hundred pounds. Lying diagonally in the gravel, it loomed out of the seabed with the two divers hanging near it. The funnel doubled the height of the machine.
The divers held index fingers against thumbs, questioning. Chan made the same sign back: I’m okay. He swam to the funnel, looked in. All the fish were gone, having feasted on whatever had remained in the machine. He tapped the funnel. The steel gave off a watery echo. Something moved. An eel shot out of the funnel, flashed toward Chan’s face; a miniature monster with silent screaming jaws, it diverted at the last instant. Chan’s heart raced, using precious air. He caught the concerned look behind the masks of his two colleagues. He showed an index finger against a thumb again. They nodded slowly.
The divers turned their attention to the mincer. They had brought down with them two heavy-duty nylon ropes with stainless steel hooks that were capable of being snapped closed at the ends. The ropes were fixed at the surface to the gantry raft. Chan watched them for a moment while they looked for somewhere to attach the hooks. Then he held out his left arm at eye level, grasped his left wrist with his right hand, started to swim north six degrees east.
It was a technique taught at advanced level: In still water every swimmer proceeded almost exactly the same distance for each flip of his fins. Chan knew that for thirty-three complete flips he covered a distance of twenty-one feet. After three complete fin strokes he was out of sight of the two divers. He remained at the bottom, following the direction that the boat must have taken. He gave himself ten minutes, too long for the amount of air he had left but sufficient if he used the spare tank dangling from the bottom of the gantry. Returning to the boat would be simple; he would ascend using the ropes they were attaching to the mincer or the two anchor lines that moored the gantry raft, whichever he saw first. He kept his eye on the compass, continued to swim north six degrees east, following a Chinese hunch.
He didn’t know why every time he dived he had the same thought as though it lurked like a shark waiting to ambush him:
He hung at 120 feet about a yard beyond the submarine cliff edge, looking down into a fertile valley. With his torch he illuminated a steep slope on which purple coral grew. Rainbow fish darted among the coral. Farther down, in the gloom, large shapes moved. Sharks were common in these waters, but their dangers were much exaggerated. More pressing was the diminishing air supply. The needle was creeping into the red zone. He was moving his light in one last farewell arc when he saw it jammed half way down the cliff against a gray coral growth: a large steel traveling chest of the kind sold in the China Products shops in Hong Kong. A corner was badly crumpled, and much of the paint had been scraped off by the slide down the cliff. He calculated. It would take only minutes to get to the fifteen-feet level where the spare air tank hung. True, it was bad practice to leave his companions to sound the alarm for him, but evidence was evidence. He exhaled, dived downward and accelerated with a couple of fin thrusts. As he reached the trunk, the needle on his air gauge moved into the danger zone.
The trunk was not locked but tied with nylon rope. Bright green nylon rope, he noted. Then, when he checked his depth gauge, his heartbeat doubled. Without noticing he had descended to 150 feet, 10 more feet than was permitted for recreational divers. To avoid the bends, he must ascend slowly and wait at specific depths, although he could not remember which. The problem was that he did not have enough air. The needle on the air gauge was in the middle of the red zone. At this depth he had no more than a minute. Panic worked his lungs, using up more air.
A hundred feet seemed like a good number to pause at. He waited at this depth until the needle struck the black pin at the end of the danger zone, at which point there was nothing left in the tank to suck at. With the last of the air in his lungs he swam upward, exhaling as gently as he could.
Turning, he saw two ropes suspended in the sea about ten yards to his right. He swam toward them. Remembering the golden rule, Never hold your breath, he tore open the buckle on his weight belt, let it drop. Exhaling freely now, he ascended the ropes like a cork. The ropes converged near the spare tank hanging from the boat. By the time he arrived his lungs were screaming; he was at the fatal point of sucking in water. For the split second it took for the mind to process the thought he paused on the brink of dissolving this misfit Charlie Chan in the vast and bitter sea, to have done with his irritating company once and for all. Then he grabbed the mouthpiece to the spare tank and gorged on air, the primal food.
He hung there fifteen feet below the friendly hull basking in sea-filtered sunlight, flooding his starved blood with air. Shock trembled his hands. Oxygen narcosis lightened his head. Underwater he could not stop laughing. Terror had cracked a carapace of anger he’d been carrying for twenty-three years. Whom did he think he was kidding? He loved air, light, life.
He was thinking of Moira when the others joined him. They saw the trembling in his limbs. Systematically they checked him: air tank empty; weight belt missing; heart still racing. The fixed needle on his depth gauge showed that he’d descended to 151 feet. Behavior consistent with hysteria.
They brought down a full tank of air, made him stay an extra forty minutes to burn off nitrogen. When they finally hauled him to the surface, all Chan could do was cough. He lay on the deck spluttering in frustration. He was lucky not to choke to death on old tobacco. He tried to stand up, but they kept him down, allowing him to sit only. When he finally managed to explain about the trunk, Higgins was unimpressed.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” he said.
Higgins called for help on the radio. He insisted Chan go back to Sai Kung on the second launch that was sent out from Tolo Harbor. If he developed signs of the bends, he would need to be airlifted to Hong Kong Island, where the Royal Navy had a decompression chamber.
Higgins promised that as soon as they had hauled up the mincer, they would use the launch to move the gantry exactly sixty-three feet, or ninety-six fin strokes, north six degrees east. Less than fifty yards from the PRC border. The divers would go down again to retrieve the trunk.
“Have you ever seen anyone with the bends?” Higgins said. “It’s distilled agony. One twinge in any joint, even your little finger, and you go into the decompression chamber. You’ll thank me.” He nodded to the two medics who helped Chan onto the other launch. “No point killing yourself over a few murders,” he called out as Chan went below.
Could the bends be worse than English humor? Chan reached for a cigarette. At least he’d be able to make the date with Moira. He had to admit he was looking forward to seeing her.
22
That night Chan wore a white linen suit, an Italian silk tie, brown Italian leather shoes, a silk shirt he’d had made in Hong Kong. Moira wore clothes she’d bought that day: long silk dress, beige with faint mauve stripes; high heels; a new bra. She wore exactly the right amount of lipstick and mascara, but what Chan liked most was the perfume. It was faint, sophisticated, mature. Maturity was a curious thing. Sandra, his ex-wife, had had few vices, worn no makeup, committed no crimes, never drunk alcohol. And he had never fully trusted her. Moira was a thief and a liar, and he would not have been afraid to share his blackest secret with her.
In the womb of trust libido thrived. Sitting next to her in the back of the taxi, he slid his hand between the folds of her dress, tried to reach her nipples but was thwarted by the firm new bra.
Moira took his hand out, held it.
“What happened to you today?”
“Nothing.”
“Just a scratch?”
“What’s that?”
“Something we say in the States, you know, like when a movie hero gets shot to pieces by the baddies and wanders into the saloon with blood pouring from twenty different holes in his body and the sheriff says, ‘What happened to you?’ and the hero says, ‘Oh, it’s just a scratch.’ I mean, why does the blood drain periodically from your face when you remember whatever it is you remember and why is your usual nervous twitch magnified by a factor of twenty and why are you suddenly as horny as a pubescent kid?”
Chan thought it over. Personal directness was not part of Chinese culture. He had to work at it to do better. “Because I nearly killed myself today and I’m so damned glad to be alive if I hadn’t promised to take you out for
