White Water td-106 Read online

  Finally he found himself under the deck hatch through which the two sailors first emerged to attack him.

  Behind him a hatch clanged shut. The other hatches were also closed. Only the deck hatch remained open like a clear invitation.

  Then, with a sudden gurgling of moving water, the sub began shifting and settling. They were blowing the ballast tanks.

  Bitterly cold brine began slopping down from the open hatch. Remo saw he had two choices: close the hatch and sink with the sub or get topside and swim for it.

  He decided to swim for it.

  Remo went up the hatch like a moth on wing, gained the deck and sprinted through the sloshing water surging over the deck plates for his bobbing power boat.

  He jumped into it, unhooked the line and pushed off.

  The engine refused to start. Remo pressed the starter button again and again. Finally the props churned water.

  "Great," he muttered darkly. "Maybe I should have stayed on the sub."

  Remo succeeded just as the closing waters met along the dorsal spine of the submarine. The sail was slipping under the waves like a retreating deity of black steel.

  Remo stayed with the power boat as long as he could. He felt the undertow drag and clutch at it. A vortex began to take shape.

  In the end he was forced to face the same choice as seamen in distress face. Abandon ship--or go down with it.

  The boat was sucked under the waves. Remo was, too. He allowed the cold waters of the Atlantic to close over him, then kicked with all his strength. Not up, which was impossible now, but sideways, out of the vortex.

  Like an elastic band snapping, the downward tug relaxed, and Remo shot to the surface.

  Reaching breathable air, he treaded water.

  Then and only then did he realize he had made the mistake of his life.

  "I should have stayed with the sub."

  In the immensity of the black night, with the uncaring sea holding him in its frigid grasp, and the familiar New England stars looking down from their remote stations, Remo's own voice sounded surprisingly small in his ears.

  Chapter 7

  The cold of the North Atlantic felt like bands of cold steel squeezing Remo Williams's chest. The air coming in through his nostrils, warmed by nasal passages and throat, was still too cold when it reached his lungs. They burned. It was a cold, life-draining burning.

  He was losing body heat rapidly. His nerves were shutting down.

  Yet somehow Remo was able to sense the upward ripple of the icy ocean water being pushed by the blunt snout of the shark.

  Expelling the remaining air from his lungs, he slid under the waves. If a shark wanted to eat him, it was going to have to fight for its supper.

  Under the water Remo's night vision came into play. He made out a blue-gray shape rising to meet him. Jackknifing, he went down to meet it.

  Predatory eyes glinted toward him. A mouth like a grinning cave filled with needles showed dim and deadly. It yawned. Teeth revealed themselves, ragged and overlapping but wickedly sharp. Teeth that could snap off an arm or a leg cleanly, Remo knew.

  The gap closed. Remo twisted his back to create torsion in his spinal column. He could no longer see the shark, but he could roll out of its path-if he timed it to the last second and the shark cooperated.

  At the last second Remo felt the lack of oxygen and knew the maneuver was doomed. He was too weak. His nerves were like spidery icicles that would break under the simplest strain.

  Sensing the weakness of its prey, the shark gave an eager, convulsive wiggle of its sleek body and lunged for Remo.

  In that moment, with ugly teeth straining for his flesh, Remo noticed a loose shark tooth and remembered something.

  Shark teeth are like baby teeth. They come loose easily and regenerate later.

  Making a spear with one hand and a fist with the other, Remo kicked like a frog and made for those rows of ugly teeth.

  A short-armed punch connected with the blunt snout. The shark recoiled under the unexpected blow. It rolled, twisted and Remo went for the gaping maw of teeth.

  With a sweep of his hand, he cleared the upper gums of teeth. The maw snapped shut, squirting a mixture of blood, triangular teeth and angry bubbles. Too late. Remo's hand had already retreated.

  On the return sweep he got most of the lower set. A few remained here and there. The lower corner was still heavily toothed.

  Threshing about, the shark fought to regain its orientation.

  Remo got under it, curled his body into a ball and, with the last atoms of oxygen still burning in his lungs, gave it an upward kick.

  Shocked, the shark shot to the surface-as much from panic as from the unexpected blow.

  Remo surfaced behind the shark, drew in air and got his mitochrondria-the part of his cells that functions like tiny energy furnaces--charged again.

  The cold air felt like the cold water around him. He couldn't tell one from the other. His skin was cold and blue and unfeeling. In the moonlight he saw the skin under his fingernails turning a purplish black.

  Kicking, Remo got to the shark's side, took hold of its sturdy dorsal fin and pulled himself on board.

  The shark didn't resist. It was stunned.

  Its tough bluish hide scraped skin from Remo's bare arms. But that hide could provide warmth by acting as a wet suit. Wrapping his legs around the shark's tail, Remo hugged it tightly, its fin nudging his crotch.

  Gradually a bit of warmth was restored in his body. It wouldn't be in time. It would not save him. But as long as he breathed, Remo still had a chance.

  Even if he couldn't exactly see that chance. Or where it would come from.

  Time passed. The shark began to switch its muscular tail. Remo clamped down to inhibit its forward movement. Once the shark dived, it would be in its element. And it would be all over for Remo.

  As they struggled, Remo focused on the will to live. A man fought for his life when his life had meaning. Remo's life had meaning to him. He wasn't always satisfied with it. Often not satisfied with it at all. But it was his life, and he intended to hold on to it.

  He thought of Chiun, and how his life had been transformed and redirected through the training of the last Korean Master of Sinanju. He thought of the House of Sinanju, and the villagers who had survived for five thousand years because the Master of Sinanju had gone out into the known world to ply the trade of assassin, feeding the village that could not feed itself because the soil was too rocky to till and the waters too cold for fishing.

  Remo saw the impassive faces of those villagers, unchanged down through the ages, with their suspicious eyes and alien faces.

  On second thought, maybe staying alive for the sake of those people wasn't the way to go.

  He thought of his own life. Of the women he had known and loved and mostly lost. He thought of Jilda of Lakluun, a Viking warrior woman with whom he had had a daughter, a laughing-eyed little girl named Freya. Over a year ago Remo had been visited by the spirit of his own deceased mother and was told by her that a shadow had fallen over Freya. The danger was not yet great, but it was growing.

  Since then Remo had been on Harold Smith's back to find Freya, but even Smith's far-reaching computers couldn't locate a teenage girl whose last name was unknown and unguessable.

  Shifting position to warm his left side, Remo recalled the image of little Freya. When he had last seen her, she was seven. Now she would be thirteen. A very young lady. Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine what her face would look like today. His imagination failed him. He couldn't envision the daughter he had seen only once in his life; he could only remember her as she was on their last meeting.

  Over the lap and gurgle of water, he thought he heard her tinkling laugh. It came again. Clearer this time.

  "Freya?"

  "Daddy. Where are you?"

  Remo's eyes snapped open.

  "Freya!"

  "Daddy, don't die. Live for me. Live for meeeeeee."

  "Freya."


  But the voice was gone. Only the monotonous waters spoke.

  Regathering his energies, Remo made a decision. He would live for Freya. If for no other reason, for Freya. Freya was somewhere in danger, and he would find her. Somehow.

  The shark was threshing more now. Remo kneed it. It huffed, expelling water from its bleeding mouth.

  Its triangular head twisted and bucked. Remo held on. He caught glimpses of the remaining teeth down in its lower jaw.

  If the shark ever caught him in its mouth, those few ragged teeth would still saw through his flesh like razors.

  "You wanna eat me?" Remo growled.

  The shark threshed, one eye coming into view. It was flat, black and inhuman. But Remo sensed a cold, predatory intelligence that saw him as warm food.

  "You want to eat me, you rat bastard?" Remo repeated, angrier this time.

  The shark flexed its stiff cartilage tail.

  "Well, maybe I'll eat you instead."

  Reaching forward, Remo snapped off a shark tooth. It happened so fast the shark couldn't react in time.

  Remo plunged the tooth into the tough hide. It went in. Sharks were not immune to shark bites. They frequently cannibalized one another.

  Blood erupted, dark, almost black-red. Remo placed his lips to the wound and drank deep. It was salty and bitter but it was sustenance. It was fish blood, so he could drink it safely. Beef blood would probably poison his purified system.

  After drinking all he could stand, Remo reinserted the tooth deep, then ripped it straight back.

  The tough hide parted, exposing reddish pink meat.

  With quick motions Remo sliced row after row of lines, filleting the shark alive.

  It struggled. Remo quieted it by squeezing until its gills expelled water. And reaching in, Remo ripped out a slab of shark steak.

  He began eating it raw. Taking big bites and gobbling the food down. There was no time for the niceties of chewing it correctly. He needed the energy from its meat, its life force, in his belly. Now.

  The shark tried rolling. Remo steered its fin against the motion. The shark righted itself. It resumed threshing and twisting, but ultimately it was weak from loss of blood. Its blood oozed out, a reddish shimmer on the surrounding waters.

  Remo ate on, ripping out fistfuls of tough meat. The taste was rank. Sharks ate the trash of the sea and they tasted like it. So even though Remo's diet was restricted by Sinanju training to certain varieties of rice, fish and duck, Remo rarely ate shark.

  As Chiun had once explained to him, "He who eats shark eats what a shark has eaten."

  "Sharks sometimes eat people," Remo had said, understanding.

  "He who eats shark risks being a cannibal by proxy."

  So Remo avoided shark. But this was life or death. His life and the shark's death. It was the law of the sea. The big fish ate the little ones.

  Little by little the shark's struggles became noticeably more feeble. After a while it just floated, still alive but dying.

  And inevitably the fins of other sharks, attracted by the smell of seeping blood, appeared in the water.

  They came from the north, south and west. At first they cut the water in aimless, searching circles. Closing in, they would rip red chunks from the shark's inert carcass in a matter of minutes.

  And from Remo, too, if he let it happen.

  Remo Williams wasn't about to let it happen.

  Fuel in his stomach, his body temperature stabilized, he got up on his hands and knees. Then, balancing carefully because the shark carcass was unstable, he found his feet.

  The approaching fins slicing the heaving swells were only yards away now. They knifed the water with cold intent. Remo could almost hear the Jaws theme in his head.

  Selecting one fin swimming away from the others, Remo faced it.

  The first maws yawed upward and lunged. It was now or never.

  Remo jumped from his perch.

  Landing on the solitary shark's back, he dropped to one knee, grabbing the stabilizing fin in his hand.

  Twisting, he steered it away from the carcass just as the feeding frenzy began.

  "Get along, little doggie," Remo muttered as he fought the shark, steering it with its own fin.

  In the beginning the shark wasn't exactly cooperative. But it was only a fish. Remo was a man. Remo stood on top of the food chain. No shark was going to disobey him.

  He lined up the shark's fin with the western horizon and established a course.

  The shark fought naturally. But to live it had to keep swimming forward. Sharks do not sleep. Sharks cannot rest. To keep breathing, they have to continue forward. Or they die.

  And since the shark had to keep swimming, it was just a matter of controlling the direction.

  Remo kept the shark on course. Sometimes with the fin, other times with a hard slap to its sensitive snout. When it tried to dive, Remo wrenched it back, and the shark would forget all about diving and try to bite the annoying thing on its back.

  After a while the shark grew too tired to resist. But it wasn't too tired to swim. It had to keep swimming.

  So it swam toward land, with its gills submerged just enough to scoop oxygen.

  An hour passed, two, then three. During that time Remo digested the food in his stomach and started to hunger for more. His body was burning calories at a fierce rate. Sustaining his elevated body temperature in the cold North Atlantic was taxing his Sinanju powers.

  When he felt strong enough, Remo broke the shark's spine with a single chopping bow. It coughed, an explosion of air. When it slowed to a glide, by using only his index fingernails Remo scored the dorsal hide, carving out a fresh shark steak. He ate two. Then he stood up.

  Somewhere in the offshore breeze, Remo smelled land. He had no idea how near it was, but he was ready to make a run for it, especially because the heavy swells were calmer here.

  Stepping back, he set himself, charged his lungs and, with tiny steps to create maximum forward momentum, Remo ran the length of the shark and stepped onto the water.

  His toes touched, skipped, touched again and kept on skipping.

  The art was in not letting his full weight break the surface tension of the water. Cold water was denser and better suited than warm. Otherwise water running might have been impossible in Remo's weakened condition.

  But he wanted to live. And so he ran, step after step, sucking the cold, reviving air into his lungs, fighting the fatigue that threatened to engulf him.

  He ran because, like a shark, if he stopped, he would die. He could not die, so he ran. And ran and ran and ran, his toes making tiny pattering slaps on the choppy gray-green surface of the Atlantic.

  Remo smelled land before he saw it. Remo had no idea how much time had passed. But the smell of cooked food and burning fossil fuels and car exhaust pulled him on.

  He saw rocks first. Cold, rockweed-covered New England granite half-eroded by relentless waves.

  Remo ran for them. But somewhere in the last mile, his strength gave out. He misstepped, lost his footing and sank into the cold, unforgiving waters-within sight of land and life and safety ....

  Chapter 8

  She didn't know who she was.

  Sometimes in the mirror, she thought she recognized her own eyes. Green eyes. Emerald green. Sometimes they were sapphires. Other times a dull gray. They looked familiar. Her hair did not, but she colored it so often she'd forgotten its true color.

  She had been told she was Mistress Kali, but the name didn't fit. Somehow it didn't fit.

  When she lay all alone in her great circular bed looking up at the mirrors on the ceiling, she knew she was not Mistress Kali. It was a persona she assumed when she donned the tight black leather that sheathed her supple form. She was Mistress Kali when the silver chains clinked and tinkled. She felt like Mistress Kali when she selected a suitable whip from her stock and donned the yellow silk domino mask.

  When she stepped out of her private chambers with its implements of pain and discipline
, she knew she was Mistress Kali. There was no doubt. Who else could she be?

  But when the silken domino mask came off, the doubts returned. They crept into her mind unbidden.

  "Who am I?" She wondered.

  Once, she asked. "Who am I?"

  "You are Mistress Kali," the sweet but distant voice replied.

  "Before that?"

  "Before that you were nothing."

  "What am I when I am not Mistress Kali?" she pressed.

  "Asleep," came the absent reply, dotted by the plasticky clicking of keys. The keys that were never still. The keys that were as much a constant in her life as the clink and rattle of chain. As familiar as the crack of the whip that brought a thrill of power control and sexual release whenever she laid it along a pale white spine and flicked an ass cheek into quivering spasm.

  "What will I be when I am no longer Mistress Kali?" she wondered aloud.

  "Of no use to me, Mother."

  The slip had been strange. She put it out of her mind because the next words chilled her so.

  "Do not forget this. Ever."

  And the clicking of keys continued. Mistress Kali-she was Mistress Kali again-slid the watery blue-green glass panel back into place.

  On the other side, the stunted figure at the computer terminal continued to type without rest. She never slept.

  And so long as she never slept, the long, vague nightmare seemed to have no ending.

  Chapter 9

  The cold water rose up to claim Remo Williams. His mind went blank. He had not the strength to process what was happening to him.

  Water touched his lips, splashed into his nostrils, stung his eyeballs.

  He held his breath-and his bare feet touched cold, silty sediment. And under it, hard, seaweedslimy granite. Reflexively his legs straightened.

  It took a few seconds for the truth to sink in.

  The water didn't even cover his head.

  Then Remo laughed. It was a laugh of sheer relief. Of pure joy. Within sight of land, he was standing in chin-deep water.

  So he began walking, shivering once or twice when the natural protective defenses of the human body overcame his Sinanju training, which had taught that shivering wasted precious energy, even if the body's reflexes forced a person to shiver in order to stay warm.