37 Hours. J.F. Kirwan
with. Prison had changed her. The softness Jake had known was gone. Maybe she’d lost her looks, or whatever Jake had found interesting in her. He might not want to see her. Two years. Two fucking years. He’d have found someone else. One of his exes – Lorne or Elise – might have reclaimed him. A hundred other girls.
It’s not fair, Katya had said earlier on the plane. Damned right. But they were Russian. History had stripped the belief in fairness from the gene pool a long time ago. What had her father said a thousand times? Make the choice right. Especially when you don’t have one.
She came back out and signalled to Katya that she wanted a private word, which in this case meant shouting to each other in the noisy corridor between the fore-section and the main hold. She told her about Jake, whom Katya had met briefly on the cargo ship that had turned into a bloodbath.
‘I’m so happy you found someone during that awful time.’
‘If I don’t –’
‘You will.’
‘If I don’t… I want you to meet with Jake. He deserves to know…’ To know what? She’d leave it up to Katya, who was better with words.
‘All right, Nad. But you will come back. You’re strong, like Papasha.’ And then Katya clearly realised what she’d just said – because one day their father hadn’t come back.
They went back to the cabin. Sergei got up and knocked on the cockpit door. It opened. He talked to the pilot, and Nadia glimpsed the stormy weather outside, another factor stacking up against them.
Sergei came back in. ‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Suit up.’
She grabbed the thin cylinder of compressed air that might just sustain her long enough to reach the interlocks on the torpedo tube’s inner hatch. She had a feeling someone would be waiting for her on the other side. Armed, naturally.
‘I’ll need a knife,’ she said to Sergei as they entered the bay where the other divers were assembling everything, including voluminous grey parachutes for the sleds. She’d never jumped out of a plane before.
‘Absolutely,’ he said. He handed her a small, short, stubby one, flat-bladed at the top, with a sharpened edge. It looked useful in many ways, except as a serious weapon.
As she strapped it in its sheath to her inner thigh – so it would be out of the way inside the torpedo tube – she recalled Jake’s obsession with diving knives. She wished he was there, but was also glad he wasn’t, as she didn’t need any distractions right now.
Some of the fear dropped out of her, displaced by adrenaline. She imagined Jake watching. He’d laugh, tell her to look on the bright side: she was going to dive a nuclear sub, an opportunity many wreck divers would relish. She smiled, and as she stripped down to her underwear, still thinking of Jake, Sergei’s eyes hooked hers. She swallowed, turned away from him and squeezed into her wetsuit. Evidently she hadn’t lost all her looks. One of the other divers tossed her a thin belt, heavier than it looked, and she fixed it around her waist.
But she remembered what was down beneath the waves. Armed terrorists intent on stealing nuclear weapons. They’d shoot her on sight. The colonel had said she’d been resourceful, ready and able to kill. She hadn’t thought much about it in the past two years, assuming neither the need nor opportunity would arise. But two years in solitary had hardened her. Maybe it would come easier next time.
She sat kitted up, the regulator from the main tank fastened to her chest. She was perched on the front of a movable skid next to Sergei. She’d thought it was noisy before, but now the Arctic wind roared just a few metres away from her, through the open cargo door at the back of the plane. Six hours ago she’d fallen in love with white puffy clouds above London. Now she was going to fling herself into dark storm clouds that would lash her with rain as she freefell.
Of all the crazy things she’d done in her life, nothing matched this. She watched the red light to the left of the open hatch, and listened to the countdown. Breathe normally, Sergei had said. Fat chance. The countdown grew louder. Tri – Dva – Odin. The light turned green.
The skid rolled towards open space.
Nadia held her breath.
Falling out of a plane at night, above a raging sea, lived up to its reputation. Sergei had said the chute would open after ten seconds, long enough to get below the wake from the propellers but not drift too far from the drop zone. But Nadia couldn’t count. She was too busy trying to catch her breath as the wind tore at her mouth.
Goggles protected her eyes, though she could barely see anything as she plummeted through gun-metal-grey clouds. She bit down on an urge to scream, panic rising from her heart up into her throat. Freefalling. It was so damned dark. The sea was racing towards her, but all she saw below was blackness. A cloudy night, no stars, no moon. Must have been eight seconds by now. Nine. Ten. She braced herself for the chute opening.
Nothing.
Where was Sergei? He’d been right beside her on the plane. He was heavier. He’d be below her, wouldn’t he? Or did everyone fall at the same rate? She couldn’t remember. He could be above her if his chute had opened. She looked up. Nothing, just the wind howling in her ears through her neoprene dive hood. How high had they been? How long before she’d hit the water?
At this speed her harness with its air tank would snap her back in two on impact. She had no emergency cord to operate the chute. He’d said it wouldn’t fail. The chute would open. Fifteen seconds now, for sure. Another five and she’d be splattered on the wave-tops. Sergei, where the fuck…
He slammed into her from behind, then spun her around as effortlessly as if they were trapeze artists in that sweet spot where gravity blinks. But they were plunging at terminal velocity, close to two hundred kilometres an hour. His face loomed close, but he was looking down at her chest. He hit her. No, he thumped the buckle to release the failed chute. She slipped away from him. Shit! She lunged for one of his shoulder straps, grabbed it, tugged herself towards him, flailing in the wind like a rag doll. They twisted in mid-air, no longer falling feet first. He looped an arm around her, pulled her close to him, yanked something, and then Nadia realised how the end of a bullwhip felt when it was cracked.
It winded her, but Sergei’s arm pressed her against him, locking them together. Her left hand clung to his harness strap; the other gripped the back of his tank. Finally he looked at her. And smiled. He fucking smiled. Cool bastard. He mouthed something. Then something else. Two. One. She took an urgent breath.
The surface of the sea whacked into her, pounded her feet, ripped off her goggles. The rushing wind was replaced by the soft, numbing sounds of the undersea that she’d loved since her first dive in the Volga at the age of eight. But it was cold, bloody cold. She fumbled for the regulator pinned to her chest, exhaled once to flush out the water, then breathed in. Air – the only thing that really mattered underwater.
Eyes still closed, she fished inside her jacket pocket for her dive mask, donned it, tilted her head back and breathed out through her nose to clear the mask of seawater, equalising pressure in her nose and ears at the same time. She opened her eyes and blinked hard to rinse out the stinging salt water. Sergei was attaching his fins, a torch in his hand.
She unfastened the fins strapped tight around her calves, slipped them on, then found her own halogen lamp. At least the seawater inside her wetsuit had warmed a little from her body heat. Sergei shone a cone of light down into the gloom. He put his hand in the beam and gave her the OK signal. She did the same, careful not to shine it anywhere near his face and render him temporarily night-blind. His smile had gone.
To business.
She checked her depth on the dive computer attached to her left wrist. Fifteen metres. The swell from the roiling waves above swayed her gently, rocking her. But she knew they must be off-course due to the late opening