“You’ll be killed, you’ll be killed!” She crossed to and sat on the bed-side, her eyes wide and scared, “Please, Philip! Please, please don’t. You’ll be killed, I tell you, I beg of you, don’t do it!” She seemed very sure that I would be killed.
“I have to, Charlotte. Time has run out. There’s no other way.”
“Please.” The brown eyes were full of unshed tears. This I couldn’t believe. “Please, Philip. For my sake.”
“No,” A tear-drop fell at the corner of my mouth, it tasted as salt as the sea. “Anything else in the world. But not this.”
She rose slowly to her feet and stood there, arms hanging limply by her side, tears trickling down her cheeks. She said dully: “It’s the maddest plan I’ve ever heard In my life,” turned and left the room, switching off the light as she went.
I lay there staring Jnto the darkness. There was sense in what the lady said. It was, I thought, the maddest plan TV ever heard in my life. I was damned glad I didn’t have to use it.
TEN
Thursday: noon – Friday: dawn
“Let me sleep.” I said. I kept my eyes shut. “I’m a dead man.”
“Come on, come on.” Another violent shake, a hand like a power shovel. “Up!”
“Oh, God!” I opened the corner of one eye. “What’s the time?”
“Just after noon. I couldn’t let you sleep any more.”
“Noon! I asked to be shaken at five. Do you know—–”
“Come here.” He moved to the window, and I swung my legs stiffly out of bed and followed him. I’d been operated on during my sleep, no anaesthetic required in the condition I was in, and someone had removed the bones from my legs. I felt awful. Hutchinson nodded towards the window. “What do you think of that?”
I peered out into the grey opaque world. I said irritably: “What do you expect me to sec in that damn’ fog?”
“The fog.”
“I see,” I said stupidly. “The fog.”
“The two a.m. shipping forecast,” Hutchinson said. He gave the impression of exercising a very great deal of patience. “It said the fog would clear away in the early morning. Well, the goddamned fog hasn’t cleared away in the early morning.”
The fog cleared away from my befuddled brain. I swore and jumped for my least sodden suit of clothing. It was damp and clammy and cold but I hardly noticed these things, except subconsciously, my conscious mind was frantically busy with something else. On Monday night they’d sunk the Nantesville at slack water but there wasn’t a chance in a thousand that they would have been able to get something done that night or the Tuesday night, the weather had been bad enough in sheltered Torbay harbour, God alone knew what it would have been like in Beul nan Uamh. But they could have started last night, they had started last night for there had been no diving-boat in the Dubh Sgeir boathouse, and reports from the Nantesville’s owners had indicated that the strongroom was a fairly antiquated one, not of hardened steel, that could be cut open in a couple of hours with the proper equipment, Lavorski and company would have the proper equipment. The rest of last night, even had they three divers and relief’s working all the time, they could have brought up a fair proportion of the bullion but I’d been damn’ sure they couldn’t possibly bring up all eighteen tons of it Marine salvage had been my business before Uncle Arthur had taken me away. They would have required another night or at least a good part of the night, because they only dared work when the sun was down. When no one could see them. But no one could see them In dense fog like this. This was as good as another night thrown in for free.
“Give Uncle Arthur a shake. Tell him we’re on our way. In the Firecrest”
“He’ll want to come.”
“He’ll have to stay. He’ll know damn’ well he’ll have to stay. Beul nan Uamh, tell him.”
“Not Dubh Sgeir? Not the boathouse?”
“You know damn’ well we can’t move in against that until midnight.”
“I’d forgotten,” Hutchinson said slowly. “We can’t move in against it until midnight.”
The Beul nan Uamh wasn’t Jiving up to hs fearsome reputation. At that time in the afternoon. It was dead slack water and there was only the gentlest of swells running up from the south-west. We crossed over from Ballara to the extreme north Of the eastern shore of Dubh Sgeir and inched our way southward with bare steerage way on. We’d cut the by-pass valve into the underwater exhaust and, even in the wheelhouse, we could barely hear the throb of the diesel. Even with both wheelhouse doors wide open, we could just hear it and no more. But we hadn’t the wheelhouse doors open for the purpose of hearing our own engine.
By this time we were almost half-way down the eastern patch of miraculously calm water that bordered the normal mill-race of Beul nan Uamh, the one that Williams and I had observed from the helicopter the previous afternoon. For the first time, Hutchinson was showing something approaching worry. He never spared a glance through the wheelhouse windows, and only a very occasional one for the compass: he was navigating almost entirely by chart and depth-sounder.
“Are you sure it’ll be this fourteen-fathom ledge, Calvert?”
“It has to be. It damn’ well has to be. Out to the seven fathom mark there the sea-bottom is pretty flat, but there’s not enough depth to hide superstructure and masts at low tide. From there to fourteen ifs practically a cliff. And beyond the fourteen fathom ledge it goes down to thirty-five fathom, steep enough to roll a ship down there. You can’t operate at those depths without very special equipment indeed.”
“It’s a damn’ narrow ledge,” he grumbled. “Less than a cable. How could they be sure the scuttled ship would fetch up where they wanted it to?”
“They could be sure. In dead slack water, you can always be sure.”
Hutchinson put the engine in neutral and went outside. We drifted on quietly through the greyly opaque world. Visibility didn’t extend beyond our bows. The muffled beat of the diesel served only to enhance the quality of ghostly silence. Hutchinson came back into the wheelhouse, his vast bulk moving as unhurriedly as always.
“Fm afraid you’re right. I hear an engine.”
I listened, then I could hear it too, the unmistakable thudding of an air compressor. I said: “What do you mean afraid?”
“You know damn’ well”He touched the throttle, gave the wheel a quarter turn to port and we began to move out gently into deeper water. “You’re going to go down.”
“Do you think I’m a nut case? Do you think I want to go down? I bloody well don’t want to go down – and you bloody well know that I have to go down. And you know why. You want them to finish up here, load up in Dubh Sgeir and the whole lot to be hell and gone before midnight?”
“Half, Calvert. Take half of our share. God, man, we do nothing.”
“I’ll settle for a pint in the Columba Hotel in Torbay. You Just concentrate on putting this tub exactly where she ought to be. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life swimming about the Atlantic when I come back up from the Nantesville.”
He looked at me, the expression in his eyes saying “if,” not “when,” but kept quiet. He circled round to the south of the diving-boat — we could faintly hear the compressor all the way – then slightly to the .west. He turned the Firecrest towards the source of the sound, manoeuvring with delicacy and precision. He said: “About a cable length.”
“About that. Hard to judge in fog.”
“North twenty-two east true. Let go the anchor.”
I let go the anchor, not the normal heavy Admiralty type on the chain but a smaller CQR on the end of forty fathoms of rope. It disappeared silently over the side and the Terylene as silently slid down after it I let out all forty fathoms and made fast. I went back to the wheelhouse and strapped the cylinders on my back.
“You won’t forget, now,” Hutchinson said. “When you come up, just let yourself drift. The ebb’s just setting in from the nor’-nor’-east and will carry you back here. I’ll keep the diesel ticking, you’ll be able to hear the underwater exhaust twenty yards away, J hope to hell the mist doesn’t clear. You’ll just have to swim for Dubh Sgeir.”
“That will be ducky. What happens to you if it clears?”
“I’ll cut the anchor rope and take oft.”
“And if they come after you?”
“Come after me? Just like that? And leave two or three dead divers down inside the Nantesville?”