I took note of the others in the room and melted into the shadows, retreating at speed to the hull I’d ascended to board the boat.
Climbing down was more arduous. I tucked my flippers under my arm and channelled my inner Poet Whitlock, freezing every time voices or light threatened my invisibility cloak, until my feet hit frigid water again.
I submerged my body and took a second to centre myself before I dove and swam back to Alexei, but a sweeping beam of light cut my meditation short and I ducked under with half the oxygen I needed.
Underwater swimming was my ninja skill. There’d been times in my life when I could swim for six minutes on one breath. But I was out of practice and stressed, and by the time I reached Alexei, my lungsburned.
I wedged the respirator into my mouth, drawing on every ounce of restraint to force myself to inhale calmly, expanding my lungs one slow breath at a time while Alexei took the weight of everything we carried and me.
It took longer to dispel the dizziness than I was happy about, but we didn’t have time to worry about it. I flashed Alexei a thumbs up and pointed at the trawler.
It wason.
We swapped our tanks, distributed our gear, and got moving. Distortion in the water told me it had begun to rain again, but we still had time to outrun the worst of it.
We swam hard for the boat, me in front, Alexei behind, attached to me by a rope. It meant I bore his weight when his pace dropped, but we’d trained for this. I had him.
The trawler came up faster now I had air in my lungs, and we took our second huge risk of the night. We separated. But this time I wasn’t leaving Alexei in the relative safety of open sea. I was passing him a net of TNT and sending him around the front of the boat while I rigged the wider rear.
There was no time for sentiment. We knocked fists and swam away from each other, blocking out the possibility that anything and everything could still go wrong. And if it did, there was every chance we’d go down with the ship.
I worked methodically around the boat, adding to the groundwork we’d laid over the last few days and weeks, attaching explosives to every location I’d earmarked when we’d hatched an elementary version of this plan this last winter. A lot had changed since then—in practical terms and ones less tangible—but the fundamentals had remained: seek and destroy. A frame of mind that kept my hands moving, working fast, then pushed me on to meet Alexei in the middle.
I knew he’d take longer. I clung to the underside of the boat and waited, shaking my tense muscles out, checking my tank. Checking the time. Alexei’s radar scrambler was on a countdown. If anything held us up here, we had a limited window to escape before we blew anyone who spotted us into the night sky.
We have enough air.
I held onto that thought until I sensed movement in the water.
Alexei appeared like a ghost. With the respirator wedged in his mouth, his expression was hard to read, but he flashed me the golden signal.
Thumbs up.We were locked and loaded. All that was left was to bolt and press the magic button.
The kill switch was attached to my waist. I gripped it for luck and pushed away from the boat, diving deep again on the off chance that the radar scrambler had already failed, taking every precaution while we still had time. And we did have time, just, if we swam like hell.
We’d been under long enough that we were starting to falter, the cold and exertion levels a tough match for the adrenaline we needed to keep going. Brain fog filtered into my senses. Halfway back to the boat, I realised we’d forgotten to swap our tanks for the third set we’d secured to the guide rope.
It’s fine. We have enough air.
But fretting over it gave me the worst feeling a man could ever have underwater—panic, a feeling that wasn’t fact.But the tightness in my chest was. The throb in my head. My body was giving me a message: it’d had enough. But the boat was still seventy metres away.
I swam harder, dragging Alexei with me, gripping the rope, holding out for that moment where the slack changed, signalling the boat was close enough for us to begin decompression stops.
Then I felt a sharp tug on my hand. A frantic pull that turned me around.
Eyes wild, Alexei pointed to the valve on his tank. It had hit the red. Either his equipment had malfunctioned or he was running out of air.
Maybe the panic squeezing my heart was his, a strange thought as I gripped his wrist and tugged him closer to me, holding him firm so he wouldn’t drift away.
I checked my tank. I was still safe, but barely.
It was a split-second decision to swap with him. Alexei was a machine. His endurance had surprised me more times than I could count. But running out of oxygen at this stage of a long cold dive was too much, even for him.
Despite his protests, I pushed my respirator into his mouth and took his in mine.
Fatigue and my overactive imagination made the air from his tank taste thin and weak.We need to surface.Before I lost my mind entirely and drowned us both.
Keeping hold of him, I shoved on, driving my body harder than ever, locked in a fight for survival I already knew was going to bleed out long after we broke through the cold waves above us.
