“Roger that. And I’ll never make fun of you for fishing again. What other diver would carry a length of line and a lead weight with them?”
Costas patted his tool belt, then coiled the line and stowed it in a pouch. “Always be prepared.”
“Thanks, by the way. I didn’t think I was going to make it up that overhang.”
“The buddy system, remember? Always pays to have a good buddy.”
“How much time do we have?”
“How deep did you get?”
“A hundred and forty-nine meters. My readout shows my gas supply’s still good for another half-hour bottom time.”
“Twenty minutes,” Costas said. “We don’t want to extend our decompression time. Those bozos on Deep Explorer would probably leave without us. Now, where were we? You ready to see something incredible?”
Jack checked his helmet readout and did a quick self-diagnostic. His breathing had returned to normal, and any aches and pains from the climb were eclipsed by the adrenalin. He looked up again at the bow of the wreck, and then along the line Costas had laid into the gloom along the port side. If there was something good to see here, he was damned if he was going to forgo it after what he had just been through.
“How many lives do I have left?” he said.
“That was about your eighth. You’ve got plenty to go.”
“Okay. Show me what you’ve got.”
3
Costas powered ahead beside the sunken hull, the wake of his fins stirring up the silt and monofilaments that were caught in Jack’s headlamp beam. To his left the hull loomed high above, blocking off the yawning chasm on the other side. About twenty meters along the line from the bow, Costas veered inside, the yellow of his helmet disappearing from view. He had entered a vertical crack in the hull, some three meters across at the bottom and widening as it went up. Jack turned to follow, spotting Costas’s figure where the line led inside, their headlamp beams revealing a jumbled mass of structure and machinery. “Keep hold of the line,” Costas said, the intercom crackling. “I tried not to disrupt the sediment when I was in here before, but even so the visibility is poor. Some of the compartments must have imploded during the sinking, and it’s a shambles inside.”
“I don’t see any evidence here of a torpedo strike,” Jack said.
“Not here. This is where the hull split when it impacted with the seabed. The cargo holds on either side are filled with iron and manganese ore, thousands of tons of it. There’s no way the ship could have survived hitting the sea floor intact carrying that kind of weight. It’s amazing that the torpedo didn’t do that itself, but these pre-war Clyde-built ships were stronger than the Liberty ships you see splitting in half in the U-boat periscope footage.”
“Where did it strike?”
“Toward the stern, just before the number two hold. We’re going to get there by swimming beneath the deckhouse superstructure, through what’s left of the engine room. Follow me.”
Jack checked his computer display. The profile had automatically readjusted to take account of his greater depth and gas consumption during his escapade over the canyon edge, and now gave him only twenty minutes before he needed to start his ascent. The wireless connection meant that the revised data should have streamed into Costas’s computer and be showing the same profile on his own helmet readout. “Are you seeing my dive time?” he asked.
“Nineteen minutes,” Costas replied. “Once we’re finished inside, we can egress from the hole in the hull caused by the torpedo strike. Let’s move.”
“Roger that.” Jack swam cautiously into the wreckage, wincing as he felt his backpack scrape against a girder. A cloud of red from an exploded rusticle filled the water, creating a haze that restricted visibility even further. He lowered the intensity of his beam to reduce the reflection off particles suspended in the water, and looked around him. As often when diving into a wreck his focus became microcosmic, concentrating on the small details, on what he could see clearly only inches from his mask, knowing that the bigger picture might be obscured by the disorder of the structure and poor visibility. He saw a porcelain washbasin free of encrustation, and then a linked belt of fifty-caliber rounds that must have fallen from one of the gun emplacements above. He passed through a collapsed bulkhead into an enclosed space, his beam revealing twisted shapes in the darkness as he swept it around.
“We’re skirting the port side of the engine room,” Costas said. “Only about ten meters to go now.”
Jack pulled himself carefully along the line, keeping clear of Costas’s fins. A tapered cylindrical shape appeared below him, its base angled up where the retaining bolts had been wrenched away but with the dial and glass face at the other end still intact. “Did you see that?” he said. “It looks like the engine-room binnacle.”
“I checked it out when I was in here before,” Costas replied. “It’s set at one quarter ahead, twenty revolutions per minute. The officer of the watch must have ordered the ship to slow down immediately after the torpedo strike. It must have been pretty hellish down here, with the explosion having taken place just beyond the next bulkhead.”
Jack paused, floating motionless above the binnacle, remembering the report on the sinking. Amazingly, none of the men in the engine room had been killed by the torpedo strike, but four of the officers had gone down with the ship when she had finally sunk. After the strike they had volunteered to stay below to restart the engine, and to close the engine-room bulkheads against further flooding. They would have known that the ship could go quickly once the point of no return had been reached, that the slow wallowing would suddenly escalate into a terrifying maelstrom as the colossal weight of the cargo pulled her down. He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking of those men. This was their tomb, but it was also the place where they had kept the ship alive, where for a fleeting instant Jack could see the gleaming brass and well-oiled machinery instead of the sepulchral gloom and twisted shapes around him.
Costas had disappeared through a gap in the next bulkhead, and as Jack followed, he saw evidence of a different kind of devastation. Instead of damage caused by implosion and by impact with the seabed, he saw the results of a massive explosion — a space some eight meters in diameter where the ship had been disembowelled, eviscerated, leaving only the twisted ends of copper pipes and shattered steel girders jutting out around the edges. To his right he could see through the jagged hole where the hull had been blown open just below the waterline, the plates folded inward like the petals of a flower.
Below him he saw where the line had been tied off to a girder, and ahead he could see Costas straddling something in the wreckage, a long cylindrical shape, his head bent down at the far end. The intercom crackled again. “I just need to finish making this safe,” Costas said. “It’s what I was doing while you were having your regulator malfunction on the surface.”
Jack pulled himself through the bulkhead and swam up behind, staring in disbelief. “My God. You’re defusing a torpedo.”
“Fuse immunisation, to be technical. And not just any torpedo. This is a British torpedo.”
“That’s impossible. Clan Macpherson was a British merchantman, torpedoed by a German U-boat.”
“That’s the official line. But take a closer look.”
Jack inspected the torpedo’s propeller and lower body. Costas was right. The torpedo was a British Mark VIII, the standard type launched from British submarines during the Second World War. He stared in astonishment. How had this gotten here?