Let's go/ he said, and flipped backwards into the water.
The cold struck through the multiple layers of rubber and cloth and
Polyurethane almost instantly, and Nick waited only for the Chief
Engineer to break through the surface beside him in a cloud of swirling
silver bubbles.
. God, I Vin Baker's voice was distorted by the earphones, it's cold
enough to crack the gooseberries off a plaster saint., Paying out the
line behind him, Nick sank down into the hazy green depths, looking for
bottom. It came up dimly, heavy shingle and pebble, and he checked his
depth gauge - almost six fathoms - and he moved in towards the beach.
The light from the surface was filtered through thick ice, green and
ghostly in the icy depths, and Nick felt unreasonable panic stirring
deep in him. He tried to thrust it aside and concentrate on the job,
but it flickered there, ready to burst into flame.
There was a current working under the ice, churning the sediment so that
the visibility was further reduced, and they had to fill hard to make
headway across the bottom, always with the hostile ceiling of sombre
green ice above them, cutting them off from the real world.
Suddenly the Golden Adventurer's hull loomed ahead of them, the twin
propellers glinting like gigantic bronze wings in the gloom.
They moved in within arm Is length of the steel hull and swam slowly
along it. It was like flying along the outer wall of a tall apartment
block, a sheer cliff of riveted steel plate - but the hull was moving.
The Golden Adventurer was hoggmg on the bottom, the stern dipping and
swaying to the pulse of the sea, the heaving ground-swell that came in
under the ice; her stern bumped heavily on the pebbly bottom, like a
great hammer beating time to the ocean.
Nick knew that she was settling herself in. Every hour now was making
his task more difficult and he drove harder with his swim fins, pulling
slightly ahead of Vin Baker. He knew exactly where to look for the
damage.
Reilly had reported it in minute detail to Christy Marine, but he came
across it without warning.
It looked as though a monstrous axe had been swung horizontally at the
hull, a clean slash, the shape of an elongated teardrop. The metal
around it had been depressed, and the pain smeared away so that the
steel gleamed as though it had been scoured and polished.
At its widest, the lips of the fifteen-foot rent gaped open by three
feet or a little more, and it breathed like a living mouth - for the
force of the ground-swell pushing into the gap built up pressure within
the hull, then as the swell subsided the trapped water was forcibly
expelled, sucking in and out with tremendous pressure.
It's a clean hole/ Vin Baker's voice squawked harshly.
But it's too long to pump with cement. He was right, of course, Nick
had seen that at once.
Liquid cement would not plug that wicked gash, and anyway, there wasn't
time to use cement, not with weather coming. An idea began forming in
his mind.
I'm going to penetrate. Nick made the decision aloud, and beside him
