and then pinched it again three times. He slid down the cable. The radar was caught between the broken ribs of the frame like a bear’s shoulders stuck in a hollow log.

  McElroy eyed the dimensions of the casing against the space available to move it in. He swam back up to the switch bulb, signaled the winch to take up slack, and then a full stop to hold the radar steady. He slipped down to the nose again. Using a long breaker bar, he tried to buck the casing back and forth to clear the ribs. It was jammed too tight. He backpedaled and squeezed the switch bulb three times, then three times again. The cable sagged. McElroy braced a short crowbar against the framing rib just behind the radar housing to act as a stop. He took the long breaker bar and poked into the open seam from above on the port side and got a purchase, but the housing didn’t move.

  He drew the bar out and laid it across the housing, hooking it under the lip of the opening in the fuselage and putting his weight on it to force the radar down. The casing torqued a little, easing the bind, but there was still friction. McElroy slipped the bar in forward and managed to wiggle the assembly back a fraction, straightening it out. He blinked back the sweat in his eyes. There was a light condensation on the inside of his faceplate. He put his head and shoulders inside the cavity. The neoprene wetsuit squeaked against the corrugated steel, and McElroy winced. He shifted his grip on the long bar and jimmied the casing away from the broken framing rib. It settled, and he pulled himself out.

  Paddling forward, he snagged the cable and positioned the breaker bar under it to span the gap in the nose of the aircraft. Under power from the winch the bar would act as tackle for the line, lifting the radar casing past the frame. McElroy felt out the slack in the towline and stood on it. His negative buoyancy didn’t count for much. He clambered astride the nose again and let himself down into the hole, warily. The cable sideslipped a touch. The casing wavered. He tried to adjust it with a flippered foot. It moved an inch, and McElroy lifted his feet in a hurry. He swam past the crimped edges of the cut and regained the towline, giving the signal switch one pinch and then two.

  The cable tightened and then stopped pulling. McElroy dropped back to the nose and reached in it to push the radar casing into a better position. The assembly jerked suddenly. The scrape of the casing carried up the cable. McElroy kicked off but missed his footing. The radar rocked in place and tipped. There was too much slack in the line. McElroy jackknifed his legs as the back end of the radar came loose and tried to use his lower body as a lever, but the force of the current trapped him against the fuselage, stuck like a fly on a windowpane. The forward end of the radar caught his left arm, grinding it against the struts. He felt both the bones in his forearm crack like lath.

  He was choking on inhaled water because he’d bitten through his mouthpiece retainer and the hoses danced against his sternum in a high rolling boil. He made a grab at them with his free hand. The current dragged his body back against the fuselage, his weight taken by the arm pinned in the wreck, and the pain nearly made him faint. He flailed at the current, kicking desperately, trying to shovel the crippled mouthpiece back between his lips, coughing and losing it, catching it again, trying now to clear his windpipe and the mouthpiece, water rattling in his lungs with a deep and unbearable ache, as though he were breathing lye. He managed to grab a handhold and gulp some air.

  McElroy trembled with cold. He kept his breathing shallow and regular, hoping not to go into shock. His blood, smoky in the water, slipped away thinly downriver. He quite expected to die.

  The swimmer seemed to sink into the hot bruise of the orange lights with the classic, undernourished grace of a predatory fish. It was the Welshman, tobogganing down the cable with the river at his back, coming to see what had gone wrong. McElroy’s heart rose in his throat.

  BRINE swung out on the cable and kicked free, skating alongside the hull to McElroy and treading water downstream. He took McElroy in a close embrace, holding his weight gently to relieve the pressure on his forearm. BRINE felt along McElroy’s upper arm, down to the elbow, and then moved his hand across the face of the heavy casing.

  Still pinning McElroy to the wreck with his hip, he cocked his knee and unstrapped the scabbarded knife from his calf. He wrapped the strap around McElroy’s bicep, drawing it tight enough to cut off circulation, and twisted the scabbard, coaxing it under the tourniquet. McElroy had already lost most sensation
below it. BRINE made sure McElroy’s breathing apparatus was secure and then shifted him carefully into a more comfortable position, guiding McElroy’s free hand to the upper edge of the frame so he had a better grip to support his own weight.

  BRINE ducked under the cable and retrieved the breaker bar. With the cable tight across his shoulders, he got a purchase on the radar housing and levered it forward. The housing grated in the rib. McElroy felt it, not in his arm but as a nausea of the inner ear. BRINE put his weight on the bar again, leaning back into the cable, and the housing tilted off McElroy’s arm. The wound stuck to the metal for a second, and then McElroy pulled free. BRINE reached out to steady him. The bar slipped in the notch, and the radar casing dropped against it. The casing twisted, twitching the cable. BRINE bounced against the hull. The bar rotated out of his grasp and flipped up in his face. It snapped his head back, and the cable caught him in the throat as it stiffened and sprang tight again, snatching him across the windpipe and hooking his chin back sharply. There was a gout of expelled air from his regulator.

  McElroy batted weakly at the current with his good arm and grabbed at the cable, but it held fast, pinching BRINE in the wreckage like a snare. McElroy, near despair, struggled to work him loose. BRINE was inert, his limbs flaccid, and McElroy realized it was too late to save him. The Welshman’s neck was broken, and his faceplate was filled with blood.

  McElroy knew he didn’t have the strength to pull himself up the towline on his own, and there was nothing he could do now to help the dead man. His air was already running low. That left downstream. He figured he didn’t have much choice. He let go the towline and began a scrabbling progress down the lee side of the wreck, lurching from one handhold to another in the headlong current, his grip skidding on the slippery plates. He steadied himself at the leading edge of the starboard wing and caught up the dragline anchored to the engine intake. He hung fire, treading water for a minute and working up his courage.

  Then he slid down the dragline, beating a painful and ungainly traverse along the river bottom, guided by the cable strung another five hundred meters downstream.

  Where the cable was made fast to the spike in the clay, McElroy was able to brace himself tenuously. He fumbled with the snap-ring and was able to gain control of the friction locks on the dragline reel with his single hand.

  His breathng had become hoarse and irregular. He let the current swing him downstream, holding the cable reel in his left armpit while he undid his equipment harness and weight belt and let them sink to the bottom. He took a long, shallow breath and made himself slip the locks on the cable reel.

  The mass of dark water swept him up and drove him down the funnel, churning into the sluiceway of the narrows. The steel and monofilament ran out unchecked, and he hurtled downriver, the reel chattering, barely able to maintain his hold on it. The skin was peeled off the palm of his hand and the muscles of his one good arm felt watery. His eyes stung from the sweat condensing on the inside of his faceplate like a prism of tears.

  He knew the length of cable would run out some fifteen hundred meters below the anchored belay, something less than a quarter mile short of the sleeper net. He also knew the undercurrents could play him false. He had to have buoyancy, to rise up so as to catch in the net and not be keelhauled on the bottom, pressed down by the rush of water until his air ran out. He was losing control of his relative attitude, too, and beginning to tumble. He was taking on the spin of a projectile down a rifled barrel, which imparted a spiral to the cable and might kink it. McEroy tried to turn end for end, bearing down on the friction locks and reversing himself as he kicked for the surface.

  The cable played out without warning, jerking the reel out of his grip, and he was abruptly shaken loose, out of control and caroming head over heels down the channel, unable to check himself. The river bore him away.

  He couldn’t fight the current, but he managed to right himself and slipstream. Then his velocity was checked with a sudden tug as he ran aground in the net.

  Up on deck, standing duty at the shoreline, the senior NCO caught the quick lunge in the line of phosphorescent floats, like the strike of a salmon, punching into the net at a point just right of center.

  “Look alive, Tommy Atkins,” the sergeant-major sang out, and gave off two short blasts on his whistle.

  Floundering underwater, vertiginous and disoriented, McElroy tucked his body and rolled along the net. The water pressure had him pasted against it. He pulled himself along, the open weave of the net too pliable and forgiving. His feet slithered on silt, then pebbles. He struggled upslope and broke water in the shallows, without even the strength to stand. He pushed the mouthpiece out from between his locked teeth with a furry tongue and stripped his mask off. He called out in the darkness, croaking uselessly against the slicker of the river in the broken ice. No sound came from his bruised throat. McElroy pawed at the water, helpless and exhausted. His lungs ached.

  Men loomed on the riverbank above him, calling to each other and signaling. McElroy drew himself out painfully onto the stones and mud of the riverbank. Soldiers were sliding down the embankment. They were speaking to him, but he had no sense of what they said. They pulled him up the bank. They were careful of his broken arm, although to McElroy it was numb. The sergeant called for a stretcher.

  In the last hour before daybreak the night had cleared. McElroy lay on his back, looking up at the stars, smelling the wet stones, the damp soil and crushed grass, a doggy musk of men in sodden woolen clothes. He listened for the sound of the river clearing its throat and the breeze that came at first light, for the compacted breathing of the earth beneath him. He longed to hear the familiar. The water rattled over the stones at the river’s edge, clucking insistently.

  By late morning, when Kim Adrian saw McElroy off at the airfield, a Soviet salvage crew had been given permission to enter the British zone and set up a floating derrick on the Havel to raise the aircraft wreckage from the bottom of the river. BRINE’s body had been recovered by the two divers on the Maltese team, but the radar stayed where it was. The Russians already smelled a rat and had lodged a vigorous protest with the Allied Control Commission. None of this was of much concern to McElroy.

  He was taken across the tarmac to the waiting Trident in a wheelchair with a British army male nurse in attendance. McElroy’s color was good for a man with his left arm in suspended traumatic amputation. It was under local anesthetic block and wrapped in a vinyl cold pack like those used to ship dressed meat.

  Adrian’s mood was surprisingly cheerful.

  “We got a man killed,” McElroy remarked quietly.

  “We know what the risks are, Jimmy,” Adrian said. “It’s our stock in trade.”

  The male nurse had gone up into the plane to see to their accomodations. He appeared in the doorway at the head of the ramp and descended. McElroy got unsteadily to his feet, with Adrian’s help. “He traded his life for mine,” McElroy said.

  “And it could have been the reverse,” Adrian said. “You aren’t to blame.”

  “There’s enough blame to go around,” McElroy said.

  “Ready when you are, Commander,” the male nurse said.

  Adrian touched McElroy lightly on his good shoulder and turned away. McElroy watched him walk off aross the tarmac toward the terminal building in the spare and chilly sunlight with his hands in his pockets.

  Leaning on his escort, McElroy mounted the ramp. They made it safely aboard and felt their way carefully down the aisle to a window seat.

  They were the only passengers on the flight. The nurse went back to fetch the wheelchair and stow it aft. He returned to fasten McElroy’s seat belt, strapping himself into a seat on the aisle one space away.

  They taxied to their assigned runway and went through final checkout, each engine revving up in turn, before they took off. McElroy imagined the Trident fading up on radar, a dusty pip on a grey-green scope, and tho
ught of reels of magnetic tape recording their inflight communications.

  The aircraft banked in a wide loop and began its climb to corridor altitude. The NO SMOKING light went off, and McElroy asked the enlisted man to light him a cigarette. He inhaled gratefully, leaning back in his seat to watch the smoke as he blew it out. It reminded him he was still alive, evidence of his own breathing.

  There but for the grace of God, he thought, and a sudden shame clutched at him, like the hand of a drowning man.