“I can pay more,” was all Viktor could squeak out before he saw out of the corner of his eye a twelve-inch spike, thinner than a knitting needle, being raised towards his face. He heard the Russian assassin’s voice once again. “An eye for an eye, da?”

The last living thought he had as the pick was being forced in beside his eye was that the Little Wolf had long teeth after all.

Two Weeks Later

The SS Titan was moving at a leisurely ten knots—well within its top speed of seventeen, even when fully laden. Like most modern tankers, the Titan was highly automated and computerisation meant everything ran as smoothly as a Swiss watch. The eighteen-foot single-propeller was tooled so perfectly that its rotations were just a gentle and pleasant vibration beneath their feet.

Olaf Jorgenson was a fifty-three-year-old Dutchman by birth but regarded himself as a citizen of the world’s oceans. He cultivated an Ernest Hemingway look with a neatly trimmed beard and small white hat tilted back on his whitened hair. He’d heard that his crew thought he looked more like the Skipper from the old TV comedy Gilligan’s Island, but they would never say that to his face.

They were halfway through their homeward voyage and as the ship had delivered its load the Titan rode high in the water. Olaf was delighted with their progress as the Southern Ocean could be a real bitch if she wanted to be. Forget about the water-level icebergs or the recent seabed tremors they had been warned about, it was the cyclonic storms that could howl around the continent that frightened the crew. The Antarctic Circle had the strongest average winds found anywhere on earth and could be a very dangerous stretch of water indeed. The Titan was just passing over the southernmost tip of the South Sandwich Trench; deep water, deeper than normal, at nearly 24,000 feet it was beyond the abyssal zone and descending right down to the hadal zone—cold, cold and black water.

Today the weather was calm with a steady, misty rain reducing visibility to a few hundred yards. It didn’t matter; their sonar and radar were state of the art—he could have guided the ship on the darkest of nights and avoided the smallest of fishing boats.

He wasn’t alone on the bridge; two of his senior officers were with him, continually checking charts in between a game of slow-motion chess. Suddenly, the sonar alarm flashed red, signalling imminent contact.

“Report, please.”

“Large body contact, five-thousand-foot depth and rising at speed,” his officer replied as he raced from illuminated screen to screen. Olaf knew they were over very deep water; the Southern Ocean averaged 15,000 feet—it had to be whales.