Henry circled back to me in the dinghy as I went down and tied the loose end of the cord to the marker buoy.
“Here,” he said as I surfaced again, and handed down a couple of yards of tie-wire. “Shoot down and wrap this around the chest just in case the cord frays through before we go down again.”
“Not on this tank, my friend,” I replied, shaking my head and beginning to feel cold. “I’ve got less than a hundred pounds left. Give me yours. No sense in breaking into a spare.”
******
“Well, guys,” I said as we picked Rick up from the beach. “That was the easy part. Tomorrow we work. It’s going to take more than a couple of hours to chip the coral away. Those two rocks are stuck to the chest like reinforced concrete.”
The chest appeared to be the size of one of those old rectangular kerosene tins: about two feet long and a foot square at the ends; but fifty-five years of being besieged by coral polyps had rounded the corners and put large bulges on the sides and top. Seaweed hung down from underneath. If I hadn’t been looking for the squarish shape I would have thought it to be just another odd-shaped rock.
Rick sat up on the bow of the dinghy wearing a face like the cat which had just eaten the canary. “No problem, Andy,” he said. “No problem at all!”
“Don’t you worry, my friend,” I replied. “It’ll keep you busy for a while.”
“What’s it going to take to knock the bloody thing loose?” he asked.
“Probably nothing more than a couple of sharp chisels and a two-pound hammer, each.”
“Sounds like a piece of cake!”
“Not at sixty feet, my friend,” I replied. “It’s going to take more than just a few gentle swings.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said, grabbing the side of the trawler as I cut the motor. “But how about having a go at it now?”
We thought it would have taken at least two or perhaps even three dives to locate the chest: the best part of a day; but we had done it in only one. There had been a fair certainty that it might have become cemented to the rocky bottom, but not as badly as it now appeared to be.
“Come on, mate,” he added. “It’s only two-thirty, plenty of time for another dive.”
“Hang on,” I said. “Let me think for a moment.”
There was ample time to complete a dive and then run back into the anchorage for the night; but now that we had found the chest I didn’t want to let it out of my sight. None of us did; and all Rick really wanted to do was to get down and have a look at it; and yet if he was going down for a dive he might as well chip away some of the coral whilst he was down there.
If we didn’t start the actual recovery until next morning, we mightn’t be able to complete the job before nightfall and then find ourselves forced into working yet another day, increasing the chance of somebody sticking their nose in. To free the chest in only one day might mean working non-stop in pairs, with the third person resting in the dinghy between dives and trying to keep an eye on the trawler. The chest was at sixty feet. Non-stop diving might create problems with decompression, requiring strict adherence to the US Diving Tables. I didn’t want to have to set up reserve bottles hanging down below the water from the stern of the dinghy. Our supposed sport-diving would begin to look like a full-scale expedition.
Maybe it would be best to spend half an hour on the bottom and find out just how hard, or easy, the task of chipping the coral from the chest was going to be.
“Okay, Rick,” I said finally, watching as the grin spread across his face. “One dive this afternoon – you and me.” I turned to Henry, disappointment at being left behind showing clearly. “You can run us across in the dinghy and then come back here and wait for us to surface.” I didn’t want the dinghy anchored in the same spot all the time. “I reckon we’ll be down for about twenty-five to thirty minutes. Depends on how much air we use up, and that’ll depend on how much work we have to do.”
“What if there’s trouble with the trawler?” he asked.
“Start the engine,” Rick said. “Put her in neutral and give her a burst. We should be able to hear the vibration from that distance.”
******
We had come prepared for coral and had gathered together a collection of tools that might be needed to do the job: half a dozen hammers of various weights; about ten heavy cold-chisels; several sharp-pointed spikes; three crowbars – one long and two short; a couple of chipping hammers; and a miner’s pick.
We set out again at a quarter after three. Rick had been striding up and down the deck for the last half-hour, eager to get down to the chest. It was at least an hour since I had come out of the water. I had been down perhaps thirty minutes that first time, and another five while I wound the wire around the chest and rearranged the cord up to the buoy. It was still on the safe side, but even so I made a mental note to make certain that I hung below the surface at ten feet for a couple of minutes on the way back up. Any strenuous work at sixty feet might increase the build-up of residual nitrogen, and increase the chance of the bends.
It would be on the following day that we would have to exercise care, keeping a record of each dive and the bottom time, as well as the time spent on the surface between each dive. We were lucky it was only sixty feet and not a hundred and sixty.
“There’s the rocks I piled up on the headland,” Rick said, pointing north as we headed into the bay with Henry at the tiller.
“Yeah,” I replied. “You couldn’t miss them even if you were blind.”
“Right.”
“Okay, Henry,” I said. “A little more to port. Slow it down a bit. Can you see that large rock on shore?”
“The dark-coloured one?”
“No, the other one. It’s got a bit of a dent in it.”
“Right, yep. Got it.”
“Okay. Now line it up with the lowest part of the scar. Okay?”
“Yep.”
“Slow it down a bit more,” I said. “Slower, we’re nearly there. How are those marks lining up, Rick?”
He dropped the flipper back into the bottom of the dinghy and began swivelling his head from left to right and then back again, trying to pick the moment we would cross the line joining the tip of the southern headland and the stones he had piled up on the other.
“Right, Henry,” he said. “Drop her into neutral now. We’re there.”
I pulled my mask over my face and leaned down into the water. Twenty feet below us, and maybe ten to the right, I could see the buoy straining against the cord.
“Perfect,” I said. “Or almost perfect. Which way’s the current running?”
I looked around, watching the reference points.
“Okay, Henry,” I said. “Head her over that way about twenty feet. You got the anchor ready, Rick?”
He untangled a couple of tools from the coil of rope and dangled the anchor and its short length of chain over the bow. I put my head over the side again. The buoy was astern of us.
“Right,” I said. “Drop her in.”
The rope snaked over the side and Henry stopped the engine. We sat in quiet contemplation and waited for the rope to go tight.
“That’s it,” I said. “Stick your head under, Rick, and see if you can find the buoy.”
He raised his head seconds later, salt water dripping from tousled hair and running down his face. “God it’s clear!”
“Yes,” I said sharply. “But can you see the bloody buoy?”
“Of course! It’s right under us.”
“Right,” I said, buckling the straps of the back-pack and adjusting my weight-belt. “Let’s get down to it.” I passed him two of the hammers and all of the chisels. “Here, you take these and I’ll bring the miner’s pick and the rest of the gear. I’ll see you at the bottom. Don’t start without me.”
I followed him down through clear water, down past the buoy, watching as his bubbles rose up lazily towards me and then bursting as they hit the pick in my right hand. With the weight of the steel we were car
rying we went down like stones. It was all I could do to clear my ears as the pressure built up. Next time we should lower the tools down rather than running the risk of dropping them to avoid a burst eardrum, and losing the lot.
I looked up, catching sunlight flickering on the ripples as Henry’s face-mask broke the surface thirty or forty feet above me. It reminded me that I had meant to tell him to keep a look-out along the northern cliff-face for that reflection of light I had seen. Perhaps it was nothing, or maybe it was Sekove and his mates wondering what we were really up to. That guilty look in Henry’s eyes came back to mind. Maybe they already knew.
As I touched bottom I saw the anchor chain being hauled to the surface, and watched as the dinghy’s propeller roared back to the trawler.
Rick was running his hands gloatingly over the chest, but slowly so as not to cut himself on the jagged edges of encrusted coral. I placed the tools at the base of one of the supporting boulders and tried jabbing the spike into the coral where chest and rock met. It didn’t even leave a mark. The coral was harder than I had thought it would be, although some of the lumps, young brain coral, were soft and could be easily smashed away; but those lumps weren’t the problem. They were only bulges sticking to the sides and top of the chest. It was the hard white calcium bonding the two boulders to the iron of the chest that was going to keep us busy.
Henry had suggested wrapping a cable around the chest and ripping it free with the trawler. We had rejected the idea. The force behind the wire cable could tear it through the rotting iron and hurl whatever might be in the chest down into the many crevices and fissures around the boulders. We might not lose the lot, but if there were sovereigns inside, or Henry’s imagined diamonds, most of them would never be found.
I dropped the spike on the pile of tools, took hold of the miner’s pick, tapped Rick on the shoulder, and motioned him aside. Doing my best to anchor my flippered feet under an outcrop of rock by the base of one supporting boulder, I took a swing at a point where the chest joined with that boulder. My aim was out and the four-sided, spike-headed pick rammed into the side of the boulder. My feet jerked free and I somersaulted over the entire conglomeration.
I struggled to turn myself the right way up on the other side of the chest and swam back over the top to find Rick doing his best to stop grinning at my efforts. It’s not easy to laugh at sixty feet with a regulator jammed in your mouth.
Giving him the two-finger sign, I picked up a chisel and one of the heavier hammers, and started to pound the chisel into the coral. The weight of the hammer was just about right, but after two or three minutes I was out of breath and gulping air like I would never get enough of it. One glance at Rick showed that he was the same. The pressure of the water on our bodies at that depth had dramatically increased the energy required for each blow. It wasn’t just a matter of raising the hammer and striking down on to the end of the chisel. The hammer had to be guided through its arc, and rammed through the restricting water.
We kept at it: working hard for one minute and then resting for the next; taking it in turns; timing each other by our diving watches. For a long time it seemed as though we were getting nowhere, but fifteen minutes later the coral started to blacken and I knew that we had broken through to the iron of the chest; and then, five minutes further on, as I fanned water against the furrow we had chiseled, I could see the break between rock and chest.
Rick grinned again behind his mask and grabbed me by the shoulder, squeezing.
The blows fell harder and more frequently then, and if it hadn’t been for the low pressure alarm on Rick’s tank we might have stayed below until our air ran out. It wouldn’t have mattered so much to him, for it would only take a minute to rise to the surface; but I might not have been left with sufficient to sit at the ten-foot level for those planned few minutes to rid myself of any nitrogen accumulation after this second dive.
We hid the tools under loose rocks strewn about the base of our altar and made our ascent, making certain that we swam in a long glide path that would take us well away from the area and out to the southern side of the bay. After the next dive, we would surface to the north.
I hung at ten feet while Rick signaled to Henry, and a minute later heard the vibration of the outboard moving slowly through the water. I waited below, watching as Rick unbuckled first his weight-belt and then his tank, the dinghy tilting as he gripped the side and rolled himself over the gunwale.
My time was up. I popped to the surface to be met by Henry’s anxious face.
******
“How’d it go?” he asked as we bounced back to the trawler across a small wave chop tossed up by the afternoon breeze.
“Not so bad,” I replied. “Not so good.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s bloody hard work,” Rick muttered. “That’s what he means.”
“You’re not wrong there,” I replied, and turned back to Henry. “The pick’s a waste of time, but we managed to clear some of it away with chisels.”
“How long’s it going to take?” he asked.
I turned to Rick. “What do you reckon? Another two or three dives to clear the rest away?”
“Yeah, about that.”
“So we should be able to raise it tomorrow afternoon, then?” Henry asked hopefully.
“Most probably,” I replied.
“Okay,” Rick said, passing the empty tanks up from the dinghy. “Better start filling these while we move back up the island.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” I asked.
Every time we went back inside the reef and past the small harbour we ran the risk of somebody coming out and asking embarrassing questions. Sekove and his friends wouldn’t be back in their punt to bother us, at least not for another four or five days and then only to remind us of our promise to eat with his family before we left; but it didn’t mean that some of the other villagers mightn’t get it into their heads to pay us a visit: for fruit cake and tea; and there was the yacht in the harbour. If he saw us again there was just the chance that he might come out to be polite; and he mightn’t be as naïve as Sekove. Every day that we stayed at the island increased the chance of discovery of our real intention. I explained my feelings to the others.
“I think you’re right,” Rick said. “What about you, Henry?”
“Yes, I guess so; and there’s one more thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“If we anchor just down from where we were when Sekove boarded us, it would save at least an hour’s travelling in the morning, an extra hour we could spend under the water.”
“Good point,” I said. “Okay, but it’ll mean keeping an anchor-watch all night. Two hours on, four off.”
******
The trawler was abuzz with excitement that evening. You would have thought we were Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon preparing to break in to Tutankhamen’s tomb instead of three ordinary guys trying to recover a black iron chest containing looted war booty.
Henry paced around the back deck while Rick and I sat at the dining table and toyed with cups of coffee. We were both dying for a beer to steady our nerves, but there wasn’t a drop left on the boat. It was just as well, for we would probably have celebrated far into the night.
Even though it only needed one to be on watch, it seemed that there were always two of us walking about the saloon, and sometimes all three. I must have finally fallen asleep at two in the morning, only to be woken at four to stand my second watch. I dropped off again at six, but they only gave me thirty minutes before letting the shrill whistle of the boiling kettle blast me into consciousness again.
It was a hurried breakfast, with Rick itching to get the anchor up and run back down into the bay.
“Come on, you two,” he muttered. “Get a bloody move on!”
“It’s not going to run away, my friend,” I said. “Sit down and eat your bloody steak and mushrooms. Save your strength for the coral.”
But he rushed the food do
wn, started the engines while Henry and I were both still eating, and then sprang out on deck and brought the anchor up.
“Okay!” he called down from the wheelhouse. “One of you buggers better get out on the bow and watch out for bommies.”
I carried my plate and coffee mug out to the bow and finished my breakfast in a leisurely manner as the Sally May pushed the water aside, churning back to the bay at a steady three knots.
******
“Where are those drums, Henry?” Rick called from the back deck.
“Down in the storage hold!”
“Right. Let’s have a look at them.”
Henry had topped up the oil in the engine the previous evening and had used diesel to clean out the empty five-gallon drum; and another empty that had been lying in the corner of the engine room; tossing the oily mess overboard as soon as it had got dark. There was no sign of the slick the next morning, the current having taken it five or six miles to the south.
The drums full of air would provide just over eighty pounds of lift. Inverted, with the handles tied to the wire wrapped around the chest, we could fill them with air from our regulators. They would have to be filled slowly though, in case the whole bundle suddenly shot to the surface and smashed into the bottom of the dinghy. Once the drums started to rise, the air inside would expand and force out any remaining water, accelerating their ascent. Rick reckoned that he could tilt one drum and let the air out if that started to happen. I wasn’t too sure and intended to be standing by with a knife to cut them both free, hoping they would miss the dinghy.
“Okay,” I said. “Who wants to go down first?”
Henry jumped forward, almost tripping over his own feet. We couldn’t say no.
Rick hadn’t run around like a madman only to be left out at the last minute. He grabbed his wetsuit. “Henry and I’ll go first, and then you can go down with Henry. If we haven’t freed it by then, I’ll do the third dive with you. Okay?”
“Fine with me,” I replied, but anxious for that second dive.
The Stone Dog Page 19