Ciasim and I went off some little way and sat by the water’s edge with a bottle of arak and a box of halva, that unique Turkish sweetmeat made out of honey and nuts, something to which he was particularly partial.
It was hotter than ever and very beautiful and on the horizon a congoa, the kind of boat that trawled for sponges instead of using a diver, drifted by.
“Look at that,” Ciasim said angrily. “They’re ruining the business, those butchers. They tear up the sea bed and everything that lives.”
“Soon be impossible to make a living in the islands at all,” I said. “What with those things and synthetics.”
I rolled a mouthful of arak around my teeth. It always tended to make me feel about eight years old and sucking aniseed balls again.
“I wouldn’t be too sure, Jack,” Ciasim said carefully. “Plenty of ways a good diver can make a living around here.”
So now we were coming to it. “Such as?”
“Wrecks, for instance. Every kind of wreck from ancient times up to ships that were torpedoed in the last war.”
I shook my head. “If it’s antiques you’re after, you are wasting your time. Most wrecks of that kind aren’t visible. They’re usually under a tumulus of sand and you’ve got to be an expert to recognise them. Even if you do, undersea excavation is one of the most highly technical games there is. You need specialists, lots of money and all the time in the world. On top of that, the Greek or Turkish governments, whichever it happens to be, will have their say in disposing of anything you bring up.”
“No, it was something else I had in mind. I found a ship last week, Jack, over towards Sinos in the Middle Passage.”
“Sinos?” I was surprised. “I didn’t know they were letting anyone work that area.”
The island of Sinos was a relic of the war. Only a couple of miles long and half that distance wide, it had enormous strategic importance during the war because of its position at the mouth of the Kasos Strait and the Germans had developed the old Turkish fortifications tremendously. It had recently acquired a rather more sinister reputation as a prison for political offenders from the Greek mainland.
“You know how it is these days?” Ciasim grinned. “Greece and Turkey are co-operating again, at least as far as things go at the official level, so all of a sudden, everyone is being friendly. A Greek Navy M.T.B. turned up to say we shouldn’t be there, but they were nice and helpful when I explained about the wreck. Said I should apply through police headquarters at Kyros for a permit to work on her.”
“And did you?”
“I saw Sergeant Stavrou that same night. He filled in a form for me and sent it off to Athens. He seemed to think I stood a good chance of getting permission.”
“How much did it cost you?” I commented sourly.
“A drink, Jack, that’s all. At Yanni’s. One of those cold German beers Stavrou likes so much. He was fine.” He shook his head and sighed. “Jack, whatever happened to you? You’ve got to start trusting people again.”
“That’ll be the day. Tell me some more about this wreck.”
“An old three-thousand-ton coaster the Germans used to run supplies between the islands. Sunk by bombing in 1945 just before the end of the war. I made a few enquiries around the bars in Kyros and found someone who was in the crew. An old man called Constantinos. Has a farm on the south side of the island. He said they were on their way to the mainland from Sinos just after the Germans had evacuated. They even had the Commander on board. Some S.S. general or other. Think of it, Jack.” He prodded me in the chest with his forefinger gravely as the arak began to take effect. “Think of the loot. You know what the Nazis were like? There could be anything down there.”
“Or nothing. How deep is she?”
“Twenty-six kulacs. I made an accurate recording.”
A hundred and thirty feet. I shook my head. “You need good equipment for that kind of deal, Ciasim. At least two divers for a start.”
“Exactly what I thought.”
He grinned, dropping into the American English he’d picked up in that prison camp. “You and me, baby, we’ll make a fortune.”
But I wasn’t so sure. Oh, there was a chance of sorts, a good chance, but there was more money to be made out of the wreck than out of sponging in the same period, which wasn’t saying much. There had been a time when I wouldn’t have thought twice about joining such a venture, but I wasn’t at my best around wrecks these days. How could I tell a man who’s never had a nerve in his body in the first place that I’d lost mine?
“This afternoon, Jack. I take you there this afternoon. We go down together. You’ll see.” He lifted the bottle to his mouth and swallowed deep, arak spilling across his face. “Now we eat.”
He pulled me to my feet and lurched across the sand towards the fire. There was corba to start with, probably the finest fish soup in the world, lobsters fried whole on the white-hot stones, fish steaks. You couldn’t have done better at the Athens Hilton. Why, then, had I lost my appetite?
When I focused the binoculars, the cliffs of Sinos jumped into view. They were two to three hundred feet high at that point and great concrete gun emplacements, relics of the German occupation, were clearly visible at every strategic point. Bare rock and grass and not much else.
“A hell of a place to die in,” I said.
Ciasim shrugged. “Politics is for the insane, Jack. I just don’t want to know.”
Which expressed my own sentiments exactly. The Seytan was anchored about half a mile off-shore, the Gentle Jane was up alongside in a spot which he assured me was the correct one in spite of the absence of any marker buoy. I leaned against the mast and watched Yassi and Abu get him ready.
Diving dress is made of india-rubber between layers of heavy twill which together makes for something pretty durable, but the gear Ciasim was wearing had definitely seen better days.
You can forget about moray eels and octopuses, sting rays and other terrors of the deep. Diving is a lot like flying. The danger comes from the very fact that you are doing something so completely against nature.
The pressure increases at up to fifteen tons for every thirty-seven feet you descend and air isn’t just necessary to breathe. It has to be fed down to you at something like fifty pounds more than the pressure at the depth at which you are working. Once the air supply is cut off, the pressure of the water can collapse the suit and the diver is quite simply compressed. I’ve heard old timers say they’ve seen blood and flesh squeezed out of the end of the air hose up top. A nice way to die…
The only decent item of equipment Ciasim had was a massive copper and brass helmet which like most of the modern variety had a check valve which closed automatically when the air supply was cut off. The exhaust valve did the same, leaving the diver with the air in his suit, but it didn’t leave him long to get to the surface.
It was crazy to take up this kind of work with the sort of gear Ciasim had. He was a good diver—none better, but he only had guts to go along with that and it wasn’t enough.
“See you down there, Jack,” he said as the helmet went over his head and they screwed the wing nuts on his breastplate tight.
I nodded and went over the rail to the Gentle Jane where Morgan was checking the aqualung. He glanced up, a worried look on his face as I stripped off my sweater and pants. Underneath I was wearing a full Neoprene wet suit in black. It was going to be cold down there and I shivered involuntarily.
“How do you feel, Jack?” he asked in a low voice as I slipped my arms through the straps of the aqualung.
“Bloody awful,” I told him and instantly regretted it. His face sagged and I put a hand on his shoulder quickly. “Nothing to do with the diving. Never bothers me these days. It’s just that I don’t fancy the idea of hooking up with Ciasim on a thing like this. We don’t have the right kind of gear. An old blue-belly like you knows that better than anyone.”
But he didn’t believe me—not for a single minute.
I gave Cia
sim three or four minutes’ start before going over and following his lines down through the clear water. It wasn’t so bad at first and then I entered the neutral zone from fifty feet on where all colours faded and things started to move in on me. Visibility was nothing like as good and for some reason, there didn’t seem to be many fish about. It was all rather sinister.
I checked my depth gauge and moved on. No reefs, no undersea chasms—nothing. A mysterious green void leading nowhere. I was sliding headlong into eternity.
A ship’s stern moved out of the gloom with startling suddenness and I straightened out and hovered, adjusting my air flow.
She was tilted ever so slightly to one side, but otherwise in a remarkable state of preservation. The anti-aircraft gun on the fore-deck was still in place on its mounting, barrel tilted towards the surface. Ciasim stood beside it. He raised a hand and beckoned. I went closer.
Black mussels grew on her rails and ventilators and some of her surfaces were covered with vicious dog’s teeth, a razor-edged clam, which not only slice like a razor as the name implies, but also carry enough poison to put you on your back for a week.
The compass and wheel were encrusted with barnacles when I peered inside the wheelhouse. Barnacles grew on the winch. I went down through an open hatchway. The interior of the hold at that point was like being inside the nave of a church, light filtering down through ragged holes in the deck, mainly cannon shells from the look of them. She’d been strafed from the air before sinking, that was for sure.
I moved into the gloom, looking for a way into the main cargo area and ran into trouble at once. This was where the bomb had landed, the direct hit which had caused all the trouble. There was a jumble of twisted girders and buckled deck plates, the whole encrusted with strange, submarine growths.
I moved closer, reached out to a metal spar only to hold myself in place. God in heaven, but it moved. Not only that, but everything in sight seemed to tremble with a kind of gentle sigh that seemed to echo through the water.
My very bowels twisted, the fear running through me like a living thing. I went up through the hatch and kept on going, leaving Ciasim to his own devices, going up just as fast as I was able. There was no need to decompress. I hadn’t been down long enough and I came up into the clear light of day a few seconds later and kicked for the ladder. Yassi gave me a hand up. I wrenched off my mask and spat out the rubber mouthpiece.
“What about my father?” he demanded.
“Still down there. He’ll be up soon, I suppose.”
Morgan was with them and I don’t think I’d ever seen his face greyer. I ignored him, stepped over the rail of the Gentle Jane and went below. By the time I heard his foot on the companionway, I had a bottle of Jameson out from under my bunk where I still had a secret hoard, and was on my second glass.
He stood there watching me and I shoved the bottle along the saloon table. “Okay, so I’ve been holding out on you. Go on, help yourself.”
“Was it bad, Jack?”
“Christmas and New Year rolled into one.”
I unzipped my wet-suit, towelled myself down and pulled on trousers and a sweater, ignoring his troubled gaze, then I filled my glass again and went on deck. Ciasim was back on board the Seytan, helmet off and in the act of lighting a cigarette from the match Yassi held out to him.
He waved. “Heh, Jack, come aboard. Let’s talk.”
I smiled bravely and muttered in a low voice to Morgan who had followed me up the companionway, “Make ready to move out. I’ve just about had it.”
I stepped over the rail to the Seytan’s deck and leaned against the mast.
“You see, Jack?” Ciasim said. “You see what I mean? You come in with me?”
I shook my head. “I’d think again if I were you. I thought the whole damned lot was going to come in on me down there.”
He frowned. “I didn’t notice anything to worry about.”
Which I didn’t like because of the implication, but I took a deep breath and tried sweet reason. “You were right about one thing. It’s a hundred and thirty feet deep. Now that means that for every forty-five minutes worked in a helmet suit, you’ll have to decompress four minutes at thirty-five feet, twenty-six minutes at twenty-feet and twenty-six minutes at ten feet. A decompression time of fifty-six minutes for every forty-five worked and you can only get away with going down twice a day.”
He was scowling now. “Why must you always talk in this way like a woman who fears every shadow? Always this decompression nonsense. Always these diving tables of yours.”
“Ciasim, you’ll kill yourself, it’s as certain as that,” I told him. “You need a team of divers down there. Half-a-dozen at the very least to get anything worthwhile and at that, it could well be a waste of time.”
He was good and angry by now, eyes touched with fire. “Talk, my friend, lots of talk and clever language, but when it comes down to it, I think you are afraid. Yes, you are afraid to go down there again.”
He didn’t mean it, not for a moment and when I cracked, I gave him the shock of his life. “Afraid?” I laughed wildly. “I’m scared to bloody death. I couldn’t even hold my bowels down there. How’s that for a laugh.”
His eyes went wide and calm and very, very dark. It was as if in one single moment of revelation he saw everything. Really understood.
“Jack.” He reached out to me quickly. “I’m sorry—truly sorry.”
I went over the rail fast. Morgan was already casting off as I ran into the wheelhouse and pressed the self-starter. Those magnificent Penta engines roared into life instantly and I swung the wheel hard over and took the Gentle Jane away in a great sweeping curve.
I ran her hard for a couple of miles before slowing down. When I glanced over my shoulder, Morgan stood in the doorway.
“Feel any better?”
“Some,” I said.
“Well don’t get too happy. You left those sponges, the good ones, on board the Seytan.”
We came into Kyros in the late afternoon. It was a spectacular little island, six or seven miles long by three across, and a single double-peaked mountain towered three thousand feet high into the sky at its centre.
A single-masted caicque, sails bellying, slipped out through the narrow harbour entrance and turned towards Crete, passing so close that I could see the eyes painted on each side of the prow. The man at the tiller waved. I waved back and took the Gentle Jane into harbour.
There was one new arrival since the morning, a ninety-foot diesel motor yacht with gleaming white hull and scarlet trim. The kind of craft that must have set someone back all of fifty thousand pounds. She was anchored a hundred yards out from the main jetty and carried the Greek flag.
I passed her well to the other side of the harbour and made for my usual mooring beside the old stone jetty where there were no dues. Brightly painted caicques were beached on the white curve of sand and fishermen sat beside them mending their nets while children ran through the shallows, their voices clear over the water.
I killed the engines, we drifted in and Morgan jumped for the jetty and tied up. I stepped over the rail and joined him.
“You going someplace, Jack?” he asked.
“I’ll buy a few tins of something or other,” I said. “I feel like stretching my legs anyway.”
He didn’t try to argue and I walked away quickly in case he did. There was more to it than that, of course. Much more. I had some thinking to do. The business down there in that old wartime wreck had really brought things home to me in a big way. I was finished.
To try with my kind of problem to earn a living as a diver could only lead to one certain end. A quick and messy death.
I came to that conclusion in a small taverna at the other end of the waterfront after my third glass of retsina. So be it. No more diving. But what was I going to do instead? That was the question. The only other thing I seemed to be much good at these days was drinking.
I walked back along the waterfront in a world of my o
wn for a while as I considered every angle. It was one hell of a situation, that was for certain. I turned along the jetty and went towards the boat. There was no sign of Morgan, but when I went over the rail to the deck I could smell coffee.
For some reason, I felt better and went down the companionway briskly. “That’s the ticket, Morg,” I called as I entered the saloon and tossed my cap on the table.
Lady Sara Hamilton moved out of the galley and stood there, a coffee pot in one hand, a tin of cream in the other. She was wearing light blue linen slacks, a white shirt knotted at the waist and looked about as beautiful as any woman could ever usefully hope to.
And the face? God help me, that dear, dear face, the wide generous mouth lifting a little in scorn, but not at me, I knew that now. And the calm, grey eyes.
“Hello, Savage,” she said crisply. “Pleased to see me?”
When she smiled, it was as if a lamp had clicked on inside, touching everything in sight.
six
THE SMILE ON THE FACE OF THE TIGER
Anything might have happened in that first golden moment if Dimitri Aleko had not appeared from the galley behind her. I don’t know what he was supposed to be. He wore old denims, faded blue sweatshirt, scarf knotted carelessly at the throat and a battered and salt-stained cap. He looked every boy’s ideal of a hard-line bosun off a Finnish windjammer.
For some reason he actually seemed pleased to see me and pushed out his hand in that rather stiff Bostonian way of his that was so alien to his Greek background.
“Good to see you, Mr. Savage. You certainly left more than a little confusion behind when we last met.”
He slipped an arm around Sara Hamilton’s shoulders in another of those little intimate gestures of his that was probably even for my benefit, just to let me know where we stood.
“It was something to see, wasn’t it, Sara?”
Jack Higgins Page 6