time. Chris made a mental note of the name: Sean Grady, son of Tom Grady.
That was a lead he could think about following up later, after he’d had a chance to take another look around the wreck of Medusa.
But this next time, despite Mark’s inevitable over-zealous cautionary warnings, he wanted to go right down inside the bomber. He knew the answer was there. It had to be.
Chapter 8
They descended along the buoy’s rope in silence, the last flickering rays from the trawler’s floodlight quickly dwindling to nothing. Once again, at about fifty feet down, their torches picked out the wing tip of the B-17.
‘There’s Medusa. You beautiful thing, you,’ said Chris. This time around he didn’t want to waste any precious dive-time — straight inside was what he wanted; straight inside, hopefully to find something, or perhaps the remains of someone. Either way, he was almost certain he’d stumble across a find of some sort in the next half an hour.
Mark pointed his torch towards the front of the plane. ‘Let’s not hang about, then. You want to make straight for the cockpit, right? I’ll go in first this time, okay?’
‘Thanks. You can shoo out any critters in there for me.’
‘And like I said to you this morning, this time we’re staying together. Okay?’
‘You’re the boss, Mark.’
Mark swam towards the cockpit and Chris followed him down to the seabed beside the nose of the bomber. He shone his torch at the open belly hatch. ‘Right, Chris, gently does it this time. Okay?’
Chris nodded as he floated beside him.
The big American stuck his head up through the hatch into the observation blister and shone his torch round before pulling himself in carefully.
‘Okay. No eels in here. I’m going up the ladder into the cockpit.’
He moved slowly up the short ladder, feeling the edges of the hatchway catch on his air cylinder. He backed down, leaned forward and rose again slowly, listening unhappily to the gentle metallic scraping sound of the cylinder on the hatchway as he pulled himself up inside the cockpit.
He shone his torch around, coming to rest eventually on the body.
‘I’m in the cockpit, no eels here either,’ said Mark. ‘You can come up.’
‘Roger that.’
‘I’m going to move to the back of the cockpit to the doorway, there should be room for you to enter. Be careful on that hatch from the observation bit into the cockpit, it’s much tighter than the first hatch.’
Chris pulled a face, remembering the damage he’d done to Mark’s equipment.
‘I’ll go slowly. Promise.’
Chris eased himself up inside the plane with extra care this time, and then climbed the ladder and squeezed tentatively through the even tighter hatchway into the cockpit.
Mark was waiting beside the bulkhead leading back into the fuselage. ‘Hi there.’
Chris nervously shone his torch down through the opening, half expecting a rerun of his ghostly hallucination. The beam of light picked out the navigator’s desk and the bomb bay.
He then turned his torch on the body. ‘Okay, I want to make sure this guy wasn’t just a souvenir-wearing Yank, sorry, no disrespect, Mark.’ He reached out and peeled back the leather of the flying jacket. It tore like tissue paper and a cloud of soft debris billowed out.
‘Gross,’ said Mark, curling his lip in disgust.
The debris took its time to settle. Chris stared at the tattered shreds of the dark tunic beneath. The silver eagle on the right of the tunic was remarkably untarnished thanks to the leather that had been covering it for the last sixty years.
‘Okay, he’s either a German or he’s someone who took souvenir-wearing a little too far.’ Chris took a couple of shots of the exposed remains of the Luftwaffe tunic.
‘Seems like you really have got a genuine story on your hands,’ said Mark.
‘Let’s go in further. Somewhere back there we’ll find the story, the reason why this plane’s here.’
‘I’ll take point again.’
‘Be my guest,’ said Chris with a jittery, anxious grin.
Mark pulled himself through the bulkhead with an agility that reminded Chris of this man’s impressive experience in wreck diving. He followed through behind him, flippers clumsily disturbing a cloud of silt from the floor.
‘Go easy on the flipper action, Chris. There’s over half a century of undisturbed sediment sitting on every surface in here.’ He was right of course. The less motion they produced, the less time they’d waste waiting for it all to settle.
Mark panned his torch around the navigation booth. The beam picked out a small desk. He reached out a hand and very gently swept the silt off a corner of it. It billowed up into a small mushroom cloud that took a dozen seconds to settle to the floor.
‘See how I did that? If you sweep it off gently it settles down really quickly.’
‘Gotcha.’
Mark looked down at the corner of the surface he’d exposed.
‘There’s a map here.’
Chris glided over. He reached out to sweep away some more of the silt.
‘Gently… if that’s paper it’ll shred with the slightest touch. Here, let me.’
Mark lightly wafted his hand above the surface of the table. The sediment began to rise into a cloud. He stopped moving, and gradually it settled elsewhere, revealing a large section of the map detailing the coastline of New York State.
Chris looked up from the map. ‘They were heading for New York.. or on their way back from a trip there?’
‘Jeeez.’
‘Mind your eyes.’ The camera flashed brilliantly as he took a couple of shots. ‘Do you know the story of Rudolf Hess?’
Mark shook his head. ‘No. A Nazi, I guess.’
‘Yes, a pretty senior one. I forget when it was, sometime after they’d kicked our arses out of France, near the beginning of the war.. but this guy sneaked over to Scotland without Adolf’s permission to negotiate a peace deal with Churchill. He came over by plane.’
‘You think we might find the body of some other high-ranking Nazi, uh? Doing the same thing? Doing a Hess?’
Chris smiled. ‘Be one helluva great story, wouldn’t it?’
‘Don’t forget your old buddy when you’re rich and famous.’
‘Mark, if this turns out to be half the earner I think it’s going to be, then trust me, I’ll put a smile on your face too. Shall we press on?’
Mark checked his watch. ‘Yeah, we should. We need to be making for the surface in twenty minutes.’
Chris led the way. The space narrowed ahead as they passed through empty bomb racks on either side of a narrow walkway above an open space below.
Chris pointed down at it. ‘Bomb bay.’
‘Wow, there’s space for a lot of bombs on these racks,’ said Mark.
‘Yup. They carried a pretty impressive amount of ordnance.’
Chris shone his torch down into the open bomb bay. He could see past what looked like an immersion heater through the open hatch to the sea floor. The outer bomb bay hatch must have been open when she ditched, or perhaps ripped off by the sea on impact.
