Understrike

by James Barrington

  A small team of hand-picked Russian sailors were waiting there. That part of the shipyard was cleared of all staff, and then the tarpaulin was removed from the cylindrical object it had encased. The crane driver lifted the upper double container off the ship and placed it beside the low loader. Six small wooden platforms fitted with heavy-duty wheels were placed in a line in front of the open door at one end of the container. Lifting straps were positioned around the cylindrical object, and it was lifted off the vehicle and lowered onto the line of platforms.

  The sailors then pushed it forward into the container, ensuring that the wheels on its underside lined up with the two rails welded to the container floor. The cylinder slid easily inside, the far end of it virtually touching the closed doors at the opposite end of the double container. A retractable steel locking lug protruded from the rear end of the underside of the cylinder, and as it was moved into position, it mated with a matching bar welded to the container floor with an echoing clang. That would prevent any further movement of the cylinder until the device was deployed, when it would automatically be retracted. The sailors closed the container doors, and collected three further wooden boxes, two large and one small, from the vehicle, which they carried on board the ship and stowed away.

  Then the crane driver lifted the unit off the concrete of the quayside and deposited it gently back on top of the other double container. One man went inside to replace the locking pins, and closed and secured the container doors behind him when he had done so.

  The following day the final stages of that part of the project began. This comprised installing the fins and other external components of the cylinder that had been removed prior to it being transported. While the installation and testing of the directional guidance system and the launch mechanism began, a succession of lorries appeared beside the ship, each carrying a loaded container which was craned onto the vessel and positioned above and around the modified containers as a form of disguise. When it sailed, it was important that the Semyon Timoshenko looked just like any other small container ship, and that it was carrying a genuine cargo of goods.

  The only part of the loading which might have appeared unusual to an experienced container ship crewman was that there were no containers on the same level and on the line immediately inboard of the upper unit, to allow the container to rotate freely when the time came. For the same reason, there were only two short containers positioned immediately fore and aft of where the modified units had been loaded, so that there was ample space to permit the doors of the upper container to be opened, and to allow it to turn without the ends getting jammed on the adjacent stacks. It looked a bit like sloppy loading, but in fact the positioning had been precisely calculated.

  Only once all that had been completed to the satisfaction of the senior Russian Navy officer overseeing this phase did the Semyon Timoshenko finally start its main engines and navigate its way slowly out of the Sevmash shipyard and begin heading north-west up the Dvinský záliv towards the White Sea.

  One of the modifications made to the vessel had been the installation of an additional fuel tank in the after part of the aft hold, to significantly increase the ship’s range, necessary because it had a long way to go. Depending on the course the navigator chose and the weather systems that they met – they would have to avoid any particularly rough seas because the cylindrical object was comparatively fragile – they were going to have to travel a little over 4,000 nautical miles which, at the ship’s normal cruising speed of around 12 knots, meant a journey time of about 14 days.

  Once they’d reached their destination – a specific spot in the ocean that they would navigate to using their enhanced GPS capability – and completed the operation as ordered, they would use the deck crane to lift up the two sets of joined containers, one after the other, and drop them over the side into the ocean. Then they would continue on their way to make the first of their scheduled deliveries, playing the role of a completely innocent container ship going about its normal business, and oblivious to the wholesale devastation being visited on one particular part of one particular continent.

  The admiral, flanked by two of his staff captains, had watched critically as the old container ship headed away from the shipyard. He knew, without even the faintest shadow of a doubt, that he would never see the ship or the crew again, no matter what happened over the next two weeks. The destiny of Russia rested upon the competence and dedication of the hand-picked men on board and the efficiency of the device that was concealed within the container load. The admiral would, he decided, go about his business entirely as normal, so that the news of the mission’s success would be almost as much of a surprise to him as to the rest of the world.

  But he would make sure that he arrived in his office in very good time on the day the weapon was deployed. He didn’t want to miss a single moment of the news broadcasts and feeds that would resound around the world.

  Chapter 3

  Present day, Monday

  Sassen-Bünsow Land National Park, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Archipelago

  The male polar bear had been following the tantalizing scent of the female for the last day and a half, ever since she had forced her way out of the ice cave where her single cub had been born and where they had hibernated during the long winter. Pregnant female bears – sows – dig themselves a snow den where they will give birth and then emerge about three months later with their cub or cubs, but the boars, the male polar bears, remain active throughout the winter, eating when they can, sleeping when they can’t, and waiting for the arrival of spring. The male hadn’t seen the female yet, but the scent trail left by her pads was both unmistakable and irresistible, and he kept pushing forward across the ice sheet.

  He hadn’t eaten in almost three weeks, existing on the fat reserves stored in his huge body and spending quite a lot of his time sleeping, and he would need to find food soon, but for the moment the urge to mate was dominating his senses. And, of course, in the barren frozen wastes of the Svalbard Archipelago, food was sometimes scarce to the point of being almost non-existent.

  There were plenty of reindeer on the island, and the polar bear was an ambush hunter, a big, powerful animal easily capable of bringing down even the largest reindeer – but catching one was another matter. Flat out, a polar bear can run at about 25 miles an hour, fast for such a large animal, but a Svalbard reindeer can hit roughly twice that in a sprint. The reindeer could easily escape unless the bear got very lucky indeed, though that did occasionally happen.

  The preferred prey of polar bears was the seals they would find on the drifting pack ice to the north and west of Svalbard. Uncatchable in the water, the seals were slow and clumsy on the ice, where the bear’s ambush technique would guarantee him fresh meat. Polar bears creep up on seals resting on the ice, or wait for hours beside one of their breathing holes and grab a seal with their paws when it comes up for air. The skin and blubber of the ringed and bearded seals the bears killed were calorie rich and easily digestible, and were normally the only parts of the animal that mature bears ate. But when hungry, a polar bear would eat almost anything, including human beings and carrion of any sort. Dead whales often float, at least for a time, and the sight of polar bears walking along the back of a dead humpback or other large whale and feasting on the blubber is not that uncommon.

  The bear walked steadily across the ice, heading north, his path defined by the female’s scent trail. Then, about halfway across the open flat icefield he was crossing, the male bear suddenly stopped, his head moving from side to side as his incredibly sensitive olfactory senses detected something else. Not another female, nor a male, and it took a few seconds before his brain processed what he had detected. And even then, although the bear knew instinctively what it was, he still didn’t know where the smell was coming from.

  What he had smelt was carrion, a dead – most likely recently dead from the smell – animal of some sort, and somewhere near. And that changed the priorities of the male polar bear
in an instant.

  The female bear was somewhere ahead of him on the island. Her trail was clear but weak, which meant she had passed this way at least a day earlier, maybe two days. He would keep following until he found her, but at that moment the allure of food, of an easy meal, was too much for him to resist.

  The polar bear sniffed the air, lifting up his head and moving it from side to side to try to locate the origin of the rank smell. He stood up on his hind legs, his head some ten feet up in the air, and looked in the direction from which the smell seemed to be coming. He saw nothing, dropped down onto all fours, and began heading west. A polar bear’s eyesight is good, but its sense of smell is infinitely better.

  The boar walked on for almost half a mile, the smell of slowly decaying flesh getting stronger, and then saw a dark object about a hundred yards in front of him, with two small white shapes moving about beside it. The bear did not quicken his pace, just continued his steady, distance-consuming gait across the ice. Whatever the thing he could see was, it wasn’t going anywhere.

  The bear covered the remaining distance and lifted his head when he got closer, a deep rumbling growl from his throat sending the two arctic foxes, which had been biting scraps of flesh from the body, scampering away. Then he lowered his head and closed his powerful jaws around one part of the sprawled shape on the ground, pulling back using his shoulders and massive front legs to start tearing the body to pieces. But what his teeth had grasped tore away easily, and the taste of it was wrong, unfamiliar.

  The bear opened his jaws and dropped the mouthful, then turned his attention to the larger part of the body, again sinking his teeth into the corpse, this time feeling the satisfying crunch of bones as the flesh tore apart. He swallowed the meat and lowered his head to take another bite, but stopped as a distant sound echoed from the ice wall a few yards away, clearly audible over the ever-present howling of the wind.

  It was a sound the bear had heard before, and he knew it meant danger. But he took another mouthful anyway, tearing the flesh from the body, before backing away as the sound grew in intensity. His muzzle red with blood, the bear darted forward again and took a final bite from the body, then turned away and, with surprising speed for such a huge animal, started to run.

  The noise that had alarmed the bear grew louder, then died away. Then it stopped altogether, and a moment later there was a metallic click, immediately followed by the crack of an explosion. Above and behind the retreating bear, a brilliant white light suddenly bloomed into existence in the sky. The bear carried on running until he was perhaps a quarter of a mile away from the dead body, then slowed to a walk. A couple of hundred yards further on, the boar stopped, looked behind him and saw nothing.

  He drove his head into the soft snow of a nearby bank, twisting and turning it to wash the blood off the fur around his mouth, then sniffed the air, seeking the scent trail of the female bear. It was very much fainter, barely detectable, but it was enough.

  The bear gave his head a final shake and then set off again, heading for the northern part of Spitsbergen, by far the largest island in the Svalbard Archipelago, faithfully following the female and at the same time moving towards the rich hunting grounds of the Arctic ice floes that lay to the north of the island group.

  * * *

  Two men, heavily muffled in hooded parkas, padded trousers and snow boots, each with a bolt action rifle slung across his shoulders and with a holstered pistol at his waist, stood side-by-side a few feet from the partially dismembered corpse, their two snowmobiles – known as snow scooters on Svalbard – on the ice a few feet behind them, each vehicle with a sled hitched to it. They weren’t looking at the body, but at the sheer wall of ice about 300 yards away, behind which the polar bear had disappeared a couple of minutes earlier.

  One of the men was holding a flare pistol in his left hand, and was resting his right hand on the flap of his holster, inside which the butt of a heavy calibre revolver could just be seen.

  ‘I reckon he’s gone,’ the man with the flare pistol said, pulling up his snow goggles as his eyes scanned the largely featureless terrain that lay to the north of them. ‘He took off when he heard the noise of the scooters, so I doubt he’ll be back.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ John Mason replied, unslinging his rifle and chambering a round. He was a little under six feet tall, with a stocky build that was obvious even with the clothes he was wearing, clean-shaven and with black hair and brown eyes. ‘If you check out the stiff, I’ll make sure we aren’t disturbed.’

  Mason’s weapon of choice was a bolt-action Savage Model 116 Alaskan Brush Hunter in .375 Ruger calibre, a rifle that the manufacturers claim is intended to stop big game in extreme conditions. The second man, Steve Barber, was carrying an identical rifle. Game doesn’t get much bigger than an adult male polar bear, and conditions on the Svalbard Archipelago were about as extreme as one could get. The name Svalbard comes from Old Norse and means ‘cold edge’ or ‘cold coast’, which pretty much says it all, and the older Dutch name Spitsbergen translates as ‘jagged mountains’. Combine the two and you get the picture.

  The laws governing what weapons could be carried outside the few settlements in Svalbard were quite specific. The minimum calibre of rifle permitted was a .308W or 30-06, because anything smaller couldn’t be guaranteed to knock down a polar bear, and most people who ventured into the barren landscape preferred a bolt-action weapon because of its utter reliability. A similar rule applied to pistols, and for the same reason. The minimum calibre allowed was .44, hence his choice of sidearm, a Smith & Wesson Model 29 in .44 Magnum. Barber was carrying an even larger calibre weapon, a Smith & Wesson Model 500 in .500 S&W Magnum, by far the most powerful handgun and cartridge combination in the world. And just like bolt-action rifles, revolvers never jam.

  Polar bears on Svalbard are protected, but because bears outnumber people – there are about 3,000 polar bears in the archipelago and around 2,700 people – contacts are fairly frequent and can be deadly. On an organized expedition in August 2011, a British schoolboy was killed and four other people were injured, two of them severely, by a polar bear on Svalbard. The bear was shot dead by another member of the group. So the invariable rule is that anyone who travels outside the boundaries of the settlements is required to be armed at all times, preferably with a rifle because of the weapon’s greater stopping power and accuracy, and most people also carry pistols, just in case. But because the animals are protected, killing one is always regarded as a last resort, and many people also equip themselves with flare pistols or something of that sort, as these have been shown to be quite effective in frightening away bears.

  But sometimes they come back, so Mason ensured that he had a clear view of the area to the north, where the bear had gone, and held the rifle in his gloved hands, ready for immediate use should it prove necessary.

  Barber tucked the flare pistol away in one of the pockets of his parka and stepped forward to look down at the corpse. He was clearly the bigger of the two men, two or three inches taller than Mason and with a width across the shoulders that suggested a powerful physique. Beneath the hood, clear blue eyes regarded the world with a kind of sardonic resignation through his snow goggles. Unlike Mason, Barber had a full beard, which he claimed helped keep him warm in the winter back home in America, though nobody actually believed him, and most guessed he was just too lazy to shave.

  ‘He looks like he’s a goddamn mess,’ Mason said, glancing towards the body.

  ‘No surprise there,’ Barber replied, crouching beside the dead man. ‘Gettin’ chomped by a polar bear’s never gonna improve anyone’s looks.’

  What was left of the corpse was clearly that of an adult male. The bear had bitten away a chunk of the left side of the ribcage, tearing the clothing off the body as it did so, and there was other damage as well, probably caused by arctic foxes, much smaller predators than the bears, which had taken bites out of the dead man’s face and soft tissue. But the biggest and most obvio
us injury was a straight line cut down the centre of the man’s torso that had exposed his internal organs, most of which also showed predation damage.

  ‘You reckon it’s him?’ Mason asked, keeping his distance and watching out for any sign that the polar bear was coming back to resume its interrupted late lunch.

  ‘Place this size,’ Barber said, ‘pretty much got to be. Unless you know of anyone else gone missing in the last three days.’

  ‘Did you know him? From back home, I mean.’

  ‘Nope. Knew of him, is all.’

  ‘He was real new out here, I heard. Just a few days.’

  ‘We’re all new out here, John.’

  ‘What killed him?’

  ‘Good question,’ Barber answered. ‘Deal is, I don’t have a good answer. That’ll be for the doc to tell us. Can tell you one thing, though. It sure wasn’t natural causes.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  Barber pointed down at the corpse.

  ‘Two things,’ he said. ‘First, this guy’s been cut open like you’d gut a deer. His parka’s been opened up and then someone went to work on his chest and stomach. Real sharp knife or cleaver, something like that.’

  ‘Shit,’ Mason muttered, moving closer so that he could see better. ‘I thought that bear had just ripped him apart.’

  ‘Nope. It’s a straight-edged cut. If a bear had opened him up, it’d be as jagged as hell. Somebody took a knife to this guy, and there’s no reason anyone would need to do that if he’d just croaked from a heart attack or whatever, so it’s definitely foul play. But I don’t think that was what killed him.’