Jack looked up, and gasped with horror. Instead of lying horizontally above him, the torpedo was now nearly vertical, nose-down. The warhead had closed back down on the main body of the torpedo, giving it the semblance of integrity, but Jack knew that it was attached by only a thin carapace of metal on one side. What was stopping the torpedo from falling further was not obvious, as the girder was nearly broken away. Costas was still straddling it, as if riding it down toward him. For a horrified moment they stared at each other, the warhead only a couple of meters from Jack’s head, hanging directly above him.
He cleared his throat. “So that’s called making it safe?”
“Jack, you need to get out of there. I can’t move, because my extra weight might be what’s giving the torpedo its grip on the remains of that girder. I need you to get to my tool belt, take out the length of black nylon line and tie off the torpedo somewhere above me, from the tail assembly.”
“Are you telling me that line has at least a two-ton weight rating?”
“One ton. But it might buy us time.”
Jack injected a small blast of air into his compensator and rose slowly out of the crate to the level of Costas’s belt. His readout began flashing amber, a warning that he had only two minutes of bottom time left. He knew where the line was kept; he opened the pouch and extracted it, then ascended past the girder to the torpedo’s tail fin assembly. He looped the rope twice around the cylindrical propeller guard and up over two massive girders above him, then repeated the loop with the remainder of the rope, tying it off at the torpedo. His computer began flashing red. “Done,” he said. “If this holds, the torpedo should hang free. But even if it does hold, I can’t see it lasting long.”
“I’m letting go now. Then we’re out of here.” Costas let go with one hand, injected air into his compensator, and then released the torpedo completely, floating free above it. There was a sickening screech as the torpedo slipped another half-meter down the rusted girder, pulling the line taut. One of the loops snapped, whipping and coiling in the water. Jack turned away and powered toward the opening in the side of the ship, followed close behind by Costas. As they cleared the hull, there was another ominous creaking sound and a shimmer in the water. Jack watched his warning light revert from red to amber as they ascended the rocky ridge outside to the level of the continental shelf. “At least you managed to defuse it,” he said, watching Costas come alongside. “Not much chance of that thing blowing without a fuse, I would have thought. Still, good to be cautious.”
Costas cleared his throat. “Well, it didn’t go exactly as planned.”
“What do you mean?”
“The threads were really rusty. You would have thought they might have coated them with zinc, too. Wartime British expediency, I guess.”
“You’re saying you didn’t defuse it.”
“Not exactly.”
“Even so, there’s not much to worry about, is there? It didn’t go off in 1943, so it probably won’t go off now. It was a dud.”
“Well, when I said not exactly, I meant I didn’t defuse it, but I did make some progress. I did manage to arm it.”
Jack’s heart sank. “You what?”
“It wasn’t a dud. The torpedo mechanic who was meant to arm it didn’t screw the fuse in far enough. It was a new type in 1943, and he was probably not that familiar with it. I tried it, just to see, and it went active. Problem was, I couldn’t screw it back out again.”
“Great,” Jack said. “So we’ve managed to leave eight hundred and five pounds of high explosive hanging by a piece of string from a rotting girder, armed with a live impact fuse.”
“We’re due for our first ten-minute decompression stop now, at ninety meters. I suggest we get behind this rocky ridge, where we should be protected from the shock wave. Stopping in the middle of the water like we are now is probably not such a great idea.”
“Can’t be too safe, can we?” Jack muttered, leading them behind the ridge. At that moment there was a huge rending sound, like a deep groaning, and then silence.
“That would be the girder. Next will be the rope. Hold me, Jack.”
“Finally lost your nerve?”
“Less chance of one of us being blown through the water. Might be a good idea to activate our ear defenders now.”
Jack quickly pressed the sides of his helmet, muffling the sounds from outside, and then clung face-to-face with Costas as low as they could go against the seabed, huddled together behind a rocky pinnacle. A moment later he seemed to be lifted bodily from the seabed, and the water shook violently around them. The sound of a huge detonation followed, a massive muted boom that seemed to course through him. A large fragment of rock tumbled down from the top of the pinnacle and landed beside them, followed by an avalanche of smaller fragments. There was a strange silence for a few moments, followed by an indescribable cacophony, a creaking, screeching and groaning noise as if an orchestra of industrial machinery were tuning up. Then, with a lingering, fading shriek, it was gone, leaving an eerie silence.
“That would be the ship,” Jack said quietly after a few moments. “Falling five thousand meters into the abyss.”
Costas gazed at him through his visor, wide-eyed. “Whoops.”
Jack stared back at him, the water still shimmering between them. “Whoops. Is that all you’ve got to say?”
“So that’s what it’s like to be underwater when a torpedo goes off,” Costas continued, his eyes glazed in wonder. “Cool.”
Jack watched his computer readout flicker, and then stabilize. “The explosion doesn’t seem to have restarted my manifold glitch, thankfully. Not sure I can say the same about my nerves.”
“Did you feel that shock wave?”
“It’s a good thing we were behind this ridge, otherwise it would have killed us.”
“We’d have been dead anyway,” Costas said. “There was enough force in that blast to have ripped our arms and legs off.”
“Why does something like this always happen when I dive with you and there are explosives involved?”
“It’s called science. What IMU is supposed to be all about,” Costas said. “Hypothesis, experiment, observation. Anyway, it solves the problem of who gets the gold, doesn’t it? The floor of that canyon is well over a mile down, with who knows how much depth of sediment lying on the bottom. The chances of our Deep Explorer friends finding even one of those gold bars again would be pretty close to zero.”
“They’ll have registered the shock wave on the surface,” Jack said. “We’ll tell them the wreck contained a consignment of ammunition. There was no record of that, but then there was no record of the gold, either. There were lots of secrets in the Second World War, and this is what happens when you mess with them. I’ll radio the Ministry of Defense in London and our UN representative to say that we saw enough to identify the wreck as a war grave, but that they have nothing to worry about, as there’s no way the salvage company can now get at her.”
“You won’t mention the torpedo?”
“That it was British? That’s between you and me, for now. There was something strange going on here, something that might have involved the gold and that plaque, and I want to try to get to the bottom of that first.”
“We didn’t exactly not interfere with a war grave, did we?”
“The torpedo should have gone off in 1943. It was going to fall through those rusting girders anyway, and the wreck wasn’t going to last long on that ridge. It’s all part of the natural process. All we did was help it on its way.”