Slinger had gone deadly white. “We—we can’t,” he stammered. “The accident did happen and the bathysphere’s stuck on the bottom with them dead in it.”
The Naval Officer swung round on him. “They’re no more dead than I am, but I suppose you sent them down in it to get them out of the way. You’ll get that bathysphere up, blast you, and be quick about it or I’ll know the reason why.”
Kate had been listening on the low bridge above. His hands began to tremble with fury when he realised that the McKay had outwitted him and that his entire scheme had been blown to smithereens. Now he slipped down a ladder and ran swiftly aft.
Landon Macy caught sight of him out of the tail of his eye.
“Who’s that?” he snapped.
“A—a visitor,” Slinger stuttered uncertainly.
“Visitor be damned!” exclaimed Landon Macy swinging round to a Petty Officer. “Stevens keep a couple of men and arrest these two. The rest of you follow me.” Then drawing his revolver, he dashed after Kate.
Kate reached the open sided crane house thirty seconds in advance. White hot with rage he had determined that the skilful manoeuvres of Camilla and the McKay to outwit him should cost the whole party their lives.
The machinery was silent. The bathysphere dangling, halted on its upward journey in accordance with his last instructions. A group of seamen lounged idly by, waiting for fresh orders. Kate pushed his way past them and leapt into the crane house, thrusting the engineer aside.
For a second he stared at the machinery then he seized the big lever and pulled it right over. The cable began to run out at lightning speed. “That’s done it,” he thought. “When the cable comes to an end it will snap off the drum or if they reach bottom first the bloody thing will be smashed up on the rocks.”
“Shove up your hands!” yelled Landon Macy, bursting in through the port door.
Kate threw him one swift contemptuous glance, then in a flash he had bounded out of the starboard entrance on to the deck.
Landon Macy followed. His pistol cracked. Kate lurched wildly just as he reached the ship’s rail then recovered and leapt over into the sea.
The blue jackets, their rifles at the ready, dived through the maze of winches, hose coils, and cable drums which crowded the stern of the vessel, following their officer as he ran towards the ship’s side.
Kate’s head had already appeared above water and he was swimming strongly towards his amphibian. They raised their rifles to take aim.
Suddenly a machine gun began to stutter from the plane. A hail of bullets spattered the machinery and the deck. One sailor fell, hit in the stomach—another in the legs. The rest dashed for cover.
Crouching behind the winches two of them took pot shots at Kate but he dived again and the bullets missed him. Two more machine guns were brought into play by his men. Three streams of bullets now thudded, zipped, whined, as they sprayed the deck and ricochetted from the machinery. The sailors were compelled to keep behind their cover and under such terrific fire dared not peer out to risk another shot.
Landon Macy, back behind the crane house was rapidly semaphoring his ship, to tell them of the hidden plane.
His Commander had heard the shooting and ordered out another boat with reinforcements. Now, he stood gripping the bridge rail with a little group of officers and men behind him all taking in Landon Macy’s signals. None of them had yet seen the plane which lay concealed behind Doctor Tisch’s ship but immediately they realised what was happening orders were given for an anti-aircraft gun to be prepared for action immediately the plane left the water.
Kate was being hauled aboard at the very moment the order was given. The engines of the plane burst into a roar. With hardly a second’s delay it began to move swiftly over the smooth water while its machine guns still kept up a heavy fusillade to cover its retreat.
By the time the canvas gun-covers had been removed the amphibian had already circled into the wind and risen in the air.
With frantic haste the gun’s crew loaded up and sighted their weapon. The plane had climbed five hundred feet.
Suddenly it swerved, losing height a little. Then shot up at so sharp an angle that it seemed certain it must stall and come crashing down tail first into the water; but Kate’s pilot was an ace and knew his business. The pompom gave a series of staccato cracks, but the livid flame of the shell bursts surrounded by their fleecy clouds of grey smoke were three hundred feet beneath him.
The attempts to bring down the plane continued. The Commander of the destroyer, a little man, not unlike the McKay in his general appearance, got redder and redder in the face as Kate’s amphibian rose higher in the air, successfully avoiding the successive bursts of shell fire from the anti-aircraft gun by constant dives, twists, and changes of direction.
Landon Macy and his men stood gaping skywards on the scarred after deck among Doctor Tisch’s machinery, praying for a hit which would bring down the plane, but after a few moments the gun on the destroyer ceased fire. The amphibian was now only a black spot in the bright blue sky disappearing swiftly to the westward.
As the men moved to pick up the wounded, Landon Macy suddenly thought of the bathysphere again. He ran to the crane house. The engineer was lying hunched at the foot of the starboard ladder, blood dripped slowly from his shattered head into a great pool on the deck. He had been caught in the first burst of machine gun fire and was quite dead. The other members of the crew had dived below to safety.
The Lieutenant Commander sprang up the ladder. The big lever was still turned right over to ‘full out’ where Kate had jammed it. The cable was sizzling through the steel blocks above it at a terrific speed. They would have been on fire with the heat caused by the friction if they had been wood. The great drums were whirling round like the wheels of a locomotive as the cable left them, the whole machinery hummed and vibrated like a powerful dynamo at full beat. Landon Macy gave the roaring machinery one anxious glance then grabbed the lever. As he jerked it back to stop the bathysphere crashing on the bottom its gears grated harshly—then it slid into reverse.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LAST DIVE
On the day after Kate’s seizure of the ship the McKay, almost as a matter of routine, had played with his gold pencil and a piece of paper for half an hour until he had drafted a brief message stating the situation without one unnecessary word. It began: “S.O.S. Do not acknowledge. Relay to Admiralty.” Then followed a concise account of Kate’s conspiracy.
That night, and each night since he had morsed the report by means of the light switch in his cabin at least a dozen times between ten o’clock and dawn; taking his sleep in three hour stretches. He had felt convinced that providing his little game was not stopped through one of the people on the bridge spotting the reflection of his flashes in the water, the message would certainly be picked up sooner or later, and help arrive; although he had no great hopes of getting it through until they crossed the great shipping belts on the way south to the Falklands.
When he scrambled into the bathysphere at 8.45 on the morning after the explosion therefore, he had not the least idea that his signals had been picked up the night before and that the Admiralty had ordered a destroyer to be detached from a flotilla which was proceeding to the Bermudas, for their rescue.
Sally insisted that since this was his first dive he should be given one of the canvas chairs nearest the portholes and, to get him settled in it, needed considerable manipulation owing to his having been last through the door. The bathysphere had been designed to hold eight persons and it was now full to capacity. Camilla, Sally, Axel, Vladimir, Nicky, Dr. Tisch, the McKay and the gunman Bozo made up the party. Sally, the McKay and the Doctor, who controlled the searchlight, had the better seats, Camilla, between two of her lovers, Axel and Vladimir, sat behind them, while Nicky as volunteer telephonist, with Bozo, who made a point of having his back against a wall, occupied places by the door.
As the sphere went under the McKay was not particular
ly intrigued. Three aurelia jellies drifted by and a big shoal of arrow worms then, at their first halt they saw a Puppy Shark about two feet in length with a Pilot fish beneath it. A hundred feet lower the strange exhilaration of that unearthly blue light had begun to get hold of him a little and he leaned forward to peer at a big Snapper which goggled in at him, pressing its face close to the window. A moment later a whole battalion, several hundreds strong, of great blue Parrot fishes came into view swimming almost vertically downwards and through them, in a horizontal direction passed a division comprising thousands of smooth silvery Sardines. The effect of this warp and woof as the two different coloured schools passed through each other was indescribably lovely. Similar sights had often been seen by the others since they occurred several times on every dive, but it was new to the McKay and he admitted to himself that the small element of risk involved in a single trip, now that the bathysphere’s resistance had been proved, was worth it.
He was peering out of the porthole with his face so close to the fuzed quartz at 500 feet that his breath condensed upon it and he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe away the moisture.
“Good God!” he exclaimed, “what’s happened?” He knew quite well that the handkerchief was a bright scarlet silk bandana patterned in green. Now it appeared dead black and the design had vanished.
The Doctor gave his throaty chuckle. “The red rays of the sun no longer penetrate to here Herr Kapitan. I was surprised myself when I first beheld this strange phenomenon, although I knew it to be so from accounts of deep sea diving.”
At 800 feet the deep blue light remained but everything had taken on a ghostly form. Strange shadowy shapes flickered past and as the sphere descended further many of them began to show luminosity. When they came to rest at 1,600, five fishes swam past with blotches on them which glistened like tinfoil in the grey blue darkness then some unseen organism spat out a rocket like burst of luminous fluid.
At 2,000 feet the Doctor put on the light for a few moments and a shoal of brilliant silver fish were caught in it turning like a flight of birds. Later they saw a creature with two large reddish lights in front and a constellation of smaller ones, all pale blue, then a great Squid with light organs encircling its eye, but the teeming life changed so constantly as the sphere was lowered that they caught little more than a glimpse of individual specimens and had no time to examine one tenth of all the marvels that passed the windows.
The Doctor judged that the day before they had been on the western fringe of the Atlantean city and he feared now that the drift of the ship might have carried them away from the area of its remains, but when they reached bottom at 10.40 he found to his joy that they were apparently well inside its limits. A line of tall rounded stones equal in circumference but uneven in height, rising quite near them from the ocean bed, definitely suggested a row of truncated columns.
By means of operating the claws in its undercarriage the Doctor turned the sphere gently and a solid surface, reaching up into the darkness like a great blank wall, came into view. For a moment he swivelled the light up and down but the beam could not reach its top and any ornamentations which it might once have had the waters had long since erased into a uniform smoothness.
As the sphere turned further the beam lit up an irregular pile of stones. All their corners and edges were rounded but they still suggested square and oblong blocks of masonry. Opposite the row of columns came a blank space where little was visible except the shadowy outline of more great monoliths in the distance; then a long smooth slope running upwards from the sea bottom at an angle of about thirty degrees and quite different in appearance from it. A dull irridescent sparkle which showed as the searchlight moved across its polished surface made it seem likely that it was a vast slab of granite. The columns appeared again and they had completed the circle.
“We are much handicapped,” remarked the Doctor, “that the ship above can no longer move us as directed. I haf wished to make a tour of at least an hour before deciding the better place for excavation but we must drill here or not at all—so let us be busy.”
With Count Axel’s help the drilling machine was set in motion at the base of the nearest column, which was quite near them. Inside the sphere they could not hear the faintest murmur as it bored into the solidified lava and the indicator on a small dial near the door was the only means of knowing when it had completed the first hole. A charge of explosive was inserted down a tube by an automatic loader, with an electric wire attached which could be reeled out as the bathysphere was drawn up, then the drill was set to work upon another boring.
All the time these operations were in progress fish came and went beyond the windows, flitting like ghostly shadows in and out of the bright beam. A sabre-toothed Viper fish snapped its wicked jaws within a few inches of Sally’s face, but on touching the fuzed quartz, whipped off again, startled perhaps by this invisible barrier. The shrimps at this depth were big fellows eight to ten inches in length. They appeared to be bright scarlet with jet black eyes whereas, at about 1,500 feet the McKay had noticed that they were only pale pink and near the surface a transparent white. Seven black jellies came bobbing along in an uneven row and then a large umbrella-like pink one with luminous spots at the base of each of its threadlike tentacles. Nearly every creature seemed to possess its own lighting apparatus, some having a coppery or silvery irridescence over their whole bodies, others luminous teeth, or portholes in their sides; only the Palid Sailfins and Eels showed no illumination. For an hour, that ghostly shadow dance, lit by displays of ever changing coloured fireworks, went on without a second’s interruption, then the Doctor reported the first borings to be completed and Nicky asked Oscar, who had taken over the deck end of the telephone, to have the sphere pulled up 300 feet.
As they ascended the McKay noticed that they were not going up quite straight but at an angle and, for a second, he feared that the sphere would be dashed against the solid wall upon their right.
His mouth set tight as he waited for instant oblivion to overwhelm them. He had just time to think grimly that this was the sort of unexpected calamity which he had visualised, when the wall top came into view six feet away and they passed clear above it. The whole episode was over so quickly that the others had failed even to realise the danger and the narrowness of their escape.
The wires connected with the charges in the bore holes had reeled out automatically as they rose and when they halted the Doctor put his hand on the lever to explode them.
“It’s no good I’m afraid.” The McKay shook his head. “We only remained stationary on the bottom because the drill and the claws held us. The ship is drifting to eastward slightly, and as she is not under power they won’t be able to tow us back to the place we’ve mined.”
The Doctor grunted with disappointment. “I will explode the charges all the same,” he said after a moment. “We may see the effect perhaps when we descend again even if we cannot collect the débris.”
No faintest sound came to indicate that the explosion had taken place when the Doctor pressed the lever of the detonator but, just after, the bathysphere lifted slightly as the water was forced upwards, then settled till the cable took its weight again with a very gentle jerk. Nicky requested that they should be lowered and six minutes later they came to rest on the bottom.
They turned the bathysphere on its own axis and could not recognise any of the stone masses as those which they had seen before. A faint cloudiness at one point, seen in the extreme end of the searchlight’s beam, indicated the probable direction of their previous position, as the explosion would have pulverised some of the stone and lava into fine dust, but they were too far off to glimpse the row of columns.
Further mining operations were obviously useless so it was decided to rise thirty feet and then drift with the ship. For the next twenty-five minutes they moved very slowly to the westward passing through two huge pillars and then across a comparatively open space, at one side of which great blocks and hummocks were vag
uely discernible in the distance.
The McKay estimated that they were drifting at about 200 yards an hour and he explained that in addition to the kedge anchors, which Captain Ardow had thrown out, the bathysphere was acting as a super kedge which assisted in slowing up the ship’s movement. Even at this low speed their position must have altered at least a mile and a half since the Doctor and Nicky had found the Atlantean remains the previous afternoon—if they had been shifting steadily in one direction. The wind had changed twice however so the probability was that they were still within a mile of the spot over which the ship had been when Count Axel staged his explosion, but it was possible of course that the ruins of the sunken city covered a much greater area.
A large headed rat-tailed macrourid a foot in length and with at least six lights had paused to peer in at the window when, without warning, the sphere suddenly began to rise.
“Oh, what’s happening?” cried Camilla in a frightened voice. “I do pray that there’s not another storm approaching. Ask Nicky—ask why they are pulling us up.”
Nicky asked, paused for a moment, then said with a start “Ah—what’s that?”
“Tell us. I’d much rather know the worst,” Camilla urged him.
“It’s the worst all right,” he muttered. “Oscar says that Kate’s just come on board and wants to see us.”
“Oh heavens!” exclaimed Sally, “I knew this would happen. What are we going to do?”
“Steady m’dear,” the McKay took her hand and pressed it, “Kate won’t try and eat you. Besides the tender should be alongside by now and we’ll—” He broke off suddenly as he remembered the Bozo was within six feet of him, placed there by Slinger for the special purpose of reporting any further measures against their captors which they might be indiscreet enough to discuss in his hearing.
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