And there were the crates stowed in the forward hold. The paperwork on their contents was vague but the order for their disposal was quite clear. Given what he knew about the rest of the cargo, these crates hardly warranted a second thought from the less than happy captain; but there was something about them which just didn’t feel right. Perhaps it was the fact that the crates were so innocent, so obviously innocuous in among all the other lethal stuff. Perhaps it was the fact that there had been nearly a hundred tons of dynamite in the warehouse at Murmansk and he had had to leave half of it behind in order to get the mysterious crates aboard.
‘Let’s start in the forward hold,’ he said.
One of the few positive things about their situation was that they had no deck cargo. That at least was forbidden. The two men walked out onto the deck and paused. Borodin looked up at the sky. It was, if anything, darker. That meant the storm was going to be a bad one; it wasn’t as if it was even noon yet and already the day seemed to be drawing towards dusk. The sky and the sea were the same leaden colour and only the vicious white horses coming towards Leonid Brezhnev like a millrace on the skirts of the next north-easterly squall made any real differentiation between them. The air around the ship was still at the moment but the squall would beat them to the forecastle head, especially as Borodin had ordered the helm over to the north-east on the way down here, so they were heading directly up towards it.
The two men went down the broad red deck at a run, but they were still drenched by the time they got the hatch open. The lighting in the hold was elderly but reliable — like the ship herself. Borodin was a fine captain and was fortunate in his chief and engineers. Spares were few and far between of course, but the crew cheerfully spent much time making good and mending so that effectively she might have been refitted seven years ago when she had been renamed in celebration of Brezhnev’s receipt of the Lenin Prize for Literature.
The yellow brightness revealed piles of crates slotted together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle to within a metre and a half of the deck itself. Borodin jumped down onto the crates and, crouching uncomfortably, began to walk across them, pausing every now and then to check the way they fitted together. Sholokov leaped down behind him and performed the same simple checks along the other side of the hold. It was awkward, potentially dangerous work made worse by the cold, the wet and the roaring of the squall which caused the ship to pitch and heave in an increasingly frenetic manner. ‘I’m glad I’m not standing on top of the dynamite in this weather,’ called Borodin. The political officer grunted. He agreed, but failed to see the wry humour of the captain’s observation.
‘Any idea what we are standing on top of?’
‘No, Captain. No idea at all.’
‘You saw the paperwork in Murmansk?’
‘Of course.’
‘So did I. What there was of it. No decipherable description of the contents.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘No original point of shipment.’
‘Transshipped through Minsk and Belomorsk.’
‘Not much help. Anything on the crates themselves?’
‘Nothing—’
The full power of the squall hit. The ship seemed to stop like a car hitting a brick wall. Both men staggered towards the bow across crates which suddenly did not seem so stable after all. Borodin fell sprawling onto the patch of wet woodwork beneath the streaming hatch. Sholokov managed to remain on his feet, dancing all hunched over like an ape performing ballet. He looked quite ridiculous and Borodin, though winded, still managed to laugh.
The wheezing laugh choked into horrified silence almost at once as Sholokov’s dance was brought to an abrupt halt by the collapse of the crate he was moving over. It was not a partial collapse, the yielding of one or two boards to his bear-like weight. The whole crate simply opened beneath him like a trap door and gulped him down. One moment he was hopping and the next he was buried to his armpits in the box’s contents. The two men were no more than five metres apart and the accident brought their faces level so that it seemed to Borodin that they were suddenly very close together indeed. He saw the shock on Sholokov’s face. The widening of his eyes, the gape of the wide mouth revealing yellow teeth and steel fillings. The sudden absolute pallor of the skin.
The ship heaved again. The boxes shifted. The political officer screamed.
Borodin was up at once and stumbling across the restless wooden crates. Less than three steps brought him over to the side of the man he suddenly realised he regarded as a friend. He looked down. Sholokov was in what looked like a perfectly square hole filled with rough lumps of black, silver-speckled crystal. The depth of the hole was impossible to tell — more than two metres, or Sholokov’s legs would hardly have fitted. The ship heaved. The crystal shifted. Sholokov screamed again, and slid a little downwards. Borodin realised the glass-like rocks were at once crushing and engulfing his political officer. Much more movement and it would be as though the sinister cargo had simply eaten the man. ‘Can you breathe, Fydor?’ he asked.
Sholokov shook his head, eyes bulging, mouth gaping. He looked like a fish out of water.
‘I’m going to take your arms and try to pull you free.’ Borodin suited the words with the action, but there was no chance of freeing Sholokov’s massive body from the grasp of the crystalline quicksand. As he heaved, Borodin looked around for something that might help. There was nothing.
‘I’ll have to get some help down here. Hang on.’
He was just about to release Fydor’s hands when another battering ram of wind made the ship pitch once again. The political officer’s agonised grasp came close to crushing his captain’s hands and they remained there, face to face, like children in a playground testing each other’s grip. Sholokov’s tongue came past the yellow line of his teeth. His nose began to bleed, a black worm of liquid oozing down into the hair of his ridiculous walrus moustache. Borodin realised that Fydor had not screamed since their grips had locked. And he realised that he was crying because he knew he was not going to save this man.
The ship’s movement eased and Borodin tore his hands free. There was a phone at the top of the ladder, where the steel rungs met the hatch cover. He ran towards it, oblivious of the fact that he was hitting his head against the unforgiving metal just above. His knees actually gave as he reached the hatch and he knelt there as though he was praying, as indeed he might have been. He ripped the ancient handset off the rest and rammed it against his ear.
It sounded as though he was sitting beneath a waterfall.
‘Bridge?’
The static on the line was like a deafening tropical downpour. He could hear nothing else. Except, like an approaching locomotive, the howling of the next squall.
‘Bridge!’
Too late.
The ship’s head dipped. Dived. The wooden floor beneath Borodin shifted forwards, heaving slightly, reflecting the roll of the waves outside. There was a clear, crisp, cracking sound like the snapping of dry branches, then a choking sound, soft as a whisper.
There was a sobbing sound, which Borodin realised he was making himself.
There came the most sinister hissing of cold crystal surfaces rubbing against each other; nothing solid was impeding their movement any more.