He had not seen the other diver who slid silently along the sea bed from the shore a few minutes before; neither did he see that diver now, emerging from a thicket of the viridescent weed nearby to take up silent station by the sunken boat’s stern, as the Saint steadied the load from deep inside.
Simon saw the laden net clear the hatchway above him; he saw it swing to one side, as each load before it had done; he saw it begin to recede upwards, off-centre in the greenish rectangle of light framed by the hatchway. And then he saw, with a dumbstruck horror such as he had seldom known in his life before, that rectangle of light suddenly shrink and narrow to a slit, and then to nothing, as the hatch was closed on him from above.
4
In the Stygian blackness of his underwater dungeon, Simon Templar heard the sound that must surely seal his fate. He heard the grinding and scraping of the heavy locking mechanism as someone secured the hatch above him; and in that instant he could hardly avoid the conviction that destiny must surely have come to claim him at last.
Death had started towards him often enough before, and perhaps half a dozen times had come close enough for him to have felt that his chances of survival were worse than even. But somehow, by a happy combination of luck and resourcefulness, he had always won through, even in circumstances where his prospects looked about as good as those of a three-legged donkey in the Grand National. But never until now had he had to give himself up for dead. On those other occasions, he had always had some reserve of his own, however tenuous, which he might somehow press into service, or some human support in the background to give at least a glimmer of hope; but this time he could think of nothing that would ever get him out.
In the first few seconds, as he realised with that sickening numbness what had happened and would happen yet, he tried, with the desperate strength of three men, to force open the locked hatch. But the attempt was useless. There was nothing for him to brace himself against while he kicked at the hatch, and he could get no real power behind the effort against the resistance of the water.
Perhaps it had been written in the stars, from the very beginning, that this was where his life was to end. He had long known that he could not go on blithely cheating death for ever and a day. That was in the nature of his hazardous trade, which he had chosen freely; and if his nemesis had caught up with him at last, he had no right now to bewail his lot. He had played the game gladly, and won gladly; and now, he had lost. It was as simple as that. There at the bottom of the sea he was alone with his ultimate fate, with not the remotest prospect of the cavalry appearing over the hill at the last minute... nor of any other miracle.
In real life there were no miracles; and real life for the Saint had dwindled down into perhaps two hundred cubic feet of underwater blackness, and a couple of minutes of breathing before his air ran out. And then the cabin would become his water tomb, and he would pass out of the living legend and into the historic. And so there was nothing left but to resign himself to the inevitable.
Above the hull, the other diver had continued swiftly and decisively with the execution of his plan. Silently, he surfaced in the blind water on the far side of the launch. He climbed aboard and released an extra length of the boat’s anchor rope. He dived again, following the rope to the anchor itself. He dragged it along the sea bed, passed the rope twice around the rail of the sunken cruiser, and then silently swam back to surface again beside the launch. Lebec, Arabella, and the crewmen were busy unloading the gold on to the Phoenix’s deck; there was no reason for them to turn to the launch, and they did not see the diver stealthily setting fire to the cushions in its cabin, before he silently slipped back into and under the water.
A minute or so later Lebec suddenly stood still and sniffed the air like a pointer dog. He turned towards the source of the acrid smoke.
“My ship! Vile!” he bellowed.
He grabbed a bucket and leapt across to the launch. The crewman followed with a second bucket, and after a momentary hesitation Arabella joined them.
While they were preoccupied with trying to douse the flames, the diver resurfaced between the two boats to proceed to the next stage of his plan. He cut the rope with which Lebec had tied the launch close up to the Phoenix. Then he braced himself against the bigger boat, and with his feet he pushed the launch well clear. He boarded the Phoenix, and made for the wheelhouse.
Lebec felt the movement of the launch, shouted, then turned in rage and astonishment as the Phoenix’s engines came to throbbing life. And the Phoenix began to pull away, with someone visible at the wheel who, from that distance, could be recognisable only as a man wearing a diver’s wet-suit and mask.
“Templar!” Lebec roared. “Stop! As a police officer I command you to stop!”
The error was pardonable, as Lebec had no way of knowing that the Saint was still at the bottom of the sea.
The seat cushions on the launch were still smouldering, but the fire had done no serious damage. Lebec barked a new order at his crewman; and as the man complied the diesel engines of the launch awoke to drumming life.
“Allez! Vite!” Lebec snapped, stabbing an outraged finger in the direction of the Phoenix as she headed for the open sea. “After him! Templar shall not get away with the gold!”
He flung himself on the anchor cable and hauled. At first the rope began to come easily aboard as Lebec took up the slack; then the rope tautened, stretched, and held fast.
With a string of Gallic profanities Lebec shouted another order. The man said something back, and Lebec took over the helm and opened the throttle. The launch’s propeller churned the water into a froth; and its nose tilted up as it strained against the creaking wet rope that tethered it. But it remained tethered; and the enraged Lebec frantically piled on more power as he watched the Phoenix heading out to sea.
Down below, in what he had accepted would soon become his sodden sepulchre, Simon Templar had heard the last hiss of air released by his tanks. Then there was nothing left but to re-breathe what remained in the tubes and in his face mask.
A stubborn instinctive will to live compelled him to try to make it last as long as possible by controlled shallow breathing, even though common sense told him that it could only postpone oblivion by a few futile minutes.
His ribs ached, and a kind of merciful red mist came up before his eyes to distance him from what was happening in the final seconds...
As the red mist darkened, somewhere above him a man at the helm of a boat switched to reverse gear and crammed on full power again, and held the throttle wide open while the turbulent water boiled around the boat with a frustrated churning of the screws, and a suffocating fog of diesel fumes engulfed it.
Simon Templar did not hear the straining of the stretched anchor rope, nor the slow sucking and splintering and rending sound made by the rotten timbers of the sunken wreck as the sustained traction on the tethered cable pulled it apart. Nor was he conscious enough to see clearly the gaping aperture of greenish light that opened up like a heaven above his head as the stern-rail and a torn-off section of deck were dragged slowly upward. It could only have been by blind reflexes that he groped his way out and up towards that light, strengthened by some reawakened spark of hope which had defiantly survived in him.
And then, as he broke surface, the feel of air on his skin must have brought consciousness briefly back to him. At any rate, something told him to tear off his face mask and take two great gulping gasping breaths, as hands reached down from the launch to bring him aboard, before the mist came up in front of his eyes again and became an infinite and engulfing black void.