Iceberg dp-3

by Clive Cussler

  "Their eagerness is going to cost us," Pitt said.

  Sandecker paused to make a course change. "Have you checked the diving gear?"

  "Yes, it's all accounted for. Remind me to buy those State Department people at the consulate a drink when we get back. Dressing up and playing bait fishermen took a bit of doing on such short notice.

  To anyone gawking through a pair of navy binoculars it could have only looked like an innocent encounter. The diving gear was slipped on board so smoothly and inconspicuously while you were going through the routine of bait buying that I almost missed detecting the transfer from ten feet away."

  "I don't like the action. Diving alone invites danger, and danger invites death. I'll have you know I'm not in the habit of going against my own orders and allowing one of my men to dive in unknown waters without the proper precautions." Sandecker shifted from one foot to the other. He was going against his better judgment, and the discomfort showed clearly in his expression. "What do you hope to find down there besides a broken airplane and bloated bodies? How do you know someone hasn't already beaten us to it?"

  "There is an outside chance that the bodies may carry identification that might point to the man behind this screwed-up enigma. This factor alone makes it worth an attempt to find the remains. What's more important is the aircraft itself. All identifying numbers and insignia were hidden under black paint, leaving nothing recognizable at a distance except a silhouette. That plane, Admiral, is the only positive lead we have to Hunnewell's and Matajic's murderer. The one thing black paint can't cover is the serial number of an engine, at least not on the turbine casing under the cowling. If we find the plane, and if I can retrieve the digits, it then becomes a simple matter to contact the manufacturer, trace the engine to the plane, and from there to the owner."

  Pitt hesitated a moment to make an adjustment on the fathometer. "The answer to your second question," he went on, "is no way."

  "You seem damned sure of yourself," Sandecker said mechanically. "As much as I hate the murderous son-of-a-bitch, I still give him credit for brains. He'd have already searched for his missing plane, knowing that the wreckage could give him away."

  "True, he would have made a surface search, but this time-for the first time-we have the advantage.

  Nobody witnessed the fight. The children who found Hunnewell and me on the beach said they investigated only after they noticed the Ulysses laying in the surf-not before. And the fact that our friendly assassins didn't kill us when they had an ideal opportunity instead of arriving at the doctor's house much later, proves they weren't ground observers. To sum up, I'm the only survivor who knows where to look-" Pitt broke off suddenly, his eyes concentrating on the graph and stylus. The black lines began widening from a thin waver back and forth across the paper to a small mountainlike sweep that indicated a sudden rise of eight to ten feet above the flat, sandy sea floor.

  "I think we've found it," Pitt said calmly. "Circle to port and cross our wake on course one-eight-five, Admiral."

  Sandecker spun the helm and made a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree swing to the south, causing The Grimsi to rock gently as it passed over the waves of its own wake. This time the stylus took lonszer to sweep to a height of ten feet before tapering back to-zero.

  "What depth?" Sandecker asked.

  "One hundred and forty-five feet," Pitt replied.

  "Judging from the indication, we just passed over her from wing tip to wing tip."

  Minutes later, The Grimsi was moored over the reading on the fathometer. The shore was nearly a mile away, the great cliffs showing off their gray vertical rock more distinctly than ever under the northern sun.

  At the same time, a slight breeze sprang up and began to ruffle the surface of the rolling water. It was a mild warning, a signal foretelling the beginning of rougher weather to come. With the breeze a state of chilling apprehension raised the hairs on Pitts neck. For the first time he began to wonder what he would find beneath the cold Atlantic waters.

  Chapter 10

  The brilliant blue sky, free of clouds, allowed the sun to beat down and turn Pitts black neoprene wet suit into a skintight sauna bath as he checked the old single-hose U.S. Diver's Deepstar regulator. He would have preferred a newer model, but beggars couldn't be choosy.

  He considered himself lucky that one of the young consulate members made a sport of diving and had the equipment on hand. He attached the regulator to the valve of an air bottle. Two single tanks were all he could scrounge. Enough for fifteen minutes' diving, and even that was stretching precious time for dives to one hundred and forty feet. His only consolation was that he wouldn't be down long enough to worry about decompression.

  His last look of The Grimsi's deck before the bluegreen water closed over his face mask was of Admiral Sandecker sitting sleepily with fishing pole gripped in both hands and Tidi, dressed in Pitts outlandish clothes, brown hair encased in the knit cap, studiously sketching the Icelandic shoreline. Shielded from anyone watching from the cliffs, Pitt slipped over the side behind the wheelhouse and became a part of the sea's vastness. His body was tense. Without a diving companion there was no margin for error.

  The shock of the icy water against his sweaty body nearly, made him pass out. Using the anchor line as a guide, he followed along its vanishing outline, leaving his air bubbles to swirl and rise lazily to the surface.

  As he sank deeper and deeper, the light diminished and the visibility shortened. He checked his two vital references. The depth gauge read ninety feet and the orange dial on the Doxa diving watch notified him that he had been down two minutes.

  The bottom gradually came into view. He automatically popped his ears for the third time and was struck by the color of the sand-a pure black. Unlike most areas of the world where the bottom sand was white, the volcanic activity of Iceland had left a carpet of soft ebony grains. He slowed his movement, spellbound by the strangeness of the dark color beneath the vast shroud of blue-green water. Visibility was about forty feet-quite good considering the depth.

  Instinctively he swung around in a three-hundredand-sixty-degree circle. Nothing was in sight. He looked up and vaguely saw a shldow pass over him. It was a small school of cod foraging near the bottom for their favorite diet of shrimp and crab. He watched a moment as they slowly slipped overhead, their slightly flattened bodies tinted a dark olive and spotted with hundreds of small brown dots. Too bad the admiral can't hook one, he thought. The smallest weighed no less than fifteen pounds.

  Pitt began swimming in ever-widening circles around the anchor line, dragging a fin in the sadd to mark his trail. Underwater he often saw fantasy, at deep depths his perception was distorted, danger magnified beyond clear thinking. After five circuits he saw a dim form through the blue haze. Quickly kicking his fins, he swam toward it. Thirty seconds later his hopes were broken and discarded. The form proved to be a large jagged rock poking up from the bottom like some forgotten and crumbling outpost in the middle of a desert.

  Effortlessly he slipped around the current-worn sides, his mind blurred, struggling for control. This couldn't be the readine on the fathometer, he thought. The peak was too conical to match that of an aircraft fuselage.

  Then he saw something lying in the sand just five feet away. The black paint on the broken and bent door blended against the black sand almost to the point of invisibility. He swam forward and turned it over, recoiling in surprise for an instant as a large lobster scurried from its new home. There were no markings anywhere on the inside paneling. Pitt had to move quickly now.

  The plane had to be very close, but he was due to pull the valve for his reserve air, and that only left a few minutes of extra breathing-barely enough to get him to the surface.

  It didn't take him long to find it. The aircraft was resting on its belly, broke in two, evidence of the impact from the crash. His breathing became harder now, signaling him that it was time to go on reserve. He pulled the valve and headed for the top. The watery ceiling over his he
ad slowly became brighter as he rose along with his air bubbles. At thirty feet he stopped and searched for The Grimsi's keel; it was important that he break water out of sight from shore. She sat like a fat duck with her props tucked into her bottom, rolling drunkenly with the swells. He stared upward at the sun to get a direction. The Grimsi had drifted around her anchor lirie on a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc so that her starboard side now faced the coast.

  He pulled himself over the port freeboard and, dropping his air tank, crawled across the deck into the wheelhouse. Sandecker, without looking up, slowly placed his rod against the railing and just as slowly walked over and leaned in the doorway.

  "I hope you've had better luck than I have."

  "She's lying a hundred and fifty feet off the starboard beam," Pitt said. "I didn't have time to search the interior; my air was scraping bottom."

  "Better get out of that suit and have a cup of coffee. Your face is as blue as a windmill on a Delftware saucer."

  "Keep the coffee hot. I'll relax as soon as we've got what we came for." Pitt started for the door.

  Sandecker's eyes were set. "You're not going anywhere for the next hour and a half. We still have plenty of time. The day is young. It's senseless to overdo your physical resources. You know the repetitive dive charts as well as any diver alive. Two dives to one hundred and forty feet within thirty minutes invites a case of the bends." He paused, then drove the point home. "You've seen men scream their lungs out from the agony of pain.

  You know the ones who lived and the ones who were paralyzed for life. Even if I pushed this old scow to the hilt, I couldn't get you to Reykjavik before two hours.

  Then, add another five hours on a jet to London and the nearest decompression chamber. No way, my friend.

  You go below and rest up. I'll tell you when you can go down again."

  "No contest, Admiral; you win." Pitt unzipped the front of his wet suit. "However, I think it would be wiser to sack out above deck so that all three of us are in view."

  "Who's to see? The coast is deserted, and we haven't another boat since we left the harbor."

  "The coast isn't deserted. We have an observer."

  Sandecker turned and gazed across the water toward the cliffs. "I may be getting old, but I don't need glasses yet. Damned if I can detect any obvious glitters."

  "Off to the right just beyond that rock that projects from the water."

  "Can't see crap from this distance." He stared sideways at the point Pitt described. "It'd be like looking through a keyhole and seeing another eye if I picked up the binoculars and stared back. How can you be sure?"

  "There was a reflection. The sun flashed on something for a moment. Probably a pair of lenses."

  "Let them gawk. If anybody should ask why only two of us were on deck, Tidi was seasick and in misery on a bunk below."

  "That's as good an excuse as any," Pitt said, smiling. "So long as they can't tell the difference between Tidi and me in that wild set of duds."

  Sandecker laughed. "Through binoculars from a nine away, your own mother couldn't tell the difference."

  "I'm not sure how I should take that."

  Sandecker turned and stared into Pitts eyes, his lips twisting from the laugh to a wry smile. "Don't try. Just get your ass below. It's nappy time. I'll send Tidi down with a cup of coffee. And, no hanky-panky. I know how horny you get after a hard day's dive."

  An eerie, yellow-gray light showed through the hatch when Sandecker shook Pitt awake. He woke slowly, mind blurred, more groggy from a catnap than from an eight-hour sleep. Pitt could feel the drop in the wave action; The Grimsi was barely rocking, even in the low even swells. There was no hint of a breeze. The air was damp and heavy.

  "A change in the weather, Admiral?"

  "A fog bank-rolling in from the south."

  "How long?"

  "Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes."

  "Not much time."

  "Enough… enough for a quick dive."

  Minutes later Pitt had slipped into his gear and dropped over the side. Down again into a world where there is no sound, no wind; down where air is not known. He cleared his ears and kicked his fins hard and descended, his muscles cold and aching, his brain still sluggish from sleep.

  He swam silently, effortlessly, as though suspended by a wire through the great fluid backdrop. He swam through the darkening colors, the blue-green now changing slowly to a soft gray. He swam with no sense of direction, save for what his instinct and the landmarks on the bottom told him. Then he found it.

  His heart began pounding like a bass drum as he approached the plane cautiously, knowing from experience that once he entered the tangled wreckage, every movement would be a menace.

  He flippered around to the shattered opening of the fuselage eight feet aft of the wings and was greeted by a small rosefish, no more than six inches long. Its orance-red scales contrasted vividly with the dark background and fluoresced in the dim light like a tiny Christmas tree ornament. It stared at Pitt for a moment from one beady eye set solidly under a spiny head. then began darting back and forth in front of his face mask as he entered the plane.

  As soon as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, they met with a jumbled mess of seats, broken from their moorings on the floor, and wooden boxes floating in confusion against the ceiling. Tugging two of the boxes toward the opening, he pushed them out and watched until they lifted free on their way toward the surface.

  Then he spied a glove with its finger sockets still encasing a man's hand. The body attached by a greenish arm to the hand was jammed between the seats in the lower corner of the main cabin. Pitt pulled the corpse out and searched its clothing. He must have been the one who fired the machine gun from the doorway, Pitt reasoned.

  The head wasn't a pretty sight; it had been smashed to semiliquid paste, the gray matter and skull fragments straggling in reddish tentacles away from the center mass and swaying in unison with the current. The pockets of the torn black overalls covering the remains held nothing but a screwdriver.

  Pitt shoved the screwdriver under his weigbtbelt then, half swimming, half gliding, he entered the cockpit. Except for a broken windshield on the copilot's side, the heart of the aircraft appeared empty and undamaged. But then he happened to look up at his air bubbles rising to the overhead panel and travelin(Y like a shyer snake in search of an escape exit. They eventually ran together and clustered in one corner, encircling another corpse, pushed up there by internal gases expanding under the decomposing flesh.

  The dead pilot wore the same type of black overalls. A quick search revealed nothing; the pockets were empty. The little rosefish wiggled past Pitt and begin nibbling on the bulging right eye of the pilot. Panting heavily, Pitt pushed the body upward out of the way.

  He fought an urge to vomit into his mouthpiece and waited until he regained control of his breathing again.

  He glanced at the Doxa watch. He had only been down for nine minutes, not the ninety his imagination suggested. There was little time left. Quickly he groped around the small enclosure, looking for a log book, a maintenance or check-out list, anything with printing on it. The cockpit kept its secret well. There was no record of any kind. Not even a sticker with the aircraft's call letters adhering to the face of the radio transmitter.

  It was like leavin(, the womb, being born again, when he emerged from the plane. The open water was darker now than when he had entered. After checking the tail section, he kicked over to the starboard engine.

  No hope here; it was almost totally buried in the bottom silt. He got lucky on the port engine. Not only was it easily accessible, but the cowling had broken off, leaving the turbine casing bare for inspection. But fate wasn't playing the game. He discovered the area where the identification plate should have been. It was gone.

  Only the four little brass screws that once held it remained, neatly set in their threads.

  Pitt slammed his fist against the casing in frustration. It was useless to look further. He knew all id
entifying marks on instruments, electrical components, and other mechanical units on the plane would be erased.

  Silently he cursed the brim behind the thoroughness. It seemed uncanny that one man could have considered and planned for every conceivable contingency. In spite of the near freezing water, trickles of sweat rolled down his face under the mask. His mind was turning aimlessly, posing problems and questions, but impotert to come up with solutions. Without thinking! without controlled effort, his eyes began following the antics of the rosefish. It had trailed him from the cockpit and was cavorting around a silver object a few feet beyond the bow of the plane. Pitt kept his eyes on the little fish for nearly thirty seconds, aware of nothing except the sound of his exhaust bubbles, before he finally reacted and recognized the long silver tube as the hydraulic shock absorber of the nose wheel.

  Swiftly he was over it, studying the cylinder carefully. The crash had torn it from the support strut and, together with the tire and wheel, had thrown the assembly out from under the nose section. It was the same story. The manufacturer's serial number had been filed from the aluminum housing. Then, as he was about to head toward the surface, he threw a last quick look down. On the end section of the housing where the hydraulic tubing had pulled from its connection, Pitt spotted a small marking: two roughly gouged letters in the metal-SC. Taking the screwdriver from his weightbelt, he etched his initials next to the other marking. The depth of his DP matched that of the SC.

  Okay. No sense in hanging around, he reasoned.

  His air was becoming difficult to inhale-the signal that his tank was getting low. He pulled his reserve valve and moved upward. The rosefish followed him until he turned and waved his hand in its path, sending the little marine creature scurrying behind a friendly rock. Pitt smiled and nodded. His playful companion would have to find a new friend.

  Pitt arched on his back at fifty feet, looking directly up at where the surface should have been, trying to get his bearings in relation to The Grimsi. The light was equal in all directions, only his ascending bubbles indicated the direction of his native element. It slowly began to get lighter, but it was still much darker than when he dropped off The Grimsi's side. Pitts anxious head broke water, to be engulfed by a thick cloak of fog. God, he thought, this soup makes it impossible to find the boat. To strike out for shore would have been at best a four-to-one gamble.