Dark Oceans

by Mark Macrossan

  And to his great relief, stuck to the door of the refrigerator as promised, was a list of emergency numbers for various tradesmen including a plumber.

  It was when he began to remove his jacket that he realised he still had the gun. He’d totally forgotten about it – despite its weight – sitting there in his left coat pocket, while still in his right, and almost counterbalancing it, was its taciturn companion, the silencer. Not items he’d want to be walking through a security check with (not that he was likely to be using an airport in the foreseeable future). He removed the Beretta and the silencer and buried them at the bottom of his bag, underneath his spare clothes and the remaining wads of banknotes.

  The next thing he did was open up his laptop and go online. Absurd, this need, this addiction to being online, being “connected”, but it provided a certain degree of comfort, a sense of security. Which was ironic, this feeling of security, with the internet being the home and highway of so much vice – there was little doubt it was fast becoming, if it wasn’t already, the primary tool of the modern criminal. All of which Jon knew of course, but he still connected and he still felt better.

  And then he noticed he had a Skype message.

  It was from Emerald, sent just over an hour earlier. It consisted of two words:

  – contact me

  He presumed she meant on Skype (he had no other means, he didn’t have her phone number), so he replied.

  – At your service.

  Unlike the previous evening, this time there was no immediate response. He stared at the screen for a while then gave up. He wondered what he’d do next – the whole situation made him feel like he was under house arrest. To rid himself of the sensation he decided to go for a short walk, explore the area, maybe find a shop.

  It turned out Lucinda was well-served. There was a Sainsbury’s at the end of the street, as well as a few fast-food establishments, so he could breathe just that little bit more easily. Especially as one of them was the Oriental Taste (“chinese and peking cuisine to take away”): he could almost be back in Soho. Almost. With a bit of luck though, they’d have Peking Duck. Before ordering, he retraced his steps to the Promenade and sat down for a while in view of the Prime Meridian monument, and looked out over the water and watched the sunless afternoon make way for the night. If there’d been a visible sun, he would have seen it set over the sea as he was sitting there. No such luck.

  Her response came just after 7pm, well after he’d returned to the house with a morale-boosting supply of French wine and chinese takeaway. It was a video call this time and he answered it. That beautiful face materialized, and those green eyes. Unsmiling though, she looked stressed. And she looked as though she was trying not to show it.

  ‘Good evening Mr Marriner.’

  ‘Miss Strand.’

  ‘Did you leave London?’

  ‘I’m not sure I should answer that.’

  A smile. A sparkle in her eyes. ‘OK.’

  The mottled brick was visible inside as well as out. And the empty shelves gave the game away all by themselves.

  ‘And what about you, Emerald.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Well I had been thinking about the Black Sea. But then again, I was hoping…’ It was a rare hesitation from this most self-assured of women. ‘I was wondering if you would like some company. You might be feeling lonely. Now that you’re dead.’

  ‘Depends who the company is. Dead is forever, after all.’

  Another smile.

  ‘I thought you were hoping you’d never see me again,’ he added.

  ‘I’m not sure if I would put it like that, exactly.’

  ‘You did, actually.’ He returned the smile.

  ‘Yes, OK,’ she said. ‘But Jonathon. I think you’re being a little bit cruel here.’

  He thought for a moment. Considered the situation. He didn’t have to think for long.

  ‘Well… You’re right. It is a bit lonely here. Just me. And the ocean.’

  ‘I can imagine. So without… naming any names…’ She left a meaningful pause, so it might sink in. ‘Can I just get you to confirm… it’s the place we talked about earlier.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘That’s good. I’ll be there in…’ A grin, and she looked down for a moment, shook her head, as if she were scolding herself. And then she suddenly turned and quickly checked over her shoulder, as if she’d heard something.

  ‘What is it?’

  Shook her head. ‘I’ll be there soon, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And you know,’ she said quickly, before he had a chance to sign off. ‘There’s a storm coming. We could maybe sit it out together.’

  Whether she was being metaphorical or not, to Jon the words sounded fine either way.

  ‘We could. There’s nothing like a good storm. The bigger…’ He trailed off.

  Emerald was looking over her shoulder again and this time it wasn’t fleeting. She continued to look off-camera at something.

  ‘What is it?’

  She held up a hand and mouthed the word Wait.

  He watched as she got up out of her chair and disappeared from view. There was a clicking sound – possibly a door being opened, or closed – and then nothing. He kept watching the screen, wide-eyed, but there was nothing to see. And now, no sound.

  Then all of a sudden, there was a loud thud and a crash. A grunt. Someone else was in the room. Horrified, Jon thought he heard a muffled shriek, and then the sound of someone being punched. A curse, and then a cough.

  And then bursting across the screen, visible for an instant, was a person, probably a man, in a dark jacket of some kind, with an arm around Emerald’s neck, dragging her down. The man – Jon didn’t get a chance to see his face – seemed to fall on her, throw himself onto her, and then both the man and Emerald were out of the frame. Furniture was shifting though, as if there was an earthquake. The camera, the picture on his screen, was shaking.

  ‘Emerald!’ He couldn’t help it. He shouted her name out of pure frustration as much as anything. He felt so utterly helpless. He didn’t even know where she was, where this was taking place…

  ‘Emerald!’ he shouted again. And even more impotently: ‘I’m on my way!’

  More struggling, crashing, strangled cries of anguish and, for a moment, silence, and then, from nowhere, a blunt object, like a block of wood or a cricket bat flew at the camera with a terrible suddenness and violence, and the screen went black.

  Oh Jesus.

  Jon stared at the black screen. His mind was racing though, like a computer turning over, trying to perform an impossible calculation. But there was absolutely nothing he could think of to do. Not a thing.

  He waited, it must have been at least five, ten minutes. Eventually, after a small eternity of frozen silence, he hesitantly, reluctantly, switched off his Skype. There was a horrible feeling of finality about it. Somehow, it felt like he’d just turned off a life-support system.

  As he sat there, in the pale light, he noticed his hand was trembling. And he began to shake, all over. Like that old song.

  Part Six – Dark Oceans

  “Before their eyes in sudden view appear

  The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark

  Illimitable Ocean without bound…”

  (from Paradise Lost by John Milton)

  64. 17° 36' 45" S 167° 23' 49" E

  (New Hebrides Trench, Coral Sea)

  5.15am Vanuatu Time (18:15 UTC)

  Saturday, 26 October

  Synchronously – give or take a few seconds – with Jon clicking out of his Skype screen on his laptop in Peacehaven while sitting discomposed on a chair in a house that (as Alastair put it) straddled the Prime Meridian, on the opposite side of the globe in the Pacific Ocean at the precise point on the Coral Sea corresponding with the geographic co-ordinates 17 degrees 36 minutes 45 seconds South, 167 degrees 23 minutes 49 seconds East, the first rays of the rising sun shot out from the eastern horizon and inst
antaneously made contact with the restless, corrugated waters there. This particular spot on the surface of the ocean, now beginning to scintillate as if bejewelled with a myriad fragments of iridescent-orange Fire Agate, lay just over one thousand three hundred kilometres west of the Prime Meridian’s opposite number, the Antimeridian.

  If you were on a boat at this spot, you would see no land. You would have to sail east for eighty kilometres or so before you arrived at the first of the Vanuatu islands. Around a hundred kilometres would get you to the capital, Port Vila. And if for any reason you were to go straight down, you would have to descend over six thousand six hundred metres – nearly seven kilometres – before you hit the bottom. Because you would be positioned directly over the New Hebrides Trench.

  Indeed if you were to jump in the water and then breathe out and allow yourself to sink straight down, feet first, it would take you, based on an average rate of about three metres a second, over half an hour before you touched the bottom. And assuming you were somehow able to stay alive after the air had been crushed from your lungs and water forced into every orifice and cavity in your body, you would be able to make a handful of noteworthy observations on your way down: you would see daylight petering out after only two hundred metres; you would be able to confirm that the darkness was well and truly absolute at a depth of one thousand metres; below one thousand metres, generally referred to as the aphotic or midnight zone, you would continue to descend through, specifically, the Bathyal Zone (or Bathypelagic layer, between 1000 and 4000 metres), followed by the Abyssal Zone (between 4000 and 6000 metres). Finally, after thirty-three minutes of this rapid plummeting, you would reach the Hadal Zone (a word derived from Hades, the underworld – at 6000 metres and below), and then nearly four minutes later, at a depth of 6,648 metres, enjoying a frigid water temperature of around one degree Celsius, a pressure of 6,800 tonnes per square metre and in the darkest dark you had ever or could ever experience, suddenly and without warning you would feel your feet slam into the soft, silty, ocean floor.

  Because if you want dark, oceans hold the purest blend.

  Now call it a coincidence if you will, but the timing of Jon’s mouse-click happened to correspond not just with the first moments of sunrise on the surface, but also with something similar that occurred at this very spot directly beneath it (which of course shared the same GPS coordinates) – here on the seabed, in the Hadal darkness of the lower reaches of the New Hebrides Trench. The lights came on.

  How? Because on this particular day, this undersea location had a visitor.

  Two days earlier, an unmanned, remote-controlled lander was lowered to this forbidding place by a research vessel on the surface. The lander was essentially a two metre high aluminium tripod attaching an assortment of scientific instruments (designed to withstand the brutal pressure at these depths) including waterproof video cameras with lights, also remotely controlled, as well as bait for attracting fish and other sea-dwellers. The lander was connected to a permanent buoy on the surface by a cable. The buoy transmitted data, including video footage, to the vessel which was to remain in the area for a period of a total of six days. The team, formed as part of an international project run through a small group of universities, managed to set the tripod down at a depth of 6648 metres in a spot they dubbed Mare Tranquillitatis – Latin for Sea of Tranquillity and named after the plain on the Moon where the first moon landing took place. Like its namesake on the Moon, here also there was a large, flat area of comparatively darker basaltic sediment. The lights on the platform were set to come on for only five minutes every two hours so as not to interfere with a marine environment accustomed only to complete darkness. And on this day, at 5.15am, the lights sprang on.

  There wasn’t always someone from the team to monitor the footage as it came in and control the cameras (rotate them, adjust the focus) – in which case the footage would be pored over later – but these guys were early risers and this time the team’s sole female, a research scientist from Seattle, was on hand to observe this morning’s “lights up”.

  On this occasion there was plenty of action. The main camera was already pointed at the bait. They’d used a pig carcass – disturbingly human-like in this researcher’s opinion – and overnight it had attracted quite a crowd. For these depths anyway. It was covered in a scuttling gang of four, no, five bright prawns – lobster-like in appearance – and about fifty amphipods (smaller, pale-coloured crustaceans, part shrimp, part cockroach) and both the prawns and the amphipods looked to be approaching their task with gusto. And then the researcher noticed something lurking in the background shadows. It was a large, brown cusk-eel (genus Bassozetus): an eel-like fish, torpedo-shaped with beady eyes, it looked like a penis (the prototype dickhead, it occurred to her, which was something it had in common with her research partner). The cusk-eel gradually floated into the light. The prawns and amphipods didn’t know it was there, or were unconcerned. But they should have been concerned, because all of a sudden the cusk-eel’s mouth snapped open and in a vacuum manoeuvre sucked one of the larger amphipods into its gullet in little more than an eyeblink.

  Life in the depths.

  65. 17° 44' 31" S 168° 18' 51" E

  (Grand Hotel and Casino, Port Vila, Vanuatu)

  The same time

  5.15am Vanuatu Time (18:15 UTC)

  Saturday, 26 October

  Meanwhile…

  In Port Vila, ninety-eight kilometres to the east-south-east, in the direction of the rising sun (which in Port Vila, given its more easterly position, had risen four minutes earlier), Dominique Drayle was staring at himself in the mirror of his hotel room and waiting for a knock on the door.

  Out through the glass sliding doors and past the balcony, the previously black sapphire, now Persian-blue waters of Vila Bay were gradually lightening and at the same time divorcing themselves from the dawn sky. Drayle wasn’t interested in the view out of his room however – only the one in the mirror.

  He was never going to get used to this.

  The operation – or operations – had taken place just over a month earlier – over three days, September 22 to 24. The dates he was clear on, if not the events that took place on them, which were still a blur. He’ll never forget, though, what happened when he made Dr. Fischer hand over the mirror. The shock of seeing this… thing. This alien. Unrecognizable. Which was the point, up to a point, but not this. This was definitely not the plan.

  The plan had been, in summary: a chin implant and reshape, removing the cleft and the double-chin in the process; rhinoplasty, to reduce the size of, and reshape, his slightly hooked Roman nose (a “nasal hump excision”); implants to make his cheekbones more prominent; removal of the scar across his face; and a face-lift, pulling the skin back and narrowing his eyes slightly (slightly, note). Also, to complement and accentuate the changes, he’d had his curly blond hair straightened and coloured dark brown, almost black (and he’d grown it as well), and he’d been regularly applying serious amounts of fake tan, banishing his natural rosy complexion.

  The operation hadn’t been a success.

  Sure, the cleft chin was gone, and the scar as well (with the help of make-up); and the hair looked sufficiently different, as did his complexion (although the cheap self-tan somehow managed to turn everything he touched orange, like some sort of B-grade Midas touch).

  But…

  First there was the swelling. A degree of swelling was, naturally, always to be expected for a procedure of this nature. Drayle’s, though, had been dramatic, frightening even, and although much of it had now settled, there was a degree of permanent residual swelling, especially over his cheekbones. And the facelift was too extreme – the skin had been pulled too tight and his eyes appeared narrower, more elongated. His nose had been made too small – particularly with his new, swollen face and more prominent chin. Even now, his nose was still numb, and he had to take Panadeine Forte constantly for chronic pain. And on top of all that, the combination of the swelling, the
tighter skin over his face, the narrower eyes and smaller nose, along with the straight dark hair and darker skin had made him look Asian. His previous Germanic looks (Germanic good looks) had, not just partially, but completely disappeared. And last but most certainly not least: the final insult was his new face wasn’t even symmetrical! His nose was slightly crooked and one cheekbone was higher than the other. It had been suggested to him his face had been asymmetrical to start with, but we all knew who made that suggestion. And after all, he would, wouldn’t he. He would say that. That Herr Doktor Florian Fischer, he was a dead man.

  Literally.

  After the botched operation, Fischer had scuttled back to Bangkok, the rat, leaving Drayle to recuperate on his own. Albeit in the soft and capable hands of the surgeon’s assistant, the impossibly alluring Laska. And out of the public gaze, another plus. But Drayle had just had it confirmed: Florian Fischer would no longer be looking in the mirror admiring his Germanic good looks. Drayle had, via the usual channels, notified a certain Korean gentleman (an extremely ungentle gentleman, that is) who, conveniently, happened to pass through Bangkok from time to time. According to official sources, Dr. Fischer had fallen prey to a particularly vicious gang of robbers while enjoying a glass of wine in his city apartment. Nothing plastic surgery was ever going to fix. Not plastic surgery nor, as it turned out, the intensive care capabilities of the Bumrungrad International Hospital which was where Florian Fischer spent the last three days of his richly-rewarded, praise-filled life.