I tried to get at the door but couldn’t make it, we’d landed nose down and facing seawards on the outside of the reefs and from the position where I’d been hurled under the instrument panel the door was above and beyond my reach. I was too dazed, too weak, to make any real effort to get at it. Icy water poured in through the smashed windscreen and the fractured floor of the fuselage. For a moment everything was as silent as the grave, the hiss of the flooding waters seemed only to emphasise the silence then the machine-gun started again. The shells smashed through the lower after part of the fuselage behind me and went out through the top of the windscreen above me. Twice I felt angry tugs on the right shoulder of my coat and I tried to bury my head even more deeply into the freezing waters. Then, due probably to a combination of an accumulation of water in the nose and the effect of the fusillade of bullets aft, the helicopter lurched forwards, stopped momentarily, then slid off the face of the reef and fell like a stone, nose first, to the bottom of the sea.
FIVE
Wednesday: dusk – 8.40 p.m.
Among the more ridiculous and wholly unsubstantiated fictions perpetuated by people who don’t know what they are talking about is the particularly half-witted one that death by drowning is peaceful easy and, in fact, downright pleasant. It’s not. It’s a terrible way to die. I know, because I was drowning and I didn’t like it one little bit. My ballooning head felt as if it were being pumped full of compressed air, my ears and eyes ached savagely, my nostrils, mouth and stomach were full of sea water and my bursting lungs felt as if someone had filled them with petrol and struck a match. Maybe if I opened my mouth, maybe if to relieve that flaming agony that was my lungs I took that one great gasping breath that would be the last I would ever take, maybe then it would be quiet and pleasant and peaceful. On the form to date, I couldn’t believe it.
The damned door was jammed. After the beating the fuselage had taken, first of all in smashing into the reef and then into the sea-bed it would be a miracle if it hadn’t jammed. I pushed the door, I pulled at it, I beat at it with my clenched fists. It stayed jammed. The blood roared and hissed in my ears, the flaming vice around my chest was crushing my ribs and lungs, crushing the life out of me. I braced both feet on the instrument panel, laid both hands on the door handle. I thrust with my legs and twisted with my hands, using the power and the leverage a man can use only when he knows he is dying. The door handle sheared, the thrust of my legs carried me backwards and upwards toward the after end of the fuselage and suddenly my lungs could take no more. Death couldn’t be worse than this agony. The air rushed out through my water-filled mouth and nostrils and I sucked in this one great gasping breath, this lungful of sea-water, this last I would ever take.
It wasn’t a lungful of water, it was a lungful of air. Noxious compressed air laden with the fumes of petrol and oil, but air for all that. Not the tangy salt-laden air of the Western Isles, not the wine-laden air of the ægean, the pine-laden air of Norway or the sparkling champagne air of the high Alps. All those I’d tasted and all of them put together were a thin and anæmic substitute for this marvellous mixture of nitrogen and oxygen and petrol and oil that had been trapped in an air pocket under the undamaged upper rear part of the helicopter’s fuselage, the only part of the plane that hadn’t been riddled by machine-gun bullets. This was air as it ought to be.
The water level was around my neck. I took half a dozen deep whooping breaths, enough to ease the fire in my lungs and the roaring and hissing and dizziness in my head to tolerable levels, then pushed myself backwards and upwards to the extreme limit of the fuselage. The water was at chest level now. I moved a hand around in the blind darkness to try to estimate the amount of air available to me. Impossible to judge accurately, but enough, I guessed, compressed as it was, to last for ten to fifteen minutes.
I moved across to the left of the fuselage, took a deep breath and pushed myself forwards and downwards. Eight feet behind the pilot’s seat was the passenger door, maybe I could force that. I found it right away, not the door but the opening where the door had been. The impart that had jammed the door on the righthand side where I’d been had burst this door open. I pushed myself back to the upper part of the fuselage again and helped myself to a few more deep breaths of that compressed air. It didn’t taste quite so good as it had done the first time.
Now that I knew I could go at any time, I was in no hurry to leave. Up above, guns in hand, those men would be waiting and if there was one outstanding attribute that characterised their attitude to work on hand, it was a single-minded thoroughness. Where those lads were concerned, a job half done was no job at all. They could only have come there by boat and that boat would have been very nearby. By this time it would be even nearer by, it would be sitting directly over the spot where the helicopter had gone down and the crew wouldn’t be sitting around with drinks in their hands congratulating themselves on their success, they’d be lining the side with searchlights or flashes and waiting to see if anyone would break surface. With their guns in their hands.
If I ever got back to the Firecrest again, if I ever got in touch with Uncle Arthur again, I wondered dully what I would say to him. Already I’d lost the Nantesville, already I’d been responsible for the deaths of Baker and Delmont, already I’d given away to the unknown enemy the secret of my identity – if that hadn’t been obvious after the fake customs officers had smashed our transmitter it was bitterly obvious now – and now I’d lost Lieutenant Scott Williams his life and the Navy a valuable helicopter. Of Uncle Arthur’s forty-eight hours only twelve were left now, and nothing could be more certain than when Uncle Arthur had finished with me, I wouldn’t be allowed even those twelve hours. After Uncle Arthur had finished with me my days as an investigator would be finished, and finished for ever; with the kind of references he’d give me I wouldn’t even qualify as a store detective in a street barrow. Not that it would make any difference what Uncle Arthur thought now. Baker and Delmont and Williams were gone. There was a heavy debt that had to be paid and the matter was out of Uncle Arthur’s hands now. On the form to date, I thought bleakly, there wasn’t one bookmaker in the land who would have given odds of one in a thousand of that debt ever being repaid. Only a fool bets against a certainty.
I wondered vaguely how long the men up top would wait – my conviction that they would be waiting was absolute. And then I felt a dry salty taste in my mouth that had nothing to do with the steadily deteriorating quality of air. It was pretty foul by this time, but a man can survive a surprisingly long time in foul air and there was enough oxygen left in that heavily tainted atmosphere to last me for a good few minutes yet.
The question was not how long they would wait but how long I could wait. Or had I already waited too long? I could feel the panic in my throat like some solid lump in my windpipe completely obstructing my breathing and had to make a conscious physical effort to force it down.
I tried to recall all I could from my marine salvage days. How long had I been under water and how deep down was I? How long had that dive down from the surface of the sea to the bottom taken?
Under those conditions time loses all meaning. Say forty seconds. Just over half-way down I’d taken my last gulp of air before the water in the fuselage had flooded over my head. And then a minute, probably a minute and a half, fighting with that jammed door. Since then a minute to recover, half a minute to locate that open door, and then how long since? Six minutes, seven? Not less than seven. I couldn’t reckon on a total of less than ten minutes. The lump was back in my throat again.
How deep was I? That was the life-or-death question. I could tell from the pressure that I was pretty deep. But how deep? Ten fathoms? Fifteen? Twenty? I tried to recall the chart of Torbay Sound. There were eighty fathoms in the deepest channel and the channel was pretty close to the southern shore at this point, so that the water was steep-to. God above, I might even be in twenty-five fathoms. If I was, well that was it. Finish. How did the decompression tables go again? At
thirty fathoms a man who has been under water for ten minutes requires to spend eighteen minutes for decompression stops on the way up. When you breathe air under pressure, the excess nitrogen is stored in the tissues: when you begin to surface this nitrogen is carried by the bloodstream to the lungs and is eliminated in respiration: and if you rise too rapidly respiration can’t cope with it and nitrogen bubbles form in the blood, causing the agonising and crippling diver’s bends. Even at twenty fathoms I’d require a six-minute halt for decompression on the way up and if there was one certain fact in life it was that decompression stops were out for me. I’d be a broken man. What I did know for certain was that every additional second I remained there would make the bends all the more agonising and crippling when they finally struck. All at once the prospect of surfacing beneath the steady guns and the pitiless eyes of the men above seemed positively attractive compared to the alternative. I took several deep breaths to get as much oxygen as possible into my blood-stream, exhaled to the fullest extent, took a long final breath to fill every last cubic millimetre in every last nook and cranny in my lungs, dived under the water, pushed my way out through the doorway and made for the surface.
I’d lost count of time on the way down and I now lost all count of time on the way up. I swam slowly and steadily using enough power to assist my progress through the water, but not so much as prematurely to use up all the stored oxygen. Every few seconds I let a little air escape from my mouth, not much, just enough to ease the pressure in my lungs. I looked up but the waters above me were as black as ink, there could have been fifty fathoms above my head for any trace of light I could see. And then suddenly, quite some time before the air supply was exhausted and before my lungs had begun to hurt again, the water was a shade less than pitch black and my head struck something hard and unyielding. I grabbed it, held on, surfaced, sucked in some lungfuls of that cold, salt, wonderful air and waited for the decompression pains to start, those sharply agonising twinges in the joints of the limbs. But none came. I couldn’t have been more than fifteen fathoms down and even then I should have felt something. It had probably been something nearer ten.
During the past ten minutes my mind had taken as much a beating as any other part of me but it would have to have been in very much poorer shape than it was for me not to recognise what I was clinging to. A boat’s rudder, and if any confirmation had been required the milkily phosphorescent water being turned up by the two slowly turning screws a couple of feet ahead of me would have been all that was required. I’d surfaced right under their boat. I was lucky. I might have surfaced right under one of their propellers and had my head cut in half. Even now, if the man at the wheel suddenly decided to go astern I’d be sucked into the vortex of one or other of the screws and end up like something that had passed through a turnip-cutting machine. But I’d been through too much to cross any bridges before I came to them.
Off to port I could see, sharply illuminated by a couple of powerful lights from the boat’s deck, the reef where we’d crashed. We were about forty yards away and, relative to the reefs, stationary in the water, the engines turning just enough to maintain the boat’s position against the effect of wind and tide. Now and again a searchlight patrolled the dark waters all around. I couldn’t see anything of the men on deck, but I didn’t have to be told what they were doing, they were waiting and watching and the safety catches would be off. Nor could I see anything of the boat itself but I made up my mind that, even though I couldn’t recognise it, I’d know it if I ever came across it again. I took out the knife from the sheath behind my neck and cut a deep vee notch in the trailing edge of the rudder.
For the first time, I heard voices. I heard four voices and I had no difficulty in the world in identifying any of them. If I lived to make Methuselah look a teenager I’d never forget any one of them.
‘Nothing on your side, Quinn?’ Captain Imrie, the man who had organised the manhunt for me aboard the Nantesville.
‘Nothing on my side, Captain.’ I could feel the hairs rise on the nape of my neck. Quinn. Durran. The bogus customs officer. The man who had almost, but not quite, strangled me to death.
‘Your side, Jacques?’ Captain Imrie again.
‘Nothing, sir.’ The machine-pistol specialist. ‘Eight minutes since we’ve been here, fifteen since they went under. A man would require pretty good lungs to stay down that long, Captain.’
‘Enough,’ Imrie said. ‘There’ll be a bonus for all of us for this night’s work. Kramer?’
‘Captain Imrie?’ A voice as guttural as Imrie’s own.
‘Full ahead. Up the Sound.’
I thrust myself backwards and dived deep. The waters above my head boiled into turbulent, phosphorescent life. I stayed deep, maybe ten feet down, heading for the reef. How long I swam like that, I don’t know. Certainly less than a minute, my lungs weren’t what they used to be, not even what they had been fifteen minutes ago: but when I was forced to the surface, I’d my dark oilskin over my head.
I needn’t have bothered. I could see the faintly shimmering outline of the disappearing wake, no more. The searchlights were extinguished; when Captain Imrie decided a job was finished, then that job was finished. Predictably, the boat was in complete darkness with neither interior nor navigation lights showing.
I turned and swam slowly towards the reef. I reached a rock and clung to it until a measure of strength returned to my aching muscles, to my exhausted body. I would not have believed that fifteen minutes could have taken so much out of a man. I stayed there for five minutes. I could have stayed there for an hour. But time was not on my side. I slipped into deep water again and made for the shore.
Three times I tried and three times I failed to pull myself up from the rubber dinghy over the gunwale of the Firecrest. Four feet, no more. Just four feet. A Matterhorn. A ten-year-old could have done it. But not Calvert. Calvert was an old, old man.
I called out for Hunslett, but Hunslett did not come. Three times I called, but he did not come. The Firecrest was dark and still and lifeless. Where the hell was he? Asleep? Ashore? No, not ashore, he’d promised to stay aboard in case word came through at any time from Uncle Arthur. Asleep, then, asleep in his cabin. I felt the blind unreasoning anger rise. This was too much, after what I had been through this was too much. Asleep. I shouted at the top of my voice and hammered feebly on the steel hull with the butt of my Luger. But he didn’t come.
The fourth time I made it. It was touch and go, but I made it. For a few seconds, dinghy painter in hand, I teetered on my stomach on the edge of the gunwale then managed to drag myself aboard. I secured the painter and went in search of Hunslett. There were words I wished to have with Hunslett.
I never used them. He wasn’t aboard. I searched the Firecrest from forepeak to the after storage locker, but no Hunslett. No signs of a hasty departure, no remnants of a meal on the saloon table or unwashed dishes in the galley, no signs of any struggle, everything neat and in good order. Everything as it ought to have been. Except that there was no Hunslett.
For a minute or two I sat slumped in the saloon settee trying to figure out a reason for his absence, but only for a minute or two. I was in no condition to figure out anything. Wearily I made my way out to the upper deck and brought dinghy and outboard over the side. No fancy tricks about securing them to the anchor chain this time: apart from the fact that it was, the way I felt, physically impossible, the time for that was past. I deflated the dinghy and stowed it, along with the outboard, in the after locker. And if someone came aboard and started looking? If someone came aboard and started looking he’d get a bullet through him. I didn’t care if he claimed to be a police superintendent or an assistant commissioner or the top customs official in the country, he’d get a bullet through him, in the arm or leg, say, and I’d listen to his explanations afterwards. If it was one of my friends, one of my friends from Nantesville or the reef back there, he got it through the head.
I went below. I felt sick. The helicopter
was at the bottom of the sea. The pilot was down there with it, half his chest shot away by machine-gun bullets. I’d every right to feel sick. I stripped off my clothes and towelled myself dry and the very action of towelling seemed to drain away what little strength was left to me. Sure I’d had a hard time in the last hour, all this running and slipping and stumbling through the dark woods, locating and blowing up the dinghy and dragging it over those damned seaweed covered boulders had taken it out of me, but I was supposed to be fit, it shouldn’t have left me like this. I was sick, but the sickness was in the heart and mind, not in the body.
When Eight Bells Toll Page 12
