Killer

“Get the carbines. I’ll dress,” he said to Ross, and was off at an easy surefooted lope.

“Get the carbines.” Ross passed the terse order on to Kate and Simon, then he was heading for the other supply tent with its gaping side. Simon paused, frowning, but Kate obeyed immediately and without thought.

“Come on, Simon,” she yelled over her shoulder, and he followed.

In the supply tent, Colin was moving the pieces of the boat around, looking for a coil of rope. Most of the rope was being used to hold the net in place, and the floe together, forty-foot strands of it radiating from the corners and sides of the orange square. But he came out with the last heavy coil hung over his shoulder. The rifles were leaning against the side of the tent where Job was changing. Simon had two of the carbines, Kate one and the ammunition. Ross shrugged the rope on to the ground with a crisp smack.

“Cut two forty-foot pieces,” he said, and went back into the tent for the harpoons.

Again it was Kate who reacted first. She put the carbines and the ammunition beside the rifles and hefted the axe. It took her a couple of minutes to unravel the jumble of forty feet and measure it by eye against the twenty foot sides of the net. She was cutting the second length when Job came out of the tent.

“What are you doing?” he yelled, at the top of his voice, over the cacophony of screams, groans, grunts and cries coming from the terrified walrus herd.

“Cutting rope, Colin said.”

Ross came out of the storage tent, the harpoons glistening under his arm. “Good,” he said. “Now three twenty-foot pieces.” Kate began to measure and cut.

“Do we have time for this?” asked Job, lifting his hand and gesturing towards the red-foaming battleground which was surging towards them like an avalanche.

“Got to,” said Ross. “We’ll use the long bits round our waists. I’ll take Kate, you take Simon. That way anyone who gets in trouble will get help.”

Job nodded. He was about to ask why Kate wasn’t his partner – she wouldn’t be much help to Colin if he went down, but she might be able to at least pull his own lighter body to safety – when he saw Simon Quick and realised the two at either end of a rope would have to act as a team or they wouldn’t stand a chance. Ross and Kate stood side by side tying the rope round their waists. Job watched them move smoothly and in unison. Unnoticed during the last few days, something of central importance had sprung up between them, and it was as though they had been working together all their lives. He wondered if they realised yet that they were tied together by much more than the rope.

He turned and picked up the end of his own rope. Simon was already tying his end in place. Ross glanced up at Kate, who was tugging the knot round her bulky waist. Her teeth flashed in a lean smile.

Job went back to the tent-side and got the Weatherby and a carbine. He handed the latter to Quick, who made a negative gesture with his hand and went and got the Remington. Job shrugged and gave him the shells from his pocket. They stood between the camp and the sea, on the eastern edge of the floe, the rope between them in coils on the ice.

Colin took a carbine and five clips of bullets. Kate did the same. On the way past the fire, he picked up the axe and slipped it through the rope around his waist. Kate picked up a harpoon and one of the shorter pieces of rope. She tied the rope to the end of the harpoon, and looped it ready to go over her wrist when she needed to use the silver spear. Colin loped off until the rope grew taut. Then they moved together towards the northern edge of the floe.

Out on the ocean, terrifyingly close, was the wildly screaming crescent of the walrus herd. There were more than a hundred and seventy of them in all, not counting the young, and they were swimming with slow, unshakeable, terrifying purpose towards the floe. Suddenly, behind them, a great black and white shape reared up out of the water, a great scream echoed even through the terrible noise, and the killer hurled itself forward.

They opened up. Ross, on one knee, had the carbine on automatic and was spraying the walruses, trying to turn them. Job, however, was shooting deliberately, like a marksman, with the Weatherby. After each whipcrack of his rifle, a head would sprout a brief aura of red, and begin to sink. Simon was doing the same with the Remington, but there were fewer red auras, fewer deaths. Kate put her carbine on single-shot and began to shoot smoothly and accurately.

The herd hesitated. One or two turned, only to turn back again. Ross snapped the carbine off automatic and threw away the first empty clip. It took him several moments to fit the second, and he cursed Simon under his breath – he had practised with enough rifles to be able to shoot and reload them as smoothly and easily as a man with two hands, but this carbine was different. Eventually he held it upside down under his left arm and wedged the curving clip in with his right hand.