Black Sun: A Thriller (2 page)

“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 gunned the throttles, grinding the metal hull and risking the props.

“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 beginning to list.

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

The order was unnecessary. The men were already
near the stern, readying the lifeboat. He counted five men there. Only Vasili and the crewman beside him were missing. And their passenger.

“Go!” he shouted. “Go now!”

As they pushed through the hatch, Petrov charged below deck.

Dropping into the swirling water, his feet went instantly numb. He waded to a closed cabin door and pulled the key he’d taken from Vasili. He unlocked the door and forced it open.

Inside, sitting cross-legged on a bunk, was a twelve-year-old-boy with a round face and dark hair. His features were indistinct. He could have been European, or Russian, or Asian.

“Yuri!” Petrov shouted. “Come to me!”

The boy ignored him, chanting and rocking back and forth.

Petrov charged forward, lunging and grabbing the child off the bunk. He slung him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and then turned toward the door, just as another impact rocked the boat.

The
Star
groaned as it took on water. Petrov braced himself against the wall that now leaned at a twenty-degree angle. Regaining his balance, he fought his way out into the hall.

With Yuri clinging to his neck, Petrov fought against the rushing water and made it to the stairs. He clambered onto them, dragging himself and the child upward, pushing through the hatch as the boat passed thirty degrees. She would roll over at any second.

He looked to the rear deck. The survival boat was gone, floating thirty yards from the foundering stern.
But something was wrong. The men were in a panic, looking around, pointing to something.

A shape erupted underneath them, a huge gray body with a triangular dorsal fin. The life raft flipped, sending the men flying into the sea. Dark tails slashed between the sheets of ice, cutting the surface like knives. Petrov heard the horrible sound of his men screaming.

Akula
, murdering his crew. He had never heard of such a thing.

The
Star
tilted farther and items came pouring out of open cabinets. He pulled himself through the doorway and stood on what had been the bridge’s side wall. It began dropping away beneath his feet. The ship was rolling. A rush of air came up through the water.

He jumped.

Landing hard on the pack ice, he tumbled. Yuri was flung free of his grasp, sliding and sprawling on the ice.

A thunderous crash erupted behind him and Petrov turned to see his boat plunging toward the depths of the sea. Pockets of air exploded as the vessel went down; concussions echoed through the frigid air and waves of debris came rushing to the surface.

And then it was quiet.

Roiling black water, floating wreckage, and small chunks of ice swirled where the ship had been, but the noise of the struggle had ceased.

He looked to the south. The survival boat was gone and the only sign of the crew was a pair of empty life-jackets. In places he saw the sharks crossing back and forth, searching for anything they might have missed. Only he and Yuri remained.

Somehow they had landed on the edge of the ice
pack. Three feet thick and as hard as concrete, it might as well have been solid ground.

He turned to look at the boy.

Their cargo, paid for at a cost of ten million dollars, with the lives of his crew taken for interest. Did he even know what he was? What he could do? Did it even matter anymore?

Already shivering, Petrov stood. He raised his eyes to what lay beyond them: a shelf of brilliant white, the barren wasteland of the ice pack, floating on the salt water of the sea. It was a continent in all but name, with only two citizens to inhabit it. And in all likelihood, they would be dead before the sun rose again.

Southern Mexico, December 2012

D
anielle Laidlaw scrambled up the side of Mount Pulimundo, sliding on the loose shale and grabbing for purchase with her hands as much as her feet. The frenetic pace of the ascent combined with the thin mountain air had her legs aching and her lungs burning. But she could not afford to slow down.

Thirty-four years old, attractive, and athletic, Danielle was a member of the National Research Institute, a strange hybrid of an organization, often considered a science-based version of the CIA. That they were currently searching for the truth behind an ancient Mayan legend seemed odd, but they had their reasons. The fact that another armed group was trying to stop them told Danielle that those reasons had leaked.

She glanced back to one of the men climbing with her. Thirty feet downslope, Professor Michael McCarter struggled. “Come on, Professor,” she urged. “They’re getting closer.”

Breathing heavily, he looked up at her. Imminent exhaustion seemed to prevent a reply, but he pushed forward with renewed determination.

She turned to their guide, a twenty-year-old Chiapas Indian named Oco. “How much farther?”

“We must get over the top,” he told her, in heavily accented English. “It is on the other side.”

A few minutes later they crested the summit. McCarter fell to his hands and knees, and Danielle pulled a pair of binoculars from her pack.

They stood on the rim of a volcanic crater. A thousand feet below lay a mountain lake with a small, cone-shaped island bursting upward at its center. The island’s steep sides were thickly wooded but unable to disguise its volcanic nature. Yellowish fog clung to it, drifting downwind from vents and cracks.

“Is this it?”

Oco nodded.
“Isla Cubierta,”
he said. Island of the Shroud.

Danielle studied it through the binoculars. If Oco was right, this place would be the key to finding what they were searching for: a Mayan site that legends referred to as the Mirror, a reference to Tohil, the Mayan god of fire, who wore an obsidian mirror on his forehead. It was a symbol of power and might, and if Danielle, McCarter, and the NRI were correct, a symbol of far more than that. But so far the Mirror had remained hidden. To find it they needed help, help that supposedly existed on the Island of the Shroud.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“The statue is there,” he insisted. “I saw it once. When I came with the shaman. He told me that the time was coming, the time when all things would change.”

Danielle scanned the terrain. To reach the lake required a hazardous descent, down a steep embankment
of loose and crumbling shale on the caldera’s inner cone. It would be rough, but much easier physically than the climb they’d just completed.

She tied her hair into a ponytail to let the breeze cool her neck, then settled her eyes on McCarter. He’d managed a sitting position now, though his chest still heaved and fell. His loose linen shirt was open; the T-shirt he wore underneath was drenched in perspiration. Sweat poured down his face, leaving brackish, salty trails on his dark skin.

McCarter was in good shape for a sixty-year-old university professor. And they’d brought only small packs and limited supplies, having discarded all else in the name of speed. But three days of constant hiking and climbing had taken its toll.

“Ready?” she asked.

He looked up, clearly in a state of unreadiness.

“It’s all downhill from here,” she promised.

“I’ve been hearing that load of tripe since I turned forty,” he said, between breaths. “And so far nothing has gotten any easier.” He waved her on. “Go. I’ll try to catch up.”

McCarter and Danielle were an unlikely team, but they’d formed a bond two years earlier, when Danielle had recruited him for an expedition to the Amazon. Things had started well enough, but in the depths of the jungle everything had gone horribly wrong. By the thinnest of margins, the two of them and a very few others had survived.

In the aftermath of that mission, Danielle had quit the NRI and McCarter had gone back to New York to teach. At the time, he had seemed far more likely to sue
the organization than to ever work for it again, but in answering to his own curiosity he’d agreed to do just that. Despite her own reasons not to, Danielle had rejoined as well, in hopes of protecting him. The way she figured it, she owed him that much. He would never have heard of the NRI if she hadn’t recruited him. After eight months in the field and several close calls, including a car bomb and two shootings, she wasn’t about to leave him now.

Besides, her only chance of returning to Washington, D.C., and the semblance of a normal life she’d been building was to finish this job and deposit McCarter safely back in New York.

“We stick together,” she said. “Besides, you’re the expert here. You’re the one who needs to see this. All we have to do is get down there before them, learn what we need to know, and follow the lake out.”

“And what happens when they catch us?”

“They want the statue. They’re not going to chase us.”

She extended a hand, which McCarter eyed suspiciously before reaching out and grasping.

She helped him to his feet and the three of them went over the side, skidding and sliding and running where they could. As they reached the bottom, she could hear shouting far up above. Their pursuers had come to the crest.

“Hurry,” she said, racing across the last ten yards of solid ground and diving into the cold mountain lake.

When they were halfway across, gunfire began cracking from the ridge. Shots clipped the water around them
and she dove under the surface and kept kicking until she could no longer hold her breath.

She came up shrouded in the sulfurous mist. McCarter and Oco surfaced beside her.

The gunfire had ceased but another sound caught her attention: a distant rhythmic thumping reaching out across the mountains. It was the staccato clatter of helicopter blades, somewhere to the east. Apparently their enemies had a new trick in store.