Cave Diver

by Jake Avila

  Leading them around the side of the building, Ford stopped by a nondescript timber door built into the brick foundations.

  ‘There is a key in my pocket.’

  The stocky man delivered two hefty kicks and the bolt gave way to reveal a storeroom stuffed with non-perishable supplies.

  ‘Behind the cupboard.’

  It was mounted on hinges and the stocky man eagerly flung it open to reveal a heavy steel door with a combination dial. Ford recited the password without being asked. ‘15061945’ was the date his parents had reached the nearby village after escaping the submarine.

  It took the stocky man two attempts to work the dial correctly. With a clunk, the heavy steel door swung open. Inside, the vault was pitch-black. Giving Ford a suspicious look, he pushed him ahead.

  ‘You first.’

  When Ford turned on the light, the Indonesian man scowled.

  ‘Is this a joke?’

  Aside from a large timber wine rack full of dusty bottles, the vault appeared to be empty.

  ‘Look under the rack.’

  The Indonesian grunted as he pulled out a flat, nondescript box made of dark timber. Prying open the lid, he let out a soft hiss. The gold ingots were the size of chocolate bars. Covetously, he picked one up and held it to the light, where it gleamed seductively.

  ‘You see,’ he told the other man, tracing his fingertip over the finely embossed surface. ‘The Chrysanthemum Seal of Japan.’

  Ford cleared his throat. ‘You’re holding a kilogram of gold bullion worth 40,000 US dollars. There are ten bars in the box. I’m afraid that’s all that’s left. Please take it and go.’

  He held his breath and prayed. It was a tiny percentage of the cargo the submarine had brought upriver in 1945, and although there were still tonnes on board, nobody would ever be able to retrieve it from the bottomless depths of the Hoosenbeck Cavern.

  The stocky man sighed and got to his feet.

  ‘You have fifteen patients alive upstairs. And I will execute them one by one until you give me the exact location of the submarine.’

  With a sinking heart, Ford knew it was over.

  ‘Third brandy box, on the right. There is a map.’

  Chapter 4

  Margaret River, Western Australia, present day

  Making love underwater, her skin is slippery as slick rubber. Weightless, effortless, nerve endings sing. He can feel Natalie is close, lifts and lunges, consumed with her pleasure. Above him she grips his shoulders, starts to shudder. They roll over, and he drives even harder. Her hair floats like a shroud and he can’t see her face, but he can feel the torrent of bubbles as she comes. He can’t stop pounding. Even when he feels her fingers scrabbling at his throat, her ribcage collapsing under his hands.

  Dear God, he wants to stop, but he can’t. The awful, relentless, pounding, pounding . . .

  Breathe, why don’t you, Nat?

  BREATHE!

  Nash opened the door a crack to learn that the source of the relentless pounding was Frank Douglas hammering on his front door.

  ‘Robbie!’ His eyes were wide. ‘Had to come and see you. This deal is big, my friend. Huge. Hey, did you just get out of bed?’

  Blinking in the early morning sunlight, Nash reluctantly opened the door. The dream had jangled his senses. Was this part of the nightmare?

  In a fawn leisure suit and tan loafers, Frank Douglas looked like a time traveller from the 1970s. Even more incongruous was the shiny new black briefcase he was holding.

  ‘Frank . . . you came all this way?’

  ‘You left me no choice, laddie. Time and tide wait for no one.’

  Douglas flashed a too-perfect smile. Years ago, a shard of aluminium from an exploding helicopter rotor had removed most of his teeth and half his nose. The resultant stitch work had given him a porcine aspect that hadn’t improved with age.

  He looked Nash critically up and down. ‘You look like an escapee from the Burma Railway – all skin and bone. Get some duds on and I’ll take you down to the surf club for a fry-up before we get down to business.’

  ‘Slow down, Frank. What about a cup of tea?’

  ‘OK, OK, but have you got coffee?’

  Nash got the machine going while Douglas expanded on the merits of his AirAsia flight crew.

  ‘Nothing’s too much trouble, service with a smile, and there’s nothing more sexy than small and demure, am I right?’

  Handing him a long black, Nash realised Douglas must now be about seventy. Although the tropical tan made him appear hale, there was a hint of jaundice in the whites of his eyes, which were a similar colour to his nicotine-stained fingers. There was also a hint of desperation. It was a six-hour flight from Port Moresby, and Nash wasn’t looking forward to telling Douglas he wasn’t interested in the expedition.

  Back in the living room, Douglas saw the picture of Natalie on the laptop, which Nash had forgotten to switch off.

  ‘Mate, I’m sorry,’ he mumbled.

  If they’d spoken at the funeral, Nash couldn’t remember. He closed the laptop. Every time someone brought up Natalie’s loss it was like tearing the scab off the wound.

  Douglas reached for his cigarettes, then hesitated.

  ‘You can smoke on the deck.’

  Nash opened the bi-fold doors. As Douglas went past him, an odour of Scotch trailed in his wake. Placing his shiny briefcase on the outdoor table, he extracted a cigarette from the packet with his too-white false teeth. Seeing Nash was drinking peppermint tea, he smiled.

  ‘Still the health nut, eh? You’re as bad as your dad and mum. How are they, by the way?’

  ‘Keeping busy.’

  ‘With the . . . what do you call it?’

  ‘Wildlife sanctuary.’

  Nash’s parents were long-term volunteers, repairing fences, trapping feral animals, planting trees, although age was restricting their physical contributions. Nash thought better of asking Douglas if he planned to see them while he was here. Over the years they had drifted apart.

  Douglas lit his cigarette with a gold lighter and blew out a nervy stream of smoke.

  ‘Who’d’ve thought Peter Perfect would end up a hippie?’

  Nash saw no point in dignifying the comment with a reply. In his narrow expat microcosm, Frank Douglas was so out of touch he couldn’t fathom that he was the anachronism. But there was no denying the man was an incredible pilot. Nash would never forget that sudden storm in the Star Mountains where Douglas, in near zero visibility and a seventy kph crosswind, had somehow found his way out of a dead-end valley, then landed safely in a hewn-out jungle clearing the size of a postage stamp. No question, his skills had saved their lives that day.

  Nash decided to just get it over with.

  ‘Uncle Frank, I’m sorry you came all this way, but I’m not interested.’

  Douglas looked bewildered.

  ‘It’s nothing personal, Frank. It’s me. I’m not . . . ready.’

  Although it was the truth, saying it out loud was somehow shameful, and suddenly Nash felt secretly furious with Douglas for arriving unannounced.

  ‘Christ, laddie, I know you’ve been smashed by all this.’ Douglas stubbed out his cigarette. ‘But you’ve got to take the bull by the horns, get right back on board and ride that fucker for all he’s worth.’

  Nash stared into space. Douglas meant well. Didn’t they all? But grief was like navigating an alien world, and the old pilot was starting to suck up all the available oxygen.

  ‘OK, OK, let’s hear it, then.’

  It seemed the fastest way to get him out of there.

  ‘That’s the spirit.’ Douglas gave him a wink. Self-importantly opening his briefcase, he took out a document and placed it in front of Nash with a flourish. ‘This is a confidentiality deed. You need to sign it first.’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  Douglas coloured slightly. ‘You’re not signing your life away, mate, you’re just agreeing not to disclose any aspect of the pr
oposal being offered to you.’

  The official-looking deed had been drafted by a law firm in Jakarta, on behalf of a production company called Shangri-La. Nash frowned at this; Indonesians were not welcome in PNG, although that could explain why they were prepared to sign a pariah like him to the team. He scanned the legalese with a rising sense of scorn. The following offer would be one-time only, the details of which he was not to reveal from this moment on in perpetuity, on pain of litigation, and they weren’t even naming the cave, just referring to it as the ‘nominated location’.

  What a joke.

  Nash scrawled his name and pushed it back across the table.

  ‘This better be good, Frank.’

  Douglas grinned broadly. ‘Robbie, it’s the Hoosenbeck.’

  A shudder ran through Nash.

  The Hoosenbeck?

  The Southern Hemisphere’s holy grail of cave diving was a so-called ‘bottomless lake’ inside a vast cavern at the end of a sheer-sided river gorge, discovered by a Dutch speleological team in the late 1960s. Their weighted ropes had not hit bottom, and no one knew how deep it was, or how far it extended. The fact it was situated five or so kilometres inside Indonesian Papua, a ‘paradise lost’ of inaccessible rainforests and impenetrable mountains, where a vicious guerrilla war had raged for decades, had prevented any chance of further exploration.

  Nash breathed out slowly. ‘Frank, you’re talking about my boyhood dream.’

  ‘I know, laddie.’

  Douglas handed him a stunningly detailed aerial photo of the three-gorge Hoosenbeck system, a deep and narrow cut in the flanks of the Jayawijaya mountain range. Nash devoured the image with his eyes. Once liberated from its cave, the snowmelt-driven Hoosenbeck River ran fast and strong for twenty kilometres until it fed into the Sepik’s headwaters. All that rock-boring power had fuelled Nash’s suspicion that this system was linked to the Kaiserin, a mere ten kilometres across the border. On their last expedition, he had been tantalised by the possibility of making the connection below ground.

  From his magic suitcase, Douglas presented Nash with a contract. The fee almost made his eyes pop out of his head.

  ‘You can write about the expedition afterwards –’ Douglas tapped a threatening non-disclosure clause – ‘but not before. They want the scoop, you see?’ He handed Nash a pen.

  The signature field seemed to swim before his eyes as Nash placed pen against paper. Then a vision of last night’s dream returned, of Natalie’s broken ribs, and his racing pulse slowed.

  ‘I need to think, Frank.’

  Douglas shook his head in exasperation. ‘About what? This is all you’ve ever talked about. Remember our last trip to Lanzarote? Soon as you conquered that five-kilometre lava tunnel, we cracked the porto, and you started raving about the Hoosenbeck all over again.’

  ‘I know. It just doesn’t . . . feel right.’

  ‘Robbie, mate, you gotta see reason.’ Douglas stabbed the contract with his yellow forefinger. ‘It’s pay dirt, the big time. Are you telling me you can’t use the money?’

  Douglas was breathing heavily now. Although he’d notched up decades flying the most dangerous skies on earth, PNG was flooded with young western pilots desperate for commercial hours and the school maverick was being left on the ground. And while the diving expeditions had got him out of penury, Nash knew the truth was he couldn’t afford to come home.

  A throbbing pain erupted inside Nash’s skull. Cornered by Douglas’s need, he felt trapped within his own home, simultaneously aware that its shelter was fleeting, that soon all its memories of Natalie would be gone, repossessed by the bank, and he couldn’t do anything about it because inside him there was fucking nothing left.

  Nash got up unsteadily. ‘I need you to go, Frank.’

  ‘Aw, come on, Robbie. Let’s talk it through.’

  ‘I said go!’ Nash erupted. ‘What, are you fucking deaf, too?’

  Watching Douglas leave, stiff and hunched, part of Nash wanted to call him back to apologise. He hadn’t wanted to send a wrecking ball through a lifelong relationship, but the old guy was never going to understand.

  Needing to clear his head, Nash went down to the river and waded in. With no destination in mind, he swam upriver, the brackish high tide giving way to fresh water. Here the river was shallow, in summer often retreating to pools. He swam on, losing himself in the river’s gentle flow. Gliding over tangles of paperbark limbs, pygmy perch scattered while schools of minnows, confident in their diminutive scale, darted around him, picking off dislodged food particles. A marron waved a claw and thought better of it. Hauling himself onto a rock, Nash listened to the wind rustling through the tall karri on the ridge. Sometimes, he and Natalie had come up here for picnics. If you went far enough, and were prepared to wade through the rocky sections, you could lose the tourist kayaks, leave it all behind.

  When he got back to the house it was dusk. Jacquie’s VW was in the drive and he felt sick with guilt. Frank would have turned up at her place in a mess.

  She was sitting on the deck in a fleecy jacket, arms wrapped around herself even though it wasn’t cold.

  ‘Where were you?’ she asked without looking at him. ‘I’ve been sitting here for hours.’

  ‘In the river . . . I don’t know.’ She must have seen the bills on the table. And having spoken to Frank, she would know what he had just turned down. Clearing his throat, he said, ‘Look, Jac, I’m going to get my shit together. I just need a bit more time.’

  She nodded without conviction. ‘The thing is, it’s not just about you anymore.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve been diagnosed with cancer.’ She turned to face him, and her eyes were dull with pain. ‘It’s ovarian.’

  ‘What?’ He stared at her in disbelief. ‘Isn’t that . . .?’

  ‘Rare?’ Jacquie breathed out slowly. ‘I thought it was gluten intolerance. Lucky the specialist bothered to check. Rob, it’s stage three.’

  The horror struck him like a rogue wave on a rocky jump-off. His sister was the healthiest person he’d ever known. It was family lore that she had never missed a day of school. She’d completed her first Rottnest Island swim aged fourteen, beating every girl under eighteen. She’d captained her school at netball, despite being the shortest girl in her year. Her enthusiasm and drive were legendary. She was bulletproof. More importantly, she was the engine, the heart of the family. In short, she was irreplaceable.

  He pulled her to him. They held each other and sobbed. When the first rush of grief had passed, Jacquie explained chemo would begin next week. They needed to shrink the tumours down and hopefully she would be operable within a few months. She said her chances were fair, which didn’t sound promising to Nash, but he was in that strange limbo of trying to put a brave face on things, without diminishing their import.

  ‘It’s Mum and Dad I’m most worried about,’ Jacquie said. ‘This is going to hit them hard.’ She looked up at him. ‘Will you come over there with me tomorrow, Rob?’

  Instantly he agreed to pick her up in the morning. When she was ready to head home, he gave her another bear hug by the door, and found himself unable to let go. It was as if he was holding the history of his life in his hands, and he began crying at the thought of losing her, too.

  ‘I love you so much, sis,’ he breathed at last. ‘Is there anything else I can do to help?’

  ‘Yes!’ She thumped her balled fists against his powerful chest. ‘Yes, there bloody well is. Get on with being who you were meant to be.’ Freeing herself from his embrace, she laughed. ‘Oh shit, now I’m crying again – I’ve got a Zoom meeting at seven.’ She gave him a kiss and yelped at his bristles. ‘And make sure you shave tomorrow morning. Look human for Mum and Dad, OK? They haven’t seen you in ages.’

  As her tail lights disappeared down the road, he bit his lip.

  Not Jacquie.

  How on earth was it fair that fate might take her before him? It was a travesty. Like
this dirty, stinking house.

  Standing in the chaos, Nash saw it clearly for the first time. Jacquie’s bombshell had blown away the emotional miasma. His sister was sick, she needed his help. So did his mum and dad.

  Ringing Douglas’s number, Nash hoped he was not too late.

  The old pilot was half-drunk.

  ‘Robbie, I’m sorry, kid, I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that.’

  ‘Frank, it’s OK. I’m sorry, too. Look . . . I am interested. Can I buy you dinner?’

  They met in an almost deserted airport hotel bar. Douglas had cold-showered and only a slight unsteadiness revealed his intoxication. He made no mention of Nash’s change of heart, just handed him the contract.

  Nash scanned it briefly before signing on the spot.

  Douglas was thrilled. It might be Shangri-La’s scoop, he kept saying, but Nash was going to get all the glory and write the book.

  ‘Oh, and don’t forget 250 grand, laddie.’ Insisting on cracking a bottle of expensive champagne, Douglas raised his flute high. ‘Well, here’s to the mighty Hoosenbeck. And the man who’s going to plumb her virgin depths!’

  Taking a token sip, Nash felt no emotion beyond a steely sense of duty, which was to cover his dread at the magnitude of what lay ahead. Never had he felt so ill-prepared for an expedition. All he could do was trust his experience would provide when the time came.

  ‘So, when are we going, Frank?’ He pushed away his plate of trout half eaten.

  ‘Three weeks.’ Douglas wiped his mouth on a napkin. ‘There’s a ship leaving Fremantle on Wednesday. A container for your gear is coming tomorrow. You’ll need to book a flight to Moresby. Get your shots up to date. Now, we’d better figure out your inventory before my gate is called.’

  As they tallied up the lengthy gear list, Nash was suddenly curious.