The Golden Reef (1969)

by Pattinson, James

  The wind held all day and the log ticked off the miles. The sun glittered on the water and the foam hissed away from the bows. The two men talked little, but Keeton, rather to his own surprise, found himself glad of Dring’s company.

  Once he remarked: ‘I worked three years for this boat.’ And then, half-angry with himself, wondered why he had felt it necessary to impart this information.

  ‘You could have worked for something worse.’

  Keeton discovered the girl that evening. Leaving Dring at the helm he went for’ard to make sure that everything was secure for the night and thought he heard a noise in the spare cabin. When he pushed back the hatch he saw her.

  ‘You!’

  She climbed out of the cabin. She was wearing jeans and a shirt. She looked nervous but defiant.

  ‘How did you get in there?’

  ‘I swam out last night and climbed on board.’

  He wondered whether it had been that which had wakened him. It made no difference now. She was here.

  He said: ‘I suppose your brother was in on this?’

  ‘No‚’ she said. ‘He knew nothing about it.’

  They went aft and Dring said, grinning: ‘I told you that kid had a will of her own.’

  ‘We’ll have to put back‚’ Keeton said, and added bitterly, ‘This will lose us a couple of days at least.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back‚’ Valerie said. ‘I want to come with you.’

  ‘What about Aunt Beckie?’ Dring asked. ‘She’ll raise Cain if you don’t turn up.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You see, I told her I was coming.’

  ‘You’re not‚’ Keeton said.

  She looked at him calmly. ‘Do you want to lose those two days?’

  Keeton thought of Rains, perhaps already getting a boat, a sea-going launch maybe with a better turn of speed than the Roamer.

  Dring said: ‘I don’t see why she shouldn’t stay now that she’s here. We can make her work her passage.’

  Keeton was caught in two minds. He turned to the girl. ‘What about clothes?’

  ‘I’ve got everything I need. I didn’t swim out in these, you know. I put the lot in a waterproof bag and carried it on my shoulders.’

  ‘You had it all worked out, didn’t you?’

  ‘I knew you’d need someone to change the dressing on your chest.’ She was still looking at him with a certain air of amusement, as though she knew that she had him in a corner and was enjoying the situation. ‘Are you going to let me stay?’

  Keeton surprised himself by bursting suddenly into laughter. ‘All right then, all right. You stay. But you work too. Before we’ve finished you may wish you’d stayed at home with Aunt Beckie.’

  ‘May I have something to eat and drink?’ the girl said. ‘I’ve had nothing since yesterday.’

  She slept on a mattress in the spare cabin. She cooked the meals and washed the dishes. Keeton, though he would not admit as much, found life a great deal easier than it had been when he sailed the yawl alone. He even enjoyed having the dressing on his chest changed, the touch of her fingers on his skin, the closeness of her.

  ‘The cuts are healing nicely‚’ she said. ‘You won’t need any bandage soon.’

  “My chest itches‚’ Keeton said. ‘I want to scratch it.’

  ‘You mustn’t. You’ll pull the scabs off.’ She looked at him as though puzzled by something in his character.

  ‘Tell me, Charlie, how much longer would you have let those men torture you before you told them what they wanted to know?’

  Into Keeton’s mind suddenly came a picture of the dead men lying on the Valparaiso’s poop, of Bristow with his bloody head and his body arched over the thwart. His face hardened and the cold, steely look came into his eyes.

  ‘If they had taken all the skin off my chest‚’ he said, ‘I still wouldn’t have told them that. You don’t know what it cost. My God, you don’t know what it cost.’

  The expression on his face made the girl shiver. She turned her head away, avoiding his eyes, as though she had caught there a glimpse of some picture that made her afraid.

  Chapter Eight

  Oyster

  They came to the reef in the evening of a day that had been like all the rest, without incident.

  ‘Here?’ Dring said.

  ‘Here.’

  Keeton had been afraid throughout the voyage that Rains might have got there before him, that he would see another vessel anchored off the reef, a diver coming up out of the sea. But there was nothing of the kind; nothing but the ripple of water over the coral and the scarcely visible masthead of the Valparaiso.

  Valerie looked at the mast and Keeton saw her shiver slightly, as though a cold hand had touched her shoulders.

  ‘And there’s a ship down there?’

  ‘Yes, a ship.’

  ‘So this is what you came for‚’ Dring said. ‘This is your pearl.’

  ‘My oyster. Does it scare you?’

  ‘Why should it?’

  ‘It’s a coffin too.’

  The girl shivered again. ‘It scares me. Are you going down into it?’

  ‘I didn’t come all this way to look at the masthead.’

  ‘What ship is it?’ Dring asked.

  ‘One I once served in. Do you want to know the name?’

  Dring answered slowly, looking into Keeton’s eyes: ‘I think I already know. I ought to have guessed sooner what this was all about. There was an item in the paper not long back, a story about a survivor. I’d forgotten the man’s name was Keeton. This is the Valparaiso, isn’t it?’

  One corner of Keeton’s mouth went up in a kind of grin. He said nothing.

  ‘There was something else in the story too. You were supposed to have lost your memory. You were picked up from a lifeboat nearly a year after the Valparaiso was sunk and you couldn’t remember a thing.’

  ‘There’s not much wrong with your memory‚’ Keeton said drily.

  Dring half-closed his eyes. ‘Come to think of it, I remember something else. There were two other survivors from the Valparaiso in Sydney. I forget their names. Wouldn’t be Rains and Smith by any chance?’

  ‘What do you think, Ben?’

  ‘And you were supposed to be sailing round the world. But you slipped back. Maybe you wanted help.’

  ‘Maybe I did.’

  Dring sucked in a deep breath. ‘Your pearl is a golden one, isn’t it, Skipper? How much is there down there?’

  ‘Rains said it was a million pounds.’ Keeton’s voice was flat and casual. ‘I imagine he knew the facts. He was the mate.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know where the ship is?’

  ‘He didn’t. Whether he knows now depends on how much Ferguson found out.’

  ‘Ferguson?’

  ‘He came on board while I was asleep. I surprised him taking a dekko at the charts. I had a shot at him but he got away.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘The same day I was carved up.’

  The girl was staring at Keeton. She seemed to be seeing for the first time the hard, brutal, grasping world of which he was a part.

  ‘So this is the information they were trying to get from you?’

  ‘It is. Men will go to great lengths for the sake of a million pounds.’

  ‘Yes‚’ she said, still looking into his face. ‘They will.’

  He found it impossible to meet her eyes; he had to turn away. Somehow she made him feel dirty.

  Dring took out a cigarette and lit it. Keeton could almost fancy he heard the man’s brain ticking over.

  At last Dring said: ‘Let’s get this straight. If you can lift that gold – with my help – what do you intend to do with it?’

  ‘Dispose of it.’

  ‘Yet – I just want to make the point – legally it belongs to the Australian government, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It belongs to anyone who can salvage it.’

  ‘Is that the law?’

  ‘Whether it’s the
law or not, that’s the way it’s going to be.’ Keeton’s voice hardened. ‘I’ll tell you something: I was left on board that ship to die. When Rains and his heroes abandoned her I was trapped in the magazine. They thought the ship was a goner. I did too. It took me a day to get out. The ship had a list to port and there were shell holes you could drive a cart through. The gun’s crew were lying dead on the poop and I had to pitch them overboard – my mates – the men I’d lived with. There were other dead men in the engine-room; when the ship ran aground on this reef they rotted. Have you ever smelt a man rotting?’

  ‘Yes‚’ Dring said, ‘I have.’ And his jaw was hard.

  ‘I lived on board for eight or nine months. Then I got away in a patched-up boat. I nearly died.’

  ‘I see‚’ Dring said.

  ‘But do you? Do you really see why this gold is mine? Why I don’t give a damn for the Australian government. And why I’ll see that murdering swine Rains burning in hell fire before I’ll let him get his filthy hands on a single ounce of it.’

  He felt the girl’s hand on his arm. He turned and saw that the expression on her face had softened. There were tears of compassion in her eyes, and her voice was gentle.

  ‘I am sorry, Charlie. I didn’t know.’

  Once again he could not meet her eyes. Once again he felt dirty, because he had not told them about Bristow.

  The first time down they did not venture inside the ship. They swam round it, reconnoitring. It was an awesome experience for Keeton to see the decks on which he had walked, the superstructure, the gun platforms, the davits, all engulfed by water in this queer, greenish light that filtered down from the surface. Already marine growths had begun to attach themselves to the vessel, the first step in a process of incrustation that would go on through the years, lending a curious, dreamlike beauty to something that was essentially no more than an iron shell.

  The coral on which the ship was lying was like a weird forest in which the trees had become inextricably interwoven, their branches twisted and convoluted, their trunks gnarled and whitened with age until they had become glimmering skeletons. The ship had descended on this forest, crushing out a bed for itself; and there it lay, listing a little to starboard, with the useless propeller and rudder sticking out from the stern.

  Keeton looked at Dring just ahead of him. The Australian might have been some imaginary creature from outer space, with the cylinders of compressed air on his back, the glass-fronted mask, the flexible tubes passing over his shoulders and the big rubber fins on his feet. From the exhaust valve in the apparatus intermittent streams of bubbles floated up towards the surface like blobs of molten silver. A shoal of tiny fish darted past and were gone. Up above, the sea rippled like a gleaming skin, breaking the shafts of sunlight into a thousand pieces. And over all was the unnatural deathly silence of this submarine world.

  Keeton saw Dring beckoning. They swam up to the surface and climbed on board the yawl.

  ‘Do you think you’ll be able to manage it?’ Valerie inquired anxiously.

  ‘Yes‚’ Keeton said. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Do you, Ben?’

  ‘I don’t know the inside of the ship‚’ Dring answered cautiously. ‘The Skipper does. If he says we can get to the strongroom I don’t see any great difficulty.’

  ‘I’ll draw a plan for you‚’ Keeton said.

  He led the way into the cabin, found a sheet of paper and drew a rough outline of the Valparaiso.

  ‘Here’s the shell-hole in the boat-deck. That will be the best way in.’

  ‘Where’s the strong-room?’ Dring asked.

  ‘Three decks down. About here.’ Keeton made a mark with the pencil.

  ‘What about the door? Is it locked?’

  ‘No. I sawed the padlock off.’

  ‘So there’s this bit of alleyway to drag the loot through and then it comes straight up through the shell-hole. Is that right?’

  ‘That’s it. My idea is to take a rope down from the yawl and drag the cases up one at a time. They’re not big.’

  ‘Could work. Bound to be snags, but I don’t see anything against it.’

  ‘It’s got to work‚’ Keeton said.

  Again the girl looked anxious. ‘You’ll be careful inside that wreck?’

  Dring put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘Too true, kid. We’re not looking for trouble.’

  Swimming in through the hole in the boat-deck was an eerie experience, but there were no snags. It was like entering a house by the roof. There were jagged projections of iron that had to be avoided, but there was sufficient light coming from above to reveal these hazards. The pallid skeleton of the engineer remained in its tangle of metal, and Keeton felt a momentary shock when he saw the skull grinning at him. But it was nothing; these were only the impotent bones of a man; they could not harm him.

  Swimming ahead of Dring, he found the alleyway without difficulty. There was no obstruction between it and the wrecked engine-room; the way lay open before him. He gripped a handrail and waited as Dring secured the lower end of the rope that stretched down from the yawl. Then he moved into the alleyway, pulling himself along the rail.

  The light was dimmer here and there was a sliminess under his hand, and his heart was beating faster with mingled excitement and apprehension, for he could not tell what he might meet inside this cave of steel. He came to the place where he and Bristow had stood guard, and it was familiar even in the gloomy submarine twilight. His hand made contact with a cylindrical object, and he realized that this was a fire extinguisher still seated in its bracket waiting for the fire that would never come.

  To his immense relief he found that the door to the strongroom was wide open. It had been his one great fear – that the door might have been jammed; but luck seemed to be smiling on him at last.

  He moved into the strong-room and groped in the almost complete darkness for one of the cases of gold. His fingers made contact with slimy timber and a handle. Dring came to help him and between them they hauled the case out into the alleyway and down the gentle slope to the engine-room. Here Dring fastened the rope round the box and waited below to guide it on its upward journey while Keeton swam to the surface and climbed into the yawl.

  The girl looked relieved to see him; as soon as he had removed his mask she began to question him.

  ‘Is everything all right? Nothing’s happened to Ben?’

  ‘Everything’s fine, Val. Give me a hand and we’ll drag up the first instalment.’

  He drew in the rope steadily, the girl helping; it came up dripping with sea-water and fell in coils on the deck. It came easily, smoothly, with no snags, and in a very short while the case of gold broke the surface with Dring beside it.

  Keeton exulted. ‘We’ve done it! We’ve done it!’

  The gold bar lay on the deck and gleamed in the sunlight. The two men and the girl looked down at it in silence. It was as though this bar of metal with its shining yellow eye had hypnotised them all, robbing them of the power of movement and the gift of speech. Then the girl sighed.

  ‘Why should it be worth so much? What is there about it to make it so valuable? It’s just yellow metal.’

  Dring gave a laugh. ‘It’s gold. You don’t have to bother your head about any other reasons. It’s gold.’

  ‘Come on‚’ Keeton said. ‘Let’s get some more.’

  They went down again, and then again. One after another the cases were hauled up and piled on the deck. All too soon for Keeton, Dring called a halt. Keeton wanted to go on; the fever was in his blood and fatigue meant nothing. But Dring was firm; he knew about diving.

  ‘There’s a limit, Skipper. If you go beyond the limit you start to do crazy things. That’s when accidents happen. We’ve done enough diving for today. There’s always tomorrow.’

  Keeton realized that Dring was right, but he was eager to have the gold on board and to get away. He looked out over the sea, and it was empty to the horizon; no sail, no smoke, no mast. But how long woul
d it remain thus? How long before some other vessel moved into that circle of water? How long before Rains and Smith and Ferguson came over the horizon, drawn by the gold as wasps are drawn by a honey-pot?

  ‘I’d like to get the job finished.’

  ‘I know, Skipper. I know just how you feel; but you’ve got to take things easy. If not, the job may finish you.’

  He had to take Dring’s advice; but he chafed at the delay and was like a caged animal in the restricted space of the yawl. They packed some of the cases in the forward cabin and some in the quarters aft, under the table and in any available corner.

  ‘It’s going to be cramped when we have the full load‚’ Dring said. ‘But what’s a little discomfort in a good cause?’

  That evening Dring brought up the question of his own share of the gold. ‘I’m not greedy. How about twenty per cent for me and ten per cent for Val?’

  ‘I don’t want anything‚’ the girl said quickly. ‘It frightens me. The whole thing seems wrong somehow.’

  Dring grinned. ‘Well, it doesn’t frighten me. I don’t mind taking your share.’

  Keeton finally agreed to let Dring have a quarter of the gold. He felt he was being generous.

  The sharks appeared on the second day. There were two of them and they came gliding through the blue-green water with a sinuous, purposeful motion. The smaller fishes fled before them, but they did not attack the men.

  Back on the deck of the yawl Dring said: ‘Sharks only go for you if there’s blood. They smell it. A wounded man doesn’t stand a chance. It’s lucky those cuts on your chest have healed.’

  ‘I hate the brutes‚’ Keeton said.

  But he saw no more of the sharks, and one after another the cases of gold were manhandled out of the strong-room and hauled to the surface. The yawl sank lower in the water as the gold weighed it down.

  By evening a wind had begun to blow and it freshened rapidly. Soon the yawl was tugging at the cable and beginning to drag the anchor.