The current was taking us slowly away from the substructure of the rig and we were drifting higher, with the sandbars below us losing definition. The only purchase either of us had was against the other's body and we were using our legs now, not for striking but for leverage, my right foot working for pressure against his neck as one of his legs was hooked suddenly around mine as he went for a knee lock and got it and began putting stress into the movement with our ankles braced together bone on bone.

Our black rubber bodies drifted, entangled intimately in a deathly embrace, a slow and freakish sea-creature afloat on the current, the pressures and tensions of its own destruction working within it, the quadruple lung system starving for air, the twin heads close together in mortal enmity, each willing death on the other.

This wasn't how it was meant to be, this slow surrender to the sea itself, the drifting away to death of a four-armed creature, the light turning as the grey-green world revolved, the mind spinning in silence, in eternal peace.

Think.

A whirlpool of colours streaming, swirling, a singing of yellow in my eyes as the deep came, darkening.

Think.

Nitrogen narcosis.

Do something.

The consciousness ebbing as the rapture of the deep drew over me, the pain sharp in my knee and the brain waking, Christ sake do something, finish him off and get up there, his hand hooking again and the rush of salt water against my face as the mask was wrenched away, fighting him half-blinded now and with pressure against the nose and the shape of his other hand indistinct as his wrist came free and he hooked again and dragged my air tube away, taking my last hope of life.

Not good enough and had to try but salt water now in my eyes and in my mouth and no more air and he kicked with his fins to get clear while I drowned but don't let him he'll leave you here to die and my hand moved, frenzied, part of the mind driving it, part of the mind striving to clear a space for conscious thought like a bubble in black water, a bubble of light, my fingers closing and snatching at his head and dragging the mask off and going for his air tube and finding it and tearing it away as he squirmed clear of the knee lock and began fighting for his life against the sea.

Then at some time our faces passed close to each other and his looked as dead as mine must look, the eyes dulled by the water and the mouth flattened as he held on to the last breath of his life, as I was doing. Then we drifted apart in the reddening light as the blood from the wound in my hand began clouding against my eyes. 1 felt behind me for the air tube but it was out of my reach: he'd pulled the mouthpiece over my head and the tube was hanging somewhere behind my shoulder-blades. The longing began in my chest: the longing to drag air into the lungs and breathe again.

The sea darkened as he loomed suddenly against my face, his shoulder hitting and turning me as 'his arm hooked again and again behind him, his hand trying to find the air tube as it drifted past my eyes. I cut it away with my knife and kicked clear of him.

The effort had taken the last of my strength and my chest was hammering with the need for air and I knew that soon my throat must open and suck the water in, and in the deep red singing I saw Moira, as I knew one day I would, her long eyes and the flow of her copper hair, turning her head in the way she did, to watch me with her smile as my mind became lulled in the soft-coming waves of nothing, nihil, annihilation, while somewhere as if in a different place the organism continued with its desperate travail, my hand reaching overhead and the fingers searching, the breath held in the hollows of the sea and the mind lingering, alive, the nerves subservient to the primitive nub of matter at the top of the spine - the hand suddenly frenzied as the fingers touched the concertina rubber of the tube and grasped it, pulling it over my head and trying to force the mouthpiece against my teeth, think, as they closed on it, on the life it could give, but think, as the forebrain was roused from its narcosis - face the surface and my legs kicked and I turned on my back, remembering, my hand lifting, taking the mouthpiece higher than the regulator with the opening downwards, bring it down, my face reaching upwards and my mouth hungry for the bubbling air and biting on it, exhale, the water turning me, swallow, my body drifting, now breathe, the sigh of the cylinders echoing in the deep vaults of the sea, now breathe, the lungs greedy and pulling at the valve and sweetly filling, breathe.

I saw him once more.

He was slowly windmilling in the blood-red cloud, his arms open and his legs apart and his movement graceful as the current turned him, his eyes quiet as he danced alone.

His mask was still hanging at his neck, its strap holding it, and I pulled it over his head and put it on, squeezing the water out by degrees as I breathed into it. Then I kicked with my fins and my hands reached upwards, following the bubbles and slowly climbing their chain.

Don't hurry.

Let the bubbles go, there's no hurry.

Remember what you know: never climb faster than they do. Let them go.

The light grew stronger above me, its molten silver spreading in a pool as I neared the surface, following the bubbles, following. Globules of darkness began appearing and I watched them, amused, think, their effect mesmeric, their dark spheres floating psychedelically against my eyes, remember, their thin strings stretching above them, remember the mines.

The faint trellis of girders was on my left and I turned and moved in that direction, my heart thudding because the organism had been perturbed. Basic forebrain cerebration was starting up again as the effect of the nitrogen narcosis began wearing off: at the crude decision-making level I was able to plan what I was going to do for the next few minutes. Consideration of later problems was beyond me for the moment: it was enough to be alive.

When I reached the surface below the deck of the rig I removed the mouthpiece and turned off the air and hooked both arms across a horizontal girder and hung there, filling my lungs, slowly and deeply, again and again, sending oxygen through the system and driving the residue of carbon dioxide out of the body tissues, hanging as limp as I could and thinking of nothing, closing my eyes.

The water lapped at the girders, a slow swell moving the surface without disturbing it; I heard a sea bird call as it flew between the islands; another answered, far away.

Then the riveter started up again and the shock went through me and I opened my eyes, thinking I'd slept: maybe I had. It was time to go.

I didn't find it easy to put the mask on and the mouthpiece between my teeth because there'd been death down there and I didn't want to go there again, but I couldn't stay here by daylight: there was no certain cover for me above the water-line.

Orientate.

The island was to the north, and I could see it clearly: a series of humped green hills and a fall of granite rock where I knew there were caves. The sea between here and Heng-kang Chou was glass smooth under the climbing sun, except where the flotsam made a patch of black, its edges shining. They could see it too, because I heard cries and in a moment the riveter stopped and their voices were clearer. They were calling in Mandarin but I understood well enough: it was one cry repeated, man overboard, and interspersed with short sharp words of enquiry and response, where, there.

The hiss of the welding plant died away now and the only background was the murmur of the diesel generators. The men's voices were raised sharply against it and I heard the first order being shouted. Feet began ringing on the iron decks.

I dived.

Sound burst suddenly against my eardrums: the power launch was tied up on the far side of the rig, below bad-weather derricks, and its engines started up as I began a long curving path that took me through the girders on the north side of the substructure with the minefield ten or fifteen feet above my head. I turned slowly on my back and saw their dark blobs against the flare of the surface. The body of the diver floated above them and the oblong shape of the launch went curving across, its draught too shallow for the keel to foul the outrigger framework that held the mines suspended. Its engines were loud now, filling the sea with their sound.

With fifty feet on the depth gauge I was invisible from the surface and this was as deep as I wanted to go because the pressure was already tangible and it was urgent that I stayed free of narcosis. There was also a lingering sense of fear as 1 moved again in the deeps, watching the enemy above me through a dead man's mask.

Ignore.

I kicked with the fins, setting a steady rhythm, still swimming with my face to the surface in the hope of navigating. The compass was useless at this distance from the rig and I couldn't go up and check my bearings: all I could do was to keep the pool of sunlight in my wake and on my left. But it was amorphous and diffuse, its glare dazzling me. I shut my eyes against it. The boat's engines were idling now as they took the body aboard and examined it.

Desultory thought process: Mandarin was blown. The cover story Ferris had given me had been thin at best but now it wouldn't stand a chance because they knew by now that the diver hadn't just got into difficulties down there: his mask was missing and his air tube had been severed with a knife. The three secret service men who'd escorted Tewson to and from the Golden Sands Hotel were almost certainly on board the rig and there'd be a naval defence cadre with frogmen responsible for underwater maintenance and security and if they were good at their job they'd inspect the substructure down to the sea bed and find my gear and the radio.

I didn't see any point in going back to the rig when night came, just to get picked off by rapid fire or caught alive and grilled and taken to Pekin and grilled again and thrown on the heap.

I could hear the launch again, taking him back to the rig. The thing that narked me was that I couldn't tell Ferris we'd blown the operation and he couldn't tell London to switch that red light off and shut down the station on Mandarin. Ferris would go on brooding over the chart and haunting the radio room in Swordfish and Egerton would go on ordering trays of tea for his mission staff in Operations and punching out requests for a situation report and all they'd get was silence.

Well, they shouldn't bloody well ask me to do the impossible.

All right I'd done it before but there were limits and this time they'd blown the fuse. Some stupid pratt in the Ministry of Defence had seen the news about Tewson's shark thing and got the wind up and hit the button and told the Bureau to go and verify and set up an operation to get him out of Hong Kong if he was still alive. That was all right till we told them he was under an armed guard on Chinese territory in the middle of the sea: that was when Control should have told them to go home and shut up about it and maybe that was what Egerton had in fact done but they wouldn't listen.

Well, they'd listen now all right. Your bright little boffin's gone and run away from home and he's not coming back so you'd better change the combinations on the files and take that launcher off the secret list and stop his pension because there's nothing more we can do for you.

The sun was in my eyes.

It was all I had to steer by but it wasn't very precise: it was just a big dazzling area that changed shape sometimes when the swell ran heavy and created surface undulation, and if I went off course I'd waste time and air and energy and I didn't want to waste any of those things because they were the means of life. But the only hope of taking a straight line to the island was by surfacing and correcting my bearings and I was still only half a mile from the rig and the look-outs were alerted. . Sun in my eyes.

I closed them.

No go. I had to watch the surface all the time to keep the flare of light in my tracks and on my left and I had to check the gauge every thirty seconds to keep at a constant depth.

Dazzle.

The sound of the engines was faint now but I could hear they were idling: they hadn't been shut off. The body was being put aboard the rig. Another sound was coming in, fainter still but regular, and I couldn't place it. I didn't think it was the riveter: that would make a sharper vibration through the water and they wouldn't have started work again so soon.

The sun was going down, its brightness flowing away to my left and leaving me in twilight. A kind of peace was coming into me, a stillness, and my eyes were closing of their own accord, drawing darkness across the last of the day, while Watch it.

The twilight deepening to night, where nothing Christ sake watch it will you!

Been rolling over, I'd been rolling slowly over, hypnosis induced by the dazzle.

Orientate.

But it was difficult because there wasn't anything for the eye to fix on except that shifting pool of light and if I didn't stay locked on to it. I could swim in a circle: in these weightless conditions with my only navigational reference tending to induce hypnosis there was no way of making the island unless I surfaced and took bearings and I couldn't do that because I knew what the sound was, the new one.