Now I was hearing Bonard's last mocking words, "You'll never find her… she's put a great barrier between you." It fitted perfectly with the operation which had to be supplied with money for the payoffs from the Chinese. The pieces were suddenly coming together by themselves. The operation's second cover was an underwater station somewhere along the Great Barrier Reef!
I swung out of the bed, ignoring the sharp pain in my shoulder. Judy had taken a dress from the closet, gone into the next room and changed. She was just zipping it up, a bright yellow and violet print that blended together in a vibrancy that was also subdued. I walked to where she'd hung my trousers over the back of a chair and fished out two small keys on a separate ring.
"You want to knock off thinking just about Judy?" I said to her. "You want to help me?"
"Maybe," she said, eyeing me cautiously. I shook my head.
"Maybe isn't good enough," I said. "I'm going to need help and right now you're the only safe person I know around here. I can't trust anyone else — not yet anyway."
"That's nice to hear for a change," she said. "About being trusted. What do I have to do?"
"Go to the public lockers at the airport at Ayr," I told her. "Here are the keys. Take the bag out of the locker and bring it here at once. There's a car downstairs you can use. You can drive, can't you?"
"Lord, yes," she said, taking the keys from me.
"And while you're doing that, I'll be making a phone call. To America," I added. Her eyebrows shot skyward.
"Blimey, mate," she said. "Make it collect."
VII
I found a good atlas on Judy's bookshelf, and had it open on my lap when my call to Hawk finally went through.
"I've got to use the goodies Stewart gave me to take along," I said. "Do we have any subs near the Great Barrier Reef?"
There was a moment of silence and I knew he was checking out the highly classified Naval Deployment chart. Finally he came back on.
"I believe so," he said. "We have three in the Coral Sea. One of them could move down to the reef very quickly."
"Good enough," I said, tracing a line with my finger on the map. "Have him surface and stand by for our signal as near to Flinders Passage as he can. There's plenty of deep water there. We'll use the call name Boomerang."
"I have it," Hawk answered. "Good luck." I put down the phone and smiled grimly. Hawk knew he'd get the details later. And he had gleaned plenty from our short conversation, more than others would. The fact that I'd asked for one of our subs to stand by told him immediately that there was top-level trouble in Australian Intelligence. The stand-by part of it also told him that I was still hunting.
I sat back and studied the map in my hands. The Great Barrier Reef ran for some thousand miles along the northern coast of Queensland. Ordinarily, the search would be a gargantuan task, but I was banking on factors that narrowed down the area. If I was right in my thinking about an undersea station, I could pretty well eliminate all those shallow areas of the reef. I could also eliminate the outer edge of the great reef because of the constantly seething surf that would make any kind of undersea-to-surface operation extremely hazardous. And lastly, as Mona had operated on land from a point near Townsville, I was betting that her sea cover wouldn't be too far away. Judy came in and I took the bag from her.
"Good girl," I said. "Now you can get out of that outfit and gather your scuba gear."
She shook her head and, hands on hips, watched me open the bag. I took out a scuba outfit and a length of thin wire attached to two small, black fitted cases — one a little larger than the other. A small round object, similar to the very front section of a telephone receiver with a stretch rubber-band in the back of it also emerged from the suitcase.
"Maybe I'd better explain these to you first," I said, "seeing as how you'll be using them with me. You'll strap on the larger of these two small sets. You could call them a kind of underwater walkie-talkie. The smaller of the two boxes will be strapped onto my back and the thin wire will run from it to the one you'll have. When I talk into this mouthpiece, which will fit tightly inside my diving mask, my words will be instantly converted into electrical impulses which will travel along the wire, which is of course insulated. When the electrical impulses reach the set you have, they'll be automatically converted back into sound and words. I'll be below, underwater, and you'll be on the surface. It's a one-way walkie-talkie, from me to you, because the other part of the set you'll have on is a sending apparatus. When I give you the information I want to give you, you press a button on your set and start sending it. I'll brief you on what to say and how to say it. Now let's move. Every minute counts."
Judy, looking sober and perhaps a little frightened, went into the other room to change and I quickly put on the scuba-suit, except for the flippers, face mask and special equipment. I made a mental note to congratulate Stewart on being so psychic about what I might need.
Judy came out, filling the scuba-suit with beautiful curves. I never knew one of the damned outfits could look so sexy. We piled everything into the Mercedes, taking along two extra air-tanks, and headed for the coastline. I gave Judy a final briefing on how to signal the submarine if and when we found our target. She, in turn, told me what was the best probable spot to start our search — a little island reef to the south of Magnetic Island. As I pulled the Mercedes onto the firm white sand of the beach, she looked at me with a long, level look.
"Tell me what the ruddy hell I'm doing out here," she asked.
"I'll give you four reasons. You pick out whichever one you like best. You're doing something for your country. You're making up for having helped a group of foreign agents. You're helping me. You're getting a nice, extra-long visa to the States."
She looked at me, unsmiling. "Maybe it's a little bit of all of them," she said. I grinned at her and we started to put on the special equipment and the aqualungs. Before I strapped on my face mask, I took her by the shoulders.
"Now remember, when the time comes, after you send the message I give you to send, you take off, understand. I may come up after you and I may not. But you are to take off at once. Find your way back here to the car and go home. Have you got that right?"
Her lower lip thrust out a little. "I've got it," she said crossly. "But it's a little like having to leave when the party gets started."
"You just leave," I said severely. "Or you'll find this party to be pretty deadly."
I leaned over and kissed her quickly, and she clung to me for a moment. Then we strapped on our special gear and walked into the warm, clear waters of the Coral Sea.
The length of wire was wound around a small spool which attached to my diving belt and wound out by itself. The hunt began; with Judy swimming above, on or just under the surface, feeling the slight tug of the wire to guide her as I moved along far below, 1 explored the hidden recesses of the vast coral formation known as the Great Barrier Reef. Built over the millions and millions of years by trillions of tiny limestone-secreting polyps, the great reef is the largest structure on earth built by living organisms. I avoided the smaller crevices in the coral structures. What I sought would require space. Besides, in the small crevices were the man-killers, the giant moray eels with the razor-sharp teeth, deadly stonefish and giant squid. I wanted no excursions into trouble with the vicious beauty that lurked in these waters. I passed a group of Mako sharks and sighed in relief as they kept going. A school of delicately colored butterfly fish kept me company for a while and then went off on their own pursuits. It was slow and painstaking and frustrating. Though I was well covered by the scuba suit, certain varieties of the coral were deadly sharp and I had to skirt them with the greatest of care. I ran head-on into a red and white reef octopus as I came up to peer across the top of one spot. More afraid and surprised than I was, he scurried off in that strange way they have, moving through the water like an eight-armed ballerina waving all her arms to unheard music.