Fifty-Eight

JAKE WAITED UNTIL Zhang had mounted the steps and returned inside the boat before he moved. He could see Gunter’s discarded oar still floating some way away. He was being pushed towards the shore, and so was the oar, but the oar had a considerable head start. He crawled to the front corder of the raft, and leaning over the side he started to paddle. His movement was severely restricted by the pain in his side. He felt pathetic, splashing his hand in the water ineffectively. Every stroke was agony, and not only did not seem to bring him any closer to his immediate goal of the oar, also took him further away from the ship in terms of time. He knew the longer he took to reach the paddle, the less chance of ever catching the Spirit of Arcadia. So he kept on paddling like a puppy at sea.

When fatigue almost overcame him, and he was forced to his knees to relieve the pressure on his ribs, something remarkable happened. The oar appeared to stop dead in the water. It was no longer advancing, he was actually gaining on it, and without any effort on his own part. The wake of the bow thruster alone was propelling him forwards, but not the oar. Within a minute he was almost on top of it. He could see the reason it wasn’t moving. It was caught against one of the submerged pieces of pier. A jagged triangle of concrete and steel poking through the surface of the fjord like a spring shoot. Jagged, and very sharp. Easily capable, Jake realised with horror, of puncturing an inflatable life raft.

He hurled himself forwards, bouncing on the front inflated section sending a surge of pain through his side. With arms outstretched, he tried to grab the oar with one hand while simultaneously pushing off from the fragment of pier. His left hand closed around the shaft of the oar and he pulled it out of the water, threw it over his head and heard it land on the rubber bottom of the raft behind him. At the same time, a spur of reinforcing steel jutting from the smashed concrete caught him in the middle of his right hand, reopening the wound created during his battle with Ibsen. Blood gushed from the tear in his skin, but he couldn’t let the pain distract him from his task. With both hands, he pushed off from the pier with all the force he could muster. The raft floated away from the obstacle. Jake scramble to the other end, clambering over inflated air chambers that were designed to add buoyancy and redundancy and also to provide somewhere to sit. He collected up the oar on his way. Reaching the end, he started paddling furiously. The ship was now a considerable distance away and was executing a turn. The raft began to move, but by paddling only on one side it was not only advancing but also turning to the left. He shuffled on his knees to the right hand side, lowered the oar into the water and began paddling again, bringing the the craft back straight, and then round to the right. Shuffling back to the left hand side he repeated the operation. But it was no good. One man alone could not paddle fast enough. And a man with at least one broken rib, and who was losing blood through the gash in his hand, stood no chance. Jake fell back onto his back, splashing down into the water that was still swilling around in the bottom of the raft, and roared.

“Nooo! Lucya!”

His cries and screams carried across the water, bounced off the sloping remains of Longyearbyen, and echoed back out over the fjord. Jake was beaten.

In the distance, the Spirit of Arcadia had turned one hundred and eighty degrees, and was sailing towards the mouth of the fjord, and the open sea.

Fifty-Nine

23 HOURS LATER

Jake opened his eyes, frightened. Something had made a sound. This was odd, because since he had seen the ship sail out of the fjord and head south, there hadn’t been any sign of life, at all. No birds. No butterflies, or moths. No sea lions, or polar bears. Not even any fish. And certainly no people. The world was dead, and he had accepted that he was going to die here too. The wake from the ship and the current in the fjord had carried him further east, away from the open sea. There was no broken pier here, and no pulverised town. Just steep sloping hills on either side. Grey hills, thick with toxic ash. Nowhere to go on land, nowhere to go at sea. Jake was beaten and he knew it.

He had tried to make himself as comfortable as he could given the circumstances. He had succeeded in removing most of the water between two of the parallel inflatable sausage benches, making a third of the raft more or less dry. The wind had changed direction and was now blowing up the fjord, the mountains to either side offered no protection. So he had unrolled the bright orange hood and erected that, giving him some degree of shelter. A bright pink buoy had fallen out of the folds of the hood as he had unfurled it. It looked like it had been punctured and hastily repaired with silicone. He’d wedged it into the corner between the outer air chamber and an inflatable bench, and used it as a head rest. Staying down low, curled up, he was able to conserve a little body heat despite his wet clothes and the icy conditions. He’d even managed to go to sleep for a while.

But then there had been the noise, loud enough to rouse him from his slumber. He pushed the orange cover back down into the raft, got to his knees, and scanned the landscape in every direction. Nothing moved except the water, rippling in the wind. Had he dreamt the sound, he wondered? Maybe it was the dehydration causing his mind to play tricks on him. When had he last eaten, had anything to drink? He had no idea. He’d beed adrift for hours, perhaps days? And before that he had hardly eaten on board. His mind wandered. How would he die here, what would kill him first? The cold? Or the hunger? Maybe a combination of both. Perhaps he should try and get to the land. Choose his own demise rather than let fate decide. He had options. The toxic ash could finish him off. The memory of Stacy writhing in agony flashed before his eyes. Too painful. He could deliberately drown himself, that would seem fitting for a sailor. But he knew he’d never have the courage to go through with it. The survival instinct was too strong.

There it was again, the noise. Jake snapped his head around in the direction he thought it had come from. He hadn’t imagined it, he had definitely heard something that time. A splash. Something in the water. Not loud, but its effect was amplified a thousand times by a total absence of any other sound.

Jake strained his eyes, stared at the water where he thought the sound had emanated from. Was it a fish? No, he didn’t think so. But there was something there. Something black, protruding from the surface, It was about a hundred metres away, small, difficult to see. He considered the possibilities; a fin of some kind? But it didn’t seem to be moving. Perhaps another piece of the pier, or other wreckage? But he had drifted a long way from Longyearbyen, he couldn’t image there would be any wreckage this far out. Whatever it was, Jake had a strange feeling that it was watching him. His curiosity was intense. If there was something alive over there, he had to find out what. He positioned himself in the tapered front of the raft, picked up his only oar, and began paddling towards the mystery excrescence. It was slow going. Two strokes. Pull the paddle out of the water. Shuffle to the right. Put the paddle in the water. Two strokes. Pull the paddle out. Shuffle to the left. All the time he had his eyes fixed on the mystery object. Inexplicably, it appeared to be growing. Rising out of the water. Where previously it had looked like it was maybe thirty or forty centimetres, now it was over a metre. It looked suspiciously like a head on a stick. Were those eyes? They certainly looked like eyes, but they weren’t aligned properly, weren’t symmetrical.