THE SENTINEL (A Jane Harper Horror Novel)

by Robinson, Jeremy; Bishop, Jeremy

  He turns toward me. The expression on his face looks something like a disappointed teacher. Sorry Mr. Viking Willem, a dog didn’t eat my homework but a polar bear nearly ate my face.

  Asshole.

  “South,” he says, and I’m still clueless and even more annoyed. “You’re looking south.”

  This is one of those moments in a movie when the camera pulls back while at the same time, zooms in. I think Spielberg did it in Jaws, when Chief Brody sees the shark up close for the first time. It’s something they do when the main character realizes that they’re even more screwed than they were before. This is my personal “we’re going to need a bigger boat,” moment, only I’d settle for any old boat, because that’s the only way we’re going to save ourselves.

  We’re stuck.

  On an island.

  “I thought this was a peninsula,” I say, more to myself than to Willem.

  “We did, too,” he says. “That’s how it appears on the maps.”

  “Well, someone did a shitty job making the map,” I say, looking at the half-mile divide of ocean between the southern fringe of the island and the mainland. It’s not a huge distance, but even from here I can see the ocean water is moving quickly through the straight. If we tried to cross in the raft—which no longer has a functioning ballast system—we’d be flipped, or dragged back out to sea...and then flipped. Frustrated, I pick up a rock and chuck it.

  Willem watches the stone sail into the distance and says, “The map was probably accurate a few years ago. Maybe even last year. But the glaciers are melting fast. The island was probably connected to the mainland by ice for thousands of years.”

  “It’s melting that fast?”

  He gives me that same condescending teacher look again, like he’s looking over a pair of invisible glasses.

  “What?” I say, doing nothing to hide my annoyance. “Just because I’m involved in anti-whaling doesn’t mean I’m a fricken environmental encyclopedia.”

  He squints at me. “I bet your friends could tell me that the glaciers are melting at a rate of seven meters per day. You’re American, so that’s about twenty two feet. And they could probably tell me that the melt rate of glaciers that end beneath the ocean are one hundred times faster than that.”

  I cross my arms. “What’s your point?”

  “The point is…” he says, softening his expression, “you’re not like them.”

  This is true. But he’s as much of an enigma as I am, because he sounds like an eco-freak.

  “You weren’t bothered by the whale meat,” he says. “If I’m not mistaken, you actually approved of the attack. And, you’ve got a good arm.”

  Shit.

  “That was you with the paint,” he says. It’s not a question. “And that foul smelling oil.”

  I sit down. The guilt is too much for my tired body. But he doesn’t chew me out or pile on the guilt, he simply asks, “So, who are you?”

  He crouches down in front of me, waiting for an answer.

  So I tell him. Everything. The WSPA. My mission to watch the whaling techniques, to watch the actions of the Sentinel and her crew, and to testify on behalf of, or against, both parties if need be. I detail the events leading up to the catastrophe that brought us here, but he interrupts before I can finish that part of the story.

  “So you’re undercover, then?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “And the WSPA has armed undercover agents?” There’s a bit of doubt in his voice.

  “The gun isn’t mine,” I say. “I found it on the Sentinel before she sank.”

  He gets serious and sits down across from me. I try to avoid his eyes, but they’re bright blue and hard to ignore, especially when he’s leaning down, trying to get my attention. “How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “People,” he says. “How many people were on board?”

  “Thirty,” I say.

  He shakes his head with a sigh. “And you’re the only survivors?”

  I almost say yes, but then remember McAfee and crew. “We think there’s another group of survivors. Captain McAfee and his lackeys. They left us for dead. But we haven’t seen them. They knew about the peninsula, but they were in a Zodiac, so it’s possible they made it to the mainland.”

  “The captain left you? Left three women?” The news has clearly offended his sense of chivalry. The feminist in me starts to form a rebuttal, but I decide to let it go. His concern is a welcome change to the people I normally encounter.

  “The captain is a murderer,” I say, my voice oozing venom. “He was responsible for the explosion.”

  The look on his face says that if McAfee were sitting here with us, Willem would strangle him, but he manages to ask calmly, “You’re sure?”

  “We have proof,” I say. “He took cover before the explosion. Knew it was coming. Peach has a video of it.”

  “How many others were involved?” he asks.

  “One for sure. Mr. Jackson, the security man.” I give a couple of air quotes when I say “security”. “I think he actually planted the explosives. Chase is the brains of the operation, so it was probably his plan. There might have been a few others. But most of the crew abhorred violence.”

  “Aside from throwing bottles.”

  “Right,” I say, “But you saw how good they are at that, so… Did I hurt him?”

  The subject change catches him off guard and I can see he’s confused by the question. “Your father. The bottle that went through the window. He looked hurt when he came out.”

  “The smell made him vomit,” he says. “He was more embarrassed than hurt. He was laughing about it…until the Sentinel rammed us. And then…well, we are descended from Vikings.” He smiles briefly, but it fades. “He’s hurt now, though. Twisted his ankle escaping the ship. Even if this wasn’t an island we wouldn’t be going anywhere fast. I can’t leave him, and Alvin knows he wouldn’t survive the journey. We’ll either be rescued, or die here.”

  The conversation is turning bleak and depressing, but there are still some details I need to know. Things that, if I survive, I’ll tell the world. “What about you?” I ask. “How many men on the Bliksem?”

  “Fifteen fishermen and one stowaway,” he says. “Now just three. My father, Alvin and I were on the bridge when it happened. The explosions killed the rest.”

  The number of dead, over a few whales, is staggering. I try to observe a few moments of silence in their honor, but his description of the crew has me curious. “Who was the stowaway?”

  “Me,” he says.

  “But your father—”

  “Didn’t want his son to fish for a living.” He leans back on his arms and looks at the sky behind me. “He saved every penny he could. Pushed me in school, like a drill sergeant. And worked himself to the bone. Sent me to a boarding school in the U.S. From there, Harvard. I became a teacher and quickly defaulted on my loans. Things went downhill from there and I decided to come home, live the simple life for a while. But my father hasn’t noticed I’m no longer a child and turned me away. Alvin slipped me on board. My father didn’t speak to me for days. And then you—the Sentinel—showed up. The whale meat was my idea and—” He laughs. “I saw pride in my father’s eyes for the first time. All this time he’s been pushing me to be someone better than him and never noticed we’re not all that different.”

  Willem stands and brushes off his bright orange survival pants. “And now I get to watch him die.”

  I stand and raise my chin defiantly. “We’re not done yet.” His revelation about his father has stirred feelings in me that I’ve been avoiding for weeks. “You take after your father and I’ll take after mine. We’re getting the hell off this island and back to civilization. And so is your father.”

  “Your father sounds like a tough guy.”

  “He is,” I say, hearing the lie, but not correcting it. It’s just a single word. Was. Past tense. But I’m not ready to say it yet. So I crush that morsel of pain
and swallow it down for later.

  “But I still disagree,” he says. “We’ll be lucky to survive the storm. It’s going to get dark, and cold.”

  He points behind me. I look to the north and see a dark churning Arctic storm swirling toward us like it’s the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, a scream rolls up from somewhere below. It’s Peach. And Jenny. And then a man. Alvin?

  I find out exactly who it is a moment later when Willem lunges down the hill and shouts, “Father!”

  15

  As I charge down the grade after Willem, my mind races through the most likely scenarios we might find upon reaching the Bliksem crew’s camp. The first option is that the polar bear has returned and Jenny is so freaked out she’s forgotten she has a gun. The second option is that they have encountered McAfee and the two captains are trying to kill each other. Both scenarios are awful to consider, but are, unfortunately, the most likely I can imagine. Whatever it is we find, I want to be ready, so I take out the knife, flick open the five inch blade and hope I don’t trip and fall on it.

  We arrive at the camp a minute later. It’s a natural depression in the endless stone landscape, surrounded by several large rocks that look like they could have been placed in a semicircle by some ancient settlers. They’ll help block the ocean breeze, but they won’t do anything to protect us from the incoming storm. A quick scan of the area reveals no immediate danger.

  No bear.

  No McAfee.

  Just Alvin, Peach, Jenny and a man who I can only assume is Willem’s father. They’re all crouched over an object that I can’t see, but it’s clearly a curiosity and not a danger.

  While I put my hands on my knees and catch my breath, Willem moves closer. “Father,” he says in English. The captain of the Bliksem turns back briefly and I see his face, thick wrinkled tan skin, crow’s feet around his eyes, a white beard and white, close cut hair. Without the beard, he might look a lot like the Colonel. “What happened?” Willem asks.

  His father waves him over. “Willem! Come see!”

  The others make room for him in their tight semi-circle. None of them have noticed me yet. They’re too focused on whatever it is that made two grown women and an old man scream. I’m interested, too, but the storm rolling in keeps my attention on the north. I’ve spent a lot of time on the ocean. I’m pretty good at gauging storms. This one’s going to be bad, and we’ve got about two hours before it hits us hard. Time is short.

  “Jane,” Willem says. “Come see this.”

  He sounds excited, and I wonder if he’s forgotten that we’re all likely to freeze, starve or be eaten to death soon. Like you’re one to talk, I think at myself. I’ve been making light of our situation since it began. Who am I to mock the way someone else handles getting crapped on by life?

  As I turn around, the wind picks up behind me and flings open the cloak. I’m still holding the black bladed knife in my hand and the storm roils in the sky behind me. When I see the others, there are five sets of wide eyes staring at me. I look at Jenny, who’s grinning. “We having another Van Helsing moment?”

  “Totally,” she says.

  I pull the cloak down around me, pull the hood down from my head and close the knife.

  “Jane,” Willem says, motioning to his father, whose bewildered look has yet to fade, “This is my father, Captain Jakob Olavson.” He turns to his father and motions to me. “Father, this is Jane—”

  “Muninn,” Jakob says.

  Willem laughs.

  “What?” I ask. I don’t like people laughing about me without my blessing. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Not at all,” Willem says. “In fact, I think you impressed him. He called you a Raven. Muninn. One of Odin’s ravens.”

  “That’s a good thing?”

  “It means memory, or mind, but I think the description has more to do with how you look—the cloak, the knife, your hair…your eyes.”

  I’m uncomfortable with the visual inspection and try to think of a way to change the subject, but Jakob picks up where his son left off. “A harbinger,” he says. His English is understandable, but the accent is thick compared to Willem’s. “The raven is drawn to death.”

  “Great,” Peach says, looking down at the object they were all looking at and stepping away from it. I can’t see it clearly yet, but from here it looks like just another stone.

  “Father,” Willem says, his single word statement communicating something close to Knock it off.

  But the old man’s voice can’t be stifled. “Odin’s ravens welcomed the dead into Valhalla. Some even called him Hrafnaguð, the ‘raven god.’ So, you see, the birds represent great power, but their presence usually follows death.”

  At first I think he’s talking doom and gloom about us, like we’re all about to die—which might be true—but then I remember that there are thirty something fresh corpses floating around in the Arctic Ocean, and I wonder if that’s what they found. Is it a corpse washed up on the beach? No, I think, we’re too far from the water…

  And Jakob looks far too amused to have just seen a fresh corpse…unless maybe it’s McAfee’s.

  “What he’s not telling you,” Willem says, “is that the Raven is our family’s crest. For our family, the raven was a harbinger of death, but not our deaths.”

  “For our enemies,” Jakob says. “Our ancestors flew the raven banners before entering battle. They were buried with the warriors. They hung in our halls. And on the Bliksem’s bridge.” The man’s energy fades.

  Willem puts a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Show her what you found.”

  Jakob’s brief levity is gone, but he turns around and motions to the roundish object lying on the ground. “It’s here.”

  The others gather round again as I see the object for the first time. From where I’m standing, it looks like a stone. Granted, the color is all wrong. It’s not dark gray like the other rocks. And it’s very round. Most of the stones here are flat. Before I can ask, Willem picks it up in his gloved hands and turns it over.

  It’s a skull.

  The lower jaw is missing. As are many of its teeth.

  “Alas, poor Yorick,” I say. “I knew him, Horatio.”

  Willem laughs. Everyone else looks at me like I’m possessed. I look at Peach and Jenny. “Really? Hamlet? Shakespeare? Nothing?”

  “Was it a movie?” Jenny asks. She sounds serious, but I can see a glimmer of humor in her face.

  I roll my eyes and look at Jakob. “Who is he?”

  The old captain somehow manages to shrug using only his eyebrows.

  “The rest of him is under there,” Jenny says, pointing to a pile of stones. “The skull fell out when Alvin moved one of the rocks. Scared the shit out of us.”

  Alvin mutters something, and though I can’t understand him, I think he’s calling them pansies or something because he chuckles at himself, and Jakob grumbles at him.

  “He’s been here a long time,” Willem says. “Skull structure doesn’t look Inuit, either, so he’s probably a Norseman.” He looks at the burial mound. “This is an amazing find.”

  “They settled this far north?” I ask. It doesn’t seem possible.

  “Hunting expeditions, maybe. Whalers—”

  Peach gets in a, “Some things never change,” but everyone ignores her.

  “But settlements? No. Nothing remotely close to this. Nothing we know of, anyway. It’s possible there were a lot of colonies on the western coast that we just haven’t found yet. Vesterbygden is the northernmost settlement we know about, a hamlet in the west, along the Davis Straight. It’s possible this man traveled with the Inuit. They traveled this far north. But he’s been buried like a Norseman, so he wasn’t here alone.”

  It’s all very interesting, but I can’t help wondering, “How do you know so much about them?” Before Willem can answer, I figure it out. “History teacher?”

  He nods.

  “No wonder you de
faulted on your school loans.”

  He smiles at his misfortune and turns his head to the sky. The clouds are closer. Darker. He turns to his father. “Can you move?”

  “Move where?” Jakob asks. “This is a barren landscape. I’d rather face my death like a man. Here with our ancestor.”

  I look at the burial mound and as thoughts of Vikings and settlements flash through my mind. “You’re wrong,” I say.

  Willem looks at me. “I don’t think so. We need to find cover.”

  “Not about that,” I say. “About the Vikings not settling here.” I can tell he’s about to shush me, so I speak fast. “When I was scouting the area earlier I saw a structure at the center of the island.”

  This perks up Jakob’s attention. “A structure?”

  “Probably just ruins now, but it’s something. And the mountains will shield us from the worst of the wind.”

  “Umm,” Jenny says. “Don’t we want to go south? Not inland, over these big effing hills?”

  Fearing Willem will reveal we won’t be going south any time soon, I quickly say, “We can’t head south if we’re frozen solid.”

  She growls, but relents. “I’ll get the raft.”

  Willem puts his hand out to Jakob. “Father?”

  Jakob looks at Willem, and then at me. “There is really a structure? I don’t like to be lied to, Raven.”

  That he trusts me at all is something of a mystery to me. He knows we’re from the Sentinel crew, but I haven’t sensed any hostility from him yet, and Willem hasn’t explained the situation to him. So why the kindness? “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  Peach huffs and starts picking up her bags. She hasn’t said much and wears a permanent scowl. I’d like to explain to her that lying to people who are dangerous is not the same as lying to people who are innocent, but she’d probably just tell me that whales are innocent, so I decide to stow that delightful conversation away for another day.

  Jakob takes Willem’s hand and winces as he stands.

  “Where are your supplies?” I ask Willem. “I can carry them while you help your father.”

  Willem frowns. “We’re wearing all the supplies we have.”