Undertow

by Desmond Cory

  Meuvret’s torch, spinning slowly towards the deck, caught in its beam for a second the great brown body with its lifted head, flashed on the blank eyepiece of the diving mask; in that moment, Moreno dropped his own torch and the blade of his own knife came flowing smoothly out into his hand. He was swimming too fast to change direction or to swerve away, too fast to give Fedora time to turn, and the two men collided awkwardly in a sudden bewilderment of tangled limbs and jerking bubbles; were lifted apart by the swirling water and were instantly twisting, circling, paddling wildly round to face each other like wrestlers, the torchlight spilling redly off the waiting knife-blades.

  Moreno’s finned feet flailed in the water as he came in again, fast and at chest level; Johnny dived to his right and across the beam of the fallen torches, hoping to be lost for a second in the darkness as he turned. He wheeled and found Moreno almost on top of him, turning to jab viciously downwards at his thighs; he twisted inwards and felt Moreno’s weight cannon into his shoulder; caught mutually off-balance, they swayed apart and spun to face each other once more. Again Johnny was seized by a sense of complete unreality, the sense that he was taking part in a scene belonging to the animal world rather than the human—a dark prehistoric battle fought beneath the waves by giant predators to whom survival was a matter of strength and cruelty, of skill and cunning. He glimpsed Elsa out of the corner of his eye; she was crouched now in the corner, keeping Moreno in the beam of her torch and trying whenever possible to shine the light full in his eyes; that was why Moreno had missed an opportunity just then. It made the odds a little more even, and Fedora was rapidly learning; he knew now better than to strike out at Moreno with all his strength, since the water resisted the blow and pushed him away from his target even as his hand descended. Moreno was taking care now not to turn his back towards Elsa; almost certainly he had recognised them both by now. Yes, or was it that he. . . ?

  Fedora’s legs kicked out in a sudden reflex as Moreno torpedoed himself through the water, straightening out his long dark dangerous body in a swift and unexpected plunge far to Fedora’s left. The move had taken Elsa by surprise, too; she dived away in a fan of bubbles . . . not fast enough. A huge brown hand closed vicelike over her ankle, pulled her to a halt; the wide shoulders seemed to poise themselves for a second, then jerked as the knife came veering wickedly in towards her belly. With the movement there came a sound like the slap of a heavy glove against a table, and in the same instant something took Fedora around the chest and sucked him violently forward; the breath was whipped from his lungs and light blazed in his eyes; he felt a sudden and unbearable vertigo, such as a spider might feel when being sucked down the whirlpool of the wastepipe. His legs struck against something hard and unyielding, his fingers stang from contact with what must have been Elsa’s diving-mask; his ears rattled with a dull, obscene gurgling noise, then burst with a tremendous booming clang. A hand closed over his left shoulder. . . .

  Then Moreno and nothing but Moreno, a gigantic ominous shape looming over him, the bright knife swinging down towards his stomach as slowly as in a dream. Then a heave, and the whole world lurching sideways, Moreno with it; Elsa somewhere underneath him, first pushing him away, then brought up hard against him, the unexpected yet familiar smoothness of her legs, clammy cold, pressing on his ribs . . . then she was gone, and in her place a narrow steel girder driving hard against ids chest, and Moreno and the knife coming in at him again, fast this time, very fast and smooth. And his knee came up to jar against the sweep of Moreno’s forearm, deflecting the thrust, and his own right hand came round in a clean half-circle, confident and almost casual, sinking his knife deep into Moreno’s throat, ramming the hilt up tight against the cold brown skin. He drew it out, and a cloud of blood misted the visor of his mask. That was it. It was over. Moreno was dead.

  THE safe stood in the corner of the officers’ cabin, buckled almost to unrecognisability. Neither Moreno nor Meuvret had been an explosives expert, thought Johnny grimly as he surveyed the wreckage by torchlight; they had detonated enough 808 to have blown a hole in the hull itself, and in so doing had certainly saved Elsa’s life. Moreno’s blade had broken the skin in a line along her lower ribs; and that was all.

  Johnny lowered his head and shoulders to peer inside the twisted safe door, playing the torch beam from side to side. The safe was empty, except tor a waterproof lead-lined despatch case stamped with the initials, O.L.H. He showed it to Elsa, who nodded. They had found what they had come for. It had cost already a dozen lives, perhaps many more; and almost their own, Fedora looked at it. It is difficult to laugh inside a diving-mask; he shrugged his shoulders, instead.

  BACK in the control room Moreno’s body still drifted, one leg now raised in a weird high-jumper’s straddle. Johnny passed it by, directing the torch beam up the shaft of the conning-tower; he and Elsa had a long swim before them, a very long swim, and already he felt tired. The hatch of the tower, he noticed, had fallen; shaken, maybe, by the blast of the explosion. He swam slowly up to it, pushed against it. Nothing happened. He felt for the steel rungs of the ladder, braced his feet against them, tried again. Elsa’s hands and masked head appeared in the torchlight close beside him, thrusting, testing, helping him to push. But to no effect. The hatch was jammed, jammed tight. Fedora stared at it, and his stomach seemed suddenly to turn over in a wave of panic so powerful that he had to suppress a desire to vomit.

  He looked for a few moments longer at Elsa’s long competent fingers with their blunt nails, still probing desperately for an interstice in the hermetic sealing of the hatch; a small blue fish was poking its nose at the metal, too, as though also anxious to seek a way out. Was there any other way out? Probably not. Almost certainly not. All the same, Moreno’s body had drifted some short way in the last few minutes; some current, at least, had to be passing down the hull. Fedora pushed himself away from the ladder, descended in a slow spiral to the control room once again.

  He found what he was hunting for halfway down the companionway; a long, rectangular rent low down in the submarine’s grey steel skin; a good six feet long, but nowhere more than nine or ten inches wide. This, he thought, was clearly where the bomb had struck that had finished off the U-boat. But the metal seemed to have been in no way weakened by the explosion; the edges of the fissure were razor-sharp in places, and he cut his wrist while exploring one ragged lip. He withdrew; Elsa was close behind him, watching intently. He shook his head and swam on.

  During the next fifteen minutes they investigated the rest of the hull. It was an unnerving experience. Most of the ship’s equipment and furnishings had survived intact under a film of slime; on one of the bunks they found a sailor’s skeleton, hardly disturbed, and farther down the ship a skull lay with complete incongruousness on top of a plotting table, as though someone had placed it there five minutes before. The little fishes that had been frightened by the explosion were now back in their dozens, except for a few who had been too close and who now floated, belly upwards, overhead. Fedora tried to trace the point where the fishes were entering, but found nothing other than a hole the size of his fist beside the torpedo-room bulkhead.

  He had a sudden ridiculous longing to smoke a cigarette. His mind was fast becoming a blank, was failing to receive the most obvious of sensory impressions. When he looked at his wrist-watch, he had to concentrate on the dial to be sure of what it said. He looked towards Elsa, jerked his thumb towards the air cylinder on his back. She raised one hand with the fingers outstretched; five minutes more. That made it a grim lookout, thought Johnny.

  They each carried only a single cylinder, because they hadn’t had enough money to buy any more. Meuvret and Moreno had been working on double cylinders, and since Elsa had been prudent enough to close the valves it was reasonable to suppose there was a good deal of air left in them. The trouble was that, since neither Elsa nor Fedora knew how long they had been submerged, they had no way of knowing exactly how much. Taking the new cylinders, they would be gambling th
eir lives on an unknown quantity.

  But now they had no alternative.

  They swam back to the control room; slowly, because both were overwhelmingly aware of the need to husband what little air might be left to them. They changed the cylinders; Elsa to Meuvret’s, Fedora to Moreno’s. It wasn’t difficult. Then they stared at each other through the expression-killing plastic of the masks. From now on, they were on borrowed time. They paddled silently back to that great useless rent in the U-boat’s side.

  It was, after all, a ten-inch gap. It was just on the cards that one of them, or both, might be able to wriggle through, at that place where the ripped steel gaped open the widest. What impeded them, of course, was the harness they carried and the cylinders themselves. In changing the cylinders, however, Fedora had had an idea; and now he saw that the idea might even work. It was a question of letting slip the cylinders, getting out through the hole, and then getting the equipment back on again, all without taking breath. Difficult, yes, but maybe possible. Elsa was slimmer than he was, though, and far more at home under water. So Elsa would have to try it first. . . .

  He explained the idea to her by means of gesture, watching all the time the brown intelligent eyes behind the mica of her visor. When he had finished, she nodded and tapped him approvingly on the shoulder. For now it seemed that this was the only way. And so she positioned herself carefully, and breathed in deeply, and when her lungs were filled to the maximum she unbuckled the carrier and spat the nozzle of the air-tube from her mouth and let the equipment slide off her back into Johnny’s waiting hands and thrust herself as hard as she could into the gaping steel mouth that instantly seemed to close over her head and shoulders.

  . . . She nearly managed it. But not quite. For well over forty seconds, Fedora watched her body thrash and wriggle and wrestle in the water, her shoulders wedged as though inextricably in the cruel metal gap; then abruptly she tore herself backwards, pushed herself downwards, and Johnny caught her round the waist and slipped the air-tube into her mouth again. He felt her body shuddering against him as the air flooded back into her lungs, trembling from the pain of the salt sea water against her raw, steel-whipped shoulders and back. Vivid red scratches ran down almost to the points of her breasts, showing by how narrow a margin her attempt had failed, and the upper edges of her swimsuit had been shredded to ribbons. Johnny’s own body twinged in sympathy as she writhed against his chest; he crushed her savagely against him, as though trying to kill her anguish by inflicting on her greater pain himself. The pain would hardly have mattered if she had got through. But she hadn’t.

  After a while, her muscles relaxed; Fedora hoisted the harness back on to her shoulders and they set off once more for the control-room. Elsa was too cramped with pain now to swim; he had to drag her along behind him as best he could. And there for long minutes she rested, directing the torch beam upwards while Johnny attacked the conning-tower hatch, this time with an iron crowbar. He worked slowly, using his remaining energy in brief frenetic bursts. Yet at the end of his efforts the heavy iron lid that held them prisoner was barely even scratched.

  Another quarter of an hour had gone by. Conning-tower and escape cabin jammed, thought Fedora, pausing to review once more the chain of abandoned possibilities. Hole in the hull too small to get through. Impossible to make it larger. And the minutes moving past while he was thinking. It was no good. He wasn’t thinking at all. His brain just turned in circles. There’d be very little air left now. No use. They’d had it. They were screwed.

  He swam down to Elsa, and for a few moments they floated side by side, her arm across his waist. Behind the impassive visor, her eyes were wrinkled up and there were tears on her cheeks. Fedora wished exasperatedly that there were some way of kissing her; it would be as useful a way of passing the time as any other.

  . . . Of passing the time. . . .

  The small fishes moved inquisitively around them as they floated, already as though lifeless, linked together by their intertwined arms. Not far away were Moreno and Meuvret, floating as they were floating but now forever apart. Four corpses in a sunken U-boat; two of them dead and two of them slowly dying. The end of the affair. . . .

  Johnny thought of those who had died already in this grey steel tomb, of those who had drowmed in a matter of seconds as the bomb-ripped carcase had plunged to the ocean floor. He thought of the skeleton on the bunk and the skull on the table; all that remained of the crew, of Heilman himself. The war had been almost over when that bomb had dropped and Heilman had died; Heilman’s thoughts had also been of escape, of escape from Europe to a new life in the Argentine. The U-boat had sailed to carry him there, a long voyage across the Atlantic, a flight from the destiny that would otherwise have awaited him at Nuremberg; a fugitive ship, a ghost ship; no guns, no shells, no torpedoes, just provisions and loot. . . .

  Elsa felt him suddenly stiffen in her arms, and raised her head with an effort. Her eyes were hot now, her brain muzzy, and for the last half-minute she had been listening to the fast crescendo ticking of the blood in her ears; certain signs that the air in her cylinder was slowly failing. But now Fedora was tapping her shoulder and turning away, ploughing himself downwards once again towards the companionway passage. Too weary now to use her arms, she pushed herself off from the bulkhead and flippered her way painfully after him. The movement made her head start pounding wildly and her vision began to dim; she followed him closely, blindly, well aware that whatever idea had occurred to him represented their last and only chance. . . .

  THEY broke the surface to a world not of air, as they had expected, but of light; a light so stunning in its intensity that at first all they could do was float on their backs and blink agonisedly through their misted visors at the wide blue vastness of the sky. When they opened their mouths and let the warm sea air rush madly into their lungs, gulping in huge mouthfuls of it, while the sunlight hurtled down at them, swamping them in its radiance. To their left was the Polarlys, waiting silently, patiently; to their right, and at least a hundred yards nearer, was the long grey outline of a Navy corvette. Fedora heard a distant shout echoing from the bridge, and thought confusedly that the voice sounded rather like Trout’s; he took Elsa under the shoulders and slowly, exhaustedly, they paddled towards safety.

  The boarding-net came down with a rush as they approached. Mounting it cost Elsa the last remaining fragments of her energy; she stepped over the rail on to the deck, turned towards the Polarlys and saw with a sudden clarity the lonely figure of Feramontov at the stern staring towards her, his hands resting on his hips, the sea breeze ruffling his fair hair. She took another step forward, and one of the watching seamen caught her as she collapsed.

  “Well, fancy meeting you here,” said Trout “Welcome aboard.”

  Fedora rested his weight on the guardrail, let sea water dribble out of his mouth. “It’s all right,” he said uncertainly. “Moreno’s dead.”

  “Yes, I thought perhaps he might be,” said Trout.

  THE hotel window looked out on the steeply-angled slope of the Rock. Below were blue flowers and bougainvillea, the concrete quays and grey ships of the harbour; in the distance, red and brown, the Spanish coast, the low hills behind Algeciras. It all still seemed to Fedora slightly unreal. Only the faint chirping of the cicadas seemed familiar. Macfarlane sat in the easy chair and smoked his pipe and watched Fedora with his usual air of polite but uncomprehending concern.

  “They’ll fly her to England, of course,” he said, “as soon as she’s fully recovered. The boys from the Department will have to put her through the hoops. You realise that?” ‘They won’t get much out of her,” said Johnny. “Valera couldn’t.”

  “No,” said Macfarlane thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose our Spanish friends are going to be very pleased about Valera. He was rather a good man, in his way.”

  “They’re getting the Heilman papers, aren’t they?—with the compliments of Her Majesty’s Government. What more do they want?”

  “Gi
braltar, for one thing,” said Macfarlane. “And your lady friend for another. They did arrest her, after all.”

  “Not on an extraditable offence. You’re not suggesting that we should hand her back?”

  “Oh no. It’s just another reason why we want to get her over to London as soon as we can. By the way, I’ve made it crystal clear in my report how extremely useful she’s been. I think I can guarantee that she’ll be shown every courtesy . . . perhaps even offered employment. Though as to that last, I can’t be sure.”

  “Valera offered me every courtesy. It didn’t pay.”

  “All the same—”

  “And she doesn’t want employment. Not of that kind.”

  “You seem very sure.”

  “To hell with the Department, anyway,” said Johnny. He gave up looking out of the window. There was nothing there he hadn’t seen before. He tried looking at the ceiling, instead. Nothing there, either. He got up. “I think I’ll be going.”

  “There was just one thing,” said Macfarlane, “I wanted to ask you.”

  “What?”

  “You never explained just how you did get out of that damned U-boat.”

  Johnny’s eyes focused, as though in pain, on the pipe in Macfarlane’s hand. The last chance is always a hateful thing ‘to think about. Especially when . . . you can’t explain it, that’s the trouble. When it’s something so simple and obvious. You just can’t explain what happens to your brains when you’re trapped sixty feet under water, how it is that the simple and obvious things disappear from sight and there’s nothing left but panic or a dull resignation to death. . . .

  “The torpedo tubes,” he said. “Manually operated. Opened quite easily. What we did was, we got out through the tubes.”

  He looked back with one hand on the doorknob.

  “By the way,” he said, “your pipe’s gone out.”