37 Hours

‘Kill me,’ he said, squinting from blood that dripped from his brow into his eyes.

She took off the camera and placed it on a ledge, facing the other way. Kneeling down next to him, her face close to his so he could spit in it if he wanted to, she spoke. ‘My father was Vladimir Lakshev. Does that name mean anything to you?’

His eyes flared, maybe with recognition, perhaps blinding pain, almost certainly hatred for her. ‘You’ve had all you’re going to get from me, suka. Just do it.’

Fair enough. The Promise. His arms weren’t working, so he couldn’t do it himself. She prised the pistol from his broken fingers, stood up, and aimed it downward at the top of his skull, execution style. Her uncle had shot a horse with a broken leg once, right in front of her and her sister. Katya had cried. Nadia hadn’t. She squeezed the trigger. The gunshot boomed around the closed room. He quivered, then stilled. A torrent of emotions threatened to explode inside her, but she held it all back. Solitary had taught her how to do that.

Later. Much later.

She checked the small glass porthole to the next section. Empty. The hand wheel turned easily enough and she stepped into the bunkroom, then froze. Sixteen corpses, all shot at point-blank range. Most were only in shorts and vests, suggesting at least some had been gunned down while asleep. Precision shooting, heart or headshots, a few in the neck, dead centre.

Whoever had done this, it wasn’t their first mission. Nor was it the work of your average terrorists, whatever they were. Such men would be patriots, passionate, dreaming of glory or martyrdom. They’d cut corners, make mistakes, go over the top when killing – rage or whatever fuelled them evident in their handiwork. This was the work of flawless, stone-cold killers carrying out their tasks with military precision.

She thought back to her own training at Kadinsky’s camps. This resembled the work of highly trained hard-core Special Forces operatives. People like her father. She thought of what she’d just done. Who was she kidding?

People like her.

Staring at the corpses, she recalled what her mother had once said, in front of her father, a jibe at him when he couldn’t respond because young Nadia had been there. She’d said that if you kill people, they wait for you. They are there waiting for you when you die. If she’d been right, the man she’d just shot was about to have his hands full. Which also meant that if she was killed, the man she’d just tortured and shot would be waiting for her too, with a carving knife to sculpt her face.

She was about to move on when she noticed something odd. Two of the corpses had an identical tattoo on their upper arms. A lizard. Maybe they were brothers. They had both been shot in the back. They were at the far end of the bunkroom, by the opposite entrance. The layout of corpses didn’t make sense, unless…these two had been the killers, infiltrators, who had dispatched most of the men but then someone else heard the shots and cut them down. She stared again at the lizard. Some kind of gang tattoo?

The next compartment was empty of bodies: on one side tall fridges and a kitchen, on the other side weapon racks behind padlocked glass doors. She listened. Distant creaks and clangs. Sergei should be aboard by now. She used her Glock to smash the glass, and selected an MP-443 Grach from the rack, attracted by its chunky grip. She checked the eighteen-round magazine, fired a single nine-millimetre round through a fridge door to check it was functional, and walked on.

Under the control room she found another body, this one in a wetsuit like hers, shot in the back. She crouched, did a three-sixty sweep, but neither heard nor saw anything. She aimed her pistol at the spiral staircase leading to the control room.

‘Sergei, you up there?’

No reply. She started to creep up the metal steps, when suddenly she began coughing, at first as if her throat was irritated, then more violently. She backed up, hunched over, her lungs on fire. Her eyes watered, and she stumbled towards a glass case housing an oxygen mask and cylinder, yanked it open, and put it on. As soon as she did, she could breathe again. Once the attack was fully passed, she carefully climbed back up the steps.

Four more corpses awaited her: two with pistols in their hands, lying beneath the periscope; the other two slumped over their control yokes, heads propped up on the dashboards where myriad red lights blinked. No entry or exit wounds. Staring around, she saw no clue of how they’d been killed, until she spotted blackened flakes of paint on the floor.

Looking up, she saw a round hole in the roof, scorch marks all around it, the tough ceiling paint bubbled and black. The hole was about the same size as the cylinder Sergei had been carrying. Must have been a fast-acting neurotoxin, released as soon as the cylinder cored through the submarine’s double hull. Then Sergei and his two men had entered, but the one downstairs had been shot. She needed to find Sergei. She descended to the main deck.

The next hatch porthole revealed the second of Sergei’s divers, face down in a pool of blood still oozing from his throat. Sergei was deeper in the room interrogating someone. Well, that was one word for it. She spun the wheel and entered. Sergei glanced her way, then back to his prisoner, a bald man with a curved scar on his left cheek, naked to the waist, his back covered in tattoos reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno. He was handcuffed to a valve wheel above his head. His legs didn’t look right. Sergei must have smashed the man’s knees with the large wrench lying on the floor. She swallowed, surprised the man was still conscious.

‘Thanks for uploading the virus, Nadia,’ Sergei said.

The prisoner looked her way. ‘Nadia. Nice name.’

Sergei punched him in the gut, clearly not for the first time. ‘Where is it?’ he said.

The man coughed, spat, and continued talking as if having a casual conversation. ‘I knew a man who had a daughter called Nadia. Always talked about her. Said he missed her like the rain.’

Nadia grabbed a pipe for support. That’s what her father used to say. Not to her. To her mother. A bittersweet joke between them. Love had withered early in the marriage.

Sergei took out a knife, and slid it slowly into him, just below the left rib. The man bit down. Spittle and blood bubbled from his lips as he ground his teeth. A groan turned into an angry roar.

‘Where is it?’ Sergei asked. No anger, only a sense of urgency.

The man breathed rapidly, then glanced again in Nadia’s direction. ‘You’d be about the right age. Nikolai called you his Bayushki bayu, his little Cossack.’

The lullaby Katya sang to her. But her father’s name was Vladimir, not Nikolai. That had been the name of their grandfather.

Sergei twisted the knife. This time the man screamed.

‘Leave, Nadia, it’s about to get ugly,’ Sergei said.

‘No, stay,’ the man said. ‘I’ll go.’ He looked up at Sergei. ‘You will join me very soon, comrade, at the bottom of the ocean, where you belong.’ He then moved his jaw, as if chewing something.

Sergei gripped the man’s jaw, tried to force it open. ‘Blyad!’

The man thrashed and bucked, then swallowed something. Sergei hit him in the stomach, trying to make him spit it back out, but it was no good. The man’s body relaxed, and hung limp from the cuffs. But he was still breathing, in shallow gasps.

Sergei groped for the keys in his pocket, but Nadia raised her pistol and fired at the chain between the man’s cuffs. The prisoner slumped to the floor, Sergei breaking his fall.

Sergei spoke to the prisoner again. ‘What did you mean we’re going to join you?’

The man simply stared into space.

She glanced at Sergei. ‘Cyanide?’

He shook his head. ‘TTX.’

She knew it, the deadly toxin from the blue-ringed octopus. ‘It’ll block his ability to breathe.’

‘I know what it does, Nadia.’ Sergei faced her. He spoke quickly. ‘There’s one warhead missing. And he must have set some kind of device to sabotage the sub, blow it up or take it over the ledge.’

‘He’s not going to tell us where it is.’ She knelt next to the prisoner. ‘You said you knew my father. When he was working with the military?’

His body had grown still. Paralysis was setting in. His diaphragm would stop working, and he’d suffocate. But his eyes turned to hers, his speech slurred. ‘After,’ he said. ‘Eight…years ago.’

That couldn’t be right. Her father died eleven years ago. His face took on a blue tinge.

‘Where?’ She thought about mouth-to-mouth to keep him alive, but the toxin…

He stared at her intently. ‘Eyes…like his.’ He tried to breathe in, but couldn’t. ‘T…ch.’ His body trembled once, then his eyes glazed, and the air came out of him in a long sigh, like a deflating balloon.

‘He was the one who killed two of my men, despite the gas,’ Sergei said. ‘We need to find the case. It’s ten to midnight. My guess is there’s a device set to blow the sub at midnight.’

‘Wait, slow down. Case? What case?’

Sergei wasn’t really listening. His eyes darted everywhere, as if searching the compartment. ‘If the warhead is still outside –’

‘It can’t be. What would be the point? It’s gone, somehow. Which is where we need to be.’

He gazed around him again. She understood. This was his sub, his command. And his tomb? Go down with the ship and all that bullshit? Sergei didn’t seem the type.

‘We have to find it, Nadia.’

She grabbed his arm. ‘Sergei, what case? What are you talking about?’

His gaze turned back to her, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Of course, why would you know?’ He took a breath, and spoke quickly. ‘Each warhead has a series of arming codes, exactly for eventualities like this. Even if you steal a warhead, you can’t arm it. Best you’ll have is a dirty bomb. The arming codes are kept in a reinforced steel case, like a briefcase. Only the Commander and the Executive Officer can access it. And it’s gone.’

‘Do we know if the warhead – or any of the others – have been armed?’

He shook his head.

Shit.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘The warhead is probably long gone. But there are still eleven warheads on board. If there’s a bomb, it’ll be an unholy mess.’

‘He said bottom of the ocean. The sub was obviously grounded on a cliff edge for a reason.’

He nodded, frowning. ‘So, something to tip it over the edge.’

She imagined the sub toppling over the cliff, the two of them trapped inside while it plunged downwards like a stone, until pressure or impact cracked its hull. She recalled watching the sled dive downwards on full thrust. And then it came to her. An image of the sub rose in her mind, the first thing she’d seen. In truth, the second.

The sub’s massive propeller.

‘What if it’s not a bomb? The engines… If they started the propeller…’

His brow creased further, then flattened. ‘The virus you uploaded stopped the main engine room computers. But there’s an auxiliary control room back near the propeller. Quick, this way.’

She ran behind Sergei as fast as she could through chamber after chamber. A hundred metres, trying not to trip or smash her head. He was much taller but knew his ship backwards. She had a hard time keeping up. On a good day she could run a hundred metres in fourteen seconds, but this was taking for ever, having to open a hatch every ten metres.

At last they reached the final hatch, the one to the auxiliary engine room that controlled the sub’s propeller. She glanced at her dive watch. Two minutes to midnight. Sergei gripped the hand wheel and tugged. It wouldn’t budge. A stoic, heavily bearded face appeared at the porthole, taking on a grim, twisted smirk when he saw Sergei. He pointed to his watch and mouthed something she couldn’t decipher, but didn’t really need to. Clearly he wasn’t going anywhere, except down, and he intended to take them along for the ride. He turned his back and began flipping switches.

‘Is there any way we can override him?’

‘No,’ Sergei said. ‘We have to go back to the conning tower.’ He punched the porthole with his fist. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted. ‘Dammit, we have to abandon ship.’ He spun on his heel and bolted back the way they’d come.

Still chasing Sergei, she heard the deep stutter of the diesel engines starting up, a bass growl that accelerated into a hammering, the steel floor vibrating, setting her teeth on edge. Soon, the blades of the propeller would start to turn. Initially the submarine’s twenty-five thousand tons of mass would fix it on the ground, but as the engines rose to maximum power, the propeller would nudge it over.

Five compartments later, Sergei stopped, and flung open two cupboard doors. Inside were one-size-fits-all bail-out suits, with full-face masks, and small air bottles that looked like they were for children. He tossed a set to Nadia.

‘Ditch the suit, just put on the mask; check that it fits.’

It did, barely. ‘How do we get out?’

‘Viktor is coming,’ he said.

The engine’s pitch rose, and there was another sound now, like a helicopter underwater. The sub’s propeller blades were turning.

Sergei grabbed her hand. ‘This way. Leave all the doors open.’

She didn’t get it. For a submariner it was practically second nature to seal hatches behind you, just in case, to stop the whole sub being flooded should it spring a leak. She added it to her list of questions for later, hoping there would be a ‘later’.

The sub began to judder, the engine noise rising to a high-pitched whine. The propeller whirred like a dentist’s drill. And then it happened. The ship moved. A small, juddering lurch forward. Sergei stopped and tapped something into the dive computer on his wrist. She hoped Viktor was receiving the message, whatever it was. Sergei looked her way as he made the final tap.

The explosion almost knocked her off her feet, as a booming blast of air cannoned around the close quarters. Suddenly knee-deep in seawater, she waded to the hatch entrance to the conning tower section. Water jetted in with the ferocity of a rocket engine. She fought the instinct to run.

This was their way out.

‘Put your mask on,’ Sergei yelled.

She did, checking none of her hair was trapped under the rubber seals, securing the straps behind her head, pulling them as tight as they’d go.

The sub lurched forward again. Stopped. And then. No, no, no! The water, chest height, began running away from her, towards the front end. The sub began to tilt forward. Sergei dived into the broiling water and was gone. Water continued to thunder into the room, the level rising quickly, to her shoulders, her neck. It splashed over her mask, and then her ears and head were underwater, the sounds suddenly muffled, the gushing of water shifting to a deep grumbling. The air cylinder wouldn’t last long. She needed to get out. Right now.

And then she saw Sergei, on the opposite side of the room. He was closing the hatch. It made sense: water flooding the forward compartments would tip the sub further, whereas if it flooded the rear, it could delay the sub going over the edge. But another lurch confirmed the worst. The sub was on its way to a deep grave. The faucet eased off, then stopped. The chamber was full. She swam towards the hole in the ceiling. The sub began to move forward and tilt further at the same time. Seizing the ragged edges of the hole, she pulled herself through, and gripped a rung of the conning tower ladder. She glanced at her dive computer to check the depth of the dark water around her. Forty metres.

The halogen beam of the remaining sled, some thirty metres to port with Viktor and the other diver aboard, allowed Nadia to survey the scene. The sub was already at a thirty-degree angle. The propeller was at full thrust, its blades a ghostly blur. The only thing slowing the sub down was the friction of the sub’s hull against the bedrock of the ledge. But in a matter of seconds the sub would tip over and become one gigantic torpedo. She knew what she had to do. Get off the sub and swim towards the sled. But she had no fins, and the wake of the sub and its propeller would suck her in and shred her.

Where the hell was Sergei?

The halogen light focused on her. The sub began to tilt further. Her guts tightened as she looked down. The conning tower was located far forward on a Borei sub. She was already over the abyss.

Forty-five degrees.

Sergei’s head appeared. Then his shoulders. COME ON! One hand. He heaved himself up. He was carrying something. The sub began levering itself over the ledge. Tipping point. The halogen lights from the sled grew brighter, but the sled didn’t dare get too close.

Fifty degrees.

Sergei was out, carrying some piece of equipment the size of a briefcase. He reached for her hand. She grabbed it, and glanced backwards into the yawning abyss behind. The safety of the ledge was just within their reach but the sub was gathering speed. Now or never. She yanked Sergei to the left, and they kicked hard off the hull of the sub. She fell, while the massive black body of the sub, now at seventy degrees, thundered past, splintering rocks on its way, the grinding noise deafening.

She hit shaking ground, the jagged lip of rock separating her from the chasm, and she feared the entire ledge would give way. Her hands tried to dig into the rock for support, but her legs dangled over the edge in empty water, currents whipping over her body. At last the sub, almost vertical, powered past, the prop blades lost in a fury of dark foam. Instead of sucking her down, now the thrust of the propeller pushed her upwards, and she wasted no time in clawing herself fully onto the ledge.

Sergei was beside her. But whatever he’d tried to salvage – the case, she realised – was gone. She guessed he’d had to let it go or else follow his sub to the bottom. The halogen light grew brighter. But she lay there, as did Sergei, counting, waiting. A muffled boom rose from the abyss, but nothing else. No blinding flash. No detonation. The warheads hadn’t been armed. She dared to breathe again, whereupon her air became stingy. She sucked in a deep breath and held it.

The two divers on the sled were the ones she’d descended with. One of them held out a regulator for her. She had to take off her full-face mask in order to use it, so would be pretty much blind on her way back to the surface, but it was the only way. She caught a glimpse of Sergei, about to do the same. He caught her eye, initially sad, and then he smiled. He fucking smiled. She ripped off her mask and clamped her mouth over the regulator, and took several greedy breaths, then gave them the OK signal, and clambered aboard the sled as it began the slow climb to the surface.

God, she needed some new swear words.

Chapter Five

Nadia nursed a mug of coffee, inhaled the bittersweet aroma, and let the steam float over her nose, eyes and forehead. The ascent had been short, but they’d had to wait on the surface for half an hour before the helicopter plucked them from the roiling sea. They’d travelled to Murmansk airport, flying low over the Arctic’s northernmost city, where she glimpsed the Lenin, the famous nuclear-powered icebreaker, once the pride of the atomflot but now a naval museum. Then a quick transfer to the same aircraft in which they’d arrived. Now she was on her way back to Moscow. She shivered under the thin blanket wrapped around her.

Viktor, the driver of her sled, now Sergei’s number two on this mission, got up from where he sat opposite her, and draped his blanket around her shoulders.

‘Stay warm, little tovarich,’ he said.

The Russian word for comrade was only ever used with irony these days, but she took it in a good way. The other diver, who had not yet spoken, nodded to her.

‘Next time we need to get inside a really tight hole, we call you,’ he said, and then the two men burst out laughing. It was infectious, but was cut off when light from the corridor flooded into the room, and Sergei stood there, silhouetted. Her gaze lingered.

‘Come,’ he said.

She took her mug with her, and handed the blanket back to Viktor. ‘Spasiba,’ she said, and followed Sergei to the luxury cabin.

The same four people were there – the colonel, his aide, Katya and Bransk – but the mood was sombre. Sergei summarised what they knew.

‘A single warhead was taken. They knew exactly what they were doing, and we have no idea where they are, and whether it was armed or not.’

‘Is there any way to disarm it?’ Katya asked.

‘Yes,’ answered the colonel. ‘With the codes in the briefcase our brave captain accidentally dropped in a kilometre of water.’

Nadia had to admit, they’d come so close, and then lost their one quick way of disarming the warhead. She could understand the colonel’s frustration – and there would be hell to pay when they got back. The way the colonel was baiting Sergei would be nothing compared to what would happen back in Moscow.

Sergei’s face tightened as he glared at the colonel. ‘Easy for you to say, sat in a nice warm room while we were fighting for our lives.’

‘Frankly it would look better in my report if you hadn’t let go. Or if you’d left it in the damned submarine, then at least we might have a chance of salvaging it!’

Nadia watched the muscles on Sergei’s forearms go rock hard. She sought to defuse the situation. ‘Surely they can’t be the only codes?’

Sergei brooded for a moment then nodded. ‘There are backup codes in a vault in the Kremlin. I know which warhead was taken, so if we find it – and that’s a big ‘if’ – we can make it safe.’

‘And next time,’ the colonel said, leaning forward, planting his forefinger firmly on the tabletop, ‘I will have the case.’ He leaned back, and waved a hand dismissively. ‘Our forces are sweeping the area. There’s a chance we’ll catch them with it, whoever they are.’

Sergei stared hard at him. ‘Probably it was airlifted away long before we surfaced. It could be anywhere by now, flying low.’

The colonel shook his head dismissively, and held up a palm. ‘No. They would have landed somewhere close. We have roadblocks creating a cordon for a five-hundred-mile radius on land.’

The emerald eyes of the colonel’s aide met with Nadia’s as if to say, here we go again. Posturing and denial. They had lost a nuke. A head would have to roll. The problem was that there was a chance of Nadia and Katya somehow being dragged down with whoever was going to take the rap.

‘The tattoos,’ Nadia said, suddenly remembering.

‘What?’ the colonel replied, not hiding his irritation.

‘At least two of them – the terrorists, or whatever they were – had a tattoo like a lizard.’

Sergei stared at her, while the colonel threw up his hands.

‘Why is she here?’ he said.

‘The client for the Rose,’ she began, then paused. ‘How good are your files on what happened on the Chinese cargo ship?’

The colonel looked flustered, his cheeks reddening slightly. This was his territory, but he clearly had no idea what she was talking about. Sergei watched her, the hint of a smile there, as usual. Was he born that way? Wouldn’t surprise her.

‘Cheng Yi’s last words,’ she said, then closed her eyes to recall them exactly as he had spoken them. ‘He is blind, but can see. Water and air are the same to him. He will find you in the darkness. You will not hear him when he comes for you.’

‘Again, seriously, why is she still here?’ the colonel exclaimed.

‘Not a lizard,’ Bransk said. ‘A salamander. Some live underground in watery caverns. Not exactly blind, but they can survive in permanent darkness.’ He stroked his beard. ‘There is one who goes by this name. He has been in the shadows for years.’ His dark eyes bore into her. ‘You think he is the same client?’

She didn’t really know, but it seemed to fit. She nodded.

‘And how does that help us exactly?’ the colonel said, arms folded.