Testament

by David Gibbins

  He glanced again at his readout. Costas had been gone for ten minutes now, and still there were no comms. It would be at least another five minutes until the diagnostic was complete and he knew whether or not he could follow. He made himself focus on the objective of their dive, running through the details once more. Clan Macpherson had been a freighter of 9,940 tons’ burden owned by the Clan Line, one of the last of the great East Indies shipping companies. On her final voyage she’d had a crew of 140 men, made up of Indian Lascar ratings, British deck and engineer officers, and Royal Navy gunners to man her defensive armament. Her master, Captain Edward Gough, was a veteran of two previous sinkings, and had been decorated for his courage and seamanship. Her voyage halfway round the world from India to Liverpool was to have been a routine one, plied by thousands of ships during the war. After leaving Calcutta, she had sailed unescorted down the Bay of Bengal and across the Indian Ocean to Durban in South Africa. From there she had joined the first of a succession of convoys that were to take her up the coast of West Africa to Freetown, the staging port for ships heading across the Atlantic to the Americas or north to Gibraltar and home.

  The final leg of that route, as part of convoy TS-37 between Takoradi in the Gold Coast and Freetown, should have been uneventful. The weather was fine, clear and overcast, and the 848-mile journey was expected to take five days at the convoy’s maximum speed of eight knots. The main focus of the U-boats was in the North Atlantic; it had been more than two years since a TS convoy had been struck. The escort for the nineteen merchantmen when they had left Takoradi on April 26 was little more than a token force—one corvette and three armed trawlers—and there was no air cover. Yet when the first ship was hit, when the first plume of water rose from a torpedo strike, the sight would have been sickeningly familiar to many of the seamen in the convoy. By that stage in the war the Clan Line had lost thirty-two ships—more than half its fleet—and more than 600 men, a rate repeated in the other shipping companies. Many of the seamen in TS-37 would have seen ships sunk in other convoys in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and would have endured the fear of not knowing whether they were to be next.

  That first strike by U-515 at 8:55 p.m. on April 30 was followed within five minutes by three others, and then a further three ships were sunk in another devastating five-minute attack in the early hours of the morning. Clan Macpherson had been the last to go, straggling behind the convoy, settling down by the head and listing to starboard. Captain Gough survived, but the ship had taken almost her entire complement of engineer officers with her when she finally plummeted to the seabed and came to rest on the edge of the continental shelf more than one hundred meters below Jack now.

  Jack ran through a checklist of her cargo: pig iron, groundnuts, linseed, jute, tea. At least there was no record of munitions, other than ammunition for her own guns. Diving into wrecks with unexploded ordnance, their fuses decayed and unstable, was not usually Jack’s favorite pastime. But there was no way of knowing for sure. The discovery that she had also secretly been carrying two tons of gold had shown what could be missing from cargo manifests. For a moment, thinking of Costas somewhere below him, risking his life, Jack wished that the researcher in the archives had never found that record, and he felt a flash of anger at the salvage company and its investors. He was damned if he was going to let that gold line anyone’s pockets. He would fight tooth and nail to see it go to humanitarian relief, using the considerable weight of IMU’s board of directors and their legal team to drag it through the international courts as far as it could go.

  And there was another factor that weighed on Jack’s mind, the official reason for his inspection. If Landor and the salvage company had imagined that war grave designation was something they could simply brush aside, they would be wrong. It was something else that made Jack want to spin out an ownership dispute as long as possible. New UN legislation currently in its final reading, spearheaded by IMU, would prevent salvors who transgressed from dealing with the financial institutions of signatory nations. To transgress would make them into pirates, only able to sell their finds and launder their money on the black market, making it easier for law enforcement agencies to shut them down. Investors lured into supporting them with promises of sunken treasure would pull out and put their money elsewhere. Jack was here today because this scheme was the best hope of protecting historically important wrecks in international waters. Above all, he would do all he could to protect a war grave from being plundered; persevering with the dive and making a case against Deep Explorer was his commitment to the memory of the men who had gone down with this ship on that terrible night in 1943.

  He stared into the depths again. He had seen enough wrecked merchantmen from the two world wars to have some idea of what to expect. A ship that was not heavily laden could sink slowly, allowing enough time for its interior compartments to fill with water before it went down; the wreck could be substantially intact, damaged only by the torpedo strike and by the impact with the seabed. A fully laden ship that sank quickly could be another matter entirely, its compartments still filled with air and imploding as the ship sank, leaving jagged masses of metal. Clan Macpherson had been carrying more than 8,000 tons of cargo, an enormous dead weight once buoyancy had been lost.

  There was one aspect of those sinkings that haunted Jack the most. Men must often have been trapped inside air pockets, alive after the ship had disappeared from the surface. Their deaths would not have been like those portrayed in Hollywood films: a final few moments as the churning waters rose, a gulp of seawater and unconsciousness. Instead they would have been horrific, surrounded by the shrieking and cracking of the hull, the air pockets lasting long enough for the titanic pressures of the ocean to bear down on them, bursting their eardrums and collapsing their sinuses, a final unspeakable agony as the ship plummeted to its grave.

  Men who went to sea in ships knew full well the horrors of Davy Jones’s Locker. It was what singled them out, what made them tough. Jack came from a long line of such men, sea captains who had defended England’s shores at the time of the Spanish Armada, explorers and adventurers who had pushed the boundaries of knowledge during the Age of Exploration, merchants who had built fortunes on the spice trade with the East and the riches of the West. He himself was another, modern kind of explorer, one who had dared to go where his ancestors could scarcely have imagined, who had descended into the world of their nightmares, who had touched the void. His boundary was no longer the distant horizon that had beckoned his forebears, but he knew the same siren call of the unknown as he stared into the depths. He knew their excitement, and he knew their fear.

  The LED display on his computer flashed green. The computer had fixed the fault, and the rebreather was good to go. He took a deep breath and steeled himself. It was time to dive.

  2

  Jack raised his head out of the water one last time and gave a thumbs-down signal for the benefit of the crewmen on Deep Explorer who were watching him. The ocean swell was now producing two-meter troughs, and he needed to get below the turbulence. He grasped the shot line beneath the buoy and pulled himself down, feeling the hiss of air into his suit as his automated buoyancy system compensated for the change in pressure, keeping him neutral. Five meters down, he was below the main effect of the swell, but the current was stronger than on the surface, pulling him out almost horizontally from the line. He clicked his buoyancy compensator to manual, pinched his nose through his visor to equalize the pressure, and grasped the line with his other hand, letting it run through his fingers as he slowly dropped spread-eagled into the depths. He had watched Costas do the same, holding on as he plummeted out of sight, and prayed that he had kept hold of the line until reaching the wreck. To let go would mean being swept off site beyond the edge of the continental shelf, and surfacing far from the ship. With no means of communication and the current trending southeast, that could only mean a long, slow ride into the middle of the Atlantic, with little chance of ever being picked
up.

  Jack was in his element. The tension he had felt on the surface, the slight edge of seasickness in the swell, had disappeared. As he descended further, his intercom began to crackle. “Costas,” he said loudly. “Do you read me. Over.” There was still no response. He rolled over, seeing the smudge of Deep Explorer’s hull still visible above him, then turned back to face the green-blue gloom below. He had reached sixty meters, the safe limit of compressed-air diving, and was now entering the realm where his life depended on the continuing function of his oxygen rebreather. If the glitch recurred now, before he reached Costas, his only chance of survival would be an emergency ascent using the system’s bailout regulator, a dangerous move that would put Costas beyond his help should anything go wrong. If all went well, the rebreather would allow him an hour at 120 meters, the maximum depth of the wreck indicated by the sonar. But their expectation had been for a bottom time shorter than that. All Jack needed to provide evidence for a war grave designation was to verify the identity of the wreck.

  He had kept his helmet headlamps off for the descent, knowing that the beam from the thousand-lumen bulbs would cut through the gloom but also reflect off suspended particles in the water, potentially dazzling him. He wanted to accustom himself to the low light before reaching the wreck, and then only use the beam for close-up work. He checked his depth readout again: ninety meters. The gloom was enveloping him, but below it he began to sense something darker, the mottled shapes of rocky outcrops on the sea floor. Below him and just off to the right he saw the flashing red of a strobe. He felt a huge wave of relief course through him. It was a beacon, a waymarker. It showed that Costas had reached the seabed safely. Then he saw another light, a distant smudge perhaps twenty meters beyond the strobe, along the line of the drop-off where the continental shelf abruptly ended and the seabed angled into the abyss.

  And then he saw the wreck. For a moment it took his breath away. The vast bulk of the ship loomed below him, its funnel gone and the superstructure a mass of twisted metal but still recognizable as a merchantman of its era. Beyond it he could see the inky blackness of the water above the drop-off, and on the other side the level plateau of the continental shelf at 120 meters’ depth. The ship had come to rest along the very rim of the shelf, upright but split in two places where the hull had impacted with ridges on the sea floor. The strobe light had been placed below the bow; the smudge of white came from one of the breaks further back in the hull. Jack sank down toward the strobe, passing the intact four-inch gun still in its mount on the forecastle, its ammunition box open and ready for use. Seconds later he came to a halt just above the flashing red beacon, seeing that Costas had jammed it into a crack in the rock in front of the 200-lb lead weight from Deep Explorer that anchored the shot line.

  He kept hold of the line and let himself float with the current for a moment, taking stock of his situation. He was 124 meters deep, on the rim of the continental shelf. To his right he could see a jagged seascape of rocks extending east, a plateau that would eventually reach the African coast. To his left was the yawning chasm of the drop-off, no more than twenty meters away. The wreck was blocking the current, a south-trending flow that might exceed four or five knots in the open water beyond the drop-off, too strong to swim against. To stray out there might be to take a roller-coaster ride to oblivion, with the current sweeping down the side of the canyon and taking anyone with it to an abyssal depth before ejecting them far away, beyond the drop-off. He steeled himself, breathing rhythmically, focusing on the task at hand. He was going to have to be careful.

  He switched on his headlamps and looked around. The world of gloom and shadows, a place where nothing seemed alive, had suddenly transformed into one of vivid colors and marine growth. It was too deep for most corals, but the rock was covered with living accretion and the water was filled with diaphanous organisms that reflected the light: plankton and diatoms and miniature nudibranchs. He blinked hard, adjusting to the particulate reflection, and then looked up, the two beams of his headlamp converging on the side of the hull above him. The iron was covered with rusticules, extrusions of ferrous material that seemed to drip off the hull like stalactites, with little trails of red streaming from them into the current as if the ship were bleeding. He could now see that the solidity of the wreck as it had first appeared in the gloom was an illusion—that after more than seventy years on the seabed, exposed to a powerful current, the hull plates were thin and friable, not far from crumbling entirely. The force of the current bearing on the hull meant that when the structure gave way, it was likely to be catastrophic, causing large parts to break away and be swept into the abyss. This was not a wreck that Jack would normally wish to penetrate, and the sooner they got out of here the better.

  Then he saw the lettering below the port rail some ten meters above him, a few meters back from the gun mounting. It read: Clan Macpherson. It was what Jack had wanted to see, the proof that he needed. He checked his readout, making sure that the video camera on the front of his helmet was running. Those letters had probably been the only surviving remnant of her peacetime livery, as if in defiance of the gray uniformity that war had imposed on all ships. The sight of them, nearly clear of corrosion, gave him a strange sense of clairvoyance, allowing him to see for a moment the rusting hulk transformed into the ship as she originally had been. He thought of the men who had crewed her, of those who had gone down with the ship, who were still here now. More than ever he felt that the wreck was a place of sanctity, as deserving of respect as the thousands of other ships that had taken men down with them in the two world wars, whose remains were strewn across the ocean floor.

  He angled his head so that his beam panned over the seabed. He could see a thin white line extending from the strobe along the port side of the wreck, the side in the lee of the current facing away from the drop-off. He reached down and gave it a tug. He guessed that it extended to where he had seen the smudge of light partway along the hull, somewhere in the green-black haze ahead.

  Suddenly his intercom crackled. “Jack, are you there? Over.”

  Jack felt another rush of relief. “I’m at the bow, over. The manifold glitch recurred and I had to wait on the surface for the computer to fix it. What’s the story with the comms?”

  “A few moments ago I realized that the problem wasn’t with our intercom but with the diver-to-ship link. I shut that off, and hey presto.”

  “So Deep Explorer can’t hear us.”

  “Just you and me. Like it should be.”

  “You were on your own. I was worried.”

  “You won’t believe what I’ve found.”

  “I saw the ship’s name.”

  “It’s incredible,” Costas said. “The coordinates in the official report were dead on. Captain Gough fixed the position of the sinking with almost pinpoint accuracy, after having been torpedoed and from an open boat.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Jack said. “Back then they were still taught navigation in the same way as Nelson’s officers, using dead reckoning with a sextant and chronometer. The best captains had a sixth sense for it, and Gough was obviously one of those. So what have you found? And where the hell are you?”

  “Jack, I need you to do something for me. I need you very carefully to look round the starboard side and see how much of the wreck is actually hanging over the edge.”

  Jack looked to his left beyond the bow over the drop-off, seeing the particulate matter at the furthest extent of his beam rush by at an alarming speed, like a snowstorm caught in a car’s headlights. He finned a few strokes past the bow, feeling the edge of the current stream against his body, and peered over. In his experience, most drop-offs were not absolutely sheer, but this one was. The rock at the edge formed a jagged precipice over a darkness as forbidding as he had ever seen. To his right, Clan Macpherson’s bow rose high above him, and he could now see the starboard side of the hull hanging over the void. “Just out of curiosity, how stable is the geology?” he asked.

>   Costas’s reply crackled through. “The bedrock’s metamorphic, pretty friable. This cliff edge is like a snow cornice on the top of a mountain ridge. Not where I’d choose to park a ship carrying eight thousand tons of cargo.”

  “You don’t want to see what I can see. From here, the hull looks as if it’s barely balanced on the edge.”

  “That’s what I thought. But around the other side, where I am, you should be fine penetrating the hull providing you don’t disrupt anything. Thankfully our rebreathers don’t produce exhaust, so there’s no danger of creating air pockets that could crack any weakened structure. It’s pretty rusty in here.”

  “We’ve seen the ship’s name on the bow. That’s all we need. We can leave now.”

  “You’d kill me if I told you what I’d found but didn’t give you the chance to see it for yourself. Anyway, I’m in here already. You should be with me.”

  “I’m trying to see the logic in that.”

  “It’s called the buddy system.”

  “Right.”

  “Trust me. Follow the line.”