Killer

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.