Submarine Shenanigans

The inside of a submarine, Clive learned, is basically a very expensive tin can that someone filled with wires and anxiety. Everything was narrow, everything was metal, and everything hummed with the low, constant vibration of engines doing something important underwater.

He landed in a corridor and immediately heard boots. Lots of boots, moving fast.

"INTRUDER!" someone yelled.

Clive braced for the worst. What he got was something much stranger.

A group of uniformed sailors rounded the corner, skidded to a halt, and stared at him. Then they stared at each other. Then one of them — a burly man with a moustache that looked like it had its own postcode — stepped forward.

"Is this the agent?" he whispered to the man beside him.

"Must be. Command said the contact would be in disguise."

Clive's brain, which had been preparing for "captured and thrown overboard," quickly recalibrated. "Yes," he said. "I'm the agent."

The sailors' faces lit up. The moustached one actually saluted.

"A sheep costume," he said, shaking his head in admiration. "Genius. Nobody would ever suspect."

"That's... that's the idea," Clive said.

They gave him a tour. The whole submarine, stem to stern, with the enthusiasm of kids showing off a treehouse. The torpedo bay. The sonar room. The mess hall, which smelled like canned soup and regret. Everywhere they went, sailors stopped what they were doing to salute "Agent Wool," which was apparently his code name now.

The captain was a woman with eyes that could cut glass. She shook Clive's hoof with a grip that suggested she could crush walnuts with her bare hands.

"Agent, we've been expecting you. Your reputation is... extraordinary."

"I get that a lot," Clive said, which was technically true.

She led him to the bridge and gestured at the controls. "Perhaps you'd like to demonstrate your skills?"

Clive looked at the console. It was covered in dials, switches, and screens showing things that moved in ways he didn't understand. Squawk, perched on a pipe overhead, gave him a look that said you're on your own, mate.

Clive reached out and flipped a switch. The submarine tilted. Everyone grabbed something.

"Bold!" the captain said. "An aggressive opening manoeuvre!"

He turned a dial. The submarine dove. The depth gauge spun. A sailor in the corner went pale.

"Deeper! Testing our limits!" the captain narrated, apparently interpreting Clive's random button-pressing as tactical brilliance.

Over the next few hours, Clive accidentally performed what the crew would later describe as "the most unorthodox but effective series of submarine manoeuvres in naval history." He nearly hit a reef (which the captain called "testing proximity protocols"), surfaced unexpectedly in a shipping lane (which she called "asserting surface dominance"), and at one point turned the submarine in a complete circle for no reason (which she called "the Wool Spiral" and later wrote up as a new tactical formation).

That night, the captain gathered the crew.

"We've received orders," she said. "A top-secret mission. We're to intercept a vessel carrying classified cargo in uncharted waters."

The crew cheered. Clive did not cheer. Clive was thinking about how "uncharted waters" was never, in the history of language, followed by something good.

"Sounds like trouble," Squawk muttered from his pipe.

"Everything sounds like trouble," Clive whispered back. "Because everything *is* trouble."

The submarine dove, heading into the dark.