Elements of Risk: A Noah Stark Thriller

by Ridgway, Brady

Chapter 15

  I felt the boat decelerate and I knew that we were approaching the site. I left Denis in the cabin to prepare the equipment, went out to see how Martina was doing. She didn’t look happy.

  A thin layer of cloud diffused the weak glow of a quarter-moon. Lights from Romanshorn shimmered on the calm water, tinged the cloud above the town pale orange. But the light did not reach us out on the lake. The water looked black, like a giant sea of crude oil. I shivered.

  ‘It says we here,’ Martina said, pointing to the GPS. ‘Why you stay down in cabin so long?’ I could only just make out her face in the gloom.

  I put my arm around her waist and kissed her on the cheek. She pulled away.

  ‘Sorrykočka. Denis has been teaching me about the rebreather. It’s quite complicated.’ She softened, pressed her body against mine. I looked around for the police buoy, but couldn’t see it. The GPS said that we were exactly on the spot. I had taken the coordinates from fairly rough sightings from the shore. We might be hundreds of meters from the buoy. I didn’t know how we were going to find it without turning on a torch, giving away our position to anyone who might be watching.

  Then Denis emerged from the cabin looking like a one-eyed alien. He had an image intensifier strapped to his head, probably something he had liberated in Iraq.

  He scanned the water, found the buoy within minutes. It was directly behind us. We had passed it in the dark. While he pointed out its position Martina turned the boat around, headed slowly towards it. I moved to the bow of the boat and scanned the water in front of us. We were only metres away when I finally saw it. I leaned over to grab it, almost fell in, hooked it to a cleat on the bow, signalled Martina to cut the motor.

  Silence spread out across the lake. Water lapped gently against the hull. I clambered back to the stern. Denis was in the cabin. I was about to go and help him with the gear when he emerged with the rebreathers. He carefully stood them upright against the side and looped a cord from them to the handrail to prevent them from falling over.

  ‘Never let it lie down,’ he said. ‘If water gets to the Sofnolime it will not work properly.’

  He might as well have been talking Chinese, but I nodded as if I understood. He returned to the cabin and I stood in the door as he passed the rest of the equipment out to me.

  When he emerged from the cabin again, he was wearing a dry suit; there was a large pile of gear in the cockpit of the boat. Denis handed me a set of thermal underwear and I began to strip off. It was brass-monkey weather. I quickly donned the thermals; then Denis helped me into a dry suit.

  When it was snug, Denis hoisted the rebreather onto my back. I tightened the straps. It was lighter than I had expected.

  ‘Okay, so do not forget the ‘UD signals eh.’ He had showed me the ingenious Head Up Display in the cabin. It comprised four LEDs linked to the computer by a fibre optic cable and attached to the mouthpiece so that it was easily visible in the bottom left hand corner of my mask.

  ‘Tell me again.’ I was already forgetting most of what Denis had taught me.

  ‘Just stay with me and you will be fine.’

  ‘What if we get separated?’

  ‘Okay, so I’ll tell again, but you will never remember.’ While he attached the hoses and opened the valves he assailed me with a long monologue. ‘Like I said, the two green ones mean that everything is okay, okay?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘‘Opefully that is all you will see. If the two red ones flash slowly at the same time, that means the oxygen partial pressure is too low; okay? Okay. So when the red ones flash fast it means that the partial pressure is too ‘igh; yes? Then you look at the computer on your wrist and see what the pressure is. In the descent the partial pressure will increase. If you go down too quickly you will get a warning. Stop for a moment or even go up a little. It is the opposite when you are going up. Then the partial pressure will decrease. If you do not pay attention and go up too quickly, the lights will flash. If you keep going it will be the last thing you will see. Pffft.’ He shrugged his shoulders in the way only the French can, signifying the end of my life. ‘So it is important to take it very slowly; okay? Okay. Now there is another warning that you can get. If one of the oxygen controllers fails, the green and red lights on that side will flash in turn. There is nothing you can do. The other one automatically becomes the master.’

  ‘What if the second one fails?’

  ‘You are fucked. But it will not.’

  I wasn’t reassured.

  ‘I ‘ave put new Sofnolime and two new batteries. The cylinders are full too. We ‘ave enough for three hours underwater, but we will freeze to death before then so we ‘ad better ‘urry.’

  The instructions were still buzzing in my head when Denis added the final words of doom. ‘And another thing. Because we are using ‘Eliox we would normally inflate the dry suit with some other gas. But that is too complicated now, so we will ‘ave to use the ‘Eliox.’

  He didn’t have to elaborate. I knew that helium is a bad insulator. That meant my ill-fitting suit would be inflated with helium instead of nitrogen or even argon, which have much better insulating properties. We would have less protection from the frigid water. Despite the warnings of impending doom, while he was talking, Denis was snapping hoses into place, starting up the dive computer, tightening straps and inflating the counterlungs with short bursts of air. I endured the tucking and prodding and tried to stay calm. Behind the mask my heart was racing.

  Denis continued with his briefing. ‘Yes. I almost forget. When you go down the pressure increases and the air in the counter lungs gets smaller. So you must add dilutant to the system as you descend. Do not forget: the ‘Eliox is on your left and the oxygen on your right. If you get them confused…’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m fucked.’

  Denis beamed at me. I was his star pupil.

  I put my hands to the two inflators. Oxygen cylinders are normally painted green and a ship always displays a green light on the starboard, or right, at night. I used that to remind me which was which.

  Denis continued. ‘When you are coming up again, think of the counterlungs as a buoyancy compensator. You will ‘ave to dump air while you are rising or you will come up like a fart in a bath.

  ‘Et voila, we are ready.’

  I wasn’t! I had changed my mind. I did not want to go through with it at all. I wanted to take all the equipment off, go back to the hotel with Martina and bang her brains out. Even the thought of dealing with the Russian Mafia scared me less than descending into the black void.

  But I just nodded and even managed a grimace of a smile. The hood that I was wearing distorted my face so much that Martina did not see the fear etched on my face. I helped Denis check his equipment. Despite the outside temperature I was beginning to feel warm. The thermal underwear was doing its job. At the rear of the boat we donned our masks and fins; Denis did a final check of all my gear and then told me to breathe out completely. Time to flush my body of nitrogen, the majority of the gas that we call air.

  When I had breathed out completely, Denis twisted open the mouthpiece and I popped it into my mouth. I breathed in. The gas didn’t feel or taste any different, but I was breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen; and already a little removed from the surface.

  With Denis’ help, I stepped over the handrail at the back of the boat onto the small wooden platform above the propellers. I looked down at the blackness. My hand went to the torch that was clipped to my weight belt. I couldn’t turn it on while on the surface without giving ourselves away, but the feel of it in my hand calmed me a little. There was a splash and Denis was in the water. I held my mask in place with my other hand and strode forward after him.

  Chapter 16

  My world went black. I remained submerged for a few seconds before bobbing back to the surface. The water ran from my mask and I could just make out the shape of the boat next to me. Lights glittered from the shore. I finned back to the platform at the stern of the boat. Denis wa
s there already; he was fiddling with his equipment.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s leaking.’

  ‘The dry suit?’

  ‘Oui. There is an ‘ole somewhere. The fucking water is coming in.’

  ‘Now what?’

  But he was already unbuckling the Inspiration. He slipped it off and lifted it onto the swimming platform at the stern of the boat. ‘You will ‘ave to do the dive alone.’

  ‘Can’t you use my dry suit?’ I was starting to feel a little panicky. The prospect of diving with Denis had been daunting enough, but the thought of descending into that blackness on my own with unfamiliar equipment was enough to turn my insides to jelly.

  ‘It’s too big for me.’ He pulled himself out of the water. And that was it; the decision had been made.

  Despite the dry suit, I shivered. The bits of my face that were exposed to the water between the mask and my hood began to ache. I could see Denis and Martina looking over at me, waiting, so I propelled myself hand over hand to the front of the boat, to the buoy line.

  It was safe to use the torch in the water, so I snapped it on with my free hand. I was immediately enveloped by a cold green glow. I ducked my head under the water and looked down, shining the torch towards the buoy line. The thin black line cut through the green water, plunged into infinite darkness.

  For an instant I felt a rush of panic. I imagined that the lake was bottomless and that I might sink down into that blackness forever, my body falling slowly in the dark, long after I had stopped breathing; my lungs crushed to the size of a pea by the unrelenting pressure. Fortunately the feeling passed, but it left me with a strong sense of dread, as if something terrible were about to happen.

  I looked up at the boat for a moment. Then I released the air from the buoyancy compensator and slowly slipped beneath the surface. When I was completely submerged, about a meter down, I stopped. The two green LEDs from the head up display, amplified by the water, stared unblinking at me. They looked like the eyes of some feral creature, caught in the beam of a torch. Apart from my ragged breathing, it was completely silent. The reassuring opening of the demand valve when breathing on SCUBA wasn’t there. Neither was the burst of bubbles when breathing out; just the gentle whisper of my breathing; and that green-eyed monster watching me from the edge of the light. I felt very alone.

  I looked at my dive computer. It showed that I was at one and a half meters, my oxygen partial pressure was .69 and my carbon dioxide scrubber was just warming up. I was good to go.

  The surface was already only a memory, so I started to slide down the buoy line. The depth gauge on the computer was the only way of tracking my progress. Apart from the green glow of the torch I could see only the buoy line. Because there were no bubbles, I wasn’t even completely sure which way was up.

  As the depth increased, the increasing pressure squashed the small pockets of air in my dry suit and buoyancy compensator and I began to sink a little faster. I stopped for a moment and squirted a little air from the dilutant bottle into the dry suit to increase my buoyancy.

  The depth gauge told me that I was at thirty metres already. I continued. When I reached a hundred metres I stopped again. I pointed the torch down the buoy line, half expecting to see the aeroplane, to see something, anything; but there was only darkness.

  A hundred metres might not seem like much to the non-diver; at its deepest the ocean reaches more than ten thousand metres. But any diver will tell you that a hundred metres is plenty deep. It is already way beyond the reach of sport divers, who breathe air. It is as deep as many technical divers will dare to go. And I still had a way to go. The green eyes continued to stare. During the minutes that it had taken me to descend, the creature had become my friend: my guardian. As long as the eyes stayed green I would be all right. I continued down the buoy line.

  At one hundred and fifty metres I really wanted to see the plane. But there was still only the blackness beyond the light of the torch. It occurred to me for the first time that the Swiss police might not have found the wreck at all. We had assumed from the beginning that they had found the aeroplane and had snagged it with an anchor. But it was equally possible that they had just left the buoy there to mark the general area. I might find the anchor buried in the mud at the bottom; if I ever got to the bottom.

  I sank another ten metres; still no sign of the plane, or of the bottom. During the ride out Denis had told me that the equipment had been certified to one hundred metres, tested to one hundred and fifty and pressure tested to one hundred and sixty. Beyond that it might begin to fail, its parts crushed by the weight of the water. I was approaching that limit.

  When I reached one hundred and seventy metres I stopped again and shone the torch down between my fins. My heart began beating faster. There was something there. I couldn’t make out any detail, but the light from the torch seemed a little brighter. Something white was reflecting the light.

  A sudden hiss from a solenoid in the Inspiration startled me. There was a rush of gas as oxygen was automatically injected into the system to replace that which my body had burned. I snapped the torch off for a moment, but the darkness was so intense, so absolute, that I turned it back on immediately.

  I slowly descended the line, looking down all the time, playing the beam of the torch about, hoping to see what it was that was down there. Then I saw it.

  The vague shapes and shadows suddenly coalesced and I realised that I was looking at the nose of an aeroplane. It was just beneath my feet. My depth gauge showed one hundred and ninety metres. I was beyond the limit of the equipment, almost as deep as Denis’ deepest dive. I had to descend even further because the aeroplane was lying at an angle on the bottom, nose high.

  As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw for the first time that the aeroplane was completely intact, resting on the muddy bottom. And the bottom was sharply inclined, plunging even further down; to depths beyond my reach. The buoy line went down further. It seemed to be snagged behind the wing.

  I shone my torch on the nose and began playing it over the fuselage. The glass of the windshield flashed as the beam passed over it. Something looked out of place. Something protruding from the side window on the opposite side of the plane. I couldn’t make it out, so I moved over the nose towards it. As I neared I realised that it was a man. He was staring at me.

  My heart stopped. Logic and reason deserted me. For an instant I wondered what he was doing down there, how he had got there before me. But then I saw his white shirt and the three gold bars on his shoulder. It was the co-pilot. He had obviously opened his side window and tried to get out. But the window was too small and he was jammed there. I thought of him struggling to free himself as the plane began to sink, the shock of the freezing lake as the water poured in, his frantic struggles as his head slipped below the surface, his last despairing gaze at the surface as the blackness shrouded him.

  I tried to put him from my mind and finned carefully back to the left side of the plane. A silver badge next to the door reflected the light from my torch. It read: ‘British Aerospace 125 700,’ a Hawker Siddeley. The door was closed. There was a red handle recessed into the fuselage on its left. I couldn’t feel it properly through the thick rubber gloves. But after a short struggle I managed to pull the handle and the door cracked open. It pivoted at the bottom. I pulled it open. The door came to rest on the mud, sending up a cloud of silt. I was going to have to be very careful. If I finned too hard I might stir up the silt reducing the visibility to zero. I probed the dark interior with the beam of my torch.

  Chapter 17

  A cargo net covered a small baggage compartment opposite the door. Inside were a single black plastic box and four small suitcases.

  I eased myself through the door, trying not to snag my air hoses on anything. I found myself in a cramped galley. There was a small basin with what looked like an urn just above it. Next to the basin was an oven and a number of small cupboards; all closed.
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  I paused for a moment, looked at my wrist-mounted computer. My oxygen partial pressure was normal and a bar graph showed that I had plenty of carbon dioxide scrubber available. The depth gauge indicated one hundred and ninety six metres. My cylinder pressure gauges had hardly moved; both tanks were almost full.

  A long rod held in place by four silver hooks secured a cargo net over the baggage compartment. I freed the rod and pushed it to one side. I needed both hands to check the contents of the box, so I released the torch. It was attached to my shoulder strap by a short lanyard and floated up to the ceiling. Without the light shining directly into the cargo compartment it was difficult to see, but I could just make out the shapes of the box and the suitcases.

  I ignored the suitcases at first. I assumed that the osmium must be in the box. It was small, only about twenty-five centimetres wide, and it looked strong, designed to protect fragile contents. I snapped open one of the catches, was just about to open the second when something tapped me on the shoulder. It was a very light tap; I hardly felt it through the dry suit. I assumed it must be the torch, floating around at the end of its leash. But when I looked up I saw it still floating near the ceiling. I put the case back into the luggage compartment and turned to see what had bumped into me.

  I nearly shat myself. There was someone there. His arms were raised above his head like some comic book spectre. One arm went off at a crazy angle just above the elbow. A jagged piece of white bone protruded from the flesh where his arm had broken.

  It was the closest I had ever come to panic in my life. I grabbed my torch, tried to calm my breathing. I was puffing like a steam engine at full stretch. I held the torch in a vice grip and shut my eyes for a moment trying to clear my thoughts. But that just made things worse. I knew that it was probably the captain and that he was indubitably dead. But some dark and primitive part of my brain still saw him as a threat. I shivered. The cold hit me for the first time. I opened my eyes, looked my tormentor in his one remaining eye, concentrated on breathing slowly. The oxygen solenoid opened and I heard a rush of gas enter the system to replace all the oxygen I had just wasted.