have seen a blue hole in the flashback. He would have remembered everything from that event in 1943, but not added other memories. And anyway, the trauma idea doesn’t ring true. The intelligence officer was assuming what we might assume, that experiences such as that 1943 ditching must have been traumatic. But that’s just wrong. Flying night raids over Germany was about the most terrifying thing a man could do in that war, yet Brown and his fellow crew had done it over and over again, and volunteered for more. There was a reason they were selected for the nuclear programme. They were the toughest of the tough. Some people just don’t get traumatized.’
Jack peered at the map. ‘If he really was describing one specific blue hole, the trouble is there are hundreds of them in the Bahamas over several thousand square miles. All we have to go on is the last reported position of the aircraft over that sector north of the island of San Salvador.’
‘I looked into this with my oceanographer friend,’ Mikhail said. ‘At the co-ordinates of the target minesweeper noted in the file, the Liberator would have been beyond the land-mass plateau of the Bahamas and probably over the abyssal plain, beyond the huge underwater cliffs that run up from the Puerto Rico Fault along the Atlantic side of the Bahamas towards the coast of Florida. The plain is at least a mile deep and you won’t find blue holes there. But there’s one crucial feature we noticed. Off San Salvador there’s an undersea ridge that extends about twenty- five nautical miles north-east, rising up from the abyssal plain. The detailed bathymetry was unknown in 1945, but I wondered whether there might be sections of reef shallow enough to have been upstanding land mass in the Ice Age, enough for rainwater erosion to have formed caverns that might have become blue holes as the sea level rose. We just don’t know enough about the sea and reef at that point. That whole sector was a weapons test range, designated in April 1945 and in the event seeing little use. After the war it became part of the Atlantic Test and Evaluation range for anti-submarine weapons, continuing to be an exclusion zone even after the decision had been made to use another sector of undersea trench closer to Nassau for most testing. The San Salvador ridge extends beyond the twelve-nautical-mile Bahamas territorial limit, but the weapons test zone remains in force beyond the end of the ridge and we couldn’t find any record of exploration or diving there. So it’s possible that there is a shallow reef and a blue hole that has never been properly charted.’
Jack reached over and picked up the photograph showing the raft with the airman’s body slumped inside. He looked closely at the dark smears on the pontoons and the mass of marks the man had made with his own blood. He could just make out a sequence of numbers, possibly repeated several times, but the image needed to be magnified and sharpened for there to be any hope of reading it. He stared, his mind racing. Something was niggling him, something his father had told him when they had seen the survival equipment at the museum at Hendon, about how pilots were trained to think of what information the crew who escaped from a ditched aircraft might need to call in a rescue. He needed to get this image to Lanowski.
At that moment Mikhail’s two-way radio crackled and he spoke into it briefly, then got up. ‘Okay. That was Ben. There’s a propane tanker truck beginning to back down the lane. This was scheduled. Ben’s going to remain concealed, and will stay at the top of the lane until he’s relieved by John. I need to go out and make sure the path’s clear for the men to drag the hose to the propane tank. It’s hidden under a cedar growth beyond the barn.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Jeremy said, getting up and stretching. ‘I need some fresh air. I’ll see if Rebecca’s out of the shower yet.’
‘Can I use the internet and a scanner?’ Jack asked.
Mikhail pointed to a monitor on a desk in an alcove. ‘Be my guest. It can be a little slow out here. There’s Skype if you need it.’
Mikhail and Jeremy left the room together, and Jack went over to the desk and sat down. He opened up the IMU home page and quickly logged on, then accessed his email account and clicked on the Skype. He checked his watch. Seaquest II was in a different time zone, one hour ahead of Bermuda, and he guessed that by now Lanowski and Costas would have their heads down over the computers in the operations room. He picked up the landline phone and dialled IMU Headquarters in Cornwall. The phone was answered immediately. ‘Hello, this is Jack Howard. Please patch me through to Seaquest II. Get me a secure line. This is a priority call.’
21
S econds later, the line crackled as the satellite link connected Jack to the officer of the watch on Seaquest II, and then he was through to the operations room. A slightly annoyed voice answered. ‘Lanowski here.’
‘This is Jack. Switch on your Skype.’
‘Jack!’ The voice lightened up. ‘I was just in the process of terraforming the Caribbean during the Ice Age.’ A face materialized on Jack’s screen, the familiar lank fringe and little round glasses staring somewhere just below the webcam, presumably at another screen. Lanowski looked up and peered closely into the camera. ‘The computer isn’t up to it, as usual. But I refuse to dumb down and give it simplified data. Computer programs are only as big as the brains that create them. Costas tells me I need to make my own, and he’s right. But meanwhile here’s the score. We’ve just been looking at the Bahamas outer ridge abyssal plain. Interesting layering of megaturbitides along the fault line, with magma extrusions rising alarmingly high into the plate divide. Drop anything down there and it would sink through about a mile of silt and then into the molten core of the earth. I’ve got James Macleod and the geology team at IMU very interested in doing a sub-bottom probe survey.’
‘Is Costas with you now?’
An unshaven face appeared from one side of the screen. ‘I’m with you, Jack.’
‘Okay. Keep all that geomorphology data up and running. I’ve got a possible lead from Mikhail.’ He quickly ran through the story of the Liberator attack and the airman’s account. As he talked, Lanowski emailed through a link that flashed on his screen. Jack clicked on it, opening up a detailed topographical and bathymetric map of the Bahamas islands. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can visualize the flight route east from Nassau to the sector of sea north of the island of San Salvador.’
‘That’s beside the fault line we’ve been looking at, about dead centre on the map,’ Lanoswki said.
Jack zoomed in on the island. ‘Yesterday I called James Macleod and asked him to trawl through our database for anything that might hint at undersea research in the Caribbean in the late 1930s, anything odd. I need to know if he found anything on the Bahamas.’
‘We’re on to it already. He’s been liaising with us this morning,’ Lanowski said. ‘Let me give him a call now. This might take a few minutes. Stay online.’
Costas’ face reappeared on the screen. ‘How’s tricks?’
‘Mikhail’s got this place locked down,’ Jack replied. ‘Ben and the MI6 guy are doing perimeter security. They know Saumerre’s men have been shadowing Rebecca since she arrived in New York from Turkey two days ago. The farm is about as remote as you can get in the Adirondacks, but Mikhail’s not taking any chances.’
‘I found out something interesting,’ Costas said. ‘The MI6 file on Saumerre passed to our security people shows that he’s a diver. He trained at Cambridge when he was a student and qualified with the British Sub-Aqua Club. If he thinks this place in the Caribbean is going to give him his biggest prize, he might want to get involved personally this time and not just leave it to his henchmen.’
‘They’ll all be divers too. You remember his previous men, the Russians we encountered in the mineshaft in Poland last year?’
‘I remember how incompetent they were as divers, and how none of them got out alive.’
‘This time might not be so easy. Saumerre will have learned his lesson with the Russians. Shang Yong and the Brotherhood of the Tiger only employ the elite.’
‘You’re sure it’s them?’
‘Ben saw a man he was convinced was trailing Rebecca in New York. His description of the tattoo on the man’s wrist, the distinctive grimacing tiger, clinches it. We’ve seen that tattoo before, in Afghanistan two years ago, remember? And I trust Ben’s appraisal of the people he thinks we’re up against. He says they’re good, very good, skilled operators in an urban environment like Manhattan, where he thinks they stalked Rebecca while she was at school over the last two days. Mikhail’s calculation is that a group of Chinese gangsters are going to be less familiar with the forests of the Adirondacks, and that he’d have the upper hand out here.’
‘How is Rebecca?’
‘Not really woken up yet.’
‘Jeremy looking after her?’
