Death in the Kingdom

by Andrew Grant

  The US was the one outfit that could put our lot off sending a submarine on a covert pick-up-and-run operation. With their technology, the Yanks would have the sub’s plot on screen from the first turn of their screws. Allies or not, American paranoia ensured that they kept watch on friend, foe and potential foe alike. But if we were trying so hard not to attract their attention by foregoing the obvious means of salvage, it meant that Uncle Sam knew something about this damned box and its contents. Therefore for Sir Bernard and his puppet masters, their desperation to keep this from the Yanks explained the unorthodox, low-key retrieval operation I was fronting. Did they want us to succeed or fail? That was still the twenty-thousand euro question! I would do my damnedest to succeed, even if it was just to piss off Sir Bernard fucking Sinclair, especially if he was relying on my failure.

  ‘Boat,’ said Niran, dragging me from my musings. I followed his outstretched arm. Three or four miles away a large white-hulled cruiser was brushing the remaining white caps aside as it slid through the water at a rate of knots. It was either coming from the direction of Ranong or Kawthaung. ‘Charter boat. Wealthy tourists. Maybe divers,’ Niran added quickly, a look of concern suddenly clouding his wrinkled mahogany face as he turned to me. Images of failure and of him once again losing his beloved boat no doubt caused the turmoil I could see reflected in his eyes. I was feeling more than a little of that turmoil myself. At the mention of divers, my mouth had gone bone dry. I suddenly had a very, very bad feeling. Whoever was on board that boat was in a hurry to get somewhere. The sea was still uncomfortable enough to put off any casual leisure cruises. I grabbed the Motorola and called Tri. He answered after two seconds.

  ‘If that boat anchors anywhere near our dive site, let me know immediately.’

  ‘Okay,’ came the reply.

  That was it. I’d already learned that Tri didn’t waste unnecessary effort as far as dialogue was concerned. I lit a cigarette. The habit was now no longer a struggle to maintain. I’ll give up again when this is over, I promised myself silently, knowing full well that any attempt was going to be more than a struggle. I smoked that fag and followed it with another as the white boat went out of sight behind our sheltering island and passed on up the passage.

  Travelling at the same clip the intruding boat had been going when it had vanished from view, I figured it would either be passing or pulling up at our dive site within five minutes. I checked my watch and waited. That five minutes dragged on forever. If the boat stopped over the wrecks, what would we do? But I knew exactly what we’d do. We’d send Tri over there to force them off the mooring. We’d become pirates for the day while we hoisted up the buddha and I retrieved the black box.

  ‘They have gone around the western tip of the island. They are a kilometre short of the dive zone,’ Tri reported. I waited. I didn’t believe in coincidence. It wasn’t something that happened in my world, and whatever the white boat’s role in this scenario, it was a player, not a spectator. Of that I was certain.

  ‘They are moving on, going around Pila Kyun,’ Tri added five minutes later.

  ‘Keep on going,’ I muttered in a prayer to the deities. Was I wrong after all? It had been known to happen, but not often, and not about things like this. Were these guys just tourists or were they after the damned wrecks? I lit another in the endless chain of cigarettes I had been smoking and waited. There was nothing else to do.

  ‘They have stopped in the bay on the north side of the island,’ Tri came back at me.

  ‘Will they be able to see the dive site from where they are?’

  ‘No. They are deep in the bay and the hills are high. They may just be a dive party of tourists seeking shelter for the night.’

  ‘Let’s pray that’s so,’ I replied. I put down the Motorola and left Niran to his bridge. Down in the mess I stood in front of the map. It would soon be dark, and that was some sort of blessing. In my book, no one in his or her right mind would dive at night. If the people on the white boat were after our prize, I was figuring they wouldn’t start until daylight and then they would have to zero in on the wrecks first. Did they have that sort of technology with them? If they were bad guys, whoever they were, I was betting they had a side-band sonar unit or similar with which to grid search the area, looking for images of the wrecks. The reef formations would help disguise the sub, but once they spotted the freighter, they’d go down looking. If they were Yanks then they would know that, way back in 1945, three of their planes took out a sub and a freighter in one hit, even if they hadn’t known the exact location until now. If that was the case, what little birdie had been singing?

  Okay. I was paranoid. That was a plain fact, and that was part of what I got paid for. I had to assume the worst. If the Yanks were in the game then they had the technology, including the unseen stuff—spy satellites zipping round above us. If they were plotting our movements, the only hope for us would be if the satellite co-ordinates of our dive position were broad. There was a fair chance they were. There were only so many satellites up there with full-on search and observation capabilities, most of them American and most of them positioned to fly over potential hotspots and enemies. I was prepared to bet that, in the grand scheme of things, Burma and Thailand didn’t represent such hotspots to the Pentagon. I went back to the bridge and grabbed the hand-held. ‘Tri, call if they move. Will you be able to tell if they put out runabouts?’

  ‘Yes. This radar is very good.’

  ‘Okay. I want us to move back on-site early. We leave at 04:00.’

  ‘We’ll be ready,’ he said.

  ‘Okay, Niran?’ I asked.

  Niran nodded. ‘Okay!’

  I left the bridge and headed down below again. I had the divers get the gear back on deck. I wanted us to be able to get on-site and underwater as soon as possible. Once we were there, possession was everything. If the weather held we could anchor right between the two wrecks. Tri and his trawler would see off anything short of a destroyer, and I doubted if the Yanks—if the guys in the white boat were indeed Americans—had a warship close enough to get to where we were in a week. They could, of course, cut a deal with the Burmese, or the Thais for that matter, and roll up with some serious floating hardware. Time would tell, I guessed. It all depended how badly they wanted the box.

  It wasn’t a night for sleep and at 04:00 we upped anchors. We didn’t even have our navigation lights on. There was a dying full moon heading for the horizon and Tri had his radar. He led and we sat on his tail. A single orange light, low on the water directly in the centre of his stern, was our sole guide. The reason for all the sneaking around in half darkness was simple. I wanted us onto the site before the guys on the white boat knew it. If they had a radar watch, what would the watcher see? A pair of fishing boats heading out into the Andaman, eager to get back to work after days of no fishing and no money? Or would they see a couple of salvors coming their way? Was this white boat operation just a couple of divers with a hired Thai crew, or did it have a full complement of bloody Seals or similar? If it were the latter we would have a real problem on our hands.

  ‘Have they moved?’ I asked Tri via the Motorola.

  ‘No. They are still in the bay,’ he replied.

  So we waited. I wished we could just go full throttle and race to the spot, but Odorama had a steady seven knots max and that was that. I fired up cigarette after cigarette and tried to do deals with whatever deity happened to tune into my wavelength. In the end I couldn’t stand the bloody suspense. I went down to the well on the foredeck and struggled into my wetsuit. The others soon followed. The chatter was nervous. As we organised ourselves, I went over the plan to raise the buddha. The guys had it figured. The compressor was ready, the air hoses had been coupled. Inside the cargo hold were three small elevator bags, ready for deployment, with a larger one ready to inflate outside the wreck. Once on the surface the net winches could lift the buddha on board Odorama. Easy, huh?

  The coming few hours would see me go after the box a
lone and buddy-less, while the other divers concentrated on raising the buddha and appeasing the great god, Tuk Tuk.

  ‘We are close,’ Niran called from above. I started back up to the tiny bridge. As I arrived in the doorway to Niran’s throne-like room, Tri peeled away to port. He had led us into the city block, no doubt using his radar and charts. Now I had to nail the shop doorway. Standing on the steps I leaned into the wheelhouse, the GPS in my hand. I switched it on and talked Niran into position. When X marked the spot I gave him the nod and, seconds later, the anchor was rattling its way down into the depths. I told Niran to hit the lights. He flicked a series of switches and the whole working area of the boat was bathed in a bright yellow glare. Tri brought the trawler around in a tight circuit. When he was thirty yards off our port side and slightly ahead of us, he also dropped his anchor. I was almost prepared to wager that he had landed it just about right on the bloody sub.

  ‘I don’t understand how that works,’ Niran said, indicating the GPS I still clutched in my hand.

  ‘Magic,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘White man’s magic. You have good luck down there.’

  ‘I hope so. I really hope so, Niran,’ I said as I turned to go. As an afterthought I left the GPS on the sill beside the wheel and grabbed the Motorola. ‘Tri, any change of status from the white boat?’

  ‘No. Still anchored down,’ came the response.

  ‘Watch them closely,’ I ordered. Whatever happened above the tide over the next hour or so was out of my hands. Essentially it had passed into the hands of Tri and, to a degree, Niran. I would have more than enough to contend with down below. I went back to the deck and moved forward to where the other divers were going through their final preparations.

  Dawn was coming but it was still half an hour away. I wanted to wait for natural light, but a voice in my head was telling me to get into the water and get moving. That damned voice sounded like fucking Bernard. So with every instinct saying no, and that nagging bloody voice saying yes, I gravitated towards where my tanks and harness were sitting. Even in tropical conditions with perfectly clear water and strong sunlight, I knew that light at over a hundred feet down would be pretty gloomy. The water we were about to dive in, freshly stirred and shaken by the storm, would have its visibility cut to a few yards, probably half of what we had experienced on our last dive. Essentially that meant it was going to be pretty black down there, and it sure as hell was going to be pitch black in the sub.

  ‘I’m going down,’ I announced as I started donning the remainder of my kit. The other divers looked at each other and then, in seconds, all of them were nodding. They were here, the gold buddha was down there. The sooner it was collected the better, and the sooner they would receive the big bonus Tuk Tuk had undoubtedly promised them. Thing was, while the inside of the freighter’s hold would also be black as hell, they had lights and they had each other. I was going into hell alone.

  Billy helped me on with my twin pack while Tan dropped a heavily weighted line down into the depths. Once it bottomed, he coiled the excess, tied it off and attached the rope to an orange net float. He tossed the float over the side. We’d lost our buoys so this was the next best thing to guide us down, especially in the dark.

  With my spear gun attached by a bungy hanging from my weight belt on my left side, and the strap of my dive torch tied to my right wrist, I went over the side. Light from the Odorama’s deck spilled into the water and reflected off the swell which was the colour of tar. There was a steady current pushing away from the mainland. The tide was on the move. I had to work against it while I sorted myself out.

  When I was as ready as I was ever going to be, I swam to the float and, with a wave to the others who were standing ready to hit the water, I started down the line. This was one way for me to get down quickly and keep my bearings. Floating free in the blackness would have been totally disorientating. My bubble trail and depth gauge were the only things that told me which way was up. Shit, it was black!

  When I touched eighty feet I checked my wrist compass and circled the line, looking for a landmark to lock onto. At the very edge of the beam of my torch, about twenty feet away, I saw a thickly weeded column. It was the radio mast of the freighter. We were bang on target. I continued to turn, hanging from the line until the compass told me due east. If I held the course, despite the tide drift, I would hit the reef head on within thirty yards.

  I let go of the weighted line and kicked away. I would hold at eighty. Fish were gliding all around me, little fish, big fish. The torchlight was pulling them in. That wasn’t comforting. I didn’t want to meet Mr Jaws face to face as he came to the light to check me out. I kicked a little harder and the reef loomed out of the blackness so suddenly that I gasped a couple of breaths and sent a plume of bubbles racing to the surface. Diving in the dark in murky water was never good for the nerves.

  Resting on one of the ragged coral teeth, I checked my bearings. Something further on in the jumble of rock and coral glinted in the beam of my light. It was an anchor. Tri’s anchor. A chain stretched away above until it merged with the dark. I let go of the coral and swam to the chain. There, ten feet further on, right at the edge of my beam of light, I could see the single bronze screw of the Victor raised above a coral slab. Right on target all the way round.

  I swam to the screw and paused for a moment. I was going to have to follow the incline and the hull down another thirty feet. Thirty feet doesn’t sound like much in the real world, but when you’re diving it’s a lot and it affects everything you do. I used up a minute’s worth of oxygen getting mentally prepared, then started down the weed- and coral-encrusted hull of what had been one of Britain’s finest submarines of its day. Now it was just a pile of junk, rotting away on the bottom of a distant ocean. However what was inside the hull was another story. I didn’t want to think of how it had ended for the crew and I wasn’t looking forward to what I was going to have to do inside their tomb.

  I passed the conning tower lying at its drunken angle. Mr Moray wasn’t lurking this time. Another few feet and I slid over the gun position. The beam of my torch fought the milky water and the blackness, carving out a cone of visibility that centred on the torn metal where the bow had been. I swam closer and dropped down to hover directly in front of the opening.

  This was the part I had been dreading. I knew that if I hesitated too long I would chicken out. Since childhood I had hated confined spaces and the dark. Maybe it was a legacy from my stepfather. His idea of a suitable punishment for misbehaviour—or anything else for that matter—wasn’t his belt or a kicking. Instead he would lock me, my brothers and my sister in the coal cellar. The day he did that to my mother was the day I flattened him with a coal shovel and left home. Anyway, the scars that bastard had inflicted on me were still there. They shimmered like the weeds that waved from the gaping hole in front of me. It was like looking in the jaws of a fantasy monster. Enough!

  Torch in my right hand, my spear gun in my left, I entered my own personal version of hell. But what a hell it must have been for the men who had died there.

  12

  The first couple of yards were easy. I glided along the main trunk of the submarine, following the beam of my torch. Because the sub was lying tail up, nose down and at an angle of thirty degrees, the terms up and down were relative. Corroded, rusted pipes lined the bulkheads that were virtually above and below me. Debris, weeds and coral sand filled the corner where deck and bulkhead met. It was like being in a skewed house-of-horror ride at the fair, the sort of thing that had thrilled me as a kid. Right now, I wasn’t particularly bloody thrilled.

  The first skull gleamed at me from its bed of sand. It was just the dome of the crown. The bone was still clean and gleaming yellow, the colour of old ivory. The eye sockets, fortunately, had been buried. For me there was nothing as haunting as the empty sockets of a skull. Mortality. It was all too human a concept. I wondered whether the big octopus that jetted away from me, moving dee
per into the submarine’s hull, had a concept more complex than escape. The damned ink it shot out behind it for protection didn’t help visibility, but I swam through it and carried on. I hoped I wouldn’t run into a predator that really did want a scrap. There was bugger all room to turn and run, let alone fight the denizens of the deep.

  I passed through an open hatch. The heavy oval door was buckled back against the bulkhead. One of the hinges was gone and the thick metal lip that would have once surrounded the hatch opening had been torn half-off and blown inwards. Whether it had been open or shut when the torpedoes and bomb had gone off, I doubted it would have mattered. The force of the blast must have been horrendous. Now there were electrical cables hanging suspended in the water. I could see indentations of pipes and tubes in the walls. There were mesh panels covered in algae and debris. These tiny corners were where the sailors would have slept. I didn’t look closely. I didn’t want to see what I knew full well would be there, lying jumbled where deck and bulkhead met.

  I guessed I had travelled maybe three-quarters of the length of the fore hull when I sensed movement above me. I stabbed the beam of my light upwards, my heart doing double time. What I saw almost caused me to smile. Because of the angle the sub’s hull was lying at, with its tail up, my exhaust bubbles looked like little beads of mercury as they merrily made their way along the bulkhead above me, heading for the highest point they could reach. In this case, that was where the lip of a hatch surround met a bulkhead. Here they formed a big shimmering pool. It might have been beautiful in another place and time.

  I slowly kicked on again, gliding through the second open hatchway, the beam from my torch probing the pitch darkness ahead of me. I used the butt of the spear gun to push myself off the bulkheads and the pieces of unidentifiable equipment that crowded in on me in places. Mostly, however, there was enough room to move freely—something for which I was extremely grateful. My claustrophobia was just a scream away.