﻿COVER OF DARKNESS By David Edgerley Gates COVER OF DARKNESS David Edgerley Gates Copyright© 1998 DAVID EDGERLEY GATES Published at Smashwords McElroy got off the plane at Gatow at 2100 hours Berlin time. Kim Adrian was there to meet him. The two men shook hands. “Why all the hugger-mugger?” McElroy asked. Adrian smiled apologetically. “We find ourselves captive to informed sources,” he told him. “We’re on our own patch here, of course, but the Americans supplied us with the operational intelligence.” “Does that mean we have to play by their rules?” McElroy asked. Adrian shrugged. “A small price to pay,” he said. The face of the airfield was greasy in the drizzle of light rain, the runways vacant and granular under the glare of the approach lights. Blue halogen lamps hissed along the perimeter fence, and the clang of metal striking metal carried clearly across the vault of open space, as sound travels over water. The two men crossed the wet tarmac into the lee of the hangars. A black Mercedes touring saloon with the motor running was waiting in the shadows, showing no lights. It was flanked by two lorryloads of Tommies in battle dress, British Army of the Rhine, posting automatic weapons. Berlin in March of 1965 was still an occupied city under the authority of the four wartime Allied powers---Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union---but with nominal German civil administration. The divisions of the Cold War had taken on a brutal material shape with the building of the Wall four years before, and the No Man’s Land it created, a death strip patrolled by armed guards. Adrian glanced up at the fretful weather. There was a kinetic charge about his person, as if he were a lightning rod for the static electricity in the air, or an excitement he couldn’t quite contain. He opened the door to the car, and McElroy ducked inside. There were two men sitting in back. The U.S. Air Force major surrendered his place to McElroy, taking one of the two folding jump seats opposite. Adrian got aboard, tugging the door shut behind him, and adjusted the blackout curtains. He took the second jump seat, put on the dome light, and rapped on the polarized glass that separated them from the driver. The Mercedes oiled into gear, the trucks fell in convoy fore and aft, and they picked up speed sharply as they left the air base. The four men sat in the back of the moving vehicle as if for a rubber of bridge. Kim Adrian made the introductions. “Commander Jimmy McElroy, Lieutenant Commander Gwyn Owen, casename BRINE.” McElroy studied the Welshman on the seat beside him. Thick and dark, weight about thirteen stone, dressed in dark worsted pants and an Appledore jersey, a naval tunic stripped of service insignia, and rope-soled boots. Bare of jewelry save a heavy diver’s watch on a synthetic band. BRINE, McElroy thought to himself, fishing for the association. “Deepwater search and rescue,” the Welshman said, smiling. “We haven’t met.” “I’ve heard the name,” McElroy said. “I’ve heard yours,” BRINE said. “You headed the dive team that went after an American B-52 that crashed in the Med off Algeciras, reportedly carrying nuclear weapons.” “It was a joint operation, US/UK,” McElroy told him. They both turned their gaze toward the Air Force major. “Major Jacobson is with us in the office of liaison with the American defense intelligence effort,” Adrian explained. “Major, why don’t you do the honors? We can all benefit from your experience.” If he read condescension in Adrian’s tone, the major didn’t acknowledge it. He leaned forward, unzipped his documents case, and extracted a green vinyl folder, opening it on his lap. “This briefing is classified CODEWORD, with a restricted command channel,” he announced. McElroy offered BRINE a cigarette, which was declined. McElroy lit one for himself, and sat back, watching the smoke eddy in the currents of the air conditioning. “This morning at first light, Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces began an air defense exercise,” the major said. “Russian bombers took the part of aggressor aircraft and drew fighter reaction throughout Poland and East Germany. We’ve been monitoring the exercise since it started.” He glanced up from the material in his folder. “Berlin is a hundred miles inside East Germany,” he remarked. “Russian and East German units are stationed all around it, some of them quite close to the city. We intercept their military radio traffic on a regular basis, and this kind of readiness exercise is fairly routine. It’s a dress rehearsal, simulating an actual attack on Soviet forward defenses by NATO forces.” He took an eight-by-ten photograph out of his folder and handed it to McElroy. The black-and-white glossy was in an acetate envelope. It showed a radar screen, a grey circle spattered across with white pips and bars. Superimposed on the screen was a grid of the civil air corridors leading out of Berlin to the West German border. The radar targets being tracked ran in a line down the middle of the screen from north to south. “At the top of the screen is the Baltic coast, and the bottom is the Czech border,” Major Jacobson went on. “In the middle is Berlin. You can seen that the flight path of the attacking bombers takes them right over the city, even though they’re flying at ten thousand meters.” McElroy passed the photograph to BRINE. “The point is that the Russian bombers taking part in this mock attack flew in from bases in the Soviet Union, and then they flew home again,” the major said. “But under cover of the bombers, flying directly below them at an altitude of eight thousand meters, six aircraft of an unknown operational profile were deployed into East Germany.” “How do you know they didn’t go back?” McElroy asked. “At about 1030 hours this morning, local time, on approach to Gross Dölln airfield right outside Berlin, one of those six planes developed an apparent instrument malfunction and crashed,” Major Jacobson said. There was a cone of silence in the car. The air conditioning rustled. Radial tires wheezed over wet asphalt. “Where?” BRINE asked. “Here,” Kim Adrian said. “In the British sector of West Berlin.” The intercom popped. McElroy blinked. “Sir?” The driver spoke from the front seat. “We’re alongside the Havel now.” Adrian depressed the squawk bar. “Thank you,” he said. “Flash the truck ahead, and we’ll have a look.” The Mercedes slowed down. Adrian switched off the dome light. McElroy parted the side curtains, peering out. BRINE crouched on the floorboards by the window. The darkened Mercedes rolled by a bank of woods along a half frozen river. The weather had turned to a fluff of snow that fluttered against the windows of the car and sifted away into the gloom. McElroy’s breath condensed vaguely on the inside of the glass. He made out figures in the woods stationed about every thirty meters along the riverbank, patrolling the edge of the trees. They were obviously standing guard and were armed with assault weapons. He saw the flare of a match as one of them lit a cigarette, cupping the flame. “Russians,” Kim Adrian said, speaking softly at his left shoulder. They drove in silence past an omnibus and an armored personnel carrier. A hooded sentry loomed up and fell away in the night. Adrian rapped his knuckles on the glass partition behind the driver, and the Mercedes picked up speed. Adrian secured the blackout curtains and turned the dome light back on. McElroy lit another cigarette, keeping his face blank. “Berlin is governed by a Status of Forces agreement,” Adrian said. “The four military powers accommodate each other within those limits. Following the crash, the commandant of the Soviet garrison sent over two busloads of troops to guard the site. The commandant of the British sector assigned his units to flank the Russians. Late this afternoon, when a Russian salvage team attempted to clear the checkpoints, they were refused entry. The salvage team will be allowed in when the Russians withdraw their men.” “It’s a stalemate,” McElroy said. “We can stall them until daybreak,” Adrian said. “Which gives us no more than seven hours.” The car drew to a stop. Major Jacobson zipped up his documents case. Adrian turned off the dome light, and one by one the four men got out of the car, McElroy last. He stepped out into snow gusting in a falling wind and blowing off a body of water he could sense close at hand. They were standing next to a large communications wagon with US AIR FORCE stenciled on the side panels and the warning RESTRICTED AREA lettered on the door. “We’re at this point just half a kilometer north of the nearest Russians,” Adrian said. “Which puts us approximately eleven hundred meters from the crash site.” “Which is where, exactly?” McElroy asked, turning slowly to get his bearings. “At the bottom of the river Havel in about sixty-five feet of water,” Adrian told him, gesturing into the drifting snowflakes. The wind died away, and McElroy heard the chuckling of the river and the thin creak of the skim ice in the darkness. The interior of the communications van was painted the color of tinned peas. One end was laid out as a Ready Room, with a teletype and a scrambler terminal. The near wall was a bank of monitoring and recording devices, hooded screens, computer readouts, and calibrating equipment, manned by U.S. Air Force personnel. The opposite wall was given over to an eight-foot-square display map of northern Europe and the Baltic, sandwiched in plexiglass and backlit. There was a radar grid laid over the map to a radius of two hundred nautical miles out from Berlin, at the center. The plexiglass was criss-crossed with dotted lines in colored grease pencil, red, yellow, blue, and green, aircraft headings marked with numbers and times. The colors were fluorescent. McElroy understood that the map board showed the course of the Air Defense exercise up to the time the Russians had lost their plane. The route of that aircraft was indicated in black, with an X in the river. Major Jacobson led them to the far end of the operations area where a small work station had been set up. “Aircraft carry electronic systems with specific signatures,” the major said. “An onboard radar, for example, sends out signals of a certain frequency, and we can analyze those characteristics to identify it. Before the crash we were able to record some signals from the aircraft, but they don’t indicate anything we recognize. That plane is equipped with a new radar, perhaps being tested for the first time.” “Which might explain why it crashed,” BRINE said. Jacobson smiled. “It just might,” he said. He took a diagram out of his folder. It was a three-view schematic perspective of an aircraft---side, top, and full-face views---with dimensions to scale and a block of text elucidating technical data running along the margins. “This is a Yakovlev prototype Soviet fighter-bomber,” the major told them. “The airframe has been adapted to long-range, all-weather interceptor capacity and given the interim NATO designation FIREFLY. We believe this is the aircraft that crashed, but we don’t have an accurate profile. We know next to nothing about this plane, and it appears the Russians have dropped one right in our laps.” Adrian switched on a high-intensity drafting light and positioned it over a large graph. “This is a chart of a four mile stretch of the river Havel,” he said. “Point of impact, here. The width of the river is from five to six hundred meters shore to shore, but fifteen hundred or so meters downstream it narrows to a bottleneck with an attendant Bernoulli effect. The current picks up rapidly. Russian troops are stationed on both banks of the river some five hundred yards north and south of the crash site. Our present position is a little over a thousand meters upstream.” McElroy pursed his lips and let out a deep breath. “You want us to thread the needle,” he said. “Support personnel?” BRINE asked Kim Adrian. “We’ve brought in an underwater demolition team from Malta,” Adrian told him. “You’re to brief them only with regard to the job at hand, not its significance.” BRINE consulted his watch. “Best get to it,” he said. McElroy shrugged. The two men went outside and crunched across the frosted ground in the eddying snow to the canteen, marked with the broad A of the British army. An infantry corporal drew them strong, scalding tea from a spigot into paper-thin tin cups. The metal conducted the heat and scorched their palms, and both of them passed their cups back and forth from hand to hand, blowing off the rising steam. “What do you make of it?” BRINE asked him. “Could be worse,” McElroy said. “Tricky stretch of water, that,” BRINE remarked. McElroy nodded, sipping his tea thoughtfully. “You want to throw for who goes first?” BRINE asked. McElroy smiled. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’m wondering now what kind of fish we’ve got on the line.” “Mind you’re not the bait,” the Welshman said. McElroy made the dive from a point on the riverbank a thousand yards upstream from the triangulated position of the wreckage. The skin of ice sighed as he slipped under it, and the dark water closed over his head like a shroud. The air expelled from his underwater breathing apparatus flailed away downstream. He rehearsed the operation of the waterproof infrared spotlamp strapped to his left forearm and paid himself out on the towline into deeper water. There were two thousand meters of cable on the reel, six-ply monofilament and sheathed steel. A second reel hung from his work apron. Like flycasting gear, the reels were equipped with friction locks. The rewind was mechanical. He slipped the drag on the cable, quartering across the current. The bones in his wrists shivered as he picked up speed. He set himself like a hook in the throat of the river. The mass of water crowded down on him, both a physical pressure and a slough of sound. The pulse of the channel accelerated along the rivercourse and drew him down it like a trawling lure. The beam of the infrared torch picked out striations in the silt. Shadows flitted across tumbled-smooth stones and industrial litter. There was a high level of turbidity in the water, limiting his range of vision. He took up slack in the line, tightening the drag. At either hand now, as he plunged along the dark watercourse belowdecks, the Russians stood topside watch in the dirty weather. Downriver, the UDT had strung safety netting across the narrows. Beyond that was the Wann See, the locks of the canals, Potsdam. McElroy steadied himself on the axis of the line, trying to correct for his yaw as he swung in a wide traverse across the riverbed. He paid out more cable, a little at a time. The dull bulk of the aircraft came up at him out of the river like a kraken, lying belly-up on the bottom. His first pass took him by just short of the antenna mast on the nose. He unreeled another few meters of cable and overshot the fuselage on the return sweep, grounding precariously on the underside of the port wing. He dogged the reel and dropped to three points of contact, still wobbly from his plummet downriver, but the airframe didn’t settle as it picked up his nearly negligible mass. McElroy recovered his balance and hugged the metal surface, flattening his body so the water slipstreamed past him. They hadn’t prepared him for her size. The aircraft seemed enormous. He estimated the wingspan at ninety feet and the length overall at about a hundred and thirty. Upside-down in the silt, with the canopy and vertical stabilizers half-buried, the height of the wreck was still almost eighteen feet. It was an inert, ungainly artifact, lit only in unsatisfactory fragments by the narrow focus of the electric torch. McElroy secured the towline and slipped over the leading edge of the wing, set at a severely raked angle to the hull. The water tugged at him, and the fuselage afforded little friction for purchase. He was wary of handholds, the crash having ruptured stress points, leaving sharp, ridged fissures in the skin. He studied a break in the hull plates. It looked like a reinforced honeycomb. He worked his way delicately to the nose. The bow section was metallic and opaque. He ducked down and put his face mask to the cracked canopy, peering into the tangle of the cockpit. The instrument panel was obscured by a snarl of wiring harness and by a large mass of twisted upholstery. He realized it was the underside of the pilot’s command seat. The pilot had stayed with his aircraft and had only fired the ejection mechanism when it was too late. The explosive charge had driven him through the canopy, head-first into the riverbed. McElroy eased up onto the starboard wing. He unhooked the dragline reel from his kit and threaded the cable through the intake of the starboard engine. He felt an itch travel across the airframe from the set of his cleat on the opposite wing. It was the upstream towline binding against steel and vibrating under load. BRINE and the Maltese team were on their way down with the oxyacetylene gear. He took a grip on the reel and pushed off into the current, slipstreaming over the ventral tail stabilizers. He let off the drag, and the line played free. The river bore him away downstream. The plane wreck swept back in the murky water and faded into darkness. The current swelled, gathering force as the banks of the river drew together. McElroy tightened the drag, slowing down. Plastic collars on the cable told off distance in metric increments, and he brought himself to a stop five hundred meters downriver from the wreck. He screwed a piton through the silt into the clay underneath and snubbed the safety line to a snap-ring. He locked the cable reel, leaving it to bump against the bottom. Calculating his position at about two thousand meters above the safety net, McElroy checked his watch to clock his return against the river and paced himself hand over hand up the dragline. It took him four and a half minutes to make the distance, which meant a little under a minute for every hundred meters gained. He estimated it would take ten minutes to get up the towline from the wreck to the staging area, where they were free to surface, and figured his margin of working air at twenty minutes. The aircraft wreckage swam up out of the dusky water like coals rekindling under ashes. McElroy scrambled aboard the starboard wing and crab-walked across across the body of the plane to port, hands flat on the plates, treading water downstream to steady himself as he skittered over the bump of a ventral fairing between the engine intakes. BRINE and a backup diver had manhandled the oxygen and acetylene cylinders into position, the tanks depressed into the bottom sediment and silting up on the upstream face. McElroy scooped up the towline reel, made sure of the set of his cleat, and swam forward with some effort across the nose, letting the reel pay out surplus cable from the hitch. He kicked over and down, trailing line, and took a tuck around the body of the aircraft. He locked the reel, passing it up to BRINE. BRINE passed the reel between his legs and set his feet against the fuselage, straddling the cable. It acted as a breeches buoy, leaving the Welshman with both hands free. He took up the blowtorch, fending the hoses clear, and lit it off. A hot, brilliant flare incandesced at the cutting head of the torch in a lather of pressurized bubbles. They boiled away furiously up out of the light, spending themselves in the dark, restless tumble of water, and were carried off downstream. BRINE started his first cut on the port side of the radome, two feet aft of the tip, it being his object to clip the nose of the plane off like the top of a soft-boiled egg. The infrared-sensitive faceplate of McElroy’s diving mask did little to filter out the visible light spectrum, and he shielded his eyes with his left hand, not looking directly at the hot spot where the metal honeycomb oxidized grudgingly into smudge. The torch bit in with a rush of steam, and a purling line of alloy glittered liquidly along the cut, fusing to the edges. Powdery detritus congealed immediately in the cold running water to flakes of sediment blown off by the rush of gas. The bright glare at the cutting head sparkled in a clouded halo of grit, impurities precipitated out and iron particles introduced into the oxygen flow to facilitate combustion. The divers were counting on the current to dispel the stink and high volume of exhaust gases attendant on subsurface salvage. BRINE made laborious progress. The skin of the airframe had been designed to withstand the high temperatures of atmospheric friction. McElroy checked his time. He was already on his reserve air. He straightened, backpedaling, and hovered near the wreck a moment. Then he went up the towline for fresh tanks. It took him nine minutes and change to make the distance. The drizzle had turned gusty and ice-laden when he broke water at the shoreline. McElroy scrambled up the slippery bank and sat down facing the river. He stripped off his mask and diving hood and let the mouthpiece dangle. Two ratings took the duty of changing his tanks. One of them brought him a mug of tea with a dram of rum in it. McElroy sipped at it gratefully. The flat and muted sounds about him were hesitant in the thinner medium of air, a hollow chime against the disequilibrium of his inner ear. The hiss and mutter of the river at his feet, the throbbing generators on the communications wagons, the movement of people in and around the vehicles, all seemed heard from a great distance. He could see nothing of the far bank in the darkness and the raw wet. The men scattered about the staging area nearby were close to silent, trading short courtesies, smoking, drinking tea or coffee, waiting on the event like guests at a wedding before the bride arrives. The second rating brought him the underwater camera. McElroy slithered down the bank. The two divers of the relief team were waiting in the shallows. McElroy steadied himself against the towline, the cable angling into the water from the drumhead on the winch, and squirmed back into his hood. He spat in his face mask, rinsed it in the river, and settled it over his eyes and nose. He cleared his mouthpiece, put it between his teeth, and slipped underwater. The relief divers followed McElroy’s lead, sliding down the cable. The hot blur at the nose of the aircraft grew sharper and brighter as they descended into the gloom, their movements bullied by the tug of the current. BRINE was bent to his work with the torch. He’d finished the cut circling the nose and was shearing the rivets. McElroy moved alongside, signaling to one of his divers to take over BRINE’s post. The two men accomplished a brief exchange with hand signals, and then BRINE wagged McElroy the thumbs’ up and hauled off topside with his diving mate. McElroy straddled the fuselage and indicated the next cut, a ventral incision the length of the radome, a distance of almost ten feet straight back. The diver with the torch set to work, the second diver taking up the slack in the gas feedlines to keep them from fouling. They duck-walked back from the nose, paying themselves out on short stops of cable. The alloy panels split under the hammer of the blowtorch, the job going faster because they were separating a seam in the hull. Bits of glittering debris fused together and spun away downriver. McElroy prowled aft with the camera, photographing the salient features with a strobe attachment. The otherwise aerodynamically clean surfaces of the hull were interrupted by missile pylons well inboard, large bulged fairings on the underside of the fuselage, clusters of electronic vanes, and asymmetric dielectric strips, nonconducting. At the tail, just forward of the jet exhausts, the heavy panels of the air brakes jutted out, deployed on their hydraulic struts. A panic response maybe, or a last-minute maneuver to ditch the plane on its belly with minimal damage. McElroy had a sudden unbidden glimpse of what it must have been like to experience the crash firsthand, the whistle of the air brakes and the shudder of the laboring engines, the abrupt jibe in the airframe as it dropped to stall speed, losing lift, the controls unresponsive, and the top-heavy plummet of inert mass into the river, the turbines inhaling water instead of air, sucking the aircraft to the bottom as the turbine blades cracked with the violent drop in temperature. The reflexive ejection release, the concussive plunge, the quick death from a broken neck, or suffocation in the muck. McElroy drove ahead again, hand over hand, pushing with his flippers to counter the pull downstream. He took hold gingerly of a horizontal stanchion and propelled himself forward, swimming up under the port wing and shoving his way through the soupy water, murky with particulate matter, disturbed sediment, and debris. Hot and brilliant, the bloom of the cutting torch flared erratically, a spastic iris leaking and occluding light. McElroy felt trapped for a moment in the airless press, but then he collected himself and moved on up the fuselage. The nose of the plane was split, and the diver with the torch was making a lateral cut across the ventral surface of the hull to finish a pattern in an elongated H, like dissecting a frog. BRINE and his diving mate came back down the cable, relieving the divers with the torch. They went up the line, but McElroy stayed behind. The three men began jimmying up the plates, using heat and breaker bars to snap the welds. They peeled back the alloy sheets and broke off the nose of the radome. The assembly exposed inside the sprung plates was about the size of a small automobile engine block, cased in some kind of composition material similar to Bakelite. The divers peered in at it. The components made up an interlocking clutter, and the housing was locked into the circular steel ribs of the hull frame, sides and top. Color-coded wires twisted back into the shallow recesses behind the instrument panel. Squinting past the blistered steel, McElroy squeezed the camera into the gap and took a couple of shots from different angles. He could see that the radar module incorporated a bayonet mount, for repair or replacement. If the frame weren’t warped too far out of true, they could extract the whole assembly, depending on its weight. He directed BRINE to burn through the second framing rib aft so they could spring the jaws of the severed struts, twist the radar casing, and thread it between them, like drawing a piston out of its sleeve. BRINE tapped his forefinger on the crystal of his watch. McElroy nodded and swam up the towline with the camera. Stripped out of his wetsuit, McElroy hunkered bareheaded in the open door of the van. He was dressed in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, his feet in insulated slippers, wrapped in a wool blanket, drinking black coffee from a dented tin cup. Behind him BRINE rummaged around in their stores, hunting dry socks for the next dive. This smaller vehicle served as their support inventory, bare of communications equipment, the floor chalked off into sections for different instruments and gear. They hadn’t been assigned a security guard. The rain had let up briefly, and looking up, McElroy could make out a faint starshine. There was no moon, but he took that for an omen. Parked in front of the van was a late-model American Ford sedan, the body and brightwork masked off in flat camouflage drab. The windows and windscreen were non-reflecting glass, and the license plates were lettered in Cyrillic. The car was attached to the Allied Military Mission. The rear suspension of the Ford hiked the differential up a good six inches higher than the front end, which was just the fashion for running heavy contraband goods over bad roads at high speeds, McElroy figured. The driver, a U.S. Army Spec/5, lounged on the hood of the car smoking a Camel; he had what the Englishman pictured as a rangy Appalachian Piedmont cast to him, the look of a family history rich in hot cars and moonshine. McElroy knew he wasn’t far wrong. The high-powered, heavily-sprung Mission vehicles regularly played hare-and-hounds with Soviet military personnel and East German Volkspolizei, traveling under diplomatic cover and taking photographs of restricted installations on the other side of the wire. The back seat of the Ford, hung with blackout curtains, doubled as a darkroom. The rear door opened, and the Air Force major, Jacobson, got out, followed by Kim Adrian. The major had a manila enbelope with him. McElroy didn’t see who else was in the back of the car. The enlisted man, ignoring Major Jacobson, flipped his cigarette away and got behind the wheel of the Ford. He drove away. Jacobson and Adrian came over to McElroy. BRINE came to stand in the doorway of the van at McElroy’s shoulder, their shadows thrown out sharply on the wet ground like those of a primitive family group huddled in the mouth of a cave. “We’ve got photographs of the landing at Gross Dölln,” Major Jacobson said. “Taken together with what you’ve given us from the river, we have a definite identification. We can confirm the downed aircraft is a FIREFLY.” The two divers moved out of the doorway, and the other two men stepped up, halfway into the light. “We’re short of time, Jimmy,” Adrian said. “I’m short a man,” McElroy said. One of the divers on the Maltese team had been injured, not seriously but bleeding badly. BRINE had brought him back to the surface. The other two divers were below and due up. “Can we do it?” Kim Adrian asked him, impatiently. “That’s the immediate question.” McElroy smiled through his fatigue. “Is that the Royal We?” he inquired. Adrian ducked his head. “We need breathing room, Jimmy, a space to fold our tents and steal away,” he said. BRINE glanced at his watch. “Two hours until daybreak,” he said. “I’m not going to risk the men,” McElroy said to Adrian. “One team, one more dive.” Adrian nodded. “It’s your responsibility,” he said. He and Major Jaobson left the trailer. McElroy and BRINE looked at each other. “A tired man gets careless,” BRINE remarked, “and a careless man makes mistakes.” McElroy turned away, flexing his back and shoulders in an effort to shake off his stiffness and jitters. “You don’t strike me as a careless man,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking of myself,” BRINE told him. “Good,” McElroy said. “I wouldn’t want to push my luck. We’ve had it fairly easy, barring accident.” “Knock wood,” the Welshman said. The two divers gathered up their clammy wetsuits. 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 thought 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.