Operation: North Sea

- 8 -

Banks watched the rain lash against the window. He had men lost out there in the storm and there was little he could do about it. The thought of it was driving him mad with frustration, and it was all he could manage to retain his calm. When the radio squawked, he almost jumped in the air.

The operator turned and handed him the mike.

“It’s your guys, for you.”

“The floatel,” he said, hope momentarily leaping in his chest.

“Sorry, sir. No, the mainland.”

It was the colonel again, and he sounded fierce, as if he’d just been giving someone a bollocking. Banks knew the tone well of old and was glad it wasn’t being directed at him this time for it was strong enough to strip paint.

“I put a rocket up Air Sea Rescue’s arse,” his superior officer said. “They’re going to have choppers in the air within the hour; they asked for volunteers and got plenty so at least somebody’s showing some spunk. Sit tight, they’re coming for you.”

“And the floatel?”

“They’re going to try for that too. That’s going to be trickier in the high seas, but they say they can get it done. Any word from your lads?”

“None, sir, they’ve gone dark.”

“Wiggins is a good soldier. He’ll bring them home.”

“Aye, sir. That he is.”

There was no more left to say. He handed the mike back to the operator.

“I need a smoke. Anywhere around here we can have a crafty one?”

“Just stand in the doorway and prop it open with your foot. That lets enough air in and smoke out without you getting soaked. It’s what I do.”

Hynd joined him on the doorway and they both lit up. A stiff breeze blew in through the partially opened door, but the operator had been right, very little rain made its way inside.

“Might be a good time for yon wee talk you were after, Frank?” he said.

“Not just now, please. I’m feeling like a spare dick at an orgy here, Cap,” Hynd said. “There’s nowt to get our teeth into. But I’m worried about the lads, especially the younger ones…”

“I know, Sarge. I’m feeling the same way. But the colonel was right about one thing—Wiggo’s a good man. He’ll see them right.”

Seton came to join them. He already had his pipe lit, and took out his hip flask and passed it ‘round.

“Well, Sandy,” Banks said as he handed the flask to Hynd, “is this what you expected?”

“In truth, I don’t know what I expected. I hoped, though, I hoped for some time to study the thing, and maybe test a theory.”

Banks laughed. “You have a theory? There’s a surprise.”

“It’s something I’ve been working on for years and relates to how what we think of as magic is merely the result of rhythm, repetition, and force of will.”

Banks wiped a hand up over the top of his head.

“Whoosh!” he said, and Seton laughed before continuing.

“You remember the Loch Ness thing, how the song brought the monster to heel, or at least calmed it down?”

Banks’ own laughter died as quickly as it had come as he remembered that day on the dark waters of the loch.

“I’m no’ likely to forget,” he said.

“Sorry,” Seton replied, although he looked anything but. “But remember the song. If it, or something like it worked once, there’s no reason it won’t work again. I’ve found some chants encoded in The Concordances of the Red Serpent and…”

“You’re going to sing at it? That’s your plan?” Hynd interrupted.

Seton shrugged.

“Do you have a better idea?”

The operator turned from his seat and broke into the conversation.

“If you’ve got a plan, it might be time to put it into effect. We’ve got something incoming on the radar, and it’s bloody huge.”

Banks flicked his still-lit butt out into the rain and went back to the control board. The radar pinged and showed a dim outline closing in on their position.

“I’ll tell you something else for nowt,” the operator said. “Its no’ a fucking whale. And it’s coming right at us.”

Banks calculated time and distance in his head. They had seconds at the most.

“If you’ve got an alarm, hit it,” he said.

The almost deafening honk of the claxon started up then, five seconds later, the whole rig shuddered and rang as if hit by a giant hammer. Another claxon joined the first.

“What the fuck’s that one?” Banks asked.

“Imminent structural integrity failure,” the operator shouted back, his face white. “Another hit like that and the rig will go over.”

“I’m not waiting here to die like some caged hamster,” Banks said and headed for the door. Hynd and Seton moved to join him as he got his pistol out of its holster at his hip. Just having a weapon in his hand improved his mood—a miniscule amount at best, but at least it felt he was doing something.

He stepped out into the rain and almost knocked over the rig manager.

“What the fuck’s going on now?” the burly man shouted.

“I thought that was your job to know?” Banks answered. “Best get inside; things are liable to get hairy.”

The manager noticed for the first time the gun in Banks’ hand, and his eyes went wide.

“I can’t have shots fired on the rig,” he said.

“And I can’t have useless full-on fucking fuckwits telling me what I can and can’t do,” Banks replied, pushed the man aside, and stepped to the edge of the gantry overlooking the docking area.

Below him, the waters seethed and roiled as if being churned from below, but there was no sign of the beast.

“Come on, you fucker,” Banks muttered. “I want to shoot something, and you’ll do nicely.”

As if in answer, the beast obliged.

The snout came out of the water first, two great black nostrils each wider than a man, snoring out spray that stank of rotting fish and kelp. The head rose up and again Banks was reminded of a giant horse, as if the sculptures of the kelpies at the Falkirk Wheel had been animated and brought to life. He felt strangely detached, as if he wasn’t watching a real beast at all but some fantastic special effect in a cinema playing directly in front of his eyes in full surround-sound.

The head kept rising, impossibly far out of the water until he was no longer looking downward but straight out into the piercing gaze of a pair of sky-blue eyes each bigger than a beach ball.

He raised his pistol, aware of Hynd stepping up beside him. They stood side by side and took aim without needing any spoken agreement, Banks going for the left eye, Hynd the right. They fired in unison… and at the same instant the beast blinked, both eyes simultaneously. The shots ricocheted away as if they’d hit rock.

Before they could take aim again, the beast let its head fall. As it went down, the eyes opened again and Banks got the distinct impression they were looking directly at him. More than that, if he didn’t know better, he’d have said the bloody thing was smiling.

The beast hit the loading dock full on, its weight driving all of the area below the gantry into the water in a mass of bent and torn metal. The rig’s columns shrieked under the pressure and the whole structure lurched alarming to one side before steadying. A cable screamed, loud even above the claxon and sprung from its mooring somewhere to Banks’ left. He heard it whistle as it cleaved the air and saw it coming at him out of the corner of his eye. Instinct kicked in and he threw himself to one side. As he went down, he turned to see the sarge pushing Seton out of the path of danger. In doing so, Hynd exposed his whole left side to the onrushing rope of twisted metal. It took him under the ribs, lifted him off his feet with it as it passed, and slammed him hard against the door of the control room behind them.

Banks was at Hynd’s side seconds later. The sarge’s face was pale, his eyelids fluttering. Blood flecked his lips.

“Something’s broken inside, John,” he said, bubbling more blood. “Broken ribs, maybe a punctured lung. And it’s fucking painful.”

“Medic!” Banks shouted, banging on the door above him. “We need a medic here, right fucking now.”

He quickly stepped across the gantry and looked down. There was no sign of the beast. There was also no sign of the docking area; it had been smashed down into the depths, leaving only twisted and torn metal behind.

To the rig crews credit, they reacted to the situation with almost military speed and efficiency. The doctor who arrived was a small, tidy man who ignored everything but his new charge and only answered questions after he’d examined Hynd thoroughly and the sarge was being taken away on a stretcher.

He addressed Banks directly.

“He’ll live,” he said. “And don’t worry. We’ve got all mod cons in our infirmary; we get accidents on a regular basis out here and I make sure we’re equipped to deal with them. He won’t be walking around for a while but after I’ve tended to him, he won’t want to. I think he’s punctured a lung but there’s not much blood so it could be no more than a nick. If that’s the case, all it will take is a simple wee operation, some stitches, and he’ll be right as rain. As I said, don’t worry. I’ll make him comfortable.”

“You’ll have to work fast, doc,” Banks said. “We might be leaving in a hurry, possibly within the hour.”

If we’re given that long.

He didn’t say it out loud, but he didn’t have to. He saw in the doctor’s eyes that the situation was clear to him.

Banks stopped the stretcher bearers before they could move away and bent over Hynd.

“We’ve still got to have yon wee chat you wanted, Frank,” he said. “So don’t go anywhere without telling me.”

“I suppose a fag is out of the question?” Hynd said, started to laugh then coughed up more blood. That was the signal for the stretcher bearers to move.

Without another word, the medic followed them off the gantry, leaving Banks and Seton standing alone in the rain. Across the other side of the walkway, a line of crewmen were standing looking down into the water, as if in disbelief at what they were seeing.

The alarms cut off abruptly and the only sound now was rain lashing on metal and the crash of the sea on the pillars of the rig below them.

“Now what?” Seton said.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” Banks replied, ignoring the rain and lighting up a fresh smoke. “I’m down four men since we got here—three lost out there in the dark, one away to a hospital bed. My batting average is shite today. So it’s over to you. Maybe your luck will be better.”

“You’re ready to believe me?”

“Sandy, after what I’ve seen these past few years, I’m ready to believe just about anything. Did you see yon best just now? The fucker shut its eyes deliberately as we were about to shoot, then it smiled at me. This bloody thing is sentient. I’d bet my pension on it. What do you need and what can I do?”

It turned out that Seton’s needs were simple—all he required was use of the rig’s tannoy system, turned up loud, and a means to play a recording he had on his phone through it.

“I can’t authorise the use of rig equipment for non-company personnel,” the rig manager said.

“I wasn’t asking,” Banks said. “I was telling. Now we can do this by the books; I’ll call my colonel, he’ll call the minister, the minister will call your boss, your boss will call you, and you’ll do what you’re told. Or you can stop being an arsehole, save us half an hour, and do what you’re told right fucking now. What’s it to be?”

As Banks knew he would, the man backed down immediately; his bluster was only of any use when he had power over the people he used it on… it cut no ice with anyone else willing to give as good as they got. And after the day Banks had had, taking shit from middle managers wasn’t on his to-do list.

The operator, after double-checking with the rig manager, was able to oblige Seton’s needs.

“How long?” Banks asked.

“Ten minutes, tops,” Seton replied and went to join the operator at the console.

“What now?” the manager asked, the petulant whine of an admonished child all too clear now in his voice.

“Either we get rescued or the beast comes back and we test my theory,” Seton said from the console. “Want to put a tenner on what comes first?”

Banks left Seton to it and went in search of the infirmary. It wasn’t hard to find, merely down one flight of stairs and a few yards back along a corridor. Nobody stopped him entering and he did so to find the doc bent over Hynd. There looked to be a lot of blood, far too much of it. But the doc smiled grimly when he saw Banks approach.

“He had a wee hemorrhage when I opened him up to see what the problem was and things got a tad messy. But although it looks bad, it’s really nothing to worry about. I’ve got him sorted and stitched back up again. He’s under sedation and will be out for a couple of hours.”

“Was it his lung?”

“Aye, and I was right, it was just a very small puncture, easily repaired. But he broke three ribs and he’s going to have to be careful not to burst his stitches. He’s also going to be sore for a good wee while. Don’t expect him to be an action man for a few weeks or so after he wakes up.”

Banks was about to reply to thank the doctor when the quiet was broken by a sound from somewhere outside, the same bagpipe-drone wail they’d heard before. Banks went outside to the gantry and looked down, half-expecting to see the horse-head again. But there was only emptiness below; the noise was coming from farther off.

Out in the dark waters beyond the reach of the rig’s lights, the beast sang.