Santorini by Alistair MacLean

‘We wouldn’t drift. A diving ship normally carries four splayed anchors to moor it precisely over any given spot on the ocean floor. We just tie up to the Kilcharran, that’s all.’

‘I’m not doing too well, am I? One last objection, sir.

Probably a feeble one. An anchor is only an anchor. This bomber and its cargo probably weighs over a hundred tons. I mean, it’s quite a lift.’

‘Diving ships also carry flotation bags. We strap them to the plane’s fuselage and pump them full of compressed air until we achieve neutral buoyancy.’

‘I give up,’ Carrington said. ‘From now on, I stick to diving.’

‘So we twiddle our thumbs until the Kilcharran arrives,’ Hawkins said. ‘But not you, I take it, Commander?’

‘I think we’ll have a look at the Delos, sir.’

Chapter 5

They had rowed about a mile when Talbot called up the Ariadne. He spoke briefly, listened briefly, then turned to McKenzie who was at the tiller.

‘Ship oars. The timing device is still at it so I think we’ll start the engine. Gently, at first. At this distance I hardly think we’d trigger anything even if the bomb was activated, but no chances. Course 095.’

There were nine of them in the whaler – Talbot, Van Gelder, the two divers, McKenzie and the four seamen who had rowed them so far. Those last would not be required again until they reached the last mile of the return trip.

After about forty minutes Van Gelder moved up into the bows with a portable six-inch searchlight which, on such a clear night, had an effective range of over a mile. The searchlight was probably superfluous for there was a three-quarter moon and Talbot, with his night-glasses, had a clear bearing on the monastery and the radar station on Mount Elias. Van Gelder returned within minutes and handed the searchlight to McKenzie.

‘Fine off the port bow, Chief.’

‘I have it,’ McKenzie said. The yellow buoy, in the light of both the moon and the searchlight, was clearly visible. ‘Do I anchor?’

‘Not necessary,’ Talbot said. ‘No current that’s worth speaking of, no wind, a heavy anchor weight and a stout anchor rope. Just make fast to the buoy.’

In course of time McKenzie did just that and the four divers slipped over the side, touching down on the deck of the Delos just over an hour after leaving the Ariadne. Carrington and Grant disappeared down the for’ard companionway while Talbot and Van Gelder took the after one.

Talbot didn’t bother entering the after stateroom. The two girls had stayed there and he knew it would hold nothing of interest for him. He looked at the dead engineer, or the man whom Van Gelder had taken to be the engineer because of his blue overalls, and examined the back of his head carefully. The occiput had not been crushed and there were no signs of either bruising or blood in the vicinity of the deep gash in the skin of the skull. He rejoined Van Gelder who had already moved into the engine-room.

There was, of course, no smoke there now and very little traces of oil. In the light of their two powerful flashlights visibility was all that could be wished for and it took them only two minutes to carry out their examination: unless one is looking for some obscure mechanical fault there is very little to look for in an engine-room. On their way out they opened up a tool-box and took out a long slender chisel apiece.

They found the bridge, when they arrived there, to be all that they would have expected a bridge on such a yacht to be, with a plethora of expensive and largely unnecessary navigational aids, but in all respects perfectly innocuous. Only one thing took Talbot’s attention, a wooden cupboard on the after bulkhead. It was locked, but on the understandable assumption that Andropulos wouldn’t be having any further use for it Talbot wrenched it open with a chisel. It contained the ship’s papers and ship’s log, nothing more.

A door on the port side of the same bulkhead led to a combined radio-room and chart-room. The chart-room section held nothing that a chart-room should not have had,

including a locked cupboard which Talbot opened in the same cavalier fashion he had used on the bridge: it held only pilot books and sailing directions. Andropulos, it seemed, just liked locking cupboards. The radio was a standard RCA. They left.

They found Carrington and Grant waiting for them in the saloon. Carrington was carrying what appeared to be a portable radio: Grant had a black metallic box slightly larger than a sheet of foolscap paper and less than three inches thick. Carrington put his visor close to Talbot’s.

‘All we could find. Of interest, I mean.’

‘We have enough.’

‘Dispatch would appear to be the keynote of your investigations, Commander,’ Hawkins said. Glass in hand, he was seated across the wardroom table from Talbot. ‘I mean, you seem to spend singularly little time on your — um — aquatic investigation.’

‘You can find out interesting things in a very short space of time, sir. Too much, for some people.’

‘You refer to our shipwrecked friends?’

‘Who else? Five things, sir. Van Gelder was right, there were no signs of bruising or blood where the engineer had been gashed on the head. An examination of the engine-room turned up no signs of protrusions, angle-beams or sharp metallic corners that could have caused the injury. Circumstantial evidence, I know, but evidence that strongly suggests that the engineer was clobbered by a heavy metallic instrument. No shortage of those in an engine-room. We have, of course, no clue as to the identity of the assailant.

‘Secondly, I’m afraid the owner of the Delos has been guilty of telling you fibs, Admiral. He said he abandoned the Delos because he was afraid that the reserve fuel tank might blow up. There is no such tank.’

‘Isn’t that interesting. Does make things look a little black for Andropulos.’

‘It does a bit. He could always claim of course that he knew nothing of the layout of the engine-room and had always assumed that there had to be a reserve tank or that in a panic-stricken concern for the welfare of his beloved niece he had quite forgotten that there was no such tank. He’s undoubtedly intelligent, we know he’s a thespian of some note and could put up a spirited and convincing defence in court. But he’d have no defence against a further charge that the explosion was not due to natural causes, unless you regard the detonation of a bomb, almost certainly a plastic explosive, under the main fuel tank as being a natural cause.’

‘Well, well, well. One wonders how he’ll talk his way out of this one. You’re quite certain, of course?’

‘We are wounded, sir,’ Van Gelder said. ‘The Captain and I are developing quite some expertise on the effects of explosives on metal. In the bomber, the metal of the fuselage was blown outwards: in this case the metal of the fuel tank was blown inwards.’

‘We are not explosives experts, sir,’ Talbot said. ‘But it would seem that Andropulos wasn’t either.’ He nodded towards Carrington and Grant. ‘But those two gentlemen are experts. We were talking about it on the way back. They reckon that Andropulos — if it was Andropulos, it could have been Alexander or Aristotle — made an amateurish blunder. They say the villain, whoever he was, should have used what they call an inverted beehive plastic explosive attached to the underside of the tank by a magnetic clamp, in which case more than ninety per cent of the explosive charge would have been directed upwards. It would seem that they didn’t use such a device.’

Hawkins looked at Carrington. ‘You can be sure of this, Chief?’

‘As sure as can be, sir. We do know that he couldn’t have used a beehive. The explosive charge would have been either flat, circular or cylindrical and in any of those cases the disruptive explosive power would have been uniformly distributed in all directions. Grant and I think he didn’t deliberately sink the yacht but that he just, through ignorance, kind of accidentally blew a hole through the bottom.’

‘If it weren’t for the three dead men, this could be almost amusing. As it is, one has to admit that life is full of its little ironies. What’s that you’ve got in front of you there, Carrington?’

‘Some sort of radio, sir. Took it from the captain’s cabin.’

‘Why did you take it?’

‘Struck me as odd, sir, unusual, out of place, you might say. Every cabin is fitted with its own bulkhead radio — all probably fed from the central radio in the saloon. So why should he require this additional radio, especially when he had access to – and was probably the only user of – the much superior radio in his radio-room?’

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