“Are you all right?”
He gave her the thumbs up.
He wasn’t all right. He was hating every moment of it but he didn’t want her to know that. He took another deep breath. When he looked up at the surface again he realised they were deeper. They had been slowly sinking. Dennis glanced down at his feet. He couldn’t see much past them and the panic began to return. Natalie caught his arm and they slowly descended. Then at thirty feet he could see the sea bed. At forty feet the pressure began to hurt his head. He stopped again and put his hands either side of his head and rubbed his temples. It didn’t take the pain away. His ears were also hurting. Natalie swam over. Dennis opened and closed his mouth a few times, champing on his teeth. It did ease the pressure a little. Natalie pointed upwards at the surface.
“Do you want to return to the dinghy?”
Dennis shook his head. She asked again, realising his holding his head probably meant that the pressure was hurting him. She asked him again if he wished to return. He shook his head more firmly this time and to prove the point he turned and began kicking downwards. At sixty feet they touched the sea bed. Natalie went into a kneeling position, motioning Dennis to do the same. She checked her watch and the gauge on her tank. It had taken five minutes to cover the sixty foot dive. This would normally be unacceptable. It should have taken less than a minute. But knowing it was Dennis’ first dive and he didn’t actually have a PADI licence which meant that she probably shouldn’t have let him come, five minutes seemed reasonable.
’At least he made it safely to the ocean floor,’ she said to herself.
They were taking one hell of a risk. Checking once more that he was ok, they set off, swimming along the sea bed.
Always looking ahead Dennis realised for the first time in his life that there wasn’t really much life at all in the open sea. He saw no fish. No man eating sharks. Nothing. He laughed. Earlier he’d been afraid at the thought of sharks. Now he knew they didn’t exist. How could they? After all there was nothing to eat down here.
They glided towards what looked to be grass. Long thick blades of grass that were evenly spaced apart. Just as he thought it was strange the ’grass’ disappeared one by one in front of him and he realised it was in fact eels. They were using the flow to catch and feed on the rich nutrients of the currents. The current was strong down here just as Ali had said it would be. The silt stirred up in the current kept visibility down to five metres. Dennis found this reassuring, almost as if they were closed in, safe. Natalie pointed ahead and following her finger Dennis could see the other divers. The side of a ship loomed up from the seabed. His excitement quickened. This was it. As they got nearer Natalie flicked on her helmet’s lights. Dennis remembered his now and flicked the switch. The lights revealed more of the ship.
’It looks like a trawler’ he said to himself.
George was at the bow with Alex. Tom and Jack at the stern. Natalie took Dennis over the side and onto the deck. Dennis felt his flippers touching rope netting and he imagined himself getting tangled in it. He kicked with his feet, looking nervously down at the age old ropes, his flippers kicking up sediment. Crabs darted out from the tangle. Plastic buoys attached to the nets bobbed in the current. Starfish crawled over the deck, moving incredibly slowly. They all knew now that this was a fishing trawler and not the small freighter they were looking for. At the bow George rubbed away some of the slime covering the ships painted name. The letters S….H….A….H, some more rubbing, O….F….P….E….R….S….I….A.
The Shah of Persia, and beneath the name, Gabes. The ship’s home port.
Natalie peered in through the windows of the bridge. Two were still intact. The other had been smashed. Large shards of glass covered in sediment where they had fallen. There was nothing of interest in the bridge. The ship’s wheel looked as slimy as the rest of the boat. The other divers joined her in a group. They all faced her. She got Dennis into the middle of them and checked her watch. They still had fifteen minutes of air left but there was nothing more to be seen. It was an old trawler. It could have been on the bottom, ten years, twenty, thirty. It was a job to tell. She checked that Dennis could remember how to ascend. He gave her the thumbs up.
Slowly they began to rise. Dennis’ head still hurt with the pressure but he had got used to it. He was only reminded of it as they ascended and the pressure changed. At the surface six heads bobbed in the waves. Dennis spat his mouthpiece out, glad to be rid of it. His jaw ached, unaccustomed to the regulator. He opened his mouth to speak and a small wave lapped at his face and he involuntarily gulped a mouthful of water which made him gag. The two engined dinghy powered down as it reached them. One of the crew reached out a hand to Natalie.
“I think you’d better help Mr Dennis first,” she said.
The crewman reached out to the journalist who was still coughing.
“Throw me your mask first then undo your harness and I’ll pull the tank up.”
Dennis threw his mask into the boat. The crewman reached out with a pole with a hook on the end, caught hold of the scuba tank and pulled it aboard. Dennis held onto the rope that ran around the entire boat. The crewman positioned himself, reached out his hand and with amazing strength pulled Dennis out of the sea and into the dinghy. Dennis instantly turned around to help Natalie then stopped and smiled at her. She was floating on her back staring up at him. Her tank bobbing upended nearby.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
“Oh yes.”
“You look like you belong there.”
“I do. This is my home.”
She was the last to get back into the dinghy.
Back on the main ship Hutchinson saw them climbing the steps to the deck. He left the bridge and descended to join them.
“What did you find down there?” he called to Natalie before he was even halfway to them. She was pulling on her hair to ring it out. Dennis made a comment and she playfully flicked the water from her hand at him.
“It was just an old trawler. The Shah of Persia out of Gabes.”
Hutchinson was carrying a laptop and he placed it on top of an oil drum and opened it. He tapped the left button and the screen came on instantly. He scrolled on the pad and clicked on ’Internet explorer’ He typed ’Shah of Persia’ into a search engine and viewed the results. Over two billion links for Gabes and Shah of Persia. He then defined his search adding ’fishing trawler’ and narrowed it down. Finally on the third page he found the link he wanted.
“Ah here we are. The ’Shah of Persia’ a 100ton fishing trawler. Built 1964, Nantucket island, U.S.A. Re-registered 1982, Gabes, Tunisia. Sank in mysterious circumstances with all hands lost, July 1983.”
Hutchinson clicked on another link. It brought up a free encyclopedia. He scanned the home page. There was a brief history of the ship originally named ’Wilhelmina’.
“It says here,” Hutchinson read from the page as his group formed a circle around him, “That the ship may have sunk in a storm. Although other reports, unconfirmed, state that it was involved in an accident with an Italian navy submarine. An incident the Italian navy deny happened.”
“There have been similar cases in Scotland where Royal navy submarines have snagged trawler nets and dragged the vessels to their doom,” Dennis added.
“Are they not aware of it?” Natalie asked, “The submarines I mean.”
“They wouldn’t even feel it. Imagine a 6000 ton nuclear submarine against a small diesel engined trawler. No contest. Submarines today are almost the size of a world war two aircraft carrier.”
“I didn’t realise they were so big. I guess you’re right.”
“Well whatever sank it,” Hutchinson said, “It’s not the ’Tangipito’