Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  They were both suitably impressed by the profusion and confusion of the wires dangling from the circuit boxes and if they weren’t equally impressed by the speed and efficiency with which, barely consulting my notes, I buttoned them all back in place again, they ought to have been. Fortunately, the circuit boxes were no higher than waist level, my left arm was now so far gone that I could use it only from the elbow downwards.

  I screwed home the last lead, shut the box covers and started to test all the circuits. Vyland watched me impatiently; Royale was watching me with a face, which, in its expressionlessness and battered appearance, was a fair match for the great Sphinx of Giza; but I remained unmoved by Vyland’s anxiety for haste – I was in this bathyscaphe too and I was in no mind to take chances. Then I turned on the control rheostats for the two battery-powered engines, turned to Vyland and pointed at a pair of flickering dials.

  ‘The engines. You can hardly hear them in here but they’re running just as they should. Ready to go?’

  ‘Yes.’ He licked his lips. ‘Ready when you are.’

  I nodded, turned the valve control to flood the entrance chamber, pointed to the microphone which rested on a bracket at the head-height between Royale and myself and turned the wall-switch to the ‘on’ position. ‘Maybe you’d like to give the word to blow the air from the retaining rubber ring?’

  He nodded, gave the necessary order and replaced the microphone. I switched it off and waited.

  The bathyscaphe had been rocking gently, through maybe a three-or four-degree arc in a fore-and-aft line when suddenly the movement ceased altogether. I glanced at the depth gauge. It had been registering erratically, we were close enough to the surface for it to be affected by the great deep-troughed waves rolling by overhead, but even so there could be no doubt that the average depths of the readings had perceptibly increased.

  ‘We’ve dropped clear of the leg,’ I told Vyland. I switched on the vertical searchlight and pointed through the Plexiglas window at our feet. The sandy bottom was now only a fathom away. ‘What direction, quick – I don’t want to settle in that.’

  ‘Straight ahead, just how you’re pointing.’

  I made the interlock switch for the two engines, advanced to half-speed and adjusted the planes to give us the maximum forward lift. It was little enough, not more than two degrees: unlike the lateral rudder the depth planes on the bathyscaphe gave the bare minimum of control, being quite secondary for the purpose of surfacing and diving. I slowly advanced the engines to maximum.

  ‘Almost due south-west.’ Vyland was consulting a slip of paper he had brought from his pocket. ‘Course 222°.’

  ‘True?’

  ‘What do you mean “true”, he snapped angrily. Now that he had his wishes answered and the bathyscaphe a going concern Vyland didn’t like it at all. Claustrophobic, at a guess.

  ‘Is that the true direction or is it for this compass?’ I asked patiently.

  ‘For this compass.’

  ‘Has it been corrected for deviation?’

  He consulted his slip of paper again. ‘Yes. And Bryson said that as long as we took off straight in this direction the metal in the rig’s legs wouldn’t affect us.’

  I said nothing. Bryson, the engineer who had died from the bends, where was he now? Not a couple of hundred feet away, I felt pretty certain. To drill an oil well maybe two and a half miles deep they’d have needed at least six thousand bags of cement and the two bucketsful of that needed to ensure that Bryson would remain at the bottom of the ocean until long after he was an unidentifiable skeleton wouldn’t even have been missed.

  ‘Five hundred and twenty metres,’ Vyland was saying. ‘From the leg we’ve left to the plane.’ The first mention ever of a plane. ‘Horizontal distance, that is. Allowing for the drop to the bottom of the deep, about six hundred and twenty metres. Or so Bryson said.’

  ‘Where does this deep begin?’

  ‘About two-thirds of the distance from here. At a hundred and forty feet – almost the same depth as the rig is standing in. Then it goes down about thirty degrees to four hundred and eighty feet.’

  I nodded, but said nothing. I had always heard that you couldn’t feel two major sources of pain at the same time but people were wrong. You could. My arm, shoulder and back were a wide sea of pain, a pain punctuated by jolting stabbing spear-points of agony from my upper jaw. I didn’t feel like conversation, I didn’t feel like anything at all. I tried to forget the pain by concentrating on the job on hand.

  The tow-rope attaching us to the pillar was, I had discovered, wound round an electrically driven power drum. But the power was unidirectional only, for reeling in the wire on the return journey. As we were moving just then it was being paid out against a weak spring carrying with it the insulated phone cable which ran through the centre of the wire, and the number of revolutions made by the drum showed on a counter inside the observation chamber, giving us a fairly accurate idea of the distance covered. It also gave us an idea of our speed. The maximum the bathyscaphe could do was two knots, but even the slight drag offered by the tow-cable paying out behind reduced this to one knot. But it was fast enough. We hadn’t far to go.

  Vyland seemed more than content to leave the running of the bathyscaphe to me. He spent most of his time peering rather apprehensively out of a side window. Royale’s one good cold unwinking eye never left me; he watched every separate tiny movement and adjustment I made but it was only pure habit; I think his ignorance of the principles and controls of the bathyscaphe were pretty well complete. They must have been: even when I turned the intake control of the carbon dioxide absorption apparatus right down to its minimum operating figure it meant nothing to him.

  We were drifting slowly along about ten feet above the floor of the sea, nose tilted slightly upwards by the drag of the wire, our guide-rope dangling down below the observation chamber and just brushing the rock and the coral formations or dragging over a sponge-bar. The darkness of the water was absolute, but our two searchlights and the light streaming out through the Plexiglas windows gave us light enough to see by. One or two groupers loafed lazily by the windows, absentmindedly intent on their own business; a snake-bodied barracuda writhed its lean grey body towards us, thrust its evil head against a side window and stared in unblinkingly for almost a minute; a school of what looked like Spanish mackerel kept us company for some time, then abruptly vanished in an exploding flurry of motion as a bottle-nosed shark cruised majestically into view, propelling itself along with a barely perceptible motion of its long powerful tail. But, for the most part, the sea floor seemed deserted; perhaps the storm raging above had sent most fish off to seek deeper waters.

  Exactly ten minutes after we had left, the sea-floor abruptly dropped away beneath us in what seemed, in the sudden yawning darkness that our searchlight could not penetrate, an almost vertical cliff-face. I knew this to be only illusion; Vyland would have surveyed the ocean bed a dozen times and if he said the angle was only 30° it was almost certainly so, but nevertheless the impression of a sudden bottomless chasm was overwhelming.

  ‘This is it,’ Vyland said in a low voice. On his smooth polished face I could make out the faint sheen of sweat. ‘Take her down, Talbot.’

  ‘Later.’ I shook my head. ‘If we start descending now that tow-rope we’re trailing is going to pull our tail right up. Our searchlights can’t shine ahead, only vertically downwards. Want that we should crash our nose into some outcrop of rock that we can’t see? Want to rupture the for’ard gasoline tank? – don’t forget the shell of those tanks is only thin sheet metal. It only needs one split tank and we’ll have so much negative buoyancy that we can never rise again. You appreciate that, don’t you, Vyland?’

  His face gleamed with sweat. He wet his lips again and said: ‘Do it your way, Talbot.’

  I did it my way. I kept on course 222° until the tow-wire recorder showed 600 metres, stopped the engine and let our slight preponderance of negative buoyancy, which our forward
movement and angled planes had so far overcome, take over. We settled gradually, in a maddeningly deliberate slow motion, the fathometer needle hardly appearing to move. The hanging weight of the tow-wire aft tended to pull us astern, and at every ten fathoms, between thirty and seventy, I had to ease ahead on the motors and pay out a little more wire.

  At exactly seventy-six fathoms our searchlights picked up the bed of the sea. No rock or coral or sponge bars here, just little patches of greyish sand and long black stretches of mud. I started the two motors again, advanced them almost to half speed, trimmed the planes and began to creep forward very slowly indeed. We had to move only five yards. Bryson’s estimate had been almost exactly right; with 625 metres showing on the tow-wire indicator I caught a glimpse of something thrusting up from the bed of the sea, almost out of our line of vision to the left. It was the tailplane of an aircraft, we had overshot our target to the right, the nose of the plane was pointing back in the direction from which we had come … I put the motors in reverse, started up the tow-wire drum, backed about twenty yards then came forward again, angling to the left. Arrived at what I judged to be the right spot, I put the motors momentarily into reverse, then cut them out altogether. Slowly, surely, the bathyscaphe began to sink: the dangling guide rope touched bottom, but this lessening of weight failed to overcome the slight degree of negative buoyancy as it should have done, and the base of the observation chamber sank heavily into the black mud of the ocean floor.

  Only fifteen minutes had elapsed since I’d turned down the intake control of the carbon monoxide absorption unit but already the air in the cabin was growing foul. Neither Vyland nor Royale seemed to be affected; maybe they thought that that was the normal atmospheric condition, but they probably didn’t even notice it. Both of them were completely absorbed in what could be seen, brightly illuminated by the for’ard searchlight, through our for’ard observation window.

  I was absorbed in it myself, God only knew. A hundred times I had wondered how I’d feel, how I’d react when I finally saw, if ever I saw, what was lying half-buried in the mud outside. Anger I had expected, anger and fury and horror and heartbreak and maybe more than a little of fear. But there was none of those things in me, not any more, I was aware only of pity and sadness, of the most abysmal melancholy I had ever known. Maybe my reactions were not what I had expected because my mind was befogged by the swirling mists of pain, but I knew it wasn’t that: and it made things no better to know that the pity and the melancholy were no longer for others but for myself, melancholy for the memories that were all I would ever have, the pity a self-pity of a man irretrievably lost in his loneliness.

  The plane had sunk about four feet into the mud. The right wing had vanished – it must have broken off on impact with the water. The left wing-tip was gone, but the tail unit and fuselage were still completely intact except for the riddled nose, the starred and broken glass that showed how the DC had died. We were close up to the fuselage, the bow of the bathyscaphe was overhanging the sunken cabin of the plane and the observation chamber no more than six feet distant from those shattered windows and almost on the same level. Behind the smashed windscreens I could see two skeletons: the one in the captain’s seat was still upright, leaning against the broken side window and held in position by the seat belt, the one in the co-pilot’s seat was bent far over forward and almost out of sight.

  ‘Wonderful, eh, Talbot? Isn’t that just something?’ Vyland, his claustrophobic fear in momentary abeyance, was actually rubbing his hands together. ‘After all this time – but it’s been worth it, it’s been worth it! And intact, too! I was scared it might have been scattered all over the floor of the sea. Should be no bother for an experienced salvage man like yourself, eh, Talbot?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but turned away immediately to stare out of the window and gloat. ‘Wonderful,’ he repeated again. ‘Just wonderful.’

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ I agreed. I was surprised at the steadiness, the indifference in my own voice. ‘With the exception of the British frigate De Braak, sunk in a storm off the Delaware coast in 1798, it’s probably the biggest underwater treasure in the western hemisphere. Ten million, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold specie, emeralds and uncut diamonds.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Vyland had forgotten he was an urbane top executive and he was back at the hand-washing again. ‘Ten million, two hundred and––’ His voice trailed off slowly, faltered to a stop. ‘How – how did you know that, Talbot?’ he whispered.

  ‘I knew it before you ever heard of it, Vyland,’ I said quietly. Both of them had turned away from the window and were staring at me, Vyland with a mixture of puzzlement, suspicion and the beginnings of fear, Royale with his one good, cold, flat, marbled eye wider than I had ever seen it. ‘You’re not quite so smart as the general, I’m afraid, Vyland. Neither am I for that matter. He caught on to me this morning, Vyland. I’ve worked out why. Do you know why, Vyland? Do you want to know why?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded hoarsely.

  ‘He’s smart, is the general.’ I went on as if I hadn’t heard the interruption. ‘He saw when we landed on the rig this morning that I only hid my face until I was certain that a certain person wasn’t among the reception committee and that then I didn’t bother any longer. Careless of me, I admit. But that tipped him off to the fact that I wasn’t a murderer – if I were I’d have hidden my face from everybody – and it also tipped him off to the fact that I had been out on the rig before and was frightened someone there would recognize me. He was right on both counts – I wasn’t a murderer, and I had been out on the rig before. In the early hours of this morning.’

  Vyland had nothing to say, the shattering effect of my words, the limitless avenues of dark possibilities they were opening up had him completely off balance, too confused even to begin to put his conflicting thoughts into words.

  ‘And the general noticed something else,’ I went on. ‘He noticed that when you were telling me about this salvage job that I never once asked the first, the most obvious question in the world – what was the treasure to be salvaged, what kind of vessel or aircraft the treasure was in, if any. I never once asked one of those questions, did I, Vyland? Again careless of me, wasn’t it, Vyland? But you never noticed. But General Ruthven noticed, and he knew there could only be one answer – I already knew.’

  There was a pause of perhaps ten seconds, then Vyland whispered: ‘Who are you, Talbot?’

  ‘No friend of yours, Vyland.’ I smiled at him, as near as my aching upper jaw would allow. ‘You’re going to die, Vyland, you’re going to die in agony and you’re going to use your last breath on earth cursing my name and the day you ever met me.’

  Another silence, deeper even than the one that had gone before. I wished I could smoke, but it was impossible inside that cabin, and heaven only knew the air there was foul enough already, our breathing was already unnaturally quickened, and sweat was beginning to trickle down our faces.

  ‘Let me tell you a little story,’ I went on. ‘It’s not a fairy story but we’ll start it with “Once upon a time” for all that.

  ‘Once upon a time there was a certain country with a very small navy – a couple of destroyers, a frigate, a gunboat. Not much of a navy, is it, Vyland? So the rulers decided to double it. They were doing pretty well in the petroleum and coffee export markets, and they thought they could afford it. Mind you, they could have spent the money in a hundred more profitable ways but this was a country much given to revolution and the strength of any current government largely depended on the strength of the armed forces under their control. Let’s double our navy, they said. Who said, Vyland?’

  He tried to speak, but only a croak came out. He wet his lips and said: ‘Colombia.’

  ‘However did you know, I wonder? That’s it, Colombia. They arranged to get a couple of secondhand destroyers from Britain, some frigates, mine sweepers and gunboats from the United States. Considering that those second-hand ships were a
lmost brand new, they got them dead cheap: 10,250,000 dollars. But then the snag: Colombia was in a state of threatened revolution, civil war and anarchy, the value of the peso was tumbling abroad and Britain and the United States, to whom a combined payment was to be made, refused to deliver against the peso. No international bank would look at Colombia. So it was agreed that the payment be made in kind. Some previous government had imported, for industrial purposes, two million dollars’ worth of uncut Brazilian diamonds which had never been used. To that was added about two and a half million dollars’ worth of Colombian gold, near enough two tons in 28-lb ingots: the bulk of the payment, however, was in cut emeralds – I need hardly remind you, Vyland, that the Muzo mines in the Eastern Andes are the most famous and important source of emeralds in the world. Or perhaps you know?’

  Vyland said nothing. He pulled out his display handkerchief and mopped his face. He looked sick.

  ‘No matter. And then came the question of transport. It was supposed to have been flown out to Tampa on its first leg, by an Avianca or Lansa freighter but all the domestic national airlines were temporarily grounded at the beginning of May, 1958, when the new elections were coming up. Some members of the permanent civil service were desperately anxious to get rid of this money in case it fell into the wrong hands, so they looked around for a foreign-owned freight airline operating only external flights. They picked on the Trans-Carib Air Charter Co. Lloyd’s agreed to transfer the insurance. The Trans-Carib freighter filed a false flight plan and took off from Barranquilla, heading for Tampa via the Yucatan Strait.

  ‘There were only four people in that plane, Vyland. There was the pilot, a twin brother of the owner of the Trans-Carib Line. There was the co-pilot, who also doubled as navigator, and a woman and a small child whom it was thought wiser not to leave behind in case things went wrong at the elections and it was found out the part played by the Trans-Carib in getting the money out of the country.