Cave Diver

by Jake Avila

  Some months later, he had turned up unannounced in Margaret River. Letting him in, Nash felt ashamed. The beautiful house Jonathan had designed was a mess – bottles, dishes, rubbish piling up in the bins.

  ‘Doing it tough, are you?’ Jonathan said, looking around.

  In the months since Natalie’s accident, Nash had lost weight and the stress lines on his forehead had deepened into angry cracks.

  ‘I don’t want sympathy. I don’t deserve it.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Jonathan told him evenly. ‘That’s why I’m here. We’re going to bring a civil suit against you for negligence, hopefully manslaughter.’

  Nash stared at him for several seconds. ‘Brendan? I thought . . .’

  Jonathan shook his head. ‘It’s nothing to do with Dad. Bec and I have decided it’s the right thing to do.’

  Jonathan’s wife was a crown prosecutor, a hyper-efficient legal bloodhound whom even Natalie had struggled to like. Nash found himself laughing shrilly.

  ‘You want the house, Jonathan? Mate, take it – take everything!’

  Jonathan leaned forward, his dark eyes radiating malice. ‘I don’t want the house. I want you. I want everyone to know what a fucked-up piece of selfish shit you are. I want your name to become synonymous with cowardice and incompetence. The Rob Nash brand is going to turn sponsors off so fast, you’ll forget you ever had a phone number!’

  There had been no suit because there didn’t need to be. With Jonathan and Bec’s assistance, The World Tonight had produced a one-hour special entitled ‘Maverick of the Deep’. Every rival Nash had ever had was trotted out to cast aspersions, every error he had ever made was ruthlessly dissected. They made his career look like a sequence of lucky breaks and double-crosses. The breathless voice-over and sinister soundtrack even had him believing it.

  The next morning, Nash mechanically geared up under a dark sky. A front had moved in during the early hours and dumped a rare drenching of rain. He’d had a tormented night, twisting and turning in the back of the Land Cruiser. At some point, he’d decided that he didn’t want to dive today, but the feeling was uncomfortably close to fear, and now he had to prove that it wasn’t.

  Nash checked the rebreather. The size of a large backpack, the closed-circuit device had revolutionised cave diving by recycling the gases a diver breathed. Gone were the days of lugging multiple cylinders around for use at different depths. The rebreather contained bottles of oxygen and trimix – a combination of nitrogen, oxygen and helium – their percentages varied with depth by computer to offset the pernicious side effects of gas under pressure. Exhalations were run through a scrubbing agent to remove carbon dioxide. Nash also strapped on a small side-mounted trimix tank, which he would switch to when it was time to penetrate the squeeze.

  In the middle of the saucer-shaped entrance pool lay the jagged mouth of the Octopus. While swimming down to it, a sense of foreboding came over him, as if a vestigial element of Natalie’s spirit waited here in anguish.

  He should have come sooner. Paid his respects.

  Free-falling the ten-metre-wide tube was like skydiving through an empty grain silo. Normally, he relished the feeling. Now, he found himself thinking how strangely devoid of life this place was. There were no fish, no crustaceans, just occasional finger-like curtains of bacteria on the rocks.

  He reached the halocline – the boundary where fresh water floated on top of salty water – marked by a brownish line on the rocks. On a clear day, the tonality of the water shifted from gin clear to a brilliant blue, so alive and electric, as if the very molecules were charged with neon. The phenomenon was responsible for the formation of the Nullarbor caves. When seepage from rainfall hit the salt-water table, it supercharged the attack on the limestone. Thus, the caves quietly continued to grow, calving off blocks which could have been cut from a quarry.

  At the bottom, Nash swam quickly down the main arm. The rectangular passage was about the size of a railway tunnel, but it seemed smaller and meaner than he remembered. The water on his exposed skin was cold. The rain had created turbidity, restricting visibility to five or six metres, despite his high-intensity dive lights.

  After 100 metres, he reached the rockfall which had closed the arm. There was the stack of limestone blocks they had shifted to uncover the passage in the side wall. Just inside was the little six-litre tank he had abandoned to drag Natalie to the surface. No one had dived here since. This was unusual. Nash felt as if he was intruding on a grave. Or a crime scene.

  Steeling himself, he entered the mouth of the passage. At this juncture it was treacherously roomy – about the internal dimensions of a small car. However, the tempting aperture curving out of sight would soon narrow dramatically. In preparation for this, he removed the rebreather and switched to his smaller open-circuit trimix tank.

  After the whisper quiet of the rebreather, the regulator was astonishingly loud and its cloud of trimix bubbles distracting. Positioning the tank in front of him, Nash pushed it into the narrow passage which soon became a squeeze, about the circumference of a kitchen waste bin. He shimmied forwards, using his elbows and knees for leverage. The ceiling scraped the top of his protective helmet. Dislodged particles, swept ahead of him by the unseen current, shone ghostly in the lights.

  It was only a few body lengths, but it seemed to take forever to reach the vertical dog-leg where Natalie had become wedged. He had not meant to tarry here – his destination was a huge chamber he’d discovered, which he planned to chart and name in her honour. But now, a visceral sense of the terror Natalie must have felt, trapped and alone in that confined and dreadful space, overcame him, and he saw his plan for what it really was: a misguided attempt at closure. In the bright lights, he could see the abrasions her rebreather had left on the soft limestone roof . . . even the faint scratches made by her scrabbling fingernails. The post-mortem report recorded she had lost them.

  And the baby.

  Neither of them had known Nat was six weeks pregnant.

  Nash managed to remove the regulator and vent his meagre breakfast into the cold water. The paroxysm triggered a psychological reflex. All at once he was hyperconscious of the rock around him. The knowledge of all that mass pressing down upon him – that he couldn’t just turn around and flee – became an intolerable concept.

  Nash began shunting backwards. Then his weight belt snagged on a projection. On a normal day, this was easily rectified by reversing direction and trying again. But now he believed the cave was hungry for another victim, that it was out to swallow him alive, and he simply could not countenance surrendering even a single centimetre to it.

  The most dangerous hazard in any underwater cave is the human mind. Nash had seen divers with regulator failure freak out and drown in terror, despite having a spare buckled to their chest. Although training and experience mitigated the risk, they were not fail-safe, because you could never foresee every contingency. But not in a million years would Rob Nash ever have conceived of something like this happening to him. Everybody said there was antifreeze in his veins.

  In a rising, ugly panic, Nash fought to free himself. His helmet slammed repeatedly on the rock above. Then he lost his grip on the tank. It slid deeper into the passage sloping away from the dog-leg.

  Lunging after it, he grabbed hold of the valve. The movement freed the snag. But now the surface seemed so much further away . . .

  Oblivious to everything but the need to escape, Nash wriggled backwards out of the squeeze in a frenzy of fear. Even the relative expanse of the passage mouth failed to calm him. Panic shut down his peripheral vision. He was physically unable to strap on the rebreather, so he clutched it to his chest and finned madly back down the long passage. His thighs were on fire, threatening to cramp. The arm of the Octopus had doubled in length and, in the turbid water, Nash believed he was being sucked backwards. His gear was trying to kill him, too! Dragging gas through the mouthpiece was like sucking mud through a straw. His throat was burning: were
the oxygen sensors faulty, or had the computer failed? He wanted to scream, to rip off the suffocating equipment and smash his way through the rocks to the air above.

  Some distant part of him observing his plight wondered whether Natalie was watching on, too. Perhaps she wanted him to stay down there with her and their unborn child forever?

  At the main shaft, Nash stared longingly at the disc of bright blue above. He required a five-minute decompression, but with a glance back down the dark tunnel, he made his decision. No way was he staying a second longer. Inflating his buoyancy control vest, he shot to the surface like a wayward cork – screaming an exhalation to save exploding his lungs with a pulmonary barotrauma.

  On hands and knees, he crawled out of the pool, so terrorised that he didn’t even feel safe by the water’s edge. Hanging on to a barbed wire fence, he sobbed Natalie’s name, begged for her forgiveness.

  The cold south wind was indifferent.

  Chapter 7

  Wednesday, 30th May, 1945

  In the interests of future authentication, I should briefly establish my personal circumstances. I am the personal physician of Ambassador Erwin Hartmann. Privately wealthy, he took me to Japan with him in 1943 to treat his hypertension. There is not much to say about me. Boring and middle class, connections in high places kept me out of uniform and the only thing that will make me interesting to you is the love of my life.

  Of course, I am referring to Ilse Hufnagl. You will have heard of her because she is the most innovative film-maker the world has ever seen. It is a tragic disgrace that her talent has been debased for propaganda. She was the Führer’s favourite until her big mouth got the better of her. We met while she was in Tokyo, filming more Axis lies. I still don’t know what she sees in me. I am a humble doctor, but she tells me I am the only man she has ever been able to truly rely on.

  So much for bona fides. Since the mutiny we have been confined to the crew’s quarters, which absolutely stink because it has taken us two terrible days to carry all the bodies to the torpedo room and fire them into the sea. I also had to carry the bodies of Captain Nishigori, and his officers, who Heider personally executed with Nishigori’s own katana sword so as to maximise their humiliation.

  You will know of Heider. He is the blond-haired blue-eyed Übermensch of Nazi propaganda and a true monster. Even though he is exempt from combat, Ilse said he got special permission to participate in mass executions in Poland. That would be his style. I loathe the way he looks at her.

  * * *

  Kebayoran Baru, Jakarta, Indonesia

  It took Sura several moments to realise it was Jaap snoring and not the savage dogs of her father’s military police. Another nightmare. This time they had come for her during a news bulletin and dragged her away to the cells under Menteng. Since hatching the plan with Alatas, such dreams had plagued her. And seeing her father during the interminable planning meetings over the past six weeks had been fraught; every raised eyebrow and disapproving sniff set her on edge. She was a consummate liar, but he had always been able to see right through her.

  Rolling over, she straddled Jaap, who opened his eyes in surprise.

  ‘This is our last morning under his roof.’ She ground herself against him. ‘Make it count.’

  She was stepping out of the shower when the intercom bleeped. Angka’s heavyset face filled the screen.

  ‘He wants to see you now.’

  A shiver passed through her.

  ‘This early in the day? I wonder why.’

  Angka had no time for rhetorical questions and hung up.

  ‘I told you this was too dangerous.’ Jaap paced up and down as she hurriedly got dressed. ‘Let’s just go to the fucking airport. Get on a plane to South Africa. We’ve got more than enough money to start a new life there.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. We’d be intercepted before we got out of the car park.’

  ‘Then we’ll go to the docks –’

  ‘Stop being an idiot!’ she exploded. ‘And keep packing.’

  She wanted to say, in case I don’t come back, but the last thing she needed was meaningless heroics from Jaap. What he failed to understand was that her father was a vast malignancy, and no part of the Javan organism was immune to his influence.

  When she knocked on her father’s open door, his gaze was so cold she went numb.

  He pushed his leather chair backwards. Woodenly she came forward to kiss the backs of his hands, but he pulled them away. Kneeling, she placed her head in his lap in the ritualised gesture of filial apology. He pulled her upright.

  ‘Once again I find out that you have not been honest with me.’

  She thought her heart might burst when he placed surveillance photos on the desk. She was so scared it took several moments for her to work out that the naked figures in the photos were her and Jaap, having sex in the spa at the Singapore Hyatt a week before. Thinking themselves anonymous on the tenth floor, they had not closed the curtains in the living room or shut the bathroom door.

  Almost delirious with relief, she closed her eyes.

  ‘I thought he was your cameraman. Now I discover you are his whore.’ Spots of white were flaring in Wijaya’s cheeks.

  Although the images were pornographic, Sura knew her father was no prude. He was probably more furious that Jaap was white.

  ‘Father, he has converted.’

  His savage slap made her ears ring. ‘Stupid slut! Golkar is a party of respectability and I will soon become its leader. Did it ever cross your mind what would happen if this reached the tabloids? Our Suyanto name would be dragged through the mud! How could you be so reckless? Never forget you’re a celebrity.’

  Sura felt a surge of icy hate. That had been his choice, not hers.

  ‘I’ve a strong mind to replace you with Tommy on our little project,’ he mused. ‘Say what you like about him, at least he can be trusted.’

  Sura felt sick. Was he really going to entrust her prize to that spoilt brat? Her younger brother had spent his life fooling around with sports cars and whores. Where she worked slavishly for success, Tommy had it laid out before him. Even when she won her scholarship to Cambridge, on merit, Wijaya’s reaction had been one of benign amusement. And then, when she chose journalism as a career, he had hijacked it by buying up half the Indostar Network to ensure favourable coverage, a move that had contaminated her professional integrity forever.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Father. It was stupid and selfish of me. I promise it will never happen again. You know I have only ever worked for your success.’

  Wijaya made a steeple with his fingers and nodded slowly. ‘Well, perhaps bringing Tommy up to speed now might be challenging.’ He reached for a glass of water on the table and took a measured sip. ‘So, you fly to Jayapura today. Is everything prepared?’

  Sura exhaled slowly. The wily old jackal had been bluffing all along.

  ‘Yes, Father. The ship will leave Port Moresby tomorrow with the salvage equipment and the Australians aboard. It should reach the Sepik next week.’

  He glanced at the laptop on his desk. ‘What exactly are your concerns with the cave diver?’

  ‘Mr Nash hasn’t worked for some time, and there are questions concerning his mental state after the accident last year which killed his wife. He may not be reliable.’

  He stared at her shrewdly. ‘Is this a pitch to keep Mr Boerman on?’

  ‘As well as being a first-rate cameraman, who has worked with me for years, Jaap is also a certified commercial diver. To replace him at this late stage would be risky, but of course –’ she dropped her eyes – ‘it is entirely your decision.’

  ‘Very well. But you will not embarrass me again, is that clear? A ship is a small place.’

  ‘Absolutely, Father.’

  Wijaya put his hand under her chin and looked into her eyes.

  ‘Promise me now that you will respect and obey Goki’s commands. The expedition will be dangerous, and I cannot afford to lose you.’

  He a
lmost sounded sincere. Sura kissed the back of his hand.

  ‘I swear it, Father. This means as much to me as it does to you.’ Kissing him again, she rose to her feet. ‘Salam. I will make you proud of me. You’ll see.’

  General Suyanto watched her go before picking up the topmost photo on the desk. Unwittingly, the agent had captured the impulsive ferocity Sura worked so hard to conceal. Suyanto sighed. His beautiful daughter had inherited his drive, and she had an almost frightening intelligence, but she was also headstrong and vicious. Tommy had numerous childhood scars to prove it. After almost losing him to a swimming pool incident, they had never left him alone with Sura again.

  A bamboo side panel slid open and Goki stepped out, resplendent in his uniform with its chest full of medals, including the prized golden star of the Bintang Sakti. The squat commando had served General Suyanto for more than two decades. From wet work sorting out the fanatics in Aceh, to covert intelligence gathering in Timor, he was a lethal and efficient operator, and Suyanto had absolute faith in his abilities.

  ‘What do you think? Speak freely.’

  Goki blinked slowly. ‘She’ll be a handful, sir. Especially with her muscle man, but it’s nothing I can’t manage.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want backup? You’ll be a long way from help.’

  The commando shrugged. ‘Do you really need another loose end, sir? It would mean more cleaning up when this thing is done.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Suyanto conceded.

  There were preparations underway for the disappearance of the Indonesian contingent – compensations with no-fault damage waivers for grieving relatives to sign. No doubt, Sir Julius was making equivalent arrangements in Port Moresby. With two tonnes of gold at stake, it was vital no one was left alive to tell the tale.

  ‘You will need to watch her very carefully, Goki. She’s devilishly clever.’

  ‘A chip off the old block, sir.’ Goki gave a rare grin.