SKELETON GOLD: Scorpion (James Pace novels Book 3)

by Andy Lucas

  Slipping from his warm bed, he stepped out into the kitchen area and made himself a mug of tea. Taking it out into the observation rim, he watched the rain run in streams down the clear, curved polycarbonate, dropping unseen onto the treetops below. The sound was soothing, as was the warmth of the liquid.

  Eyeing his reflection in the plastic, mottled and distorted by the half-light thrown from inside the kitchen, he resolved to fight, and win.

  20

  Being back aboard the Sea Otter, baking beneath a flawless sky, felt very different this time. Sarah was not with him, which he was pleased about. Pace and Hammond had made the journey back on their own, leaving her and Baker at home to help Doyle McEntire unravel the mystery at that end. The Falcon had dropped them at the same remote military airfield that they had used to get back to the UK, with a helicopter transferring them back to the ship, now holding station twenty miles off the coast. The vessel had turned around and headed back to the Namibian coast on direct orders from McEntire. The corpse would have to stay on ice until this new mission was completed.

  That had been the night before and Pace had endured a restless night, being glad when dawn broke clear and hot. Hammond had not fared any better and the two men met up on the sun deck at a little after six-thirty, for a subdued breakfast of croissants and coffee.

  Their job was a simple one. Somewhere beneath the sparkling blue water sat a WW1 Royal Navy submarine, lost for a century. A huge lump of metal, it should be easy to find with their high-tech sidescan sonar array, Pace knew. They had roughly identified a search area from the directions in the old diary but it covered roughly six square miles. Their only option was to run repeated, monotonous lines within the grid, using the ship’s navigation computer and GPS to ensure they didn’t miss any of the seabed.

  The search area was rectangular in shape and fairly close to shore which gave the added problem of swell and wave action in the shallower water. The bonus was that the depth of water in the search area, for the most part, was within human diving limits. Devoid of coral, flat and shelving, the majority of the inshore water covered vast kelp forests, in which thousands of seals played, hunted and did their best to avoid the healthy shark population.

  The area wasn’t called the Skeleton Coast for nothing. The two men had swatted up on the history of multiple shipwrecks, going back hundreds of years. Sudden storms, vicious currents and unpredictable winds had left many a mariner to die a terrible death beneath a merciless sun. The constantly shifting sands also moved the shoreline hundreds of metres every decade, in perpetual motion that left some of the sunken vessels now perched a mile or more inland, well away from the crashing surf. Rusting, metal skeletons of freighters, fishing boats and twisted oil carriers littered the desert sand, alongside the bleached bones of whales, dolphins, seals and human beings.

  ‘If it’s going to be so easy to find,’ Hammond questioned, between bites of his pastry, ‘why has nobody discovered it before?’

  ‘Nobody knew where to look until that old diary surfaced. The submarine vanished without trace, or record. The Admiralty would have had to search an entire ocean, which would be impossible even today, with all our improved technology. The course headings, speed and travel times listed in those pages now give us a ball park to look in.’

  ‘This is a tourist area now. Lots of wrecks fairly close to shore must attract sports divers from around the world?’

  Pace had researched the diving opportunities and had been surprised that very little sports diving took place along the Skeleton Coast.

  ‘The area is too remote and considered dangerous,’ Pace explained what he’d learned. ‘The few official diving tours stick to a couple of well-known wrecks much further north. Nobody had any clue that a huge treasure was just waiting to be found. We will be the first.’

  They discussed the search and how it would work. The captain had been given instructions to take his orders from Pace and joined them after breakfast for another coffee. Ex-military and very experienced, he knew every secret system aboard and had acted as an offshore operations base for his boss for more than a dozen covert missions since retiring from the Royal Navy. He quickly explained about the equipment they had to work with.

  Pace was a helicopter pilot by trade and now a novice scuba diver. Hammond knew a lot about ocean exploration, thankfully, having been on many legitimate expeditions, including one where he had narrowly avoided being shark bait. One of his expedition colleagues, unfortunately, had not been as lucky. Pace knew he was out of his depth, so sat back and listened as the other two spoke.

  Aside from concealed weaponry, the ship carried covert surveillance and search equipment. Stored in a special compartment within the keel, a sonar torpedo could be lowered and played out behind the stern without ever having to be brought up to the surface. Powerful computers and cutting-edge sonar interpretation software would allow them to trawl up and down until the sonar torpedo, or fish as Hammond referred to it, swept above a metal target. They would be able to generate an accurate 3D image of any interesting target, measuring length, density and magnetism.

  Pace had seen recent media reports where airliners had been lost at sea, so he knew enough about sonar arrays to understand how they worked. In theory, he just needed to sit in front of a glowing screen and wait until a neat, submarine-shaped piece of metal floated into view. Then he and Hammond would dive down to it and explore. According to the diary, the secret consignment had been transferred to the forward hold before the vessel was hijacked, so whatever it was, it should still be there. So should the gold.

  The search needed to get underway swiftly, so the captain left them to go and input the search grid into the ship’s navigation computer. They finished their coffee and both headed back to their respective staterooms to get showered. By eight o’clock, both Pace and Hammond were stuck in the bowels of the ship, inside a small monitoring room, eyes fixed to a large computer screen.

  The screen showed a digitised image of the seabed. The ship had already run its first lane and had just turned around to run back again, this time a few hundred feet east of the first run. It would travel back and forth, up and down, running lanes until the entire grid had been covered. This would take several days so everyone was hoping they got lucky and found the wreck of the K45 in the first few runs.

  Luck, unfortunately, was not with them. Pace’s initial optimism quickly faded as hour after lonely hour went by. The seabed below was largely empty, although they were both amazed at the clarity of images the software produced. Occasionally, an object would appear on the screen, in vivid detail. Mainly oil drums and discarded maritime rubbish broke the monotony but twice a larger image peaked their interest until they identified the wrecks of a small freighter and what appeared to be metal canons from a long-eroded wooden sailing vessel.

  They were just starting a third day of entombment in front of the screen when the very edge of their current search lane showed an image that jerked Hammond awake. Pace had just nipped out to get them some coffee and when he came back, Hammond’s beaming grin told him their luck had just changed!

  The image was clearly cylindrical, and only measured about twenty feet in length. It was at the edge of the scanned field but the object clearly continued into the, as yet unscanned adjacent search lane. What made it so exciting was the very clear image of two large, tri-bladed propellers, partially submerged in sand.

  ‘Call me old fashioned,’ quipped the bald accountant-cum-adventurer, ‘but that looks like the stern of a bloody big submarine.’

  Pace clapped him on the back, partially with relief. There couldn’t be too many sunken submarines sitting just off the Skeleton Coast, he decided. It was possible, true, but unlikely. Grabbing a telephone from its cradle on a nearby desk, he hurriedly explained the situation to the bridge, where the captain immediately agreed to turn around and run the next lane from where they were. If it turned out to be a false alarm, the ship’s computers could easily pick up from where the search patt
ern had left off.

  Up on deck, snatching a few minutes of fresh air while the ship slowly turned onto its new lane, Hammond noted the dark skies at the same moment that Pace felt an increase in motion beneath his feet. The wind was picking up, out of nowhere, as a nasty storm headed their way. It had only been an hour before that the skies had been blue and the sea flat, but not anymore.

  The sheer ferocity of the squall was terrifying. They just had enough time to power the ship out to sea, away from the risk of being blown aground, and point its rakish bow into the wind before the full force of the storm slammed into them.

  All thoughts of continuing the search were put on hold as everyone was ordered to go to their cabins, with the exception of the vital crew members who manned the bridge, engine room and watch positions. With the little ship rolling and pitching like a cork inside a washing machine, Hammond joined Pace in his stateroom, to wait out the storm. Both men were frustrated by the delay.

  ‘How long do these storms last?’ wondered Pace. It had snuck up on them so fast, he hoped it would leave just as quickly.

  Hammond was no help. He had been on enough company ocean missions, holidays, cruises and training exercises over the years to understand the unpredictability of sea storms. It might pass in a few hours, or last a few days. The winds were strengthening swiftly, which was never a good sign.

  ‘I think we can forget about getting down onto that submarine for at least a few days,’ he guessed.

  ‘Really?’ groaned Pace. ‘We are so close now. That’s not what I want to hear.’

  ‘Sorry, mate, but that’s what I think. In fact,’ he added cautiously, ‘I’m more worried that we might find ourselves sitting on the bottom, right next to the submarine if the storm is a bad one.’

  Despite the severe motion of the ship, and the constant crash of dislodged drawers, upending chairs and the smash of glass items from the bathroom, Pace hadn’t considered the possibility that the ship might be in danger.

  Hammond knew the vessel was specially designed and rugged but he also knew that some sacrifices to structural integrity had been made in order to create the underwater covert facilities. The weight of concealed gun systems and the covert torpedo tubes also placed a question mark over seaworthiness in extremely rough, persistent conditions. His gut instinct was that they would be fine as long as the running tide and angry waves did not push them onto concealed rocks or dump them up onto the beach, as similar wild weather had done to far larger vessels in the past.

  Pace was not one to suffer from sickness. As a pilot, he was used to throwing a helicopter around the sky in all weathers but the huge swells and pounding waves, crashing up and over the ship now, forced him to hang on tightly to the bar counter as he somehow managed to pour them both a large glass of Jack Daniels.

  Choosing his moment, judging the gap between crashing waves, he staggered back to the sofa, where Hammond waited. This sumptuous leather seating was securely bolted down to the floor and sported integral armrests that could be pulled down when needed, very much like in the rear seat of a family SUV. Today was one of those times it was needed, so Hammond already had them down by the time the glass was slipped into his hand. Safely seated, squeezed in between the armrests that created tight, single seats, even the violent motion of the struggling ship was manageable.

  With little else to do but ride out the storm, they sipped at their drinks and carried on planning their dive. Although they had not yet seen a full scan, or measured the unknown wreck against the known dimensions of a K-class submarine, they knew they’d found what they were looking for. Now, they also knew its depth. One hundred feet.

  Pace watched the rain hammer down against the windows and felt strangely comforted. After so many recent weeks spent in the Amazon jungle, continually rained upon, and with England in the grip of its worst summer rain for thirty years, the sight and sound offered a strange familiarity. Even the shuddering, explosive crashing of wave after wave against the hull quickly faded into the background of his consciousness.

  The storm raged for ten hours before deciding to move on, leaving in its wake a decidedly battered but serviceable ship. They had stayed in Pace’s stateroom the entire time, too wary of the sudden need to evacuate to bother sleeping.

  The next day, little evidence of the storm’s hand could be seen on the little ship. Crew members had swept, cleaned and replaced everything they could. The sky had returned to a clear, pale blue hue and the water shimmered invitingly, although it was murkier than before because of the fine sediment still suspended within it.

  Pace, Sarah and Hammond had passed some of the night, as the storm slowly eased, agreeing a plan on how to conduct a search. During their bumpy deliberations, they had repeatedly referred to a downloaded schematic of a K-class submarine that Sarah had found in the naval archives, scanned and emailed over to them the day before.

  The submarine was huge and they could only guess at how one man had managed to sink it, after being locked out on the outer hull by the hijackers. To get it to sink, they had agreed, somehow Captain Barrett must have found a way to open a hatch. The hatch wheel locks were fitted both inside and outside on the submarine but Pringle’s diary made it clear that they had been locked from inside. How Barrett pulled it off they might be able to find out when they actually swam down to the wreck.

  They made the assumption that at least one hatch would be open and that would be their point of entry. They would tie themselves together with thin nylon cord so they would not get separated, especially inside the dark confines which would contain the dead submariners and possibly many inches of sediment, which would kill visibility if disturbed. The cord could easily be cut with their dive knives in an emergency but they both hoped that wouldn’t happen.

  They weren’t able to check their equipment so Hammond had used the time to run through diving protocols with his friend. If they were going to be down there for a while, they would need to come up slowly, adhering strictly to the decompression stop times in the dive tables.

  The accepted maximum safe diving depth for a standard scuba tank was about one hundred and sixty five feet, so they were well within this depth. If they wanted a quick dive, they could go down to the submarine and back without the need for decompression stops but both men knew it could be a lengthy examination, fraught with risk.

  They decided to use double tanks, diving in daylight, and limit themselves twenty minutes of bottom time. This wouldn’t give them a great deal of search time but it would mean they would not need any decompression stops, although Hammond cautiously suggested a ‘safety stop’ of three minutes, at a depth of six metres. The extra air would also give them additional time, in case of emergency.

  They had toyed with the idea of doing everything remotely but the depth was manageable and there was no substitute for the human hand, or eye, when it came to exploring wrecks. It was also a bit of excitement after the boredom of three days of searching.

  The next lane run was short, covering only the half a kilometre needed to scan the full site. The image produced by the sonar showed a long, submarine-shaped object that appeared to be sitting upright on the seabed. There was the hint of a conning tower outline, looking down from above, and the absence of metal debris around the wreck told them that it had gone down virtually intact.

  Donning wetsuits, they made their way to the stern of the ship. The ship had stopped a few hundred metres to the north of the wreck and the anchors had been deployed, biting firmly into the sand below. The deck crew helped them on with their tanks and ran through the safety checks with them.

  Pace checked his diver’s watch. It was nine o’clock in the morning and they were ready to go. Slipping on a full face mask, flippers and gloves, each diver checked their radio connection, which was loud and clear. Both gave a grin before moving over to a small metal platform by the railings. Resembling a shark cage, without the sides and roof, they stepped onto the platform and held on to the chain that linked it to a small winch.
The winch whirred into life and lifted them up from the deck.

  Once level with the top of the railing, two crewmen eased the platform out over the side and reversed the winch, slowly lowering the platform down until it reached the lapping water, where it stopped. Sitting down on the platform, Pace tipped forwards and entered the ocean, immediately followed by Hammond.

  Not wasting a moment, they synchronised their watches at 09:03, upended and began to stroke down hard towards the seabed, angling southwards as they dove deeper, aiming towards the unseen beast.

  The murky, chilly water reduced visibility to about thirty feet so the upper fronds of a waving kelp forest had already engulfed them before the shadowy outline of a huge black shape solidified below them. Finally, human eyes beheld K-45 once more.

  Feeling his heartbeat quicken on his chest, Pace kept swimming, kicking with his fins as Hammond had taught him. The dark shape rapidly filled his vision until both divers stopped and floated, mid-water, five feet above its weed-strewn, barnacle encrusted conning tower.

  ‘What a ship,’ Hammond’s words filled Pace’s ears as clearly as if they had been chatting at a table. ‘She looks perfect, as though we could get her engines running and sail her back to Plymouth!’

  ‘I can hardly believe it,’ replied Pace, absorbing the sheer enormity of the submarine.

  It was sitting on the seabed, wearing a thick green blanket of algae, coral and barnacles, the once-grey outer hull lost completely beneath. The hull was doubtlessly corroded and breached in places but, at first glance, they could not see any holes. Upright, without any sign of battle damage, even its deck gun looked as if it was ready to fire; angled in a slightly elevated position. It too wore a green sheath. The entire submarine was curtained around its perimeter by thirty-foot high kelp strands, resembling a huge underwater footprint from above.