“I’ll remember.” This was Larry’s big moment. To be in the centre of the stage, to get his own back for my sneers and gibes, above all to indulge a sadistic streak wide as a bam door — this was going to be one of the high spots of his existence. He advanced towards me, big gun wavering slightly, wetting his lips continuously and giggling in a high and horrible falsetto. “The inside of the right thigh, high up. He’ll scream like — like a pig going under the knife. Then the left. And he’ll still be able to work.” The eyes were wide and staring and mad, and for the first time in my life I was confronted by a human being drooling at the mouth.
Vyland was a good psychologist; he knew I would be ten times more scared of Larry’s viciousness, his neurotic instability, than of any coldly calculated brutality he or his two thugs would have brought to bear. I was scared all right. Besides, I’d put up a good enough front, it would have been expected of me, but there was no point in overdoing it.
“It’s a development of the early French bathyscaphes,” I said rapidly. “This model is a combined British and French naval project, designed to reach only about twenty per cent of the depths of its predecessors — it’s good for about 2,500 feet — but it’s faster, more manoeuvrable and it’s equipped for actual underwater salvage which its predecessors weren’t.”
Nobody ever hated anyone more than Larry hated me at that moment. He was a little boy, I was a promised toy, the most wonderful he had ever seen, and he was being robbed of it just as it came within his grasp. He could have wept with rage and frustration and the sheer bitterness of his disappointment. He was still prancing in front of me and waving the gun around.
“He’s lying!” His voice was shrill, almost a scream. “He’s just trying——”
“He’s not lying,” Vyland interrupted coldly. No triumph, no satisfaction in his voice, the end had been achieved and the past was done with. “Put that gun away.”
“But I tell you——” Larry broke off in an exclamation
of pain as one of the two big silent men caught his wrist and forced the gun down till it was pointing at the floor.
“Put that heater away, punk,” the man growled, “or 111 take it off you.”
Vyland glanced at them, then ignored the by-play. “And you not only know what this is, Talbot, but you’ve actually worked on it. The general has impeccable sources in Europe and we got the word this morning.” He bent forward and went on softly: “And you also worked on it later on. Recently. Our sources in Cuba are even better than those in Europe.”
“I didn’t work on it recently.” I held up my hand as Vyland tightened his mouth. “When this bathyscaphe was brought out in a freighter to do its preliminary unmanned dives in the sheltered waters off Nassau, the British and French thought it would be cheaper and more sensible to hire a local vessel suitable for the job instead of bringing one out from Europe. I was working with a salvage firm in Havana at the time and they had a ship with a heavy crane and boom right aft. It was ideal for the job. I was aboard it, but I didn’t work on the bathyscaphe itself. What would be the point in denying it if it wasn’t so.” I smiled faintly. “Besides, I was only aboard the salvage ship for a week or so. They got wind that I was there, I knew they were after me and I had to leave in a hurry.”
“They?” Vyland’s eyebrow was still working as smoothly as ever.
“What does it matter now?” Even to myself I sounded tired, defeated.
“True, true,” Vyland smiled. “From what we know of your record it might have been any one of the police forces of half a dozen countries. Anyway, General, it explains one thing that has been worrying us — where we saw Talbot’s face before.”
General Ruthven said nothing. If ever I’d needed conviction that he was a tool, a pawn of Vyland’s, I needed it no longer. He was miserable, unhappy and clearly wished to have no part whatever in what was going on.
I said, as if a great light had suddenly dawned upon me: “Have you — were you the people responsible for the loss of this bathyscaphe? My God, it was you! How in the—–”
“You didn’t think we brought you here just to discuss the diagrammatic layout of this vessel?” Vyland permitted himself a small pleased smile. “Of course it was us. It was easy. The fools moored it on a wire hawser in ten fathoms of water. We unhitched it, substituted a frayed hawser so that they would think ‘that it had broken its moorings and that the tide had carried it out to deep water, then we towed it away. We made most of the trip in darkness, and the few ships we saw we just slowed down, pulled the bathyscaphe up on the side remote from the approaching vessel and towed it like that.” He smiled again — he was spoiling himself this morning. “It wasn’t difficult. People do not expect to see a bathyscaphe being towed by a private yacht.”
“A private yacht. You mean the——?” I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling, I’d almost made the blunder that would have finished everything. It had been on the tip of my tongue to say the Temptress — but no one knew I’d ever heard that name, except Mary Ruthven, who’d told me. “You mean the general’s private yacht? He has one?”
“Larry and I certainly haven’t one,” he grinned. “Larry and I ” — an off-beat phrase, but there was nothing in it for me, so I let it pass. “Of course it’s the general’s yacht.”
I nodded. “And equally of course you have the bathyscaphe somewhere near here. Would you mind telling me what in the world you want a bathyscaphe for?”
“Certainly not. You’ll have to know anyhow. We are — ah — treasure-hunting, Talbot.”
“Don’t tell me you believe this Captain Kidd and Black-beard nonsense,” I sneered.
“Recovering your courage, eh, Talbot? No, it’s rather more recent than that and very close to here.”
“How did you find it?”
“How did we find it?” Vyland seemed to have forgotten his urgency; like every criminal who ever lived he had a streak of the ham in him and wouldn’t pass up the chance of basking in the glow of his own glory. “We had a vague idea where it was. We tried trawling for it — in the days before I met the general, that was — but had no success. Then we met the general. As you may not know, the general provides his yacht for his geologists when they plod around setting off their little bombs on the bottom of the ocean tuning in with their seismographic instruments to find out where the oil strata are. And while they were doing this we were plotting the ocean bed with an extremely sensitive depth recorder. We found it all right.”
“Near here?”
“Very near.”
“Then why haven’t you recovered it?” Talbot giving his impression of a salvage specialist so engrossed in a problem that he has forgotten his own circumstances.
“How would you recover it, Talbot?”
“Diving for it, of course. Should be easy in those waters. After all, there’s a huge continental shelf here, you have to go a hundred miles out from any point off the west coast of Florida before you even reach five hundred feet. We’re close inshore here. Hundred feet, hundred fifty?”
“The X 13 is standing in how much, General?”
“One-thirty feet low tide,” Ruthven said mechanically.
I shrugged. “There you are then.”
“There we are not.” Vyland shook his head. “What’s the greatest depth at which you can expect divers to perform really useful work, Talbot?”
“Perhaps three hundred feet.” I thought a moment. “The deepest I know was by U.S. divers off Honolulu. Two hundred and seventy-five feet. U.S. Submarine F4.”
“You really are a specialist, aren’t you, Talbot?”
“Every diver and salvage man worth his salt knows that.”
“Two hundred and seventy-five feet, eh? Unfortunately, what we’re after is in the bottom of a big hole, a deep chasm in the sea bed. The general’s geologists were very interested indeed when we located this hole. Said it was just like — what was it, General?”
“The Kurd Deep.”
“That’s it. The Hurd Deep. In the English Channel. Deep valley in the sea-bed where the Limeys dump all ‘their old explosives. This one here is four hundred and eighty feet in depth.”
“That makes a difference,” I said slowly.
“Doesn’t it now? And how would you get at that?”