block. If they moved quickly they might just survive.
He brushed past Vasili, driving for the pilothouse. Before he could open the door, something slammed into the boat again, but this time the blow was sharp, a solid impact, rolling the boat ten degrees or more.
He shouted to his crew. “Reverse, reverse! Get us the hell out of here.”
The engines rumbled beneath the deck and Star began to back up, but another impact shoved the bow to the right, crashing it into the ice floe.
Yanking the door open, Petrov went for the wheel and pushed a crewman aside. His hand found the throttles and moved the engines from a quarter astern to half.
“Something hit us!” the crewman shouted.
“Ice, moving on the currents,” Petrov said, strangely certain that he was wrong.
The impact had been powerful, deliberate, more like an intentional ramming. He began to think about the orcas and the sharks.
Vasili stumbled back inside the bridge. “It could have been a submarine,” he said. “Remember the FSB.”
Petrov thought of their cargo and the importance it was deemed to hold. Agents of the FSB, the Russian successor to the old KGB, had hunted them for weeks, trailing them across much of Siberian Russia. No doubt they were still looking, but a submarine, a ramming? Perhaps it made sense; certainly they would not risk destroying the vessel with a torpedo.
He spun the wheel, bringing the nose of the vessel around. After swinging through ninety degrees, he shoved the throttles forward. The boat began accelerating, bulling its way through the ice, pushing toward gaps of black sea, spots of open water where he could make better time.
If they could just …
Another impact caught the boat, jarring it to the right, lifting the bow and then dropping it. The hull couldn’t take much more.
Petrov gunned the throttles, grinding the metal hull and risking the props.
“Captain, you have to slow down,” the crewman said.
“One mile!” he shouted back. “Then we’ll slow.”
But even before he finished the words, a crushing impact hit on the port side. An alarm began ringing as water flooded in.
“Get everyone topside!” Petrov yelled.
The crewman shouted something back to him, but the alarm drowned it out.
“Maybe we should make a distress call,” Vasili said.
Petrov glanced at him. “Too late now.”
A voice shouted from the deck. “Akula!”
It was the Russian word for shark. Petrov glanced out the window and saw a dark shape slicing through the black water toward them. It hit them below the water-line and Petrov was thrown to the floor by the impact.
Another blow followed, stronger and heavier, multiple thuds, likes fists pounding on a door. The sharks were slamming themselves into the hull, ramming it like living torpedoes, hitting the boat with such force that they had to be injuring themselves.
“What the hell is happening?” Vasili yelled.
Petrov could not fathom it. He had never heard of such a thing. It was as if some sort of madness had infected them.
He glanced to starboard. They were about to hit the ice.
“Hold on!”
The ship slammed into the ice shelf, then recoiled from the impact. It rocked wickedly in one direction and then back in the other. For a brief instant it rolled to a level beam before beginning to list.
“Abandon ship!” Petrov shouted. “Abandon ship!”
The order was unnecessary. The men were already near the stern, readying the lifeboat. He counted five men there. Only Vasili and the crewman beside him were missing. And their passenger.
“Go!” he shouted. “Go now!”
As they pushed through the hatch, Petrov charged below deck.
Dropping into the swirling water, his feet went instantly numb. He waded to a closed cabin door and pulled the key he’d taken from Vasili. He unlocked the door and forced it open.
Inside, sitting cross-legged on a bunk, was a twelve-year-old-boy with a round face and dark hair. His features were indistinct. He could have been European, or Russian, or Asian.
“Yuri!” Petrov shouted. “Come to me!”
The boy ignored him, chanting and rocking back and forth.
Petrov charged forward, lunging and grabbing the child off the bunk. He slung him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and then turned toward the door, just as another impact rocked the boat.
The Star groaned as it took on water. Petrov braced himself against the wall that now leaned at a twenty-degree angle. Regaining his balance, he fought his way out into the hall.
With Yuri clinging to his neck, Petrov fought against the rushing water and made it to the stairs. He clambered onto them, dragging himself and the child upward,