Killer

The killer, lost in a panic at the burning strength of the net around its head, was running, with all its massive strength, on the surface. As soon as the net had closed around it, the whale had been hurled back in its memory to the moment when, as a calf, running in a small family unit with its parents in the south Pacific near Antarctica, it had been captured. They had used nets on it then too, wrapping its sensitive young body in the strong strands, dragging it out of the water and into the boat, away from everything it knew and loved, and into a strange, terrifying world.

But now its panic was coming under control. It had not been dragged, helpless, out of the water. It still had a chance to escape. As it swam, it tore at the strands tight across its face and mouth, and began to free itself from the net.

Ross knelt, rigid, as the great fin loomed up, almost near enough to touch. He had to tilt his head back a little to see its curved rose-thorn point, nearly a yard above his head. Then he was looking down, through the thin covering of water which hissed and writhed over the black bulge of the killer’s back.

“Closer!” he yelled. “Give me another ten feet.” The monster seemed to be moving faster now. But they were inching up. He was over the net now. He glanced up. Only a yard or so away the back of its head rose like a wet rock out of the churning sea; its blowhole opening and closing as it gasped in air.

“A yard,” he screamed. “Give me a yard!”

Simon paddled harder, the strokes beginning to knot his back and shoulders as he thrust the canoe through the water. Colin took the first harpoon. He should have attached the twenty-foot length of orange rope to the hook at the front of the canoe but he forgot. They were coming in on the whale’s right, on their left. He would have to stab it down across his chest. They would have to be very, very close. He licked his lips and was surprised by the sharp taste of salt on his tongue. His face and the front of his anorak were running with spray.

“Closer,” he yelled.

The black, orange-squared hump was under the bows now, rising out of the water less than a foot from the left side of the boat. Colin leaned over to his left, harpoon poised over his head, breath held in excitement and against the warm stench of the whale breathing.

Simon, watching, guiding the boat up against the whale’s head, terribly aware of the huge black sail of its fin a little behind his shoulder, screamed, “Now!” and Colin’s hand began to travel down.

At Simon’s cry, as though it understood, the whale’s head lashed to the right, striking solidly against the side of the boat.

Colin stabbed out to his left as the boat wallowed right, out from under him. The harpoon came down behind the blowhole, into the breadth of the monster’s neck. For a terrifying moment, Colin hung over the ocean, his one hand gripped wildly on the solid column of the buried harpoon, legs in the rocking boat, the full weight of his massive body trying to hurl him down into the churning ocean. He looked down the length of the silver shaft as though in a dream to where it ended, not in a barbed point, but in a dimple of sleek black flesh which rapidly became a pool of blood. With his full weight resting on it the harpoon slipped even deeper, trembling under his hand as it rubbed against the hard muscles deep in the whale’s body, seeming to give off a tone like a tuning-fork. Ross pushed away from it, throwing himself back into the boat.

As soon as the great sail of the fin changed its attitude, Simon hurled the boat, made ungainly by the heaving weight of Colin in the bows, away to his right – and it was as well he did so, for the whale on its way down took the opportunity to strike at them with the breadth of its tail – which was almost twice the size of the boat. The great tail lashed down a scant yard away, missing them completely but nearly swamping them as it hit the water.

For a second they sat still in the wildly bobbing boat, Ross slowly straightening, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand; Simon sitting gasping for breath as though he were drowning.

The line hissed down into the water, until its end disappeared overboard. Colin cursed, then saw it didn’t matter. The floe, still moving sluggishly forward, tilted and began to turn round and round, like a very slow spinning top.

“Right,” said Simon, and he began to paddle easily away from the floe.

“Simon! Where the hell are you going?”

“About a hundred feet away from the floe. At least a hundred feet away. Further.”

Colin still didn’t see.

“Look. The killer’s attached to the floe, right? It can’t dive more than forty to sixty feet. It’ll never drag that much ice down with it. It has to stay within sixty feet of the floe. So, if we go within sixty feet of the floe, then we’re in the killer’s ground. It’ll come straight up through the bottom of the boat and tear us to shreds. See?”

Colin nodded.