When eight bells toll (27 page)

"Calvert nears the sunset of his days," I said. "My mind's going. Sure they'll leave. But not for forty-eight hours yet. They will think they have plenty of time, it's less than eight hours since we instructed Sergeant MacDonald to tell them 'hat we were going to the mainland for help."

"I see," she said dully. "And what did you do on Dubh Sgeir to-night, Philip?"

"Not much. But enough." Another little white lie. "Enough to confirm my every last suspicion. I swam ashore to the link harbour and picked the side door of the boathouse. It's quite a boathouse. Not only is it three times as big on the inside as it is from the outside, but it's stacked with diving equipment."

"Diving equipment?"

"Heaven help us all, you're almost as stupid as I am. How on earth do you think they recover the stuff from the sunken vessels? They use a diving-boat and the Dubh Sgeir boathouse is its home."

"Was - was that all you found out?"

"There was nothing more to find out. I had intended taking a look round the castle - there's a long flight of steps leading up to it from the boatyard inside the cuff itself - but there was some character sitting about three parts of the way up with a rifle in his hand. A guard of some sort. He was drinking out of some son of bottle, but he was doing his job for all that. I wouldn't have got within a hundred steps of him without being riddled. I left"

"Dear God," she murmured. "What a mess, what a terrible mess. And you've no radio, we're cut off from help. What are we going to do? What
are
you going to do, Philip?"

"I'm going there in the
Firecrest
this coming night, that's what I'm going to do. I have a machine-gun under the settee of the saloon in the
Firecrest
and Uncle Arthur and Tim Hutchinson will have a gun apiece. We'll reconnoiter. Their time is running short and they'll want to be gone to-morrow at the latest. The boathouse doors are ill-fitting and if there's no light showing that will mean they still haven't finished their diving. So we wait till they have finished and come in. We'll see the light two miles away when they open the door to let the diving-boat in to load up all the stuff they've cached from .the four other sunken ships. The front doors of the boathouse will be closed, of course, while they load up. So we go in through the front doors. On the deck of the
Firecrest.
The doors don't look all that strong to me. Surprise is everything. Well catch them napping. A sub-machine-gun in a small enclosed space is a deadly weapon."

"You'll be killed, you'll be killed!" She crossed to and sat on the bed-side, her eyes wide and scared, "Please, Philip! Please,
please
don't. You'll be killed, I tell you, I beg of you, don't do it!" She seemed very sure that I would be killed.

"I have to, Charlotte. Time has run out. There's no other way."

"Please." The brown eyes were full of unshed tears. This I couldn't believe. "Please, Philip. For my sake."

"No," A tear-drop fell
at
the corner of my mouth, it tasted as salt as the sea. "Anything else in the world. But not this."

She rose slowly to her feet and stood there, arms hanging limply by her side, tears trickling down her cheeks. She said dully: "It's the maddest plan I've ever heard In my life," turned and left the room, switching off the light as she went.

I lay there staring Jnto the darkness. There was sense in what the lady said. It was, I thought, the maddest plan TV ever heard in my life. I was damned glad I didn't have to use it.

TEN

Thursday: noon - Friday:  dawn

"
Let me sleep." I said.   I kept my eyes shut.   "I'm a dead man."

"Come on, come on." Another violent shake, a hand like a power shovel. "Up!"

"Oh, God!" I opened the corner of one eye. "What's the time?"

"Just after noon.   I couldn't let you sleep any more."

"Noon!   I asked to be shaken at five.  Do you know-----"

"Come here." He moved to the window, and I swung my legs stiffly out of bed and followed him. I'd been operated on during my sleep, no anaesthetic required in the condition I was in, and someone had removed the bones from my legs. I felt awful. Hutchinson nodded towards the window. "What do you think of that?"

I peered out into the grey opaque world. I said irritably: "What do you expect me to sec in that damn' fog?"

"The fog."

"I see," I said stupidly. "The fog."

"The two a.m. shipping forecast," Hutchinson said. He gave the impression of exercising a very great deal of patience. "It said the fog would clear away in the early morning. Well, the goddamned fog hasn't cleared away in the early morning."

The fog cleared away from my befuddled brain. I swore and jumped for my least sodden suit of clothing. It was damp and clammy and cold but I hardly noticed these things, except subconsciously, my conscious mind was frantically busy with something else. On Monday night they'd sunk the
Nantesville
at slack water but there wasn't a chance in a thousand that they would have been able to get something done that night or the Tuesday night, the weather had been bad enough in sheltered Torbay harbour, God alone knew what it would have been like in Beul nan Uamh. But they could have started last night, they
had
started last night for there had been no diving-boat in the Dubh Sgeir boathouse, and reports from the
Nantesville's
owners had indicated that the strongroom was a fairly antiquated one, not of hardened steel, that could be cut open in a couple of hours with the proper equipment, Lavorski and company would have the proper equipment. The rest of last night, even had they three divers and relief's working all the time, they could have brought up a fair proportion of the bullion but I'd been damn' sure they couldn't possibly bring up all eighteen tons of it Marine salvage had been my business before Uncle Arthur had taken me away. They would have required another night or at least a good part of the night, because they only dared work when the sun was down. When no one could see them. But no one could see them In dense fog like this. This was as good as another night thrown in for free.

"Give Uncle Arthur a shake. Tell him we're on our way. In the
Firecrest"

"
He'll want to come."

"He'll have to stay. He'll know damn' well he'll have to stay. Beul nan Uamh, tell him."

"Not Dubh Sgeir?   Not the boathouse?"

"
You
know damn' well we can't move in against that until midnight."

"I'd forgotten,"  Hutchinson said slowly. "We can't move in against it until midnight."

The Beul nan Uamh wasn't Jiving up to hs fearsome reputation. At that time in the afternoon. It was dead slack water and there was only the gentlest of swells running up from the south-west. We crossed over from Ballara to the extreme north Of the eastern shore of Dubh Sgeir and inched our way southward with bare steerage way on. We'd cut the by-pass valve into the underwater exhaust and, even in the wheelhouse, we could barely hear the throb of the diesel. Even with both wheelhouse doors wide open, we could just hear it and no more. But we hadn't the wheelhouse doors open for the purpose of hearing our own engine.

By this time we were almost half-way down the eastern patch of miraculously calm water that bordered the normal mill-race of Beul nan Uamh, the one that Williams and I had observed from the helicopter the previous afternoon. For the first time, Hutchinson was showing something approaching worry. He never spared a glance through the wheelhouse windows, and only a very occasional one for the compass: he was navigating almost entirely by chart and depth-sounder.

"Are you sure it'll be this fourteen-fathom ledge, Calvert?"

"It has to be. It damn' well has to be. Out to the seven fathom mark there the sea-bottom is pretty flat, but there's not enough depth to hide superstructure and masts at low tide. From there to fourteen ifs practically a cliff. And beyond the fourteen fathom ledge it goes down to thirty-five fathom, steep enough to roll a ship down there. You can't operate at those depths without very special equipment indeed."

"It's a damn' narrow ledge," he grumbled. "Less than a cable. How could they be sure the scuttled ship would fetch up where they wanted it to?"

"They could be sure. In dead slack water, you can always be sure."

Hutchinson put the engine in neutral and went outside. We drifted on quietly through the greyly opaque world. Visibility didn't extend beyond our bows. The muffled beat of the diesel served only to enhance the quality of ghostly silence. Hutchinson came back into the wheelhouse, his vast bulk moving as unhurriedly as always.

"Fm afraid you're right.   I hear an engine."

I listened, then I could hear it too, the unmistakable thudding of an air compressor. I said: "What do you mean afraid?"

"You know damn' well"He touched the throttle, gave the wheel a quarter turn to port and we began to move out gently into deeper water. "You're going to go down."

"Do you think I'm a nut case? Do you think I
want
to go down? I bloody well don't want to go down - and you bloody well know that I
have
to go down. And you know why. You want them to finish up here, load up in Dubh Sgeir and the whole lot to be hell and gone before midnight?"

"Half, Calvert. Take half of our share. God, man, we do nothing."

"I'll settle for a pint in the Columba Hotel in Torbay. You Just concentrate on putting this tub exactly where she ought to be. I don't want to spend the rest of my life swimming about the Atlantic when I come back up from the
Nantesville."

He looked at me, the expression in his eyes saying "if," not "when," but kept quiet. He circled round to the south of the diving-boat — we could faintly hear the compressor all the way - then slightly to the .west. He turned the
Firecrest
towards the source of the sound, manoeuvring with delicacy and precision. He said: "About a cable length."

"About that.  Hard to judge in fog."

"North twenty-two east true. Let go the anchor."

I let go the anchor, not the normal heavy Admiralty type on the chain but a smaller CQR on the end of forty fathoms of rope. It disappeared silently over the side and the Terylene as silently slid down after it I let out all forty fathoms and made fast. I went back to the wheelhouse and strapped the cylinders on my back.

"You won't forget, now," Hutchinson said. "When you come up, just let yourself drift. The ebb's just setting in from the nor'-nor'-east and will carry you back here. I'll keep the diesel ticking, you'll be able to hear the underwater exhaust twenty yards away, J hope to hell the mist doesn't clear. You'll just have to swim for Dubh Sgeir."

"That
will
be ducky.   What happens to you if it clears?"

"I'll cut the anchor rope and take oft."

"And if they come after you?"

"Come after me? Just like that? And leave two or three dead divers down inside the
Nantesville?"

"
I wish to God," I said irritably, "that you wouldn't talk about dead divers inside the
Nantesville"

There were three divers aboard the
Nantesvilte,
not dead but all working furiously, or as furiously as one can work in the pressurised slow-motion world of the undersea.

Getting down there had been no trouble. I'd swum on the surface towards the diving-boat, the compressor giving me a clear bearing all the time, and dived when only three yards away. My bands touched cables, life-lines and finally an unmistakable wire hawser. The wire hawser was the one for me.

I stopped my descent on the wire when I saw the dim glow of light beneath me. I swam some distance to one side then down until my feet touched something solid. The deck of the
Nantesville. I
moved cautiously towards the source of the light.

There were two of them, standing in their weighted boots at the edge of an open hatchway. As I'd expected, they were wearing not my self-contained apparatus, but regular helmet and corselet diving gear, with air-lines and life-lines, the lifelines almost certainly with telephone wires imbedded inside them. Self-contained diving equipment wouldn't have been much use down here, it was too 4eep for oxygen and compressed-air stores too limited. With those suits they could stay down an hour and a half, at least, although they'd have to spend thirty to forty minutes on decompression stops on the way up. I wanted to be gone in less than that, I wanted to be gone that very moment, my heart was banging away against my chest wall like a demented pop drummer with the ague but it was only the pressure of the water, I told myself, it couldn't be fear, I was far too brave for that.

The wire rope I'd used to guide me down to the
Nantesville,
terminated in a metal ring from which splayed out four chains to the corners of a rectangular steel mesh basket. The two divers were loading this basket with wire- and wood-handled steel boxes that they were hauling up from the hold at the rate of, I guessed, about one every minute. The steel boxes were small but obviously heavy: each held four 28-lb ingots of gold. Each box held a fortune. There were three hundred and sixty such fortunes aboard the
Nantesville.

I tried to calculate the overall rate of unloading. The steel basket held sixteen boxes. Sixteen minutes to load. Another ten minutes to winch up to the diving-boat, unload and lower again. Say forty an hour. In a ninety-minute stretch, about sixty. But after ninety minutes they would have to change divers. Forty minutes, including two decompression stops of, say, twelve and twenty-four minutes, to get to the surface, then twenty minutes to change over and get other divers down. An hour at least. So, in effect, they were clearing sixty boxes every two and a half hours, or twenty-four an hour. The only remaining question was, how many boxes were left in the
Nantesville
's strongroom?

I had to find out and I had to find out at once. I'd had only the two compressed air-cylinders aboard the
Firecrest
and already their two hundred atmospheres were seriously depleted. The wire hawser jerked and the full basket started to rise, the divers guiding it clear of the superstructure with a trailing guide rope. I moved forward from the corner of the partially opened hatch remote from where they were standing and cautiously wriggled over and down. With excessive caution, I supposed: then- lamp cast only a small pool of light and they couldn't possibly have seen me from where I was standing.

I felt my hands - already puffed and numbed by the icy water - touch a life-line and air-line and quickly withdrewthem. Below and to my right I could see another faint pool of light.   A few cautious strokes and I could see the source of the light.

The light was moving. It was moving because It was attached to the helmet of a diver, angled so as to point down at an angle of forty-five degrees. The diver was inside the a strongroom.

They hadn't opened that strongroom with any Yale key. They'd opened it with underwater torches cutting out a roughly rectangular section in the strongroom's side, maybe six feet by four.

I moved up to this opening and pushed my bead round the side. Beyond the now stooping diver was another light suspended from the deckhead. The bullion boxes were neatly stacked in racks round the side and it was a five-second job to estimate their number. Of the three hundred and sixty bullion boxes, there were about one hundred and twenty left. Something brushed my arm, pulled past my arm. I glanced down and saw that it was a rope, a nylon line, that the diver was pulling in to attach to the handle of one of the boxes. I moved my arm quickly out of the way.

His back was towards me. He was having difficulty in fastening the rope but finally secured it with two half hitches, straightened and pulled a knife from his waist sheath. I wondered what the knife was for.

I found out what the knife was for. The knife was for me. Stooped over
as
he had been, he could just possibly have caught a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye: or he might have felt the sudden pressure, then release of pressure, on the nylon rope: or his sixth sense was in better working condition than mine. I won't say he whirled round, for in a heavy diving suit at that depth the tempo of movement becomes slowed down to that of a slow-motion film.

But he moved too quickly for me. It wasn't my body that was slowing down as much as my mind. He was completely round and facing me, not four feet away, and I was still where I'd been when he'd first moved, still displaying all the lightning reactions and coordinated activity of a bag of cement. The six-inch-bladed knife was held in his lowered hand with thumb and forefinger towards me, which is the way that only nasty people with lethal matters on their minds hold knives, and I could see his face dearly. God knows what he wanted the knife for, it must have been a reflexaction, he didn't require a knife to deal with me, he wouldn't have required a knife to deal with two of me.

It was Quinn.

I watched his face with a strangely paralysed intentness, I watched his face to see if the head would jerk -down to press the telephone call-up buzzer with his chin. But his head didn't move, Quinn had never required any help in his life and he didn't require any now. Instead his lips parted in a smile of almost beatific joy. My mask made it almost impossible for my face to be recognised but he knew whom he had, he knew whom he had without any doubt in the world. He had the face of
a
man in the moment of supreme religious ecstasy. He fell slowly forwards, his knees bending, till he was at an angle of almost forty-five degrees and launched himself forward) his right arm already swinging far behind his back.