Pandemic (39 page)

‘Roger that,’ another voice spoke on the intercom, and Richter sensed the increasing vibration as the pilot wound on the power and the Merlin began to climb out of its hover.

Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

It became obvious fairly quickly that Krywald was not a natural sailor. The water in the harbour was almost flat calm, but outside the protection afforded by the jetties
it became fairly choppy. By the time they were a mile or so off-shore Krywald was looking distinctly green, his eyes fixed determinedly on the distant horizon and his replies faint monosyllables to
anything either of the other two men said.

Elias wasn’t drawn to Krywald, but he sympathized with him. The gulf that exists between somebody who is seasick and someone who isn’t is enormous. It’s said that there are two
stages in the condition: in the first you’re afraid you’re going to die, but in the second you’re afraid you’re
not
going to die. And the only truly infallible cure
for
mal de mer
is to go and sit under a tree.

But they were now a long way from anywhere Krywald was likely to find a tree. Elias glanced back over his shoulder towards the rocky outline of Crete, around eighteen miles distant and still
just visible through a slight heat haze, then gazed ahead at the open water.

Before starting up the engine back at Chóra Sfakia harbour, Elias had taken the only chart he could find in the boat and marked on it the co-ordinates ‘McCready’ had supplied
to Krywald. The position indicated was pretty much mid-way between the two islands of Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, so Elias didn’t think they’d have any trouble finding it. They
were even then passing abeam Gavdopoúla, the smaller and more northerly of the two islands, so the chart was now almost superfluous. Elias realized he could navigate the rest of the way just
by using his eyes.

On the chart itself, which lay on the wooden bench seat in front of him, Elias had placed one of the two GPS units that Krywald had supplied. As he gazed down at the squat black box, which
looked something like an over-sized mobile telephone, he noticed the co-ordinates in the display change. The boat was moving steadily south-south-west at about eight knots: Elias glanced at his
watch and calculated that they should reach the dive site within about thirty minutes.

In fact, this estimate was slightly pessimistic, and just under twenty-two minutes later Stein headed to the bow of the boat to toss the concrete block serving as an anchor over the side. Elias
watched as the rope vanished over the gunwale, waiting for the tell-tale slackness that would signify that the anchor had reached the seabed, then instructed Stein to cleat the rope down and
switched off the engine.

The open boat swung gently around in a circle, its bow now secured by the anchor rope. Elias checked the GPS once again, cross-checking it with the co-ordinates provided, then pulled off his
shirt and shorts to reveal a pair of black swimming trunks. He next attached the lead weight to the end of the polypropylene rope and measured out lengths of it using an old diver’s trick
– from the average man’s left shoulder to his outstretched right hand was about three feet or one metre.

Using this crude but surprisingly accurate method, he identified the depths at which he wanted the four extra aqualung cylinders to be located, and swiftly secured them in turn to the rope. He
then lowered the weight, the rope and the cylinders over the side and tied down the rope securely to a set of cleats on the port-side gunwale. It was crucial to his own survival that the
compressed-air cylinders were located at the correct depths, so he took extra care in paying out exactly the right amount of rope before securing it.

Ten minutes later Elias zipped up the jacket of his wetsuit, shrugged the aqualung onto his back, secured the weight belt around his waist and checked all his equipment twice, from the knife
strapped to the calf of his right leg to the mask pushed up to rest on his forehead. Then he turned to Stein. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said.

‘I know you don’t, but it’s really very simple. Once you’ve found the aircraft, all you need do is position these charges, activate the detonators, and get back up to the
boat. Then we’re out of here and on our way back to the States.’ Stein bent down and opened the neck of the rucksack he’d placed on the seat beside him. He pulled out a
plastic-covered packet and tossed it from hand to hand. ‘This is what’s called an M118 Composition Block Demolition Charge,’ Stein explained. ‘Usually they contain four
half-pound sheets of C4 plastic explosive, and they’re normally used as cutting charges to slice through steel bridge supports, building girders or metal beams, that kind of thing. These are
a bit bigger in fact, each containing about six kilos of plastic, because we don’t want anything left intact down there.’

Elias looked uneasily at the packet as Stein offered it to him. ‘How stable is it?’

‘Very,’ Stein replied. ‘Watch this.’

He hefted the package of explosive in his hand a couple of times, then smashed it down on the wooden bench with all the force he could muster. The explosive flattened out slightly, but otherwise
didn’t react in any way. Elias had instinctively crouched down low in the stern of the boat, but gradually eased himself back to an upright position.

‘You can hit this stuff with a hammer or even fire a bullet into it, and it still won’t do a goddamn thing,’ Stein continued. ‘You have to use a detonator. Good reaction
time there, though it wouldn’t have done you any good. If this baby had gone off you could use the biggest bit left of this boat as a toothpick.’

‘Christ,’ Elias said. ‘Don’t do things like that. What’s this C4 stuff made of anyway?’

‘Basically, it’s RDX,’ Stein said, ‘with a polyisobutene plasticizer added. The C4 looks like uncooked pastry, and you can perfectly safely mould it into pretty much any
shape you want, which is why the military use it so frequently. It’s got a shelf-life of years, and it’s cheap, reliable and goes off with a hell of a bang.’

‘And underwater?’ Elias asked. ‘Is it waterproof, or what?’

Stein nodded. ‘Water doesn’t affect it at all. Now the detonators are real easy.’

He reached again into the rucksack and pulled out a plastic box about the size and shape of a child’s pencil case. He opened this and pulled out a long thin object, itself similar in size
to a pencil. ‘This is a three-hour detonator,’ he explained. ‘Normally C4 is triggered by an electrical detonator powered by some kind of battery or current generator, but in
these circumstances we obviously can’t go that route.

‘This detonator has a battery installed at the end you insert into the explosive, with two contacts that will actually carry the current. All you have to do is snap the end off each
detonator, right here where the metal is pinched in. That allows sea water to seep inside and starts a chemical reaction which slowly eats away at a membrane about halfway down the detonator
itself. Behind that membrane is a water-activated switch: once the membrane’s pierced, the switch completes the circuit to connect the battery, and everything goes bang.’

Kandíra, south-west Crete

There was little that Inspector Lavat could usefully do to assist Hardin and his team in their search for the hot agent: police work had no place in the purely medical and
epidemiological investigation of the two deaths. Though he realized that the investigations were inextricably linked, he was far more concerned with the murder of his own officer, and he frankly
wasn’t sure how best to identify the killers.

As a routine precaution, he had instituted a watch at all ferry ports and all three airports on the island, but the description his cordon police officer had provided was so vague as to be
almost useless. The man was over at headquarters in Irakleío, trying to help build up a photofit picture of at least one of the two suspects, but Lavat wasn’t optimistic about the
likely result of that.

The roadblocks were still in place, although village residents were now being allowed to move into and out of Kandíra. All outsiders were still being refused entry. Lavat had just
completed a tour of the perimeter of the village, checking that his officers were still manning the cordon and that they had an adequate supply of drinking water at their posts. Then, because it
was, even by Cretan standards, a very hot day, he’d himself taken shelter from the sun in one of the tents erected near the main road entering the village.

He was sitting with his second glass of water when Theodore Gravas appeared at the entrance flap. Twenty minutes earlier they’d both stood at the barrier to watch as the light grey Merlin
sent from the
Invincible
had lifted off from some waste ground outside the village – bound for the laboratory in Irakleío with the organ samples Hardin had extracted from Spiros
Aristides’s body.

‘Found anything yet?’ Lavat asked, as Gravas sat down on the other side of the table.

The doctor shook his head. ‘I’ve just been talking to Hardin. They’ve found nothing in Spiros’s house so far. They’ve taken swabs from the floors, doors, walls and
so on, but the Americans seem to believe the causative agent either wasn’t there to be found or it’s been dissipated since and is now so scattered that they won’t be able to find
it.’

‘So what’s their next move?’

‘Hardin’s people have just started on Nico’s apartment. Since that scene hasn’t had the same amount of traffic as Spiros’s house they may get lucky there.
Otherwise, our best bet to find the agent is in the blood and tissues of its victims, so we’ll have to wait and see what Irakleío can uncover.’

ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, off Andikíthira, Sea of Crete

The second location O’Reilly directed the pilot to lay almost directly north of Andikíthira and around two miles off-shore. Here again, he lowered the sonar
body into the water and began an active sweep of the seabed below them and further around the eastern and northern coasts of the small island.

Metallic objects, especially large metallic objects, are not uncommonly found on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. This area was a birthplace of civilization and was always the principal route
for commerce between Europe and North Africa, besides being the location of several naval and air battles in the wars of the twentieth and previous centuries. And shallow waters – in
oceanographic terms the Mediterranean is considered a shallow sea – are often the scene of the most violent storms, which have claimed numerous victims over the years.

While it wouldn’t be true to suggest that the seabed is littered with wrecks, there were certainly more than either Richter or O’Reilly had expected. Their first two sonar scans had
between them located no fewer than forty-eight separate large metallic objects on the sea floor extending to the east and north of Andikíthira, and when O’Reilly carried out his third
scan, to the northwest of the island, he identified a further nineteen.

‘Jesus,’ Richter said, doing the arithmetic in his head, ‘that’s sixty-seven contacts in all. You said your speciality is finding needles in haystacks, Mike, but if we
have to dive on all of these we’re going to be here for weeks.’

O’Reilly shook his head. ‘You won’t have to. We can carry out a lot of filtering first to discriminate between old shipwrecks and the remains of a fairly modern aircraft. Look,
I may be teaching you to suck eggs, but ships are big and aircraft are comparatively small. So, the first thing is to eliminate all returns over a certain size, simply because unless you’re
looking for a Jumbo Jet, the wreckage would be just too big.

‘Second, when a ship sinks it tends to stay all together in one piece, being a very heavy and robust piece of engineering, specially designed to spend its life on the water. Aircraft need
to fly, obviously, so their construction is much lighter and hence weaker, and they tend to break up on impact with the water and get scattered over quite a wide area.

‘So what I’m looking for is not a single piece of wreckage, but a number of small pieces that are lying in more or less the same area. Now,’ O’Reilly gestured at the
display in front of him, ‘applying those fairly simple parameters to these sixty-seven contacts, we can immediately eliminate fifty-two of them, which gets us down to fifteen altogether.
Eight of these contacts are too deep for free diving, and three of them are less than half a mile out from the shore, so in fact we’re left with only four possibles to check out.’

Between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

David Elias descended slowly towards the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, his left hand lightly encircling the anchor rope as he followed it down, his right hand clutching
one of the two torches he’d chosen at the dive shop. The second torch was safely in the string specimen bag attached to his weight belt, along with the coil of thin polypropylene cord, the
four M118 demolition charges and half a dozen pencil detonators, more than he needed but just in case he dropped some.

The water around him grew increasingly cold and dark as he swam deeper, but visibility was still good enough for him not to need to use his torch. Elias had no idea how long it would take him to
find the wreck, and he would certainly need one torch, possibly both, when he did, so he was conserving his resources.

The bottom appeared suddenly, looming under him, and Elias checked his depth gauge as he slowed to a stop just above the seabed. Eighty-three feet. Fairly deep, but not too deep. He pulled out
the polypropylene cord, unravelled one end of it and secured it to the anchor rope just above its concrete weight. He needed to be able to find his way back easily to the rope, and then up through
the water lying directly beneath the boat, because that was where his spare aqualungs were positioned, and if he couldn’t locate them he would either die or be crippled when he surfaced.

Holding the still coiled cord in his left hand, Elias peered around him. He had no idea in which direction the wreck might lie, because the co-ordinates McCready had supplied were obviously only
those of the Greek diver’s boat up on the surface. The wreck itself had to be somewhere close by, but it could lie in any direction around him. He first checked his compass, then kicked off
the seabed and began swimming with lazy, energy-conserving strokes to the north, paying out the cord as he moved away from the concrete anchor.