37 Hours

Fair enough. The Promise. His arms weren’t working, so he couldn’t do it himself. She prised the pistol from his broken fingers, stood up, and aimed it downward at the top of his skull, execution style. Her uncle had shot a horse with a broken leg once, right in front of her and her sister. Katya had cried. Nadia hadn’t. She squeezed the trigger. The gunshot boomed around the closed room. He quivered, then stilled. A torrent of emotions threatened to explode inside her, but she held it all back. Solitary had taught her how to do that.

Later. Much later.

She checked the small glass porthole to the next section. Empty. The hand wheel turned easily enough and she stepped into the bunkroom, then froze. Sixteen corpses, all shot at point-blank range. Most were only in shorts and vests, suggesting at least some had been gunned down while asleep. Precision shooting, heart or headshots, a few in the neck, dead centre.

Whoever had done this, it wasn’t their first mission. Nor was it the work of your average terrorists, whatever they were. Such men would be patriots, passionate, dreaming of glory or martyrdom. They’d cut corners, make mistakes, go over the top when killing – rage or whatever fuelled them evident in their handiwork. This was the work of flawless, stone-cold killers carrying out their tasks with military precision.

She thought back to her own training at Kadinsky’s camps. This resembled the work of highly trained hard-core Special Forces operatives. People like her father. She thought of what she’d just done. Who was she kidding?

People like her.

Staring at the corpses, she recalled what her mother had once said, in front of her father, a jibe at him when he couldn’t respond because young Nadia had been there. She’d said that if you kill people, they wait for you. They are there waiting for you when you die. If she’d been right, the man she’d just shot was about to have his hands full. Which also meant that if she was killed, the man she’d just tortured and shot would be waiting for her too, with a carving knife to sculpt her face.

She was about to move on when she noticed something odd. Two of the corpses had an identical tattoo on their upper arms. A lizard. Maybe they were brothers. They had both been shot in the back. They were at the far end of the bunkroom, by the opposite entrance. The layout of corpses didn’t make sense, unless…these two had been the killers, infiltrators, who had dispatched most of the men but then someone else heard the shots and cut them down. She stared again at the lizard. Some kind of gang tattoo?

The next compartment was empty of bodies: on one side tall fridges and a kitchen, on the other side weapon racks behind padlocked glass doors. She listened. Distant creaks and clangs. Sergei should be aboard by now. She used her Glock to smash the glass, and selected an MP-443 Grach from the rack, attracted by its chunky grip. She checked the eighteen-round magazine, fired a single nine-millimetre round through a fridge door to check it was functional, and walked on.

Under the control room she found another body, this one in a wetsuit like hers, shot in the back. She crouched, did a three-sixty sweep, but neither heard nor saw anything. She aimed her pistol at the spiral staircase leading to the control room.

‘Sergei, you up there?’

No reply. She started to creep up the metal steps, when suddenly she began coughing, at first as if her throat was irritated, then more violently. She backed up, hunched over, her lungs on fire. Her eyes watered, and she stumbled towards a glass case housing an oxygen mask and cylinder, yanked it open, and put it on. As soon as she did, she could breathe again. Once the attack was fully passed, she carefully climbed back up the steps.

Four more corpses awaited her: two with pistols in their hands, lying beneath the periscope; the other two slumped over their control yokes, heads propped up on the dashboards where myriad red lights blinked. No entry or exit wounds. Staring around, she saw no clue of how they’d been killed, until she spotted blackened flakes of paint on the floor.

Looking up, she saw a round hole in the roof, scorch marks all around it, the tough ceiling paint bubbled and black. The hole was about the same size as the cylinder Sergei had been carrying. Must have been a fast-acting neurotoxin, released as soon as the cylinder cored through the submarine’s double hull. Then Sergei and his two men had entered, but the one downstairs had been shot. She needed to find Sergei. She descended to the main deck.

The next hatch porthole revealed the second of Sergei’s divers, face down in a pool of blood still oozing from his throat. Sergei was deeper in the room interrogating someone. Well, that was one word for it. She spun the wheel and entered. Sergei glanced her way, then back to his prisoner, a bald man with a curved scar on his left cheek, naked to the waist, his back covered in tattoos reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno. He was handcuffed to a valve wheel above his head. His legs didn’t look right. Sergei must have smashed the man’s knees with the large wrench lying on the floor. She swallowed, surprised the man was still conscious.

‘Thanks for uploading the virus, Nadia,’ Sergei said.

The prisoner looked her way. ‘Nadia. Nice name.’

Sergei punched him in the gut, clearly not for the first time. ‘Where is it?’ he said.

The man coughed, spat, and continued talking as if having a casual conversation. ‘I knew a man who had a daughter called Nadia. Always talked about her. Said he missed her like the rain.’

Nadia grabbed a pipe for support. That’s what her father used to say. Not to her. To her mother. A bittersweet joke between them. Love had withered early in the marriage.

Sergei took out a knife, and slid it slowly into him, just below the left rib. The man bit down. Spittle and blood bubbled from his lips as he ground his teeth. A groan turned into an angry roar.

‘Where is it?’ Sergei asked. No anger, only a sense of urgency.

The man breathed rapidly, then glanced again in Nadia’s direction. ‘You’d be about the right age. Nikolai called you his Bayushki bayu, his little Cossack.’

The lullaby Katya sang to her. But her father’s name was Vladimir, not Nikolai. That had been the name of their grandfather.

Sergei twisted the knife. This time the man screamed.

‘Leave, Nadia, it’s about to get ugly,’ Sergei said.

‘No, stay,’ the man said. ‘I’ll go.’ He looked up at Sergei. ‘You will join me very soon, comrade, at the bottom of the ocean, where you belong.’ He then moved his jaw, as if chewing something.

Sergei gripped the man’s jaw, tried to force it open. ‘Blyad!’

The man thrashed and bucked, then swallowed something. Sergei hit him in the stomach, trying to make him spit it back out, but it was no good. The man’s body relaxed, and hung limp from the cuffs. But he was still breathing, in shallow gasps.

Sergei groped for the keys in his pocket, but Nadia raised her pistol and fired at the chain between the man’s cuffs. The prisoner slumped to the floor, Sergei breaking his fall.

Sergei spoke to the prisoner again. ‘What did you mean we’re going to join you?’

The man simply stared into space.

She glanced at Sergei. ‘Cyanide?’

He shook his head. ‘TTX.’

She knew it, the deadly toxin from the blue-ringed octopus. ‘It’ll block his ability to breathe.’

‘I know what it does, Nadia.’ Sergei faced her. He spoke quickly. ‘There’s one warhead missing. And he must have set some kind of device to sabotage the sub, blow it up or take it over the ledge.’

‘He’s not going to tell us where it is.’ She knelt next to the prisoner. ‘You said you knew my father. When he was working with the military?’

His body had grown still. Paralysis was setting in. His diaphragm would stop working, and he’d suffocate. But his eyes turned to hers, his speech slurred. ‘After,’ he said. ‘Eight…years ago.’

That couldn’t be right. Her father died eleven years ago. His face took on a blue tinge.

‘Where?’ She thought about mouth-to-mouth to keep him alive, but the toxin…

He stared at her intently. ‘Eyes…like his.’ He tried to breathe in, but couldn’t. ‘T…ch.’ His body trembled once, then his eyes glazed, and the air came out of him in a long sigh, like a deflating balloon.

‘He was the one who killed two of my men, despite the gas,’ Sergei said. ‘We need to find the case. It’s ten to midnight. My guess is there’s a device set to blow the sub at midnight.’

‘Wait, slow down. Case? What case?’

Sergei wasn’t really listening. His eyes darted everywhere, as if searching the compartment. ‘If the warhead is still outside –’

‘It can’t be. What would be the point? It’s gone, somehow. Which is where we need to be.’

He gazed around him again. She understood. This was his sub, his command. And his tomb? Go down with the ship and all that bullshit? Sergei didn’t seem the type.

‘We have to find it, Nadia.’

She grabbed his arm. ‘Sergei, what case? What are you talking about?’

His gaze turned back to her, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Of course, why would you know?’ He took a breath, and spoke quickly. ‘Each warhead has a series of arming codes, exactly for eventualities like this. Even if you steal a warhead, you can’t arm it. Best you’ll have is a dirty bomb. The arming codes are kept in a reinforced steel case, like a briefcase. Only the Commander and the Executive Officer can access it. And it’s gone.’

‘Do we know if the warhead – or any of the others – have been armed?’