Operation: North Sea

- 4 -

Banks listened without speaking while Wiggo reported on his conversation with the cook.

“And you don’t think he’s having us on?” he asked when the corporal finished.

“No, Cap. I think I trust him a damned sight more than the bag of wind upstairs.”

Banks spoke quietly, as if to himself.

“And it fits Seton’s story better than the brush off that was given to us earlier. I think it’s time I had another wee word with the man up top. You hold the fort here, Wiggo. The sarge and I will go and see if the boss man wants to change his story.”

“I’ll tag along too,” Seton said. “The big fart owes me an apology.”

“You going tooled, Cap?” Wiggo said, nodding towards the kit bag where the rifles were stowed.

Banks patted the pistol at his hip.

“This will do for now. We’ll be back in half an hour. Don’t get up to any mischief.”

“You ken me, Cap.”

“Aye. That’s what I’m worried about.”

By the time the three of them arrived outside the manager’s office, they were soaked through. The trip across on the walkway had been a hair-raising one, Wiggo’s earlier comparison with a roller-coaster being even more apt now that the wind and swell had gone up another notch and horizontal rain lashed into their faces. But there was a stout guard rail to hold on to and they were never in any real danger. Likewise, the elevator clanked and creaked alarmingly in the wind but Banks reckoned it had seen plenty of such journeys in this kind of weather and worse so wasn’t worried for their safety. All the same, they were all soaked through and dripping wet in the corridor when he raised his fist and rapped, hard, three times on the manager’s door.

“Come in,” the voice shouted from the other side.

As they entered, Banks closed the door behind them and turned to see that the big man behind the desk was most definitely unhappy.

“Well, I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” he said to Banks. “Because of waiting for you in Aberdeen, the supply boat was late arriving. Now it’s stuck here, and it’ll be moored up for the duration of the storm. On top of that there’s a load of new supplies waiting back at port, some of it perishable foodstuff. It’s a fucking logistical nightmare in the making. And it’s your bloody fault, listening to fucking fairy stories and nonsense. A grown man like you… you should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Sorry to have inconvenienced you,” Banks said, keeping his voice calm but making sure his tone implied exactly the opposite. “But your logistical problems don’t concern me. What does concern me is what you did to make McLeod change his story when you had him in here last night.”

“Christ. It didn’t take long for you to shove your nose into my business, did it? Change his story? That was simple. All it took was to sober him up.”

“Aye, that and a bloody miracle worker,” Banks said sharply, allowing his voice to rise for the first time. “You must be, if you can sober up a tee-totaller.” He saw the man’s face drop. “You didn’t know, and you didn’t bother to check. You hectored and bullied him, didn’t you? Threatened to give him the sack, I’d guess. Did you tell him he’d be on the first boat home? You don’t give a fuck about your crew, do you? You were only worried about your bottom line.”

“That’s all I’m paid to worry about,” Smith replied, but now there was a petulant whine in his voice, like a kid after being caught misbehaving.

“Never mind about that. What else did you learn from the man that you haven’t told us? Just tell us what you really know about this creature. Either that or fetch McLeod here and I’ll ask him myself.”

“Creature? There is no bloody creature,” Smith replied, more sure of his ground. “Drunk or not, McLeod couldn’t have seen what he said he’d seen. It’s just not possible.”

It was Seton who replied.

“And yet I’m here to tell you that it is.”

“You?” Smith laughed. “You’re a nutter. There are no beasties, no monsters, you deluded old fuck.”

Banks spoke up softly.

“If he’s a deluded fuck, then so are we, for we’ve seen some of his ‘beasties’. Killed them even. That’s why we’re here. We’re what you might call experts, although my corporal prefers the term ‘monster magnets’.”

Smith looked from Banks to Seton and back again and Banks saw both confusion and doubt in the man’s eyes.

“Look,” Banks said. “Seton here really is an expert. The top brass believes him, we believe him, so you’d better start at least considering the idea, before it’s too late for everybody on this rig.”

Before Smith could reply, the floor shifted suddenly beneath them and the walls rang with an impact, as if something had hit the rig hard.

“What was that?” Banks said.

“The supply boat at a guess,” Smith replied, reaching for the waterproof that hung behind his seat. “From the sound of that hit, she’s slipped her moorings in the storm. That’s all we fucking need.”

They followed the rig manager out into the storm.

At first, Banks wasn’t sure what they were seeing when they looked down at the dock from their high vantage. The water beneath them seethed and roiled, too violently even accounting for the storm. The supply boat had indeed broken from its moorings and lurched sickeningly up and down from fore to aft, splashing hard with each move and raising washes of water across the dock.

Then they saw, or at least caught glimpses, of the cause of the commotion. Something huge moved beneath the boat, silver and gold and green all at once, moving in sinuous waves to and fro as if searching for something.

“Still think there’s no beastie?” Seton shouted in the manager’s face. “What the fuck do you call that then?”

The rig manager called out, a cry of alarm that was immediately lost in the wind as the thing below the supply boat surged upward, a great maw gaping, filled with teeth, wider by far than the boat itself, engulfing the small vessel completely inside its mouth as the jaws closed on it. The last thing they saw as the beast fell away back into the water was a burst of bubbling froth on the water and the shimmering flesh of the thing’s flanks flashing silver, just once before it sank into the depths below the rig and all went quiet.

The next ten minutes was all chaos and panic. Banks saw that Wiggo had brought the other squad members up top of the floatel, but there was nothing the team could really do but watch as the rig manager directed rescue lifeboats out into the storm, a risky maneuver in its own right, and one that reaped no rewards. It quickly became clear that the supply boat had been lost with all hands. The only evidence it had been there at all was some debris floating on the surface, and even that was being rapidly dissipated in the waves.

Banks waved to Wiggo, motioning that he should take the others back inside out of the storm then followed the manager back up to the second floor once they knew further searching was hopeless.

They held a conclave in the manager’s office.

“What are you planning to do now?” Banks asked.

“There were twelve men on that boat,” Smith said. He was pale in the face, on the verge of shock. “I knew them all. Most of them were at my birthday party last year.”

Seton produced his hip flask and offered it to Smith.

“Hell, I’ll need more than that,” he said, went to his desk and produced a large bottle of Bells that he drank straight from the neck for several seconds before turning to Banks. “You asked what I plan to do now? You’re the experts, you tell me. What the fuck can we do now?”

“Shut up,” Seton said.

“Let the man speak, he’s had a shock,” Hynd said.

“No, I mean, be quiet. Listen.”

It was only when they all stopped talking that Banks heard it and at first, he took it for a trick of the wind before he realised there was a tonal quality to it that sounded almost like a bagpipe drone.

Seton spoke and Banks recognised it as a quote from the sheet of paper he’d read from earlier, the record from a thousand years before.

“It sang, a mournful thing like a dirge, as if in sorrow at the carnage it wrought.”