209 -376-177- 286 -164 - 1.

It threw me and then I got it: I'd read US print Polaris for US Sprint Polaris. Both missiles had a compressed gas launcher giving them a super-fast initial ascent with virtually no heat involved and getting them out of sight almost immediately and this could be the same type, which would explain why I couldn't see any exhaust ducts or shields.

He was asking me more about the camouflage but when I started off he cut in at the first interval and said he couldn't hear me through the jam so I told him to stand by and we sweated it out for twelve minutes till the riveter stopped and by that time I was right on the edge of my nerves because the logical time for a daily inspection of the minefield below me was first thing in the morning.

I turned down the volume for receive while Ferris put specific questions and then raised it for transmission and spoke close to the mike with the welders for background cover . . . configuration on both planes perfectly consistent with oil rig . . . telemetry requirements identical in many respects . . . giving similar installation images . . .

While I was filling in the picture it occurred to me that it made a certain amount of sense to build a missile base right on the doorstep of a UK possession and call it an oil rig. The Chinese Republic had silos all over the mainland for reaction-take-off missiles but they were being photographed regularly by the American SR71 from eighty thousand feet and by the Soviet Turo-9 from somewhere just under that altitude: it wasn't possible to hide things any more. Aerial surveillance by high-altitude plane and satellite units had been jacked up to the point where you couldn't plant a row of beans without getting a call the next morning from the CIA or the KGB to say that according to their photographs you'd put them in upside down.

There were immense problems involved in building a conventional-take-off missile base on the continental shelf in terms of getting the exhaust gas away but if you first thought of an oil rig as a disguise and then considered the similarities between an oil rig and a submarine and used compressed gas to pop the missile up the tube as they did with the Sprint and the Polaris then you'd build one of these things.

Question: how far was George Henry Tewson from the design concept of Polaris?

'He was with the Ministry of Defence,' she'd said grandly, high on bubbly, then she'd remembered they told her not to say things like that, 'actually his work wasn't important, to tell you the truth,' poor little bitch, out of her depth.

287-387-498-190-54 . . .

He was on mission factors now: how long did I think I could stay on board the rig with any security? What was my life-support status in terms of rations, air, essential rig-to-island gear? How long would the radio stand up in these conditions?

Necessary to leave rig immediately exchange concluded. Fair chance of returning at nightfall but Bloody riveter began banging away and I called a 20-20 into the mike for stand-by and cut it dead to save the batteries and started to sweat it out again, watching the iron ladders and trying to think what I could do if Ferris asked me to keep station while he got into signals with London. That'd take up to an hour in cypher and I couldn't wait that long: I couldn't wait another two seconds with any security and he knew that because I'd told him.

Banging away, the whole of the superstructure vibrating, the rivets going into my head.

09.37.

If they just found me clinging to the girder looking dead beat the cover story might hold up long enough for me to try some kind of a get-out but if they found me with a radio it wouldn't hold up at all. There wasn't anything I could do about that: the instant I saw them on the ladder I could knock the Hammerlund into the sea behind the pontoon leg but they'd hear the splash and investigate and find the rest of the stuff. No go.

09.40.

There had to be a limit and in five minutes I'd open up the set and keep sending fifteens: Situation contained but leaving station. London was in a panic or they wouldn't have pushed me into this kind of position but if I could get out to Heng-kang Chou and delay the action for eight or nine hours till nightfall and take it up again from there they'd still have a live executive in the field and total security in the target zone. If I gave it more than another five minutes on board this rig they'd have a dead duck.

09.44.

The riveter stopped and I hit the set with twos.

He came in straight away with another question but I didn't answer it. I told him the situation was too insecure and I had to leave station.

He asked for a repeat and that brought the sweat out again.

We were throwing each other contractions for this exchange: the phrasing was right out of the book because the executive was in a red sector and had to get out and the director was having to decide whether to let him go or punch in a priority signal when he had him on the air. Contractions take very little time indeed but I didn't have any to spare because my instinct was yelling at me to get the hell out of this death-trap: send him fifteens and shut down the set and drop into the sea and pull out.

Priority message.

Blast his eyes.

I waited.

He wasn't going to ask me for time while he talked to London. He didn't have to. He'd already done that.

Basic contractions: 2-8-0.

Executive will withdraw objective from target zone.

The objective was normally a file or a document or a chunk of strictly hush electronics but this time it was a man and what they were asking me to do was bring Tewson off the rig.

Chapter Fourteen.

FLOTSAM.

Something moved away from me in the sand as my fins touched the sea bed, and a flash of silver showed against the pontoon as a group of pomfret took refuge.

The depth on the gauge was 106 feet and I was aware of the pressure here at 4 atmospheres. Movement felt heavy and the silence brooded. The light was diffused, scattering down from the surface and leaving no shadows where the pontoon legs stood braced on the sand. Visibility was twenty or thirty feet: the girders were sharply defined in the immediate vicinity but grew hazy on the other side of the pontoon, finally vanishing into the insubstantial wall where sight was halted.

I'd changed air tanks on the surface, buckling the full ones into the backpack as a routine safety measure and bringing the old ones down with me to leave here with the radio and some of the rations. There might not be fresh water on Heng-kang Chou and I was taking one quart along with me. The hammerlund would have to be left here and I'd been worrying about that but there wasn't any choice: if I took it to the island I'd be able to stay in signals with Ferris during the next nine hours and with minimum background interference, but the waterproof bag was showing signs of giving out and the two-mile trip wouldn't improve it. The radio was a component in the life-support chain of this operation and I'd have to leave it lashed to the rig with the other gear for picking up tonight.

I wasn't thinking about the London directive Ferris had thrown me because there wasn't any point.

I would have said no straight away and shut the set down on that but Egerton always likes you to give it a bit of thought before you tell him he's run the mission into the ground. It wasn't that he didn't realize what he was asking me to do: when the executive's in the target zone the director in the field is normally in rapid and constant signals with Control. The moment I'd left Swordfish they'd lit up the red bulb over the mission board for Mandarin in London and it wouldn't go out till I'd left the target zone or blown the operation or got snatched or neutralized by the opposition.

Ferris had had all the time he needed to tell Egerton precisely what the situation was and Egerton therefore knew bloody well that I didn't stand a hope in hell of bringing Tewson off this rig. I'd set up a get-out action when I'd gone aboard but London didn't know that and in any case it was in the extreme resource category and I put my chances at ten to one against getting away with it. This was nothing but routine procedure: when you go into the target zone you leave every possible door wide open behind you and if there's anything you can use for a last-minute hit-and-run get-out you give it a go because in a lot of cases the alternative's a ten-year stretch in a brainwash facility or a six-foot hole where no one can see them digging.

I'd made no provision for pulling a man out with me and there wouldn't have been anything I could have done about it even if London had briefed me on it before we'd gone into the access phase: the rig was manned and guarded and Tewson was under the protection of the opposition and it was no go all along the line.

Ferris knew that. He'd been instructed to field-brief me with the signal and he'd done that. I'd received the directive and acknowledged it and all I could do now was hole up on Heng-kang till tonight and come back and go over the rig again to see if I could fill in a few of the gaps: try finding out what type of missile they were going to plug into this thing, take a closer peek at the unit that looked like a tropospheric scatter system, do a soft-shoe snatch on one of the guards and get him into cover and see if he Could understand Cantonese.

But that would be all I could do before I had to pull out and when I pulled out I couldn't bring Tewson with me. They bloody well ought to know that.

Even at this depth I could feel the vibration of the riveter in the pontoon leg and when I lashed the used air tanks to the girder they began ringing to the percussion: at four atmospheres the residue of air was being compressed by seventy-five per cent and the vibration was hitting them like a drum, so I took them off and looped some of the cord round the girder to damp out the metal-to-metal contact before I lashed everything tight and damn nearly knocked into him when I turned round because he was right behind me and reaching for his knife.

High cheekbones and light yellow eyes behind the mask, nothing on him except the diver's knife, no spear-gun or anything. His move for the knife surprised me because you can't use any kind of blade under water with enough speed to do any damage: you've got to wait till you can get in close and then start ramming with it. He was shorter than I was and that meant he couldn't get in close unless I let him and I wasn't going to do that and he ought to know.

Conceivably it was just a defensive reaction when I'd turned round: he was offering the knife correctly, hilt down and blade up at forty-five degrees - he knew how to use the thing and unless I backed off it wouldn't be any good reaching for my own knife because he'd be ripping into me before I could get anywhere near it.

We looked at each other through our faceplates for two or three seconds before we made a move. Everything was in the eyes: not communication but reaction. His eyes were alert and hostile, the lids narrowed and the pupils enlarged. He watched me with total attention. In my own eyes he'd seen shock and now saw decision. Man is- one of the territorial animals and contact between two members of their species gives rise to an immediate issue when one or the other is on his own ground. For both of them - but particularly for the intruder - there is the primitive decision to be made: to fight or run.

But he hadn't been waiting to see what I would do. The situation was more sophisticated than it would have been for two of the lower animals: this diver had seen me lashing something to the base of the rig and it could be explosive and whatever it was he wanted to find out as soon as he could and take it aloft for close examination. He also wanted to know what I was doing here and who I was and where I'd come from and he was going to subdue me if he could and similarly take me to the surface and hand me over for interrogation.

There'd been a chance that I might have capitulated in the instant of encounter but the time was past now and he saw that. The very fact of my standing here face to face with him was an expression of hostility and he was going to make the first move: by infinite degrees he was bringing his body lower and turning the trunk with the right shoulder coming towards me and the elbow at right angles, the blade of the knife cocked and steady, dull silver in the strange underwater light.

Combat at eighteen fathoms has its own rules and some of them run counter to the norm: you don't draw back to bring momentum into a blow because the pressure of the element is going to kill off momentum anyway. You have to streamline the strike and he did that and the blade hit the glass of my faceplate and the point stayed there scraping on the surface as I held his wrist and we looked at each other, locked and motionless. He'd struck directly forward and into the aim and I'd known he'd have to do that because it was the only way and I'd worked fast and my forearm had driven straight upwards to connect my hand to his wrist but the water had built up resistance against the bicep area because it was travelling at right angles and it had slowed the blow but not critically: he'd struck for the throat or my breathing tube and hit the faceplate and his wrist was locked in my fingers and I began squeezing.

The bone was thin and I began levering, working for a fracture, watching the pain start in his eyes. A foot blow was out of the question because of the drag of the fins so I knew he'd have to use his left hand and I was ready but he was wickedly fast, clawing for my breathing tube again and again as I jerked my head back and kicked upwards from the sea bed and dragged him with me, keeping the pressure on his wrist: but we were clear of the sand now and fighting in the manner of fish, and he used the element for his own defense, letting my grip on his wrist move his whole body, the kinetic energy travelling through the arm to the shoulder and beyond.

Breathing became difficult as the muscles demanded oxygen: the lungs began creating a vacuum, setting up pressure lag at the regulator.

He had stopped his left-hand action because I was holding the air tube out of his reach, my back arched and my head angled, but this was defensive because my right hand was immobilized and time was already running out: in scuba diving exertion of any kind is at a heavy premium and we were making demands on oxygen that weren't going to be met. I estimated we had two more minutes before exhaustion set in.