The Cross of Gold Affair - Davies Fredric - Страница 31

“Mr. Solo, this is Lieutenant-Commander Bransen. He’s the U.N.C.L.E. representative in STEP’s program and will accompany you from here.” He turned to go, visibly fighting an urge to salute Napoleon.

The new escort was a tall Norwegian in dark-blue denim trousers and an ancient-looking sweater. He seemed to wear his rank lightly-he looked more like a fisherman plying the herring trade in some sub-zero fjord than a Navy officer. “Call me Gus,” he said, holding out one big hand in greeting. “We’re all ready to get the show on the road, as soon as you and I suit up. How would you like to go to the check-out area by way of the zoo?”

With no more ado, he turned and led the way through to the “zoo,” a high-ceilinged room with four seals and a submarine waiting in a sea-water pool. The pool took up over half the room’s area, and had plenty of room for the sub and some rocks to serve as rest stops for the seals.

“We don’t hold much with saluting here,” said Bransen, referring to the youngster who had introduced them, “mainly because our most able-bodied ‘seamen’ can’t get their flippers up to eyebrow level. This pool is where they come to visit, to look at freaks who choose to spend most of their time on dry land. We zoo-animals get walruses, sea lions, dolphins and elephant seals as visitors, with an occasional experimental whale. They’re a lot better behaved on the whole than the visitors at most other zoos-for instance, I’d balance them any day against the lot who go down to Coney zoo to watch Oscar the Walrus get fed.”

“Well, Commander, I must say you run a pretty tight—

ah-zoo, here. Do your visitors just come and go when they feel like it?”

“Almost. There’s a depth-compound outside here we keep fenced in, and they’re free to roam all through it, up, down and sideways. New trainees are brought in aboard ship or in tow, through gates that we keep secured other times. We let recruit frogmen get the hang of their equipment by assigning them patrol duty repairing the fence. Frequently the marine mammals are rotated by our request, other times by Navy requirements to train other breeds in the close coordination techniques we’ve developed here.

“Right now you’re kind of lucky. The current project involves testing out our diver-mammal linkage by scouring the local bay and river bottoms for junk that’s been dumped here during the past four centuries. We’ve been using these four harbor seals”-he waved his hand at the quartet of wet noses and whiskers pointing at him-“and from the word headquarters sent, I’d say these are the best workers we could have for your job.”

He bent down at the water’s edge and snapped his fingers loudly twice. One of the seals separated from the group and scudded in, leaving almost no wake. Before Napoleon could blink, the animal was out of the water and balancing on its flippers, barking in Bransen’s face. As smoothly as if he were doing an Orpheum circuit routine at the Palace, Bransen reached into his trousers pocket and pulled out a quarter. The seal sniffed it, and then watched suspiciously while he flipped it out into the pool.

The seal stayed, looking from Bransen to the pool, until he barked rapidly like one of them. Then it did a side-flip, hitting the water belly up, and Napoleon could make out an underwater twist, a sudden nipping motion, and a quick reversal. Before the quarter could have sunk to the bottom it was back neatly deposited on the deck at Bransen’s feet. With magnificent elan the seal twisted around and rejoined the other three on the rocks.

“What on earth did you say to it?” asked Napoleon.

“Her, not it. Her name is Sourpuss, and I told her to go get that coin before it hit bottom, and bring it back here. If she wasn’t in a particularly unplayful mood tonight, I

might have bought an eyeful of quarter plus salt water-usually when I give her quick instructions, she does things like spit in my eye.” He reached out and took back the quarter and pocketed it. -

“All that?” asked Napoleon. “It’s a very economical language. I suppose your finger-snapping told them which one you wanted.”

“Right. Each seal has a number, and I call more than one at a time with a little code of hand-claps. That’s the first thing we take on ourselves to teach a new animal, and the others help newcomers learn. They have a pecking order as strict as Naval rank, and sometimes I think they even help us learn the code. After you’ve worked with a team of them, and worked with the personnel who have been on SEALAB n, you pick it up. It’s far more subtle than a system of numbers and acoustic emergency signals, but you pick it up.”

“I imagine a two-way dictionary would be pretty hard to compile, though, Gus. Is there a Berlitz course in Seal?”

“Oh, for tonight, you won’t have to talk to them. I ve been working here as a trainer almost since I joined U.N.C.L.E.‘s underwater division, and you and I will go in with them. That sub will take us up to a position offshore from your pier, and my whiskered quartet will be right there with us. After we group, all six of us will tear into the ungodly right on their soft white underbelly.”

Napoleon looked out at the fishy smelling group with its eight black eyes staring straight at him. “That’s quite a job for two men and four seals.”

“After a man has been down below with a team of them and recovered the ruins of Dutch exploration ships and Yankee clippers from New York Harbor, he kind of gets the feeling that these fellows are unbeatable.” He leaned against a pillar, and flipped four fish from a canvas bucket out to the seals. All four fish were caught neatly, with much barking and smacking. “You know how delicately an archeologist picks up each thimbleful of sand when he’s near a find-imagine trying to resurrect ships that have been down on the dark river bottom since the time of Henry Hudson. They re in worse condition than the tomb of Cheops, I figure, and

for that kind of heavy, controlled work I’ll take the strong backs and sensitive noses of my team, any day.”

In the dressing room, Napoleon found a wetsuit laid out for him. “Just your size,” said Bransen. “Mr. Waverly sent your measurements over while you were sky-riding, and asked that you please not get your new suit wet.”

“Should I strip for this?” Napoleon looked over the black rubber suit and watched Bransen don his own gear right over his clothes.

“Not at all. When we can fit you as closely as this, you can put the suit on over full evening dress, swim miles, and step out with your white dinner jacket dry and uncreased. You get a lot better fit this way than we ever got overseas.” Strapping and zipping himself in, Napoleon looked at Gus. “Frogman?”

“Yup. Sixteen months Search and Destroy in the Bay of Haiphong. I just got rotated back here a year ago, and elected Reserve duty so I could sign up with U.N.C.L.E. Stateside Navy work just didn’t have the feel I wanted-in the Regulars, I’d probably be a full Commander by now, pushing a pencil instead of suiting up to invade Coney Island. With U.N.C.L.E.‘s underwater activities, training the Navy people during their programs here, and working with all kinds of the sea folk, I’ve had more than my fill of action.” For a moment they couldn’t talk, helping each other check out connections on their scuba apparatus and getting used to the bite of their mouthpieces.

“I do more than just salvage work,” said Bransen as he helped check Solo’s weapons compartments. “I was an observer with the unit that brought up the nuclear device off Spain-just in case our side missed, U.N.C.L.E. wanted to make sure no one else made a successful grab. We danced around with a team of sea-going Thrushes for days, while everybody wondered if we’d have to detonate it to keep them from getting it.”

Bransen was standing in front of Napoleon, adjusting his visor for maximum peripheral view. Napoleon looked through his face-plate and through Bransen’s, squarely into a pair of steel-blue eyes with the flat look that gets into a man who’s seen it all. U.N.C.L.E. was a hard enough taskmaster