They climbed off the drum and Stratton crouched to inspect it.‘You sweet and brilliant man,Tusker Hamlin . . . It’s another clamp. And there are others attached to the cable around the drum. We don’t need a depth gauge. The cable’s pre-set for every stop.’
Christine slumped back down onto her cross-brace and pulled her blanket back round her. She offered one to Stratton who took it and did the same.
He consulted the table, checked the watch and hit a button on the side of it. ‘Four and a half hours. Then we move up to the next stop.’
She exhaled noisily. ‘Is it going to be this easy?’
‘I doubt the decompression will be perfect. There’s always risks even with the most sophisticated set-ups. It’ll be a resounding success if we’re barely alive by the time we see daylight . . . We’re going to have to watch each other for any symptoms. There’ll also be a carbon dioxide build-up. We’ll have to flush the air every so often.’
‘What are the signs?’
‘Discoloration - the lips, for instance. Light-headed-ness. Talking crap.’
‘I think I’ve suffered from it before,’ Christine said, trying to match his humour. But there were too many fears for her to keep it up for long. ‘Is there enough air for the two of us? Hamlin planned this trip for one.’
Stratton shrugged.‘My maths doesn’t extend to cubic litres and oxygen consumption at partial pressures. Sorry.’
He decided to set the tap to a gentle flow of air. ‘If these bottles are full we should have enough.’
‘How come you know so much about diving?’
‘Ever heard of the SBS?’
‘You were a courier?
‘A what?’
‘SBS is a courier company - isn’t it?’
‘No, I wasn’t a courier . . . It’s like your navy SEALs.’
‘Oh. OK. Makes sense,’ Christine said, wrapping her arms around herself, feeling the cold.
Stratton moved to the end of his strut and lifted his blanket to make some room. ‘Sit over here. We need to keep warm.’
‘Not the old Eskimo ploy,’ she said, moving across the bell to sit beside him.
‘The lengths I go to to use that line.’
They pulled their legs out of the water, propped them on the opposite strut and adjusted the blankets. Stratton put an arm around the girl and they got as comfortable as they could.
‘What happened to Durrani?’ he asked.
‘He killed Mani and I think he intended to kill me. But he hesitated for some reason. I guess he was in a lot of pain. Then the lights went out. I punched him in the chest with everything I had. He must’ve been in bad shape. When the lights went back on he was lying on the floor, gasping for air . . . I’ve never seen anyone die up close before today.’
‘How’d you get so beaten up?’
‘That bastard Mandrick.’
‘What’s the deal with him?’
‘Works for the crooked corporation that owns Styx. They were making money from the mine, cheating Uncle Sam. Small potatoes. But a good enough reason for us to shut down the interrogation cell before it became an embarrassment . . . Mandrick kept all the dirt on a small computer. He liked insurance. It was all the proof I needed. But I blew it . . . Doesn’t matter now, though. We got what we wanted in the end. At the risk of sounding mercenary, this works out pretty good for us.’
‘Glad someone’s happy.’
Christine looked at Stratton. ‘He has what you came for.’
Stratton had not forgotten.
‘He’ll get picked up when he surfaces,’ she said. ‘The feds still want him.’
‘That’s not good for me, though. The feds’ll get what I came for . . . But he knows they’ll be waiting for him. That’s why he’s still down there. That pod’s designed to decompress at depth. He’ll surface when it’s done . . . You have any idea what time it is?’
‘It was around four p.m. when I went to see Mandrick. Dinner’s at six but I wanted to see him a couple of hours earlier. It couldn’t have been more than an hour after that when the alarms went off.’
‘That means it’ll be dark when we surface. He needs it to be dark.We’re ten miles off the coast. Not a problem if you’re wearing the right gear. He’ll be miles out of the area by dawn. On the road by late morning.’
Christine had nothing consolatory to offer.
‘Unless we’re there when he surfaces,’ Stratton added.
‘He must’ve started his decompression long before us.’
Stratton had already thought of that.
She wondered what was going through his mind. ‘Why do I get the feeling you’re planning on taking another risk before we’re even done with this one?’
‘I want to finish what I came for.’
‘I’ve been around special ops for a few years now and I’ve never met anyone like you before.What drives you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Fear of failing? No. I have that but I’m not in your league.’
‘I get as scared as the next person. I suppose I just don’t know when to quit until I’m in over my head. Then I have to figure how to get out. So far I’ve been lucky.’
‘You’ve solved one puzzle for me.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’ve wanted to be like you all my life. But I never made it because deep down I didn’t really believe you existed . . . Thanks.’
‘You hitting on me?’
‘Could be my last chance. This is the new me. It’s your fault. I see what I want and now I’m going for it.’
They chuckled together.
‘We should relax and save our air,’ Stratton said. ‘Try to sleep. I’ll stay awake.’
Christine rested her head comfortably against him, enjoying the closeness despite the circumstances. He placed the palm of his hand against the side of her head.
She mused thoughtfully for some time but her eyelids soon grew heavy as the events of the day drained her. Seconds after closing her eyes she fell into a deep sleep. It seemed to her as though only a few minutes had passed before the digital clock chirped.
She sat up, wondering where she was for a second.
Stratton took the pliers and reached down into the water. He jiggled with the clamp and a few seconds later the drum began to roll and the bell ascended.
He adjusted the gas, adding some oxygen to the mix, breathing in and out deeply, hoping he might spot any dangerous symptoms before they incapacitated him. He had experienced decompression sickness before during a familiarisation exercise in an RAF decompression chamber before a week of HALO jumps with the SAS. The team had been inside a large chamber containing chairs and tables and had been invited to occupy themselves with a variety of games such as kit construction or drawing pictures. In Stratton’s case he’d had to continually subtract seven from four hundred.
It was odd the way some had reacted differently to others. And at different periods of the decompression process. Some people had lasted barely a minute before they’d begun to act strangely, drawing wildly or becoming hysterical. One of the guys had started to do a little jig. Assistants wearing oxygen masks had been on hand to give oxygen immediately to anyone who showed signs of going under. Stratton had concentrated everything he had into subtracting his numbers and when the decompression had reached a dangerous level the pressure had been reversed and the exercise brought to a stop. When Stratton had reviewed his maths afterwards he’d found that he’d only made a couple of mistakes and had wondered if that was down to poor arithmetic or if he had started to succumb.
The bell came to a sudden stop and Christine tried to make herself comfortable against him once again but she was becoming fidgety. She chuckled to herself as she pulled the blanket down. Stratton was immediately aware of a change in her.