by Jay Garnet
Half an hour had gone.
Already he was beginning to feel the cold, for even the Aegean is well below the temperature at which the body operates efficiently. In addition he realized he was beginning to feel just a tiny bit light-headed.
He had just squatted down for the third time when he felt four hard jerks from Niko above: a summons to come up.
But he was not yet ready. What the hell was going on? An hour, he’d said. Niko was worrying too early.
He jerked the lifeline once, indicating that he was still all right. He stooped again, and was holding up a handful of coins, when the lifeline sprang taut so violently that he dropped them.
Jesus! What the bloody hell was the matter with Niko?
He gave the line another, strong tug and bent to retrieve the coins. It took him a few minutes of intense concentration, for they were scattered in little nooks among the pieces of pottery.
He was therefore taken totally by surprise by a violent shove that lifted him off his feet and toppled him over backwards. His arms windmilled slowly as he sought to keep his balance. Automatically he did everything he could to keep his helmet up.
Two thoughts careered through his mind: Fuck, Niko! and then, as he realized he was not being hauled up, Shark! That, too, was unlikely; though there are sharks in the Mediterranean, attacks are almost unknown.
He sat down heavily in a cloud of silt, bringing his nose into sharp contact with the face-plate. As he steadied himself and looked back through the silt, he saw that there was no shark.
But there was another diver.
And he was stooping towards the coins. He seized a handful and began stuffing them into his own bag.
The apparition seemed like a bad dream, some new and evil counterpart to the rapture of the deep. But there was nothing illusory about Mike’s tumble, about the blood seeping from his nose and the silt settling around him.
Some other bastard muscling in on his treasure – his treasure! The find that was going to guarantee his independence, start a new life for him!
Surprise gave way to violent anger. It never occurred to him not to counter-attack. He rose and stepped forward with no particular plan of action other than to take immediate, unthinking revenge and protect his property.
As he moved, the figure opposite also stood, having finished bagging the handful of coins, looked up, then drew a knife from his belt.
Mike had never got into a fight below water, but he had once spoken to a frogman from Gibraltar who had. The frogman had pointed out that even with a sharp knife it’s hard to move fast and strongly enough to penetrate a diving suit. It would take quite a blow to puncture two layers of sheet rubber and a layer of twill. Now, as every film-goer knows, the thing to go for on a frogman is the air tube. The same is true for hard-hat divers, although the pipe is that much tougher.
Mike’s attacker was clearly an amateur in such matters. Mike pulled his own knife and made a slow-motion stride almost within striking range. His adversary lunged forward at Mike’s midriff, failed to get anywhere near and backed off hastily to one side, towards the edge of the abyss.
Mike had been down forty minutes. He was cold, slow and vulnerable. He was breathing heavily. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, he suddenly felt supremely self-confident. But he was experienced enough to realize that he was suffering from the first effects of the narcs. He was in no state to fight. There had to be another way, for he was not at all certain how much longer he could hang on to his declining faculties. He had to think fast. His adversary was coming at him again. The chances were he was going to get through sometime and if Mike was only semi-conscious, even his suiting and a tough pipe wouldn’t save him.
Suddenly Mike saw what he had to do. He was held to the seabed by the weight of his suit, which was partially buoyed up by the air inside his helmet. It was possible to make himself lighter by adjusting the air intake. It was a trick that took some skill, for too much air would lead to a blow-up, and he needed more than partial buoyancy to achieve what he had in mind.
He reached into his bag, felt around for his hacksaw and withdrew it. Then, as he adjusted his intake valve, he felt the rush of air into his helmet, the slight surge down over his chest and the sudden lightness. Praying he’d got the balance right, he pushed himself forwards and upwards, jumping as hard as he could. Still in slow motion, he took off towards his attacker’s helmet. He saw the knife slicing towards him and felt a blow on his leg. But by that time he was kicking at the helmet itself, to give himself another boost upwards. He was suddenly out of reach of the flailing arm below, and gripping tight to his enemy’s air pipe. Now it seemed he had all the time in the world.
Holding the pipe in one hand and his hacksaw in the other, he sawed at the tough rubber. As soon as the teeth bit, the pipe divided neatly, blasting bubbles out into the water around him. The lifeline parted even more easily: he cut through it in seconds.
Eight feet below him, the helmeted figure was lunging hopelessly upwards when the cut hose snaked down gently across his helmet.
The stricken diver dropped his knife and twiddled his air valve. Then he seized the hose and held it up in front of him in a gesture of incomprehension. Mike, meanwhile, was still suspended above him, hanging on to the cut line. He was still a few pounds heavier than water, and had no intention of drifting down into the reach of the desperate man below.
His victim was already as good as dead. He wouldn’t drown, for at the end of each pipe is a one-way valve that blocks water. Nor would he die of the squeeze, because the remaining few breaths of air in the helmet were at the same pressure as the water outside.
No: he would die of asphyxiation, and the process would take several minutes.
Mike hung above, watching with a combination of relief and horror the death throes of the figure below.
The man held his air pipe pleadingly towards Mike. He went down on his knees and struck the sand with one arm, as if protesting at the unfairness of it all. Then he stood up and tottered backwards, stepping towards the edge of the cliff. Mike had a glimpse through the face-plate of the wide-open, silently screaming mouth, saw the terror-stricken eyes. After that the diver took another pace back, felt the ocean floor falling away beneath his boot, waved his arms in a dying attempt to keep balance, then slowly tumbled over backwards. In a final spasm a leg kicked and he began a slow somersault into the darkness. Before he vanished, Mike saw the legs go rigid as the gas in the suit escaped from the helmet. Now the head would be in a partial vacuum and its owner mercifully unconscious. The last view Mike had was of the dim figure sinking upside down into the depths. He knew even then that in later years he would dream of that sight and perhaps imagine himself dying in such a way. Not a blow-up exactly; more a blow-down – a unique death in diving history.
Only then did he let go his line, drift slowly back to the floor, readjust his air intake and give the double tug which signified he was to be brought up.
On the way he realized dreamily – for he was barely conscious himself – that whoever was tending the dead man must soon notice that something was amiss. There would be no immediate difference in the weight, for he had not been suspended; and it took as much pressure to blow air down the cut pipe as if there was a diver on the end; but there would be something – his own gymnastic addition to the line, perhaps, or the sudden blank in the phone link.
According to plan, he rose slowly to seventy feet, then hung for five minutes while the nitrogen that had gathered in his tissues began to seep out of his muscles and blood. Decompressing after an hour at a hundred and eighty feet would be a tedious business. From seventy feet there would be a pause every ten feet, each pause longer than the last. At ten feet he would have to hang in the water for all of thirty-five minutes. He moved up to sixty feet, and began to feel a little better physically.
Mentally, though, he was still in poor shape, in an agony of shock and frustration. This was the first time he had ever killed a man hand to hand, and he had
done it so easily, driven by anger and his desire for revenge. He had no idea who the diver was, nor how he came to be there. Niko must have some answers. Christ! If only he had bothered to buy some decent gear with a phone link before setting off on this insane expedition!
At that moment he heard through his helmet the distant thud of motors. He glanced up. The shadow that was the Hecate had begun to move. An instant later his line snapped upwards. As the boat accelerated, so the sideways pressure of water began to swing him towards the surface. He was rising quickly, far too quickly. Not only that: the moving shadow above him was getting closer. Niko was winding in the line as fast as the capstan would turn.
‘You silly cunt!’ Mike shouted uselessly in his helmet. ‘You’ll fuckin’ cripple me!’
When he hit the surface less than half a minute later, his world became a mass of surging spray and his limbs were pinned back by the current. Fortunately, the Hecate’s top speed was no more than ten knots. Mike began to swing and bang helplessly against her side, and then, in one of his wild gyrations, he noticed that the diving ladder was right beside him. He steadied himself against it and with the remnants of his strength hauled himself on to it. It took him an age to climb each step, but he finally struggled clear of the rushing water and stuck his helmet over the edge of the gunwale.
Niko saw him, shouted and made waving signs to show he was on his way. He cast an anxious glance behind him and abandoned the wheel to help Mike aboard. That part was a nightmare: even for two people, 350lb of human flesh and diving equipment is tough to ship. When the diver inside is close to collapse, it is nearly impossible.
Mike lay on his back like a dying beetle while Niko scrabbled with his face-plate, and then, even before Mike could scream out the question that was surging within him, Niko pointed over Mike’s shoulder.
Mike sat up and looked aft.
Some two hundred yards away a cabin cruiser was creaming along in their wake.
‘He chase us!’ shouted Niko, helping Mike off with his helmet. ‘They come after us! They put down diver!’
He returned hastily to the wheel, leaving Mike to struggle with the rest of his gear. ‘I try to warn you. But they pull up empty hose. No diver! I think something happen down there. Maybe, Mikis, he do this thing. They shout! I go! They come! Now we have trouble.’
Mike had dropped his weights and was sitting in his clammy suit, gripping the gunwale, exhausted, staring back at the launch.
‘Yeah,’ he shouted back at Niko. ‘Big trouble. Like not long from now I’m going to be bent like an old tin can.’ He began to struggle out of his suit. ‘That bugger down there tried to kill me. So I cut ’is pipe for ’im.’
‘Ah, Mikis, now they going to get us!’
The cruiser was almost upon them. She was at least twice as long as the Hecate, at least twice as fast and possibly four times as heavy.
‘Blimey,’ said Mike, ‘them blokes can really move.’
He stepped out of his suit, so that he was wearing only his swimming trunks and a T-shirt.
It was clear they were trapped.
A voice boomed out over a loudspeaker: ‘Pull over or we ram you!’
‘We can’t do a bloody thing, Niko,’ said Mike, who was too tired and apprehensive about his own condition to care any more. ‘Pull over. I’ve got to get back below.’
‘They kill us!’ Niko said, his face set.
The white cruiser was twenty yards away – he could now see her name, Argo, quite clearly – and closing.
Suddenly Niko threw the wheel of the Hecate over. Mike was not at all clear what he was up to – perhaps trying to swing her round so fast that he could head away in the opposite direction before the large cruiser had time to turn. But the Argo’s own performance was that of a greyhound compared with a snail. As the Hecate turned, the Argo’s stern dug in, her bows swung round and within ten seconds she was upon the Hecate amidships. Mike, who was gripping the gunwale again, was catapulted over the side and, as the waters closed over him, had time to think of only one thing: go deep, avoid the props.
He could swim no more than a few yards underwater. He had no idea in what direction he had gone, but realized as he surfaced that the roar of engines had ceased.
He’d come up about ten yards to the rear of the cruiser, a little to one side. He could see members of the crew up in the bows peering down over the side. Of the Hecate there was no sign. Wreckage littered the surface of the sea. There were no other ships close by, and no islands close to hand. He trod water. No one saw him.
There was no hope of escape. Indeed, the very attempt would have meant death or, at least, supreme agony. He was cold and exhausted, and his consciousness was clouded again. He knew that in his veins there would already be forming the little bubbles of nitrogen gas that over the next few hours would create a hell equivalent to withdrawal from heroin. He had nothing to lose by going on board, and perhaps a lot to gain, for the cruiser offered the only conceivable way of avoiding the bends.
‘Here!’ he shouted, and waved.
There was an answering shout, and a young man on the Argo’s bow pointed to him. He began to swim a slow side-stroke towards the cruiser.
By the time he reached it a ladder was in position. He paused for a while on the part of the ladder that was underwater. It was a long way up, and he could hardly move.
At the top of the steps his arms were seized. The treatment was rough, but he hardly noticed. He was too exhausted to do anything for himself any more. Young men’s voices, talking in Greek, told him to come on. He found it much easier to close his eyes and let them drag him.
In the well of the boat they sat him dripping on the deck. He collapsed sideways. He opened his eyes once, and saw that one of the men had gone.
He breathed deeply, still conscious. No pain yet.
The other young man returned. He was lifted again. They balanced him on his feet as if they were testing some sort of toy.
‘You can stand? You can hear?’
‘Reckon so,’ he said.
‘We go now down steps. You look out. No fall.’
They led him below decks, through a pair of double doors and down a companion-way. His head lolled. He saw nothing but his own feet. The men put him on a chair. He leant forward and put his head in his hands.
A voice probed his fogged consciousness.
‘Well, Mr Michael Cox, you have some talking to do.’ The voice was deep, American, and with a hint of something that was not American.
Mike looked up.
In front of him, leaning back into a leather sofa, was the grossest figure he had ever seen. The man was wearing a white jellaba which swept over the bulk of flesh, unifying the separate masses of chest, paunch and thighs. Yet the man did not look unhealthy. From the solidity of his neck and shoulders, Mike could see that his was the bulk not just of obesity, but also of muscle. There was a black moustache. The head was bald. The eyes were dark, intense and powerful, and at that moment fixed unwaveringly on Mike.
‘’Oo the ’ell are you?’ Mike said.
‘You do not know me.’ It was a statement not a question. ‘That’s fine, just fine. But I know you, Mr Cox, and I need to, because you’ve just killed a man who was part of this ship’s crew. I want to know what happened, and you’re going to tell me. You will give me no trouble, because trouble means time wasted, and we both know what that means for you. You know and I know that you should still be hanging over the side decompressing. Not very long from now, Mr Cox, you’re going to have a problem. So let me hear from you.’
The big man lay back, spread his huge arms along the back of the sofa and smiled in anticipation. But Mike, tired and frightened as he was, did not feel ready to talk.
If he explained why he was down there, he would reveal the treasure, and lose it. But wait . . . How come the cabin cruiser had turned up precisely at that moment? And what was there about it that was vaguely familiar? He couldn’t think. He had to play for time.
‘W
hat you done with Niko?’
‘Niko? Ah, the idiot who tried to run away with you.’ The great shoulders heaved themselves into a shrug. ‘A crazy man. He put himself right under our bows. We looked for him, but . . .’
Mike felt a twinge in his right elbow. It was starting. He winced.
‘Yes. I shouldn’t like you to suffer too much, Mr Cox. I want to know your story, and I want to know it fast. I have two other suits aboard and good equipment. We can decompress you easily enough simply by dropping you back over the side. But not before I have your story.’
Mike’s left knee screamed at him. Was it really worth risking paralysis for the sake of a few coins?
No, it wasn’t.
He began to talk. He supposed he should be talking about the coins. The big man interrupted once or twice to ask about Mike’s own background. When Mike told him about the attack on the seabed, his interrogator breathed: ‘Fool! Idiot!’ Otherwise he made no comment.
At the end of another fifteen minutes Mike was feeling random, shooting pains in several parts of his body and was moving and bending almost constantly in an attempt to relieve the symptoms. When he had finished, the big man said: ‘So it was all true.’
‘’Oo the ‘ell are you? And ‘ow did you . . . ?’ Mike broke off, grimacing and straightening his right leg. He bent it again, then stood and almost immediately doubled over to relieve the pain in his back.
‘I think we’ll leave all that until later. First, I need your agreement on a plan I wish to see completed. We shall return to the site of your wreck, and you will lift the coins for me. Then we shall see . . . Don’t even think of arguing, Mr Cox. It will waste your valuable time.’
Mike’s elbows felt as if they were being held in a vice. He stared out from his agony at the fat man. ‘Yes,’ was all he said.
The fat man grinned again.
‘You’re a wise man, Mr Cox. Now, we shall save your life.’
On deck everything was ready. The orders must have been given before Mike was ever brought below. He was hurried into a hard-hat suit that had scarcely been used. A compressor started. He was helped over the side.