Warning Order (A Spider Shepherd short story) by Stephen Leather Page B

this is panning out…’  He shrugged.
    ‘It’s going to be worse when the kid arrives, of course,’ said Jimbo. ‘Then she’ll say you’re using operations to get out of nappy-changing.’ He grinned. ‘And she’ll probably be right, too.’
    Shepherd grinned. ‘Nappies are one thing I’m not looking forward to,’ he admitted. ‘Anyway, I hate to spoil the party but this is supposed to be squadron training, so how about we focus on the task for a few minutes?’ He unrolled a map and spread it out over the floor. ‘We’ve come on this little pleasure cruise to test-launch a self-inflating reconnaissance boat.  There’s a question mark over it because in previous tests it has not always inflated correctly. Assuming it does this time, we’ll be using it to make a covert landing on the Lofoten Islands - here.’ He tapped the map. ‘And if you want to keep an eye on the movements of the Russian Northern Fleet, the Lofotens are as good a place as any, because it’s based just around the corner in Murmansk.’ He paused. ‘Oh, and we’d better hope the outboard works too, because the Lofotens are also home to the Moskstraumen - it means maelstrom in Norwegian apparently - a whirlpool powerful enough to drag in a much bigger boat than ours.’
    ‘You’re all good news today, aren’t you?’ Liam said. ‘So where is this inflatable wonder boat?’
    ‘Already loaded in one of the torpedo tubes.’
    Liam did a double-take. ‘You’re shitting me, right? We’re going to trust our lives to a rubber boat that’s been fired out of a torpedo tube? What if it gets shredded?’
    ‘It won’t, but if it doesn’t inflate correctly or it sinks, we’ll be swimming to the coast because once we’ve exited the sub, the crew have no means of knowing if we’re fine or fucked and won’t even be able to see us, let alone pick us up again. They stay submerged and access comms by trailing a tiny aerial on a wire several miles long, timing the deployment precisely to coincide with the transit of a military comms satellite overhead.  That allows the sub to remain undetected by enemy forces, but unfortunately, for operational and practical reasons, it also means that it cannot surface to rescue us if we get into difficulties as there’s no way of getting the boat or us back on board.’ He paused again to let that sink in.
    ‘Remind me again why the SBS boys aren’t doing this?’ asked Jimbo.
    ‘Because the Special Boat Service are experts at ducking out of dangerous jobs,’ said Liam. ‘Their motto is “By Strength And Guile” and they’re always heavy on the guile.’
    ‘It’s our mission and we’re stuck with it,’ said Shepherd. ‘OK, Survival brief: Geordie?’
    Geordie, the patrol medic, cleared his throat. ‘We’re well inside the Arctic Circle, so even wearing dry suits, if we’re in the water, our survival time is going to be limited. For an unprotected body, at a water temperature close to freezing point, exhaustion and unconsciousness will set in within fifteen minutes and death will follow within forty-five minutes. Our dry suits will prolong that survival time by up to another couple of hours, but no more than that. Should the boat capsize, we’re better adopting a defensive posture in the water to conserve heat than trying to swim or even tread water, both of which can cut survival time by as much as fifty per cent. At the risk of getting my boyfriend over-excited again-’ He gave Jimbo a sideways look, ‘-huddling together in the water will also decrease heat loss significantly. However, the good news is that we have the Norwegian coastguard chopper on standby, so there should be no problems.’
    Shepherd took up the briefing again. ‘Okay, as I said, the recce boat is deployed by being fired through the submarine’s torpedo tubes.  The patrol will follow through the lock-out system in the sub’s conning tower and swim to the boat. The only other issue may be the weather, which is