Blue Blood by Peter Tonkin

Author:Peter Tonkin [Tonkin, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sharpe Books
Published: 2019-12-04T22:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Stirring

Robin Mariner began to stir just at the moment when, unknown to her, Paolo Ursini stabbed the blade of the Sabatier through the cod’s head and the thin metal of the work surface underneath it with a noise like a gun shot that nobody else heard. She opened her eyes as Paolo - equally as unaware of her existence, for the moment - slipped silently back out of the claustrophobic little galley into the increasingly terrifying warren of corridors. Lightless, constricting, apparently airless - seemingly endless... She blinked several times to clear her vision, as the light from his listlessly carried torch gleamed along the edge of the meat cleaver’s blade, bringing to vividness for an instant a ruby or two of blood. That was merely cod’s blood; for the moment, at least.

Robin did not wake into darkness, but in many ways she would have preferred to have done. Instead she woke to the disturbingly theatrical sight of two men putting the broken body of a battered woman on to the bed next to hers. The grotesque little scene was made worse by the stark beam of torchlight which brought too much brightness to parts of it and sharp-edged, dramatic shadows to the rest. One glance at the way the woman’s head was hanging off her shoulders told the all too widely experienced Robin that she was definitely dead.

Robin looked on without stirring or, for the moment, speaking. One man was tall, powerful-looking and black. He wore a naval-looking uniform beneath a white coat. Robin could not see badges or rings of rank. The other man was shorter, rounder and bearded in black with silver highlights on either side of his determined chin. He wore a naval uniform with four gold rings that told her what he was. Something about the place, silent and shadowy, lit only by the horizontal blade of the torch beam, told her where she found herself, unexpected though this was too.

The uniforms told Robin at once that she was on a naval vessel. Their accents in a moment would confirm it as Canadian. And everything else except the silence and the darkness - both anathema to submariners - told her she was on a submarine. A sub without light, power or propulsion. A sub that, from the feel of it, was sitting at the surface - for the time being at least. But then, wherever the sub had come from, it must have surfaced - and quite recently at that - to have taken her aboard out of the life raft, which was the last thing she remembered with any clarity. A surfaced Canadian navy submarine, then, where someone was slaughtering women. Or had broken the neck and battered in the face of one woman, at least. It seemed only sensible to her - if less than courteous and bordering on bad form, for they had clearly saved her life - to stay silent for the moment. And to observe events from under lowered lids

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