Book extract: Kraken Rising by Greig Beck

Southern Ocean — Edge of the South Sandwich Trench. October 12, 2008

FIVE hundred feet down, the silent leviathan glided through the water. At that depth there was just the faintest trace of sunlight penetrating down to create wavelike ripples on its surface, but below it, there was nothing but utter darkness.

The USS Sea Shadow was an experimental design submarine. Based on a miniaturised Ohio Class design, the 188-foot craft had an electric drive and high-energy reactor plant that allowed it to navigate the seas in total stealth. In addition, nano-paint on echo-free tiles reduced the chance of detection from active sonar — it was effectively an ocean ghost.

For now, Shadow, as the crew affectionately knew it, carried only conventional impact torpedoes, simply to add test displacement weight. The rest of its armament stores were empty, but when the craft was fully operational, it would be crammed with enough weaponry to obliterate anything on or below the water. The new design submarine was fast and invisible, and as far as the navy was concerned, was a high seas game changer.

The test run was watched from naval command with a mix of pride and trepidation. Shadow was in international waters, which would have made it diplomatically awkward should it have been detected. Even though the closest hi-tech power, Australia, should not have possessed the technical capabilities to see or hear it, training runs in this part of the Southern Ocean were necessary and extremely useful as the environmental conditions were as hostile as they could get. And if the Aussies could find them, then the project would be determined a fail.

Today’s exercises were to be carried out on the edge of the deepest trench in the region — the Southern Sandwich Trench, just off the Antarctic’s coast. Muddy plains, abyssal mountain ranges and crevices that fell away to 26,000 feet into the Earth’s crust, dominated the ocean floor here.

Captain Clint O’Kane stood on the command deck, shorter than the rest of his crew, but his authoritative presence made him seem like he towered over every one of them. His dark eyes were unreadable, as they reflected the green glow of the instrument panels.

O’Kane was relatively young, but had been a mariner for two decades. Still, he felt his heart rate lift as he passed over any of these deeper zones. It was the trenches that worried all submariners.

These cold black voids were worlds of crushing depths, permanent blackness, and were most often shielded from them as the deep water made the liquid compress enough to repel most of their sonar pulses. And every now and then, when something did bounce back, more often than not it could never be identified. In that mysterious darkness, there were temperature fluctuations and flow variations that defied explanation, and every mariner felt there were things down there that saw them, without ever being seen themselves.

This trench had an additional reputation — it was the Southern Sea’s Devil’s Triangle. Dozens of ships had disappeared down in these stretches of water. And aircraft had also vanished, like the 1920 disappearance of Amelia J — a low-flying spotter plane that gave a single fear-filled message: “It’s coming up”, before disappearing from radar, never to be seen again.

O’Kane would sail into the teeth of any battle that he was commanded to, against any odds, and never even blink. But he always slept better when they were well away from this particular deepwater stretch.

“Contact.”

The single word was like a small electric jolt to his gut. He casually approached his sonar officer, standing just behind him, and outwardly radiated his usual calm.

“Distance?”

The officer calibrated his sonar, and concentrated. “Five miles, coming up out of the abyssal zone.”

“That deep?” O’Kane grunted. “Biological?” He knew that sperm whales could get down to nearly 7000 feet to hunt in the total darkness for the giant squid.

He waited. The officer’s face was creased in concentration.

Beside him, O’Kane could see his screen, the winding sonar line passing over the long darker stain on the sensor. The man leaned even closer to his console and also pressed fingertips over one of his microphone’s ear cups. He shook his head and shrugged.

“Non-magnetic signature, but unknown.”

O’Kane groaned. They had an online identification library of blips, pulses, and pings for every deepwater biological creature and geological movement. Their library also stored the propeller sounds of the world’s entire naval fleets — they should have been able to isolate, and then identify, anything and everything below the water.

He remembered Fuller’s Law — nature provides exceptions to every rule. O’Kane ground his teeth. Meaning, he was back to relying on experience and his gut.

“Give me bearing and speed.”

“Sir, relative bearing is sixty degrees, three miles out over the trench and speed is at twenty knots, variable. Rising, and moving into a parallel course.”

O’Kane grunted his approval. Parallel was good, he thought. At least it wasn’t moving any closer. “Too fast for a whale,” he said.

The sonar officer half turned and pulled one of the cups away.

“I don’t think it’s a whale, sir. It’s not making a sound … and it’s big, very big.” He frowned and swung back. “Doesn’t make sense.”

The officer rotated dials and leaned forward for a moment, his face a sickly green from the monitors. “Whoa.”

O’Kane didn’t want to hear that word from his sonar man. He began to feel a sudden slickness as beads of perspiration popped out over his face and body.

The officer spun. “It just turned towards us, and speed increased to fifty knots.”

“Fifty knots? Not possible.” O’Kane’s jaw set. “Sound red-alert. Come to twenty degrees port bearing, increase speed to maximum.”

He exhaled through clenched teeth. Anywhere else he would have immediately surfaced, but doing so here would mean exposure to the unfriendly satellites he knew were always watching. He could not risk breaking cover over a damn sonar shadow.

“Object now at 1.1 miles and closing. Collision course confirmed. Not responding to hailing, sir.”

O’Kane had only one option left — to fight.

“Ready all torpedo tubes. Come about eighty degrees starboard, and then all stop.” The huge steel fish yawed in the water as it moved to face its pursuer. O’Kane grabbed the back of the operator’s chair, as incredible centrifugal forces acted on the huge armour-plated body.

“On my order.” O’Kane planted his legs and stood straight, waiting.

“Five hundred feet, collision imminent. Closing to 480 feet, 430, 400 …”

It was too fast, and O’Kane knew it was probably already too close. “Fire tubes one and two. Brace.” He gritted his teeth. “Firing one and two — brace, brace, brace …” The echo sounded as his order was relayed to the torpedo room.

The order was drowned out by klaxon horns. O’Kane felt the slight pulse that went through the superstructure as the torpedoes were expelled from the nose of the submarine. He held his breath, his eyes half closed as he waited for the sensation of the impact detonations, and the destructive shock wave that would follow.

Seconds stretched … nothing came.

O’Kane opened his eyes. “Status update.”

“Negative on impact, sir. Bogey seems to have, uh, vanished.”

The sonar operator spun dials, and hit keys, his face dripping sweat now. “It just … ” He shook his head. “Something’s wrong.”

“Impossible. It must have dived.” O’Kane felt his heart racing.

“Let’s give it some space. Full speed astern.” He felt the thrum of the engines kick in and looked to the inside wall of the submarine, as if seeing through the inches of steel plating. His gut told him it was still there.

“Come about, ahead full.” The USS Sea Shadow jumped forward as the high-energy reactor gave the drives immediate power.

Go, go, go, O’Kane silently prayed.

The operator suddenly jammed one hand over his ear cup again.

“It’s back — a hundred feet, fifty …” He balled his fists and spun, his face contorted.

“Where …” O’Kane almost yelled the words. “… where the hell is it?”

“It’s … on us.”

The crew and Captain Clint O’Kane were thrown forward as the submarine stopped dead in the water. He held on to an instrument panel and then started to slide, as unbelievably, the huge craft was tilted. The sound of metal under pressure immediately silenced the yells of the crew. There was nothing more terrifying to submariners than the sound of the ocean threatening to force its way in to the men living in the small steel-encased bubble of air below the surface.

O’Kane looked at the faces of his men, now all turned to him.

There was confusion and fear, but no panic. They were the best men he had ever served with. For the first time in his long career he decided to break protocol.

“Blow all tanks, immediate surface.”

The order was given, and the sound of air rushing from a compressed state to normal atmosphere, as it filled the ballast tanks, was like a long sigh of relief throughout the underwater craft. O’Kane’s fingers dug into one of the seat backs as he waited for the sensation of lift. It never came.

“Negative on rise. We’re still going down.” The operator’s voice now sounded higher than usual.

The command deck tilted again — nose down, now leaning at an angle of 45 degrees.

“Full reverse thrust!” O’Kane yelled the command, and he immediately felt the engines kick up as the screws turned at maximum rotations. He leaned over the operator again and looked at his screen. He knew the result without having to see the numbers.

“Descending.” The officer now calmly read them out. “800 feet, 825, 850, 880 …”

The USS Sea Shadow had been tested to a thousand feet, and could probably withstand another few hundred. But beyond that …

O’Kane exhaled as the sound of hardened steel compressing rose above the thrum of the engines.

“Something has us,” he said softly. It was every mariner’s nightmare — the unknown thing from the depths, reaching out and taking hold. He knew how deep the water was here, but it didn’t concern him. They would all be dead and pulverised long before they ever reached the bottom.

Anger suddenly burned in his gut. But not yet, he thought.

O’Kane spun. “Get a Cyclops out there, now.”

Hands worked furiously to load and shoot the miniature wireless submersible that was a torpedo with a single large eye for a nose-cone. Inside the fast-moving craft was a high-resolution streaming video camera with remote operational capabilities.

“Cyc-1 away, sir; bringing her back around.” The seaman worked a small joystick, turning the six-foot camera craft back towards them.

O’Kane leaned closer to the small screen, waiting.

“Sea Shadow coming up on screen, should be … oh god.” The seaman’s mouth hung open.

O’Kane stared, feeling his stomach lurch. Nothing could ever prepare any man or woman of the sea for what confronted him on that tiny screen. O’Kane pushed himself upright, and slowly looked down at his right hand, spreading his fingers, then closing them into a fist. In the hand of a god, he thought.

Into his head jumped a few lines of a 200-year-old poem by Tennyson, and much as he wanted to cast it out, it sang loud in his mind: Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea; His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep; The Kraken sleepeth.

No, not sleeping, thought O’Kane, now awake.

He raised his eyes back to the screen and continued to stare at the thing that engulfed his entire submarine. Rivets popped in the skin of the vessel, and then the super-hardened hull started to compress. The 33-foot diameter submarine began to buckle, and he saw that the automated distress beacon had been activated.

“We’re gonna breach.”

The shout came from behind him, and he spun, roaring his commands. “Sound general quarters, increase internal pressure, close all watertight doors, shut down everything non-essential, and watch for goddamn fires.”

The hull groaned again as they continued to descend into the darkness.

“What do we do?” The seaman at the screen looked up at him with a face the colour of wax.

O’Kane could feel the crew’s eyes on him; he could feel the fear coming off them in waves. His hand went to the key around his neck. The high tech, prototype submarine had self-destruct capability. He alone could trigger it.

“What do we do, sir?” The man gulped dryly, his face twisted.

If there was one thing O’Kane was sure of; while there was life, there was hope. His hand fell away from the key.

“We pray.”