Hunter Killer - Alex King Series 12 (2021)

with the rifle next to him.

Chapter Six
 
King checked his phone. The message just gave a time only. He had memorised the coordinates back in London, all that needed confirming was the time, and now he had that. He deleted the message and slipped the phone back into his pocket. Within less than a mile of driving, King knew he would have to abandon all thoughts of driving the pickup and find a snowmobile to complete his journey, so he turned around and headed back into town. The plan had been hastily put together, time being the overriding factor, and now he wondered what else he had overlooked, besides the near impossible task of boarding a submarine at a depth of over two thousand feet in Arctic waters and setting off charges before an international salvage team could attempt to bring it up to the surface. The more he thought about the mission, the more he felt he was doomed to fail. His motivation had been solely to discover what had happened after he had delivered a terrified woman to a submarine waiting for her underneath the ice of a fjord, and of course, keeping samples of the virus out of the hands of the Russians, and he had not given much thought to the environment he was operating in. The cold was savage, biting. Any exposed skin turned numb after less than a minute, and his clothing made movement both cumbersome and slow. He had bought the dry-suit and diving equipment he would need in case he could not get the submersible docked, but at that depth he would need trimix breathing gas of 10/70/20, that is 10% oxygen, 70% helium and 20% nitrogen. Naturally, the salvage divers would have the facility to mix their own gases dependent on the depth they were diving, but King was certainly no expert and deep diving required a team. The thought of piloting the mini sub was certainly more appealing, and in truth if he indeed had to dive, then he felt it was bordering on the very real prospect of becoming a suicide mission.
King pulled down his left glove at the wrist and checked his watch. The light was misleading. It was getting dark and still not yet three-thirty-pm. The locals had recently emerged from three months of darkness, so they would no doubt be in good spirits, but he had heard that the three months of daylight they would experience in the summer months was just as depressing as the months of darkness, with people working too many hours to get tasks done that would otherwise be difficult in darkness and colder temperatures and sleeping in perpetual light could take its toll as they suffered from insomnia. He pulled up at the hotel and saw the row of snowmobiles to the left beside a small convenience store. King parked up and got out, slinging the rifle over his shoulder on the leather sling strap. The cold air attacked his face and neck, and he pulled the collar up higher. He trudged up the steps, dusted with icy powder that looked like icing sugar. It was neither snow, nor ice and felt dry and grippy underfoot. It was like no snow he had seen before, and he realised why the Inuit people had a hundred different words for the various types of snow and ice.
There was a young woman of around twenty at the counter. King wondered what life held for a young person on the island. Whether they got out straight after university, of which he knew there to be a small campus, or if they remained and lived full and happy lives. Island living was one thing, but artic living was quite another. Put the two together with three months of daylight and three months of darkness, and an average summer temperature of just 5ºC with winters down to as low as -40ºC, then he saw it more as merely existing than living.
“Hi, do you rent out snowmobiles?” he asked.
The woman nodded, then replied in faultless English, but with a heavy Norwegian  accent, “Yes. I need to see your passport and drivers’ licence and take a five-hundred-euro deposit,” she paused. “We don’t actually take it from the card unless you damage the skidoo.”
“Great.” King walked cumbersomely over to her, propped the rifle against the counter and set about hunting for his wallet hidden somewhere within the many layers of thermal clothing.
“Are you from the research team?” she asked, seeming to study him intently.
King almost replied no but checked himself in time. “Yes. I’m a marine engineer,” he said, finding the statement somewhat bizarre and alien to him.
“For the submarine?” she asked but didn’t wait for his reply. “How exciting…”
“Yeah…”
She put a cross on a triplicate sheet and waited for him to hand her his card. When she took it, she slipped it into the PDQ terminal and tore off the permission slip when it printed out. She handed the copy to King, then placed the pen for him to sign where she had marked the crosses. “I hope you can return those poor sailors to their families,” she said quietly. “Finally put them to rest…”
“Yeah,” King replied hesitantly. Until the discovery of the vessel, the families had assumed they had still been on patrol, blissfully unaware of their demise. The submarine service was clandestine, with the crew not having contact with the outside world. Their only communication was a fortnightly one-hundred-and-twenty-word message, referred to as a FamGram, to which they could not reply. King felt treacherous somehow, guilt-ridden. The Royal Navy had played the long game, hedging their bets that there was a communication problem with the vessel, or at least hiding behind the fact until they traced their missing submarine. The story had gotten out and people empathised with the families, sympathised with the crew and their terrible fate. The top naval brass had