The Ice House (21 page)

35

He was in a pitch-black suffocating enclosure, in the bilge, ­beneath the lowest deck of the boat, in a curved space intersected with the thick iron ribs that braced the outer, reinforced hull structure. It was some kind of watertight compartment, turning the hull into a double-skinned structure, between sealed bulkheads, a safety feature.

At its lowest level, if he let himself slide down there, towards where the keelson would be, he sank up to his knees in bilge water. The distance across, from outer skin to inner hull, was a little further than the length of his arm at head height, narrow­ing to about fifteen centimetres where it curved under the hull towards the keel. The hatch they had pushed him through was about a metre above his head, just within reach. He would be able to get up to it by bracing his legs against the inner and outer walls – if his legs would stop shaking.

There was no light at all, not even a crack of it coming through the seal on the hatch, so he could see absolutely nothing. He had figured out where he was by feeling his way around, very slowly. He had worked a big boat like this once, as engine room crew, in his teens. A summer job. Sometimes they’d sent him down to clean the bilge pump, so he knew the rough structure.

The air stank of engine oil and stale sea water. He had to breathe deeply to get enough of it into his lungs but he wasn’t sure if that was an effect of the repeated tasering, or because there wasn’t much air down here. He had read about people sent to clean huge metal storage tanks dying because there was no oxygen in the bottom level. He tried to wedge himself against the outer hull and stay as high up as possible.

‘Make a noise and we’ll give you more,’ they had told him as they pushed him in. Meaning more tasering. By that point everything had been a blurred daze, his brain not working properly at all, his heart labouring, his breath so constricted he had felt as if he were asphyxiating. He had dropped the two and a half metres from the hatch without really knowing what was happening, smashing his head and knee off the bulkhead on the way down. He could feel blood trickling from a cut behind his ear. But at least – as far as he could recall – the son hadn’t used the baseball bat on him. Not yet.

They hadn’t wanted a mess up there, hadn’t wanted a mess on their clothes – they were headed for the shareholders’ meeting, had no time to deal with him, and didn’t want to do it there, in Helsinki harbour. But they were going to do it, sometime later, out to sea. They were going to ‘question’ him, then kill him. He knew all this because he had heard them talking about it all as he lay there being repeatedly shocked, his body like a quiver­ing rigid board, but his mind – at least at first – startlingly un­affected.

He had been tasered before, as part of the military training programme, but not like this. He had no idea how long it had gone on, or what the charge was. It seemed more powerful than what he had been through before. And they hadn’t stopped until he had repeatedly blacked out. How long had that taken, and how long had he been out? He didn’t know that either. But they must have dragged him to the hatch leading here whilst he was unconscious, then waited for him to come round to put him in. The son and Zaikov had disappeared by then, presumably into the sleek Mercs back on shore, and it was the big man who had used the taser who had manhandled him into here.

He didn’t know how long he had before they came back from their meetings, because he didn’t know what time it was now, didn’t know how long had elapsed since he had been put in this place. They were due to finish at seven, he knew, because that also had been discussed in front of his prone form. And it had been mid-afternoon when all this had started. But time had slipped and slid away from him as he waited for his heart and brain to recover. There had been a persistent mental confusion which was only now dissipating. When he had full control of his muscles he would need to work out what he was going to do. Or they were going to set sail, pull him out and kill him. He had no doubt about that.

He eased himself back against the freezing outer hull, throbbing with engine vibrations, and tried to get his breathing regular. He tried to relax, but still the buzzing was there, in his legs and arms, across his chest, the feeling you got when you banged the nerve in your elbow, but magnified many times over and through many sets of muscles.

What had gone wrong? Zaikov had looked down at him, writhing on the deck – looked down at him with eyes filled only with hatred – and said something like, ‘He is too small, too stupid. How could he have killed Uri?’ Uri. The dead son. They were blaming him for that, for the events of ten years ago. But why?

He forced his mind back there, into the past. It had been a crystal-clear memory for so long but now he couldn’t get it to focus properly, not with his brain struggling to rewire itself. That was an effect of the tasering that he’d read about – the mental sluggishness, the loss of memory. It would pass, sooner or later. Maybe. Or he’d have a reaction – the name of which he’d forgotten – and pass out, stop breathing, die.

Uri Zaikov. Ten years ago. He couldn’t recall the date or even the season now. But he could remember Uri Zaikov collapsing in front of him, blood pouring out of a stab wound to his back. Had
he
done that? He struggled to fill in the gaps, before and after, but trying didn’t do it. Like when you had some forgotten word or detail on the tip of your tongue.

He closed his eyes, tried to empty his mind, make space for it. He could see Uri Zaikov’s shocked white face, the eyes staring up at him, the voice pleading softly, in Russian. He had gone down on one knee right beside the man, pulled his clothing away and turned him on his side, found the wound. He had a clear image of it, the tiny slit with all that dark blood running out of it. The Russian’s clothing had been soaked with it. He had staggered through the doors just behind Carl – big, wooden, ornate doors – then collapsed at his feet. Where was it? What place?

He couldn’t get there, couldn’t build the rest of the picture. Just the wound and the pleading voice. The wound was near the heart, between the ribs. Had it actually pierced his heart? There had been blood bubbling through his lips too. Flecks of it had spattered Carl’s face as he leaned over to hear him speaking. So the lung must have been punctured, or the throat.

What had happened next?

He had taken his own jacket off – a light, canvas summer jacket, so the season must have been summer, the weather hot – and had started to tear it to pieces, intending to bind the wound, to try to stop the bleeding.

He had been trying to save the guy, not kill him. He had even said that to him, tried to reassure him. Then Viktor had got there,
out of breath, blood all over him. Because there had been two others with Uri Zaikov, and Viktor had chased and caught them outside somewhere, shot them. Carl hadn’t seen it, but had seen the bodies, later. Viktor had the pistol he had used in one hand.

He had walked up and pushed Carl out of the way. Then bent over and cursed Zaikov, put the gun against his face and pulled the trigger.

Carl saw it all, right now, saw it happening. Viktor had shot Uri Zaikov when he was already down, already mortally wounded. Then stepped back and spat on the body.

36

He thought it was maybe twenty minutes more before he could be sure of his legs. Then he started to properly feel his way around the compartment. He found a potential weapon quite quickly, clipped to the bulkhead below the hatch – a kind of wrench, heavy, with a handle about two metres long. He tried to remember whether he had seen one before in this area of a boat, and what it would be for. Obviously there was something that you could loosen with it.

He considered banging on the outer hull with it but guessed that would only make them lean through the hatch to tase him again. Besides, from the position of the engine noises he was on the port side of the boat, and it was moored to starboard. And in any case, who would care about a banging noise from a boat? Passers-by would assume someone was doing repairs. The crew might respond, but they wouldn’t be able to help if the big guy was standing guard above the hatch.

He eased himself lower down, breathing carefully. The engines were turning over continuously, either in readiness to leave or because they needed them to turn a generator or power some other system. He moved over three sets of the iron ribs, towards the stern of the boat. He decided – from the noise – that he was in a compartment right at the stern, alongside the engine room. He lay back against the outer hull with his feet submerged in the bilge water and thought about it.

There would be a bilge pump somewhere down there, in the water. He tried to listen for it and decided it was switched off, if there was one. The water level wasn’t going down. Where had the water come from?

The raw water intake vents. The engines on almost every boat were water-cooled. They needed to take in cold sea water constantly from an intake below the waterline, then pump it out through a vent above the waterline. The intakes needed a fair bit of maintenance. Usually there would be a filter of some sort, a pump in the engine room to suck the water in, tubes to bring the water from the intakes to the engine system. He started looking for them.

It didn’t take long. There were five of them, thick
PVC
­material, at waist height if he stood as near the bottom as he could, all about the diameter of his wrist. There were big nuts fixing the piping to metal intake fittings that would protrude through the hull, allowing in the sea water. One of them was leaking slightly – a broad, steady trickle of water – confirming that this compartment was below the waterline.

The wrench would be to undo the nuts, to get the pipes off for maintenance. He guessed they might be using only one intake right now, while the engines were just ticking over, and felt to see if there were any temperature differences or vibrations to give a clue as to which.

He thought he could detect movement inside two of them, including the one with the leak. If he used the wrench on them then sea water would flood into the compartment, quite quickly. It would fill to the level of the sea outside. Would that be enough to unbalance the boat, set off some warning system? Maybe not, but if the compartment was wholly below the water­line there was a danger it would fill entirely. He might drown if they didn’t work out what was happening and respond. He judged they would – not because of the extra ballast but because the engine would very quickly start to overheat if he took away its coolant supply. That might prompt a response. What else was there he could do? It was a risk. But if they didn’t respond he could always close the vent again, when the water got too high.

He set to work on the nuts, trying to get the wrench in place, without worrying about what the second part of the plan would be, if they did respond. He saw now why the wrench had such a long handle. It was easy to lever the nuts loose. After a few turns water started to flow in. He could hear it running down the hull, splashing into the bilge below. He kept going and got the first one off. A thick jet of water started to pour in, instantly soaking him. He had to fight a moment of panic, force himself to get to work on the second intake.

By the time he got it off and there were two jets of water flooding the compartment, the level was up to his knees. He stripped off the fleece beneath his jacket and struggled for a few seconds to tear it into strips, then gave up and simply twisted the sleeves and forced one into the first gurgling intake pipe, the other into the second, at least partially blocking them. He tried to wedge them pointing upwards, so that the open ends weren’t in the steadily deepening water. Then he recovered the wrench and started to clumsily climb back to the furthest bulkhead, under the hatch. It was only then he found a ladder bolted to the inner wall, coming away from below the hatch. He got onto the bottom rung and waited.

Within five minutes the water was around his thighs. Now, if he let himself off the ladder, he would sink up to chest height. He tried to listen for signs that the engine was struggling but could no longer hear anything except the gush of sea water flooding in. In the enclosed space, the noise was deafening.

After a bit he had to climb further up the ladder. He thought the speed it was coming in must start to slow now. But instead he felt a slight movement of the boat. There was a drawn-out creaking sound. Had it listed slightly? Maybe the compartment below his feet continued under the bulkheads, letting more water in than he had planned for.

Even as he was considering it he felt his centre of balance again shift a little. That would be enough to get them looking, he thought. A heavy boat like this would snap the moorings before long. He listened for signs of them opening the hatch, started to wonder – for the first time – what he planned to do then.

But they didn’t open it, and the water kept rising. He had ­either miscalculated the height of this compartment or the depth of the boat below the waterline, because roughly ten ­minutes later he was right at the top of the ladder, his head pressed against the hatch, the water above his waist.

He managed to wedge the wrench behind the ladder, so he had both hands free. There was a definite list now. He wasn’t imagining it. He started to worry the boat would capsize, with him trapped in there. It seemed unlikely, but nevertheless it was hard not to panic about it. He told himself the reason this compartment existed was to stop the boat capsizing by limiting the quantity of water that could enter through a punctured hull. It was a safety feature, so he was OK.

He pushed himself off the top of the ladder, keeping his feet on the rungs below the water but letting himself float back to the outer hull. He braced one hand there, fixing himself away from the area immediately below the hatch. The water crept up to his chest. The temperature had to be less than twelve degrees. The cold started to take effect, gripping his muscles. He started to shiver. If they didn’t come soon he was either going to drown or freeze to death.

Time to close the vents again.