Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Put that heater away, punk,’ the man growled, ‘or I’ll take it off you.’

  Vyland glanced at them, then ignored the byplay. ‘And you not only know what this is, Talbot, but you’ve actually worked on it. The general has impeccable sources in Europe and we got the word this morning.’ He bent forward and went on softly: ‘And you also worked on it later on. Recently. Our sources in Cuba are even better than those in Europe.’

  ‘I didn’t work on it recently.’ I held up my hand as Vyland tightened his mouth. ‘When this bathyscaphe was brought out in a freighter to do its preliminary unmanned dives in the sheltered waters off Nassau, the British and French thought it would be cheaper and more sensible to hire a local vessel suitable for the job instead of bringing one out from Europe. I was working with a salvage firm in Havana at the time and they had a ship with a heavy crane and boom right aft. It was ideal for the job. I was aboard it, but I didn’t work on the bathyscaphe itself. What would be the point in denying it if it wasn’t so?’ I smiled faintly. ‘Besides, I was only aboard the salvage ship for a week or so. They got wind that I was there, I knew they were after me and I had to leave in a hurry.’

  ‘They?’ Vyland’s eyebrow was still working as smoothly as ever.

  ‘What does it matter now?’ Even to myself I sounded tired, defeated.

  ‘True, true,’ Vyland smiled. ‘From what we know of your record it might have been any one of the police forces of half a dozen countries. Anyway, General, it explains one thing that has been worrying us – where we saw Talbot’s face before.’

  General Ruthven said nothing. If ever I’d needed conviction that he was a tool, a pawn of Vyland’s I needed it no longer. He was miserable, unhappy and clearly wished to have no part whatever in what was going on.

  I said, as if a great light had suddenly dawned upon me: ‘Have you – were you the people responsible for the loss of this bathyscaphe? My God, it was you! How in the –’

  ‘You didn’t think we brought you here just to discuss the diagrammatic layout of this vessel?’ Vyland permitted himself a small pleased smile. ‘Of course it was us. It was easy. The fools moored it on a wire hawser in ten fathoms of water. We unhitched it, substituted a frayed hawser so that they would think that it had broken its moorings and that the tide had carried it out to deep water, then we towed it away. We made most of the trip in darkness, and the few ships we saw we just slowed down, pulled the bathyscaphe up on the side remote from the approaching vessel and towed it like that.’ He smiled again – he was spoiling himself this morning. ‘It wasn’t difficult. People do not expect to see a bathyscaphe being towed by a private yacht.’

  ‘A private yacht. You mean the –?’ I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling, I’d almost made the blunder that would have finished everything. It had been on the tip of my tongue to say the Temptress – but no one knew I’d ever heard that name, except Mary Ruthven, who’d told me. ‘You mean the general’s private yacht? He has one?’

  ‘Larry and I certainly haven’t one,’ he grinned. ‘Larry and I’ – an off-beat phrase, but there was nothing in it for me, so I let it pass. ‘Of course it’s the general’s yacht.’

  I nodded. ‘And equally of course you have the bathyscaphe somewhere near here. Would you mind telling me what in the world you want a bathyscaphe for?’

  ‘Certainly not. You’ll have to know anyhow. We are – ah – treasure-hunting, Talbot.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you believe this Captain Kidd and Blackbeard nonsense,’ I sneered.

  ‘Recovering your courage, eh, Talbot? No, it’s rather more recent than that and very close to here.’

  ‘How did you find it?’

  ‘How did we find it?’ Vyland seemed to have forgotten his urgency; like every criminal who ever lived he had a streak of the ham in him and wouldn’t pass up the chance of basking in the glow of his own glory. ‘We had a vague idea where it was. We tried trawling for it – in the days before I met the general, that was – but had no success. Then we met the general. As you may not know, the general provides his yacht for his geologists when they plod around setting off their little bombs on the bottom of the ocean tuning in with their seismographic instruments to find out where the oil strata are. And while they were doing this we were plotting the ocean bed with an extremely sensitive depth recorder. We found it all right.’

  ‘Near here?’

  ‘Very near.’

  ‘Then why haven’t you recovered it?’ Talbot giving his impression of a salvage specialist so engrossed in a problem that he has forgotten his own circumstances.

  ‘How would you recover it, Talbot?’

  ‘Diving for it, of course. Should be easy in those waters. After all, there’s a huge continental shelf here, you have to go a hundred miles out from any point off the west coast of Florida before you even reach five hundred feet. We’re close inshore here. Hundred feet, hundred fifty?’

  ‘The X 13 is standing in how much, General?’

  ‘One-thirty feet low tide,’ Ruthven said mechanically.

  I shrugged. ‘There you are then.’

  ‘There we are not.’ Vyland shook his head. ‘What’s the greatest depth at which you can expect divers to perform really useful work, Talbot?’

  ‘Perhaps three hundred feet.’ I thought a moment. ‘The deepest I know was by US divers off Honolulu. Two hundred and seventy-five feet. US Submarine F4.’

  ‘You really are a specialist, aren’t you, Talbot?’

  ‘Every diver and salvage man worth his salt knows that.’

  ‘Two hundred and seventy-five feet, eh? Unfortunately, what we’re after is in the bottom of a big hole, a deep chasm in the sea bed. The general’s geologists were very interested indeed when we located this hole. Said it was just like – what was it, General?’

  ‘The Hurd Deep.’

  ‘That’s it. The Hurd Deep. In the English Channel. Deep valley in the sea-bed where the Limeys dump all their old explosives. This one here is four hundred and eighty feet in depth.’

  ‘That makes a difference,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Doesn’t it now? And how would you get at that?’

  ‘All depends how difficult it is to reach. The newest Neufeldt-Kuhnke rigid diving-suit, armour-plated in cast steel, could just about make it. I doubt if any diver could accomplish anything at that depth. He’d be under a pressure of two hundred pounds to the square inch and any movement would be like a barrel of heavy tar. Anything except the simplest manoeuvre would be beyond him. The way to do it would be with observation turrets – Galeazzi and my old firm, Siebe-Gorman, produce the best – and use those. They can go down about one thousand five hundred feet. You get inside one of these and use a phone to guide laying of explosives or dredgers or grapnels or power grabs. That’s the way they took over ten million dollars’ worth of gold from the Niagara, from about the same depth, off New Zealand, and about four million dollars’ worth of gold from the Egypt, lying four hundred feet off Ushant. Those are the two classic cases of modern times and that’s how I would do it.’

  ‘And of course that would require at least a couple of surface vessels and much specialized equipment,’ Vyland said softly. ‘Do you think we can go around buying up observation turrets – if there are any available in this country – and dredgers and then sit anchored in the same spot for weeks without exciting suspicion?’

  ‘You have a point,’ I admitted.

  ‘So the bathyscaphe,’ Vyland smiled. ‘The valley in the sea floor is less than six hundred yards from here. We take with us grabs and hooks attached to wires on drums fastened to the outside of the scaphe, fix them on – you can do some very fancy work with those extension arms and graphs fitted in front – then come back here, unreeling the wire as we go. Then we haul the wire in from the X 13.’

  ‘As easy as that, eh?’

  ‘Just as easy as that, Talbot. Clever, you would say?’

  ‘Very.’ I didn’t think it clever at all, I didn’t th
ink Vyland had even begun to appreciate the difficulties involved, the endless slow-motion try, try, try again frustration of underwater salvage, the scope of the initial preparation, the skill and experience of years required. I tried to remember how long it had taken to salvage two and a half million dollars’ worth of gold and silver from the Laurentic, sunk in only just over a hundred feet of water – something like six years if I remembered rightly. And Vyland spoke as if he was going to do it in an afternoon. ‘And where exactly is the scaphe?’ I asked.

  Vyland pointed at the semi-circular trunking. ‘That’s one of the support legs of this rig – but it happens to be raised twenty feet above the sea bed. The bathyscaphe is moored below that.’

  ‘Moored below it?’ I stared at him. ‘What do you mean? It’s beneath the bottom of that leg? How did you get it there? How do you get into it? How in the world –?’

  ‘Simple,’ he interrupted. ‘I am not, as you may have gathered, much of an engineer but I do have an – ah – professional friend who is. He devised the simple expedient of fitting a reinforced and completely waterproof steel floor of great strength across the bottom of this leg – about six feet from the bottom, actually – and letting into this a tapering steel cylinder about six feet long and not quite three feet in diameter, projecting downwards, open top and bottom, but the top capable of being sealed off flush with the waterproof floor by a screwed hatch. In a recession about two feet from the top of this cylinder is a reinforced rubber tube … You begin to see daylight, I think, Talbot?’

  ‘I see daylight.’ They were an ingenious bunch, if nothing else. ‘Somehow – almost certainly at night – you got the rig’s engineer’s to co-operate with you in the lowering of this leg – I suppose you told them the yarn about top secret research, so secret that no one was allowed to see what was going on. You had the bathyscaphe on the surface, unbolted its bridge cover, lowered the leg slowly until this cylinder fitted over the bathyscaphe’s entrance hatch, pumped this rubber ring full of compressed air to make a perfect seal, then lowered the leg into the water, pushing the bathyscaphe down before it while someone inside the bathyscaphe, probably your engineering friend, adjusted the hydrostatic valve for one of the adjacent flooding chambers enough to let it sink easily but not so much as to rob it of its slight positive buoyancy necessary to keep the top of the entrance chamber jammed into the cylinder at the foot of the leg. And when you want to take off you just climb into the bathyscaphe, seal both the cylinder and the bathyscaphe hatches, have someone on the rig blow the air from the rubber seal gripping the entrance chamber of the bathyscaphe, flood your tanks to get enough negative buoyancy to drop clear of the leg and there you are. Reverse process when you come back except that you’ll need a suction pump to clear the water that’s accumulated in the cylinder. Right?’

  ‘In every detail.’ Vyland permitted himself one of his rare smiles. ‘Brilliant, you might call it?’

  ‘No. The only brilliant thing was stealing the bathyscaphe. The rest is within the scope of any moderately competent underwater operator. Just an application of the double-chambered submarine rescue diving bell which can fit in much the same way over the escape hatch of practically any submarine. And a fairly similar principle has been used for caisson work – sinking underwater piers for bridges and the like. But smart enough for all that. Your engineer friend was no fool. A pity about him, wasn’t it?’

  ‘A pity?’ Vyland was no longer smiling.

  ‘Yes. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  The room became very still. After perhaps ten seconds Vyland said very quietly: ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said he was dead. When anyone in your employ dies suddenly, Vyland, I would say it was because he had outlived his usefulness. But with your treasure unrecovered, he obviously hadn’t. There was an accident.’

  Another long pause. ‘What makes you think there was an accident?’

  ‘And he was an elderly man, wasn’t he, Vyland?’

  ‘What makes you think there was an accident?’ A soft menace in every word. Larry was licking his lips again.

  ‘The waterproof floor you had put in in the bottom of the pillar was not quite as waterproof as you had thought. It leaked, didn’t it, Vyland? Only a very small hole, possibly, and in the perimeter of the floor where it joined the side of the leg. Bad welding. But you were lucky. Somewhere above where we’re standing there must be another transverse seal in the leg – to give structural strength, no doubt. So you used this machine here’ – I pointed to one of the generators bolted to the deck – ‘to drive in compressed air after you’d sent someone inside the leg and sealed this door off. When you’d driven in enough compressed air the accumulated water was driven out the bottom and then the man – or men – inside were able to repair the hole. Right, Vyland?’

  ‘Right,’ He was on balance again, and there was no harm in admitting something to a person who would never live to repeat it to anyone. ‘How do you know all this, Talbot?’

  ‘That footman up in the general’s house. I’ve seen many cases. He’s suffering from what used to be called caisson disease – and he’ll never recover from it. The diver’s bends, Vyland. When people are working under a high air or sea pressure and that pressure is released too quickly they get nitrogen bubbles in the blood. Those men in the leg were working in about four atmospheres, about sixty pounds to the square inch. If they’d been down there more than half an hour they should have spent at least half an hour decompressing, but as it was some criminal idiot released the built-up pressure far too fast – as fast as it could escape, probably. At the best of times caisson work, or its equivalent, is only for fit young men. Your engineer friend was no longer a fit young man. And you had, of course, no decompressor. So he died. The footman may live long enough but he’ll never again know what a pain-free existence is. But I don’t suppose that troubles you, does it, Vyland?’

  ‘We’re wasting time.’ I could see the relief on Vyland’s face, for a moment there he’d suspected that I – and possibly others as well – knew too much about the happenings on the X 13. But he was satisfied now – and very relieved. But I wasn’t interested in his expression, only in the general’s.

  General Ruthven was regarding me in a very peculiar fashion indeed: there was puzzlement in his face, some thought that was troubling him, but worse than that there were the beginnings of the first faint incredulous stirrings of understanding.

  I didn’t like that, I didn’t like that at all. Swiftly I reviewed everything I’d said, everything I’d implied, and in those matters I have an almost total recall, but I couldn’t think of a single word that might have been responsible for that expression on his face. And if he’d noticed something, then perhaps Vyland had also. But Vyland’s face showed no sign of any knowledge or suspicion of anything untoward and it didn’t necessarily follow that any off-beat word or circumstance noted by the general would also be noted by Vyland. The general was a very clever man indeed: fools don’t start from scratch and accumulate close on 300 million dollars in a single lifetime.

  But I wasn’t going to give Vyland time to look at and read the expression on the general’s face – he might be smart enough for that. I said: ‘So your engineer is dead and now you need a driver, shall we say, for your bathyscaphe?’

  ‘Wrong. We know how to operate it ourselves: You don’t think we’d be so everlastingly stupid as to steal a scaphe without at the same time knowing what to do with it. From an office in Nassau we had obtained a complete set of maintenance and operation instructions in both French and English. Don’t worry, we know how to operate it.’

  ‘Indeed? This is most interesting.’ I sat down on a bench without as much as a by-your-leave and lit a cigarette. Some such gesture would be expected from me. ‘Then what precisely do you want with me?’

  For the first time in our brief acquaintance Vyland looked embarrassed. After a few seconds he scowled and said harshly: ‘We can’t get the damned engines to start.’

  I
took a deep draw on my cigarette and tried to blow a smoke-ring. It didn’t come off – with me it never came off.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ I murmured. ‘How most inconvenient. For you, that is. For me, it couldn’t be more convenient. All you’ve got to do is to start those two little engines and hey presto! you pick up a fortune for the asking. I assume that you aren’t playing for peanuts – not operating on this scale. And you can’t start them up without me. As I said, how convenient – for me.’

  ‘You know how to make that machine run?’ he asked coldly.

  ‘I might. Should be simple enough – they’re just battery-powered electric motors.’ I smiled. ‘But the electric circuits and switches and fuse boxes are pretty complicated. Surely they’re listed in the maintenance instructions?’

  ‘They are.’ The smooth polished veneer was showing a distinct crack and his voice was almost a snarl. ‘They’re coded for a key. We haven’t got a key.’

  ‘Wonderful, just wonderful.’ I rose leisurely to my feet and stood in front of Vyland. ‘Without me you’re lost, is that it?’

  He made no answer.

  ‘Then I have my price, Vyland. A guarantee of my life.’ This angle didn’t worry me at all but I knew I had to make the play or he’d have been as suspicious as hell. ‘What guarantee do you offer, Vyland?’

  ‘Good God, man, you don’t need any guarantee.’ The general was indignant, astonished. ‘Why would anyone want to kill you?’

  ‘Look, General,’ I said patiently. ‘You may be a big, big tiger when you’re prowling along the jungles of Wall Street, but as far as the other side of the legal divide is concerned you’re not even in the kitten class. Anyone not in your friend Vyland’s employ who knows too much will always come to the same sticky end – when he can no longer be of any use to him, of course. Vyland likes his money’s worth, even when it costs him nothing.’

  ‘You’re suggesting, by inference, that I might also come to the same end?’ Ruthven inquired.