Marine K SBS

by Jay Garnet

  Two days later Mike returned to his room after doing some maintenance work on his boat. Two men were waiting in the corridor leading to the stairway. They were Krassnik’s crewmen, two of those who had manhandled Mike on his first acquaintance with the American. They were not men to argue with.

  ‘He wants to see you,’ one of them said curtly.

  Mike knew what he meant, but tried to stall. ‘OK. Tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Now.’

  They escorted him in silence along the quayside to the Argo.

  On board, Krassnik waved him into the armchair, while the two men stood back.

  On Krassnik’s desk lay Mike’s little transmitter.

  ‘Yes?’ said Mike, all innocence. ‘What’s up?’

  Krassnik sighed, as if dealing with a recalcitrant teenager. ‘This was found. It has a range of no more than a mile. I cannot believe that there is anyone else that close who would want to place such a device aboard the Argo, or be in a position to do so. Clearly you are an amateur in such things. Such a goddamn stupid thing to do, and a stupid place to put it. And Georgios here naturally found the receiver in your room. I was foolish to be so lenient with you. First, of course, I need to know who is paying you and to whom you have imparted your information.’

  ‘I don’t know what . . .’

  ‘Come, Michael, we have little time,’ said Krassnik, speaking more quietly. ‘If my safety is at stake I may have to move fast. If that happens your life is not worth that.’ He snapped his finger and thumb casually.

  ‘There’s no one.’

  ‘Please, don’t be foolish. Better talk now while you still can.’

  ‘Look, Krassnik, there really isn’t anyone. I was just bloody fed up not knowing what you did for a living. I was curious.’

  ‘Yes. And Georgios and his friend are curious to know how you respond to a little persuasion. You already know the game, of course. You remember the rules – into the suit, over the side. But the rules have changed. No compressors this time. You will feel pressure, even at ten feet. At twenty feet, with no extra air in your helmet, you will start bleeding from the nose, ears, mouth and eyes. At fifty feet, if you’re still conscious, you will have the interesting experience of feeling your stomach being forced up your windpipe. Naturally, at any time you’ll be able to call a halt by telling me what I want to know. You like the sound of the game?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake! I don’t know any fuckin’ thing! At least I only know what I ’eard, which is that you’re involved with some deal in Egypt, but I don’t know anybody that . . .’

  ‘I see you do not yet take me seriously. We shall proceed at once.’

  Krassnik pressed the intercom button, and while Mike sat frozen in impotent fear and rage, the Argo’s engine hauled her aft, out of her berth, and then, with a surge of power, drove her towards the open sea.

  A few miles out, Georgios and his young associate forced Mike up to the deck. There lay the suit.

  ‘I suggest you do not struggle,’ Krassnik said. ‘If you do they’ll have to knock you out. And then you might not be able to talk in time.’

  Mike was already in the suit when his racing mind made a connection.

  ‘Listen, Krassnik. I can’t tell you anything because I don’t ’ave any bloody contacts. Believe me. Just one thing. You want to make money from me. Well, I can suggest a way of making so much money you’d never need to worry about bloody weapons again.’

  This time Krassnik took notice. ‘Talk,’ he said.

  So, standing there in the diving suit, the corslet and helmet lying beside him, the boat silent in mid-ocean, Mike told Krassnik about the Edinburgh and the gold.

  ‘I was there. You ask Sandra. I told her.’ Krassnik’s eyes narrowed fractionally at the mention of his daughter’s name. ‘I know where it is in the ship. I know ’ow much – over five tons of it. Five bloody tons of pure Russian gold!’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘That I get it for you, of course. I’m no use to you in this business any more.’

  Mike was beginning to make sense. The returns were scarcely worth the investment in time and money. Eventually, Krassnik knew, the police would pick Mike up, protection or no. Then the game would be over for the diver. But if he could be useful in another game . . . Five tons of gold! That was something worth playing for. It wasn’t even much of a risk, for both men would be forced to trust each other by the nature of the information each possessed.

  ‘Come on, Krassnik.’ Mike drew strength from the respite. ‘At least ask me some more questions.’

  Krassnik gestured to his two goons. ‘You’re a lucky man, Michael,’ he said, turning away to the stairs leading down to his cabin. ‘A very lucky man.’

  His suggestion undoubtedly saved Mike’s life, even if it gave him less than the freedom he longed for. Indeed, it was to bind him to Krassnik, though at a greater geographical remove, for many years to come.

  Back in Piraeus there were more questions. Krassnik did some checking of his own, while detaining Mike on board. After two days he returned and told him: ‘I believe you about the gold. I believe it will one day be lifted. But it is not possible now. So when? And what guarantee is there we can do it first?’

  Mike began to talk, of his ambition and of the technical problems. We know air is no good at much over three hundred feet, he explained, because the nitrogen gave you all sorts of problems. But there was a gas that got over a lot of these problems – helium. This had to come from the States, and it was very expensive. And there were other problems with helium as well. It affected your vocal cords and made you sound all squeaky, which was dangerous if you were trying to get across information. And it was also a very good conductor of heat. So, if the water outside was cold, you died like you were in a deep freeze.

  ‘But it’s a fast-developing field,’ he added. ‘The ideas are all there. A lot of work’s going on in scuba gear, rigid suits, submersibles, different sorts of gas combinations – also to get deeper and overcome the bends and the narcs. We may ’ave to wait a few years, but Christ, what’s a few years when you’re talking about making millions?’

  Krassnik heard him out because he had already made up his mind. He really had nothing to lose by going along with the scheme. Murder was easy, but messy. And he had no wish any longer to risk Mike’s continued presence in the area, especially when his own business was expanding so fast and unpredictably. His only problem was how to keep tabs on him, and ensure that when the time came they would be in business together.

  ‘OK, Michael, you have a deal. But I don’t want any trouble from you. So I have one final element to add to the equation. Take this, and this.’ He pushed a piece of paper and a ball-point pen across the table.

  ‘You’re going to write what I tell you to write, and then you’re going to sign it. OK? Now write: ‘I, the undersigned, Michael Cox, wish to declare that I am solely responsible for the death of David Kellogg. I killed him on April 20, 1950, in the following circumstances . . .’

  Krassnik saw that Mike was not writing. He looked resigned as he pointed to the piece of paper.

  ‘What do you think I am, Krassnik? Ready to sign my own fuckin’ death warrant?’

  ‘That’s no death warrant, Michael. It’s merely an investment on my part to make sure that you treat me right. I want you to be in no doubt that if you should ever double-cross me, if you should ever try to do this deal without me, your life won’t be worth living. If I don’t get you, the police will. You’ll be a fugitive for life. Besides’ – he smiled disarmingly – ‘I’m not even asking you to tell a lie. We’ll get the circumstances down just as you told me.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! The bloke attacked me! I ’ad no choice!’

  ‘That’s OK, Mike. We’ll say that if it makes you happy. But it won’t stop the police wanting to interview you. And it sure as hell won’t stop the family making a God-awful fuss. Now, shall we proceed? Don’t give me a reason for putting you back in that diving suit.�
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  10

  In a sense Mike did win his freedom from Krassnik. He was free of him for far longer than he would have imagined possible. For twenty-two years he was free.

  Sometimes, after a gap of a year or more, he would realize that there had been no contact during that time. Sometimes he allowed himself the hope that Krassnik had forgotten. But then, eventually, there would be a letter or a call from some minion who had no idea who Mike was. ‘A message from Mr Krassnik,’ the voice would say. ‘He wants to hear from you.’ That was all.

  It was all that was necessary. Then Mike would set aside an hour or two one evening and write to the address he’d been given, a box number in Washington, New York or Paris, with details of his own situation and a review of technical developments in diving and his latest prognosis for the raising of the gold.

  His own words, spoken in desperation that afternoon aboard the Argo, turned out to be wildly optimistic. True, it was in theory possible to dive deep enough to reach the Edinburgh. A deep-water submersible could have got down there, a machine like the Trieste, perhaps, which in 1960 plunged nearly seven miles to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place known on earth.

  Or a diving-bell. Divers in bells went ever deeper by replacing nitrogen with helium, and experimenting with arcane combinations of gases, the proportions of which varied with depth. In 1961 a Swiss diver, Hannes Keller, and the editor of Life, Kenneth MacLeish, went down to seven hundred and twenty-five feet in Lake Maggiore, Italy.

  Or an armoured diving-suit, which protected the diver from the effects of pressure in great Michelin-man swirls of metal.

  Depth was not the problem. But none of these devices would, in Mike’s opinion, ever be flexible or manoeuvrable enough to salvage a ship in several hundred feet of icy water. The problem was to get divers in flexible suits down deep enough and long enough to do the work, and still allow them to breathe, communicate and keep warm.

  A rapid dive overcame the need for extended decompression, but left no time for useful work. To spend more than a few minutes at five hundred feet meant many hours of decompression – a hopelessly uneconomic activity. Unless the diver was inside a decompression chamber by then, he might die of cold. Even working at shallow depths with helium involved the peculiar problem of communication: in helium the vocal cords vibrate more rapidly, so that even a basso profondo sounds like Mickey Mouse. For all these reasons it was simply not worthwhile to work hard-hat or scuba divers at depths much below three hundred feet.

  Mike wrote to Krassnik year after year to reiterate these problems. He was in a good position to know what he was talking about, for he had returned to a well-paid job with a Southampton salvage firm. The work kept him in touch. But the techniques would have been familiar enough to a diver of the 1930s. There were refinements, but as yet no fundamental changes.

  For sixteen years Mike lived in Southampton, a bachelor, lusty enough for several years, but increasingly isolated by his two obsessions: the lesser one with Sandra, whose image faded with the years but who had effectively spoiled him for any relationship that might have led to marriage; the other, with the Edinburgh and her gold. During all this time the most he could do towards salvaging the gold was to research the circumstances of her sinking from a diver’s point of view, and the problems of returning to her.

  After some reading in the Public Records Office, and some discreet enquiries at the Ministry of Defence, these became depressingly clear. For a start, no one knew exactly where the Edinburgh lay. She zigzagged coming out of Murmansk, steered an erratic course back and sank after veering in a wide circle in the midst of a battle. She could have gone down anywhere in some fifteen hundred square miles of ocean.

  Secondly, he was told in no uncertain terms that the British government would never sanction a return to the Edinburgh. She had been declared a war grave in 1954, and as such was considered inviolable.

  Thirdly, in any official operation, the Russians would be involved. Though the gold had been destined for America, it had been insured by Britain and the Soviet Union jointly. After the insurance was paid out by the British War Risks Insurance Office the gold – at that time valued at $6.2 million, or £1.5 million – technically became the joint property of Britain and Russia.

  One thing Mike could confirm: the Edinburgh was in international waters. He did not wish to fight for permission to salvage the gold; nor did he wish to share the proceeds with the governments concerned. He therefore decided that, to avoid the complications of dealing with the British and Russian governments, any attempt to raise the gold would have to be a pirate operation.

  It was not until 1962 that a breakthrough began to seem possible. That year Mike read an account of a twenty-six-hour stay in an underwater habitat by a Belgian, Robert Sténuit. It was clear from his experiment that his extended stay under pressure had been no more of a strain than a couple of hours would be. Moreover, the decompression time was about the same. Apparently, once a man was totally saturated with gas, it didn’t matter how long he stayed down, as long as he was warm. To Mike this was something of a revelation.

  Mike saw at once that if he was to remain in the forefront of technological advance he could not afford to stay in salvage. The work was simply not demanding enough.

  He had no wish to work abroad. That would take him away from northern waters. It was fortunate, therefore, that the revolution for which he had been waiting occurred right on his doorstep, brought about by the discovery of North Sea gas and oil.

  He made his move when gas first began to flow in 1968. He applied to a newly formed, fast-growing French company, Comex, which had just signed its first North Sea diving contracts. His experience stood him in good stead. He began diving offshore, inspecting rigs and pipes. Working in electrically heated suits, he built up experience of breathing oxygen and helium.

  Helium certainly eradicated the narcs and allowed more rapid decompression from shallow depths. But in deeper dives it was like starting all over again. With helium, divers could go deeper for longer, but the problems in these untried regions were similar to those faced by compressed-air divers in the early days. No one knew how the body would react. No decompression tables existed; they had to be established by trial and error. There were no ways of coping with the strange voice distortion or the rapid loss of heat from the lung tissues.

  Besides, the basic flaw in diving theory still remained. If a diver went deep – five hundred feet, say – he would still have to spend an age decompressing. Not even oil money could sustain such twisted economics.

  Comex itself showed the way forward by applying the techniques developed by men like Sténuit, and also by the American ‘aquanauts’, who showed it was possible to live like spacemen for extended periods in an underwater habitat. No matter how long the men stayed down, it seemed they sustained no injury. And as long as the body was completely saturated with gas, decompression times needed to conform only to the depth of the dive, not to the length of stay at that depth. Theoretically, a man could work for a year at a thousand feet. Decompression might take two weeks, but in economic terms that was rendered insignificant by the length of time he had been down. Work under pressure at depth was now limited only by more tractable factors: food supply, temperature control and the diver’s stamina.

  It was this concept, known as ‘saturation diving’, that made possible the development of North Sea oil, and also made it worthwhile to tackle the other remaining problems: how to communicate; how to counteract the cold most effectively; how to keep a diving vessel and the bell itself stable over extended periods (a sudden move horizontally or vertically might snap even the toughest cable); how to save helium after it was breathed out (at eight hundred feet, a team of divers breathed twenty-five times as much as at sea level, at a cost of up to £5000 a day); how to check on divers at work (a vital consideration, for extreme conditions could distort judgement. Question: How can you tell when a diver’s lying? Answer: When his lips are moving).

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bsp; Mike knew the problems well enough. In the early 1970s he found himself peculiarly well placed to assess the solutions as they emerged. For in 1972 his career as a diver came to an end. He’d known for some years that he’d been on borrowed time. At forty-six he was the oldest diver he knew. He had been working on the Glomar 3 rig. A connection broke at five hundred feet. As the most experienced man he was asked to make the repair. On the way up, the electrical heater in his suit began to malfunction. They had to bring him up fast; and then the time spent decompressing wasn’t quite enough. That night there was pain in his ears and he found it difficult to keep his balance. They decompressed him again; the pain went. He remained disoriented, nothing serious, but enough for the doctor to recommend he stop diving. He became instead a diving supervisor, responsible for scheduling and controlling the dives.

  As far as the Edinburgh was concerned, the move did not concern him unduly, other than as a sign of his own mortality. If he did put together an operation to reclaim the Edinburgh’s gold, he wouldn’t expect to be one of the divers anyway.

  About this time the focus of the diving industry shifted north, away from Yarmouth to Aberdeen, away from gas to oil. Mike moved north, too, and rented a flat near the harbour. It was here, in late 1973, after one of his reports, that Krassnik called him, the first time in nineteen years they had spoken directly.

  The American wasted no time in pleasantries. The conversation was a long one, for Mike had some comments on the technical implications of what was being suggested, but in essence Krassnik’s message was: ‘It’s time to speed up. You know what’s happening to the price of gold? Going crazy. It just broke the $100 an ounce barrier. You’ll see it in the papers. That changes things. Whatever the difficulties of raising that gold, we gotta go for it, and go hard. Time was, it was worth a measly $6 mill. Now it’s $20 mill, and rising. Before, even if we had the technology, the project was marginal. Now we’d be into profit. You say we’ll soon have the technology. OK, don’t try to get ahead of the field. Let everyone else spend the research money. Then we move.