by Paul Kearney
“We don’t have the time for that,” Willoby said. “My orders —”
“Your orders?” Stephen said, cutting him off. “The man who gives those is standing behind you.”
“Willoby is right,” Cutter said, halting the argument in its tracks before it started to take off. “We make the best of it, get ashore in the dark as well as we can. There’s been enough time wasted with this boat trip already.”
Stephen backed down, simmering.
The Polar Star battled on. They were all dog-tired now, having been on their feet in the pitching wheelhouse for some six hours. Hanlon had a big thermos flask jammed in beside the radar, but it was empty. He seemed to live on tea, and had knocked back cup after cup during the night, hardly spilling a drop despite the bucking of the boat under his feet. Even his eyes were sunken, and periodically he wiped them with a dirty handkerchief.
“Is it a submarine you boys are out looking for?” he asked quietly. Beyond the wheelhouse windows the morning was arriving, grey and chill, the sky and the sea the same colour.
“I can’t really say,” Cutter told him. Realising then that an opportunity had presented itself, he added, “It might be... and it might not.”
Hanlon flipped the switch on the sonar, and a pinging noise began. He alternated his gaze between the sea to his front and the glowing arm of the sonar sweep.
“Take a look at that then,” he said, pointing one filthy finger at the sonar.
Cutter leant over the screen and followed the circular line of the sweep. A large flowing dot appeared before them.
“What is it?” he asked Hanlon.
The fisherman didn’t reply for a moment. He seemed puzzled.
“It’s no boat, that’s for sure. And it’s not a lost container. It’s moving under its own power — you watch it.”
Hanlon was right. Cutter saw the shape zigzag slowly back and forth in the seas ahead of the boat. His head snapped up, and he moved to the window, peering out intently.
“Can you see anything?” he asked Hanlon.
“Not in this swell. I’ve binos in the locker behind you; get ‘em out and someone go take a look from the masthead.” When they all hesitated, he sneered, “What, a bunch of big tough soldiers scared of heights?”
Willoby retrieved the binoculars from the locker.
“I’ll go,” he said.
Stephen had them out of his hand before the soldier could react. “My job, I think.” He was out the wheelhouse door a second later, the freezing cold spray of the morning entering with his departure.
“Brave lad,” Hanlon said approvingly. “I wouldn’t climb that masthead in a swell like this for all the tea in China.”
***
Stephen paused a second on the deck outside the wheelhouse. The cold air took his breath away, and the spindrift was being hurtled down the length of the boat in packets of white water. He zipped up his parka, checked the tubed collar that was his life jacket, and clenched his teeth as the cold water trickled down his neck and soaked his hair. Then he made his way aft along the slippery deck, moving as slowly as an old man, both hands gripping the guide rail that ran along the superstructure of the trawler.
It was full-on morning now, and looking up Stephen saw gulls battling with the wind overhead. The cloud was so low he felt as if he could almost reach up and touch it. He twisted his body into the safety hoops of the mast and began climbing up, his boots ringing on the metal rungs. As the trawler pitched and rolled under him, he was flung out and in, and he grasped the rungs so hard his hands began to cramp up.
I had to do it, of course; I had to volunteer. He did not even know why.
Soon he was at the top, and the movement of the boat was more pronounced at the tip of the pendulum that was the masthead. He stood in the tiny rusting platform and braced himself against the rails that surrounded him, fumbling and cursing to get the long-barrelled binoculars out of the breast of his coat.
It was a wild and fearsome world up there. Standing twenty feet above the deck, he was able to see the great waves that the trawler was fighting her way through more clearly. An entire landscape was on the move around him, a saw-toothed, white-fringed awesome wilderness of water. He had never seen anything like it before; it was both exhilarating and terrifying to watch.
Remembering something, he delved into a pocket and reached for a black plastic walkie-talkie. Good old Motorola. He pressed the send button, but of course, no one else on the boat had his switched on.
Brilliant.
A second later however, his own comms crackled, and Connor’s voice said thickly, “Hello, who’s that?”
“It’s me, you twit,” Stephen commed back, grinning. “Get up to the wheelhouse and tell Cutter to switch on his radio.”
“Stephen! Where are you? I thought —”
“Just do it, Connor. Out.”
Lifting the binoculars, he battered his eye socket with the lens, struggling to see through them in the crazy dance of the swaying mast. Finally he gave up, and decided to use his Mark I eyeball instead.
A gull sailed across his vision, so close he could have reached out and slapped it on the arse. He stared out into the greyness, eyes watering under the assault of the wind. It wasn’t as bad as it had been, nothing like, but before last night he would still have called this a storm. He marvelled at the courage of men like Hanlon, who took rustbuckets out into this fearsome wilderness and tried to make a living out of it. No wonder it was considered the most dangerous job in the world.
For some reason his thoughts turned to Helen at that moment, and he wondered where she was now; exploring some unknown prehistoric region perhaps, in a world even more dangerous than this storm-tossed ocean. Part of him wished, even now, that he could be with her, but the other half hated himself for even thinking it. Bad enough he had slept with his best friend’s wife. What was worse was that it was highly likely she was only using him to get at Cutter — and he had fallen for it. He had let her do it. He missed Cutter’s friendship, the easygoing camaraderie of the old days. Between betraying him with Helen, and then this whole Claudia-Jenny thing, Cutter was no longer the man he had been. No longer the friend he had been. That was something that pained Stephen, and angered him at the same time. He wondered sometimes if he and Cutter could go on working together like this, whether things might one day get easier. He hoped so. He —
Something there, in the seas ahead. A glimpse of black, flipping over into the water.
His radio hissed static.
“Stephen, how’s it going? Over.” It was Cutter.
“Wait one,” he commed back.
His eyes streamed and stung as the salt air scratched at them, and he blinked away the spray, tasting it on his lips, feeling it sting his corneas.
There it was again; a snatched glimpse of something disappearing, rolling over into the flank of a wave some half mile ahead.
“My God,” he whispered aloud. It had to be huge, the size of a whale. Perhaps it was a whale, he told himself, but he wasn’t convinced.
“Cutter,” he said into the little radio, “do you see anything on the sonar just ahead of us? Over.”
“Yes. Less than a mile to the west, almost dead ahead. It’s moving back and forth. Can you ID it? Over.”
At that moment, he saw its snout break the surface and open up as though it were going to snap at a passing seagull. A great black beast with a mottled, relatively pale underbelly. It flopped down again and disappeared into the canyon of a towering wave.
“Did you see that — did you see that?” Stephen shouted into his radio.
“Negative. The swells are too high. What did you see? Over.”
Stephen remained stock still, as though frozen to the mast. He stared out at the blank majesty of the sea and felt a sharp thrill of fear flood his veins. It was one thing to face these creatures on dry land, where there was backup — where there was a place to run. It was quite another to encounter them at sea, in a rusting cockleshell hundreds o
f miles from anywhere.
He thumbed the comms button.
“We’re going to need a bigger boat,” he said with a mirthless smile on his face.
EIGHT
Uncomplaining, the soldiers lined the sides of the Polar Star, their weapons cocked and ready.
Private Watts was at the masthead, keeping a lookout and sending down periodic reports through chattering teeth. Willoby, Connor and Stephen were sorting through the mass of gear on the deck, lashing rucksacks to stanchions. The two inflatables sat in their white containers, ready to be blown open at a moment’s notice. Periodically, Connor went to the ship’s rail and heaved bile into the sea, his empty stomach convulsing time and again now that he was able to see the waves rising and falling around him.
In the wheelhouse, Cutter stood studying the sonar, whilst Liam Hanlon remained at the wheel, seemingly welded to it, a part of his boat. He had gone silent; he had seen the fear on their faces and did not know what to make of it.
“It’s gone,” Cutter said, exhaling relief. “I can’t see it anywhere.” He paused. “You’re sure there are no whales in this section of the Atlantic?” he asked yet again.
“I’ve never seen one,” Hanlon replied. “Are you sure your boy wasn’t seeing things?”
“Do you think the sonar was seeing things?” Cutter snapped back.
“Oh, there’s something out there, right enough, and it’s no submarine. It’s too small, and changes course too quickly. I reckon you’ve found the thing you came out here for, is that so?”
“One of them,” Cutter said. He felt almost sorry for Hanlon. The man might be a greedy motormouth, but he didn’t lack courage, and he had been brought out here at the risk of his own life, under false pretences. It was the way things worked in this world.
“You think the Cormorant met up with our mystery creature, don’t you?” Hanlon said.
“It’s possible.”
The fisherman drew himself up and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. The lines of his face tightened.
“Aye well, this is no wooden inshore boat. If anything tries messing about with the Star, it’s going to meet with raw steel.”
“That’s the spirit,” Cutter said, and he clapped the old fisherman on the shoulder. Then, before turning to leave, he glanced down at the sonar.
And a look of horror dawned on his face.
“What the hell is that?”
Hanlon turned sharply.
He stared at the screen. “Holy Mother of God; it’s right on top of us!”
Automatic gunfire rang out along the ship, cracking sharply over the sound of the wind and the waves, the pulse of the diesels.
“Jesus Christ!” Hanlon exclaimed.
“Mind your course, Skipper,” Cutter shouted. He left the wheelhouse and ducked out into the roaring, storm-driven spray of the morning.
“What’s going on?” he cried as he lurched aft. Even in the middle of the gale, he could smell the cordite stink of the gunfire.
“Stand fast!” Captain Willoby bellowed. And Cutter saw a sight which would remain seared into his memory for the rest of his life.
The Polar Star was in the trough of a great, smooth-crested wave. A mountain of water, they were climbing up its side, the struggling diesel engines ploughing the steel prow of the ship up the flank of the wave as though the trawler were trying to cut it in half. The crest of the wave was higher than the masthead; it was a thirty footer, a monstrous juggernaut of water.
And Cutter could see into the depths of the wave, as though he were looking into a vast aquarium that reared high above his head. In that moving titan of water a dark shape loomed, streamlined and huge, longer than the boat under their feet, and sleek-nosed as a missile. The edge of one great flipper broke the surface of the water, a flipper twice as long as a man, and then the wave had moved on under the hull of the boat, and the monster within it had been taken back into the depths once more.
So shocked were the soldiers that after Watts, up in the masthead, had fired a terrified burst, they hadn’t even thought to bring their weapons to bear. They stood rooted to the steel deck, machine-pistols forgotten in their hands, safeties still on. In their midst, Connor, Abby and Stephen crouched thunderstruck while seawater sloshed knee-deep around them, pouring out of the scuppers as the trawler began its rocking-horse motion again.
Stephen collected his wits first.
“Pliosaur!” he shouted at Cutter. “I didn’t know they could get that big. It must be fifty-feet long!”
“Stand to!” Willoby yelled into the wind. “Safeties off. Get a grip you stupid bastards! Sergeant Fox — if we see that thing again, you open up on it with everything you’ve got! Fox — are you listening to me?”
“Aye — I mean yes, sir.” He turned. “You heard him, you muppets. Get your fingers out and stand to. Bristow, get that bloody Minimi up on the rail. Pete, break out some frags.”
“Now we know what got the Cormorant,” Cutter said. He helped Stephen stand in the middle of the mound of soaking, rope-lashed gear that covered the deck.
“Yeah — now don’t you wish we’d flown?”
“It ignored us, Stephen. I don’t know why, but it just floated by. Did you see its eye?”
“I did. I thought it was looking straight at me.”
Cutter’s white, unshaven face broke into an incredulous smile. His own eyes were bright as those of a schoolboy let out for the summer.
“My God, Stephen, did you ever see anything so magnificent in your life? It hasn’t swum these seas for 160 million years, and it just drifted by us.”
“Incredible,” Stephen agreed, smiling at Cutter’s excitement.
“It’s an air-breather Stephen, not a fish. It’ll surface periodically; this thing is not about to dive down deep.”
“In other words, it’s not going to go away.”
“How are the cold waters of the Atlantic affecting it though — that’s the question. It seemed sluggish to me. Even something that big might be dying at these temperatures.”
“Hence our luck in passing it by,” Stephen suggested.
“Yes, could be. If I’d only had a camera.”
The boat lurched under them, and the wind shrieked through the guy-wires of the mast. It was picking up again.
“Let’s leave the holiday snaps for another time, eh?” Stephen said. He grinned at Cutter, who looked happier than he had in weeks.
Willoby joined the two men, his M-4 slung across his chest. His face was dripping water and he looked as grey as the sea around them.
“All right, you got me; I’m officially impressed. What the hell was that?”
“Liopleurodon,” Cutter told him. “The greatest marine predator of all time; one of the Plesiosaur family, from the Jurassic.”
“It’s actually true then,” Willoby said, shaking his head. “I kind of half thought it was a joke, or a front for something else.”
“It’s all true,” Cutter said. “Somewhere in the waters around us there is an anomaly, a gate if you will, between our time and an era that existed in the far past. And things can come through that gate.”
“Spielberg would wet himself if he knew the half of this,” Willoby said. He seemed to regain some of his martial poise. “How do we kill it, Professor?”
Cutter frowned.
“Kill it — why bother? The temperature of the water is killing it minute by minute. You don’t need to shoot it, Captain — it’s on its way out already.”
“Thank God for that then. By the looks of it, that thing could soak up a thousand rounds without blinking.” Then Willoby’s face changed. “If stuff like that is slipping through into our seas, then what in the world is running about this island we’re headed for?” He asked the question as though it had just dawned on him.
“That’s the interesting part,” Stephen told him. “Welcome to our world, Captain. You won’t have a dull moment, I assure you.”
Willoby blinked slowly, deep in thought. He looked
at Cutter.
“Professor, I —”
“There it is — breaking surface to starboard!” Watts yelled from her post at the masthead.
The black, mottled snout of the Liopleurodon rose out of the water less than twenty metres away. Its head was the length of a family car.
At the starboard rail, Joe Bristow opened up with the Minimi, spraying automatic fire with the weapon held at his hip, the barrel resting on the rail. Spent casings flew through the air with a tinkling of brass. Around the Liopleurodon’s head the water was stitched white. The other soldiers joined in, their carbines on full automatic. The dead man’s click sounded in several weapons before Willoby shouted, “Cease fire — cease fire!”
The creature had submerged, though before the waves broke it up, they were all sure they had seen a dark cloud muddy the water in its wake.
Connor staggered over, wriggling his little finger in his ear.
“Do you think we’re doing much more than just pissing it off, Professor?”
Cutter said nothing. He stared over the rail of the boat at the blank waves, breathing in the acrid reek of the cordite. His own ears were still ringing. The soldiers were reloading. Bristow’s Minimi was steaming in the cold air, the sea spray hissing off the hot barrel.
He turned to Willoby.
“Connor may have a point. A thing that size can soak up a lot of punishment. Captain, unless it’s directly threatening the boat, I would suggest that your men conserve their ammunition.” He was calm, but there was something akin to fury in his eyes.
“Very well, Professor. I agree,” Willoby said. Their stares locked, and the tension between them seemed almost to fizzle for a second, until Cutter turned away.
In the wheelhouse, Liam Hanlon was standing where Cutter had left him. He was chewing on the corner of his handkerchief.
“I should turn this boat around,” he said, his voice furious, face livid with fear. “You people got me out here under false pretences.”
“I know,” Cutter said, and he genuinely felt remorse. “I know. But we’ve none of us any choice in this. You’ll take us to Guns Island now, and you won’t say a word about it.”