Cuttlefish (19 page)

The air grew older and staler as the boat made its way down the canal under the American gunboat, a ship they'd deliberately chosen for its shallow draught. Tim was on messenger duty on the bridge, and like everyone else there, was watching the mate and the instruments. He had to admit, watching the big telltale dials from the catfish-feelers and the magnetic grapples, that the mate was a master at controlling the submarine. The ship was moving slowly and had to go up the locks and then down onto the Pacific side. It was an exercise in navigation too, as they had to know when they could break free. You could see the sweat bead the mate's forehead as the stress told…but they got there.

“We come out, ja. Prepare to dive,” said the mate with obvious relief, reaching for the lever that channelled their battery power into the fore and aft electromagnetic grapples. There was a sharp click, and the
Cuttlefish
slipped free.

And then things went wrong.

The explosion nearly rattled them off their feet. It was the closest blast they'd experienced in all their brushes with the Royal Navy. Tim nearly panicked. But the mate stayed as cool as if it had not happened, pulling the dive levers, giving the twin screws of the
Cuttlefish
full thrust. Turning and corkscrewing away. “Damage reports, sectors,” he snapped into the speaking tube.

One by one the sectors reported in. A minor leakage aft in upper steerage appeared to be all the damage there was. The “all quiet” light burned. There were no more explosions, and the mate began to
adjust the dive levers. They were already at 220 feet. The
Cuttlefish
could not take much more, Tim knew. Three hundred feet was supposed to be her maximum dive depth.

Slowly, they began to rise again, still moving steadily away from the scene, still on dead quiet. By this time Captain Malkis had come up to the bridge too. There were no more sounds of the hydrophones, though, as the pressure gauge showed they were back to thirty feet, then twenty, and then ten feet—maximum periscope depth. They stopped there. “Raise the periscope,” said the captain. Tim and the other rating on bridge duty wound the double cranks.

“Ah,” said Captain Malkis. “It appears that the Americans were not as good at keeping the canal secret as they might have been. Their gunboat appears to be sinking. I would guess that the bay has been mined, probably by the Royal Navy. That was unlucky for them, and lucky for us that we did not strike it.” He sighed. “We'd better see if we can render any assistance, and hope we do not strike a mine ourselves.”

The
Cuttlefish
turned back towards the coast, coming slowly to the surface. “We'll need a deck party, Mr. Mate,” said the captain. “By the looks of it there are a number of men in the water.”

The submarine surfaced.…

But an explosion and a waterspout soon changed that.

“We're being fired on by the shore batteries, sir!” said the periscope man.

The mate swore. The captain took a deep breath. “It appears they don't want our help, gentlemen. It is time to turn and run.”

So they did.

Tim was relieved to be going away, even if it meant that he now had to run for strong tea. Now all they had between them and Westralia was the vastness of the Pacific. They had an offshore rendezvous to
pick up a cargo of caliche drogues—which were like little submarines themselves, carefully weighed and air-buoyed to neither sink nor float—that the
Cuttlefish
would tow underwater past the blockades on Westralia's ports. But after they'd collected them, attached them, well, then it would be just plain sailing across the open sea, for months, in a small space, with a girl he was not supposed to speak to.

He should have guessed that she wasn't going to put up with that. He was beginning to grasp some truths about Miss Clara Calland.

“We can't just let him get away with it. We have to find out who it is,” she said quietly, on her way to the shower, just when he happened to be cleaning the brass fittings in the passage. She'd walked past him as if he wasn't there. Now, without looking at him, she was talking to him.

He looked around hastily. “Get away with what?” he asked, nervously.

“Treachery, of course. There's a spy on this ship, and we're going to have to catch him, because they won't believe us.” And then she walked on, as if she hadn't spoken to him, as Lieutenant Ambrose walked down the passage.

It was all very well to talk of catching spies, thought Tim, methodically rubbing the brass in small circles. The trouble with boring jobs like this one is that they gave him a great deal too much time to think. But how did one do it? And who could it be?

The problem for any spy was always going to be just how they passed information on to Imperial Security. And of course just how they didn't get killed too, as the attacks on the submarine had not been anything but real. Still…the man back in Rivas had known a great deal about who was on the boat and just who Clara's friend was. Tim wondered if she would have trusted him enough to follow him into a trap.…Not a good thought. He wished now he'd taken the man's money and at least had that for evidence.

His suspicion lay with Sparks the Marconi operator. He could use the ship's wireless and its powerful shortwave transmitter. He told Clara this the next day when they just happened to encounter each other in the passage again. Purely by chance, Tim didn't believe.

“Good point,” said Clara, wrinkling her high forehead. Then she shook her head. “But it couldn't be him. He knew that Mother and I were on board and not at the smuggler's house when that man was trying to bribe you. He could use the Marconi set to pass messages at any time without suspicion falling on him. And it seems as if they've been informed, but only sometimes. I know Sparks doesn't work all the time, and he just leaves the Marconi wireless set on the standard channel when he's off duty. There must be another radio hidden somewhere. You'll have to look for it. I'm not allowed into other people's cabins. Hmm. I wonder if I can make a crystal radio.”

”A what?” asked Tim.

“A simple radio receiver,” she explained. “We made one as part of our science class-work. Only that had some parts we put together. And an earphone. If someone else is using a radio, it must be when Sparks is off duty, or there would be a chance that he might pick up the messages. If I can make a crystal set, I could pick it up.”

“Isn't that really hard to do?” asked Tim, doubtfully.

“Not really, no. Not if you're not inventing it. It's doing it for the first time that's hard.”

Tim was actually the first one to spot the Galapagos Islands, by seeing the birds. He was on masthead watch, which having been terrified of once upon a time, he'd actually come to love. Deck watch was one of the few times one got to be truly alone on the submarine, and out in the Pacific, the decks themselves, extended with spars and nets, were used by the crew for a bit of extra space and, of course, for
sail handling. Out here in midocean away from the sea lanes, only the big gossamer sails were used to propel the
Cuttlefish
, as she rode on her hydrofoil outriggers. The sails were just fairly transparent from close up, but from a few miles off looked rather like a slight blur to any observer. From up in the crow's nest Tim was above the sails that hid the deck, and, as there was only room for two people in the crow's nest if they got very close together indeed, he was alone. It was a good place for quiet, a good place for thinking. That could distract a lookout. It had taken Tim a little while to realise that that might be Volcan Wolf, beyond the birds, and that that vast flock of birds might indicate the islet that he was supposed to be looking out for. He used the voice pipe to let the bridge know, and soon the deck crew were hauling down the sails, and the distant volcanoes were more visible on the horizon.

The
Cuttlefish's
exhausts belched coal smoke, and the compressors started up. Up here, at the tip of the mast, the vibration from them was magnified. Down below the belt-chains were powered up and the submarine began to crank the outrigger-hydrofoils back into position to be the outer hull, shaping the submarine for travel on the surface, pushed by her screws. Underneath the boat itself the telescoping centre-board keel would be coming up. Tim could hear the sail-master's bellows as the sail crew folded and stowed the vast gossamer sails into the compartments inside the outer hull. Tim's task, however, was to keep watch until they had to take down and fold the mast, and strap it to the deck. For the dangerous port runs it was stashed inside the second hull, but they would, they hoped, be using it again in a day or so.

They were due to pick up the drogues here, if the local weather—the
garuas
—cooperated. By the looks of the cloud buildup to the west, Tim had been lucky to see the islands, and the drizzly rain of the
garua
would soon resume. It was ideal cover, even though it meant that the rendezvous would be tricky. Picking up cargo was always a dangerous business. The drogues would be left at a sea-mount,
anchored to the bottom, for the submarine to pick up. It was hard for observers to spot them, but it was also a good place for a trap: the submarine had to arrive at the drogues, sooner or later. It also required that the drop-off was precise. A buoy on the surface was easier to find, but it could easily be found by the wrong people, so that method could not be used. But finding something on the bottom, without a marker, was near impossible. The system the submarines had evolved was quite simple—the spot was marked with a buoy…but the buoy was merely attached to a lobster trap, with the drogue anchor dropped within yards of the buoy. It could still, Tim had heard from Big Eddie, take forever to find.

Clara was on the bridge as Mate Werner took control of the submarine on the approach to the pickup point. She'd found that the mate was, since her Rivas exploits, actually easier to deal with than the captain. He let her up on the bridge, sometimes. He was a cautious commander. They crept in underwater, on the batteries, with only the periscope visible, and with heavy drizzle and fog cover overhead.

It was unnecessary, this time. They found the buoy, and the divers went out, hooked up the line, and took an air hose to the big torpedo-like tubes of caliche—nitrates for the mines in Westralia. They would be towed like barges behind the submarine. The divers pumped enough air into their buoy section to make them neutrally buoyant, so they hung like whales in the sea, as they were pulled along. They did slow the
Cuttlefish
down, acting like sea-anchors, despite their shape, but it meant she could transport many tons of extra cargo.