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 waterline.

  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 I 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.

  They were putting the chopper aloft I stopped kicking and hung there with the surface fifty feet above me and the sea bed fifty-six feet below. The rotor was producing a light fluttering sound, most of it screened by the surface, and the other noise was louder, transmitted directly to my ears from the screws of the launch. It was rising in pitch and increasing in volume: the thing was heading in this direction. The body had been found some distance to the north of the rig and I suppose it was the logical direction for anyone to take if they wanted to start a hunt for his assailant. They knew there hadn’t been any kind of a boat near the rig and they knew his air tube had been cut clean through by a blade and it had happened underwater so they didn’t have to make any guesses: they were looking for a frogman.

  I’d shut my eyes while I was motionless and now it was dark again and I kicked with the fins to correct my attitude: I’d been drifting head-down without knowing it. I had approximately sixty seconds before the helicopter picked out the faint blob against the sandbars and signalled the launch where to find me and I didn’t like either of the two things I could do but I was going to have to do one of them. I could start swimming nearer the surface and wait till the chopper sighted me and then I could put out a cloud with the shark repellent and dive and leave it for them as a decoy while I tried to get clear, or I could go straight down to a hundred feet where they couldn’t see me and swim face-up with the sun as a bearing and try to hit the island before narcosis reduced me to a drifting piece of flotsam and the air in the tanks ran out.

  The launch was throttling down.

  As near as I could judge it was at a horizontal distance of a hundred yards: I could see its faint smudge moving slowly across the surface against the dazzling light, cutting a vee from the fluid gold and spreading it towards me.

  Assume starting square search.

  A shadow passed suddenly over me as the helicopter swung in from the south-east, lowering across the sea. Both the launch and the chopper would be armed and if I tried the decoy thing they might decide to open fire instead of bringing in divers to pick me up and hand me over for grilling, so I jack-knifed and put my arms to my sides and felt the pressure mounting as I plunged to the dark sands below.

  Chapter Fifteen : TRAP

  I couldn’t breathe.

  His hands were at my throat and he pressed with his thumbs and I couldn’t stop him. His eyes were slits and below the mask his teeth were bared with the effort as he went on pressing with his thumbs. Behind his yellow face the mountain reared.

  I tried to move but his weight was on me and the water lapped at my head, its waves coming and going without any sound. The mountain was silent, gigantic, directly above me, and I began running but I couldn’t breathe. He was blocking my throat.

  Haze began covering the mountain and I pulled off the mask and the mountain was instantly clear. Something was in my mouth and I pulled it away and my lungs bellowed, heaving inside my ribs. There was something under my feet and I pushed upwards and got my head higher out of the water, and the mountain sloped away until it was a low hill, covered in green. I pushed again with my feet and climbed higher, getting a grip on the rocks with my hands, the left one painful and oozing blood.

  Then I stopped moving and stood waist-deep in the water, wanting to do nothing but breathe the sweet air in: I’d always believed that thirst was the worst, but it isn’t. The tanks had run out of air but I didn’t need it because my head was out of the water: I’d been dying for the want of air when there was the whole sky full of it.

  He’d gone. I’d been hallucinating.

  This was Heng-kang Chou Island.

  I couldn’t have recovered full consciousness or I would have reacted faster. Situation data was coming in heavily and was so significant that I dealt with it first and the imaginative process was partially inhibited: I’d lost consciousness somewhere near the sea bed and drifted on the southerly current and exhausted the air supply in tidal breathing but I was still alive and had a refuge where I could hole up in safety and this situation was so satisfactory that I didn’t look for problems.

  Time check: 13.01.

  I’d been drifting in the unconscious state for something like two hours and the current had kept me close to the sea bed or the helicopter would have sighted me. The rubber suit was ripped in a lot of places and my knees and shoulders felt bruised: Ferris had told me the south shore of the island was steep granite dropping away to sixteen fathoms within twenty yards of the waterline, so the on-shore current had dragged me up the slope of rock to the surface.

  Rotor.

  There had to be more data before I saw the danger I was in, and it came aurally from across the sea and I went down slowly and was careful not to make a splash because if this was the south shore of the island it was in sight of the rig and at a distance of two miles a pair of medium-power field glasses could pick up an object the size of a man.

  Bloody well wake up and try to survive!

  I took off the faceplate to avoid reflection and sank into the water with only my head clear, tugging at the quick-release buckles of the backpack and letting the air tanks go, pushing them down the rockface with my hands and then my feet to start them sliding to the bottom. Then I made a five-second survey across the sea’s surface: three helicopters airborne, one of them this side of the rig and the other two well beyond it. Five boats visible, three of them cabin class, two of them smaller craft. I couldn’t see from this distance whether they were navy, police or coastguard, but they were flying the yellow-starred flag of the Chinese Republic in the stern. They would almost certainly have divers down.

  The nearest cave mouth .was this side of the southernmost point and I submerged with the mask on, surfacing every so often to breathe and keeping my head turned inshore, reaching the cave and crawling on to the fissured floor and flopping down on my stomach, drawing deep breaths, the mask still on until I remembered it and pulled it away. State of semi-exhaustion and it worried me because it hadn’t been a long swim and the fins had cut down the work. Possible blood loss: I remembered the wound had come open while I’d been engaged with the diver. Possible residual effects of nitrogen narcosis: I’d been unconscious for two hours and there would still be a lingering retention of CO2 in the tissues. Probably combination of both factors and therefore normal but I didn’t like it because I had to think and all I could see was a flutter of light in front of my eyes and all I could hear was the chop-chop-chop of that bloody rotor amplified in the cave.

  An irregular draught above my head and something pattering on my back, the sense of creatures somewhere near me. Take some interest then because everything is interesting if you want to live: all right, bats, napping all over the place above my head, I’d frightened them.

  I let my eyes shut again.

  Be too dangerous to go inland and try to reach the far side of the island because the chopper was too close and there wouldn’t be much cover in these soft green hills: there weren’t any trees, only bushes and short scrub clinging to the rock where it could. I’d reached land but the only cover was in the sea and I’d no air left in the tanks and they were gone now anyway, so much junk, all I’d had to keep me alive not long ago.

  Think of nothing. Relax.

  Got to think. Want to live.

  The break-off rdv for this phase was twelve hours from now and I was in place in the third rotating sector, Heng-kang Chou. The rations I’d been preparing to bring with me were still on the sand below the rig where I’d let them fall when the diver had found me there. I could last without food but I had a thirst beginning because I’d lost fluids in sweat and I wouldn’t be able to graze on the scrub till nightfall. Ignore thirst.

  The lights kept flashing and I shut my eyes again and lay prone, letting the whole thing go for a minute, leaving the organism to look after itself by automatic data analysis: squeaking sounds and air movement in close proximity recognizable and acceptable; volume of distant sounds constant; psychedelic display behind closed eyes attributable to nerve trauma, this data to be ignored.

  The water lapped.

  Relax.

  Now.

  I crawled higher and sat with my back propped on the rock and watched the bats dipping and swerving across the cave mouth, their wings turning pink as the sunlight shone through their thin membranes, turning black as they wheeled inside the opening again. Think. One of them coming very close, unaware of me until its radar picked me up, small ears and flat piglike face, vanishing as it weaved aside. Think of what must be done. Others hanging from the roof of the cave, for some reason undisturbed, asleep and enfolded in their leathery wings.

  Face what you know. They’re making a lot of effort out there, three choppers and five boats and probably more on their way; they want to find the man who killed their diver and they want to find him badly because he got near their missile base and they want to know who he is: they’ve got a lot of questions for him.

  Check logic. Satisfactory. It would be nice to use this half-doped forebrain for cerebration above the Neanderthal level but for the moment it was the best I could do. There wasn’t anything difficult to work out: there was a manhunt mounted for me and I must elude it.

  But the thing I had to face was that they wouldn’t deploy their forces on that scale without extending the search area and when they couldn’t find my body dead or alive in the sea they’d start searching the San-Men Island group and the nearest one was this one so they weren’t going to have to look far. They’d start with the caves along the south shore and that was where I was now so I’d better get out but if I got out they’d see me.

  Nerve-light receding now. Left hand becoming numb because I was holding ft above me against the rock face to stop the bleeding. So it didn’t look as if I could do anything and what worried me was that red lamp over the board for Mandarin where they were sitting on their hands looking at the clock and the situation crossplot and not, very carefully, looking at each other when they got up and walked around and swallowed some more cold tea with the scum on and said no sir, every time Egerton came in, no sir, there’s nothing new.

  At that end of the mission there was a building full of people with talent enough to man an international chess tournament and signals facilities in excess of the requirements of an operational air force base and a codes staff capable of hitting our agents-in-place in Moscow or Pekin with a telephone directory got up as Hymns Ancient and Modern and a permanent hotline direct to the Minister of Defence and at this end of the mission there was a half-doped ferret sitting in a cave and getting slowly covered in bat-shit.

  At a rough guess I’d say Mandarin was blown. All I was interested in now was getting out alive and I didn’t think I could do it.