"It has to be. It damn well has to be. Out to the seven fathom mark there the sea-bottom is pretty flat, but there's not enough depth to hide superstructure and masts at low tide. From there to fourteen its practically a cliff. And beyond the fourteen fathom ledge it goes down to thirty-five fathom, steep enough to roll a ship down there. You can't operate at those depths without very special equipment indeed."
"It's a damn narrow ledge," he grumbled. "Less than a cable. How could they be sure the scuttled ship would fetch up where they wanted it to?"
"They could be sure. In dead slack water, you can always be sure."
Hutchinson put the engine in neutral and went outside. We drifted on quietly through the greyly opaque world. Visibility didn't extend beyond our bows. The muffled beat of the diesel served only to enhance the quality of ghostly silence. Hutchinson came back into the wheelhouse, his vast bulk moving as unhurriedly as always.
"I’m afraid you're right. I hear an engine."
I listened, then I could hear it too, the unmistakable thudding of an air compressor. I said: "What do you mean afraid?"
"You know damn well" He touched the throttle, gave the wheel a quarter turn to port and we began to move out gently into deeper water. "You're going to go down."
"Do you think I'm a nut case? Do you think I want to go down? I bloody well don't want to go down — and you bloody well know that I have to go down. And you know why. You want them to finish up here, load up in Dubh Sgeir and the whole lot to be hell and gone before midnight?"
"Half, Calvert. Take half of our share. God, man, we do nothing."
"I'll settle for a pint in the Columba Hotel in Torbay. You Just concentrate on putting this tub exactly where she ought to be. I don't want to spend the rest of my life swimming about the Atlantic when I come back up from the Nantesville."
He looked at me, the expression in his eyes saying "if," not "when," but kept quiet. He circled round to the south of the diving-boat — we could faintly hear the compressor all the way — then slightly to the west. He turned the Firecrest towards the source of the sound, manoeuvring with delicacy and precision. He said: "About a cable length."
"About that. Hard to judge in fog."
"North twenty-two east true. Let go the anchor."
I let go the anchor, not the normal heavy Admiralty type on the chain but a smaller CQR on the end of forty fathoms of rope. It disappeared silently over the side and the Terylene as silently slid down after it I let out all forty fathoms and made fast. I went back to the wheelhouse and strapped the cylinders on my back.
"You won't forget, now," Hutchinson said. "When you come up, just let yourself drift. The ebb's just setting in from the nor'-nor'-east and will carry you back here. I'll keep the diesel ticking, you'll be able to hear the underwater exhaust twenty yards away, I hope to hell the mist doesn't clear. You'll just have to swim for Dubh Sgeir."
"That will be ducky. What happens to you if it clears?"
"I'll cut the anchor rope and take oft."
"And if they come after you?"
"Come after me? Just like that? And leave two or three dead divers down inside the Nantesville?"
"I wish to God," I said irritably, "that you wouldn't talk about dead divers inside the Nantesville"
There were three divers aboard the Nantesville, not dead but all working furiously, or as furiously as one can work in the pressurised slow-motion world of the undersea.
Getting down there had been no trouble. I'd swum on the surface towards the diving-boat, the compressor giving me a clear bearing all the time, and dived when only three yards away. My bands touched cables, life-lines and finally an unmistakable wire hawser. The wire hawser was the one for me.
I stopped my descent on the wire when I saw the dim glow of light beneath me. I swam some distance to one side then down until my feet touched something solid. The deck of the Nantesville. I moved cautiously towards the source of the light.
There were two of them, standing in their weighted boots at the edge of an open hatchway. As I'd expected, they were wearing not my self-contained apparatus, but regular helmet and corselet diving gear, with air-lines and lifelines, the life-lines almost certainly with telephone wires imbedded inside them. Self-contained diving equipment wouldn't have been much use down here, it was too deep for oxygen and compressed-air stores too limited. With those suits they could stay down an hour and a half, at least, although they'd have to spend thirty to forty minutes on decompression stops on the way up. I wanted to be gone in less than that, I wanted to be gone that very moment, my heart was banging away against my chest wall like a demented pop drummer with the ague but it was only the pressure of the water, I told myself, it couldn't be fear, I was far too brave for that.
The wire rope I'd used to guide me down to the Nantesville, terminated in a metal ring from which splayed out four chains to the corners of a rectangular steel mesh basket. The two divers were loading this basket with wire- and wood-handled steel boxes that they were hauling up from the hold at the rate of, I guessed, about one every minute. The steel boxes were small but obviously heavy: each held four 28lb ingots of gold. Each box held a fortune. There were three hundred and sixty such fortunes aboard the Nantesville.
I tried to calculate the overall rate of unloading. The steel basket held sixteen boxes. Sixteen minutes to load. Another ten minutes to winch up to the diving-boat, unload and lower again. Say forty an hour. In a ninety-minute stretch, about sixty. But after ninety minutes they would have to change divers. Forty minutes, including two decompression stops of, say, twelve and twenty-four minutes, to get to the surface, then twenty minutes to change over and get other divers down. An hour at least. So, in effect, they were clearing sixty boxes every two and a half hours, or twenty-four an hour. The only remaining question was, how many boxes were left in the Nantesville's strong-room?
I had to find out and I had to find out at once. I'd had only the two compressed air-cylinders aboard the Firecrest and already their two hundred atmospheres were seriously depleted. The wire hawser jerked and the full basket started to rise, the divers guiding it clear of the superstructure with a trailing guide rope. I moved forward from the corner of the partially opened hatch remote from where they were standing and cautiously wriggled over and down. With excessive caution, I supposed: then- lamp cast only a small pool of light and they couldn't possibly have seen me from where I was standing.
I felt my hands — already puffed and numbed by the icy water — touch a life-line and air-line and quickly withdrew them. Below and to my right I could see another faint pool of light. A few cautious strokes and I could see the source of the light.
The light was moving. It was moving because it was attached to the helmet of a diver, angled so as to point down at an angle of forty-five degrees. The diver was inside the a strong-room.
They hadn't opened that strong-room with any Yale key. They'd opened it with underwater torches cutting out a roughly rectangular section in the strongroom's side, maybe six feet by four.
I moved up to this opening and pushed my head round the side. Beyond the now stooping diver was another light suspended from the deckhead. The bullion boxes were neatly stacked in racks round the side and it was a five-second job to estimate their number. Of the three hundred and sixty bullion boxes, there were about one hundred and twenty left. Something brushed my arm, pulled past my arm. I glanced down and saw that it was a rope, a nylon line, that the diver was pulling in to attach to the handle of one of the boxes. I moved my arm quickly out of the way.
His back was towards me. He was having difficulty in fastening the rope but finally secured it with two half hitches, straightened and pulled a knife from his waist sheath. I wondered what the knife was for.
I found out what the knife was for. The knife was for me. Stooped over as he had been, he could just possibly have caught a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye: or he might have felt the sudden pressure, then release of pressure, on the nylon rope: or his sixth sense was in better working condition than mine. I won't say he whirled round, for in a heavy diving suit at that depth the tempo of movement becomes slowed down to that of a slow-motion film.