Free Black Sun: A Thriller by Graham Brown

never sleeps,” the man said.
    Danielle looked at the boy, perched on the shelf like a little bird.
    “Is he your son?” Danielle asked.
    “No,” the man said. “I kidnapped him, to sell him to Kang.”
    Danielle found this revelation hard to fathom. The man seemed to have great affection for the child. “Kidnapped him?”
    “I took him from the people he knew, though they were not his family. I took him from the only place he has ever known, though it was not a home.”
    “He’s Russian, like you,” she guessed.
    The man nodded. “He was under the care of the Science Directorate. They did experiments on him.”
    The hair went up on the back of her neck. “Experiments?”
    The man began to answer but went into a minor coughing fit first. “I wish I could say we were trying to save him, but that is not the whole truth. Kang wanted him. He promised us his safety and his fair treatment. But we did it for money.”
    “What happened? How did you end up down here?”
    The man coughed harshly once again, fighting to control it. “Things went wrong on our voyage. The navigation system, the radios, everything failed us, and myvessel lost its way in the Arctic. My crew thought we had been cursed. And maybe they were right.”
    “I don’t understand,” Danielle said.
    “We were tracking south through the night, following the compass. But when dawn came we realized we had been going the wrong way.
Akula
, orca, they followed us as if they knew we would soon fall into the sea. They pushed us onto the ice, slamming into our boat over and over again. Three and four at a time. The crew made it to the escape raft, but they were attacked and killed. And as the boat went down, I escaped to the ice floe with Yuri.”
    Danielle looked him over. He smelled of decay. He had a stump wrapped in rags where his foot should have been and his hands, nose, and other parts of his face were black with gangrene. The child didn’t appear to have suffered the same way.
    “How come he’s not frostbitten?”
    “I used my knife, I dug us a small cave, and I surrounded him as best I could,” Petrov answered. “We were there for three days. Days almost without sun. I was certain we would be dead on the fourth, but a helicopter came. Kang’s people found us.”
    “Why did he put you down here?”
    “We were so far off course, he believed we meant to betray him.”
    Danielle looked at Yuri. “All this for a child?” she said. “Why? Who is he?”
    “He’s no one. He has no family that I know of, but he is unusual,” the dying man said. “He was born with a degenerative neurological disorder. His parents couldnot care for him and he was given to the Science Directorate. They use him in experiments, and somehow they stopped the progression of his disease. But there was a strange result, a side effect. They say he senses things, sees them.”
    The man spoke in a wavering voice and she wasn’t sure the information was any more firm than the voice. Certainly it sounded odd.
    “What do you mean?” she asked. “Like a psychic?”
    The man shook his head. “No. Physical things. Magnetic anomalies, electromagnetic disturbances. They say he can see beyond the normal human spectrum.”
    “Can he really do this?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” the man said, coughing badly. “Kang thought he could.”
    “Then why is he down here?” Danielle said, realizing he’d used the past tense. “Does he not think so now?”
    The man shook his head. “Yuri would do nothing he asked,” he said. “No matter the beating or incentive. No matter the threat. He only talks to himself or sings. And he would not leave my side. So Kang sent us down here. His men told Yuri that he would see me die and then he would have only his new master to cling to.”
    Danielle looked at the young boy, slurping up the soup broth. “Does he even understand what Kang is asking?”
    “I think so,” Petrov said. “He just doesn’t respond.”
    Suddenly the boy