Hatteras Blue (27 page)

A litter of bones lay on the deck, one arm curled round the housing. A few pieces of metal lay around it. Buttons. One gleaming coin.

He could see it as if it had just happened. The attack. Men rolling from bunks that had suddenly become death traps. The scramble to leave the sinking boat, where every man on the hatchway ladders fought to displace every other. The explosion aft, and then the plunge. This sailor had managed to dog both hatches before his compartment flooded. But to no avail. His ship was in her last dive.

Galloway's hand tightened on the periscope. He must have heard the keel of the U-boat dig its grave and his in the sandy bottom. Must have waited in the dark, hopeful at first, then slowly despairing. Till sometime later—hours? days?—he had breathed enough carbon dioxide into his steel coffin to slide him into the last black sleep. And then the sea had come creeping in, drop by drop.

He stared for a moment longer, then swam on. A scrap of decayed cloth crumbled away in the backwash from his fins.

The next hatch was dogged as wdll. Galloway examined its edges inch by inch, then opened it gingerly. This has to be it, he thought. Placing a heavy cargo any farther forward would tip a submarine hopelessly out of trim. If it wasn't in this compartment there was no gold on this boat. The door was recalcitrant and he had to shove. At last it too shuddered open. He thrust his light in before him. A moment later he bubbled noisily in relief, and waved the others forward.

Three squares beyond, a steel plate had been laid across the battery covers. Reaching from bulkhead to bulkhead, it was secured to the deck by heavy bolts. He swam inside, exulting, and then halted. The job would not be as easy as he'd hoped A thin, almost invisible wire was looped from bolt to bolt.

He checked his watch as the other two swam inside. They'd been down for fifteen minutes. It seemed like an hour. Not much time left Caffey headed directly toward the plate. Galloway pulled him back and shook his finger at him like a nurse admonishing naughtiness. He aimed his light at the wire and mimed an explosion with one hand.

—Careful. She's ready to blow.

—Right. The boy nodded slowly. —Sorry.

Keyes swam over the two of them and continued on over the steel plate, keeping the tips of his fins well clear of it, and sank to the deck on its opposite side.

Galloway moved closer. His flashlight traced the filament as it curled into a hole drilled through the head of each of the massive bolts. Clever, he thought. You can't unbolt it without snapping the wire. He looked more closely at where the bolt joined the plate and saw the cavity of a weld spot; then another. Three all told. Each bolt was tack-welded to the plate.

He lay on his stomach and tried to persuade his increasingly stupid mind to reason.

Safeguards like this operated by holding a relay open until the wire was severed. Then the relay closed, either ringing an alarm or detonating a charge. The wire was grayish. In spite of its thinness it would have to be insulated if it led through steel. Could there still be a current flowing in it? He couldn't think of any power source available in 1945 that would supply electricity after over forty years' immersion in salt water.

On the other hand, if breaking the wire would have set off a charge, why hadn't it gone off when the power source had been shorted out by the sea?

One answer, he thought fuzzily, might be that the battery was sealed, but the relay wasn't. The battery, with the small load imposed by the loop, might have lasted long enough for the relay to corrode fast in the open position. That, in its turn, meant that he'd have to be careful not to jar it. Any residual voltage at all, even the contact of dissimilar metals in seawater, could set off a sufficiently sensitive detonator. And explosive—that lasted forever.

If, of course, there was a relay at all. He was thinking more and more slowly. It was hard to keep his mind on the job. He wanted to turn graceful somersaults. He reached a hand up to rub his face, found his mask in his way, and was starting to remove it when he caught himself.

Keyes was watching him from the other side of the compartment. His slightly protuberant eyes, flat and cold, seemed to flicker in the light of the flashlights. Galloway brought his hand down from his face and motioned Caffey over. He fished the grease pencil from his vest and wrote in sprawling letters on the deck: GET TOCH.

His cousin frowned behind his mask for a moment, then his face cleared. He flipped him a thumb and left.

Keyes was still watching. Galloway waited until Caffey had had time to reach the outside of the hull, then reached for his belt. Drugged as he was, he felt his pulse accelerate as he poised the cutter and looked up.

The blond man nodded, and Galloway nipped the wire. The jaws slipped through easily and the two cut ends curled apart, waving in the waier. He looked at them stupidly for a moment, forgetting what he'd planned to do next.

Something rattled behind him. It was Caffey, trailing two rubber hoses; the heavy tanks of compressed gas were still aboard
Charlene.
He handed the torch to Galloway.

He blinked hard and waggled his head. He cracked the valves, liberating a spurt of bubbles. A lighter was built into the cutting head. As he squeezed it the flame burst into life, flooding the compartment with brilliance, casting their shadows knife-edged and enormous on the bulkheads. The water boiled furiously around the cutting tip, absorbing the heat, and he was able to get quite close to the work, squinting against the glare. (He remembered only now that he should have brought the filter insert for his mask.) Holding it with both hands, he drew the flame slowly in a four-inch circle centered on each bolt head.

He completed the last circle, turned down the flame, and propped the torch near the door. It rumbled and popped, illuminating the compartment. He waved to the two others, and pointed down.

—Take hold at each end and lift.

He looked at his watch again as they swam to their places. He had to stare at it for several seconds before he could calculate the time from the position of the hands. Bad shape, he thought. Only minutes left. He and Jack would have to go up then. There was still gas in their tissues from the earlier dive. Keyes would have a few safe minutes longer.

He made a lifting motion with his thumb. The kneeling divers vented clouds of used air as they strained. The plate screeched sideways perhaps an inch, then Keyes's end came up enough to clear the bolt heads. Galloway tried to favor his sore back as he helped the two of them pull the sheet steel out of the way.

A meter-square pit was revealed by the removal of the decking. He probed it with his flashlight. Some six inches below the deck level was a surface of green metal. He did not touch that. He worked around it with the light, peering up under the deckplates. At last he saw what he wanted. A relay box. It was attached to the side of the green thing. An armored cable led from it to somewhere he could not see.

He presumed it led to the explosives.

Galloway studied this for several seconds, feeling fatigued and bored. He could think of no way to disconnect the relay without risking initiation of the charge. Any jar or vibration might close the contacts that led to the detonator. He could cut the cable, but as he did so the jaws of the cutters would short the wires inside. He chewed his mouthpiece for a moment, then decided, Well, if I can't make it safe, maybe I can work around it. He picked up the torch again and turned up the cutting flame.

Working as carefully as he could, Galloway burned a sloppy rectangle out of the steel deck. When he set the torch aside his teeth eased off the rubber. He now had three inches of clearance around the relay.

He stared down into the hole for a while then, his mind vacant, and at last recollected what he was about. He thrust his arm into the hole, down the side of the green box, and felt around. It was about two feet on a side. His fingers explored what felt like a handle. This seemed promising. He pulled on the handle experimentally.

It rocked.

Galloway stopped. He hadn't expected that. If it moved that easily it was light. Therefore, he reasoned painfully, it might not be full of gold. He glanced across the compartment. The mind behind Keyes's narrowed eyes had obviously come to the same conclusion.

They would have to lift it out, and see what else was in the cell.

He communicated this to the others. The three of them pulled the box upward, very Carefully, scraping it against the deck edge away from the relay. It was even lighter than he'd thought. That could be misleading, he reminded himself. It might be buoyant here, yet heavy in air. But it wasn't gold. When it was free they laid it on the deck.

Galloway examined it closely in the flickering glare. Distantly, through the intoxicant haze of nitrogen, he felt excitement. Bronze, yes, he'd guessed that from the verdigris tinge. Stained green by decades in the sea. The lid was hinged and hasped, held down by a corroded brass lock. Stamped into it was—he peered close—yes, an eagle and swastika, and above that the double-lightning runes of the SS.

He glanced at the others. Keyes, across from him, made an impatient gesture. Galloway nodded. He was impatient too. He lifted the torch.

The flame sliced through the hasp like a sharp knife through modeling clay. The lock clanged off the deck and disappeared into the open void below them. Galloway braced his knees and battered the lid up with the heel of his hand.

The box was packed to the top with currency, neatly stacked, neatly banded with white paper. Blue hundred-pound notes with portraits of King George VI. Fat sheafs of red notes, Cyrillic-lettered, with pictures of workers with raised hammers. Ornate notes that said 1000 Cruziero. Others he didn't recognize. And fully half of the top layer was a familiar green.

He looked across the lid at Caffey. The boy's eyes were wide.

Galloway's hand hovered over the rows. The part of his mind that never ceased watching noted dispassionately that it was trembling. At last he picked up one of the stacks of hundred-dollar bills. It was a full inch thick and lifting it revealed more beneath. He steadied this in front of his mask. The picture was of Benjamin Franklin; series of 1934; Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

On the other side of the stack was a beautiful engraving of Independence Hall.

Keyes motioned impatiently. Galloway was holding it out to him when one edge of the topmost note flaked into green silt. They stared at it. When Galloway rubbed his fingers slightly the rest of it evaporated, disintegrated, became a falling murk of water-rotted green paper.

A hand came past him and plunged into the box. Around it hundred-pound notes crumbled into powder. Keyes grabbed the box, overturned it. The red, brown, green, blue bundles slid out onto the deck, melting as they tumbled like sugar cubes in hot tea. The particolored murk swirled up around their lights, eddying to and fro as the three men groped through the quickly darkening water.

A heap of frayed powder stirred uneasily on the deckplates.

Galloway, his throat closed in horror, thought: the gold. It had to be here. Where was it? He leaned over the hole where the box had been, moving the torch to send its guttering glare into every corner of the battery cell.

It was empty.
 s

He stared for a moment, unbelieving, then thrust the torch at Caffey. He pulled off his fins and slid through the opening, careless of the jagged weld edges, pushing himself toward the bottom through the swirling paper snow.

The space was about four feet wide. The hull side of it was curved. Hastily welded steel walled it off forward and aft from the rest of the battery bank. The remaining side was taken up by four huge cable penetrations and a run of dozens of smaller wires. There was no way to get into the adjoining cells. Under his feet was a metal grating covering the ballast; under that was the outer hull.

The compartment was empty. The money was gone, disintegrated. And there was no gold. Galloway slammed a fist into unyielding steel, hardly feeling the skin peel off his knuckles. He looked at his watch, then at the two masks above him, and pointed upward. Their stay time was over. They had to surface immediately.

Galloway coiled the torch hose on one arm as they swam back through the hull. At last the probing beam of Caffey's light showed mangled piping. The three men paused at the hole that led to open sea.

Charlene'
s headlight, still burning .brightly, shone into the wreck. As Galloway peered out the sea around and behind it seemed darker, more impenetrable and menacing, than it had when they entered the hull. Our flashlights are getting weak, he thought dimly. They've been on since we dove. That's why the dark is so close. But the headlight made a bright path across the rock-strewn bottom.

He was exiting the wreck, his eyes on the light, when very slowly, very distinctly, a silhouette passed between it and him. Radiance spilled around the heavy body, the raked dorsals and trailing jet-plane caudals. The scissor tail sculled gently to and fro as it slid out of the beam, back into darkness.

He stopped just outside the hull and sank to the bottom. He swept his waning light after it, but it bored into blackness and vanished without trace.

Sharks generally circled for a time before they came in close. He motioned to Caffey and Keyes to come out. Keeping his light trained to the right, he launched himself toward the headlight.