The Depths

by John Creasey

  Copyright & Information

  The Depths

  First published in 1963

  © John Creasey Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1963-2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of John Creasey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2013 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN EAN Edition

  0755123468 9780755123469 Print

  0755133803 9780755133802 Mobi

  0755134192 9780755134199 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Creasey – Master Storyteller - was born in Surrey, England in 1908 into a poor family in which there were nine children, John Creasey grew up to be a true master story teller and international sensation. His more than 600 crime, mystery and thriller titles have now sold 80 million copies in 25 languages. These include many popular series such as Gideon of Scotland Yard, The Toff, Dr Palfrey and The Baron.

  Creasey wrote under many pseudonyms, explaining that booksellers had complained he totally dominated the 'C' section in stores. They included:

  Gordon Ashe, M E Cooke, Norman Deane, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday, Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton, J J Marric, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson, Anthony Morton and Jeremy York.

  Never one to sit still, Creasey had a strong social conscience, and stood for Parliament several times, along with founding the One Party Alliance which promoted the idea of government by a coalition of the best minds from across the political spectrum.

  He also founded the British Crime Writers' Association, which to this day celebrates outstanding crime writing. The Mystery Writers of America bestowed upon him the Edgar Award for best novel and then in 1969 the ultimate Grand Master Award. John Creasey's stories are as compelling today as ever.

  “Ocean Detectives”

  U.S. Probes Sea Bed

  Eight special ships to spy out the mysteries of the sea bed are being built by the Americans as part of a 10-year exploration of “inner space”.

  It is the biggest research and mapping programme ever undertaken by one nation.

  Our scientists know less about the threequarters of the world’s surface under water than they know of the moon.

  And the Russians are so curious about the American programme – code name Tenoc – that some of their fast submarines are shadowing three U.S. project ships already working on the plan.

  The ships, the U.S. Navy’s Bowditch, Dutton, and Michelson, all converted merchantmen, work with the Fleet Ballistic Polaris Missile programme.

  They are now floating laboratories in which oceanographers conduct research for application in naval warfare, particularly anti-submarine warfare.

  Instruments and facilities installed study the effect of the environment on sound transmission in the ocean;

  Test the environment effects of the ocean on scientific and naval instruments, and –

  Obtain background scientific information to improve ocean surveillance systems.

  The plan for this vast exploration is based on the strategy that victory or defeat in future wars may well hinge upon superior knowledge of the seas.

  This news story in the Daily Express of 5th April, 1962, appeared a month after this book was written.

  Prologue

  1951. The medical conference on board the S.S. Medici, a fine new ocean-going liner, attracted enormous publicity. The governing bodies of the Chief Medical Organisation of the World had chartered the liner in order to make sure of secrecy during the discussions and the main sessions. The subject of the conference had leaked out a few hours before the liner set sail from Buenos Aires, for a week’s cruise in the South Atlantic. The subject was of absorbing interest to all mankind, for it concerned the prolongation of the average life span. Several research groups were to announce their findings after twenty years of inquiry and experiment. Sensational stories circulated in all the world’s newspapers. The S.S. Medici. was in regular contact with the outside world, by radio, for the first five days of its cruise, and was last reported near Tristan da Cunha. Then all contact was broken. Air and sea searches were organised, the world was agog for news, but the S.S. Medici was never seen again. It was presumed sunk with all on board.

  Some reports of a severe hurricane in the area persisted but no details were established.

  1953. The S.S. Olympic, a new liner christened in the year of the Olympic Games in Japan, carried hundreds of the world’s greatest athletes from great triumphs in the world of athletics. Russian, American, British, French, German, Japanese – gold medallists from many countries were on board on a torch-bearing cruise from Japan to Europe via New York. Radio contact was broken when the S.S. Olympic was three days out from New York. In spite of air and sea searches, the ship was not seen again. There was no news of any survivors.

  A report from a French submarine of a violent storm in the vicinity was noted but there was no corroborative evidence.

  1955. The S.S. Venus of Milo, an Italian liner of forty thousand tons displacement, was given the greatest send-off ever known for a liner, and received enormous space in the newspapers. On board were Body Beautiful teams from all of Europe, going to the United States for the World’s Most Beautiful Body contest. Over six hundred of the world’s loveliest girls and most handsome men were on board – each national group under the strictest supervision. The Press called the S.S. Venus of Milo the Beauty Boat. Newspapermen sent long, ecstatic reports home of the almost unbelievable convocation of perfect human bodies, until, four days out, silence fell. After the first surprise, alarm began to possess the organisers … and the alarm was fully justified, for no trace of ship, crew or the body beautiful passengers was ever found.

  A radio ham, in Southern Ireland, reported picking up a message from the ship, very faintly. The message said: “A tremendous wave is approaching the ship …”

  That was all.

  Chapter One

  THE PROFESSOR

  No one seeing Professor Corvell for the first time, without knowing his name, would have had the slightest reason for thinking him remarkable – except for his nose. It was large and rubbery-looking, and on many men would have looked odd, even grotesque, but somehow it fitted in with the rest of his face. He had something of the appearance of a priest, a humble one, for his lips were full and soft and his cheeks were plump and pale and soft, his face was round and chubby, his hair a pale golden colour and very silky.

  Anyone being abjured in a crowd to ‘look, there’s Professor Corvell’ would have been bewildered, and probably the last man selected would have been Corvell himself. He was so young. The aura of age and experience still hung about the word ‘professor’ and if one did not think of Corvell as a priest, one thought of him as an overgrown schoolboy. He was in f
act twenty-seven. He had been an infant prodigy in a restricted world yet one which had illimitable range – mathematics. At the age of sixteen he had nonplussed most of his tutors, at seventeen he had vanished, as it were, into the curious limbo of the nation’s backroom boys. It was not only that he was a kind of human electronic computer; he had vision, which no electronic machine yet made had acquired.

  Professor Corvell had first burst into prominence by accident. The Russians had sent another man into orbit, the Americans had followed suit, jubilation on both sides had been tempered by the fact that the other might have the first landing party ready for the moon. Then the professor had come out with his modest little statement:

  “To ensure accuracy, of course, we need several space stations between the earth and the moon, and I am glad to say that we are able, in this country, to put a space station into a stationary position and service it from earth or for the moon.”

  At first, no one believed him.

  Then, suddenly, British Government policy permitted him to be interviewed on Tonight, later on Panorama, finally on This Week. Each appearance was spread further afield by Euro vision, and several television hams in North America picked up what he said, strongly. They even had the first trans-Atlantic picture of him. Moscow scoffed; Washington was cautious. With a daring which would have been inconceivable only a few months earlier, the government allowed Corvell to visit first Moscow to confer with Russian physicists, then Washington. The most renowned scientists on both sides admitted that Professor Corvell appeared to have solved one of the great problems of the space age.

  On his return from the two trips, the professor came down on the side of American ice cream.

  “It is not so much that it is better,” he declared, “but it has infinitely more variety.”

  This was taken, correctly, as an indication that the government had decided that he had said enough; the other space age nations had, in a way, been warned. Professor Corvell dropped back into proper obscurity, one of the most famous and more enterprising ice cream manufacturers in the United States brought out its thirty-first flavour, Professor C – a luminous ice cream which glowed pink in the dark. Now and again references were made to the plump little man with the big nose and the sweet tooth, but he was no longer on the centre of the stage. What very few people knew was that Corvell had finished with space stations a long time before his statements; these utterances had been made (and approved by the government) to distract attention from his latest interest: the control of water. The uncontrolled and uncontrollable oceans of the world offered a new challenge. Always fascinated by hydro-dynamics, Corvell was toying with the fantastic calculations necessary to find out whether in fact the tides of the world could be made to stand still, or do what man wanted them to do.

  For a long time before this interest Corvell was the central figure in the activities of Z5, the international secret organisation led by Dr Alexander Palfrey, with the Russian Stefan Andromovitch as his second in command. The reason for such prominence was simple. The Professor had become a kind of communal property. Each of the three major space age nations needed his knowledge and his potential, and those with vision believed that he was the greatest mathematician and physicist of his age – in fact of any age. Day and night, Z5 watched over him, not always with his knowledge. He was not a problem, as such. He realised a little of his own value to his own country, he had a proper international outlook, and he went nowhere without informing Palfrey’s men. His pleasures were few. He was a teetotaller – not, he would say brightly, that he had any prejudice against alcohol as such, but he knew of nothing more likely to disturb mental judgement.

  “After all,” he would joke, “it would startle you to see a large computer suddenly dancing a jig, wouldn’t it?”

  He himself was quite light on his feet, and a much better dancer than most; he had a good sense of rhythm.

  Then came the time of his nervous breakdown …

  The London and the British headquarters of Z5 had been moved, after the experience in The Terror, and were now underneath one of the great new commercial buildings in the heart of London. When the crowds had looked through the windows obligingly let into the wooden screens for the edification of the curious, no one had dreamed what was going to be put into the enormous hole. The ostensible purpose was of an impregnable vault, safer even than the Bank of England’s, and only after it had been finished, the air-conditioning perfected, the lifts installed, the escape shafts built and the anti-radiation devices perfected, did Palfrey and his operatives take over.

  Z5 had been under very great pressure for some time, since the defection of many of its English members. Palfrey had rebuilt the British – and incidentally the main European – headquarters in men, just as the governments of the major powers had rebuilt the structure with reinforced concrete. As far as it was humanly possible to be sure, every member – in fact everyone who stepped inside this place – was a perfect security risk; zero. There was a permanent staff of seventy, accommodation for eating and sleeping and for recreation for two hundred and fifty – against any time of emergency – and there was a floating population of agents from other parts of the world, often as many as twenty-five at any one time. It was a well-integrated little community. Some of its members spent weeks in the perfect air-conditioned atmosphere, without going up to the diesel-perfumed freshness of London. Others went up most days; there was no restriction on their movements except that imposed by their personal preferences and their work. Palfrey, who travelled a great deal, occasionally spent two or three successive days in the underground headquarters, and had come to regard such a sojourn as quite normal.

  The secretariat of Z5 was comparatively small; there were fifteen persons in all. The Secretary-General was a tall, pale- faced, bright-eyed Scotsman, named Alec Merritt. Merritt had the same kind of mind as Corvell’s, except that it was not tuned to the same mathematical perfection; the organisation mind. Next to his small office was a larger one which looked like the operations centre of a Service Ministry, and in fact it was an operations room. Instead of showing the position of hostile and/or unfriendly and allied naval air bases, aircraft, ships and missile bases and guided missiles, it showed the position of (a) Z5 agents throughout the world, (b) the position of men suspected of being potentially dangerous, and (c) men who had to be protected by Z5 because they might at any time be in some kind of danger.

  Professor Corvell, of course, was one of these last.

  He knew that Palfrey and Z5 were not secret service men in the normal sense; in a way they were in advance of the times.

  During the second world war they had worked as an allied secret service, after the war they had been used to work against individuals and groups who were setting out to make excessive profits out of human misery, and also against any groups and individuals who had a Hitler mentality. In those early postwar days, it was surprising how many believed that some form of dictatorship was the best way of governing a country, and surprising how many individuals realised what enormous power one man (or a small group) could get into his own or its own hands with the right scientific advisers.

  As the space age and the nuclear age developed, so the power which individuals could acquire increased. It was no longer necessary to try to blackmail the world, as Hitler did, with a nation armed to the teeth. It was possible to use a few comparatively small nuclear weapons based in remote parts of the world. It was Z5’s task to seek out indications of any individuals or groups who sought such power, and to report regularly to those governments who helped to pay for the Department. It also had to watch men, like Professor Corvell, who were communal property.

  A mind such as Corvell’s could be very dangerous indeed if subjugated to hostile control. Palfrey’s job was to seek out anyone who might attempt to harm, to injure or to corrupt him.

  He well-remembered his first talk with the professor. He, Palfrey, was over a head
taller, at six-feet one. He was a deceptively slender-looking man, with regular features, silky fair hair (that he had in common with Corvell) lazy-looking blue eyes with lids which seemed to droop a lot, as if he were sleepy.

  “Just what do you do, Dr Palfrey?” Corvell had inquired, giving a cherubic smile. “Naturally I have heard a great deal about you, but – well, I return to my question. Just what do you do? I am told that I may safely place myself or rather my well-being, in your hands. I am most impressed.”

  Palfrey had looked at him thoughtfully.

  “The national secret services look after the interests of their own countries, Professor – the Russians have theirs, the Americans theirs, every nation its own. The United Nations have a liaison with most of these, and a small organisation exclusive to it, which looks after the interests of the U.N., and advises where it is being threatened. Both are military and economic and – basically – political. Z5 is not political. It is subsidised by the governments of a group of big and medium-sized powers to try to make sure that while they’re looking after their own big fish, little fish don’t start making trouble.”

  “And what would you regard as a little fish?”

  “Any individual, group of individuals, corporations, political revolutionaries – virtually anyone who is not representing a government or a nation, and who might stir up trouble.”

  “I quite see the point,” Corvell had said, rubbing his big nose and smiling happily. “I had no real idea. Supposing I were to be fired by some perverse notion, for instance—”