by Peter Cave
Reaching the wreck site, Martin was both surprised and alarmed to find a host of small boats already in the area. Although the one-kilometre exclusion zone marked off by warning buoys was clear, perhaps a dozen fishing vessels and other craft ringed the outer perimeter, bobbing silently at anchor with a quiet air of expectancy. Scanning them quickly, Martin was relieved to see that one of the boats was a small Greek coastguard patrol vessel, obviously there for reasons of safety. So far it hadn’t done much of a job, he thought.
‘Seems we have company,’ Martin muttered unnecessarily.
‘Maybe we overdid the public relations bit, boss,’ Sooty observed. ‘We appear to have attracted a fan club.’
‘And not only among the locals,’ Crewes pointed out. He jabbed his finger towards a couple of sad double-ended craft anchored hard up against the ring of marker buoys. ‘Those are Turkish trencharidi – traditional fishing boats. Our fame seems to have spread even further than we anticipated.’
‘But what the hell are they doing here?’ Martin asked, puzzled and more than a little peeved. He’d wanted the cover operation to get attention, but he had not expected a three-ring circus. And while he could understand a certain amount of morbid curiosity and the presence of a few thrill-seekers, he found that being treated like the high-wire act without a safety net was a little distasteful. They were probably the same sort of people who turned up at the scene of aircraft crashes and other disasters, he reflected bitterly. But that did not explain the presence of the fishing boats.
‘Most of them are probably here hoping to see us blow ourselves up,’ Willerbey said with a sardonic smile. ‘The rest of them are probably just hoping to pick up a few free dinners.’
Martin failed to understand, and the slightly blank expression on his face gave this fact away.
‘If we start blasting down there, there’s going to be a whole lot of dead fish floating around on the surface,’ Willerbey went on to explain. ‘Very practical people, the Turks. Waste not, want not – know what I mean?’
Martin understood, finally, although he was still far from happy. ‘Well, I want them cleared away,’ he growled. He eased the diving boat into the centre of the wreck site and cut the diesel engines. After dropping the anchor, he called over to Williams: ‘Get that bloody patrol boat over here and tell the captain I want all these craft moved well clear of the area.’
As it happened, the order was unnecessary, for the patrol boat was already heading in their direction. It took a long time to convince the smiling Greek skipper that the area was dangerous, and even longer for the patrol vessel to drive the circling craft back to what Martin considered to be a safe distance, but they were finally more or less on their own.
‘Right, let’s all get rigged up,’ Martin snapped. ‘We’ve wasted enough time already.’ As Crewes and Graham started to pull on their wetsuits, he moved across to help Sooty prepare his own gear.
The two diving suits were brand new, and the only items of equipment Martin had refused to accept from the Greek authorities. It was not a matter of trust, but of personal responsibility. When it came to the safety of his men, Martin found no room for compromise. He had personally supervised the purchase and checking of the two suits and state-of-the-art helmets, and the hefty bill he had forwarded home reflected their quality.
He helped Sooty clamber into the bulky, cumbersome and extremely heavy suit. It was a slow and laborious task, but then regulation suits had never been designed for speed and efficiency. Essentially a thick layer of rubber bonded between two other layers of heavy twill fabric, a diving suit needed to be as robust as the job demanded. And when working under pressure which could crush a man’s ribcage like papier mâché, or squeeze brain tissue out through his nasal cavities, those demands were pretty heavy.
With Sooty finally suited up, Martin lifted the heavy copper and brass helmet and placed it gingerly over the man’s head, screwing it firmly down into the heavy-duty metal seating ring built into the neck of the suit. He unbolted and opened the hinged face-plate before coupling up the air hose and safety lines. It was time for a final safety check. Martin waved over to Williams, waiting by the compressor. ‘Start her up for a test run,’ he called out.
The compressor engine fired into life with a brief roar, quickly settling down to a quiet, regular throbbing. Martin turned back to Sooty. ‘Ready for final test?’
‘Ready when you are,’ the man replied. He closed his face-plate, screwing the retaining wing-nuts finger-tight. It would be down to Martin to complete full pressurization checks when the time came for descent, but for now the helmet’s highly efficient seals were good enough for a test at normal atmospheric pressure.
Martin gave the man a full three minutes before tapping lightly on the glass front of the face-plate. ‘Everything all right?’ he mouthed, exaggerating his lip movements.
Sooty raised one gloved hand in a thumbs-up gesture. It was easier than trying to nod with the cumbersome helmet on his head. Martin unscrewed the face-plate again, waving over at Williams to cut the compressor. ‘All right, everything appears to check out,’ Martin said. ‘Let’s run through procedures, shall we? I’m sending you down five minutes ahead of the others. We’ll be using your safety line as a tethering point for their spare tanks, so make sure you’re in their field of vision at all times.’
‘Got it, boss,’ Sooty replied, realizing the importance of the CO’s order. When the time came for the two scuba divers to start their two-stage ascent to the surface, they would already be running short of air. They would need fresh tanks fast, and they would need to find them easily. Sooty himself would be their beacon, and his hose and safety line a direct route to follow.
‘You’ll send whatever bodies you can find up first,’ Martin went on. ‘You’ll take a net down with you when you go. It’ll be on a separate line to the winch, so make sure you don’t get it fouled up with your own lines. By the time that job’s done, Crewes and Graham will be ready to start coming up, so you’re going to be down there on your own for about fifteen minutes while they make their first stop at thirty-five feet. Just relax and enjoy the scenery, and don’t try to be a hero. Got it?’
‘Your word is my command, boss,’ replied Sooty. There was a grin on his face as he spoke, but his voice was in deadly earnest. At a hundred feet, without backup divers, a man went by the book and did exactly what he was told.
‘OK, then we’re ready to go,’ Martin said. At his signal, Williams started up the compressor again. Martin closed Sooty’s face-plate for the last time, and carefully tightened the retaining bolts. After a final check of the helmet’s hose couplings, he rapped briefly on the glowing brass dome and stepped back as the man’s suit pressurized and took on the appearance of a slightly anorexic sumo wrestler.
With a final grin through the face-plate, Sooty began to trudge awkwardly towards the edge of the diving platform in his heavy weighted boots. He waited patiently as Williams hooked him up to the launch harness then swung him out over the surface of the water. There was time for one last thumbs up before Williams returned to the winch and Sooty began to drop slowly into the waiting sea.
Martin watched until the burnished brass top of his helmet had disappeared below the surface of the water before turning back to Crewes and Graham to give them their final orders.
21
It was a long time since he’d dived in a full regulation suit, and the restricted visibility hit him with something of a shock. Twenty feet down, Sooty felt a moment of near panic as the claustrophobia closed in on him. He was surrounded by a total and suffocating darkness, with only blurred tunnel vision of greenish light directly ahead of him. Above the faint hissing of air inside his helmet, he could hear only the steady thud of his own heartbeat.
He remembered, then, that he could move his head from side to side. The feeling of panic began to subside as he swung the heavy helmet in a wide arc, taking in more of his surroundings and adding breadth and perspective to his vision. He relaxed, e
njoying the sensation of near weightlessness and the patterns of light refracting down through the smoky-green water as the winch lowered him slowly towards the seabed.
His heavy leaded boots made contact with the sandy bottom before he quite expected it. Another brief moment of shock rippled through him – a strange, detached sense of wonder which was only just this side of fear. Perhaps it was something that no diver ever got fully used to, Sooty reflected. This sudden knowledge that he was somewhere he just didn’t belong, a trespasser in a world which was so utterly alien it seemed almost like a living force, duty-bound to find some way in which to eject or destroy him.
Again he fought against the strange fantasy by taking his bearings, establishing a point of reference. He shuffled himself around until he was directly facing the shadowy bulk of the sunken MTB. They had dropped him well clear of any possible obstructions – perhaps twenty or thirty feet from the stern. He assumed that, guided by the signal from the location beacon, Williams must know his exact position, and would have already paid out enough slack on his safety line to allow him the appropriate range of movement. It was something to check, anyway, before he set out towards the wreck. After dropping the weighted retrieval net on the seabed beside his feet, he shuffled a few steps sideways and then flexed his knees, making a couple of practice jumps to test that his lines were free and unobstructed. His body rose and fell in the water in cartoon-like slow motion, like some surrealistic mime artist. A vision of astronaut Buzz Aldrin bounding across the surface of the moon swam into his mind, making him smile. He stooped down to pick up the retrieval net again. ‘One small step for man,’ he murmured to himself, parodying Neil Armstrong’s historic utterance as he began to move ponderously towards the stern of the wreck.
‘OK, he’s on the bottom and moving,’ Williams said, paying out a few more yards of air hose and safety line over the edge of the diving platform.
It was the cue for Crewes and Graham to waddle over to join him. ‘You look like a pair of plastic ducks,’ Williams told them, grinning all over his face. The two scuba divers had exchanged their usual black suits for bright-yellow ones, their normal concern with camouflage having been replaced by the need for high visibility.
‘Quack bloody quack,’ Crewes shot back. The two divers paused at the edge of the platform, synchronizing their watches and checking their air regulators.
Martin had walked over to join them. ‘OK, you know what to do,’ he told them. ‘Just follow Sooty’s air hose all the way, and don’t forget to check the depth of those spare tanks as you go down.’ There was one last point Martin felt worth mentioning, given the circumstances. The men’s need, sometimes, to negate the horror and finality of death with a little black humour could sometimes result in the odd prank of dubious taste. ‘And try to show a bit of respect for any bodies,’ he muttered darkly. ‘The Greeks are watching us, so no sick practical jokes, please.’
He regretted saying it almost as the words left his mouth, as both men regarded him with hurt, even censorious expressions on their faces. It was too sombre a note on which to send them down, he realized. Forcing a grin on to his face, he tried to lighten the situation. ‘Oh, and bring me back a couple of decent-sized lobsters, if you can find any.’
The ploy worked. The men brightened perceptibly. ‘Settle for an octopus, boss?’ Crewes asked. ‘We could all have calamary for tea.’
Williams interrupted the banter, after an anxious glance at his watch. A stickler for routine, he was concerned about the precise timings he had already worked out. Sooty had now been on the bottom for eight minutes.
‘Time to go, you pair of clowns,’ he bellowed. ‘You’re late for your date.’
Crewes and Graham pulled their masks into place, approaching the edge of the diving platform. They jumped in together feet first, jackknifed in the water and began to dive, following the line of Sooty’s air hose.
Sooty stood in the mouth of the gaping hole in the stern of the torpedo boat, waiting for his companions to join him before venturing any further. The blast which had sent the stricken vessel to the bottom had left great jagged sheets of buckled and twisted plating in the metal hull. Although they now appeared to be softened and rounded, being deceptively covered in marine growth, Sooty was in no doubt that they could still slice through an air hose like razors. Until Crewes and Graham turned up to help guide him into the MTB’s gloomy interior, he was taking no chances.
Bored with waiting, and almost hypnotized by the faint and regular throb of the compressor motor transmitting down his hose and lines, he was blissfully unaware of the two divers as they cut down almost vertically through the water towards him.
It was so obvious that he had not heard or sensed their descent, Graham realized, as he neared the motionless diver. The opportunity to give the unfortunate man a shock almost screamed out at him, and he was unable to resist it. He detached his heavy underwater torch from his belt as he hovered in the water directly above Sooty’s head. Then, with a sideways glance and a wink at Crewes, he reached down and rapped the torch twice against the back of Sooty’s helmet.
It is not easy to make a man wearing lead-weighted boots jump, but Graham managed it. Every nerve in Sooty’s body tensed as the sound of the torch blows reverberated inside his metal helmet like the knell of doom. Involuntarily, his muscles responded with a reflex action as adrenalin flooded into his system, triggering the ‘fight or flight’ response. Arms flailing sluggishly in the water, he cleared the bottom by a good eight inches and threw himself forward, trying desperately to break into a run. Kicking out with his flippers, Graham propelled himself forward, cleaving through the water past the panicking diver to hover directly in his path.
Sooty checked himself as the yellow flash in his peripheral vision resolved into a recognizable image. His heart pounding, he tried to let his body go limp, glaring out through the face-plate towards the wickedly grinning face behind the mask.
‘Bastard,’ he mouthed through the glass. He shivered briefly as his fear dissipated, then broke into a nervous, trembling fit of the giggles.
Crewes swam down to join them. He made a gesture of pointing to his watch, then signalled forty-five minutes by opening and closing his fist. It was a reminder that their working span was strictly limited, and it was time to get to serious business. Sooty nodded, the task being easier in water, and pointed towards the dark interior of the MTB before raising his hand above his head and indicating his breathing hose.
The two scuba divers understood the message. Taking up a position either side and slightly in front of him, a few feet above the top of his helmet, they led him slowly into the gaping black maw of the breached stern, placing their bodies protectively between his air hose and the top of the hole.
From outside, the interior of the ship had merely looked gloomy and forbidding. Six feet in, and it was almost pitch-blackness, broken only by a few foggy patches of dull and greenish luminescence where some residual light from the sea above crept in through patches of corrosion in the overhead deck.
Crewes and Graham snapped on their torches, probing the depths of the cavernous hull with the bright beams. Like the house lights suddenly going up in a darkened theatre, the interior of the vessel was abruptly the stage-set of some grisly tableau.
Despite the softening effect of marine growths and heavy encrustations of barnacles and shellfish, the scene of utter devastation was still obvious. Shattered and twisted girders criss-crossed the interior of the hull at crazy angles, some propped up against each other so precariously that it looked as though a mere ripple in the water would cause them to fall.
The first skeleton was just inside the hole, lying against the down-tilted side of the ship. It looked as though it had been thrown there by some giant and careless hand. The poor bastard had probably caught the full blast of the explosion, Crewes thought with a shudder. The skull, spine and ribcage appeared more or less intact, although there was only one arm. The other arm, and both legs, were missing.
/> Graham located another body at the far end of the hull, its skeletal arms still wrapped around the wheel of the inner hatchway door, which had remained intact. The unfortunate sailor had obviously been crushed there by the pressure of the inrushing water before he’d had a chance to turn the wheel. Incongruously, the man’s synthetic deck shoes were still on his bony feet.
The first priority was to move him, Graham realized. If the hatchway could still be opened, it would afford comparatively easy access to the other areas below deck level. Stores and ammunition caches would have been kept in the fore section of the boat, so if there were any remaining mines, that was where they would be. He swam over to Crewes, directing his attention to the area and communicating his suggestions by hand signals.
Crewes understood. Together the two scuba divers made their way back to the skeleton, taking it up gently between them and transporting it back out to the open sea, where they lay it gingerly in the retrieval net. Martin’s last warning rang in Graham’s ears. It seemed a trifle undignified to load the shattered bones of the second corpse in as well. There was always the chance that they could yet come across the missing limbs, although it was more likely that they had been dragged away by scavengers at the time, when there was still meat on the bones.
After signalling for the net to be lifted by a couple of tugs on the main rope, they returned inside the hull to try and open the hatchway.
Surprisingly the hatch wheel was still free enough to be moved by hand, even after nearly two decades. The door itself, however, was not. Despite repeated tugs by both divers, it refused to budge.
There were two possibilities, Crewes figured. The door might simply be rusted in place, or it was warped – either from the initial blast of the explosion or from the impact of the wreck hitting the bottom. He placed his face-mask close to his colleague’s with an unspoken question in his eyes. Tapping his belt, he indicating the small amount of plastic explosive and fuses he had brought down with him in case of emergency.