“Delfin kasatke,” Pjotr Picatel said in a conversational tone. “Killer whales.”
“I know what they are,” snapped Ross, and, turning to face the Russian he stumbled. Pjotr Picatel was not a tall man – he stood perhaps five feet ten – but he was solid as a rock. He caught Colin and held his weight without flinching. The boat began to move back in.
“How did you find us?”
“Signalu raketi . . . we see your flare above fog.”
The boat was close to the ice now. The second officer leaned forward, holding out the boat-hook towards Pjotr’s reaching arm . . .
Something burst out of the water between the flat black rubber bows and the ice. Slowly turning over in the quiet, dark water was Simon Quick, buoyed up by his yellow lifejacket, the axe still clutched in his dead hands, the rope still wrapped around his waist, its end still firmly anchored by the steel peg buried in his chest.
Desperately, Colin tried to fight free of Pjotr’s arm, no clear idea in his mind other than to try to tempt the killer away from the boat, before it rose up the fifty feet of rope which would separate it from Simon’s corpse. “What are you doing?” the Russian shouted.
An answer exploded out of the ocean like doom.
Although it had been terribly wounded, the whale had not died. Simon had struck six blows in all before the steel peg had slammed into his heart, but such was the structure of the killer’s skull that they had not killed it immediately. At the back of its head there were two huge reservoirs which contained large quantities of blood, designed to keep its brain supplied with oxygen during long dives. The blows from the axe had cut through the outer walls of bone on each side, partially rupturing each reservoir, but never entering the brain cavity itself. So the killer, dazed, had swum into the depths of the sea, dragging the assorted jumble of net, ropes and corpse behind it.
The sound of the ship, and the cries of the returning pack had roused it, and, bleeding sluggishly, slowly dying, it had begun to search for them. It hadn’t found them. Instead it heard the sound of an outboard motor, and everything became clear. The memory of its trainer rose in the killer’s mind. It swam, as it had been trained to do, towards the sound of the outboard motor. Up through the warm water out of the dark it swam, increasingly excited. The tone of the outboard motor varied as the boat manoeuvred. Like a flock of unimaginable birds, the pack passed over its head, but the killer was no longer interested in them, and didn’t even alter its slow and dogged progress.
As the surface came nearer, it saw the hull of the rubber boat, it saw the edge of the ice. Then it saw the arms reaching between the two. It convulsed the aching, terribly wounded length of its body into one last galvanic attack. Wrenching the harpoon in its belly, screaming with agony and joy, the great whale lashed its tail up, down and streaked up through the water.
It missed the Russian, took Ross’s outstretched arm, and tore him up off the ice. Kate had seen Simon’s corpse and knew as well as Colin what it meant. Leaping unsteadily down the length of the boat, she had grabbed the boat-hook from the second officer. Her plan was very simple: as the killer came up, she would drive the boat-hook right through its eye.
When it came up out of the ocean, the net wrapped around its neck, like an orange ruff, its black and white face ruined by great welts where the orange strands had pulled against the skin, the scars on its nose and cheek livid, blood streaming in thick strands like hair from the back of its head, Kate stabbed with all of her strength for the eye above the corner of its massive jaw.
As she did so, its teeth closed on Ross’s left arm and its head jerked, unexpectedly moving the liquid tar disc of her target. The point of the boat-hook bit down into its cheek six inches too far back, and tore down the side of its head, ripping bright pink flesh open to the bone until the first strand of the net stopped its progress just at the back of the killer’s head.
The handle of the boat-hook slammed up into Kate’s armpit, hurling her into the air.
Colin felt the straps crushing his chest as his arm began to tear free. He was hanging at an angle across the thing’s face, looking down. Past the great white curve of its chin and neck he could see the sleek wall of its chest where Job had been held prisoner, and lower, on the white bulge of its belly, the stark steel column of the harpoon. It was incredible that the thing was still alive.
The whale’s head was thirty feet in the air when Colin Ross’s arm tore off.
Kate, still hanging on to the twisting column of the boat-hook, writhed and kicked against the killer’s side, and her wild movement wrenched at her improvised harpoon. The point of the boat-hook, still angled down into the muscles of the monstrous neck, tore up again, moving like a lever against the fulcrum of the net’s first strands. It slid through the crushed bone splintered by Simon’s axe, and tore through the light cartilage into the brain itself. Blood gushed down her face. She let go and fell free.
The killer went rigid as the hook broke into its head, and it began to topple like a falling tree. The crewman at the outboard motor in the rubber boat had reacted well when the whale had come up under the bows, and had slammed the engine into reverse, backing off.
The great wave thrown up as the killer hit the water swamped it, slopping also over Colin Ross as he lay where he had landed in the centre of the floe.
The water closed over Kate’s head and she sank, trying to kick off her boots, and working to strip off her bulky, heavy clothes. But by the time she had wriggled out of her overtrousers, she had run out of air. She was terribly tired, and her struggles were growing weak as her head burst free of the water. Two minutes . . . Thankfully she gasped down breath after breath, then she tried to strike out towards the floe. It was no more than twenty feet away – but her arms would not work properly and her legs felt like dead weights dragging her down. The water closed over her head again, and she struggled to the surface in panic. God help me, she thought, I’m going to drown.
On the floe, something moved. To Kate’s mind what she saw then was a natural part of this terrible, final nightmare. The shape on the ice pulled itself slowly erect. It had no left arm, only the ragged banner of a sleeve flapping in the wind. Its right arm was huge as it reached out its great square hand, blindly groping in the icy air. As it rose to its full height on the rocking ice-raft, the sun broke through the clouds somewhere far beyond the fogbank, colouring everything a strange greenish-yellow and lighting the fires in the blue ice just beyond her reach. The monstrous shape on the floe staggered forward on stiff legs, the light behind it flaming grotesquely upon the wild tumbled mass of black hair which fell forward concealing its face, making its body a hard black silhouette, casting a giant shadow on the fog, on the blue-flame ice, on the restless green water.
As the shadow covered her head, Kate began to go down for the last time. Suddenly, incredibly, her feet thumped into a solid base. Without thinking she kicked up towards the surface, but something held her legs. Confused, she looked down and saw a black shape hulking beneath her. She saw what it was and almost screamed. She looked up wildly, fighting against the horror, and at the distant edge of her vision she saw the shadow move on the surface as her monster toppled forward, arm reaching, into the ocean.
Colin’s numbed legs had saved him, bending automatically into the perfect parachutist’s landing roll. Then he heard Kate screaming and began to drag himself towards the sound. After a few agonising feet he realised the sounds had choked into silence. He began to get up, his face pressed against the ice, humping his backside ridiculously into the air, pushing with his arm until he was on his knees. He made it to his feet and staggered stiff-legged over the last few feet to the water. He began to topple forward. As he did so he saw the sharp black tip of the killer’s fin rising slowly out of the dark, still ocean. His head broke free of the water, eyes closed, he gasped in a breath and sank again. Something gently thumped him in the stomach. He opened his eyes and the killer was there, its mouth opening in a great tooth-lined cavern. Oh, my God, he thought. His legs swept in; his arms reached up over the snout, out of the water, trying to find something to hang on to, something by which he could pull himself out of the killer’s mouth, pictures flashing in his mind of Preston’s legs, Job’s white-bone arm. But of course there was nothing there to hold on to and he began to slip inch by inch down the monster’s throat . . .