When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  By this time we were almost half-way down the eastern patch of miraculously calm water that bordered the normal mill-race of Beul nan Uamh, the one that Williams and I had observed from the helicopter the previous afternoon. For the first time, Hutchinson was showing something approaching worry. He never spared a glance through the wheelhouse windows, and only a very occasional one for the compass: he was navigating almost entirely by chart and depth-sounder.

  ‘Are you sure it’ll be this fourteen-fathom ledge, Calvert?’

  ‘It has to be. It damn’ well has to be. Out to the seven-fathom mark there the sea-bottom is pretty flat, but there’s not enough depth to hide superstructure and masts at low tide. From there to fourteen it’s practically a cliff. And beyond the fourteen-fathom ledge it goes down to thirty-five fathom, steep enough to roll a ship down there. You can’t operate at those depths without very special equipment indeed.’

  ‘It’s a damn’ narrow ledge,’ he grumbled. ‘Less than a cable. How could they be sure the scuttled ship would fetch up where they wanted it to?’

  ‘They could be sure. In dead slack water, you can always be sure.’

  Hutchinson put the engine in neutral and went outside. We drifted on quietly through the greyly opaque world. Visibility didn’t extend beyond our bows. The muffled beat of the diesel served only to enhance the quality of ghostly silence. Hutchinson came back into the wheelhouse, his vast bulk moving as unhurriedly as always.

  ‘I’m afraid you’re right. I hear an engine.’

  I listened, then I could hear it too, the unmistakable thudding of an air compressor. I said: ‘What do you mean afraid?’

  ‘You know damn’ well.’ He touched the throttle, gave the wheel a quarter turn to port and we began to move out gently into deeper water. ‘You’re going to go down.’

  ‘Do you think I’m a nut case? Do you think I want to go down? I bloody well don’t want to go down – and you bloody well know that I have to go down. And you know why. You want them to finish up here, load up in Dubh Sgeir and the whole lot to be hell and gone before midnight?’

  ‘Half, Calvert. Take half of our share. God, man, we do nothing.’

  ‘I’ll settle for a pint in the Columba Hotel in Torbay. You just concentrate on putting this tub exactly where she ought to be. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life swimming about the Atlantic when I come back up from the Nantesville.’

  He looked at me, the expression in his eyes saying ‘if,’ not ‘when,’ but kept quiet. He circled round to the south of the diving-boat – we could faintly hear the compressor all the way – then slightly to the west. He turned the Firecrest towards the source of the sound, manoeuvring with delicacy and precision. He said: ‘About a cable length.’

  ‘About that. Hard to judge in fog.’

  ‘North twenty-two east true. Let go the anchor.’

  I let go the anchor, not the normal heavy Admiralty type on the chain but a smaller CQR on the end of forty fathoms of rope. It disappeared silently over the side and the Terylene as silently slid down after it. I let out all forty fathoms and made fast. I went back to the wheelhouse and strapped the cylinders on my back.

  ‘You won’t forget, now,’ Hutchinson said. ‘When you come up, just let yourself drift. The ebb’s just setting in from the nor’-nor’-east and will carry you back here. I’D keep the diesel ticking, you’ll be able to hear the underwater exhaust twenty yards away. I hope to hell the mist doesn’t clear. You’ll just have to swim for Dubh Sgeir.’

  ‘That will be ducky. What happens to you if it clears?’

  ‘I’ll cut the anchor rope and take off.’

  ‘And if they come after you?’

  ‘Come after me? Just like that? And leave two or three dead divers down inside the Nantesville?’

  ‘I wish to God,’ I said irritably, ‘that you wouldn’t talk about dead divers inside the Nantesville.’

  There were three divers aboard the Nantesville, not dead but all working furiously, or as furiously as one can work in the pressurised slow-motion world of the undersea.

  Getting down there had been no trouble. I’d swum on the surface towards the diving-boat, the compressor giving me a clear bearing all the time, and dived when only three yards away. My hands touched cables, life-lines and finally an unmistakable wire hawser. The wire hawser was the one for me.

  I stopped my descent on the wire when I saw the dim glow of light beneath me. I swam some distance to one side then down until my feet touched something solid. The deck of the Nantesville. I moved cautiously towards the source of the light.

  There were two of them, standing in their weighted boots at the edge of an open hatchway. As I’d expected, they were wearing not my self-contained apparatus, but regular helmet and corselet diving gear, with air-lines and life-lines, the life-lines almost certainly with telephone wires imbedded inside them. Self-contained diving equipment wouldn’t have been much use down here, it was too deep for oxygen and compressed-air stores too limited. With those suits they could stay down an hour and a half, at least, although they’d have to spend thirty to forty minutes on decompression stops on the way up. I wanted to be gone in less than that, I wanted to be gone that very moment, my heart was banging away against my chest wall like a demented pop drummer with the ague but it was only the pressure of the water, I told myself, it couldn’t be fear, I was far too brave for that.

  The wire rope I’d used to guide me down to the Nantesville, terminated in a metal ring from which splayed out four chains to the corners of a rectangular steel mesh basket. The two divers were loading this basket with wire- and wood-handled steel boxes that they were hauling up from the hold at the rate of, I guessed, about one every minute. The steel boxes were small but obviously heavy: each held four 28-lb ingots of gold. Each box held a fortune. There were three hundred and sixty such fortunes aboard the Nantesville.

  I tried to calculate the overall rate of unloading. The steel basket held sixteen boxes. Sixteen minutes to load. Another ten minutes to winch up to the diving-boat, unload and lower again. Say forty an hour. In a ninety-minute stretch, about sixty. But after ninety minutes they would have to change divers. Forty minutes, including two decompression stops of, say, twelve and twenty-four minutes, to get to the surface, then twenty minutes to change over and get other divers down. An hour at least. So, in effect, they were clearing sixty boxes every two and a half hours, or twenty-four an hour. The only remaining question was, how many boxes were left in the Nantesville’s strongroom?

  I had to find out and I had to find out at once. I’d had only the two compressed air-cylinders aboard the Firecrest and already their two hundred atmospheres were seriously depleted. The wire hawser jerked and the full basket started to rise, the divers guiding it clear of the superstructure with a trailing guide rope. I moved forward from the corner of the partially opened hatch remote from where they were standing and cautiously wriggled over and down. With excessive caution, I supposed: their lamp cast only a small pool of light and they couldn’t possibly have seen me from where I was standing. I felt my hands – already puffed and numbed by the icy water – touch a life-line and air-line and quickly withdrew them. Below and to my right I could see another faint pool of light. A few cautious strokes and I could see the source of the light.

  The light was moving. It was moving because it was attached to the helmet of a diver, angled so as to point down at an angle of forty-five degrees. The diver was inside the strongroom.

  They hadn’t opened that strongroom with any Yale key. They’d opened it with underwater torches cutting out a roughly rectangular section in the strongroom’s side, maybe six feet by four.

  I moved up to this opening and pushed my head round the side. Beyond the now stooping diver was another light suspended from the deck-head. The bullion boxes were neatly stacked in racks round the side and it was a five-second job to estimate their number. Of the three hundred and sixty bullion boxes, there were about one hundred and twenty left.

/>   Something brushed my arm, pulled past my arm. I glanced down and saw that it was a rope, a nylon line, that the diver was pulling in to attach to the handle of one of the boxes. I moved my arm quickly out of the way.

  His back was towards me. He was having difficulty in fastening the rope but finally secured it with two half hitches, straightened and pulled a knife from his waist sheath. I wondered what the knife was for.

  I found out what the knife was for. The knife was for me. Stooped over as he had been, he could just possibly have caught a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye: or he might have felt the sudden pressure, then release of pressure, on the nylon rope: or his sixth sense was in better working condition than mine. I won’t say he whirled round, for in a heavy diving suit at that depth the tempo of movement becomes slowed down to that of a slow-motion film.

  But he moved too quickly for me. It wasn’t my body that was slowing down as much as my mind. He was completely round and facing me, not four feet away, and I was still where I’d been when he’d first moved, still displaying all the lightning reactions and coordinated activity of a bag of cement. The six-inch-bladed knife was held in his lowered hand with thumb and forefinger towards me, which is the way that only nasty people with lethal matters on their minds hold knives, and I could see his face clearly. God knows what he wanted the knife for, it must have been a reflex action, he didn’t require a knife to deal with me, he wouldn’t have required a knife to deal with two of me.

  It was Quinn.

  I watched his face with a strangely paralysed intentness. I watched his face to see if the head would jerk down to press the telephone call-up buzzer with his chin. But his head didn’t move, Quinn had never required any help in his life and he didn’t require any now. Instead his lips parted in a smile of almost beatific joy. My mask made it almost impossible for my face to be recognised but he knew whom he had, he knew whom he had without any doubt in the world. He had the face of a man in the moment of supreme religious ecstasy. He fell slowly forwards, his knees bending, till he was at an angle of almost forty-five degrees and launched himself forward, his right arm already swinging far behind his back.

  The moment of thrall ended. I thrust off backwards from the strong-room’s outer wall with my left foot, saw the airhose come looping down towards me as Quinn came through the jagged hole, caught it and jerked down with all my strength to pull him off-balance. A sharp stinging pain burned its way upwards from my lower ribs to my right shoulders. I felt a sudden jerk in my right hand. I fell backwards on to the floor of the hold and then I couldn’t see Quinn any more, not because the fall had dazed me nor because Quinn had moved, but because he had vanished in the heart of an opaque, boiling, mushrooming cloud of dense air-bubbles. A non-collapsible air-hose can, and often has to, stand up to some pretty savage treatment, but it can’t stand up to the wickedly slicing power of a razor-sharp knife in the hands of the strongest man I’d ever known. Quinn had cut his own air-hose, had slashed it cleanly in two.

  No power on earth could save Quinn now. With a pressure of forty pounds to the square inch on that severed air-line, he would be drowning already, his suit filling up with water and weighting him down so that he could never rise again. Almost without realising what I was doing I advanced with the nylon rope still in my hands and coiled it any old way round the madly threshing legs, taking great care indeed to keep clear of those flailing arms, for Quinn could still have taken me with him, could have snapped my neck like a rotten stick. At the back of my mind I had the vague hope that when his comrades investigated, as they were bound to do immediately – those great clouds of bubbles must have already passed out through the hold on their way to the surface – they would think he’d become entangled and tried to cut himself free. I did not think it a callous action then nor do I now. I had no qualms about doing this to a dying man, and no compunction: he was doomed anyway, he was a psychopathic monster who killed for the love of it and, most of all, I had to think of the living who might die, the prisoners in the cellars of the Dubh Sgeir castle. I left him threshing there, dying there, and swam up and hid under the deck-head of the hold.

  The two men who had been on deck were already on their way down, being slowly lowered on their life-lines. As soon as their helmets sunk below my level I came up through the hatchway, located the wire hawser and made my way up. I’d been down for just under ten minutes so when my wrist depth-gauge showed a depth of two fathoms I stopped for a three-minute decompression period. By now, Quinn would be dead.

  I did as Hutchinson had told me, drifted my way back to the Firecrest – there was no hurry now – and located it without difficulty. Hutchinson was there to help me out of the water and I was glad of his help.

  ‘Am I glad to see you, brother,’ he said. ‘Never thought the day would come when Tim Hutchinson would die a thousand deaths, but die a thousand deaths he did. How did it go?’

  ‘All right. We’ve time. Five or six hours yet.’

  ‘I’ll get the hook up.’ Three minutes later we were on our way and three minutes after that we were out near enough in the midchannel of the Beul nan Uamh, heading north-north-east against the gathering ebb. I could hear the helm going on auto-pilot and then Hutchinson came through the door into the lit saloon, curtains tightly if, in that fog, unnecessarily drawn, where I was rendering some first aid to myself, just beginning to tape up a patch of gauze over the ugly gash that stretched all the way from lowest rib to shoulder. I couldn’t see the expression behind the darkly-luxuriant foliage of that beard, but his sudden immobility was expression enough. He said, quietly: ‘What happened, Calvert?’

  ‘Quinn. I met him in the strongroom of the Nantesville.’

  He moved forward and in silence helped me to tape up the gauze. When it was finished, and not until then, he said: ‘Quinn is dead.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Quinn is dead. He cut his own air-hose.’ I told him what had happened and he said nothing. He didn’t exchange a dozen words all the way back to Craigmore. I knew he didn’t believe me. I knew he never would.

  Neither did Uncle Arthur. He’d never believe me till the day he died. But his reaction was quite different, it was one of profound satisfaction. Uncle Arthur was, in his own avuncular fashion, possessed of an absolute ruthlessness. Indeed, he seemed to take half the credit for the alleged execution. ‘It’s not twenty-four hours,’ he’d announced at the tea-table, ‘since I told Calvert to seek out and destroy this man by whatever means that came to hand. I must confess that I never thought the means would consist of the blade of a sharp knife against an air-hose. A neat touch, my boy, a very neat touch indeed.’

  Charlotte Skouras believed me. I don’t know why, but she believed me. While she was stripping off my makeshift bandage, cleaning the wound and re-bandaging it very efficiently, a process I suffered with unflinching fortitude because I didn’t want to destroy her image of a secret service agent by bellowing out loud at the top of my voice, I told her what had happened and there was no doubt that she believed me without question. I thanked her, for bandage and belief, and she smiled.

  Six hours later, twenty minutes before our eleven p.m. deadline for taking off in the Firecrest, she was no longer smiling. She was looking at me the way women usually look at you when they have their minds set on something and can see that they are not going to get their own way: a rather less than affectionate look.

  ‘I’m sorry, Charlotte,’ I said. ‘I’m genuinely sorry, but it’s not on. You are not coming with us, and that’s that.’ She was dressed in dark slacks and sweater, like one who had – or had had – every intention of coming with us on a midnight jaunt. ‘We’re not going picnicking on the Thames. Remember what you said yourself this morning. There will be shooting. Do you think I want to see you killed?’

  ‘I’ll stay below,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll stay out of harm’s way. Please, Philip, let me come.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You said you’d do anything in the world for me. Remember?’ />
  ‘That’s unfair, and you know it. Anything to help you, I meant. Not anything to get you killed. Not you, of all people.’

  ‘Of all people? You think so much of me?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I mean so much to you?’

  I nodded again. She looked at me for a long time, her eyes wide and questioning, her lips moving as if about to speak and yet not speaking, then took a step forward, latched her arms around my neck and tried to break it. At least, that was the way it felt, the dead Quinn’s handiwork was still with me, but it wasn’t that at all, she was clinging to me as she might cling to a person who she knew she would never see again. Maybe she was fey, maybe she had second sight, maybe she could see old Calvert floating, face down, in the murky waters of the Dubh Sgeir boathouse. When I thought about it I could see it myself, and it wasn’t an attractive sight at all. I was beginning to have some difficulty with my breathing when she suddenly let me go, half-led, half-pushed me from the room and closed the door behind me. I heard the key turn in the lock.

  ‘Our friends are at home,’ Tim Hutchinson said. We’d circled far to the south of Dubh Sgeir, close in to the southern shore of Loch Houron and were now drifting quickly on the flood tide, engines stopped, in an east by northerly direction past the little man-made harbour of Dubh Sgeir. ‘You were right, Calvert. They’re getting all ready for their moonlit flitting.’

  ‘Calvert is usually right,’ Uncle Arthur said in his best trainedhim-myself voice. ‘And now, my boy?’