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.