Testament

by David Gibbins

  “Roger that.” Jack angled his body around, sensing the yawning chasm beneath him as the current took hold of his legs and swung them round until he was parallel with the hull. He knew that he was going to have to fin hard for a few strokes to regain the lip of the precipice, but that once he was in the lee of the wreck again, the water movement would slacken. He finned hard, but nothing happened. In a split second he realized his mistake. In the process of turning, he had allowed the current to take him crucially beyond the protective bulk of the wreck, and he was suddenly being swept along the edge of the drop-off. He felt a lurching sensation, as if he had jumped out of an aircraft, as if the bottom were falling out under him. The current had undulated downward, and he was dropping below the edge as fast as if he were riding a water chute into the void. His computer set off an audible alert and flashed red as it overrode the manual on his buoyancy system and bled air into his suit. The extra lift slowed him down enough for him to right himself and hit the alarm on the side of his helmet, activating a beacon that sent out a continuous sound-wave pulse. He smacked into something, and saw that it was a jagged lava pinnacle protruding from the cliff. He clung on to it, dragging himself up until he was straddling it, perched on an overhang between a mottled wall of rock rising high above and the sheer cliff dropping into the void below.

  He looked with horror at his depth gauge: 149 meters. In a matter of seconds he had plummeted twenty-five meters below the level of the wreck. He peered at the rock face above, trying to calm his breathing. There were other protuberances, enough for handholds. It would have been a difficult ascent in the most favorable of conditions, with overhangs that would challenge the best free-climber. Down here, he was impeded by his equipment, by the current bearing down on him like an underwater waterfall, and by his inability to use footholds. He stared at his fins, fought against instinct and pressed the catch at the back of each ankle, causing the fins to draw up and mold around his calves. He would now have no chance against the current if he were swept off, but he knew they would be of little use anyway. At least now he could try to use footholds as if he were properly climbing.

  He edged behind the outcrop, feeling the current slacken. There would be pockets of calm close to the cliff, beneath overhangs and inside fissures, and he needed to find those where he could. The air in his suit had caused his arms and chest to balloon out, reducing his maneuverability. He hit the manual override, bleeding off the air until he could move more freely. It was another counterintuitive decision, almost certainly sealing his fate if he were to be swept off, but it was his only chance of making any headway on the climb.

  He tapped his intercom. He had heard nothing but crackling since being swept away. “Costas, do you read me. I’m at a hundred and forty-nine meters depth, over the cliff beyond the bow of the wreck, at least fifty meters southwest of my original position. I was swept over by the current and am attempting to climb back. Help would be appreciated. Over.”

  There was still no response. He guessed that the rock face between them was impeding radio contact, but he knew that the sound waves from his beacon pulsing up the cliff face should be detectable by Costas’s homing device. He had to climb now, or give up any hope of survival. He released his hold on the protuberance and grasped another one above him, the jagged edges of the lava biting into the Kevlar of his glove. He pulled himself up, feeling almost impossibly heavy as he swung out against the current, every muscle in his body straining as he reached up with his other hand and found a hold. He kicked his feet back into the rock, finding a ledge and pulling himself onto it. Three meters done, twenty-two to go. He felt his heart pound, his breathing rate increase. He needed to be calm, measured, as he used to be when he had enjoyed rock-climbing, clearing his mind and focusing solely on his objective. He reached up to another handhold, and then another. Slowly, relentlessly, feeling as if he were carrying a sack of lead on his back, he fought his way up against the current, following the line of a fissure that seemed to offer the path of least resistance.

  After another five meters he stopped again, his feet and hands wedged into the fissure. He tried another hold, slipped sideways and felt the current swing him around violently, crunching his rebreather backpack against the rock. He stayed still, watching with trepidation as his computer display flickered and wavered, trying not to think of the glitch in his manifold and what might trigger it again. Above him was an overhang he had seen from below but put from his mind, hoping that the fissure would continue through it. Now he saw that the fissure led into a collapsed cavern below the overhang, the remains of a lava tube. He would have to attempt the overhang like a free-climber, using only his hands, dangling over the void. Everything up to now would seem easy by comparison. He would be in the full force of the current again, fighting a downward pressure three or four times greater than anything he had encountered so far.

  His arms felt heavy with the strain, and he was breathing hard. He thought of the bailout option, something he had refused to consider until now. He could let go and free fall into the void, no longer fighting the current but hoping that it would undulate back upward and spit him out above the ridge, allowing him to ascend to the surface. But that was hardly a viable plan. Even if he did make the surface, he would probably be miles away, dependent entirely on his beacon for any hope of rescue, being swept relentlessly out into the Atlantic by the heavy seas they knew were on the way. He tensed himself, focusing. He would only let that happen if his body gave way and he could physically hang on no longer. Until then, pressing on and reaching Costas was his only hope.

  He pulled himself up, and hit his helmet on something. He shifted to one side, inching further up the fissure, attempting to avoid the unseen obstacle. He hit his head again, this time harder. He swung back, just in time to avoid being smacked in his visor. He stared at what was in front of him, and then felt an overwhelming rush of relief. It was an old-fashioned two-kilogram lead diving weight, suspended from a white nylon line. He looked up, his headlamp beam catching the line where it came down the overhang. He eased his feet out of the fissure, reached down with one hand to click his fins back into position and then grasped the weight with the same hand, letting go of the rock with the other and feeling the current pull him far out over the void. Ahead of him the line stretched taut to a point above the rim where he could just make out a beam of light below the bow of the wreck. He could feel himself being pulled forward, slowly but surely. The current slackened, and he was in the lee of the wreck over the rim of the cliff. He finned along the remaining length of line until he reached Costas, who had belayed it around a rock pinnacle just in front of the bows.

  “Look what I caught,” Costas said.

  Jack looked at the familiar stubbled face behind the visor, hardly believing what had just happened.

  “The intercom went down as soon as you went over the drop-off. One of my design team in the engineering lab suggested that beacon with a magnified pulse array. All I had to do was activate my helmet display to locate it, and then go fishing. I think maybe we owe her a beer.”

  “Roger that. And I’ll never make fun of you for fishing again. What other diver would carry a length of line and a lead weight with them?”

  Costas patted his tool belt, then coiled the line and stowed it in a pouch. “Always be prepared.”

  “Thanks, by the way. I didn’t think I was going to make it up that overhang.”

  “The buddy system, remember? Always pays to have a good buddy.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “How deep did you get?”

  “A hundred and forty-nine meters. My readout shows my gas supply’s still good for another half-hour bottom time.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Costas said. “We don’t want to extend our decompression time. Those bozos on Deep Explorer would probably leave without us. Now, where were we? You ready to see something incredible?”

  Jack checked his helmet readout and did a quick self-diagnostic. His breathing had retu
rned to normal, and any aches and pains from the climb were eclipsed by the adrenalin. He looked up again at the bow of the wreck, and then along the line Costas had laid into the gloom along the port side. If there was something good to see here, he was damned if he was going to forgo it after what he had just been through.

  “How many lives do I have left?” he said.

  “That was about your eighth. You’ve got plenty to go.”

  “Okay. Show me what you’ve got.”

  3

  Costas powered ahead beside the sunken hull, the wake of his fins stirring up the silt and monofilaments that were caught in Jack’s headlamp beam. To his left the hull loomed high above, blocking off the yawning chasm on the other side. About twenty meters along the line from the bow, Costas veered inside, the yellow of his helmet disappearing from view. He had entered a vertical crack in the hull, some three meters across at the bottom and widening as it went up. Jack turned to follow, spotting Costas’s figure where the line led inside, their headlamp beams revealing a jumbled mass of structure and machinery. “Keep hold of the line,” Costas said, the intercom crackling. “I tried not to disrupt the sediment when I was in here before, but even so the visibility is poor. Some of the compartments must have imploded during the sinking, and it’s a shambles inside.”

  “I don’t see any evidence here of a torpedo strike,” Jack said.

  “Not here. This is where the hull split when it impacted with the seabed. The cargo holds on either side are filled with iron and manganese ore, thousands of tons of it. There’s no way the ship could have survived hitting the sea floor intact carrying that kind of weight. It’s amazing that the torpedo didn’t do that itself, but these pre-war Clyde-built ships were stronger than the Liberty ships you see splitting in half in the U-boat periscope footage.”

  “Where did it strike?”

  “Toward the stern, just before the number two hold. We’re going to get there by swimming beneath the deckhouse superstructure, through what’s left of the engine room. Follow me.”

  Jack checked his computer display. The profile had automatically readjusted to take account of his greater depth and gas consumption during his escapade over the canyon edge, and now gave him only twenty minutes before he needed to start his ascent. The wireless connection meant that the revised data should have streamed into Costas’s computer and be showing the same profile on his own helmet readout. “Are you seeing my dive time?” he asked.

  “Nineteen minutes,” Costas replied. “Once we’re finished inside, we can egress from the hole in the hull caused by the torpedo strike. Let’s move.”

  “Roger that.” Jack swam cautiously into the wreckage, wincing as he felt his backpack scrape against a girder. A cloud of red from an exploded rusticle filled the water, creating a haze that restricted visibility even further. He lowered the intensity of his beam to reduce the reflection off particles suspended in the water, and looked around him. As often when diving into a wreck his focus became microcosmic, concentrating on the small details, on what he could see clearly only inches from his mask, knowing that the bigger picture might be obscured by the disorder of the structure and poor visibility. He saw a porcelain washbasin free of encrustation, and then a linked belt of fifty-caliber rounds that must have fallen from one of the gun emplacements above. He passed through a collapsed bulkhead into an enclosed space, his beam revealing twisted shapes in the darkness as he swept it around.

  “We’re skirting the port side of the engine room,” Costas said. “Only about ten meters to go now.”

  Jack pulled himself carefully along the line, keeping clear of Costas’s fins. A tapered cylindrical shape appeared below him, its base angled up where the retaining bolts had been wrenched away but with the dial and glass face at the other end still intact. “Did you see that?” he said. “It looks like the engine-room binnacle.”

  “I checked it out when I was in here before,” Costas replied. “It’s set at one quarter ahead, twenty revolutions per minute. The officer of the watch must have ordered the ship to slow down immediately after the torpedo strike. It must have been pretty hellish down here, with the explosion having taken place just beyond the next bulkhead.”

  Jack paused, floating motionless above the binnacle, remembering the report on the sinking. Amazingly, none of the men in the engine room had been killed by the torpedo strike, but four of the officers had gone down with the ship when she had finally sunk. After the strike they had volunteered to stay below to restart the engine, and to close the engine-room bulkheads against further flooding. They would have known that the ship could go quickly once the point of no return had been reached, that the slow wallowing would suddenly escalate into a terrifying maelstrom as the colossal weight of the cargo pulled her down. He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking of those men. This was their tomb, but it was also the place where they had kept the ship alive, where for a fleeting instant Jack could see the gleaming brass and well-oiled machinery instead of the sepulchral gloom and twisted shapes around him.

  Costas had disappeared through a gap in the next bulkhead, and as Jack followed, he saw evidence of a different kind of devastation. Instead of damage caused by implosion and by impact with the seabed, he saw the results of a massive explosion—a space some eight meters in diameter where the ship had been disembowelled, eviscerated, leaving only the twisted ends of copper pipes and shattered steel girders jutting out around the edges. To his right he could see through the jagged hole where the hull had been blown open just below the waterline, the plates folded inward like the petals of a flower.

  Below him he saw where the line had been tied off to a girder, and ahead he could see Costas straddling something in the wreckage, a long cylindrical shape, his head bent down at the far end. The intercom crackled again. “I just need to finish making this safe,” Costas said. “It’s what I was doing while you were having your regulator malfunction on the surface.”

  Jack pulled himself through the bulkhead and swam up behind, staring in disbelief. “My God. You’re defusing a torpedo.”

  “Fuse immunisation, to be technical. And not just any torpedo. This is a British torpedo.”

  “That’s impossible. Clan Macpherson was a British merchantman, torpedoed by a German U-boat.”

  “That’s the official line. But take a closer look.”

  Jack inspected the torpedo’s propeller and lower body. Costas was right. The torpedo was a British Mark VIII, the standard type launched from British submarines during the Second World War. He stared in astonishment. How had this gotten here?

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Costas said. “This must have been the second torpedo of a salvo, penetrating the hole in the hull created by the explosion of the first torpedo but then failing to detonate.”

  “The odds against that are high, but it’s possible,” Jack said. “What doesn’t seem possible is that a British submarine sank this ship.”

  “Right now, the origin of this torpedo is academic. We’ve got a more pressing technical issue.”

  Jack glanced at his readout. “Twelve minutes bottom time left.”

  “Okay. I need you to come up on my right side, carefully. We don’t want to dislodge this thing.”

  Jack swam below a fallen girder and slowly finned forward, keeping his breathing shallow in order to maintain precise buoyancy. “Defusing Second World War ordnance is not exactly my speciality. You should know that.”

  “They didn’t teach you this at Cambridge? At MIT, we got the full gamut.”

  “I was researching for a doctorate in archaeology, remember? You were at MIT on a US Navy secondment to study submersibles technology. There’s a small difference.”

  “You also spent two years before that as a Royal Navy diver and in the Special Boat Service. You’d have thought,” Costas continued, wrenching something and grunting, “that some basic ordnance disposal training would have been in order.”

  “You’ll have to take that up with their lordships of the
Admiralty. ‘By Strength and Guile,’ that was our motto. We left the technical stuff to the engineers.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing you’ve got one here now.”

  Jack reached a point where his head was nearly level with Costas’s chest. The zinc-coated warhead of the torpedo, the forward meter or so, had nearly separated from the main body, presumably as a result of the impact that should have detonated it. The warhead was angled upward, and Costas had wedged himself into a space above it, holding himself against a girder with one hand and trying to force a wrench around the nose cap with the other. Jack tried to edge closer, but was blocked by a mass of wreckage. “What’s stopping the torpedo from falling into the hull?”

  “That girder below you,” Costas said.

  “You mean the rusty one that’s nearly sheared off at one end?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I should be able to make it safe,” Costas said, his voice sounding strained as he leaned against the wrench. “Providing the chemicals haven’t leaked and the threads aren’t too rusted. I just need to be sure of the fuse type. I need you to get down under the rear of the warhead and read out the specs on the base.”

  Jack looked down, seeing where Costas had meant. He switched his buoyancy to manual and released a few bubbles of air from his compensator, descending half a meter until he was floating just above the rusted girder. He slowly turned his head, barely breathing, until he could read the lettering under the base. “Okay,” he said. “There’s a red band across the center, which I know means it’s filled with explosive. Above the band it says ‘21-inch Mark VIIIC.’ That confirms it’s a British torpedo. Below the band, it says ‘Explosive weight 805 pounds zero ounces, gross weight 1,894 pounds 9 ounces. Date of filling, February 1943,’ two months before the sinking. That at least makes sense.”

  “The explosive weight means it’s a heavy fill, more than three times the TNT fill of a standard warhead,” Costas said. “Now I need you to read out the letters immediately above the red line, below the type designation.”