“That’s why it’s strange not to have found more bodies. It could be that César’s right,” Jack added, trying to sound sincere, “and they swam to the coast.”
“You’re wrong. They’re all dead,” Marco said coldly.
Everyone looked at him.
He was balancing on the back legs of his chair, picking his teeth with the tip of his knife in another display of poor table manners and bad judgment.
“And what do you base that on?” Riley asked, arms crossed.
“Easy. Remember any open doors?”
“Well . . . no, I don’t think so, but what are you talking about? You mean they hid in their cabins instead of trying to save themselves? That makes no sense.”
“It does make sense,” he said, putting the knife away and leaning on the table, “if they were attacked while they were asleep. The boat would’ve sunk in seconds. They wouldn’t have had time to even know what was happening.”
“And what makes you think that—of course,” Riley said. “The clock.”
“What clock?” Jack asked.
“One I found in the rubble on the bridge, stopped at four forty.”
“Twenty minutes before dawn,” the Yugoslav resumed, looking at the ceiling, smiling at his own joke. “A bad time for your ship to capsize and sink.”
Riley grimaced at yet another show of Marovic’s disregard for human life, but he had no choice but to admit that he was certainly right. Silence spread over the table like an improvised moment of silence for the dead.
“That explains everything. A horrible end,” César said.
“A horrible end is right,” Jack said pensively. “But an end we can take as an opportunity.”
“What do you mean?” Riley said.
“If no one had time to leave their cabins,” he went on deliberately, taking a puff of his pipe, “it means almost no one abandoned ship, which increases the chance that the gadget is still in there somewhere.”
“Hmm . . . that makes sense.”
“Of course it does, and I’d even say that piece of junk is in a cabin that remained sealed—”
“Mon Dieu! It could be intact in an air chamber!” Julie shouted.
Immediately following the five hours needed to be able to dive again without risk, Riley went back down in the basket—this time alone. Two divers were unnecessary, since he’d just be looking into the cabins through the portholes. Diving alone would also allow him and Marco to take turns and make better use of their time.
He held on to the basket with his right hand and pulled the signal cable with his left. Soon he was in front of the first porthole and gave careful signals to avoid tangling the cable that attached him to the crane. The basket leaned against the bulkhead, and Riley peered inside the ship.
Even with his helmet right up against the window, he couldn’t see anything. It was dark, and his body was blocking any light that would’ve gone in. He took the flashlight from his bag, turned it on, and brought it close to the glass. A beam of light broke through the shadows.
After an initial sweep with the light, he needed a few seconds to remember up was down. He figured the strange iron structures on the ceiling were bunk beds. Pointing the light downward, he saw, under a pile of mattresses and unrecognizable furniture and fixtures, the upper body of a naked man with scared eyes wide open and a crooked neck.
The man was dead, there was no doubt about that, but more importantly, Jack was right about a crucial point. Thanks to the airtight seal of the door and the reinforced glass window, water had been unable to enter, preserving an air pocket inside the ship.
Half an hour later, the basket was back on deck. Jack got the helmet off Riley’s head and asked, “Well?”
Riley took off his wool hat and nodded. “You’re right. The cabins are full of bodies.”
“And they’re . . . ?”
“Some are watertight, but the majority are flooded. Some of the doors were open, and almost all the windows gave way to pressure and broke.”
“Shit.”
“Well,” he said, shrugging as César and Julie removed his breastplate, “it was to be expected, and in the end it’s not that big a deal.”
“Why not?” Jack snapped. “If water got in the cabins, everything’s destroyed. You know he’ll pay less for the machine if it’s damaged.”
Riley shook his head, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “You worry too much, old friend.”
“How do I worry too much?” Jack said, frowning. “Did you get too much nitrogen in that empty head? How can I not worry, damn it?”
Riley put on his poker face. “Well, because it’s not necessary.”
“What isn’t necessary? What the hell—” Jack took a step back as if to get a better perspective. “You didn’t . . . did you?”
Riley grinned. “I think I found it.” He raised his voice so everyone could hear. “I think I found the machine.”
The crew was shocked. César stood still with the lead belt in his hands, seeming to have forgotten how heavy it was. Marco stopped rolling up the hose and looked around at the others. Julie came to the balcony of the bridge looking like she’d seen an alien.
Paradoxically it was Elsa again, despite in the end having no reason to care, who was the first to react. She separated from Helmut—who was leaning with her on the opposite bulwark, watching the operations from a distance—screamed with excitement, and threw herself into Riley’s arms, but this time Jack didn’t even seem to notice, probably because at that point even he would have kissed his captain. His cries of joy mixing with those of Julie and César, he danced, beside himself with unbridled happiness, and took Marco’s arm like a drunken villager at the town festival.
A flock of seagulls circled above the Pingarrón, squawking with a sound like mocking laughter. The soft sun of the autumn afternoon spilled onto the deck as Riley, still in the warm clothes he had worn under the diving suit, leaned on the bulwark.
“At first I couldn’t believe it. It was one of the last windows left to check, so I didn’t have much hope when I looked in. Then I found a third cabin that hadn’t been flooded, though this time there was a difference. The ones before were crew members’ with triple bunks, lockers, mattresses, piles of junk . . . and bodies. Lots of bodies.”
“Not that one?” César said.
Riley shook his head. “This cabin was much smaller than the others. It had two windows intact, and instead of mounted bunk beds, there was an individual bed, wardrobe, desk, paintings, and tons of documents scattered around, so I figured it must have been a high-ranking officer’s quarters.”
“The captain’s?” Julie asked.
“That’s what I thought at first. But later I looked at the wardrobe and saw the sleeve of a uniform.” He paused. “A black sleeve with silver braids and a bracelet with a Nazi flag.”
“An SS officer uniform,” Kirchner said with a slight tremor.
“Why would there be an SS officer on a corsair ship?” Jack asked.
Riley shrugged. “I have no idea. But the main thing is this made me look even more closely at the cabin . . . I could see it, stuck to the floor above me in a corner of the room.”
“The machine? You saw the machine?” Julie asked, barely containing her emotion.
“A safe,” Riley responded.
“What?”
“I said I saw a safe.”
“That was open . . . and inside you saw our machine, right?” Marco said.
Riley blinked twice. “Well, no. The safe was closed.”
“Okay, fine. There was a safe. Now go ahead and get to the point,” Jack said.
“Well, actually I’m done. That’s it. Then I came up and here I am.”
“How is that everything? Where the hell did you see the machine?” Jack said.
“See it? I never said I saw it, I said I think I know where it is.”
“Fuck, Alex. Stop with the riddles. Was the goddamn device in the cabin or not?”
“I think so .
. . I’m sure of it.”
“You think?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Riley said.
“Well, no, it isn’t.”
“I think it is,” Elsa said.
Jack crossed his arms. “Oh yeah? You don’t say?”
“It’s obviously in the safe!”
“And how did you come to that conclusion, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Easy. You asked before why an SS officer would be on the ship, right? If the device you’re looking for is so valuable, who do you think would guard it, and where do you think they’d keep it?”
“Hmm, that’s a pretty logical assumption,” Kirchner murmured.
“True, it makes sense,” César said.
“Maybe, but like Helmut said, it’s just an assumption,” Jack grumbled.
“A good assumption,” Riley said. “And it’s also our best chance, since our other option is to search every inch of the ship, and you know that’s impossible. I could be wrong, but I think it’s a lucky shot, and we oughta take advantage of it.”
Jack thought for a moment and raised his arms in surrender. “Okay, you’re the captain. But even if you’re right, how do you plan on doing it?”
“Doing it?”
“How are you going to go into the cabin and open the safe? Remember, it’s closed tight, and if you open the door the pressurized water will crush you.”
“Oh, that. Well, I guess we could break one of the little windows, let the cabin flood, and then open the cabin when the pressure’s equalized and take out the safe, bring it on board with the crane, and open it with a blowtorch. Done deal.”
“But didn’t you say the safe is stuck to the bulkhead?” César said. “How are we going to take it? We’d have to cut part of the bulkhead underwater.”
“We have underwater cutters,” Riley said, stretching. “It’ll be hard, but we can do it.”
“And if the safe isn’t waterproof and water gets in? I know something about that, not all of them are waterproof,” Marco said.
“Why am I not surprised,” Jack muttered, “that you ‘know something’ about safes?”
Marco showed his teeth like a hyena to a lame impala.
“You’re right, it definitely won’t be easy,” Riley said, scratching his stubble. “I guess I hadn’t thought it through too much. But anyway, that doesn’t mean we can’t do it, we just have to use our heads a little more. There’s something worth a million dollars down there,” he said, pointing, “and I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to get it.”
19
The crane made a horrible noise as it pulled up the steel cable of the basket.
“Damn it, César,” Riley called, looking up at him. “You’ve gotta grease those bearings, it sounds like you’re grinding screws.”
César nodded without paying much attention as he kept managing the controls. Julie sat on the roof of the bridge with binoculars. Jack held the signal cable, which he was coiling on deck as the basket carrying Marco came back up. They all had dark circles under their eyes. They’d been up till three the night before figuring out the best way to retrieve the device without getting it wet at all.
The big problem, aside from it being in an air bubble that could burst at any moment, was that at ninety feet deep there were four atmospheres of absolute pressure. That meant the pressure was four times the pressure out of water—no less than twenty pounds per square inch. As Jack had said the previous afternoon, they couldn’t simply open the door or break open one of the windows of the cabin. They needed a more ingenious strategy.
Suggestions had ranged from Julie’s fantasy of bringing the whole ship up, to Marco’s dream of blowing it up and recovering the pieces. Someone suggested cutting the bulkheads to separate the cabin from the rest of the ship and pull it up with the crane, but it was rejected as too labor intensive; plus the crane may not have been able to hold that much weight. Little by little, they eliminated possibilities, and it became clear they would have to access the cabin while the boat was still on the bottom.
Riley thought of welding a steel plate in the corridor, emptying the space of water with air pumps, and entering the cabin through the door. At first it didn’t seem like a bad idea, but after putting it on paper they realized it had serious issues. They didn’t have steel plates that size; getting them in the corridor would be complicated; and making them fit and soldering underwater would be nearly impossible.
They spent hours puzzling over the ship’s plans, scribbling on sheets of paper, and drinking enough coffee to wake a corpse. Finally, the solution came from where they least expected it.
As the five crew members of the Pingarrón sat around the lounge table, exhausted and on the verge of giving up, Dr. Kirchner, returning from warming up milk in the kitchen, walked past them. He was wearing the djellaba Julie had bought for him in Tangier and stopped to look at the scene with curiosity.
“Good evening,” he said. “Still haven’t solved our little problem?”
“Little problem?” Jack grumbled, his eyes red.
“It’s a little more complicated than we hoped,” Riley jumped in.
Kirchner, steaming cup in hand, went to the table, took a pair of round glasses from his pocket, and put them on. “Hmm . . . I see. Interesting. Can I make a suggestion?”
“Please,” Riley said, inviting him to look at the details more closely.
The scientist put his glasses back in his pocket and took a sip of his hot milk. “You said the ship is upside down, right?”
“Completely.”
“Right . . . In that case why don’t you come from the lower compartment and make a hole in the ceiling to enter the cabin above?”
“You’re saying to go in from below?” César asked.
“Indeed.”
“But if we do that, won’t water go through the hole we open?” Jack said.
Kirchner shook his finger no with a look of regret as if he hadn’t explained it clearly. “The air in the cabin would prevent that, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re partially right,” Riley said. “But the water that deep has four times the pressure of the air in the cabin, so when we open the hole, the water will flood at least three-fourths of the cabin and shatter the porthole, which would be a disaster.”
“I see . . .” Kirchner said, taking another sip, getting milk on his upper lip. “But in that case, you could increase the pressure of the air in the cabin until it is equal to that of the outside before opening the hole, then not a drop of water would go in. You have the equipment to do that, right?”
Jack already had an objection on the tip of his tongue but just went quiet and frowned.
“I think you’ve come up with the solution, Doctor,” Riley said. He studied the cross section of the Phobos to see how to carry out the plan, finding no problems at all. “We can fit a hose in a porthole, seal the edges, and add air pressure with the compressor till it gets to four atmospheres. Then we just have to come in from below, and the air pressure will keep water from going into the room. It’s amazingly simple,” he said, looking up from the table. “Thank you so much, Helmut. I’m very—”
But Kirchner had already disappeared, on the way to his room with his cup of hot milk. It had taken him a minute to solve the problem the crew had been working on for hours.
The diving basket’s hook punctured the surface of the water, followed by the copper bulb of Marco’s diving helmet. Once the basket passed over the bulwark, Riley and Jack lifted it to the middle of the deck, where they set it down carefully and helped him out. They took the helmet off his head, as well as the lead weights on his body. Marco panted, filling his lungs with fresh air.
“Everything’s ready,” Marco said. “I brought the guide wire to the lower compartment, left the saw there, and removed the last of the debris in the way.”
They all seemed to note the word “debris,” which included the floating bodies of sailors, but no one commented.
“And did you make sure the
hose fit tight in the window?” Riley asked.
“I did on my way up,” Marco said, “and I didn’t see air escaping from anywhere.”
“Wonderful,” Riley said with satisfaction. He left Marco to finish undressing and went to prepare for his own dive.
Time was running short, and they didn’t know how long it would take to make the hole into the cabin. They also didn’t know if their suspicions were right. If the machine wasn’t there, they would have to keep looking. They had decided to do individual dives to save time, which was a risky move. Any accident, even getting hooked on a doorknob and losing airflow, could mean death. Nevertheless, it would double their time underwater. Riley and Marco took turns while the other rested, always getting just enough decompression. It had taken almost the whole day, and half a dozen dives, to clear the compartment, lower the equipment, and fit the hose into the porthole in preparation to start cutting the bulkhead.
Trying not to think of the ways things could go wrong, Riley walked to the still-dripping basket in his diving equipment and signaled that he was ready. He was hoisted above deck and moved laterally until there was nothing under his heavy lead feet but the green sea splashing against the Pingarrón. The crane noisily let out the steel cable, lowering the basket slowly. Riley looked up as the water started to cover the windows of his helmet in time to see Elsa waving good-bye from the bulwark.
It would be the last dive of a very long day. The sun would set in less than an hour, and although he had a flashlight and didn’t need much light to work, he wasn’t willing to stay long in that giant, dark coffin. Despite the guideline from the entrance hatch to the compartment, he didn’t want to walk the ghostly corridors blind.
Lost in thought, he almost didn’t realize he was already nearing the sandy bottom. Since they would cut into the sealed cabin from the uppermost floor of the superstructure, which was flush with the seabed, he could enter on foot.
Once the basket touched down in a cloud of sand, Riley hopped out and walked in slow motion to the dark mass of the Phobos, just ten yards away. In front of him was a partially buried hatch that he entered, following the cord Marco had laid earlier.
Captain Riley (The Captain Riley Adventures Book 1) Page 13
