Operation Piracy

by Paul Somers

  We tried it, but things didn’t work out that way. The water around the anchorage proved to be unexpectedly deep—well over thirty feet, Mollie estimated, after an exploratory dive—and it was also less clear than in the first cove, so that we couldn’t see the bottom at all. That left no alternative but hit-or-miss diving. I’d already done about all the diving I wanted to do for one morning, so after a few minutes I confined myself to patrolling the shallower water where I could just make out the sea bed, and left the hard work to Mollie. She was indefatigable. Sometimes, when there was no sign of her for over half a minute or more on end, I began to feel quite anxious, but she always reappeared quite cheerfully, blowing like a whale, anything up to twenty yards from where she’d dived. She was as competent in the water as a mermaid—and much more beautiful. All the same, she didn’t get anywhere, and in the end she had to admit defeat. It would take ages, she said, to reconnoitre the cove properly when one had to keep on coming up for breath.

  As we sat on the rocks afterwards, eating the ham and rolls we’d brought with us, I said, “Well, I’m very glad we came, anyway—I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. From now on, you can count me a skin-diving enthusiast.”

  “You’ll be very good with a bit more practice,” she said. “All the same, the object of the exercise was to get results, you know, not just to have a pleasant swim.”

  “That was your idea,” I said. “You’ll remember I didn’t expect much.”

  “Well, I still say the whole thing’s very fishy.”

  This is a very fishy place.”

  “You’re hopeless,” she said. “Why won’t you be serious?”

  I shrugged. “What’s the point? It isn’t as though there’s anything else we can do.”

  There was a little pause. Then she said, “We could get some aqualungs.”

  She said it very innocently, as though the notion had only just entered her head—but she was a bit too innocent. Looking at her, I hadn’t a doubt that the possibility of more serious diving had been in her mind from the beginning, and that that was why she’d asked me to stay in Cornwall.

  Chapter Fifteen

  There wasn’t really much to argue about. I’d already committed myself to the principle of the search, and going on with it was at least as sensible as starting it. As far as the office was concerned, I might just as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. I wasn’t at all sure we’d be able to get hold of aqualungs, but we could only find that out by trying—and if we could, it would be an interesting new experience. I did point out that if Thornton and Blacke were engaged in some nefarious business under water, by the time we’d learned to use aqualungs they’d probably have finished it and cleared off for good, but Mollie said there’d almost certainly be traces of what they’d been doing, on the sea bed. She’d practically convinced herself by now that they really had been burying the jewel case and that if we could make a thorough search at about thirty feet, we might find the place. I said that full fathom five was a pretty sinister depth, but she only smiled.

  We finished our lunch and then went back to the sports shop in Falmouth for guidance. The man there told us he didn’t handle aqualung equipment, which was pretty expensive and was mostly borrowed from clubs. He recommended us to go to a place called St. Treorch, not far from St. Mawes, where there was an underwater diving school run by an ex-naval man named Commander Fox who might be able to fix us up.

  We drove round to St. Treorch straight away. The commander had a pleasant and—to judge by the considerable activity going on—a flourishing establishment near the water’s edge, with a small salt-water swimming bath, changing huts, a shop, and a restaurant. One of his assistants pointed him out to us—a bald, burly figure in swimming trunks demonstrating something to two youths on the other side of the bath—and we went tound to have a word with him. He was showing them how to load a spring harpoon gun on land, and we stood and watched while one of them did it. The loading was accomplished satisfactorily, but as the youth raised the gun Fox said sharply, “Don’t point the damn’ thing at me—keep it down! Always keep it down! Now fire it off into the bath.” The youth pressed the trigger and the metal harpoon went sizzling on its line into the water, where it lost its momentum after five or six feet. Fox said, “Those things can kill at fifty feet on dry land,” looking at me as severely as though it had been I who’d pointed the gun at him. Then his gaze focused on Mollie, and he smiled. “Well, what can I do for you?” he said.

  We introduced ourselves Mollie explained that we were working on a newspaper story that required some diving, and that we wanted to learn how to use aqualungs, at once if not sooner, and that we’d like to hire some equipment for a day or two.

  He looked a bit dubious, even when we said we didn’t mind how much we paid. He asked us if we’d done any skin-diving, and Mollie said, “Oh, yes! as though we’d both been at it all our lives. He asked where we proposed to dive and we said not very far from St. Treorch and close inshore, in not more than about thirty feet of water, and at that he looked relieved and said that with reasonable care we couldn’t come to much harm at that depth. All the same, he couldn’t accept responsibility for loaning us aqualung sets unless he was quite satisfied that we knew what we were doing, and there was a routine that couldn’t be hurried beyond a certain point, and his final decision would depend entirely on how we shaped. That seemed fair enough, and we said we were ready to start right away if he was. He switched the youths to an assistant, and went off to fetch the equipment while we changed.

  I’d never seen an aqualung at close quarters before? I gathered they varied a good deal, but the ones Fox brought back with him seemed, outwardly at any rate, to be remarkably simple pieces of apparatus. There were two steel alloy bottles of compressed air, which one wore strapped to the back with webbing harness. Two flexible, corrugated tubes led to a mouthpiece not very different from that of the schnorkel mouthpiece. The left tube was for breathing in, the right for breathing out. Air was supplied automatically to the diver at the correct pressure through a demand valve, and expelled through an exhaust valve. As with the schnorkel, a separate face mask covered the eyes and nose. A pressure gauge on the set showed 120 atmospheres when both bottles were full, and there was a red section marked on the gauge from 15 atmospheres downwards. The two bottles to gether, we were told, contained enough air for about eighty minutes’ normal diving.

  Having explained in detail how the sets worked, Fox fitted them on to us. They were pretty heavy—forty or fifty pounds—but he said that in the water we wouldn’t even notice them. We spent a little time on breathing practice, and then we had to go into the swimming bath and be fitted with weight belts, so that we had what Fox called “neutral buoyancy” and neither popped to the surface nor plunged to the bottom. Afterwards we swam around for half an hour or so, getting used to the feel of the equipment under water and receiving fresh instructions from time to time as we emerged. It seemed much easier and pleasanter than schnorkelling, because breathing was natural and there was no need to bother about things like blowing water out of the tube. Fox appeared to be very pleased with out progress, but he said we’d have to come back next morning for some practice in the sea before he’d let us take the sets away. We made an appointment for early the next day, and left.

  Mollie had had an idea that we ought to go along to the cove at low tide that evening and see if Curlew was there again, but the hour had already passed and in any case we were both worn out after the day’s exertions. When I rang the office after dinner I was almost too tired to care what they said—but as it happened they didn’t say anything. Hatcher was having his day off, Blair had gone home early because there was no news about, and Ridley, who was holding the fort, couldn’t have cared less whether I reported back or not. I said vaguely that something had happened and that I wouldn’t be in in the morning and would be ringing again, and that was that. I went to bed at nine-thirty, and in ten minutes I was dead to the world.

  We breakf
asted early the next day and then drove straight back to St. Treorch. The commander was ready for us. This time we had to fit on our own sets under his watchful eye. I thought we’d finished with the schnorkels, but it seemed we had to carry them in our belts, in case they should be needed some time for emergency surfacing. When he was quite satisfied, he took us down to a private cove and the three of us went into the sea together from a convenient rock.

  Once in, we were three independent people, with almost no sense of hearing, and no means of communication except by sign or touch. The masks made it difficult even to judge the expression of a face. I felt some slight qualms at first, a rather disconcerting sense of remoteness, but the feeling soon passed as I concentrated on the job. I tried to remember all the things that Fox had said about breathing, and to aim at an even, steady rhythm, and soon got into the way of it. I thought again how much pleasanter aqualunging was than schnorkelling. Swimming was almost effortless, and I found myself manoeuvring with astonishing ease. When I first went down to fifteen feet or so I felt a slight pain in my ears, as Fox had warned I might, but it passed when I swallowed and I didn’t get it again.

  We stayed in long enough to use up a whole bottle of air, and then the commander motioned us out. He asked us how we felt, and we both said “Fine!” He gave a satisfied nod. Then he proceeded to give us a lot more advice. If we did go down deep, he said, all sorts of horrible things could happen to us, so we’d better watch our depth meter carefully. Again, if we over-exerted ourselves, we could get carbon dioxide poisoning and what was called “shallow water blackout,” because under water you couldn’t pant and get rid of the poison that way as you could on land, so we must remember to take it easy all the time. We should always dive slowly, he reminded us, and come up even more slowly, not more than twenty-five feet a minute. Finally he emphasised once more a point he’d made before we’d gone into the sea—that we should never forcibly retain a full breath from the apparatus when surfacing because if we did we could damage our lungs even from a depth of seven or eight feet. And of course, he added, we should never dive alone, or lose sight of our companion, or stay in the water after we’d begun to feel cold.

  I thought he’d finished then, but back at the swimming bath he gave us some more instruction. We had to practise switching from aqualung mouthpiece to schnorkel mouthpiece under water, which was quite tricky; and he also showed us how to surface and clear the mask and tubes of water in case they got flooded through a leak, or the mask accidentally coming off. Finally he recharged our bottles with a powerful air compressor he kept for the purpose, and said he’d be seeing us, and wished us luck. We were on our own!

  We packed the gear away in the car, and discussed plans. Obviously we didn’t want to use up our air on more practising, and in any case it seemed wiser to rest and conserve our resources. It was already almost lunch-time, and in the afternoon the tide would be high and we’d have too much depth to contend with. The best time to make our reconnaissance, we decided, was a couple of hours before low water. Conditions would be good, and in the event of Curlew turning up again we’d be well out of the way before she arrived.

  We had a leisurely lunch at Falmouth, and in the afternoon we took the now familir route round the Helford river and parked the car by the barley field. Then we humped the diving gear to the cove, each set wrapped in a car rug in case we met anyone on the way. As an additional precaution, we kept close to the dry stone wall as we walked along the clifftop. We examined the cove carefully from above, and when we’d made sure the coast was clear we dropped down and settled ourselves in a quiet place among the boulders.

  As the tide slowly fell, exposing the weedy rocks, our sense of excitement grew. In my case, it was the thought of diving on our own rather than any belief that we should find anything which quickened my pulse. I made an effort to calm down, because Fox had emphasised that a relaxed frame of mind was essential for good diving, but I could scarcely wait. We’d fixed on five o’clock as the time to start putting on our equipment, and we set to work on the dot. But we’d hardly unwrapped the gear when two men and a girl came down to the cove and began larking about on the beach, and we had to wait for more than half an hour before they moved on. Then, keeping well back in the shelter of the rocks, we went conscientiously through the drill—cleaning and fitting the masks, testing the masks, testing the aqualungs in a pool for leaks, and making sure the harness was secure. Just before six, we lowered ourselves gently into the water.

  Once I was in, and swimming, my nervousness soon passed. My aqualung was working perfectly, and by the time we were well out in the cove I’d almost forgotten I was wearing it. We surfaced and had a good look round, checking our position from shore rocks that we’d noted the previous day as being more or less in line with the anchorage. Then we dived again. The depth meter showed twenty-three feet at the bottom, which was fine.

  Our plan of campaign was the same as on the first occasion—to swim to and fro across the centre of the cove, starting a little to the seaward side of where we thought Curlew had been, and gradually moving inwards. This time, though, we could keep close to the bottom all the way. The sea bed was sandy, with nothing to obstruct the view. The water was quite clear enough for our purpose. If we found nothing else, at least we ought to be able to find the holes left by Curlew’s anchor without much trouble.

  We swam along about six feet apart, slowly and easily. The water seemed warmer than it had been the day before. The bubbles from our exhaust valves streamed up reassuringly above us. At intervals of a few yards we stopped and scraped up handfuls of sand, marking our route, so that we shouldn’t cover the same stretch twice. When my depth meter showed that we were getting too near the side of the cove, we turned and swam back the other way on a slightly different track.

  We did five trips without seeing anything more exciting than fish. On the sixth, Mollie suddenly swam close and pointed to a dark, box-like object over on her right and we put on speed and investigated—but it was only an old biscuit tin that had been thrown overboard from a boat. We continued on our course, and turned again. By now we were in a mere fifteen feet of water, and clearly much closer inshore than Curlew had been. I looked at Mollie, and her eyelids and eyebrows went up in a kind of optical shrug.

  At the next turn we abandoned the shallow water and swam out until we were well to seaward of our starting point, with a depth of nearly thirty-five feet. We set off across the cove again. Almost at once we spotted an unmistakable mark—an anchor mark. We swam on a few yards—and then, slowly, unbelievably, some large object took shape ahead of us. Mollie saw it at the same moment as I did, and we kicked out hard and reached it together.

  It was a sunken boat—quite a biggish boat. And the name on the stern was Mary Ann.

  Chapter Sixteen

  So Thornton and Blake had been concerned in the raid—and Mollie had pulled it off again! I moved close to her and gave her arm a congratulatory squeeze, the peak expression of underwater emotion. Then I slowly circled the boat. There was no question of thinking anything out at that stage; all I wanted to do was look.

  Mary Ann was listed over towards her port side, at quite a gentle angle, her shallow keel resting on firm sand. She was completely motionless in the deep, still water. She was anchored fore and aft, and judging by the absence of drag marks the anchors had been laid out by the divers after she’d sunk.

  With Mollie beside me, I swam up over the cockpit and approached the cabin doors, which were shut. The lock, I discovered, was broken, and dents in the woodwork around it showed that it had been forced. I fastened the doors back against the cabin bulkhead, and we both peered inside. Light was entering not only through the portholes but through the roof, several planks of which had been broken out with some violence. The whole interior of the cabin was in a state of wild disorder. All the floor boards on the starboard side had been taken up, and were jammed or floating against the deckhead above the port berth, with a lot of other debris. The starboard bert
h had been practically dismantled, so that the ribs and planks of the hull were exposed both above and below the water line. A short-handled axe, which had evidently been used used for the demolition, lay in the bottom of the ship. Most of the work must have been done, I thought, while she’d still floated, for the exertion under water would have been terrific.

  My eyes were growing more accustomed now to the dim light, and as I gazed around the cabin, trying to memorise every detail for the descriptive piece I should soon be writing, my attention was caught by some small, irregularly spaced holes with splintered edges, just below the water line in the starboard side of the ship. There were six of them, and the angle of all of them was downwards. I followed the line of them, and saw that there were more holes, this time in the bottom of the boat. There wasn’t much doubt that shots had been fired through the hull from the outside. A moment later I noticed a small metal object protruding from the base of the fixed cabin table—the flattened remains of a bullet. There wasn’t any doubt.

  We moved cautiously into the cabin. Just beyond the table there was something that looked like an open attaché-case lying bottom upwards across the ribs of the boat, and as I drew nearer I saw that it was the lizard skin jewel case that had been stolen from Wanderer. Then I caught the sheen of metal again, and picked up a jewelled ring from the silt in the bilge. I started to search around for more pieces, and so did Mollie. Almost at once the water in the cabin began to lose its transparency as our movements stirred up the sediment in the bottom of the boat, and soon it was so opaque that we couldn’t see a thing and there seemed no point in staying any longer. We fumbled our way to the door and swam out of the cockpit and round the side of the ship and had a look at the bullet holes from the outside. They must have been made, I decided, by bullets of pretty high calibre, fired at very close range, for the hull was stout.