Fear is the Key (18 page)

‘What's the good of beating me over the head?'
I said savagely. ‘How will that make me remember
something I never –?'

This time I saw it coming, got the palm of my
hand up to the side of my head and was riding the
blow, going fast away from it, when it connected.
I staggered and hit the bulkhead. It was nearly all
show and to complete the effect I slid down to the
deck. Nobody said anything. Vyland and his two
hoodlums were looking at me with a detached
interest, the general was white and he had his
lower lip caught in his teeth; Larry's face was a
mask of unholy glee.

‘Remember anything now?'

I called him an unprintable name and rose
shakily to my feet.

‘Very well.' Vyland shrugged. ‘I think Larry here
would like to persuade you.'

‘Can I? Can I really?' The eagerness on Larry's
face was revolting, frightening. ‘Want that I make
him talk?'

Vyland smiled and nodded. ‘Remember he's got
to work for us when you're finished.'

‘I'll remember.' This was Larry's big moment. To
be in the centre of the stage, to get his own back for
my sneers and gibes, above all to indulge a sadistic
streak wide as a barn door – this was going to be
one of the high spots of his existence. He advanced
towards me, big gun wavering slightly, wetting
his lips continuously and giggling in a high and
horrible falsetto. ‘The inside of the right thigh,
high up. He'll scream like – like a pig going under
the knife. Then the left. And he'll still be able to
work.' The eyes were wide and staring and mad,
and for the first time in my life I was confronted
by a human being drooling at the mouth.

Vyland was a good psychologist; he knew I
would be ten times more scared of Larry's viciousness,
his neurotic instability, than of any coldly
calculated brutality he or his two thugs would have
brought to bear. I was scared all right. Besides,
I'd put up a good enough front, it would have
been expected of me, but there was no point in
overdoing it.

‘It's a development of the early French bathyscaphes,'
I said rapidly. ‘This model is a combined
British and French naval project, designed to reach
only about twenty per cent of the depths of its predecessors
– it's good for about 2,500 feet – but it's
faster, more manoeuvrable and it's equipped for
actual underwater salvage which its predecessors
weren't.'

Nobody ever hated anyone more than Larry
hated me at that moment. He was a little boy, I
was a promised toy, the most wonderful he had
ever seen, and he was being robbed of it just as it
came within his grasp. He could have wept with
rage and frustration and the sheer bitterness of his
disappointment. He was still prancing in front of
me and waving the gun around.

‘He's lying!' His voice was shrill, almost a scream.
‘He's just trying –'

‘He's not lying,' Vyland interrupted coldly. No
triumph, no satisfaction in his voice, the end had
been achieved and the past was done with. ‘Put
that gun away.'

‘But I tell you––' Larry broke off in an exclamation
of pain as one of the two big silent men
caught his wrist and forced the gun down till it
was pointing at the floor.

‘Put that heater away, punk,' the man growled,
‘or I'll take it off you.'

Vyland glanced at them, then ignored the byplay.
‘And you not only know what this is, Talbot,
but you've actually worked on it. The general has
impeccable sources in Europe and we got the word
this morning.' He bent forward and went on softly:
‘And you also worked on it later on. Recently.
Our sources in Cuba are even better than those
in Europe.'

‘I didn't work on it recently.' I held up my
hand as Vyland tightened his mouth. ‘When this
bathyscaphe was brought out in a freighter to do
its preliminary unmanned dives in the sheltered
waters off Nassau, the British and French thought
it would be cheaper and more sensible to hire a
local vessel suitable for the job instead of bringing
one out from Europe. I was working with a salvage
firm in Havana at the time and they had a ship
with a heavy crane and boom right aft. It was
ideal for the job. I was aboard it, but I didn't
work on the bathyscaphe itself. What would be
the point in denying it if it wasn't so?' I smiled
faintly. ‘Besides, I was only aboard the salvage ship
for a week or so. They got wind that I was there,
I knew they were after me and I had to leave in a
hurry.'

‘They?' Vyland's eyebrow was still working as
smoothly as ever.

‘What does it matter now?' Even to myself I
sounded tired, defeated.

‘True, true,' Vyland smiled. ‘From what we
know of your record it might have been any
one of the police forces of half a dozen countries.
Anyway, General, it explains one thing that has
been worrying us – where we saw Talbot's face
before.'

General Ruthven said nothing. If ever I'd needed
conviction that he was a tool, a pawn of Vyland's I
needed it no longer. He was miserable, unhappy
and clearly wished to have no part whatever in
what was going on.

I said, as if a great light had suddenly dawned
upon me: ‘Have you – were
you
the people responsible
for the loss of this bathyscaphe? My God, it
was you! How in the –'

‘You didn't think we brought you here just to
discuss the diagrammatic layout of this vessel?'
Vyland permitted himself a small pleased smile.
‘Of course it was us. It was easy. The fools moored
it on a wire hawser in ten fathoms of water. We
unhitched it, substituted a frayed hawser so that
they would think that it had broken its moorings
and that the tide had carried it out to deep water,
then we towed it away. We made most of the
trip in darkness, and the few ships we saw we
just slowed down, pulled the bathyscaphe up on
the side remote from the approaching vessel and
towed it like that.' He smiled again – he was
spoiling himself this morning. ‘It wasn't difficult.
People do not expect to see a bathyscaphe being
towed by a private yacht.'

‘A private yacht. You mean the –?' I could feel
the hairs on the back of my neck prickling, I'd
almost made the blunder that would have finished
everything. It had been on the tip of my tongue
to say the
Temptress
– but no one knew I'd ever
heard that name, except Mary Ruthven, who'd
told me. ‘You mean the general's private yacht?
He has one?'

‘Larry and I certainly haven't one,' he grinned.
‘Larry and I' – an off-beat phrase, but there was
nothing in it for me, so I let it pass. ‘Of course it's
the general's yacht.'

I nodded. ‘And equally of course you have the
bathyscaphe somewhere near here. Would you
mind telling me what in the world you want a
bathyscaphe for?'

‘Certainly not. You'll have to know anyhow. We
are – ah – treasure-hunting, Talbot.'

‘Don't tell me you believe this Captain Kidd and
Blackbeard nonsense,' I sneered.

‘Recovering your courage, eh, Talbot? No, it's
rather more recent than that and very close to
here.'

‘How did you find it?'

‘How did we find it?' Vyland seemed to have
forgotten his urgency; like every criminal who
ever lived he had a streak of the ham in him
and wouldn't pass up the chance of basking in
the glow of his own glory. ‘We had a vague idea
where it was. We tried trawling for it – in the days
before I met the general, that was – but had no
success. Then we met the general. As you may
not know, the general provides his yacht for his
geologists when they plod around setting off their
little bombs on the bottom of the ocean tuning in
with their seismographic instruments to find out
where the oil strata are. And while they were
doing this we were plotting the ocean bed with
an extremely sensitive depth recorder. We found
it all right.'

‘Near here?'

‘Very near.'

‘Then why haven't you recovered it?' Talbot
giving his impression of a salvage specialist so
engrossed in a problem that he has forgotten his
own circumstances.

‘How would
you
recover it, Talbot?'

‘Diving for it, of course. Should be easy in those
waters. After all, there's a huge continental shelf
here, you have to go a hundred miles out from any
point off the west coast of Florida before you even
reach five hundred feet. We're close inshore here.
Hundred feet, hundred fifty?'

‘The X 13 is standing in how much, General?'

‘One-thirty feet low tide,' Ruthven said mechanically.

I shrugged. ‘There you are then.'

‘There we are not.' Vyland shook his head.
‘What's the greatest depth at which you can expect
divers to perform really useful work, Talbot?'

‘Perhaps three hundred feet.' I thought a moment.
‘The deepest I know was by US divers off Honolulu.
Two hundred and seventy-five feet. US Submarine F4.'

‘You really are a specialist, aren't you, Talbot?'

‘Every diver and salvage man worth his salt
knows that.'

‘Two hundred and seventy-five feet, eh? Unfortunately,
what we're after is in the bottom of a big
hole, a deep chasm in the sea bed. The general's
geologists were very interested indeed when we
located this hole. Said it was just like – what was
it, General?'

‘The Hurd Deep.'

‘That's it. The Hurd Deep. In the English Channel.
Deep valley in the sea-bed where the Limeys dump
all their old explosives. This one here is four hundred
and eighty feet in depth.'

‘That makes a difference,' I said slowly.

‘Doesn't it now? And how would you get at
that?'

‘All depends how difficult it is to reach. The newest
Neufeldt-Kuhnke rigid diving-suit, armour-plated in
cast steel, could just about make it. I doubt if any
diver could accomplish anything at that depth.
He'd be under a pressure of two hundred pounds
to the square inch and any movement would be
like a barrel of heavy tar. Anything except the
simplest manoeuvre would be beyond him. The
way to do it would be with observation turrets –
Galeazzi and my old firm, Siebe-Gorman, produce
the best – and use those. They can go down about
one thousand five hundred feet. You get inside
one of these and use a phone to guide laying
of explosives or dredgers or grapnels or power
grabs. That's the way they took over ten million
dollars' worth of gold from the
Niagara
, from about
the same depth, off New Zealand, and about four
million dollars' worth of gold from the
Egypt
, lying
four hundred feet off Ushant. Those are the two
classic cases of modern times and that's how I
would do it.'

‘And of course that would require at least a
couple of surface vessels and much specialized
equipment,' Vyland said softly. ‘Do you think we
can go around buying up observation turrets –
if there are any available in this country – and
dredgers and then sit anchored in the same spot
for weeks without exciting suspicion?'

‘You have a point,' I admitted.

‘So the bathyscaphe,' Vyland smiled. ‘The valley
in the sea floor is less than six hundred yards from
here. We take with us grabs and hooks attached
to wires on drums fastened to the outside of the
scaphe, fix them on – you can do some very fancy
work with those extension arms and graphs fitted
in front – then come back here, unreeling the
wire as we go. Then we haul the wire in from
the X 13.'

‘As easy as that, eh?'

‘Just as easy as that, Talbot. Clever, you would
say?'

‘Very.' I didn't think it clever at all, I didn't
think Vyland had even begun to appreciate the
difficulties involved, the endless slow-motion try,
try, try again frustration of underwater salvage,
the scope of the initial preparation, the skill and
experience of years required. I tried to remember
how long it had taken to salvage two and a half
million dollars' worth of gold and silver from the
Laurentic
, sunk in only just over a hundred feet of
water – something like six years if I remembered
rightly. And Vyland spoke as if he was going to
do it in an afternoon. ‘And where exactly is the
scaphe?' I asked.

Vyland pointed at the semi-circular trunking.
‘That's one of the support legs of this rig – but
it happens to be raised twenty feet above the sea
bed. The bathyscaphe is moored below that.'

‘Moored below it?' I stared at him. ‘What do you
mean? It's beneath the bottom of that leg? How did
you get it there? How do you get into it? How in
the world –?'

‘Simple,' he interrupted. ‘I am not, as you may
have gathered, much of an engineer but I do have
an – ah – professional friend who is. He devised
the simple expedient of fitting a reinforced and
completely waterproof steel floor of great strength
across the bottom of this leg – about six feet
from the bottom, actually – and letting into this
a tapering steel cylinder about six feet long and
not quite three feet in diameter, projecting downwards,
open top and bottom, but the top capable
of being sealed off flush with the waterproof floor
by a screwed hatch. In a recession about two
feet from the top of this cylinder is a reinforced
rubber tube … You begin to see daylight, I think,
Talbot?'

‘I see daylight.' They were an ingenious bunch,
if nothing else. ‘Somehow – almost certainly at
night – you got the rig's engineer's to co-operate
with you in the lowering of this leg – I suppose
you told them the yarn about top secret
research, so secret that no one was allowed to
see what was going on. You had the bathyscaphe
on the surface, unbolted its bridge cover, lowered
the leg slowly until this cylinder fitted over the
bathyscaphe's entrance hatch, pumped this rubber
ring full of compressed air to make a perfect
seal, then lowered the leg into the water, pushing
the bathyscaphe down before it while someone
inside the bathyscaphe, probably your engineering
friend, adjusted the hydrostatic valve for one of
the adjacent flooding chambers enough to let it
sink easily but not so much as to rob it of its
slight positive buoyancy necessary to keep the
top of the entrance chamber jammed into the
cylinder at the foot of the leg. And when you
want to take off you just climb into the bathyscaphe,
seal both the cylinder and the bathyscaphe
hatches, have someone on the rig blow the air from
the rubber seal gripping the entrance chamber of
the bathyscaphe, flood your tanks to get enough
negative buoyancy to drop clear of the leg and
there you are. Reverse process when you come
back except that you'll need a suction pump to
clear the water that's accumulated in the cylinder.
Right?'