Black Sun_A Thriller

Black Sun_A Thriller - Graham Brown


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my agent, Barbara Poelle, thanks for the trust and support, and the laughs. I don’t know how someone so brilliant can also be so funny. To Marisa Vigilante, my editor, whose ability to see through the mist sharpened the leading edges of this novel more than I can say. To Alison Masciovecchio and Dana Kaye, my in-house and outside publicists, who do the hard work of turning unknown writers into the known. To Evan Camfield and the copy editors at Random House, who put up with my penchant for inventing new words and strange new uses of punctuation. To the sales and promotion staff at Random House—without you guys pushing hard every day, all the writing in the world would get us nowhere.
And finally to the readers, who put up their hard-earned cash, trusting that we will entertain them and sweep them away for the four hundred or so pages of each book. Thanks for the faith. I will do all I can to never let you down.



PROLOGUE

Bering Sea, November 2012
The fifty-foot trawler Orlovsky Star pushed on through frigid Arctic waters and a lingering fog that seemed to have no end. The sea was unusually calm and the wind nonexistent, but with the outside temperature dipping to fifteen degrees Fahrenheit and the water holding just above the freezing point, the conditions were anything but benign.
Alexander Petrov stood at the wheel inside the darkened pilothouse, a grim air surrounding him. His weathered face, shaved head, and clenched jaw all suggested a burden his broad shoulders were struggling to carry. He stared into the darkness ahead of the boat, listening to the thrum of the engine and the occasional muted thump of ice banging against the hull.
So far the ice had been thin: small, free-floating chunks that his boat could slide through at half speed. But the pack ice formed quickly at this time of year, spreading south like a plague, and just an hour before there had been no ice at all.
Guiding the boat on feel as much as sight, Petrov considered the danger: If the ship didn’t reach warmer waters soon, they’d be trapped and the thin hull ground into metal filings long before any rescuer could reach them.
Then again, perhaps they deserved such a fate for what they were attempting to do.
As another impact reverberated through the cabin, a voice spoke from behind him. “It’s getting thicker. We need to make better speed.”
Petrov glanced into the recesses of the darkened pilothouse. A heavyset man gazed back at him. This was Vasili, a Russian of mixed European and Asian descent and the broker of their unholy deal, the keeper of their unusual human cargo.
Despite the cold, Petrov could see a thin sheen of perspiration on Vasili’s upper lip. If Petrov was right, Vasili’s mind was reeling in a battle between greed and fear, between the possibilities of life-altering wealth just days away and a horrible death in the crushing embrace of the ice.
“What are you really worried about, Vasili?”
“That we’re lost,” he said bluntly, glancing at an exposed circuit board and what had been their navigation system.
The GPS receiver had shorted out eight hours before, the screen flashing and the casing catching fire in a shower of sparks. Petrov had examined it briefly but saw that it was clearly beyond repair. For an hour he’d used the stars to guide them, but the fog had thickened and he’d been forced to rely on the vessel’s compass.
“I was a fisherman before I joined the navy. I learned to navigate at the hands of my father,” Petrov assured him. “I know what I’m doing,”
Vasili stepped closer to him. “The crew is worried,” he whispered. “They say our journey is cursed.”
“Cursed?”
“Orcas followed us down the channel,” Vasili explained. “And we’ve seen sharks every morning. Far too many for such northern waters.”
That had seemed odd, Petrov thought, as if the predators of the sea were shadowing them, waiting for a meal to be delivered into their hungry bellies. But he hoped it was mere coincidence.
“It’s almost dawn,” Petrov said, changing the subject. “We’ll have a few hours of light, nothing more, but it should be enough. The fog will lift and we’ll make better time.”
Petrov’s statement was designed to ease Vasili’s fears, but even as he spoke, they found another mass of ice and a grinding resonance traveled down the starboard side. From the sound alone, they could tell it was thicker and heavier than those they had hit before.
Petrov reduced the speed to five knots. This was the trap he’d been hoping to avoid, one he’d warned Vasili about: Thicker ice meant slower speed and thus more time for the ice to form in the waters ahead of them.
He switched on the overhead lights, but the fog swallowed the beams and reflected the energy back, blinding him. He shut them off.
“We need a spotter,” he said.
Before he could call the crew, the boat slammed something head-on. The nose of the boat pitched upward and their momentum died, as if they’d run aground.
Petrov cut the throttle.
In utter silence he waited. Finally the boat began to move, sliding backward a foot at a time and then settling once again. He breathed a sigh of relief. But he dared not touch the throttles.
“We cannot stop here,” Vasili said.
A crewman popped his head into the control room from the lower deck. “We’re leaking, Captain,” the man said. “Starboard, forward.”
“How bad?” Petrov asked him.
“I think I can seal it,” the crewman said. “But we don’t want any more of that.”
“Wake the others,” Petrov said. “Get them into their survival suits. Then do what you can.”
It was a precaution only, and also a bluff meant to calm the fears of the men. But even in their suits, they would not last long in the water.
He turned to Vasili. “Give me your key.”
“I don’t think so,” the broker replied.
“So you will take him, then?” Petrov asked. “If we have to leave the ship?”
Vasili hesitated, then reached under his sweater and pulled out a key that dangled around his neck.
Petrov snatched it and then pushed his way outside.
The fog hung in the air, cutting at his face like shards of suspended glass. Not a breath of wind could be felt, and with the engines shut down the silence was complete.
He looked around. A thick layer of frost covered the deck while daggers of ice hung from the bridge and the ladder and the rail. Every surface, every line, every inch of the vessel had become encrusted in ice.
The ship looked dead already.
Vasili came out a moment later, bundled from head to toe, but still too stupid to put his survival suit on. “Why did you stop?”
“So we don’t rip the boat apart.”
“But we can’t stay here,” Vasili replied.
Of course they couldn’t, but they could no longer risk moving in the dark. The fog made it impossible to see the danger, and impatience would destroy them. But to some extent they seemed to be in luck. The fog was beginning to lift. In addition, the thin light of the approaching dawn had begun to illuminate things. This far north, the sun would never get off the horizon, but the light would grow quickly. Petrov hoped it would show them a way out.
And yet, even then something seemed wrong. The sky was darkest ahead of him. It should have been just the opposite; the brighter light should have been out in front of them. It had to be some illusion of the fog, but it seemed as if the sun were coming up in the wrong place.
Before he could come to terms with this, something heavy bumped the boat and pushed it to the side.
“What was that?” Vasili asked.
The slight impact could have been an iceberg moving on the current. But as he looked over the side, Petrov saw that the waters remained dead calm; the ice wasn’t moving.
“Alexander,” Vasili said.
Petrov ignored him and moved toward the bow. The fog had thinned considerably. Replacing it was a sight Petrov could hardly fathom: a field of solid white. Unbroken ice that stretched to the horizon in every direction.
“My God,” he whispered.
The ice was clearly impenetrable, but the truth was more damning than that. The sun had finally begun to peek its face over the horizon, not ahead of them and to the left as it should have been, but behind them and to the right.
Even Vasili realized the mistake.
“You’ve taken us the wrong way,” he shouted. “We’ve been sailing to the north all night!”
Petrov reeled from the error. Relying on a magnetic compass was tricky around the poles, but he was no amateur. And yet somehow they’d spent hours tracking toward the danger, into the thickening ice pack instead of away from it.
“How could this …,” he began.
“You goddamned fool,” Vasili cursed him. “You’ve driven us to hell.”
Petrov’s legs almost buckled from the realization, but urgency pushed him on. He glanced toward the stern. The ice there had not yet formed into a solid block. If they moved quickly they might just survive.
He brushed past Vasili, driving for the pilothouse. Before he could open the door, something slammed into the boat again, but this time the blow was sharp, a solid impact, rolling the boat ten degrees or more.
He shouted to his crew. “Reverse, reverse! Get us the hell out of here.”
The engines rumbled beneath the deck and Star began to back up, but another impact shoved the bow to the right, crashing it into the ice floe.
Yanking the door open, Petrov went for the wheel and pushed a crewman aside. His hand found the throttles and moved the engines from a quarter astern to half.
“Something hit us!” the crewman shouted.
“Ice, moving on the currents,” Petrov said, strangely certain that he was wrong.
The impact had been powerful, deliberate, more like an intentional ramming. He began to think about the orcas and the sharks.
Vasili stumbled back inside the bridge. “It could have been a submarine,” he said. “Remember the FSB.”
Petrov thought of their cargo and the importance it was deemed to hold. Agents of the FSB, the Russian successor to the old KGB, had hunted them for weeks, trailing them across much of Siberian Russia. No doubt they were still looking, but a submarine, a ramming? Perhaps it made sense; certainly they would not risk destroying the vessel with a torpedo.
He spun the wheel, bringing the nose of the vessel around. After swinging through ninety degrees, he shoved the throttles forward. The boat began accelerating, bulling its way through the ice, pushing toward gaps of black sea, spots of open water where he could make better time.
If they could just …
Another impact caught the boat, jarring it to the right, lifting the bow and then dropping it. The hull couldn’t take much more.
Petrov gunned the throttles, grinding the metal hull and risking the props.
“Captain, you have to slow down,” the crewman said.
“One mile!” he shouted back. “Then we’ll slow.”
But even before he finished the words, a crushing impact hit on the port side. An alarm began ringing as water flooded in.
“Get everyone topside!” Petrov yelled.
The crewman shouted something back to him, but the alarm drowned it out.
“Maybe we should make a distress call,” Vasili said.
Petrov glanced at him. “Too late now.”
A voice shouted from the deck. “Akula!”
It was the Russian word for shark. Petrov glanced out the window and saw a dark shape slicing through the black water toward them. It hit them below the water-line and Petrov was thrown to the floor by the impact.
Another blow followed, stronger and heavier, multiple thuds, likes fists pounding on a door. The sharks were slamming themselves into the hull, ramming it like living torpedoes, hitting the boat with such force that they had to be injuring themselves.
“What the hell is happening?” Vasili yelled.
Petrov could not fathom it. He had never heard of such a thing. It was as if some sort of madness had infected them.
He glanced to starboard. They were about to hit the ice.
“Hold on!”
The ship slammed into the ice shelf, then recoiled from the impact. It rocked wickedly in one direction and then back in the other. For a brief instant it rolled to a level beam before beginning to list.
“Abandon ship!” Petrov shouted. “Abandon ship!”
The order was unnecessary. The men were already near the stern, readying the lifeboat. He counted five men there. Only Vasili and the crewman beside him were missing. And their passenger.
“Go!” he shouted. “Go now!”
As they pushed through the hatch, Petrov charged below deck.
Dropping into the swirling water, his feet went instantly numb. He waded to a closed cabin door and pulled the key he’d taken from Vasili. He unlocked the door and forced it open.
Inside, sitting cross-legged on a bunk, was a twelve-year-old-boy with a round face and dark hair. His features were indistinct. He could have been European, or Russian, or Asian.
“Yuri!” Petrov shouted. “Come to me!”
The boy ignored him, chanting and rocking back and forth.
Petrov charged forward, lunging and grabbing the child off the bunk. He slung him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and then turned toward the door, just as another impact rocked the boat.
The Star groaned as it took on water. Petrov braced himself against the wall that now leaned at a twenty-degree angle. Regaining his balance, he fought his way out into the hall.
With Yuri clinging to his neck, Petrov fought against the rushing water and made it to the stairs. He clambered onto them, dragging himself and the child upward, pushing through the hatch as the boat passed thirty degrees. She would roll over at any second.
He looked to the rear deck. The survival boat was gone, floating thirty yards from the foundering stern. But something was wrong. The men were in a panic, looking around, pointing to something.
A shape erupted underneath them, a huge gray body with a triangular dorsal fin. The life raft flipped, sending the men flying into the sea. Dark tails slashed between the sheets of ice, cutting the surface like knives. Petrov heard the horrible sound of his men screaming.
Akula, murdering his crew. He had never heard of such a thing.
The Star tilted farther and items came pouring out of open cabinets. He pulled himself through the doorway and stood on what had been the bridge’s side wall. It began dropping away beneath his feet. The ship was rolling. A rush of air came up through the water.
He jumped.
Landing hard on the pack ice, he tumbled. Yuri was flung free of his grasp, sliding and sprawling on the ice.
A thunderous crash erupted behind him and Petrov turned to see his boat plunging toward the depths of the sea. Pockets of air exploded as the vessel went down; concussions echoed through the frigid air and waves of debris came rushing to the surface.
And then it was quiet.
Roiling black water, floating wreckage, and small chunks of ice swirled where the ship had been, but the noise of the struggle had ceased.
He looked to the south. The survival boat was gone and the only sign of the crew was a pair of empty life-jackets. In places he saw the sharks crossing back and forth, searching for anything they might have missed. Only he and Yuri remained.
Somehow they had landed on the edge of the ice pack. Three feet thick and as hard as concrete, it might as well have been solid ground.
He turned to look at the boy.
Their cargo, paid for at a cost of ten million dollars, with the lives of his crew taken for interest. Did he even know what he was? What he could do? Did it even matter anymore?
Already shivering, Petrov stood. He raised his eyes to what lay beyond them: a shelf of brilliant white, the barren wasteland of the ice pack, floating on the salt water of the sea. It was a continent in all but name, with only two citizens to inhabit it. And in all likelihood, they would be dead before the sun rose again.