Bennett tried to scramble to her feet to protect her and Williams, but before she could get far the man slammed her head against the metal trim between the two driver’s side doors, and bundled her unconscious body into the back of her car.

The woman then started to walk backwards, keeping her rifle pointed at Knox, who could only stay where he was, impotent with anger as he realised the two of them weren’t wearing waxed trousers after all—they were wearing biker leathers.

The man paused as he stood over Williams, who was still staring blankly into space, apparently unsure of what might happen if he touched him. The woman glanced down at him, shifted the rifle in her hands, and jabbed the butt of its grip against his temple, knocking him unconscious as well, before turning her aim back on Knox.

The man then hefted Williams’s body next to Bennett’s, climbed into the driver’s seat, started the MG’s engine, and moved over to the passenger side. It took the woman two seconds to get in the car, hand the rifle to the man, put the car into reverse, and accelerate away down the track.

Chapter 37

Chapter 37

Lieutenant Maksim Starikov had come to a very unpleasant realisation. He was going to die, trapped in a metal tube hundreds of metres under water. This terrifying and absolute certainty had arrived abruptly twenty minutes ago as he’d lain in his bunk deep in the gut of the Yorsh and started to notice the bulkheads close in around him.

He was suffering from acute and intense claustrophobia.

At first, he’d told himself he was just feeling sick, having a bad reaction to the meal he’d eaten alone in the submarine’s small mess at the end of his last shift—probably to something the cook or another member of the crew who didn’t appreciate the presence of the KGB had slipped into his food. But the queasiness that had woken him up had quickly faded, replaced by a deep, churning fear in the pit of his stomach, and an unstoppable, creeping belief that the submarine was shrinking.

He reached out and touched the bulkhead at the end of his bunk with the boot he’d been too tired to take off after spending eight hours relentlessly walking and watching every inch of the Yorsh. He was sure the thick metal plate was closer than it had been when he’d first boarded the submarine in Murmansk, and when he’d last stretched out his foot a minute ago.