Blue Blood

by Peter Tonkin

  By the time he reached it he was slithering down a slope that pitched him unceremoniously out on to the weather deck itself.

  As none of the gantries, cranes or winches seemed to be breaking down immediately, the engineer had an opportunity to look around. Because of the almost shocking impact of the icy blast, his head was cleared for a moment to allow him to do so. And because he was not a widely experienced sailor he was struck by what he saw, for it had an air of novelty to him, and an unnatural vividness that burned into his mind before his eyes exploded into tears.

  The last of the rain had cleared away downwind ahead, and the sun was just beginning to glitter blindingly off the tops of the waves behind. And, just as Ursini’s legs became used to holding him steady on the down-slope, the next wave powered in under La Carihuela's counter and her whole stem shot ten metres up into the air, sluggishly to be sure, with much howling and clattering from the over-laden winches. But up she went, to settle on the crest of the wave for a moment and show the staggering engineer a vista of surprising calm behind them. And beyond the long trough of calm, something else that no one seemed to notice, fixated as they were with the way the catch was coming in. Something the engineer did not begin to comprehend.

  ‘Stem ramp down,’ called the hirsute gorilla of a mate as the crest of the wave washed by. The stem began to fall away again, and Ursini’s gaze dropped to where the whole aft wall of the main deck began to slide open in mute welcome for the huge bulging net of the main catch heaving massively out of the water in their wake. At least the sea behind it looked calm enough, thought the engineer in his blissful ignorance.

  But then the starboard winch began to scream. The huge wet warp wrapped around it was starting to slip. The drum itself juddered noisily to a grinding halt - just at the worst possible moment. ‘Where’s the bleeding engineer?’ bellowed the mate, swinging round like an enraged silverback.

  ‘Here! ’ called Ursini and dashed forward on to the pitching, spray slippery deck.

  ‘Late and useless as usual,’ spat the mate. ‘Quick, boys, get the starboard warp up on to the crane and hold it there. Didn’t you hear me, Carlos? Drop the stem ramp and get this lot aboard now!’

  The mate ran out into the middle of the deck, swinging a grappling hook, his gaze fixed fiercely on the whale-sized bulge of the net as it heaved hesitantly out of the oily green deep. In spite of his simian sure-footedness, a monkey-tail of safety line whipped out behind him, just in case. The engineer froze, riven with shock. He had forgotten to attach his own line. He half turned, seeking the nearest attachment point. The wave slid out from under the trawler altogether and she sank back into the following trough. The catch heaved up as though it was alive - as a single entity instead of half a million netted together. The mate’s grappling hook bit into its side and the sailor turned like something out of Tarzan, tossing the line to the winch-man to attach to the port-side crane. The trough bottomed out and the back of the trawler settled beneath the surface. Green water swept upwards, past the screaming winch, towards the foot of the cranes midships.

  The men in the fish room below popped the cover on the huge chute leading down to the belts and gutting tables.

  Ursini’s feet slid out from under him and he fell flat on his back, striking his head on the deck with sickening force. A howl of derision went up from the others, but it was drowned by the sudden, overwhelming screaming of the emergency siren. La Carihuela herself was mocking the useless fish-flopping of the helpless engineer while he swirled across the deck as though the gathering water would wash him down on to the belts and tables to be gutted and frozen with the rest.

  Really beginning to panic now, Engineer Ursini grabbed at the nearest solid-seeming deck furniture. It was the broken winch. No sooner had his hands closed on it, however, than it began to spin wildly in reverse as a kilometre of warp whipped wildly free. Lucky not to lose his hands, he was hurled sideways into the gathering waves that seemed, suddenly, unaccountably, to be sweeping into the midships area.

  There was an overwhelming rumbling. For no conscious reason he could work out, Ursini found himself thinking of Etna and Vesuvius, as though this were some kind of volcanic eruption and nothing to do with water at all. The struggling engineer found himself on his back, half floating, with a horrifying sensation that he was simply being swept overboard. His fingers scrabbling automatically for the inflating toggle of his life preserver, he looked up, and like the trawler itself, he screamed. Then for the next few terrible moments - moments that changed forever his ideas of natural reality - he was the only one of La Carihuela’s crew who really had half an idea of what was happening.

  As the huge rogue wave swept in, the turbulence beneath it simply sucked the bulging net back down, gulping away fifty metres of fish-packed netting with several kilometres’ worth of warp, sweeps, headlines and ground ropes trailing behind, returning the catch to the depths it came from in little less than moments. Tugging down the rear end of the trawler as the winches, drums, cranes and gantries took the terrible strain - and buckled beneath it. The only winch that did not rip straight out was the one that was broken - it simply spewed the warp away like the string from a huge spinning top. The cranes above were not so fortunate. They toppled like trees beneath the woodsman’s axe and crashed along the already sinking deck. They tangled against each other, forming a skeletal wall reaching right across the deck screaming back to smash the gape of the stem-ramp wider still. They hesitated there for the merest moment to jerk the whole stem of the trawler down by another few fatal metres then vanished into the black depths with the rest of the netting, just as that massive wall of water stepped aboard.

  Paolo Ursini was lifted almost gently on to the massive bosom of the thing and swung around as his feet left the vanishing deck and the inflated collar of the preserver held his head at the surface for the moment. He saw the wave sweep along the afterdeck, some infinitesimally microscopic particle of it flooding down the hatch and filling the fish-room in the nanosecond before it took off the bridge-house altogether like a guillotine dealing with an old French aristocrat. The bridge-house seemed to tumble forward, falling in a weird parabola over the downward angle of the bows as the beheaded boat went down, spraying out great pulses of air bubbles instead of streams of blood.

  It went under so fast that the mate and his men on deck were still alive and screaming for the whole terrible ride down into the dark - all four of them clawing at the wildly rushing water as though they could somehow pull themselves back. Faces staring upwards, eyes rolling and mouths wide, their preservers inflated like Paolo’s, straining helplessly at the ends of their hull-secured lifelines, coming and going through billowing clouds of teasingly free- moving bubbles, like a bunch of well-tethered balloons on a windy day.

  The topmost section of the rogue broke over Paolo then, pushing him deep beneath the surface, as though the gods of chance and the ocean had decided he should join his crew-mates after all, and he saw something more strange and wonderful still. For, just as La Carihuela slid down into the shadows where even the sunbeams could not pierce, so something huge enough to dwarf her began to rise majestically into the light. Something huge enough to dwarf the largest whale that the engineer had ever heard of. Round and black and festooned in some strange type of sea-web, the head of it rose like the face of some legendary monster. When the two shapes came together, Paolo got the strangest impression that the newcomer was eating the trawler. That would be an apt enough fate, after all, considering how many fish La Carihuela had carried away to the dinner tables of the world, he thought, dreamily - blissfully unaware of what was actually happening and how terribly close to death he was.

  The two of them came together seemingly in utter silence, and a great explosion of bubbles billowed like quicksilver out of the dark. When they dissipated, the trawler was gone forever. The black-faced, wild-haired monster seemed to hesitate, then onwards and upwards it came, pulling out of the shadows behind it a simply enormous body that sp
orted an absolutely gargantuan fin.

  Is it coming to eat me now? Paolo wondered, with the readiness of a man who had been terrified by Jaws. And only the nearness of death made him view the prospect with such icy calm.

  But then his life preserver performed its function and smashed his head up through the surface of the water with utterly brutal force. The wind punched him in the face and woke him up. He found himself halfway down the long black back of the rogue wave, in the middle of the stormy Denmark Strait, utterly alone with a monster which appeared to be about a hundred metres in length and that ate trawlers and their crews. He began to cry with simple terror, and the warmth of his tears on his almost senseless cheeks told him how terribly cold he had become.

  Then the automatic beacon on his life preserver sprang into life, its batteries given life by their immersion in salt water. The little light on the top of it began to wink with all the frail intrepidity of a lone star in a lost galaxy. Its automatic distress signal began to call - just as feebly - for aid.

  And the first call was instantly answered. Paolo’s hand rose to the urgently sounding transceiver. His ill-trained fingers, made clumsier still by the cold and the lingering nearness of death, hit the buttons randomly. There was a string of pulses that formed itself into the pattern of a message - an automatic distress signal like his own. Indeed, the confused man for a moment thought it was his own - that he was receiving some weird kind of distress-call echo.

  But then his engineer’s understanding of basic communications reasserted itself. A transceiver in receive mode cannot really be expected to be picking up its own messages. Smitten with hope, Paolo began to look around.

  And there, surprisingly close at hand, was a life raft.

  Four

  Impact

  You could cut the atmosphere aboard Quebec with a knife - almost literally. Captain Robertson had kept the newly commissioned HMCS submarine under the ice almost to the limit of her specifications while he tried to hammer the crew of eight officers and forty other ranks into shape and get to know their vessel’s little foibles and failings. And, most of all, to test the newly fitted air-independent system that supposedly isolated the Paxman Valenta diesels and the massive array of batteries that powered them. Supposedly isolated were unfortunately turning out to be the mots justes.

  Captain Robertson had certainly been wise to stay this side of the Pole, though, rather than risking a direct run home round the top of Greenland and south through Baffin Bay. His masters at Canadian Fleet Atlantic HQ in Halifax - and Commodore Pike in particular among them - had been insistent that he stay within reach of the British Isles until he was absolutely satisfied that he didn’t have another Chicoutimi here. And, apart from the recent failure of the isolation system, the vessel seemed sound enough. So he was taking her home at last - the long way round.

  However, Robertson and his crew had suddenly discovered that his apparently wise decision had an unexpected impact on the voyage. No sooner had the tired, tense submariners brought Quebec out from under the ice, heading up to snorting depth for a much-needed breath of fresh air, than they had found the Denmark Strait had other ideas. Instead of allowing them to get either snorkel or search periscope up, the Atlantic had put such stormy turbulence above them that snorting - or even surfacing - proved impossible. And the shaking Quebec received in the attempt seemed to have overcome the isolation system and started the batteries to leaking somehow and somewhere as yet undiscovered; and it had backed up the whole waste-disposal system and made the heads all overflow.

  The frustrated, bitter, increasingly bloody-minded crew were working therefore in a chemically mephitic fog of ammonia, chlorine and dioxides of carbon and sulphur. The air was scarcely breathable up in the bridge below the tall fin. What it was like down in the engineering sections beggared belief. And they had been suffering this for several days now. Long beyond the life expectancy of the gas masks that they carried. Eyes were streaming. Throats were burning. Stomachs were churning. Tempers were fraying. Mistakes were being made.

  ‘We have to surface immediately, Captain. The crew are really beginning to suffer. It’s only a matter of time before something dangerous happens. The storm seems to be clearing now. The surface vessels fore and aft of us are riding easier and running well clear. It’s not as if we’re under orders to stay secret. If it was calmer we’d be running on the surface in any case.’

  ‘OK, Bob, I take your point. I don’t propose to stay down here a moment longer than I need to.’

  ‘Then take her up, Captain. Take her up now!’

  As if to emphasize the young first lieutenant’s desperate plea, the power flickered. Just for a moment there was darkness and a ghastly silence broken only by the steady, soundless vibration of the motors and the eerie whispering of the water along the single-skinned hull around them. Then the light came back and the whisper of the water was lost amid the sounds of automatic alarms and the urgent, almost febrile clicking of machines restarting and recalibrating. ‘Right!’ snapped Captain Robertson. ‘We’re going up. And tell Commander La Barbe I want him or one of his engineers here with some kind of an explanation for that blackout before we hit the surface!’

  Quebec's, long hull began to angle upwards as the captain’s orders were translated into increased power to the propeller, pumping of ballast and realigning of external vanes.

  The crewmen overseeing these processes began to call the degrees of angle, their rasping voices alive with gathering excitement.

  The depth gauges showed a rapid rise towards the surface and the crewmen observing them began to sing out the diminishing depths in series.

  ‘Thirty metres, Captain ... Twenty-five ... Twenty ...’

  ‘Ready with the search periscope.’

  In the midst of them all, the lone voice of the sonar officer suddenly cut through the burgeoning relief. ‘Something dead ahead, Captain, I can’t quite make it out. Looks like a really tight-packed shoal of fish perhaps ...’

  But his tentative warning was simply overtaken by events - as the great tug Sissy had been a few minutes earlier. And events once again took the form of the rogue.

  The wave was thirty metres high. It was formed out of the movement of water particles that rose and fell in series, allowing the almost semi-circular form of the crest to move forward along the surface while they themselves just went up and down in a semi-circular inversion beneath. But because so many of them went up thirty metres into the stormy air, a like number went down the better part of thirty metres into the depths of the icy black ocean. And their movement at the very least created a scarcely imaginable undertow.

  It was as though the rapidly surfacing submarine found itself for a few horrific moments under the weight of some gigantic watery steamroller. Her racing propeller was smashed downwards as the fluid through which it was moving simply sank nearly twenty metres in an instant. Then the same invisible, unsuspected force rolled forward along the submarine’s entire length pitching it forward with brutal force and sending it tumbling back down into the depths among the quicksilver shoals of redfish in a dark and dangerous reflection of Sissy soaring upwards among the gulls.

  The bridge and control rooms were instantly thrown into chaos. Men and loose equipment were tossed hither and thither. Anything not bolted down flew up and sailed back down the sudden precipitous slope towards the sinking stem. Chairs and those sitting in them simply took off. Those who managed to stay in situ as everyone else flew backwards were almost immediately pitched forward with equal force. And when that happened, the danger suddenly came not from the loose equipment sliding around the heaving deck but from the solid screens, panels and displays into which heads, faces and torsos were thrown as bodies heaved helplessly forward. Most forcefully amongst these was Lieutenant Pellier, the diffident sonar officer whose forehead all but shattered the display screen of the Thales Type 2040 sonar which had been warning of something unexpected in the deep water immediately ahead.

  The lights and
power flickered once again. But this time the darkness lingered just long enough to bring a wash of simple terror with it every bit as potent as a wash of abyssal water would have been. And instead of the whisper of the water on the single steely skin there was the screaming of the hull itself as the power of the turbulence sought to rip it all apart. A screaming and a sort of hissing, rippling tapping that worked along it from the bulbous bow.

  Captain Robertson was an easy man to underestimate. He was by no means tall. Nor was he as young or as slim as he had once been. His short beard and ruddy cheeks - unusual in a submariner - were more reminiscent of Santa Claus than of Sean Connery. But Quebec had something of Red October's functionality if not of her size or naked threat - and her captain was clever, fast and hard. And an outstanding commander in a crisis. He was the first man up, therefore, finding his feet even before the light and power returned. So that when they did, he was still clearly on top of things. ‘Continue with the manoeuvre, men,’ he ordered evenly, his voice steadier than his feet and the calm of his tone belying the blood that was streaming down his face as he leaned against the solid column of the periscope. ‘Report our progress as soon as you can. And I would still like this search periscope up as soon as it’s convenient...’

  The men picked themselves up and returned to their posts. But it would have been too much to expect Quebec to have come through such an adventure utterly unscathed. ‘There’s something wrong with the vanes, Captain. They are not answering properly. I can’t get them anywhere near full elevation.’

  ‘What’s our angle of ascent?’

  ‘Fifteen degrees maximum.’

  ‘Proceed on that, then. Continue to dump ballast. What’s our current depth?’