Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  While it wouldn’t be true to suggest that the seabed is littered with wrecks, there were certainly more than either Richter or O’Reilly had expected. Their first two sonar scans had between them located no fewer than forty-eight separate large metallic objects on the sea floor extending to the east and north of Andikíthira, and when O’Reilly carried out his third scan, to the northwest of the island, he identified a further nineteen.

  ‘Jesus,’ Richter said, doing the arithmetic in his head, ‘that’s sixty-seven contacts in all. You said your speciality is finding needles in haystacks, Mike, but if we have to dive on all of these we’re going to be here for weeks.’

  O’Reilly shook his head. ‘You won’t have to. We can carry out a lot of filtering first to discriminate between old shipwrecks and the remains of a fairly modern aircraft. Look, I may be teaching you to suck eggs, but ships are big and aircraft are comparatively small. So, the first thing is to eliminate all returns over a certain size, simply because unless you’re looking for a Jumbo Jet, the wreckage would be just too big.

  ‘Second, when a ship sinks it tends to stay all together in one piece, being a very heavy and robust piece of engineering, specially designed to spend its life on the water. Aircraft need to fly, obviously, so their construction is much lighter and hence weaker, and they tend to break up on impact with the water and get scattered over quite a wide area.

  ‘So what I’m looking for is not a single piece of wreckage, but a number of small pieces that are lying in more or less the same area. Now,’ O’Reilly gestured at the display in front of him, ‘applying those fairly simple parameters to these sixty-seven contacts, we can immediately eliminate fifty-two of them, which gets us down to fifteen altogether. Eight of these contacts are too deep for free diving, and three of them are less than half a mile out from the shore, so in fact we’re left with only four possibles to check out.’

  Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  David Elias descended slowly towards the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, his left hand lightly encircling the anchor rope as he followed it down, his right hand clutching one of the two torches he’d chosen at the dive shop. The second torch was safely in the string specimen bag attached to his weight belt, along with the coil of thin polypropylene cord, the four M118 demolition charges and half a dozen pencil detonators, more than he needed but just in case he dropped some.

  The water around him grew increasingly cold and dark as he swam deeper, but visibility was still good enough for him not to need to use his torch. Elias had no idea how long it would take him to find the wreck, and he would certainly need one torch, possibly both, when he did, so he was conserving his resources.

  The bottom appeared suddenly, looming under him, and Elias checked his depth gauge as he slowed to a stop just above the seabed. Eighty-three feet. Fairly deep, but not too deep. He pulled out the polypropylene cord, unravelled one end of it and secured it to the anchor rope just above its concrete weight. He needed to be able to find his way back easily to the rope, and then up through the water lying directly beneath the boat, because that was where his spare aqualungs were positioned, and if he couldn’t locate them he would either die or be crippled when he surfaced.

  Holding the still coiled cord in his left hand, Elias peered around him. He had no idea in which direction the wreck might lie, because the co-ordinates McCready had supplied were obviously only those of the Greek diver’s boat up on the surface. The wreck itself had to be somewhere close by, but it could lie in any direction around him. He first checked his compass, then kicked off the seabed and began swimming with lazy, energy-conserving strokes to the north, paying out the cord as he moved away from the concrete anchor.

  ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, off Andikíthira, Sea of Crete

  ‘That’s certainly not it,’ O’Reilly muttered, as he studied the image of the second of four possible wrecks. ‘It’s far too small, so I think it’s probably some kind of metallic rubbish that’s been dumped from a passing ship. Maybe empty barrels or cylinders, or sections of pipe, something like that.’

  Richter stared at the display immediately in front of O’Reilly, and then looked at the Senior Observer with an expression somewhat akin to amazement. ‘You can deduce all this from that garbage?’

  O’Reilly turned his head slowly to face him. ‘I would hardly expect a mere stovie, especially a part-time stovie, to understand, Spook, but this garbage, as you call it, is the product of arguably the world’s most advanced acoustic signal processing equipment, and I, as a leading exponent of such technology, can certainly deduce that what I’m looking at here are cylindrical objects. Look,’ he pointed out an image on the screen, ‘you see that? Quite clearly a regularly shaped object, round in cross-section and about one and a half metres long.’

  Richter looked carefully, and frankly saw nothing like that, but refrained from saying so. ‘It’s not an aircraft then?’ he said, feeling somewhat stupid.

  ‘Of course it’s not a bloody aircraft. OK, now we’ll try the third site.’ O’Reilly reeled in the dunking sonar body, then spoke into the intercom. ‘Pilot, aircraft captain. Jump two three zero, distance one thousand five hundred metres.’

  Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  Elias had found nothing by the time he reached the end of the one-hundred-metre length of the polypropylene cord, so he decided to try what he mentally called ‘Plan B’. He’d worked it out in his hotel room the previous evening, but it had depended absolutely on the topography of the seabed.

  If the bottom was fairly flat, and his progress outwards from the concrete anchor had confirmed that, he could use the cord itself to try to snag the wreckage. Using the anchor as the centre of a circle, he could start to swim around the perimeter, just above the seabed, and any projecting object would catch the cord. It wasn’t a bad plan, and it was the only one he had apart from repeatedly swimming back and forth from the anchor weight on a series of different compass headings, so Elias looped the end of the cord around his wrist, ascended until he was about five feet off the bottom, and began swimming slowly counter-clockwise.

  He’d swum only about fifty feet when he felt a sudden tug on his left arm, but when he investigated the obstruction, it turned out to be just a rocky outcrop projecting some six feet above the seabed. No matter, Elias thought, that just proved the plan was working, so he lifted the cord over the rock, swam back out to the perimeter of the circle as defined by his cord, and started off again.

  The sixth time it happened he found the Learjet’s wing.

  Chapter 17

  Friday

  ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, off Andikíthira, Sea of Crete

  According to O’Reilly, the third site looked more promising: a scatter of metallic debris in a more or less straight line some one and half miles off the north-western tip of Andikíthira, and lying in only fifty feet of water.

  ‘This could be it,’ O’Reilly said. ‘I can’t get a clear indication of shape, but there are a couple of large objects that could be engines, a lot of smaller bits of dispersed debris, and one flat section that might be a piece of a wing.’

  ‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘we’ll check it out.’ He turned towards the Merlin’s rear compartment where Lieutenant David Crane, the ship’s diving officer, had been sitting patiently ever since ‘Spook Two’ had lifted off the deck of the Invincible. ‘Do you want the first dive?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Damn right I do,’ Crane replied. ‘Anything to get out of this paraffin budgie for a while.’

  ‘The water’s only about fifty feet deep. Do you need to wear a wetsuit?’

  Crane shook his head. ‘No. At that depth it’s just as easy if I free-dive down for a quick look-see. If it is the plane we want I’ll come back up and get properly suited-up.’

  Richter helped Crane don the aqualung and weight belt, and then the diving officer sat in the open side doorway of the Merlin as it hovered about five feet above the surf
ace of the Mediterranean, put on his fins and mask, and gripped the mouthpiece between his teeth.

  ‘Ready?’ Richter asked.

  Crane nodded, gave the diver’s ‘OK’ sign – circling his thumb and forefinger – then straightened up and dropped straight down into the circle of rotor-disturbed water immediately below the helicopter. He reappeared briefly on the surface, waved an arm at the aircraft hovering above, then turned face down, lifted his legs and disappeared smoothly beneath the waves.

  Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  The wing stuck straight up out of the sand on the seabed, reminding Elias of that black monolith on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He unsnagged the cord from the side of the wing and looked carefully around him. Obviously he was in more or less the right place, but for the moment he couldn’t spot the rest of the wrecked aircraft.

  Well, Elias reasoned, Plan B had worked pretty well so far. He could use it to find the remainder of the wreck as well. He studied the wing for a few moments before looping the polypropylene cord over a broken spar. Then he swam away from the wing, paying out the cord as he went. Just before he reached the full extent of the rope, Elias noticed a vaguely mushroom-shaped object hovering above a pile of rocks and he stopped dead in the water.

  Seconds passed as he peered carefully at the hazy object, before suddenly recognizing it for what it was – a diver’s lifting bag, partially inflated, and attached to something on the seabed. It was then he realized that he had almost certainly found the rest of the aircraft.

  Elias checked his watch, mentally calculating decompression times, then swam over to the lifting bag. The rope securing it, he saw at once, had been looped through two adjacent holes on the side of what was obviously an aircraft fuselage, covered in marine growth and barely distinguishable from the rocks around it.

  He swam round to one end of the fuselage, peered inside and stopped short as the powerful beam of his torch revealed the three bodies sitting directly in front of him. Elias stared and shuddered, and immediately decided that he was as close to them as he was prepared to get. Fuck Stein’s instructions about careful placement – he was now going to just arm the explosives, toss them inside the wreck and get the hell away from the grisly open tomb on the seabed.

  Elias knelt down, pulled the string specimen bag around in front of him and extracted the detonators and the four demolition charges. Conscious of the power contained in these objects, he followed Stein’s instructions to the letter. Removing the diving knife from its calf sheath, he used the point of the blade to make a tiny hole at one end of each of the four charges.

  Then he replaced the knife, opened the small plastic box containing the pencil detonators and pulled out four of them. He pushed the detonators deep into the plastic explosive through the holes that he had just made, then snapped the end of the first one. Nothing terrible happened, so he felt able to breathe again, and repeated the action with the other three. He tossed the four charges into the remains of the fuselage, without even waiting to see where they fell, then picked up his torch and began to follow the cord that would lead him back first to the wing, and then to the concrete anchor, and finally up to his aqualungs suspended beneath the boat.

  Before, he had swum with lazy, energy-conserving strokes. But now, with the explosives planted and chemicals fizzing inside the detonators, he swam as fast as he was able, conscious that the clock was already ticking.

  ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, off Andikíthira, Sea of Crete

  Richter was still peering through the door of the Merlin when David Crane resurfaced. The pilot spotted the diver at almost the same moment, and swung the big helicopter to starboard to pick him up. From behind Richter, the aircrewman stepped forward and began paying out the winch cable, the orange lifting strap dangling from its end.

  Seconds later, the aircraft was established in the hover some thirty feet above the surface of the sea. Crane waited until the metal hook on the cable had touched the water, earthing it, before swimming the ten feet or so to the lifting strap. He pulled the strap over his shoulders, settled it under his armpits, gave a thumbs-up signal and dropped his arms down beside his body as the aircrewman began hauling in the winch cable. Fifteen seconds later he was standing inside the rear compartment of the Merlin, water dripping everywhere, and removing his aqualung.

  You can’t converse in the back of a Merlin, or any military helicopter, because it’s just too noisy, but as Richter looked inquiringly at Crane, the diver shook his head. As soon as the man had attached his safety harness and plugged his headset into the intercom, Richter asked him the question.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘You might not believe this,’ Crane said, ‘but it was metal chairs and a couple of tables.’

  ‘What the hell are we talking about here – some kind of mermaid’s picnic?’ O’Reilly demanded. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘About twenty metal-framed folding chairs and two round tables,’ Crane replied. ‘Probably dumped from some pleasure-boat during a drunken party.’

  ‘But no aircraft?’ Richter pressed.

  ‘No,’ Crane reached for his towel. ‘No aircraft.’

  ‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘let’s try contestant number four.’

  ‘Right,’ O’Reilly agreed. ‘Pilot, Sobs. Jump one nine five, range three thousand five hundred metres.’

  Kandíra, south-west Crete

  Tyler Hardin was peering around the bedroom of Nico Aristides’s rented apartment. His team had carried out a thorough search of the place and had found exactly what he had anticipated – only the kind of things one would expect to find in a property inhabited by a young single man.

  They’d opened the wardrobes and cupboards and stared at clothes and shoes. In the living room they’d found an expensive sound system and dozens of CDs, a television set, a DVD player with a collection of disks, some pornographic. In the kitchen it soon became clear that Nico was no cook: the fridge contained only beer, and there was nothing in the cupboards apart from biscuits and various tinned and packet meals. What they hadn’t found was anything that looked like the bottle or flask Hardin had deduced from the scanty evidence found.

  Nico’s body still lay in the bedroom. Hardin had initially considered performing a second autopsy, but the external condition of the young man’s corpse was so similar to his uncle’s that he decided it was pointless, because they were unlikely to glean any additional information. Instead, he’d given orders that both bodies should be collected as soon as possible for transferral to the mortuary in Irakleío. He had also instructed that the corpses be held in the mortuary indefinitely in case further tests were required.

  If there were any clues at all to the identity of the agent that had slaughtered the two Greeks, they were most likely to be found in the swabs and samples collected from Spiros’s house or in the tissue specimens removed from his body. All Hardin could do now was wait for the laboratory staff in Irakleío to complete their analyses.

  In the meantime, with no indication whatsoever of any further cases of ‘Galloping Lassa’, there seemed no good reason for keeping Kandíra sealed off. Hardin shook his head in frustration and headed down the outside staircase to tell Lavat that his men could start taking down their barricades.

  Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

  ‘You didn’t tell me that fucking aircraft was full of fucking bodies,’ Elias almost screamed.

  ‘Bodies?’ Krywald asked weakly. He was still suffering, though his stomach had settled somewhat once the boat had come to anchor. ‘What bodies?’

  ‘There are three dead bodies inside that fucking aircraft,’ Elias shouted. ‘It was a hell of a shock. You should have warned me.’

  ‘We didn’t know,’ Stein said firmly. ‘McCready didn’t tell us anything more about the aircraft than where to find it and what to do with it. I suppose we should have guessed there could be human remains inside.’

  Elias angrily undid the buckl
es securing his aqualung and lowered it onto the wooden seat in front of him.

  ‘OK,’ Stein demanded. ‘You planted the demolition charges?’

  Elias nodded. ‘Yes, no problem there. I did just as you said, and now all four are inside the fuselage.’ He didn’t add that he’d just tossed them inside instead of placing them carefully at intervals, as instructed.

  Stein glanced over at Krywald, and received an almost imperceptible nod.

  ‘That’s very good, David,’ Stein said, ‘we couldn’t have managed this without you.’ He waited until Elias had turned away to begin unbuckling his weight belt, before he pulled out his SIG P226, racked back the slide to chamber a round, and in one fluid motion raised it to the back of Elias’s head and pulled the trigger. The silencer muffled the sound of the shot to a dull cough, but the American’s head almost exploded with the impact from a 9mm Parabellum round at such short range. His body slumped, lifeless, over the gunwale, half in and half out of the boat.

  ‘Thanks again,’ Stein muttered, pressing down on the de-cocking lever on the left side of the SIG’s butt to drop the hammer into the safety notch. Then he replaced the pistol in the waistband of his trousers, stepped forwards, lifted Elias’s legs into the air and watched as the body tumbled into the water and floated gently away from the boat. Elias’s weight belt was still half secured around his waist, and Stein watched as his body began to sink slowly. Quickly he tossed the spare aqualungs and all the other impedimenta that the diver had used over the side, then hauled up the anchor, moved back to the stern and started the engine.

  ‘I sure hope you know your way back,’ Krywald muttered sourly, ‘because I’m no sailor.’ He briefly glanced over to where Elias’s body had disappeared from view, a spreading cloud of blood already attracting fish.

  ‘Neither am I,’ Stein replied, ‘but it shouldn’t be difficult. Hell, we can almost see Chóra Sfakia from here. All I have to do is point the boat in that direction and stop when we get to the other end. Christ, if a guy got lost here he could just hang around and follow the ferry back to Crete. Even you could manage that.’