Black Sun

Petrov reduced the speed to five knots. This was the trap he’d been hoping to avoid, one he’d warned Vasili about: Thicker ice meant slower speed and thus more time for the ice to form in the waters ahead of them.

He switched on the overhead lights, but the fog swallowed the beams and reflected the energy back, blinding him. He shut them off.

“We need a spotter,” he said.

Before he could call the crew, the boat slammed something head-on. The nose of the boat pitched upward and their momentum died, as if they’d run aground.

Petrov cut the throttle.

In utter silence he waited. Finally the boat began to move, sliding backward a foot at a time and then settling once again. He breathed a sigh of relief. But he dared not touch the throttles.

“We ca

A crewman popped his head into the control room from the lower deck. “We’re leaking, Captain,” the man said. “Starboard, forward.”

“How bad?” Petrov asked him.

“I think I can seal it,” the crewman said. “But we don’t want any more of that.”

“Wake the others,” Petrov said. “Get them into their survival suits. Then do what you can.”

It was a precaution only, and also a bluff meant to calm the fears of the men. But even in their suits, they would not last long in the water.

He turned to Vasili. “Give me your key.”

“I don’t think so,” the broker replied.

“So you will take him, then?” Petrov asked. “If we have to leave the ship?”

Vasili hesitated, then reached under his sweater and pulled out a key that dangled around his neck.

Petrov snatched it and then pushed his way outside.

The fog hung in the air, cutting at his face like shards of suspended glass. Not a breath of wind could be felt, and with the engines shut down the silence was complete.

He looked around. A thick layer of frost covered the deck while daggers of ice hung from the bridge and the ladder and the rail. Every surface, every line, every inch of the vessel had become encrusted in ice.

The ship looked dead already.

Vasili came out a moment later, bundled from head to toe, but still too stupid to put his survival suit on. “Why did you stop?”

“So we don’t rip the boat apart.”

“But we can’t stay here,” Vasili replied.

Of course they couldn’t, but they could no longer risk moving in the dark. The fog made it impossible to see the danger, and impatience would destroy them. But to some extent they seemed to be in luck. The fog was begi

And yet, even then something seemed wrong. The sky was darkest ahead of him. It should have been just the opposite; the brighter light should have been out in front of them. It had to be some illusion of the fog, but it seemed as if the sun were coming up in the wrong place.

Before he could come to terms with this, something heavy bumped the boat and pushed it to the side.

“What was that?” Vasili asked.

The slight impact could have been an iceberg moving on the current. But as he looked over the side, Petrov saw that the waters remained dead calm; the ice wasn’t moving.

“Alexander,” Vasili said.

Petrov ignored him and moved toward the bow. The fog had thi

“My God,” he whispered.

The ice was clearly impenetrable, but the truth was more damning than that. The sun had finally begun to peek its face over the horizon, not ahead of them and to the left as it should have been, but behind them and to the right.

Even Vasili realized the mistake.

“You’ve taken us the wrong way,” he shouted. “We’ve been sailing to the north all night!”

Petrov reeled from the error. Relying on a magnetic compass was tricky around the poles, but he was no amateur. And yet somehow they’d spent hours tracking toward the danger, into the thickening ice pack instead of away from it.

“How could this …,” he began.

“You goddamned fool,” Vasili cursed him. “You’ve driven us to hell.”

Petrov’s legs almost buckled from the realization, but urgency pushed him on. He glanced toward the stern. The ice there had not yet formed into a solid block. If they moved quickly they might just survive.

He brushed past Vasili, driving for the pilothouse. Before he could open the door, something slammed into the boat again, but this time the blow was sharp, a solid impact, rolling the boat ten degrees or more.

He shouted to his crew. “Reverse, reverse! Get us the hell out of here.”

The engines rumbled beneath the deck and Star began to back up, but another impact shoved the bow to the right, crashing it into the ice floe.

Yanking the door open, Petrov went for the wheel and pushed a crewman aside. His hand found the throttles and moved the engines from a quarter astern to half.

“Something hit us!” the crewman shouted.

“Ice, moving on the currents,” Petrov said, strangely certain that he was wrong.

The impact had been powerful, deliberate, more like an intentional ramming. He began to think about the orcas and the sharks.

Vasili stumbled back inside the bridge. “It could have been a submarine,” he said. “Remember the FSB.”

Petrov thought of their cargo and the importance it was deemed to hold. Agents of the FSB, the Russian successor to the old KGB, had hunted them for weeks, trailing them across much of Siberian Russia. No doubt they were still looking, but a submarine, a ramming? Perhaps it made sense; certainly they would not risk destroying the vessel with a torpedo.

He spun the wheel, bringing the nose of the vessel around. After swinging through ninety degrees, he shoved the throttles forward. The boat began accelerating, bulling its way through the ice, pushing toward gaps of black sea, spots of open water where he could make better time.

If they could just …

Another impact caught the boat, jarring it to the right, lifting the bow and then dropping it. The hull couldn’t take much more.

Petrov gu

“Captain, you have to slow down,” the crewman said.

“One mile!” he shouted back. “Then we’ll slow.”

But even before he finished the words, a crushing impact hit on the port side. An alarm began ringing as water flooded in.

“Get everyone topside!” Petrov yelled.

The crewman shouted something back to him, but the alarm drowned it out.

“Maybe we should make a distress call,” Vasili said.

Petrov glanced at him. “Too late now.”

A voice shouted from the deck. “Akula!”

It was the Russian word for shark. Petrov glanced out the window and saw a dark shape slicing through the black water toward them. It hit them below the water-line and Petrov was thrown to the floor by the impact.

Another blow followed, stronger and heavier, multiple thuds, likes fists pounding on a door. The sharks were slamming themselves into the hull, ramming it like living torpedoes, hitting the boat with such force that they had to be injuring themselves.

“What the hell is happening?” Vasili yelled.

Petrov could not fathom it. He had never heard of such a thing. It was as if some sort of madness had infected them.

He glanced to starboard. They were about to hit the ice.

“Hold on!”

The ship slammed into the ice shelf, then recoiled from the impact. It rocked wickedly in one direction and then back in the other. For a brief instant it rolled to a level beam before begi

“Abandon ship!” Petrov shouted. “Abandon ship!”