by Andrew Grant
The escort boat came alongside and rafted up to us. The Brownings were mounted, one on each of the small bridge wings. The long-barrelled heavy machine guns were covered by tarps, but their shapes remained sharp and intimidating outlines under the canvas. The five pistoleros on the trawler had the look of trained soldiers. Although they were dressed in denim and T-shirts, they may as well have been wearing uniform greens. Each of them carried a holstered Beretta 92 on his belt counterbalanced by a big fucking knife. Sunglasses and baseball caps completed the outfits.
Several of the crew of the other boat came on board, including Tri, their captain.
Tri was a razor-thin, sharp-faced guy of about forty-five. He had the definite air of a former naval man. He was pleasant enough but gave nothing away. As we hovered about the boat, he refused a beer or whisky. Instead he stuck with coffee and, through the open mess door, kept one eye on the boat alongside.
The guards remained on board the trawler, one of them moving between the small bridge wings, binoculars around his neck at all times. There was a second man seated in the tiny glassed-in wheelhouse. No doubt he was on radar watch. Radar wasn’t a standard fitting on in-shore fishing boats in these waters. Tuk Tuk had informed me that the Q-boat’s radar unit was very sophisticated with a long-range scan. All the better not only to spot pirates and the Burmese navy with, but also to avoid customs vessels!
That night I had a plate of rice with an excellent chicken curry. My stomach didn’t roll over on me. I swore off the Mekong but had a couple of beers to wash my food down. After the meal, when Tri and his sailors returned to their own boat, I sat on the foredeck outside and had a smoke. The Odorama was pointing into a gentle wind swell. The breeze was fresh and clean. I finished my cigarette, lay down on a pile of netting and closed my eyes.
Having a fucking seagull shit on your upturned face was a hell of a way to wake up. The chortling bird flew out of the rigging above me as I sat up, blinking and cursing. I tore off my T-shirt and wiped the crap off me. It was dawn and the sun was dragging its yawning yellow face over the horizon. I rolled off my net bed, stripped to my briefs and found a hose to sluice myself down. So much for modern amenities, huh?
There was movement on our rafted-up neighbour. The guard on the bridge was changing. I could smell coffee somewhere on our tub, so I followed my nose towards the cupboard that served as a galley. Mug of coffee in hand and suddenly life wasn’t looking and feeling quite so bad. The wind had dropped and there was heat in the sun. The sky was cloudless. I think I smiled.
Breakfast was seafood soup and rice. I was following that with my third cup of coffee and a cigarette out on the foredeck when Niran came out to join me. ‘The weather will be good. We can go whenever you want,’ he said, taking a Marlboro from the pack I held out to him.
‘As soon as we finish these,’ I replied, holding up my coffee. ‘I have a GPS that will get us to within two yards of the wreck.’
Niran nodded. ‘I was told that you would have that. Very good,’ he said. ‘There is a lot of water out there if we don’t know exactly where to look.’
‘You know what we are looking for?’
‘No!’ Niran shook his head. ‘Tuk Tuk said that I was to take the boat to where you said and do what you said. I didn’t ask him any questions. It is not wise to ask Tuk Tuk Song too many questions.’ He shook his head and dragged deeply on his smoke. ‘I think we are looking for gold,’ he added a moment or two later. ‘Otherwise why would we have so many guns with us?’
Niran’s logic was basic, but quite faultless. Why indeed did we have so many guns? One .50 cal and a couple of AK47s would have done the job against most of the rag tag pirates in these waters. Maybe Tuk Tuk’s show of force was for another reason.
Who could tell just how his mind worked?
We weighed anchor at 07:30 and as we started moving west along the Loughborough Passage, I called the dive team together. The first thing I did was get out the Toshiba and show them the two images of the Ruby Buddha. Once they had got over the shock I explained the rest, including the fact that there were two vessels down there, one of which contained something I needed to bring back.
The initial plan was that we would buddy-up and operate in pairs, as was standard procedure, of course. Tan, one of the former navy divers, and I would search out the remains of the sub, while the other pair, Billy and Suwat, would dive into the freighter to seek out the buddha. I passed on the information I had been given and told them that their treasure was in the second hold, and that access was through an open deck hatch. Apparently, and perhaps fortunately for us, the cover had been blown off during the sinking.
God only knows what I’d find at the submarine. The bow would be gone, thanks to the explosion of the bomb and the two or three live and primed torpedoes that had been detonated. However what I was going to be looking for would be in the captain’s tiny broom closet of a cabin, which was behind the conning tower, half the submarine’s length from its bow section. I only hoped the damned thing had landed on its belly. It would be difficult enough to navigate through it even then, but it sure as hell would be even worse if it had landed upside down or on its butt. Whatever, I guessed we were soon going to find out. The recon divers hadn’t figured which way round the sub was lying. They’d seen the wrecked bow section from directly in front. Visibility and light hadn’t been good. They’d had no time for further examination before they had had to surface and bug out in the face of an approaching Burmese navy patrol boat.
By 09:30 we were anchoring exactly where the GPS told us to park up. The escort trawler went a quarter of a mile beyond us and dropped its own hook. The sea was a startling shade of blue, but the sky above had turned grey again. The blue of first light was now gone and clouds were building on the western horizon. No matter what the day’s weather report told us, we didn’t need any electronic help to know that a storm was brewing. Damn global warming, I thought. With the monsoon season over this should have been perfect weather for diving, or anything else for that matter. If it turned sour we’d have to pull back to our sheltered anchorage.
I joined the dive team on the foredeck. Our gear had been brought up from the hold and deposited into piles. Mine was all new, three thousand pounds worth on the company card. US divers four mill suit, double tank rig, compressed-air spear gun, the works. I’d been to Thailand’s best dive shop, Divez, and paid their wages for the next fortnight. The other guys had good gear, but it showed signs of much use. My rig drew many admiring comments as I climbed into it. Apart from a tryout in the dive outfitter’s immersion tank back in Bangkok, and a swimming pool refresher in London prior to dragging my arse onto the plane, I’d last been in scuba gear a year ago in a lake in Austria. But I hadn’t been in the open sea for close to two years, so I had some rapid acclimatising to do.
The spear gun drew further comment from both the divers and our helpers on deck. The other three had powerhead lances in case the sharks got interested. The crude, home-made lances with explosive heads containing a twelve-gauge shotgun cartridge were bad news for sharks when things got up close and personal. I liked spear guns because they allowed me to be a coward and do the business from a distance. I didn’t like to be close to anything that had more teeth than my ex-wife.
‘Okay. We all know what we’re looking for,’ I said as I moved to where a section of the railing had been lifted off the side of the boat. Here, a climbing net had been installed to help us navigate the three feet from water level to deck. Three feet didn’t seem far, but it was when you were wearing a weight belt and a couple of hefty air tanks.
With a brief, silent prayer I, as the boss of this whole floating circus, led the way. I stepped backwards off the deck and dropped feet first into the water. It was surprisingly warm. There was no need for a wetsuit when you were playing around in the first ten feet of the Andaman, but down at a hundred, it got very cold very quickly.
After a minute of reorganising our bodies, minds and gear, it was time to go e
xploring. My brief said that the submarine, HMS Victor, was on the bottom, some thirty to fifty yards beyond and to the west of the freighter. First step was to find the freighter.
9
Locating the wreck of the former Dutch merchantman was easy. In fact, it would have been damned hard to miss. Once our eyes adjusted to the shifting green water-filtered light, the thing leapt out at us. The remains of the Ziderzall, or San Tao, or whatever you want to call it, were only forty feet away in a direct line from the whale-like shape of our dive boat’s bum. The 4,000-ton wreck appeared as a mass of angles and protrusions against the black of the deep shadow and grey tones of the sand and reef debris.
I kicked and started down, the other three divers fanning out at my shoulders. As we slowly glided down to the wreck, its mass changed from black and grey to a multitude of colours. Our exhaust trails marked our progress as we moved, the silver bubble streams dancing away upwards towards the surface. It was beautiful, very surreal, but the water wasn’t crystal clear. The visibility wasn’t as great as it would have been in calmer weather because of the haze from sand sediment kicked up by the ongoing storms. Despite the haze we could see relatively clearly to forty or fifty feet, and discern shapes and colours a further twenty yards from that. Beyond that distance it was just grey playing on white light which faded into total murky blackness. I did know from my previous experiences in these waters that in a month or so, by New Year at least, the water would be gin clear with visibility up into the hundreds of feet.
The freighter was sitting spine down on the more or less flat bottom. It was leaning slightly to port and, surprisingly, it seemed to be virtually intact, at least from the direction we were approaching. Over fifty years Mother Nature had worked her magic well on the hulk. Patches of rust-coloured metal showed, but most of the hull and visible superstructure were covered with algae and other marine growths that gave the boat its amazing colours. On the hull proper, the plant and animal life changed and became more drab and sparse. The sun couldn’t push its rays all the way down there. On the upper decks, however, there was light aplenty which made visible the corals, anemones, shell dwellers and kelps that clothed the wreck. Everywhere fish of all sizes and colours darted and hovered, eyes on the intruders.
The closer we came, the greater the detail emerged out of the haze. There were shattered and bent derricks. Cables had been thickened by weeds which still anchored them to the deck. The algae-covered shape of a lifeboat hung down the side of the superstructure. A conger eel watched us from a gaping hole where one of the bridge windows would have been. I didn’t doubt the rest of the hull would have its usual share of fanged fellows just like him.
A shadow passing between us and the sun caused us all to look up. A huge manta ray was making its majestic way across our artificial heaven. A magnificent sight for any diver, but we had work to do. The sightseeing would come later, if at all.
I kicked again and drifted down to the bridge roof. Here, at only sixty feet, I hung off the remains of a radio antennae and indicated to Billy that this was the place to make his mark. He obliged and came down to join me while the other two hovered above.
Each of us carried a small, deflated fluro marker buoy on a weighted spool attached to our harness. We found our targets and inflated the bags using our regulators, letting the buoys float to the surface. This meant that the next time we dove down it would be much quicker to go from A to B, saving valuable air for the important tasks ahead.
In seconds the bright orange buoy was climbing towards the surface and Billy was looking for a place to tie off the line. I signalled for Tan to follow me and we left the other two to begin their search for Tuk Tuk’s sainthood. I checked my compass, watch and depth gauge, and Tan and I pushed on, heading west. We’d already been down ten minutes and were now holding at eighty feet. All was okay so far.
The sea floor beyond the wreck of the freighter rose quite sharply, pushing the shadows back a little as it climbed up into the filtered sunlight. The sand gave way to a mass of broken coral and rock boulders that got rougher and larger the closer we got. The boulders became a reef, created from huge slabs of coral and rock that jutted up from the sea floor like giant teeth. Tan and I held our depth and slowly finned our way over the edge of the reef. I was beginning to get concerned. We should have seen the sub by now. The report said it was only a matter of yards beyond the freighter.
I turned on the torch that I had trailing from my weight belt and sent the beam hunting in the shadows of the reef, looking for debris from the Victor, looking for any sign that the sub was where the hell it was supposed to be.
Gauging distance underwater is difficult. A foot becomes a yard becomes a mile. My logical brain told me we had moved less than thirty or forty feet beyond the wreck. I turned, looked back and was reassured to see that the freighter was still visible through the grey haze. Tan’s powerhead lance prodded away to the left, attracting my attention. I followed the direction and made out the shape of a big shark moving away from us. I couldn’t see it clearly enough to identify it, but the body was thick and barrel-like. My guess was a Tiger, and that wasn’t good news. I knew that Tiger sharks were definitely not the nice guys in the fin world, and in some parts they were regarded as worse predators than the dreaded White Pointer. The spear gun in my left hand felt reassuring, but it looked like a big fucking shark and it was a small spear. We carried on heading west.
I was almost ready to concede that we had missed the sub when we saw it, or rather Tan did. He pointed down. We had almost swum right over the bloody thing.
We were holding eighty feet and were still about twenty above it. But it was easy to realise why we’d not seen it earlier because HMS Victor didn’t look like a submarine from the angle we were at. Tan, like me, had been looking for the shape of the conning tower. The fin was there all right, except that it was lying on its side at an angle that meant we had to be looking down on it from almost directly above, making it impossible to identify it for what it was.
The pair of us hung suspended in the water above the wreck, trying to define its actual shape and position. Yes, the sub was on its side, half-hidden beyond a section of reef. The conning tower wasn’t level with the bottom, but rather lay at maybe an angle of thirty degrees. Squinting into the gloom I could see that the bow section wasn’t there, as the recon report had stated. The cigar hull, covered in weeds and algae, ended about forty feet in front of the fin. The stern, from the tower back, seemed more or less complete. The rear section lay slightly uphill, propped up by an arm of the reef. The shape of a single bronze screw was clearly visible, now that my eyes were focused to see through the ocean’s camouflage.
I indicated to Tan that I was going down to take a closer look and for him to hold his position. He gave me the thumbs up and held his powerhead across his chest, ready to act if jaws came screaming out of the murky shadows at him. I dropped ten feet. I needed to see if the hatch of the conning tower was open, or if there was access through the front section of the hull. There was no way on earth that the hatch could now be re-opened if it had been closed at the time of sinking. After all this time it would be welded shut by rust, and only thermal lances or similar would burn through it. We had a few of those with us but I didn’t necessarily want to go that route. I wanted quick in, quick out and away.
I figured if I could get inside the hull and the main control area, I would have no trouble getting into the skipper’s cabin. Even in the British navy of that vintage, the old man on the sub would only have had a curtain as a door into his tiny living space. According to Bernard, the ‘box’ would be in the bottom drawer of the cabin’s only desk. It had been too big to fit into the captain’s safe.
I was at a hundred feet and beginning to feel the pressure as I came to the top of the leaning conning tower. I propped myself against what had once been the periscope stem, and used the beam of my torch to probe into the deck well formed by the steel spray skirt that surrounded the tower. Through the weeds I c
ould make out the rusted deck plates. The hatch was twisted and jammed half-open. There was no way I could get through it with tanks on my back. Also half-open was the mouth of a Moray that had obviously set up house in the fin. ‘Damn!’ I muttered. The eel wasn’t the problem—not being able to get through the door was.
I turned away and kicked forward, dropping another ten feet so I could see the front section of the hull proper as the cone of light from my torch pushed the shadows back. The forward deck gun was still there, or at least its algae-covered shape was, but just beyond that, the whole front of the submarine looked as if a giant tin-opener had been used to rip it apart. Although covered with crap, I knew that under the weeds and growth there would be razor-sharp tongues of rusted metal that could rip a wetsuit and a diver to shreds.
I moved forward of the remaining hull and hovered there, shining my light back and inside. A tunnel fringed with waving weeds and filled with darting fish faded away into black nothingness beyond the beam of my light. It didn’t appear that any of the near hatches had been closed. The force of the explosion could possibly have blown them in. I had no idea if the aircraft attack had been totally out of the blue, no pun intended. Had the sub crew gone to action stations and shut the watertight compartments, as they would have done on a full alert? Either way, the end of Victor must have been so damned sudden. One hit on the torpedo section and the whole front of the bloody tin can would have gone. It would have been on the bottom in minutes, seconds even. Maybe no time for anyone to do anything, let alone kiss their arses goodbye.
Above me Tan was flicking his torch on and off. I glanced at my watch. We had been down thirty minutes. While I still had half and hour of air left on my back, it was time to ease my way back to the surface if I wanted to dive again that day. I filled my fluro buoy from my regulator and sent it upwards. When the spool stopped unwinding, I peeled off another yard or two of line, locked the spindle and wound the line around the nearest coral fang to the sub’s gaping maw. I now had a road map right to the front door of what was going to become my own personal house of horrors. I didn’t want to think too much about what I would find inside, sixty something years on or not.