Snakehead

Prologue

Half an hour ago a frozen sun shone in the palest of clear blue skies. Pink faces were wrapped against a temperature of minus forty degrees centigrade, tiny coloured ice particles dancing in clouded breath. Now the sky has darkened, suddenly and out of nowhere, wind shaving the peaks off seventy-foot pressure ridges driven up by colliding floes. The weather window has narrowed with the unpredictable Arctic winter and there is an urgency in the figures, thickened by twenty pounds of bright red protective clothing, who crowd the ice. For while the dead will wait forever, the living know that life is short.

Petrels circle the icebreaker, plaintive cries whipped away on the edge of a wind that tugs ever more fiercely at the walls of the decontamination tent. The steel cables of the lift-arm whine and scream as the ice shifts and the submarine cants slightly to its port side where the supports they have laboured so hard to put in place prevent it from toppling back to its icy grave. A frozen crust has attached itself already to the soft orange coral accumulated along its hull.

From the tent, five figures emerge in slow motion, like spacemen negotiating a moonscape, clumsy and encumbered by their protective STEPO outfits. Beneath, they are encased in tear-resistant thermal body suits. Filtered air blows down over the faces of The Team, pale and anxious, peering out from behind clear, curved faceplates. Each of them has brought his or her own discipline to The Project: microbiology, virology, medicine, medical archaeology, pathology. Nearly twelve months of planning are nearing their moment of fruition. The tension of The Team is palpable.

‘We all live in an orange submarine, orange submarine…’ Dr. Ruben’s tuneless voice crackles in their headsets.

‘Shut up, Philip!’ Dr. Catherine Oxley’s voice carries the authority of the Team Leader, but it is also tight with stress. She wonders why it is that all the pathologists she has known share the same juvenile sense of humour.

The Seadragon looms over them. At first, when the vessel was raised from the water, Catherine had been surprised at how small she seemed, how it was possible that twenty-two men had once lived and worked — and died — aboard her. Now she seems huge, rising up out of the ice like the carcass of some giant beached mother whale with twenty-two Jonahs in her belly.

They clamber up the scaffolding erected by the crew, thickly gloved hands emerging from red sleeves reaching out to help them at each step. Everything is coated in ice and treacherous underfoot. Each movement is meticulously, painfully slow. As they climb the conning tower they can see the muzzles of the four torpedo tubes slightly proud of the foremost bulkhead. The engine-room hatch is rusted solid and no attempt has been made to open it. A sheet-metal screen around the chariot bridge is almost eaten through. The mounting behind it where the portable wireless aerial would have been disassembled prior to diving for the last time, is obscured by more than eighty years of accumulated coral. The main hatch has been cleaned off and shot with lubricating fluid and anti-freeze, but remains unopened.

Catherine watches as Dr. Ruben and Professor Marlowe get stiffly down on their knees and grasp the handwheel that locks the hatch in place. To their surprise it turns almost easily. The crew have done a fine job. But prising it loose from its seal proves more difficult. Dr. Arnold squeezes on to the bridge to help. Catherine looks away for a moment at the detritus of The Project littering the ice, at the red-suited crewmen, like slashes of blood against the white, standing in groups looking on, many of them just kids, student volunteers. Funding had been a nightmare. And she looks at the sky, almost black now, and knows that they have an hour, maybe less.

In almost twenty years of medical archaeology she has recovered many bodies from many graves. But for the first time she feels an uneasiness about the opening of this unintended tomb, and tries hard not to visualise the horrors she expects to find locked in its dark interior.

She turns back as the hatch finally breaks free, and gases escape with a moan from inside, making all the hairs rise up on the back of her neck.

They stand there for a moment, staring into the inky blackness, before Catherine snaps on her flashlight and picks out the rungs of the ladder that will take them down into the body of the submarine. She manoeuvres herself carefully to make the descent. At the bottom there is nearly a foot of water. Although the Seadragon was never holed, the salt water has, over all the years, eaten its way through rivets and joints, slowly seeping in to violate her icy sanctity. The air is steamy cold and fetid and Catherine is glad she does not have to breathe it in. She is aware of The Team following behind her, flashlights holding moisture in their beams, bringing light to decades of darkness. Catherine moves forward into the battery compartment. She points her flashlight up at the capstan and windlass motor above her head, then pans down and starboard to pick out the crewmen’s personal lockers. She has conducted a virtual tour of this Canadian-built H-boat submarine many times, but the reality is very different. She turns, knowing that she is moving into the Chief and PO’s mess, and is unable to prevent a small scream escaping her lips as a mummified face peers up at her from the table, pasty white, with shrivelled eyes and sunken nose, the dark staining of blood and vomit, like a shadow, still visible about the mouth. The uniform is preserved almost intact, but where the feet and lower legs have been in the water, the flesh is long gone, leaving the bones pale and white and washed clean.

‘Jesus…’ She hears Marlowe’s whispered oath from the fore-ends and turns back, wading quickly forward to see, in the criss-crossing shafts of light, the shrunken bodies of the ship’s crew swaying gently, silently, in hammocks rigged in the torpedo tube and stowage area. They are wrapped in blankets and coats, the horrors of a death that took them without mercy nearly a century before, frozen on their faces, like their beards and moustaches, for eternity. She shivers, wrestling in her mind with a sense of foreboding, knowing that the disease that took these men so horribly is certain to return, one way or another. It is only a matter of time.