The men who had been moving forward to start the sweep for me now came running aft, pounding along the deck directly beneath where I was crouching on ‘the wing of ;the bridge.
“Can you see him, Jacques?” Captain Imrie’s voice, very quick, very calm.
“Not yet, sir.”
“He’ll be up soon.” I wished he wouldn’t sound so damned confident. “A dive like that must have knocked most of the breath out of him. Kramer, two men and into the boat. Take lamps and circle around. Henry, the box of grenades. Carlo, the bridge, quick. Starboard searchlight.”
I’d never thought of the boat, that was bad enough, but the grenades! I felt chilled, I knew what an underwater explosion, even a small explosion, can do to the human body, it was twenty times as deadly as the same explosion on land. And I had to, I just had to, be in that water in minutes. But at least I could do something about that searchlight, it was only two feet above my head. I had the power cable in my left hand, the knife in my right and had just brought the two into contact when my mind stopped thinking about those damned grenades and started working again. Cutting that cable would be about as clever as leaning over the wind-dodger and yelling “Here I am, come and catch me “- a dead giveaway that I was still on board. Clobbering Carlo from behind as he came up the ladder would have the same effect. And I couldn’t fool them twice. Not people like these. Hobbling as fast as I could I passed through the wheel-house on to the port wing, slid down the ladder and ran towards the forepeak. The foredeck was deserted.
I heard a shout and the harsh chatter of .some automatic weapon — Jacques and his machine-pistol, for a certainty. Had he imagined he’d seen something, had the box come to the surface, had he actually seen the box and mistaken it for me in the dark waters? It must have been the last of these – he wouldn’t have wasted ammunition on anything he’d definitely recognised as a box. Whatever the reason, it had all my blessing. If they thought I was floundering about down there, riddled like a Gruyere cheese, then they wouldn’t be looking for me up here.
They had the port anchor down. I swung over the side on a rope, got my feet in the hawse-pipe, reached down and grabbed the chain. The international athletics board should have had their stop-watches on me that night, I must have set a new world record . for shinning down anchor chains.
The water was cold but my exposure suit took care of that. It was choppy, with a heavy tide running, both of which suited me well. I swam down .the port side of the Nantesville, underwater for ninety per cent of the time and I saw no one and no one saw me: all the activity was on the starboard side of the vessel.
My aqualung unit and weights and flippers were where I had left them, tied to the top of the rudder post – the Nantesville was not much more than half-way -down to her marks and the top of the post not far under water. Fining on an aqualung in choppy seas with a heavy tide running isn’t the easiest of tasks but the thought of Kramer and his grenades was a considerable help. Besides, I was in a hurry to be gone for 1 had a long way to go and many things to do when I arrived at my destination.
I could hear the engine note of the lifeboat rising and falling as it circled off the ship’s starboard side but at no time did it come within a hundred feet of me. No more shots were fired and Captain Imrie had obviously decided against using the grenades. I adjusted the weights round my waist, dropped down into the dark safety of the waters, checked my direction on my luminous wrist compass and started to swim. After five minutes I came to the surface and after another five felt my feet ground on the shore of the rocky islet where I’d cached my rubber dinghy,
I clambered up on the rocks and looked back. The Nantesville was ablaze with light, A searchlight was shining down into the sea and the lifeboat still circling around. I could hear the steady clanking of the anchor being weighed. I hauled the dinghy into the water, climbed in, unshipped the two stubby oars and paddled off to the south-west. I was still within effective range of the searchlight but its chances of picking up a black-clad figure in a low-silhouette black dinghy on those black waters were remote indeed.
After a mile I shipped the oars and started up the outboard. Or tried to start it up. Outboards always work perfectly for me, except when I’m cold, wet and exhausted. Whenever I really need them, they never work. So I took to the stubby oars again and rowed and rowed and rowed, but not for what seemed any longer than a month. I arrived back at the Firecrest at ten to three in the morning.
TWO
Tuesday: 3 a.m. – dawn
“Calvert?” Hunslett’s voice was a barely audible murmur in the darkness.
“Yes.” Standing there above me on the Firecrest’s deck, he was more imagined than seen against the blackness of the night sky. Heavy clouds had rolled in from the south-west and the last of the stars were gone. Big heavy drops of cold rain were beginning to spatter off the surface of the sea. “Give me a hand to get the dinghy aboard.”
“How did it go?”
“Later. This first,” I climbed up the accommodation ladder, painter in hand. I had to lift my right leg over the gunwale. Stiff and numb and just beginning to ache again, it could barely take my weight. “And hurry. We can expect company soon.”
“So that’s the way of it,” Hunslett said thoughtfully, “Uncle Arthur will be pleased about this.”
I said nothing to that. Our employer, Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason, k.c.b. and most of the rest of the alphabet, wasn’t going to be pleased at all. We heaved the dripping dinghy inboard, undamped the outboard and took them both on to the foredeck.
“Get me a couple of waterproof bags,” I said. “Then start getting the anchor chain in. Keep it quiet – leave the brake pawl off and use a tarpaulin.”
“We’re leaving?”
“We would if we had any sense. We’re staying. Just get the anchor up and down.”
By the time he’d returned with the bags I’d the dinghy deflated and in its canvas cover. I stripped off my aqualung and scuba suit and stuffed them into one of the bags along with the weights, my big-dialled waterproof watch and the combined wrist-compass and depth-gauge. I put the outboard in the other bag, restraining the impulse just to throw the damn’ thing overboard: an outboard motor was a harmless enough object to have aboard any boat, but we already had one attached to the wooden dinghy hanging from the davits over the stern.
Hunslett had the electric windlass going and the chain coming in steadily. An electric windlass is in itself a pretty noiseless machine: when weighing anchor all the racket comes from four sources – the chain passing through the hawse-pipe, the clacking of the brake pawl over the successive stops, the links passing over the drum itself and the clattering of the chain as it falls into the chain locker. About the first of these we could do nothing: but with the brake pawl off and a heavy tarpaulin smothering the sound from the drum and chain locker, the noise level was surprisingly low. Sound travels far over the surface of the sea, but the nearest anchored boats were almost two hundred yards away – we had no craving for the company of other boats to harbour. At two hundred yards, in Torbay, we felt ourselves uncomfortably close: but the sea-bed shelved fairly steeply away from the little town and our present depth of twenty fathoms was the safe maximum for the sixty fathoms of chain we carried.
I heard the click as Hunslet’s foot stepped on the deck-switch. “She’s up and down,”
“Put the pawl in for a moment. If that drum slips, I’ll have no hands left.” t pulled the bags right for’ard, leaned out under the pulpit raft and used lengths of heaving line to secure them to the anchor chain. When the lines were secure I lifted the bags over the side and let them dangle from the chain.
“I’ll take the weight,” I said. “Lift the chain off the drum – we’ll lower it by hand.”
Forty fathoms is 240 feet of chain and letting that lot down to the bottom didn’t do my back or arms much good at all, and the rest of me was a long way below par before we started. I was pretty close to exhaustion from the night’s work, my neck ached fiercely, my leg only badly and I was shivering violently. I know of various ways of achieving a warm rosy glow but wearing only a set of underclothes in the middle of a cold, wet and windy autumn night in the Western Isles is not one of them. But at last the job was done and we were able to go below. If anyone wanted to investigate what lay at the foot of our anchor chain he’d need a steel articulated diving suit.