The floor was bubbling up, blue and sparkling, beneath them. The deck plates were drawing back into the bulkheads, and the sea, carrying the hot equatorial afternoon sunlight around the bulk of the ship, surged up under their plastic craft. It stopped a few feet below the porthole, and the speaker hissed again.
"Pressure in 'D' hold equalized. Bleed air."
Smoothly now the level began to rise. Illya turned off their headlights again as a bright line of surface crawled upwards across the window, and the Squid began to quiver as the water took her weight. She rocked slightly as she floated free of the cradle sling, and meters sprang to life as Napoleon closed the switches that began the powerful electromotive forces driving sea water out through the Coanda ring. The two agents felt a gentle surge as the Squid slipped out of her sling, and Napoleon slid a lever slowly forward. Tanks of ballast began to flood, and the walls of the hold seemed to move upward around them. Then the hull of the ship was suddenly floating above them, and the blue-green light flooded into their pressure sphere. Napoleon thumbed the microphone button again.
"Squid away," he said. "We'll see you right here in a few days."
"A-Okay, Squid," said the metallic voice under the control panel. "Stay out of trouble, and write if you get work."
"So long, Mother Ship."
"Back to radio silence, now," said Illya to Napoleon, a tone of caution in his voice.
"Squid out," said Napoleon, and replaced the microphone.
On two of his display screens, a long oval blob indicated the freighter, already two hundred yards behind them and a hundred feet above. The Squid continued to sink, aiming for a cruising depth of a thousand feet. Soon the inside lights were switched on, as the illumination from outside dropped through the spectrum past blue and green and finally out of the visual range altogether.
They leveled off some two-tenths of a mile below the sparkling waves, secure in the knowledge of more than two miles between them and the bottom, and Illya set the course at 195˚. An automatic sonar watch would alert them if anything as large as themselves showed on their screens, or if an uncharted sea-mount should loom nearby. Napoleon leaned back for a nap. The chairs were comfortable, and they would probably have no place to sleep tonight.
"You ought to get some sleep too," he told Illya. "We have five hours to go before we come up on that island, and it's going to be a busy night."
"In a few minutes. You go ahead and I'll join you. I want to check our drift rate. The South Equatorial Current goes west at a knot and a half around here, and I don't want to miss our island by nine miles."
Napoleon woke up some time later to the smell of food. He looked first at his board, and saw they were still under way, at reduced speed, but the bottom was rising gradually. There was something showing on the edge of his scope, and he extended the range to its limits, regardless of lost definition.
Some ten miles ahead of them the bottom rose past their present depth and broke the surface over a space of two or three miles. He leaned back in his contour seat and declaimed in a properly nautical tone, "Island ho! Dead ahead at ten miles."
"You just noticed it?" asked Illya dryly. "We'll be grounding at the hundred-foot level in another twenty minutes. I thought we should have a bit of hot nourishing supper before we go ashore. Accommodations there are likely to be limited."
"A good thought. What have you whipped up in your modern all-electronic miracle kitchen?"
"I don't know. There's no name on the package—just a description of the contents in unappetizing technical terms. But it's well-balanced for a maximum of nutrition and a minimum of bulk, and it smells edible."
"That's all I ask. This salt air always gives me an appetite." Napoleon slipped out of his chair and accepted the tray Illya handed him.
They ate and drank, and filled their canteens from the fresh water supply. Then the depth alarm began to sound softly, and they returned to the control panels. In a few minutes a rocky bottom jagged with coral showed in their headlights, and the Squid settled gently to rest. A panel of switches were clicked over, and meters fell back against their stop pins as the electromagnetic fields collapsed and died.
A few fish swam idly past, attracted by the light. One or two paused to stare through the porthole at the strange exhibit within, then passed on like idle tourists at an aquarium.
Finally all was ready. The outside lights were doused; the cabin lights were set so a radio signal from above could turn them on to light the returning travelers home. Both agents slipped their packs on over their wet-suits. Napoleon crawled into the airlock and sealed the inner hatch behind him. In the yellow illumination of his underwater torch he adjusted his face-mask, and touched the button beside the hatch. With scarcely a sound, a cool pressure began rising about him. The black surface crept up and surrounded him as he hung in the three-foot cylindrical airlock.
When the lock was full, he swallowed several times as the weight of a hundred feet of sea water squeezed his eardrums and his chest. The pressure was high, but if they got to the surface with reasonable dispatch there would be insufficient time for nitrogen to dissolve in their bloodstreams necessitating gradual and tedious decompression. The inside of the sub was kept close to surface normal pressure for just this reason.
He let himself float to the top hatch, worked the dogs, and pushed it open. Then he was out, looking down at the dimly visible shape of the submarine. He waggled his fins, and swam around to the front.
Peering back in through the port, he could see Illya standing, masked and finned, next to the lock entrance, watching the indicator lights. The bottom one flashed green, and he followed Solo. Napoleon swam back to meet him.
It was almost a minute before the hatch opened and the Russian pulled himself out. His light swung around and joined his partner's, and side by side they swam along the bottom as it slanted upwards.
It was shortly after dusk when they broke the surface. The sub had been grounded at the opposite end of the island from the volcanic cone, and the U.N.C.L.E. agents surfaced quietly a hundred yards off-shore for cautious reconnaissance.
Their eyes, accustomed to the underwater darkness, could see the shore easily by the last of the sky glow. It looked deserted.
Treading water, they conferred in whispers. "No reason to think we might have been spotted. I'll go in first—signal you if it's all clear."
Illya nodded and submerged again. Napoleon replaced his scuba mouthpiece and began stroking steadily along, a few feet below the surface.
In a matter of minutes, he felt the tug of surf about him and rose again. The half-moon overhead showed him lines and curves of white froth against black sand. The surf was low, and except for the passage of the foam, his black wet-suit would be nearly invisible against the beach. He ducked under a wave and started his landing.
Water surged about him and spun him once while he fought to recover his balance, and then the sand scraped against his knees. He grabbed for it and pushed himself erect, then stumbled up the slope towards the trees some ten or fifteen feet before dropping flat.
He spat out the breathing valve and took his first lungful of natural air in several hours. Next he slipped the mask off his face and rubbed at his eyes. They itched from the pressure and a little sea water that had got in through the not-quite-perfect seal around his face. And he listened.