They were putting the chopper aloft I stopped kicking and hung there with the surface fifty feet above me and the sea bed fifty-six feet below. The rotor was producing a light fluttering sound, most of it screened by the surface, and the other noise was louder, transmitted directly to my ears from the screws of the launch. It was rising in pitch and increasing in volume: the thing was heading in this direction. The body had been found some distance to the north of the rig and I suppose it was the logical direction for anyone to take if they wanted to start a hunt for his assailant. They knew there hadn't been any kind of a boat near the rig and they knew his air tube had been cut clean through by a blade and it had happened underwater so they didn't have to make any guesses: they were looking for a frogman.
I'd shut my eyes while I was motionless and now it was dark again and I kicked with the fins to correct my attitude: I'd been drifting head-down without knowing it. I had approximately sixty seconds before the helicopter picked out the faint blob against the sandbars and signalled the launch where to find me and I didn't like either of the two things I could do but I was going to have to do one of them. I could start swimming nearer the surface and wait till the chopper sighted me and then I could put out a cloud with the shark repellent and dive and leave it for them as a decoy while I tried to get clear, or I could go straight down to a hundred feet where they couldn't see me and swim face-up with the sun as a bearing and try to hit the island before narcosis reduced me to a drifting piece of flotsam and the air in the tanks ran out.
The launch was throttling down.
As near as I could judge it was at a horizontal distance of a hundred yards: I could see its faint smudge moving slowly across the surface against the dazzling light, cutting a vee from the fluid gold and spreading it towards me.
Assume starting square search.
A shadow passed suddenly over me as the helicopter swung in from the south-east, lowering across the sea. Both the launch and the chopper would be armed and if I tried the decoy thing they might decide to open fire instead of bringing in divers to pick me up and hand me over for grilling, so I jack-knifed and put my arms to my sides and felt the pressure mounting as I plunged to the dark sands below.
Chapter Fifteen: TRAP
I couldn't breathe.
His hands were at my throat and he pressed with his thumbs and I couldn't stop him. His eyes were slits and below the mask his teeth were bared with the effort as he went on pressing with his thumbs. Behind his yellow face the mountain reared.
I tried to move but his weight was on me and the water lapped at my head, its waves coming and going without any sound. The mountain was silent, gigantic, directly above me, and I began running but I couldn't breathe. He was blocking my throat.
Haze began covering the mountain and I pulled off the mask and the mountain was instantly clear. Something was in my mouth and I pulled it away and my lungs bellowed, heaving inside my ribs. There was something under my feet and I pushed upwards and got my head higher out of the water, and the mountain sloped away until it was a low hill, covered in green. I pushed again with my feet and climbed higher, getting a grip on the rocks with my hands, the left one painful and oozing blood.
Then I stopped moving and stood waist-deep in the water, wanting to do nothing but breathe the sweet air in: I'd always believed that thirst was the worst, but it isn't. The tanks had run out of air but I didn't need it because my head was out of the water: I'd been dying for the want of air when there was the whole sky full of it.
He'd gone. I'd been hallucinating.
This was Heng-kang Chou Island.
I couldn't have recovered full consciousness or I would have reacted faster. Situation data was coming in heavily and was so significant that I dealt with it first and the imaginative process was partially inhibited: I'd lost consciousness somewhere near the sea bed and drifted on the southerly current and exhausted the air supply in tidal breathing but I was still alive and had a refuge where I could hole up in safety and this situation was so satisfactory that I didn't look for problems.
Time check: 13.01.
I'd been drifting in the unconscious state for something like two hours and the current had kept me close to the sea bed or the helicopter would have sighted me. The rubber suit was ripped in a lot of places and my knees and shoulders felt bruised: Ferris had told me the south shore of the island was steep granite dropping away to sixteen fathoms within twenty yards of the waterline, so the on-shore current had dragged me up the slope of rock to the surface.
Rotor.
There had to be more data before I saw the danger I was in, and it came aurally from across the sea and I went down slowly and was careful not to make a splash because if this was the south shore of the island it was in sight of the rig and at a distance of two miles a pair of medium-power field glasses could pick up an object the size of a man.
Bloody well wake up and try to survive!
I took off the faceplate to avoid reflection and sank into the water with only my head clear, tugging at the quick-release buckles of the backpack and letting the air tanks go, pushing them down the rockface with my hands and then my feet to start them sliding to the bottom. Then I made a five-second survey across the sea's surface: three helicopters airborne, one of them this side of the rig and the other two well beyond it. Five boats visible, three of them cabin class, two of them smaller craft. I couldn't see from this distance whether they were navy, police or coastguard, but they were flying the yellow-starred flag of the Chinese Republic in the stern. They would almost certainly have divers down.
The nearest cave mouth.was this side of the southernmost point and I submerged with the mask on, surfacing every so often to breathe and keeping my head turned inshore, reaching the cave and crawling on to the fissured floor and flopping down on my stomach, drawing deep breaths, the mask still on until I remembered it and pulled it away. State of semi-exhaustion and it worried me because it hadn't been a long swim and the fins had cut down the work. Possible blood loss: I remembered the wound had come open while I'd been engaged with the diver. Possible residual effects of nitrogen narcosis: I'd been unconscious for two hours and there would still be a lingering retention of CO2 in the tissues. Probably combination of both factors and therefore normal but I didn't like it because I had to think and all I could see was a flutter of light in front of my eyes and all I could hear was the chop-chop-chop of that bloody rotor amplified in the cave.
An irregular draught above my head and something pattering on my back, the sense of creatures somewhere near me. Take some interest then because everything is interesting if you want to live: all right, bats, napping all over the place above my head, I'd frightened them.
I let my eyes shut again.
Be too dangerous to go inland and try to reach the far side of the island because the chopper was too close and there wouldn't be much cover in these soft green hills: there weren't any trees, only bushes and short scrub clinging to the rock where it could. I'd reached land but the only cover was in the sea and I'd no air left in the tanks and they were gone now anyway, so much junk, all I'd had to keep me alive not long ago.
Think of nothing. Relax.