by Peter Tonkin
It showed him that he was wedged in a tiny bunk under a compressing curve of metallic hull. The place where he found himself was simply overwhelmingly constricted. Filled with shadows that instantly attained the weight of earth lying on top of someone buried alive. He was a potholer trapped in a deep subterranean tunnel. He was helpless, buried under an avalanche. He was choking in the cellar of a collapsed building. He was wide awake in the bottom of his grave.
The tiny worm of claustrophobia that had lurked in his subconscious since childhood was transformed in the instant into a raging ravening dragon of madness that consumed him as utterly as the terrible whale-shark of his dream.
He started up, brown eyes wide, spittle flying from the comers of his delicately sculpted lips. Annie Blackfeather, holding the little torch whose light was far too paltry to reveal the depth of madness in those staring eyes, put a gentle hand upon his shoulder and opened her mouth to soothe him like a mother. She expected him to lie back down obediently, for after all, had she not just finished stripping off his filthy clothes and giving him the gentlest of bed-baths to wash away poor Faure’s blood which had covered him like red tar?
He hit her in the throat with his elbow so hard that he smashed her larynx and separated the third and fourth cervical vertebrae - and the spinal cord within them - as neatly as a guillotine. Annie was dead before she hit the floor. But such was the feral power of the beast the claustrophobia had unleashed that he caught up the first thing to hand - a metal bedpan - and smashed her in the face with that as well.
Then he grabbed the torch from her flaccid fingers and ran out into the choking darkness silently. As naked as the day he was born. As wild as his first primal ape-ancestor who had dropped out of the trees all fangs and claws to hunt the African prairies. As mad as Hannibal Lecter and twice as dangerous.
The next person to encounter Paolo was Chief Petty Officer Albert Monks. Monks was leading a team of men from the engineering sections who were tracing all the power lines between engineering and accommodation to make sure none of them had actually begun to burn. They were certainly smoking and smouldering in places. The air was heavy and hard to breathe. The lights of their two torches - Monks held one and a leading seaman another - shone in golden blades that told of fumes in the atmosphere. But there was nothing obviously burning. Monks, unaware just how far ahead of his team he had moved, switched off his torch and squinted with his streaming eyes, using the stygian blackness as a useful backdrop certain to betray even the weakest glimmer of spark, even the faintest flicker of flame. There was no sign. No sound, apart from the water noises and the faintest gasping. When Monks reached out, there was no heat in the clammy wall section he was following. He flicked on his torch and turned to call his little team together. And there, immediately behind him, stood a naked man. Slight, crouching, absolutely hairless.
‘Hey!’ said the outraged petty officer. ‘What the hell...’ And the terror-twisted beast that was Paolo Ursini perceived another threat.
The last thing Monks saw was the bedpan in the naked man’s right hand. He hardly even had time to register that it was badly battered and liberally smeared with fresh blood.
The edge of the bedpan came down like an axe precisely on the widow’s peak of Monks’ swept-back hair. It hit high on his forehead immediately above the nasal spine and the superciliary ridges that bore his shaggy eyebrows, landing right between two slight frontal eminences, upon the suture where two plates of his skull met in childhood and fused together as he grew. There was a soft, almost squishy sound as the edge of the bedpan smashed the suture wide, splitting the skull nearly in half and causing such a powerful trauma to the frontal lobes beneath that Monks, like Annie Blackfeather, was dead before he hit the floor. And Paolo was gone before Monks’ team pulled themselves out of the shadows; as silent and as swift as a curl of smoke.
News of Monks’ murder reached Mark Robertson as he stood beside Doc Watson looking down at the battered mess that had once been Annie Blackfeather. ‘You say you know who did this, Doc?’
‘Yes, Captain. The first survivor, the man, is gone. It has to be him. The other one, the woman, is still here.’
‘What did he use?’
‘There’s a bedpan missing. It was here five minutes ago and now it’s not.’
‘A bedpan? Christ! That’s...’
‘Insane. Yes. I know.’
‘Insane?’ Mark repeated the word. Watson never said anything unconsidered. ‘You mean that literally? We have a madman running around the vessel? When she’s in this condition already?’ He gestured at the blackness, the silence, the gathering stench of smoke.
‘You’ve got to consider it, Captain. If he wasn’t mad when he came aboard then something’s set him off since.’
‘But what, in God’s name? Why! ‘There was a guy I knew once went ape if you tried to restrain him at all. Even in fun, you know? We were in school together and I used to know him pretty well. But I pulled away in the end because he wasn’t in control. It got so that if you laid a hand on him he lost it altogether. The red mist came down so to speak, and that was that. Had to give up sport wrestling pretty early on. Put too many opponents in hospital. Had to pack in playing rugby ’cause he would lash out in the scrum. Had to give up camping in the woods in the end. Started tearing sleeping bags apart. To rags and shreds. Like a werewolf, you know? Simply couldn’t control it.’ ‘And that’s what we’ve got here is it? Some kind of a lunatic werewolf?’
‘Well, I’m no kind of shrink, Captain, but I have to tell you this. Battering strangers to death with a bedpan just simply isn’t the kind of thing that a sane guy usually does.’ Mark Robertson nodded wearily.
His walkie-talkie hissed into life. ‘Captain? Captain! Shit is there anybody there? This is Leading Seaman Smith. I’m on CPO Monks’ team, working with Chief La Barbe, checking the lines for fire. Are you there, Captain? We got a man down here. I say again, man down! Over...’
The next man to encounter Paolo was Chief La Barbe himself. Unaware as yet of the deaths of Monks and Blackfeather, the chief was out in the dark alone, trying to work out some way of cannibalizing enough of the electrical circuitry to reawaken the power Quebec needed so urgently if she was going to survive. Fortunately, the chief had a visual - almost photographic - memory. He did not need his computer programs or even his books and paper schematics to tell him where the circuits were. And, just like the unfortunate Monks, he was well able to use a combination of slit-eyed observation, delicate sniffing and gentle probing to tell with almost perfect accuracy whether the cables, relays and junctions he was checking were on fire, had been on fire or were obviously damaged by fire.
La Barbe had just found a complete section that seemed blessedly undamaged. He switched on his torch for an instant to mark the place, then he swung round to head back to stores. There would be everything he needed there to get the cable out and to attach it to form a bridge that would bring back some of the power. To the pumps first. Then to the lighting, he thought, following the beam along a passageway, almost running in his excitement.
Stores was empty and, of course, dark. La Barbe ran in, torch beam swinging precisely and accurately to the areas he needed. Just as he knew every circuit so well that he could see it if he closed his eyes, he knew the disposition of everything in here. His picky insistence on always cleaning and returning everything to exactly the same place was certainly paying off now! He reached up for the tools he needed, and slipped them into the loops on the electrician’s belt that he was wearing for the job. Then he turned, swinging his torch beam ahead of him, ready to rush back to the undamaged cable. And there, in the doorway immediately in front of him, was standing a stranger. What struck La Barbe first was the strange fact that he did not recognize the man at all. Only then did it register that he seemed to be naked.
The stranger was standing sideways-on looking fixedly back along the corridor La Barbe himself was planning to follow - back to the command areas and the crew’s quarte
rs. La Barbe switched off his torch. Why he did so, he would never know. Perhaps some understanding hidden far below any conscious thought warned him of the unimaginable danger he was facing here. Stores plunged into darkness. Darkness but not blackness, for the stranger was carrying a torch as well as something La Barbe could not quite make out. The backwash of the torch’s beam illuminated the naked chest and clean-cut profile of the hairless head. And as La Barbe watched, too tense even to breathe, the strange, gaunt face turned slowly towards him. Nothing else moved. Not the torso, not the hand holding the dim little torch, not the bare feet that had brought the stranger silently here. Just the head. Swinging the face like a radar bowl towards La Barbe, mouth agape and gasping silently, teethe gleaming; nostrils flared like those of a hunting wolf, eyes like a cat’s eyes gently glowing in the torchlight.
‘Chief! It’s the Captain! Can you hear me? Over?’
La Barbe looked down at his bellowing walkie-talkie, simply riven with horror. Then, terrified that he had taken his eyes off the apparition in the doorway, he looked up again at once. Instantly struck blind by the darkness.
For the doorway was black.
La Barbe broke his thumbnail on the switch of his big bright torch but he didn’t even notice the pain. He shone the beam into the doorway and strained his streaming eyes to see. But the doorway was utterly empty. The naked stranger had vanished as silently as he had come.
The questing beast that had been the urbane Armani-clad, Armani-fragrant Ship’s Engineer Paolo Ursini was driven by the simplest of desires - to escape. But he had no idea of where he was or how to get out. Anyone who stood against him - or seemed to do so - was crushed. Everyone else was, at the moment, irrelevant. But Paolo was not quite mindless. Even in his current state he understood that the thing he had used as a weapon so far was not an efficient tool. So, when chance offered him a better one, he took it without a second thought. Without any thought at all, in fact.
The closest that Quebec had to a chef was Leading Seaman Jacqueline Smith. It was to Leading Seaman Smith that the big cod had been brought after it had fallen out of the net on to Bob Hudson’s head. And she had been in the process of preparing it when the light and power went down. It was a big fish, more than a metre long, fit, full and taken in the prime of life. And it could hardly have been fresher. After a long run leading a galley-team cooking frozen, canned and pre-prepared food at all the hours God sent on a submarine, it had brought out the cordon bleu in her.
She had gone to work with a will, taking off the head with great care and her largest Sabatier knife. She took out the fillets above the eyes and set the rest aside for stock. She pulled out the guts as the head came off and put those in the bin for the ship’s cat. She took up the Sabatier again and removed the fins and tail. Then she scaled it. The whole process was dazzlingly swift, for Leading Seaman Smith could have held her own in many a leading restaurant. And proposed to do so, the instant she had served out her time aboard.
Then she stood back for an instant, deep in thought - an artist considering her composition. ‘Steaks,’ she said at last aloud. ‘It has to be steaks.’ The Sabatier was a good tool - but for cutting up a fish this size she had a better one. So she set the big carving knife aside and reached for something bigger. Sharper. In the instant before the lights went out, she stood poised and as focused as a Samurai warrior, with a fifty-centimetre Solingen meat cleaver held up above the fish. The cleaver was her pride and joy: nearly a kilo in weight with forty centimetres of its fifty-centimetre length taken up with white-steel blade. The whole cleaver was German-forged specially hardened carbon steel, and the blade boasted a razor edge that would last for ever, all of thirty- five centimetres long.
She brought it down with force and accuracy on to the first section of the fish. But in the instant it took for the stroke to land, the light, the power, everything, died. She was lucky not to take her hand off. Shocked and confused, she left everything where it was and began to feel her way out into the corridor, trying to find out what on earth was going on.
When she came back fifteen minutes later, with a torch, an assistant and very little more knowledge, she was utterly astonished to find the partly prepared cod lying almost decorously in a battered bedpan on the chopping board. The fish’s head, beside it, had been impaled by the Sabatier carving knife with a force that had taken the French steel right through the metal worktop.
And the Solingen cleaver had vanished.
Thirteen
Stirring
Robin Mariner began to stir just at the moment when, unknown to her, Paolo Ursini stabbed the blade of the Sabatier through the cod’s head and the thin metal of the work surface underneath it with a noise like a gun shot that nobody else heard. She opened her eyes as Paolo - equally as unaware of her existence, for the moment - slipped silently back out of the claustrophobic little galley into the increasingly terrifying warren of corridors. Lightless, constricting, apparently airless - seemingly endless... She blinked several times to clear her vision, as the light from his listlessly carried torch gleamed along the edge of the meat cleaver’s blade, bringing to vividness for an instant a ruby or two of blood. That was merely cod’s blood; for the moment, at least.
Robin did not wake into darkness, but in many ways she would have preferred to have done. Instead she woke to the disturbingly theatrical sight of two men putting the broken body of a battered woman on to the bed next to hers. The grotesque little scene was made worse by the stark beam of torchlight which brought too much brightness to parts of it and sharp-edged, dramatic shadows to the rest. One glance at the way the woman’s head was hanging off her shoulders told the all too widely experienced Robin that she was definitely dead.
Robin looked on without stirring or, for the moment, speaking. One man was tall, powerful-looking and black. He wore a naval-looking uniform beneath a white coat. Robin could not see badges or rings of rank. The other man was shorter, rounder and bearded in black with silver highlights on either side of his determined chin. He wore a naval uniform with four gold rings that told her what he was. Something about the place, silent and shadowy, lit only by the horizontal blade of the torch beam, told her where she found herself, unexpected though this was too.
The uniforms told Robin at once that she was on a naval vessel. Their accents in a moment would confirm it as Canadian. And everything else except the silence and the darkness - both anathema to submariners - told her she was on a submarine. A sub without light, power or propulsion. A sub that, from the feel of it, was sitting at the surface - for the time being at least. But then, wherever the sub had come from, it must have surfaced - and quite recently at that - to have taken her aboard out of the life raft, which was the last thing she remembered with any clarity. A surfaced Canadian navy submarine, then, where someone was slaughtering women. Or had broken the neck and battered in the face of one woman, at least. It seemed only sensible to her - if less than courteous and bordering on bad form, for they had clearly saved her life - to stay silent for the moment. And to observe events from under lowered lids as the strange men, deep in conversation, tucked the girl’s corpse into bed and covered her with a blanket.
Especially as Robin was all too well aware that she herself was absolutely stark naked under her own flimsy sheet.
‘They’re bringing Monks in now, Doc,’ said the shorter man in the captain’s uniform. ‘And I don’t like it that I can’t raise the chief.’
‘I don’t like any of this, Captain.’
‘It’s put us between a rock and a hard place. I’m going to have to reduce the work parties and set watches on everybody trying to get the power back. That’ll slow any repairs we could actually practically get done. I’ll have to set up search teams into the bargain and start trying to hunt this guy down before he does any more damage. And that’ll slow the repairs still further. I’ll have to stop rationing light and use all the torches aboard, even though we’re blind and helpless when the batteries go. I’d better impound any s
pares we have in stores pretty quickly, now I think of it. All in all, if we don’t act fast and get lucky, we’ll still be chasing all over the ship in the pitch bloody darkness looking for this madman when we hit the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.’
‘Always assuming he intends to leave any of us alive,’ answered Doc. His voice was rich, deep, reassuring. His drawl made his words seem almost cheerful.
‘I don’t know what he intends,’ snapped the captain bitterly. ‘I know what I intend - for him and all the rest of us. And that’s enough for me.’
‘Do you think there are any ships in the area?’ Doc asked after a moment’s silence.
‘Well, I’m pretty certain there’s at least one. The one that we ran over and hit as it sank. The one that’s underneath us and still on its way to the seabed for all I know. The one these people came off in the first place, I guess.’
‘I meant ships that might be in a position to help us, Captain. If we could find some way to get a mayday out.’ ‘I don’t know, Doc. I don’t even know if we’re above water or below, though the motion of the hull makes it feel like we’re still on the surface. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to get a mayday out, even if we restore power, with all that damage up aloft. And I sure as hell don’t know if there’s anyone close enough to help us.’
‘I know,’ said Robin, unable to keep silent any longer. And then, as the two men turned to look at her with their faces full of surprise and suspicion, she realized that she might not know for certain after all. For it occurred to her with terrifying force that the sunken vessel they were discussing might well be Sissy. But then, her calm good sense reasserted itself. How could a submarine have run over Sissy? ‘What’s your current position, Captain?’ she demanded.