Fear is the Key (10 page)

I glanced over his shoulder and had a look at
the children. They were, as yet, no more than dark
blurs against a slightly less dark skyline, but there
was little enough to let me see that they averaged
about six feet and were built in proportion. Nor
was the
Matapan
so little: she was at least forty
feet long, twin-masted, with curious athwartships
and fore-and-aft rails just above the height of
a tall man's head. Both men and vessel were
Greek: the crew were Greeks to a man and if
the
Matapan
wasn't entirely Grecian, she had at
least been built by Greek shipwrights who had
come to and settled down in Florida just for the
express purpose of building those sponge ships.
With its slender graceful curves and upswept bows
Homer would have had no trouble in identifying
it as a direct lineal descendant of the galleys that
had roamed the sunlit Aegean and the Levant
countless centuries ago. I felt a sudden sense of
gratitude and security that I was aboard such a
vessel, accompanied by such men.

‘A fine night for the job in hand,' I said.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.' The humour had left his
voice. ‘I don't think so. It is not the night that John
Zaimis would have chosen.'

I didn't point out that choice didn't enter into
the matter. I said: ‘Too clear, is that it?'

‘Not that.' He turned away for a moment, gave
some orders in what could only have been Greek,
and men started moving about the deck, unhitching
ropes from the bollards on the landing stage. He
turned back to me. ‘Excuse me if I speak to them
in our old tongue. Those three boys are not yet six
months in this country. My own boys, they will
not dive. A hard life, they say, too hard a life. So
we have to bring the young men from Greece …
I don't like the weather, Mr Talbot. It is too fine
a night.'

‘That's what I said.'

‘No.' He shook his head vigorously. ‘Too fine.
The air is too still, and the little breeze it comes
from the north-west? That is bad. Tonight the sun
was a flame in the sky. That is bad. You feel the
little waves that are rocking the
Matapan
? When
the weather is good the little waves they slap
against the hull every three seconds, maybe four.
Tonight?' He shrugged. ‘Twelve seconds, maybe
every fifteen. For forty years I have sailed out
of Tarpon Springs. I know the waters here, Mr
Talbot, I would be lying if I say any man knows
them better. A big storm comes.'

‘A big storm, eh?' When it came to big storms
I didn't fancy myself very much. ‘Hurricane war
ning out?'

‘No.'

‘Do you always get those signs before a hurricane?'
Captain Zaimis wasn't going to cheer me
up, somebody had to try.

‘Not always, Mr Talbot. Once, maybe fifteen
years ago, there was a storm warning but none
of the signs. Not one. The fishermen from the
South Caicos went out. Fifty drowned. But when
it is September and the signs are there, then the
big storm comes. Every time it comes.'

Nobody was going to cheer me up tonight.
‘When will it come?' I asked.

‘Eight hours, forty-eight hours, I do not know.'
He pointed due west, the source of the long slow
oily swell. ‘But it comes from there … You will
find your rubber suit below, Mr Talbot.'

Two hours and thirteen miles later we were
uncomfortably nearer that still-distant storm. We
had travelled at full speed, but full speed on the
Matapan
was nothing to write home about. Almost
a month ago two civilian engineers, sworn to
secrecy, had bypassed the exhaust of the
Matapan's
engine to an underwater cylinder with a curiously
arranged system of baffle plates. They'd done a
fine job, the exhaust level of the
Matapan
was no
more than a throaty whisper, but back pressure
had cut the thrust output in half. But it was fast
enough. It got there. It got there too fast for
me, and the farther out we went into the starlit
gulf the longer and deeper became the troughs
between the swells, the more convinced I was of
the hopelessness of what I had set out to do. But
someone had to do it and I was the man who had
picked the joker.

There was no moon that night. By and by, even
the stars began to go out. Cirrus clouds in long grey
sheets began to fill the sky. Then the rain came, not
heavy, but cold and penetrating, and John Zaimis
gave me a tarpaulin for shelter – there was a cabin
on the
Matapan
, but I had no wish to go below.

I must have dozed off, lulled by the motion
of the boat, for the next I knew the rain had
stopped spattering on the tarpaulin and someone
was shaking my shoulder. It was the skipper, and
he was saying softly: ‘There she is, Mr Talbot.
The X 13.'

I stood up, using a mast to support myself – the
swell was becoming really unpleasant now – and
followed the direction of his pointing hand. Not
that he needed to point, even at the distance of a
mile the X 13 seemed to fill the entire sky.

I looked at it, looked away, then looked back
again. It was still there. I'd lost more than most,
I didn't have a great deal to live for, but I did
have a little, so I stood there and wished myself
ten thousand miles away.

I was scared. If this was the end of the road, I
wished to God I'd never set foot on it.

I'd heard of those off-shore rigs before. I'd even
had one of them described to me by a man who
designed them, but I'd never seen one before and
now that I did I realized that the description I'd
had had been on the same level as my imaginative
capacity to clothe with flesh the bare bones of facts
and statistics.

I looked at the X 13 and I just didn't believe it.

It was enormous. It was angular and ungainly as
was no other structure I'd ever seen before. And,
above all, it was unreal, a weird combination of
Jules Verne and some of the fancier flights of space
fiction.

At first glance, in the fleeting patches of dim
starlight, it looked like a forest of huge factory
chimneys sticking up out of the sea. Halfway up
their height those chimneys were all joined by a
deep and massive platform through the sides of
which those chimneys penetrated. And, at the very
right hand side, built on the platform itself and
reaching up into the sky, mysterious and fragile
in the spiderlike tracery of its slenderly interwoven
girders, twice the height of the chimneys and
outlined against the night sky in its fairy-like festoon
of white and coloured operating and aircraft
warning lights, was the oil-drilling derrick itself.

I'm not one of those characters who go about
pinching themselves to convince themselves that
things are real, but if I were I would never have
had a better opportunity or reason to pinch than
right then. To see that weird Martian structure
suddenly thrusting itself up out of the sea would
have had the most hardened topers in the country
screaming to climb aboard the water wagon.

The chimneys, I knew, were massive tubular
metal legs of almost unbelievable strength, each
one capable of supporting a weight of several
hundred tons, and on this rig I could count no
less than fourteen of those legs, seven on each
side, and there must have been a stretch of four
hundred feet between the outer ones at the ends.
And the astonishing thing was that this huge platform
was mobile: it had been towed there with
the platform deep-sunk in the sea and the legs
thrusting high up almost to the level of the top
of the derrick: arrived at the right spot, those
legs had dropped right down to the floor of the
sea – and then the whole huge platform and
derrick, maybe four or five thousand tons in all
and powered by huge engines, had risen dripping
from the sea till it was safe beyond the reach of
even the highest of the hurricane-lashed waves of
the Gulf of Mexico.

All this I had known; but knowing and seeing
weren't the same things at all.

A hand touched my arm and I jumped. I had
quite forgotten where I was.

‘What do you think of him, Mr Talbot?' It was
the skipper. ‘You like, eh?'

‘Yes. It's nice. How much did this little toy cost?
Any idea?'

‘Four million dollars.' Zaimis shrugged. ‘Maybe
four and a half.'

‘A fair investment,' I conceded. ‘Four million
dollars.'

‘Eight,' Zaimis corrected. ‘A man cannot just
come and start drilling, Mr Talbot. First he buy
the land under the sea, five thousand acres, three
million dollars. Then to drill a well – just one
well, maybe two miles deep – it cost perhaps
three-quarters of a million. If he's lucky.'

Eight million dollars. And not an investment
either. A gamble. Geologists could be wrong, they
were more often wrong than right. General Blair
Ruthven, a man with eight million dollars to throw
away: what colossal prize could a man like that,
with a reputation like his, be working for if he
was prepared, as he so obviously was prepared,
to step outside the law? There was only one way
of finding out. I shivered and turned to Zaimis.

‘You can get in close? Real close, I mean?'

‘All the way.' He pointed to the near side of
the vast structure. ‘You have seen the ship tied
up alongside?'

I hadn't but I could see her now, a lean dark
shape maybe two hundred and fifty feet long,
completely dwarfed by the massive rig, the tips
of her masts reaching no more than halfway up
to the platform deck of the oil rig. I looked back
at Zaimis.

‘Is that going to queer our pitch, John?'

‘Get in our way, you mean? No. We make a
wide curve and approach from the south.'

He touched the rudder and the
Matapan
swung
away to port, heading to bypass the X 13 to the
south: to have gone to the north, the right, would
have brought the
Matapan
under the glare of the
arc and floodlights that illuminated the big working
platform round the derrick. Even at a mile we
could clearly see men moving around the derrick
and the subdued hum of powerful machinery, like
that of diesel compressors, came at us clearly over
the darkened waters. So much, at least, was in
our favour; it had not occurred to me that work
on those mobile rigs would go on twenty-four
hours a day but at least the clamour of their
operations would drown out the throaty whisper
of the
Matapan's
engines.

The boat had begun to corkscrew violently. We
were quartering to the south-west, taking that
long, deepening swell on our starboard bow and
water was beginning to break over the sides of the
boat. And I was getting wet. I crouched under a
tarpaulin near the rudder, lit a last cigarette under
cover and looked at the skipper.

‘That ship out there, John. What chances of it
moving away?'

‘I don't know. Not much, I think. It is a supply
and power ship. It brings out food and drink and
mud for the drills and thousands of gallons of oil.
Look closely, Mr Talbot. It is a kind of small tanker.
Now it brings oil for the big machines, and perhaps
electricity from its dynamos. Later, when the strike
comes, it takes oil away.'

I peered out under a corner of the tarpaulin. It
did look, as John said, a kind of small tanker. I
had seen the same type of ship years ago in the
war; the high, raised, bare centre-deck and after
accommodation and engine-room of the inshore
fleet oiler. But what interested me more right
then was John's statement that it was there most
of the time.

‘I want to go aboard that ship, John. Can do?' I
didn't want to go aboard, but I knew I had to. The
idea of a vessel more or less permanently moored
there had never occurred to me: now that I knew
it to be a fact it was suddenly the most important
factor in my considerations.

‘But – but I was told you wanted to go aboard
the rig itself, Mr Talbot.'

‘Yes. Perhaps. But later. Can you manage the
ship?'

‘I can try.' Captain Zaimis sounded grim. ‘It is a
bad night, Mr Talbot.'

He was telling me. I thought it was a terrible
night. But I said nothing. Still angling south-west,
we were passing directly opposite the middle of
one of the long sides of the rig and I could see that
the massive steel columns supporting the derrick
platform were not so symmetrically arranged as
I had imagined. Between the fourth and fifth
of the huge legs, on either side, was a gap of
perhaps a hundred and fifty feet and here the
platform was scooped out to a much lower level
than the main deck. On this lower level the thin
spindly cigar-shaped outline of a crane reached
up as high as the topmost level of the columns:
the ship was moored directly below this cut-out
well-deck, spanning the gap and a couple of steel
pillars on either side of the gap.

Five minutes later the skipper changed course
until we were heading due west again, in a direction
that would have taken us clear to the south of
the rig, but we had hardly time to get accustomed
to the comparative comfort of heading straight
into the swell when he put the helm over again,
and headed north-west. We steered straight in,
as it seemed, for the most southerly leg on the
landward side of the rig, passing within forty feet
of the bow of the ship moored alongside, scraped
by the leg with only feet to spare and so found
ourselves directly under the massive platform of
the oil rig.

One of the young Greeks, a black-haired bronzed
boy by the name of Andrew, was busy in the bows,
and as we passed right under the platform and
came abreast of the second pillar from the south
on the seaward side he called softly to John and
at the same time threw a lifebelt, attached to a coil
of light rope, as far as he could to one side. As he
did so John cut the engine to the merest whisper,
and the
Matapan
, urged by the swell, drifted slowly
back past one side of the pillar while the lifebelt
came back on the other, so passing the light line
completely round the pillar. Andrew picked up
the lifebelt with a boat-hook and started pulling
in the grass line which had been bent on to a
heavier manila: within a minute the
Matapan
was
securely moored to the pillar, with the engine just
ticking over sufficiently to give her enough way
to take the strain of the rope so that she wouldn't
snag too heavily in the steadily deepening swell.
Nobody had heard us, nobody had seen us: not, at
least, as far as we could tell.

‘You will be very quick,' John said softly,
anxiously. ‘I do not know how long we shall be
able to wait. I smell the storm.'

He was anxious. I was anxious. We were all
anxious. But all he had to do was to sit in that
boat. Nobody was going to beat his head in or
tie rocks to him and throw him into the Gulf of
Mexico.

‘You've got nothing to worry about,' I said
reassuringly. Nor had he, compared to me. ‘Half
an hour.' I stripped off my overcoat, snapped the
vulcanized neck and wrist cuffs of the tanned twill
and rubber suit I was wearing beneath it, slipped
an oxygen apparatus over my shoulders, tightened
the straps, took the nose and eye piece in one hand
and coat, pants and hat under the other arm and
stepped gingerly over the side into the rubber raft
the crew had already slipped over the side.

Andrew sat at the after end of this flimsy contraption,
holding a line in his hand, and, as soon
as I'd settled, let go his grip on the gunwale of the
Matapan
. The drift of the swell carried us quickly
under the gloomy mass of the platform, Andrew
paying out the line as we went. Paddling a rubber
dinghy in a swell is difficult enough, paddling it
in a specific direction against such a swell all but
impossible: it would be a hundred times easier to
regain the
Matapan
by hauling ourselves back hand
over hand.

At a whispered word from me Andrew checked
the rope and took a turn. We were now close up
to the side of the ship, but still in deep shadow:
the ship lay close in to the massive legs, but the
platform overhung those legs, and so ourselves,
by a good dozen feet, so that the angled light from
the floodlights by the crane on the well-deck above
barely succeeded in touching the faraway side – the
port side – of the upper deck of the ship. All the
rest of the vessel lay shrouded in deep darkness
except for a patch of light that fell on the fo'c'sle
from a rectangular gap high up in the overhang of
the platform. Through this hole was suspended the
vertical gangway, a zig-zag set of caged-in metal
steps like a fire-escape, which, I supposed, could
be raised or lowered, with the ebb and flow of
the tide.

The conditions might have been made for me.

The ship was low in the water, the ribbed oil
tanks standing high but the gunwale only at waist
level. I took a pencil light from my coat and went
aboard.

I moved right for'ard in the darkness. Apart from
a glimmer from the accommodation aft there was
no light at all on board, not even navigation or
riding lights: the Christmas tree illuminations of
the oil derrick made those superfluous.

There were deep sliding vertical doors giving to
the raised fo'c'sle. I pulled the head and foot bolts
on one of these, waited for a slight roll of the ship
to help and eased the door back a crack, enough
for my head, arm and light. Barrels, paint drums,
ropes, wood, heavy chains – it was some sort of
bosun's store. There was nothing there for me. I
eased the door back, slid in the bolts and left.

I made my way aft over the tanks. There were
raised trapdoors with large clips which stuck out
at all angles, there were fore-and-aft and athwart-
ships pipes of every conceivable size and at every
conceivable height, there were valves, big wheels
for turning those valves and nasty knobbly ventilators,
and I don't think I missed one of all of those,
with my head, kneecaps or shins, on the way aft. It
was like hacking your way through a virgin jungle.
A metal virgin jungle. But I made it, and I made it
with the sure knowledge that there wasn't a trap
or hatch on that deck able to take anything larger
than a human being.

There was nothing for me in the stern either.
Most of the deck space and superstructure there
was given over to cabins: the one big coach-type
hatch was glassed in and had a couple of skylights
open. I used the flash. Engines. That ruled that
hatch out. And the whole of the upper deck.

Andrew was waiting patiently in the dinghy. I
felt, rather than saw, his inquiring look and shook
my head. Not that I had to shake my head. When
he saw me clamping on my rubber skull-cap and
oxygen mask that was all the answer he needed.
He helped me make fast a life-line round the
waist, and it took the two of us a whole minute:
the rubber raft was pitching and bouncing about
so much that we had one hand for ourselves and
only one for the job.

With the closed oxygen circuit the safe maximum
depth I could get was about twenty-five feet.
The oiler drew perhaps fifteen, so I had plenty
in hand. The underwater search for a wire, or
for something suspended from a wire, proved far
easier than I had anticipated, for even at fifteen feet
the effect of the surface swell motion was almost
negligible. Andrew paid out, slackened and tightened
the life-line to adjust to my every underwater
movement as if he had been doing this sort of thing
all his working life, which indeed he had. I covered
the entire submerged length of the oiler twice,
keeping close to the bilge keels on either side,
examining every foot of the way with a powerful
underwater flash. Halfway along the second sweep
I saw a huge moray eel, which writhed out of
the darkness beyond the beam of the torch and
thrust its head with its evil unwinking eyes and
vicious poisonous teeth right up against the glass
of the flashlight: I clicked the beam on and off a
couple of times and he was gone. But that was
all I saw.