Jones had caught it too, and he looked sharply at her. “If need be, I’ll bring my own crew back here.”
“Let’s find out what’s down there first,” she said. “Shall we?”
Jones nodded thoughtfully, then glanced up at Jorge and motioned for him to bring them into the wind. “The bow of whatever is down there is lying at just under two hundred thirty feet. The stern, unless it’s the other way around, is in two hundred eighty feet of water. But there’s a protuberance of some sort rising about fifteen, maybe twenty feet above the level of the main mass. No matter what, you’ll be diving to two hundred feet or more. You’re going to have to take precautions.”
“Yes?” Maria said, listening attentively.
“You’ll have only five minutes at that depth. On the way up you’ll stop at forty feet for three minutes, thirty feet for six minutes, twenty feet for eleven minutes, and ten feet for twenty-one minutes.”
“I thought you didn’t dive,” McGarvey said.
“I don’t,” Jones said. “But I’m not stupid.”
“Go on,” Maria said.
“You’ll need lights. It’ll be very dark, and cold. My wet suits are good, but you’ll start to feel the cold almost immediately. You’re going to have to stick together. Watch each other not only for signs of hypothermia, but for nitrogen narcosis as well. This is no Bahamian sport dive you’ll be making.”
“Navy?” McGarvey asked.
After a beat, Jones nodded. “When I got out I worked on an oil rig in the North Sea. About the third time I’d nearly bought the farm, I promised I’d be good to myself.”
Jones would be all right, McGarvey figured.
“Anything else?” Maria asked.
“No,” Jones said.
“Then let’s get started,” she said.
It had been many years since McGarvey had last made a dive, and then it had been the type that Jones typified as “Bahamian.” Warm, crystal-clear water, in depths of less than one hundred feet.
This was completely and ominously different. He followed Maria’s bubbles down along the buoy anchor line. The water was penetratingly cold, and just under the surface visibility dropped to less than ten feet. It was like swimming in pea soup, or in a fog, or, the thought caused him to shiver, in a very deep cave.
When he’d been changing into his wet suit in the main saloon, McGarvey had happened to glance aft at the nav station, where Jones had been studying the strip charts from the magnetometer. The captain had made a pencil sketch from the readings. The drawing was crude but recognizable as a submarine, its conning tower rising up at an angle, the boat down by the stern.
How much of the sketch was an accurate depiction of the magnetometer readings, and how much of it was speculation on Jones’s part, was a moot question. McGarvey figured he would be seeing it for himself very soon.
At seventy feet he had to stop for a moment and clear his ears before he could continue.
At one hundred feet the water suddenly got warmer and visibility dramatically increased to forty or fifty feet. It was as if he were in an airplane that had just descended out of one cloud bank and he was now looking down at another.
Maria was disappearing below him, still following the buoy anchor line, and he kicked down after her, increasing his speed.
Below 150 feet it began to get much darker, as if it were the very late afternoon or early evening of a thickly overcast day. The water temperature again dropped, and he could feel his strength beginning to ebb. Jones had warned them that beyond 200 feet they would begin to experience nitrogen narcosis, what was called “rapture of the deep.” Breathing ordinary compressed air at that depth created a state much like drunkenness. The victim’s coordination and judgment were impaired; some divers decided that they no longer needed to breathe air, that breathing water would be just fine, so they took out their mouthpieces and drowned.
“Watch yourselves and each other,” Jones had repeatedly warned.
Maria had seemed unconcerned, but McGarvey had taken the warnings to heart.
At about two hundred feet there was another thermal inversion and the water cleared. It was dark, but McGarvey could see that something very large lay on the bottom, stretching left and right into the blackness.
At first he was unable to see Maria, but then he spotted her trail of bubbles leading downward and to his left. She was far below him, barely visible.
He swam down, slowly angling toward where she had disappeared into the gloom, stopping a minute later when her hand light came on. She was at the submarine’s conning tower. He could make out the periscope and snorkel now, and as he watched, her light flashed on a large white U painted on the side of the sail. The beam shifted to illuminate a figure two, and then the seven, the nine and the eight. It was her submarine.
McGarvey swam a little closer until he was just about at the same depth as she was, but well aft of the conning tower. She still had not spotted him. She kicked off and swam around the front of the sail, disappearing on the other side.
McGarvey swam the few yards across the afterdeck to the starboard side of the boat. Maria was just entering the submarine through an open hatch at the base of the sail. The escape trunk, he figured. But it was open. Someone had probably gotten out of the boat that way.
He had started to swim forward when he spotted another open hatch directly below him. He stopped, then swam down to it. Switching on his light, he shined the beam into the interior of the U-boat. At first he could make little sense out of what he was seeing. He was looking down into the boat’s machinery spaces, probably into the engine room itself. But everything was in a jumbled mess. One of the bulkheads was twisted and nearly torn away from the inner hull. The decking beneath it was buckled.
There had been an explosion aboard.
Backing out of the blown hatch, McGarvey looked forward. Maria was still inside the boat. He turned and swam the rest of the way to the starboard side of the boat and followed the steeply curving hull down.
A very large hole had been blown out of the side of the submarine. He could look all the way through the pressure hull into the machinery spaces.
His lips were beginning to feel thick, but the water temperature no longer seemed to bother him, and he was not feeling so claustrophobic.
He held up his right arm so that he could see the depth gauge strapped to his wrist. He could read the numbers, but for a long second or two they didn’t seem to make any sense.
More than two hundred feet. He recognized the first number. Then he understood that he was at 268 feet, and that he was feeling the effects of nitrogen narcosis.
Time to leave; the thought struggled to form in his head. Warning bells were beginning to jangle at the pit of his stomach.
A Company psychologist had once told him that the reason he was so good at what he did, the reason he had survived for so long in a profession whose mortality rate was extremely high, was because he had an overdeveloped instinct for survival.
“You don’t know when, or probably even how, to give up,” the doctor had told him.
There was a certain humor in that notion, McGarvey thought, that he’d never seen before.
He pushed away from the submarine’s hull and hung there ten feet above the sandy bottom. He looked down. Something had fallen out of or had been blown from the submarine and littered the bottom. He languidly swam the rest of the way down, the air from his regulator thick and sour-tasting.
With great effort he managed to switch on his light and shine the beam on one of the bricklike objects, while with his other hand he fanned the silt from it.
For a seeming eternity he had trouble understanding what he was looking at. But the object was shiny, reflecting the harsh light. And it was gold. That fact slowly penetrated the fog in his head.
With exaggerated care, McGarvey picked up the gold bar, fumbled it into the mesh bag clipped to his waist, and pushed himself upward.
It was difficult swimming up from the bottom with the extra
weight. When he reached the sub’s afterdeck he sank to his knees to rest for a moment, his head already clearing.
The beam of Maria’s light flashed across him, and he looked up as she descended to him from above the conning tower. When she got close he could see that her eyes were very wide behind her face mask. She was frightened.
She gave McGarvey the thumbs-up sign, and he repeated it for her. Then he pointed upward. She nodded.
He waited until she’d started up to transfer a little air from his two tanks into the buoyancy-compensator vest to counteract the extra weight he was carrying, and then followed her at an angle toward the buoy anchor line that rose in the gloom, his head becoming clearer with each foot as they approached the surface.
Kurshin watched as the canvas-covered truck pulled up on the quay alongside the Comán, a hundred-foot aluminum pleasure vessel. The same two men he’d spotted at the airport climbed down from the cab and were joined by three crewmen from the ship.
The Puerto Nuevo section of Buenos Aires, which was just a couple of miles southeast of the U.S. embassy, was busy this morning. No one paid any attention to Kurshin, who was seated in his rental car, or to the crewmen who quickly unloaded the aluminum cases from the truck and started bringing them aboard the sleek ship.
McGarvey and the woman had come to Buenos Aires, according to Dr. Hesse. And Kurshin figured that sooner or later the CIA would come looking for them. By now they would have discovered the evidence he’d planted not only at the Paris embassy, but in McGarvey’s apartment as well. At the very least they would want to bring the man in for questioning. The Company had the organization and the manpower to do in a few days something that might take him months to accomplish if he had to work alone.
His planning and patience had finally paid off.
CIA interests in Argentina were not conducted out of the embassy as they were in many other countries. Here the Company operated out of Mercator Air Freight, Ltd., at Ezezia Airport, and to a more limited extent out of the Tomas Vestry Import/Export Co., GmbH, ostensibly a German firm here at Puerto Nuevo.
With everything that had been going on in Latin America in recent years, the CIA would be taking care not to advertise its presence here.
Kurshin had reasoned that the preliminary search for McGarvey and the woman might be carried out by local operatives, but that any real search would of necessity involve imported talent. Talent that would arrive in Argentina aboard a Mercator Air Freight flight.
He’d finally gotten lucky this morning. The two men were obviously American by the cut of their clothes and their looks. They’d brought with them a dozen large aluminum cases that had been passed through Argentinian customs without question before being trucked into the city to the Vestry Company docks.
They were here to find McGarvey, and apparently the Nazi submarine he and the woman were seeking.
The only question that remained was exactly where they intended to begin their search. A question Kurshin intended asking one of them at the earliest possible moment.
25
THE WEATHER HAD DETERIORATED drastically during the past forty minutes. When McGarvey surfaced just behind Maria he was propelled violently upward and to the west on the crest of a fifteen-foot wave.
For one moment Maria was rising above him on another wave, and in the next she had disappeared in a trough.
He’d caught a brief glimpse of the Chris-Craft about fifty yards downwind, hobby-horsing wildly in the rough seas. The deep low-pressure system had developed much faster than Jones had predicted.
Rising on the next crest, McGarvey caught sight of Maria again, well downwind from him. She seemed to be struggling with her mouthpiece and face mask. She was in trouble, and as he watched helplessly, a breaking wave buried her.
Immediately McGarvey released a little air from his buoyancy vest and dived beneath the surface as he took a snap compass course on where he’d last seen her.
Thrusting powerfully with his fins, and no longer impeded by the conditions on the surface, he managed to cover the distance between them in a couple of minutes, coming up once when he was within ten yards to make sure she had surfaced, and then diving again.
He surfaced within reaching distance of her and grabbed her tank harness, pulling her to him.
She struggled wildly until she realized what was happening. Her mask was half off her face, and she had spit out her mouthpiece. Her lips were blue, and spittle and mucus ran freely from her mouth and nose. She was in panic and on the verge of drowning.
McGarvey tried to shove the mouthpiece back into her mouth, but she pushed it away.
“No … no …” she cried, gagging and sputtering as she swallowed water. “Air … no air … tanks empty …”
McGarvey took a deep breath, spit out his mouthpiece, and, holding Maria close put it in her mouth.
She nearly vomited, but almost immediately she forced herself to calm down. She drew in three measured breaths while looking directly and resentfully into his eyes.
McGarvey took the mouthpiece back, breathed deeply a couple of times, and returned it to her.
The wind was so strong that the division between water and air was almost nonexistent. Breathing was next to impossible.
They had drifted nearly down to the Chris-Craft, which was now barely fifteen yards away. The boat’s stern landing platform rose and fell so violently that there was no way to approach it, let alone clamber aboard. McGarvey could see Jorge on the bridge, and he tried to signal, but the Argentinian was intent on keeping the boat at an angle into the wind. He did not see them as they bobbed in the huge waves.
There was a real danger, McGarvey decided, that they would drift past the boat and be impossible to find. Their wet suits were black and their faces white, the same colors as the dark water and cresting waves.
Jones appeared at the rail and spotted them. He shouted something to Jorge, who turned and saw them. Almost instantly the boat began to angle slowly toward them.
Jones pointed toward the landing platform at the stern, shook his head, and crossed his arms making the figure X, all of his movements and gestures exaggerated so that they could be clearly understood. Boarding by the swim platform was out. McGarvey waved his understanding and took another couple of deep breaths from his mouthpiece, handing it back to Maria.
McGarvey could not see how Jones was going to get them aboard under these conditions, but he had underestimated the man. The stern of the boat had been modified so that it looked almost like the aft section of a trawler, with a narrow deck above which rose a mast and sturdy boom.
Jones swung the boom out over the port side of the boat, then tossed a bright orange life jacket out over their heads, upwind of them. The jacket was attached by a nylon line to the boom.
As it drifted down on them, McGarvey snagged it and hurriedly tied a loop around Maria’s waist, and another around her legs, making a crude sling for her to sit in.
She took a deep breath from his mouthpiece and handed it back.
There was enough slack in the line so that the boat’s motion was not pulling at her yet. But as soon as McGarvey signaled, Jones took up the slack on the boom winch. Maria was violently yanked out of the water, swinging toward the wildly gyrating boat. She would have smashed into the hull, except that Jones had figured the length of line and the period of the waves just right, so that at the last moment she was dunked half into the water, coming up short.
Moments later the boat rose on the next wave at the same instant Jones hauled in on the boom line and Maria was yanked out of the water and dumped on the deck. It was like fishing.
In the precious seconds it took Jones to free Maria from the line, McGarvey had already drifted well behind the boat, and Jorge had to bring it around downwind of him. For ten or fifteen seconds he was out of sight of anyone aboard the Chris-Craft. Hurriedly, he pulled the gold bar from the mesh bag at his side, unzipped the front of his wet suit, stuffed the gold bar inside, under his left arm, and zipped up his
suit.
This time it took two tries before Jones could get the life vest and line near enough for McGarvey to grab. But the boarding went as smoothly as it had for Maria, though McGarvey felt as if every muscle in his body had been yanked from his bones.
“Welcome aboard,” Jones said.
“What the hell’s wrong with her tanks?” McGarvey shouted. “She ran out of air.”
“She has plenty of air. Her regulator just hung up, that’s all,” Jones said. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
McGarvey looked over at Maria, who was lying on the deck, still gasping for air. “It’s down there.”
“The German U-boat?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus,” Jones said softly. He looked out at the sea and shook his head. “We’ll be back,” he said. He looked at Maria. “We’ll be back,” he repeated.
“It’s the second time you’ve saved my life,” Maria said.
It was early afternoon, but already the day had turned very dark. Motion aboard the boat was so violent that almost everything had become impossible; cooking, eating, bathing, even moving from one part of the boat to the other entailed great risk. Jorge and Jones remained on the bridge. They were making for Puerto Lobos to the southwest, but the going was very slow.
Somehow Maria had managed to clean up and comb her hair, but she still looked battered and tense, braced in the doorway to McGarvey’s aft cabin.
“It’s getting to be a habit,” he said, looking up. He had wedged himself in his bunk with a bottle of brandy.
“Thank you,” she said. “But I’m going to need your help again. Now more than ever before.”
“Sorry,” McGarvey said, “but you’re on your own. You’ve found what you’re looking for. I’ll leave it to you to work out the details between Jones and your Captain Esformes, and whatever assorted Nazis are still running around Argentina looking for their property.”
Crossfire Page 17