Front Runner

by Felix Francis

  “In spite of not having any actual rum in it?”

  “Shut up!” she said, punching me playfully on the arm.

  Martin and Theresa arrived and came to stand with us under the royal poinciana trees as we listened to a large choir made up of children from all the islands’ schools singing a selection of the best-known Christmas carols. Everyone joined in for a rousing rendition of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” as the finale.

  One and all were in celebratory mood, wishing each other Merry Christmas, as the crowd began to disperse back to their cars.

  “Jeff,” Sir Richard called. “Come and meet the Governor.”

  He introduced me to a short, slim man with dark wavy hair that was just beginning to go gray at the temples.

  “Delighted to meet you, Your Excellency,” I said, shaking his hand.

  “Please, call me Peter. I’m not one for formality, especially not on Christmas Eve. This is my wife, Annabel.” He indicated the blonde-haired woman with a small mouth and large blue eyes who was standing next to him.

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” I said to her.

  She shook my hand and smiled at me. “Is this your first time in the Cayman Islands?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “But I hope it won’t be my last.”

  “That’s what everyone says,” the Governor said. “It’s very good for the tourist trade.”

  “Is it the islands’ main source of income?” I asked.

  “It’s certainly important, but our financial services industry is much bigger,” he said. “There are over two hundred and fifty separate banks operating in Cayman. We have almost ten thousand different investment funds licensed to trade here. And we are one of the world’s largest insurance centers, with over seven hundred insurance companies registered.”

  “All of them trying to avoid paying taxes?” I said.

  “Financial institutions and companies will always base themselves in the most tax-efficient jurisdiction,” he said as if lecturing me. “If it wasn’t here, it would be somewhere else where conditions were favorable, such as Bermuda or the Bahamas. All Cayman financial services are fully compliant with both U.S. and European directives and regulations.”

  It sounded to me like a line he had used often before.

  “No suitcases full of dodgy cash, then?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “It is far more difficult to launder illegal money here than almost anywhere in the world. That, sadly, is a reputation that the Cayman Islands has unfairly acquired from the past. Nowadays, it is simply not true.”

  I believed him. Thousands wouldn’t.

  The Governor and his wife moved on to some of their other guests.

  “Come on,” Henri said to me. “Let’s go and have some dinner.”

  As we were walking out of the garden, we met Derrick and Gay Smith, also on their way back to the road.

  “Weren’t those children great?” Gay said. “I love hearing choirs sing.”

  We all agreed with her.

  “Jeff,” Derrick said. “Would you and Henri like to come for drinks on Boxing Day?”

  Henri and I looked at each other and we both nodded.

  “We’d love to,” I said. “Where and what time?”

  “Come to our place around six,” Derrick said. “Then we could all go out to dinner afterward at the Calypso Grill.”

  What could be more Caribbean? I thought. All else it needed was the “King of Calypso” himself, Harry Belafonte, singing “Day-o” from “The Banana Boat Song.”

  “Henri, you know where we live, don’t you?” Derrick said.

  “I think so,” she replied uncertainly. “I’m sure we’ll find it.”

  30

  Christmas Day dawned sunny and calm and Henri and I were out on the beach by seven o’clock in our swimsuits and T-shirts. Even though the sun had only just peeped over the eastern horizon, the temperature was already in the mid-seventies, which gave every indication of a very warm day to come. As Quentin had said, it really was going to be a hot Christmas.

  We walked up the beach toward Martin and Theresa’s place and found the dive boat was already there with a hive of activity going on around it. Bags of diving gear were being loaded on board from the beach, along with eight scuba air tanks. Martin Reynard was directing operations while two other men appeared to be doing all the work.

  “Morning,” said Martin as we approached. “Merry Christmas.”

  Henri gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  “This is Truman Ebanks,” Martin said, pointing at a large dark-skinned man standing on the sand. “He’s our divemaster. And also Carson Ebanks.” Martin pointed at the man on the boat. “He’s the captain and our safety officer.”

  Truman was passing the gear to Carson.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” I said. “Are you brothers?”

  “No, man,” said Carson in a deep, resonant voice.

  “I thought both being called Ebanks . . .”

  He laughed. “Lots of people hereabouts are named Ebanks. Those that ain’t Boddens.” I loved the way his local accent gave the words a rhythm, almost as if he was singing them.

  “I suppose we must be related somehow,” Truman said with a similar lilt, grinning with his large white teeth showing brightly against his dark face, “but from way back.”

  The equipment was almost fully loaded when Bentley came walking down the beach to join us.

  “I thought I’d come too,” he said to Martin. “Just for the ride.”

  Henri clearly wasn’t happy.

  “Fine,” Martin said. “Let’s get going.”

  I thought for a moment that Henri wasn’t going to come, so I took her hand and squeezed it. She smiled at me and shrugged her shoulders in acceptance.

  “OK,” she said.

  The dive boat consisted mostly of a single flat platform that ran right through from bow to stern, with the driver situated in the center, a bench down each side with tank holders behind it and an overhead awning that provided shade to most of the boat. The bow had been run aground on the sand and Martin, Bentley, Henri and I now climbed a short ladder to get on board. Truman then pushed us off the beach into deeper water.

  The trip out was wonderful, with the movement of the boat causing a refreshing breeze to blow into our faces, keeping us cool.

  From out at sea I could assess the whole sweep of Seven Mile Beach, with its array of hotels and condominiums stretching away into the distance in both directions.

  “Do most people live near the beach?” I asked Henri.

  “Nowhere is that far away,” she said, “but this is certainly the busiest end. Three-quarters of the whole population live in George Town or West Bay. Most of the eastern half of the island is just deserted mangrove swamp.”

  “Here you are, Jeff,” Martin said, placing a blue mesh bag full of gear by my feet. “All you need is in here. Take the yellow guest tanks. Yellow makes it easier for Truman and me to keep an eye on you.”

  “OK,” I said. “Thanks.”

  All the scuba tanks I had ever used before were uniformly boring gray aluminum that came with the dive boat, but here we had eight smart, brightly painted ones, two each in white, yellow, red and light blue. There’s personalized license plates, of course, but I’d never come across personalized dive tanks before. The red ones had HENRI painted in large black letters down them, the white had MARTIN, the blue had THERESA and the yellow GUEST.

  Bentley, it seemed, really was only there for the ride, as he obviously wasn’t planning on getting wet. He hadn’t brought any swimming trunks with him.

  “Where are we diving?” Henri asked. “I don’t want to go too deep.”

  “The wall first, then Kittiwake after,” Martin said. “It will be good to do Kittiwake without the usual mass of tourists getting in the way. No one e
lse dives on Christmas Day.”

  “What is Kittiwake?” I asked him.

  “The USS Kittiwake. It’s a retired naval ship that was deliberately sunk here in 2011 to provide an artificial reef and a dive site.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I said. I’d never dived on a wreck before. “How deep is it?”

  “It sits on the seafloor at about sixty feet. But we’re going to do a wall dive first. That will be a deeper yet shorter dive.”

  Like every diver the world over, I’d heard of the Cayman Wall, that point where the shallow shelf on which the island sits ends and the surrounding deepness begins. It is characterized by an abrupt and almost vertical falling away of the seafloor down into the Cayman Trench, the deepest part of the Caribbean at a depth of over twenty-five thousand feet. But, of course, we would only be exploring the very top of the wall.

  “I’ll skip the first dive,” Henri said. “It’s too deep for me.”

  I watched as Martin and Truman began to pull on a wet suit each.

  “Do we actually need a wet suit?” I asked. “I’ve done all my diving in the Red Sea without one.”

  “It may be hot up here in the sunshine,” Truman said, “but it’s still wintertime. The water will be cool a hundred feet down.”

  I pulled the wet suit out of my mesh bag and started to put it on.

  “I must have a photo,” Henri said, laughing, as I grappled with the black neoprene outfit that was none too big for me. She took my iPhone and snapped away as I struggled to pull up the long zipper at the back.

  “Very funny,” I said to her, pulling a face.

  I felt like the Michelin Man.

  “It’s Theresa’s,” Martin said. “It’s the largest spare I could find.”

  Even though Theresa was only an inch or so shorter than I, she was considerably less substantial around the waist. But I managed to do it up, in the end, with some extra help from the giggling Henri.

  Next out of the bag came a BC, a buoyancy compensator, a short jacket that has an air bladder between the inner and outer layers, which, when connected to a tank, could be filled with air to make a diver neutrally buoyant so that he neither floated up nor sank down but remained level in the water as if weightless.

  I attached the BC to one of the yellow tanks and connected the regulator to the valve, checking that the pressure in the tank was well above twenty-five hundred pounds per square inch. The pressure gauge, together with a depth indicator, was housed in a console about eight inches long that was attached by a length of high-pressure hose to the tank’s valve.

  I next tested the two mouthpieces, breathing through both the primary one and the emergency alternate.

  All seemed fine.

  It had been several years since I had last been diving and I was pleased that at least I hadn’t forgotten how to set up the equipment.

  “You’ll need a weight belt,” Truman said to me. “The air trapped in the neoprene will make you float otherwise.”

  “You’d just bob round on the surface like a cork,” said Martin, laughing. “Ten to twelve pounds should be enough.”

  I attached several rectangular lead blocks to a two-inch-wide belt and placed it around my waist. Next, I tried on the flippers and the mask.

  I was ready.

  The hum of the engine dropped away as we arrived at the first location and the boat was tied to one of the colored buoys that mark every dive site in Cayman waters.

  “Have fun,” Henri said as Carson carried my heavy gear over to the boarding ladder. I had decided that going down the ladder was a more preferable means of entry for my still-delicate abdomen to jumping off the side.

  I sat on the bottom step, put on the BC, flippers and mask and slipped gently into the clear blue Caribbean water. Martin and I were acting as dive buddies, hence we would constantly check each other for safety reasons, but after so long a break from the water I was pleased that Truman the divemaster was also coming with us.

  As we descended the buoy’s anchor line, I equalized the pressure in my ears by frequently holding my nose and blowing air into my sinuses. We arrived at the bottom almost at the point where the sandy floor disappeared over the top of the wall into the abyss.

  “Remember to continually check your depth,” Truman had told us in the pre-dive briefing. “It is far too easy to go over the edge and down too deep. One hundred feet maximum. Bottom time no more than fifteen minutes.”

  I reached around for the hose to the console and looked at the depth reading on the indicator. Seventy feet. Theoretically, therefore, I could go some thirty feet down the wall face, but I was happy staying up near the top where there was plenty of bright coral.

  Truman had also told us to be aware that we were diving in a designated marine park and that we should not touch or remove anything. But looking was all I was interested in doing anyway.

  What a delight it was to be down here exploring a world so different from the one above the surface that it could have easily been on another planet yet was, in fact, just a few short yards from life as we knew it.

  Back in the 1940s, Jacques Cousteau had perfected the open-circuit scuba equipment we were now using, solving the problem of a diver having to inhale air at a low pressure by attaching a gas regulator to a highly pressurized tank. But he probably had no idea at the time that he would also be creating a whole new leisure industry.

  The ability to breathe underwater must have been a dream of human beings since they first walked on dry land and here we were doing it.

  I checked the pressure in my tank. It was fine, a little below 2000 psi.

  I looked around for Martin.

  He was below me, his white tank clearly visible against the darkness beneath. He and Truman were some way down the wall, but I was happy remaining close to the lip. I was enchanted by the multicolored anemones swaying in the gentle current and by the shoals of black-and-yellow-striped sergeant major fish and the beautiful cobalt blue angelfish as they nibbled away at some invisible food on the surface of the coral.

  Truman swam up to join me and placed his thumb and index finger together to make a circle in the universal dive signal for OK. He was asking if I was all right. I answered in the affirmative by repeating the signal. He pointed at his watch and then held up his open right hand. I repeated the OK, indicating that I’d understood. Five more minutes.

  I again checked the pressure in my tank. It had now dropped to 1700. To be on the safe side, it needed to still be above 800 when I surfaced.

  No problem.

  After five minutes, the three of us ascended slowly toward the surface, stopping for prearranged decompression safety stops at forty and twenty feet. The last thing any of us wanted was to get the bends, the agonizing, hugely dangerous and potentially lethal condition that can occur when a sudden reduction in pressure causes bubbles of gas to form within the body in the same way that they do in a bottle of fizzy drink when the top is rapidly unscrewed.

  “That was fabulous,” I said to Henri as I sat on the bottom step of the ladder to take off the heavy equipment. “I’d forgotten how much fun diving could be.”

  She used my iPhone to snap more pictures of me.

  “You’ll break the lens,” I said, laughing.

  When the three of us were back on board, Carson maneuvered the boat the few hundred yards to the Kittiwake dive site, where we again tied up to the buoy.

  “I’m definitely coming with you on this one,” Henri said, opening her dive bag. “I’m not staying on the boat again with Bentley. He didn’t take his lecherous eyes off me for a second while you were under. I kept moving away to the other end of the boat and he kept following me.” She shivered with disgust.

  So Henri and I would be dive buddies on this dive, with Martin pairing up with Truman.

  I helped Henri zip up the back of her wet suit. Whereas I looked like I wa
s bursting out of mine in all the wrong places, she looked fantastic, with the tightness of the neoprene showing off her amazing curves to perfection.

  “Wow!” I whispered in her ear. “I could go down with you all day long.”

  “Stop it,” she said quietly. “Don’t give Bentley ideas.”

  It wasn’t me who would be giving Bentley ideas, her wet suit would have done that. He just sat on the opposite bench, watching us, and I wondered what was going on in his head.

  I switched my BC from one yellow tank to the other while Henri attached hers to one of the red ones. Soon we were set to go.

  “Bottom time for this dive will be a max of thirty minutes,” Truman said, briefing us. “You may go inside the wreck, if you want, but be careful not to snag your gear on the hatches. And don’t go in on your own in case you get stuck. Maximum depth is sixty-four feet, so no decompression stops are required. Nevertheless, rise and surface slowly. Have fun, everybody.”

  Carson again carried my BC and tank to the steps and I was soon descending once more into the magical and alien underwater world, following Henri down the buoy’s anchor line.

  We swam away from the line and the shape of the ship soon came into view.

  The USS Kittiwake had been a submarine rescue craft for the U.S. Navy and had served all over the world since being commissioned in 1946. Perhaps its most memorable task had been to recover the black box flight recorder from the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle, which had blown up over the Atlantic during launch in January 1986.

  Now Kittiwake sat rather forlornly on the sandy seafloor, its superstructure already beginning to show the effects of the marine life that had begun to colonize the gray steel hull.

  Henri and I first went into the ship’s bridge through the windows from which the glass had been removed. Then we ventured deeper into the vessel, moving down companionways to the lower decks. At one point, we were even able to surface in a compartment where there was an air pocket.

  It was an eerie feeling, moving through these watery spaces where once over a hundred men had lived and worked, past the mess hall where the tables at which they had eaten still remained in rows and bolted to the steel floor, along the corridor of the officers’ quarters and into the captain’s cabin.