‘It is, sir.’
‘You astonish me. Most interesting, most. Could be a big part of the answer to our problem, don’t you agree, Commander?’ Talbot nodded. ‘I think we should act immediately on this one. Ah! The very man himself.’
Myers had just entered, carrying a piece of paper which he handed to Talbot. ‘Reply to your latest query to the Pentagon, sir.’
‘Thank you. No, don’t go. We’ll have another message to send them in a minute.’ Talbot handed the paper to Hawkins.
‘”Security at bomber base”,’ Hawkins read, ‘”believed to be 99.9% effective. But cards on the table. However unlikely, there may be one chance in ten thousand that security has been penetrated. This could have been that one chance”. Well, isn’t that nice. Absolutely useless piece of information, of course.’
‘”Plane carried fifteen H-bombs of fifteen megatons each and three atom bombs, all three equipped with timing devices”. Well, that’s just fine. So now we have three of those ticking monsters to contend with.’
‘With any luck, just one,’ Talbot said. ‘Sonar picks up only one. Extremely unlikely that all three would be ticking in perfect unison. Point’s academic, anyway. One or a hundred, the big boys would still go up.’
‘Identified by size, they say,’ Hawkins went on. ‘Sixty inches by six. Pretty small for an atom bomb, I would have thought. 4000 kilotons. That’s a lot, Dr Wickram?’
‘By today’s standards, peanuts. Less than half the size of the Hiroshima bomb. If the bomb is the dimensions they say, then it’s very large for such a small explosive value.’
‘It goes on to say that they’re designated for marine use. I suppose that’s a fancy way of saying that they are mines. So your guess was right, Dr Wickram.’
‘Also explains the size of the bomb. Quite a bit of space will be taken up by the timing mechanism and, of course, it will have to be weighted to give it negative buoyancy.’
The real sting comes in the tail,’ Hawkins said. ‘”When the ticking stops the timing clock has run out and the firing mechanism is activated and ready to be triggered by mechanical stimulation”, by which I take it they mean ship’s engines. So it looks as if you were right about that one, Van Gelder. Then, by way of cheerful farewell, they say that enquiries so far confirm that the timing mechanism, once in operation, cannot be neutralized and appears to be irreversible.’
The last words were met with silence. No one had any comment to make for the excellent reason that everyone had already been convinced of the fact.
‘A message to the Pentagon, Myers. “Urgently require to know state of development of the EG & G krytron” — that’s k-r-y-t-r-o-n, isn’t it, Lieutenant? — “nuclear detonation device.”‘ Talbot paused. ‘Add: “If operating model exists essential dispatch immediately with instructions.” That do, Admiral?’ Hawkins nodded. ‘Sign it Admiral Hawkins.’
‘We must be giving them quite some headaches in the Pentagon,’ Hawkins said in some satisfaction. ‘This should call for still more aspirin.’
‘Aspirins are not enough,’ Van Gelder said. ‘Sleepless nights are what are called for.’
‘You have something in mind, Van Gelder?’
‘Yes, sir. They can have no idea of the really horrendous potential of the situation here in Santorini – the combination of all those megatons of hydrogen bombs, thermal plumes and volcanoes and earthquakes along the tectonic plate boundaries and the possibly cataclysmic results. If Professor Benson here were to make a very brief précis of the lecture he gave us in the wardroom this evening it might give them something more to think about.’
‘You have an evil mind, Van Gelder. What a perfectly splendid suggestion. Uneasy will lie the heads along the Potomac this night. What do you think, Professor?’
‘It will be a pleasure.’
When Sub-Lieutenant Cousteau, together with the two divers and their equipment, returned from Santoriai, they found the Ariadne in virtual darkness. With the thought of the malevolent listening bug on the sea-floor dominating every other in his mind, Talbot had sought Lieutenant Denholm’s advice on the question of noise suppression: Denholm had not been half-hearted in his recommendations, with the result that the use of all mechanical devices on the ship, from generators to electric shavers, had been banned. Only essential lighting, radar, sonar and radio were functioning normally: all these could function equally well, as they had been designed to do, on battery power. The sonar watch on the ticking device in the crashed bomber was now continuous.
The two divers, Chief Petty Officer Carrington and Petty Officer Grant, were curiously alike, both aged about thirty, of medium height and compact build: both were much given to smiling, a cheerfulness that in no way detracted from their almost daunting aura of competence. They were with Talbot and Van Gelder in the wardroom.
‘That’s all I know about the situation down there,’ Talbot said, ‘and heaven knows it’s little enough. I just want to know those three things – the extent of the damage, the location of this ticking noise and to see if it’s possible to remove this atom bomb or whatever, which I’m convinced in advance is impossible. You are aware of the dangers and you are aware that I cannot order you to do this. How does the prospect appeal, Chief?”
‘It doesn’t appeal at all, sir.’ Carrington was imperturbable. ‘Neither Bill Grant nor I is cast in the heroic mould. We’ll walk very softly down there. You shouldn’t be worrying about us, you should be worrying about what your crew is thinking. If we slip up they’ll all join us in the wide blue yonder or whatever. I know you want to come down, sir, but is it really necessary? We’re pretty experienced in moving around inside wrecks without banging into things and we’re both Torpedo Gunner Mates and explosives, you might say, are our business. Not, I admit, the kind of explosives you have down there but we know enough not to trigger a bomb by accident.’
‘And we might?’ Talbot smiled. ‘You’re very tactful, Chief. What you mean is that we might bang into things or kick a detonator on the nose or something of the kind. When you say “necessary”, do you mean “wise”? I refer to our diving experience or lack of it.’
‘We know about your diving experience, sir. You will understand that when we knew what we were coming into we made some discreet enquiries. We know that you have commanded a submarine and the Lieutenant-Commander was your first lieutenant. We know you’ve both been through the HMS Dolphin Submarine Escape Tower and that you’ve done more than a fair bit of free diving. No, we don’t think you’ll be getting in our way or banging things around.’ Carrington turned up palms in acceptance. ‘What’s your battery capacity, sir?’
‘For essential and non-mechanical purposes, ample. Several days.’
‘We’ll put down three weighted floodlights and suspend them about twenty feet above the bottom. That should illuminate the plane nicely. We’ll have a powerful hand-flash each.
We have a small bag of tools for cutting, sawing and snipping. We also have an oxyacetylene torch, which is rather more difficult to use under water than most people imagine, but as this is just a reconnaissance trip we won’t be taking it along. The closed-circuit breathing is of the type we prefer, fifty-fifty oxygen and nitrogen with a carbon dioxide scrubber. At the depth of a hundred feet, which is what we will be at, we could easily remain underwater for an hour without any risk of either oxygen poisoning or decompression illness. That’s academic, of course. Provided there’s access to the plane and the fuselage is not crushed a few minutes should tell us all we want to know.
‘Two points about the helmet. There’s a rotary chin switch which you depress to activate an amplifier that lets us talk, visor to visor. A second press cuts it off. It also has a couple of sockets over the ears where you can plug in what is to all effects a stethoscope.’
‘That’s all?’
‘All.’
‘We can go now?’
‘A last check, sir?’ Carrington didn’t have to specify what check.
Talbot lifted a phone, spoke briefly and replaced it.
‘Our friend is still at work.’
The water was warm and still and so very clear that they could see the lights of the suspended arc-lamps even before they dipped below the surface of the darkened Aegean. With Carrington in the lead and using the marker buoy anchor rope as a guide they slid down fifty feet and stopped.
The three arc-lamps had come to rest athwart the sunken bomber, sharply illuminating the fuselage and the two wings. The left wing, though still attached to the fuselage, had been almost completely sheared off between the inner engine and the fuselage and was angled back about thirty degrees from normal. The tail unit had been almost completely destroyed. The fuselage, or that part of it that could be seen from above, appeared to be relatively intact. The nose cone of the plane was shrouded in shadow.