Fade to Black
a novel by
Josh Pryor
Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA
Fade to Black
Copyright © 2011 by Josh Pryor
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book layout and design by Andrew Mendez
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pryor, Josh.
Fade to black : a novel / by Josh Pryor. —1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59709-125-1
I. Title.
PS3616.R97F33 2011
813’.6—dc22
2011011752
The Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council and Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs partially support Red Hen Press.
First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
Pasadena, CA
This book is dedicated to the memory
of my grandfather, Gene dePrado . . .
I advise the zip
And the earth was without form, and void; and
darkness was upon the face of the deep.
—Genesis 1:2
Fade to Black
Ross Sea: Antarctica
Longitude/Latitude: 80° 30' 17'' S, 175°00' W
July 1981
Surfacing less than a kilometer from the disintegrating edge of the Ross Ice Shelf was insane in the best of conditions. Today, in conditions such as these when the wind howled across the gray-green sea like a pack of frothing wolves and the seasonal landmass was sheering apart beneath the onslaught of nearly four months of perpetual daylight, it was fucking suicide. A fool’s errand. Monoliths of ice as big as the Politburo building in Moscow crashed into the churning abyss as the shelf contracted toward the southern pole laying waste to the mighty ramparts and battlements the perpetual darkness of Antarctic winter had built over the previous months. The largest of these—many weighing in excess of 1,000 tons—broke free with screeching thunderclaps that seemed to herald the end of the world. Only a lunatic would not have been terrified. But there was no chance of that—no chance that Senior Lieutenant Rodya Keldysh was choknútyy despite what his wife, Akilina, told him each time he shipped out. He was trembling too badly, his heart filled with too much dread he would admit shamelessly the next time he held Aki’s soft, warm body in his arms. What he would give to be at home in bed with her now, her worried eyes prying at his impenetrable wall of reassurance, desperately wanting to understand him, though she knew better for he was too practiced at it, even as she carried a living piece of him inside her. They had talked about names, but nothing had been decided. A boy—he wanted a boy.
Keldysh had been above deck scarcely over a minute and already the pencil-thin cable tethering him to the conning tower had sprouted jagged teeth of ice that gnawed at his gloves. It was -45 degrees Celsius, a glorious summer day. One wrong twist, a move too sudden and the frozen umbilical would snap, severing his only tie to life but for the dream of it. Metal fatigue, the chief engineer had warned him—in temperatures so far below freezing the very physics of things was altered. The world was not the world we knew. A gust of Antarctic wind could instantly char the skin black as if by fire. Each time a swell smashed into the Vaslav Annenkov’s hull, Keldysh was peppered with frozen pellets of spray that peppered him like buckshot. Poor little crab clinging to a rock in a raging sea. Hold on for dear life, little crab, or go swimming. Straight to the bottom, little limbs knitting uselessly against the oncoming deep. The cumbersome dry-suit promised to protect him from the glacial waters was a luxurious lie, a tuxedo on a dead man. If the cold of the sea didn’t kill him almost instantly, Keldysh would be pulverized in the collapsed ruins of the White Kingdom crumbling into oblivion all around him.
It was taking them too fucking long. A coordinated rendezvous in this place, here and now—Christ Himself couldn’t work miracles in cold like this. But neither did Christ take orders from the KGB. Given the choice of being tethered to the Vaslav in this mess or remaining nailed to the Cross for all eternity, Keldysh was sure that the Son of God would have chosen the Cross. At least it was not a cold death. A chance encounter with one of the 1,000-ton rogues bobbing in the sea about them could gut the Vaslav from stem to stern and render it a frozen tomb.
No more apparent than the dull buzz of an insect, came the labored growl of an outboard motor guiding a small craft through the shifting labyrinth of ice. The puny vessel, an ancient whale-boat, pierced the clinging mist, its high painted bow flaking and splintered to reveal patches of bare wood. Three men in dry-suits similar to his own—the helmsman wrestling with the outboard, another braced in the prow with an old wooden mooring pole he used to deflect the oncoming blocks of ice, and a third hunkered deep in the belly—comprised the miserable crew. Keldysh, officer that he was, suddenly found his own safety to be of secondary concern. How these three fools had made it this far was anyone’s guess? Each heaving swell presented the whale-boat with a treacherous mountain to climb, each trough a frozen pit out of which to dig itself. If the helmsman misjudged the timing of his arrival by a fraction of a second, he would slam the deep-keeled whale-boat down hard atop the Vaslav’s deck so that it would splinter apart and cast all three into the swirling abyss. That he might be crushed to death himself was Keldysh’s only consolation. He’d never lost a man at sea; this despite all he had witnessed in nearly a decade as a submariner is why he slept like a baby each and every night. One way or another, he would allow nothing to change that. But with an impressive display of seamanship, the helmsman spared Keldysh his nightmares, timing the whale-boat’s arrival atop a swell so that it scarcely kissed the Vaslav’s starboard flank as the man in the bow snagged the one of the deck grates with the mooring pole and held them as steady as could be reasonably expected.
The man hunkered in the belly of the whale-boat—the poor soul tasked with the safe arrival of their cargo—heaved onto his knees and braced his chest against the gunwale scraping back and forth against the Vaslav. His face was muffled against the biting cold, but the thin crescents of his exposed cheekbones were badly frostbitten. Fringed in ice, his dark scared eyes had withdrawn deep into his skull as if huddling near the embers of his brain, his iced lashes wreathing the sunken hollows like the hoary blooms of first frost.
“Get on with it!” the helmsman barked. “I can’t feel my prick inside my pants!”
The man with the dark ice-encrusted eyes carefully retrieved something from the bottom of the boat—a fairly large package wrapped in a drab wool blanket—and extended it out over the gunwale to Keldysh who was experiencing the early stages of hypothermia. His arms were impossibly heavy, weakened by the loss of blood that had since migrated into his core to nourish his vital organs. He dropped to his knees so he would be closer to the water, but felt closer to God than made him comfortable. The deck was enameled with ice but he managed the wrestle the parcel onto his lap without falling overboard. He estimated the wind at 30–35 knots.
The whale-boat had taken on water during its brief passage through the turbulent soup, and the helmsman bailed mechanically with a large coffee can to keep her from swamping. Still, she was riding dangerously low, low enough to be at risk of capsizing on the return trip. They wouldn’t make it back to shore alive. Although he would catch hell from the captain, Keldysh urged the three of them to ditch the floundering craft and board the Vaslav where it was safe. “You’re sinking!” he shouted into the face of the wind. “You’ll die if you go back now!”
“Udachi!” blurted the man with the mooring pole, pushing off with all the force he could muster as the helmsman gunned the outboard and stabbed them back into the bobbing labyrinth of ice. But it wasn’t Keldysh who needed good luck. He could hardly watch as the ludicrous craft clawed its way up the wind-shattered face of a three-meter swell and sledded into the gaping trough waiting to swallow them whole on the other side.
Although prayer was strictly forbidden onboard Soviet military vessels—an act of petty treason—Keldysh muttered one under his breath before passing the horrible parcel to a shrouded figure waiting in the conning tower. “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us.”
The select few on hand to witness the arrival of the mysterious cargo muttered to one another in disgust. For this, they had journeyed thousands of miles to the frozen asshole of the earth! To them, the creature occupying the Plexiglas cage the captain held before him like a lighted birthday cake was stew meat, a pair of cheap women’s gloves at best. None could fathom an equation in which a small white rabbit with darting pink eyes and ugly yellow-gray incisors was worth dying for. Of course, Keldysh saw what they could not possibly see, what only he, the captain and a handful of others knew. Far deadlier than any bomb in the Soviet nuclear arsenal, Ivan the Terrible lurked behind those darting pink eyes. Who could’ve imagined that doomsday could appear so harmless?
They were just underway and preparing to dive when the Vaslav collided with an iceberg, taking the brunt of the impact aft of the port stabilizer and glancing sharply starboard. A grating metallic shriek reverberated down the length of the sub’s sleek titanium hull. Keldysh knew what such a sound could mean and it turned his blood to ice water. As one of the only officers onboard experienced with polar navigation, he had warned the chief sonar man of the perils of nomadic ice. Subsurface clutter could wreak havoc on the echoes the Vaslav relied on to guide her safely through the water. If Keldysh were to hazard a guess, a phantom signal had led the sonar man to misjudge the relative position of the object they had struck. Armed with faulty information, the helmsman had steered directly into it. But now was not the time for guessing. Now was not the time for blame.
Although probably not severe enough to sink them, the collision had knocked the Vaslav’s primary operational systems offline. This was a standard safety feature of all VM-4 pressurized water reactors, and under ordinary circumstances Keldysh would have been grateful. These, however, were not ordinary circumstances. At the moment of impact the captain instinctively threw out his arms for balance, sending the cage crashing into the deck. One of the six transparent panels it comprised split away from the others, setting Ivan free. Now it was out in the open, scampering about for a place to hide in the thin blood red glow of the auxiliary lights, fueled by adrenaline and instinct and only the devil-knows-what. In an instant, the crew, trained to act rather than react, gave chase through the listing bridge. None seemed to care that the Vaslav’s primary systems had automatically gone offline to conserve power. They were having too much fun laughing and cursing at one another as the rabbit, aided by the slow circular rocking of the boat, darted through wide open legs and scrambled out of the reach of grasping hands, its claws scratching furiously over the steel deck plates in its futile bid for life. For a drawn-out moment, even the urgent calls from the chief engineer, a frantic voice on the intercom, went unheeded. Maybe the three on the whale-boat knew what they were doing—risking death on the water rather than death unknown.
And then it was over.
One of Keldysh’s men cried out triumphantly as he scooped the rabbit from the deck and held it kicking wildly at arm’s length. “Ayyy!” he cried, clutching the elusive creature by the roll of loose skin at the base of its skull. Twin pinpricks of blood marked the back of the crew member’s left hand where he’d been bitten. The rabbit, for all its inherent menace, went immediately limp, a slow fixed gaze overtaking its once darting pink eyes. There it remained suspended in the devilish light, intermittently twitching its little pink nose, a model of utter docility.
“Hold on tight, Vidchenko!” one of the crew members chided. “We may have to scuttle the lifeboats if he gets loose again!”
The others laughed. All but Keldysh and the captain.
Seaman Vidchenko was with Military Unit 2 and had been on deck to oversee the exchange in case anything went wrong. Standard protocol. Vidchenko was a good man—all of the men onboard the Vaslav were good men, handpicked by the captain himself. All, of course, but Vidchenko. He belonged to Keldysh. Keldysh had pushed hard for Vidchenko. Not because his service record was exemplary, which it was, but because Vidchenko was Akilina’s baby brother. Family. Serving on the Vaslav meant rapid promotion, better pay, and a distinguished military career. It meant a good life for Vidchenko’s wife, Elizaveta, and Keldysh’s two young nieces, Anastasiya and Nadina, the cousins of his own child-to-be. In Aki’s own words, it meant that Keldysh could “keep Andrej out of trouble . . .” How was he going to explain this to her? Aki would never forgive him. But right now, Keldysh could not second-guess himself. He had tried to convince Aki that another vessel, any vessel—a crab boat in the Bering Sea for the love of St. Peter—would have been a better choice. But she would have nothing of it, and now her baby brother was dead. Vidchenko was still armed—an AK-47 slung over his shoulder—and there were four dozen other men and their families to think about. Right now, Keldysh’s only responsibility was to the uninfected members of the crew. The living. Anastasiya and Nadina—Keldysh could help raise his two nieces himself if need be. But he could not raise the dead.
“Good work, Andrej,” said Keldysh. It was the only time he had ever called his brother-in-law by his given name onboard the Vaslav.
Vidchenko smiled broadly in the fiery red shadows, Ivan cycling his legs idly in a half-hearted attempt at flight.
Keldysh smiled calmly. “Show me where you were bitten.”
The captain and Keldysh exchanged glances before the captain excused himself.
“It’s nothing,” explained Vidchenko. “Just a scratch.”
“Please, Andrej . . .”
Vidchenko held out his right hand. Gravity had stretched the twin droplets of blood into parallel exclamation points, reminding Keldysh of just how fucked he was.
After a brief moment, the captain returned. “I’ve contacted the doctor,” he explained. “He should be up shortly.”
“The doctor?” Vidchenko scoffed. “Captain, I’m fine. Like I said, it’s just a scratch.”
Keldysh’s voice was now sterner, imbued with the authority of rank and no small amount of frustration with himself. He’d known having his brother-in-law onboard was a stupid fucking idea. “Remember to whom you’re speaking Seaman Vidchenko!”
Vidchenko came to attention, the rabbit dangling comically at his side. “Yes, Senior Lieutenant!”
“At ease, seaman,” the captain reassured, his tone conveying nothing in the way of alarm, simply concern. “You’re bleeding. Permit me the decency of tending to one of my crew.”
Shortly, two crew members emerged from below deck: the doctor and one of the reactor engineers, a man wearing a lead apron and monstrous lead-lined gloves. Keldysh recognized him as Seaman Bochkaiy, a thick, brutish man of Hungarian descent famous among the crew for his tolerance to vodka and radiation.
“Give Comrade Bochkaiy the rabbit,” Keldysh ordered.
“It’s just a scratch,” Vidchenko echoed. “I don’t understand.”
Without expression, Bochkaiy received the rabbit from Vidchenko and disappeared with it at arm’s length. A plodding Frankenstein dumbly anticipating supper.
“Stop being a baby and give me your arm” said the doctor. From a small metal case, he produced a hypodermic no bigger than his little finger.
Doubt now crept into Vidchenko’s eyes. He withdrew his arm as if it was a poisonous snake the doctor held. “What is this, Rodya?”
“Seaman!” Keldysh’s voice cracked slightly, but he quickly regained his edge. Keldysh could hardly forget the timetables the army doctors had outlined. The incubation period took anywhere from twenty-four to ninety-six hours depending on the individual and a variety of secondary factors, most notably body temperature. If an infected subject could be kept “profoundly” hypothermic—that is, hovering just below 20 ˚C—it was possible to stretch the timeline. The problem was keeping the organism cold enough to delay its lifecycle enough without killing the host. Ivan burned hot; the freezer would have to be cranked all the way down just to compete with his infernal nature. But why anyone would want to prolong the inevitable was beyond comprehension. Ivan the Terrible was a death decree. This man with whom Keldysh had shared countless holidays and family occasions, this man whose infant daughters he had rocked to sleep—“Djadja Rody”to them—this man who made Aki belly laugh—his “little brother” Andrej—was a danger to him now, to every man onboard. Keldysh knew what had to be done; the KGB had imprinted the ghoulish contingency protocol on his soul. Keldysh had never thought of himself as a fool, but in this instance he had somehow lacked the foresight, enough simple imagination to see that such misfortune as this wasn’t so much coincidence, yet rather the natural consequence of his own stupidity. “The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. . . . And yet I know that one fate befalls them both.”He recited the familiar verse in his head, its words, he found, like so many of those borrowed from the Bible, as inevitable as was the sudden turn his destiny had taken. He now understood the bloody Rorschach marking Andrej’s hand: it was the face of doom.
“The doctor needs to give you antibiotics so the wound doesn’t become infected,” Keldysh urged him with a lying serpent’s grin. “Eli would cut off my balls if I brought you home foaming at the mouth lie a rabid dog.”
“It’s true,” said the doctor. He was a thin man with watery eyes and breath that smelled vaguely of diesel fuel. Keldysh believed him to be an alcoholic, or worse, and did not trust him either.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Vidchenko’s warm blue eyes were perplexed. He gently massaged his hand where he’d been bitten, smearing the blood into a pale pink Rorschach that he studied mutely, contemplating its hidden meaning. Keldysh saw the horror taking shape in his brother-in-law’s mind, a wisp of smoke coalescing in advance of a raging fire that would lay waste to everything it touched.
The doctor clucked his tongue nervously and looked to the captain for instructions.
“Look,” Keldysh reminded him forcefully. “I stuck my out neck to get you on the Vaslav. Don’t make this into issue we’ll both regret.”
“My girls,” Vidchenko whispered, as if it was they the bloody Rorschach had revealed.
“If it will make you feel better, I’ll give you the injection myself.” Keldysh fixated on the AK-47. If Vidchenko went mad now, icebergs would be the least of their worries. All he could think of was the grainy black and white photographs the army doctors had shown him. Oil rig workers murdered savagely and strung up by their intestines from the rafters of a small nondescript barracks somewhere on the ice. Accompanying the gore was an official framed portrait of Khrushchev hung on one of the walls. It was an old and faded photograph, and someone had penned in a long beard and bushy eyebrows so that he vaguely resembled Tolstoy.
“Enough!” the captain barked, his demeanor undergoing a profound and instantaneous transformation. “The clock is ticking.”
Vidchenko looked up to find the captain leveling a Makarov 9mm squarely between his eyes.
The doctor stopped mid-cluck, paling. “Captain,” he warned. “His blood—”
“Now,” the captain instructed Vidchenko coldly, “or I tell your wife we had you shot for treason.”
The Vaslav listed badly to one side, but no one seemed to notice. Keldysh’s heart thudded in his ears; his mouth was dry. Vidchenko complied, slowly extending his arm. His eyes locked onto Keldysh’s own and would not let go until the powerful sedative rendered him all but dead.
“Get him into the freezer before he wakes up,” the captain ordered. He squatted and studied the small wound on the back of Vidchenko’s hand. “Doesn’t look like much.”
t t t
Fifty-two hours had elapsed since the collision in the Ross Sea and the Vaslav was limping back to Vidyaevo as fast as her damaged stabilizer would allow. A wounded duck. Despite a direct order from Senior Lieutenant Keldysh to stay away from the freezer, Seaman Kalinin, the cook, could not resist the temptation. He had never seen a man frozen solid before. And although the entire crew could have easily survived on their dried and canned stores for the remainder of the voyage, he saw no reason to deprive himself of real food. This had nothing to do with disrespecting the dead as the lieutenant suggested when issuing the order; this was about eight double-cut lamb chops hidden in a package marked chicken livers. Kalinin had traded a pair of real American Levi’s for the delicacy and he wasn’t going to let the beautifully marbled meat go to waste. The Vaslav would have to undergo extensive repairs when they returned to port and you could bet that one ministry or another would be watching her like a hawk. The only way he would ever get the lamb chops off the damaged vessel was in his gut. He had been thinking about them for days. It was no accident that he was now too fat to wear the pants that had not long ago been the pride of his wardrobe. Comrade Vidchenko would understand; he, too, had been a born carnivore with an appetite for meat nearly as prodigious as Kalinin’s own. Of course no one had told him that Vidchenko wasn’t actually dead when they had locked him in the freezer . . . Heart attack—sudden, instantaneous death—was the official word being circulated around the Vaslav. And the rumors . . . Ridiculous ghost stories no more credible than the tales of sea monsters prowling the deep ocean trenches recounted by scared little tadpoles wetting their gills their first time out of port. As far as Kalinin was concerned, half of what you heard on a submarine was pure bullshit, and the other half was lies.
Aside from the obvious, his freezer was a mess. You would have thought the clumsy oafs who had stuck Vidchenko here had been grappling with a live gorilla and not a dead man. Much of what had been arranged neatly on the shelves—an assortment of vacuum-packed vegetables and brown paper-wrapped packages of meat—lay strewn about the floor. Fortunately, Kalinin had labeled each himself for ready identification. But it was Vidchenko’s corpse that now interested him.
This was not at all what he expected. First, there was Vidchenko’s position. Kalinin had expected him to be laid out flat on his back—like Lenin perhaps—a model of dignified repose. Not bunched up in the corner with his knees drawn tightly into his chest and his free arm wrapped about them in an icy hug. There was also the matter of the handcuffs. He couldn’t possibly fathom why anyone would go to the trouble of chaining down a dead man. If they were aboard a ship and contending with waves such precautions were common sense. On a surface vessel, as had been made eminently clear to him during their brief ascent from the abyss, anything that wasn’t secured was bound to end up in your lap. But down here. . . . He didn’t see the point.
Locating his beloved chicken livers was not going to be easy. Nothing was where he had put it. Days of meticulous organization had been undone in less than thirty minutes dancing with the waves. And now with Vidchenko’s corpse occupying a good two-thirds of the floor space, there was scarcely enough room for Kalinin to bend over let alone conduct a thorough search. He cursed the idiots responsible and began sifting through the mess.
It was cold and his fingers ached and he became more frustrated with each moment his prize did not turn up. At first, he had returned the packages neatly to the shelves, however before long he was stuffing them anywhere they would fit. By the time he reached the bottom of the pile, unearthing Vidchenko’s half-buried legs in the process, Kalinin was ready to pull out his hair.
“Gahhh!”
And then he saw them—six or seven packages jammed beneath the bottom shelf behind Vidchenko. Until now he had done his best to show the deceased proper respect, but respect was no longer an option. Lamb, not the stringy impossible-to-chew mutton the butcher near his home peddled to the unwary, but juicy melt-in-your-mouth lamb . . . Vidchenko wouldn’t dream of denying him the pleasure. Too fat to be delicate, Kalinin wedged himself alongside Vidchenko and managed to coax one of the brown packages from the awkward niche: pork loin. He grabbed another: sausage. The third package was further back—he had a good feeling about this one—so it was necessary for him to reposition himself. He was now practically sitting in Vidchenko’s lap, his ear mere inches from the dead man’s blue lips as he groped blindly for his prize.
It was faint, virtually imperceptible—a hoarse scraping emanating from somewhere deep within Vidchenko’s throat—but he had definitely heard it: a whisper. Kalinin shivered but not from the cold. It was as if an insect had scurried out of the dead man’s mouth and into his ear. It was now loose inside his head and he could not get rid of it. He nearly wrenched his arm out of the socket trying to escape. Terrified, he had crabbed backwards into the freezer door, and remained there crouching on his heels in disbelief, pain stabbing at his shoulder.
“Vidchenko, you fucking bastard! You scared the shit out of me!”
But there was nothing. No response, not even a twitch. Vidchenko just sat there, knees drawn into his chest, no less dead-looking than before.
“Vidchenko . . . If you’re alive, say something! I’ll get the doctor.” Kalinin’s warm breath encircled his head like a ghost.
Still, there was no reply. Maybe he had imagined it after all. Maybe the months of isolation beneath the waves were finally starting to take a toll. A day was an awfully long time to spend locked in a freezer. By now, Vidchenko’s heart was probably harder than a diamond and about as useful when it came to pumping blood through his veins. One more chance—that’s all Kalinin would give him.
“You’d better say something or I’m going to close the door and forget about you,” he warned. “I’ll let you die in here!”
Vidchenko responded as if he had been zapped with a defibrillator. A nervous jolt rattled him from head to toe, jump-starting his brain. One eye was frozen shut, but the other snapped open—luminous and milky white—and settled on Kalinin. Vidchenko tried to speak but the words stuck in his throat like dead leaves, used up and well on their way to becoming dust. After a moment of just sitting there—his one turbid eye staring blankly into space—he attempted to straighten out his legs. At first they were unresponsive. Slowly, however, his mind tapped into the proper nerve impulses, and with incomprehensible effort he uncoiled himself from his semi-fetal position at the rear of the freezer. Pain underscored every movement. The herky-jerky pantomime that ensued was both pathetic and terrifying. He flopped around lamely like a marionette in the hands of a rank amateur, straining toward Kalinin with all his strength. He tired quickly though, and gave up when he noticed that he was chained to the shelf.
“I’ll get the doctor,” Kalinin stammered, crossing himself. “Everything’s going to be all right. Hang on!” He was propping open the freezer door with a large frozen roast when Vidchenko stopped him in his tracks.
“Please . . .” he rasped, rattling the handcuff and breathing the same frantic insect back into Kalinin’s ear. “Get this off of me . . . I’ll die in here.”
Vidchenko was quaking with cold. Kalinin could hardly look at him. No man should have to suffer this way. He felt as if it was he who was somehow to blame.
“I don’t have the key!” Kalinin shouted. He grabbed his heaviest apron, the one he used for butchering meat, from its hook near the freezer door and covered Vidchenko with it as best he could.
“You don’t understand . . .” Vidchenko rambled on deliriously. “They want to kill me—that’s why they put me in here!”
“You had a heart attack—they thought you were dead!”
“That’s a lie!” Vidchenko wailed feebly. “The rabbit bit me . . . I’ll show you . . . Look—look at my hand!” He tried to raise his right arm but the handcuff stopped him short and he sank back, defeated. “Ple-e-e-ease . . .” he whimpered, “Please don’t leave me . . .”
Rabbit? There were no rabbits onboard. Vidchenko had obviously been in the cold too long; his brain was freezer-burned and there was nothing in the world anyone could do to fix it. But at least Kalinin could offer him peace of mind.
He kept a large cleaver in the kitchen that came in especially handy when he prepared oxtails for the crew. If he could hack through bone with it, there was a chance he could hack through a thin steel chain. After several whacks at it, though, he gave up. The blade simply wasn’t sharp enough to sever the high tensile steel. The stale icy air scorched his lungs. Panicking, he pressed the cleaver into Vidchenko’s frozen left hand and bent his comrade’s rigid fingers into the shape of a fist around the handle. It was a miracle none snapped off in the process.
“There. You keep trying,” said Kalinin, starting out the freezer door. “If I’m not back in a minute,” he called over his shoulder, “you can cut out my heart.” He heard the ring of the steel blade strike the chain as he bolted down the companionway toward the tube that would take him to the bridge.
Less than two minutes later, Kalinin returned with Senior Lieutenant Keldysh and an armed security detail breathing down his neck. Kalinin had never seen the crew in such a heightened state of alert. Not even when they played deadly games of cat and mouse hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface with their American counterparts was their tension so apparent. Fear unsettled the thin veneer of courage and self-control each man onboard wore as if it was no less a requirement of the uniform than rank insignia.
“What in God’s name have you done, cook!” Senior Lieutenant Keldysh roared at Kalinin with malicious disdain as they arrived at the open freezer. “If any of us make it off of this boat alive, I will personally lead your firing squad!”
As for Vidchenko . . . Only bits and pieces remained. Butcher scraps. A partial fingertip, a few frozen hunks of flesh and bone splintered about the bottom of the freezer like wood chips. Nearby lay a severed hand hacked off at the wrist oozing blood as thick as tree sap. Two small puncture wounds marked the back of it. The cleaver was nowhere to be seen.
“Radio Moscow,” Keldysh muttered to no one in particular, though he was looking at—through, rather—Kalinin. Despite the hell bent sprint from the bridge to get here, the blood had left his face and he was now the color of congealed bacon fat. “Tell them we’re a ghost ship.”