After their initial reaction they got right to work on the truck's rear doors. They wouldn't yield to a crowbar or the mechanical claws of the Hard Suits.
Donatelli had said the assassins who killed the armored truck guards simply slammed the doors. They were probably rusted shut rather than locked, Austin guessed. The torch blazed to life, and the diver drew its scalpellike flame along the lock and hinges, the rust exploding in a shower of sparks. They tried the crowbar again, both saturation divers putting their backs .to it. The doors fell off, and a brownish cloud of rotting debris, flushed out by the intruding seawater, enveloped the four men. When it settled and the water was somewhat clear again, Austin edged forward and probed the truck's interior with his light.
The space was piled with metal strongboxes that had fallen off shelves. The swirling water had cleaned away the clothing, hair and remnants of tissue so that the grinning skulls caught in the beam of the light looked freshly scrubbed, not green with algae as they might otherwise have been. The bones had all tumbled in a heap onto one side of the truck with the other debris. Austin moved aside to make room for his partner.
Zavala was silent for a moment. 'Looks like the charnel house you see under the old churches in Mexico and Spain.'
'It's more of a slaughterhouse,' Austin said grimly. 'Angelo Donatelli's memory is pretty good. Those strongboxes are probably for the jewels that were being shipped.' He willed himself to avoid the sightless eyes. 'We'll deal with that stuff later.'
He gestured to the saturation divers, and they swam closer to inspect the inside of the truck. In telling the divers about the stone slab earlier, Austin had warned, 'You'll also come across some human bones. I can tell you later how they got there. Hope you're not superstitious.'
The divers stared into the truck and shook their heads, but their stunned reaction was temporary. The NUMA divers were pros. They swam into the truck without further hesitation and started moving the boxes and bones aside. Within minutes they had exposed a solidlooking corner of a blackishgray object.
The long lost talking stone.
While the divers tidied up the interior, Austin and Zavala scudded back to the diving bell and returned with a block and tackle attached to the Kevlar tow line that went up to the ship. The bones had been respectfully placed in a neat pile. The strongboxes were stacked out of the way except for one the divers had set aside. With great ceremony a diver opened the box to display its contents. Light glittered off a breathtakingfortune in diamonds, sapphires, and other precious stones.
Austin heard Zavala's sharp intake of breath. 'That stuff must be worth millions.'
'Maybe billions if the other boxes are as full. This confirms that the motive was murder, not robbery.' He signaled the saturation divers to move the box, and he set the double block and tackle he was carrying just inside the door. Zavala had been carrying a metal loop. The saturation divers attached this wire collar around a protruding end of the slab, then affixed the line to the pulley.
Austin knew that the center of lift should be maintained directly above the center of gravity. He also knew this ideal seldom occurred. It was like telling someone to lift with his legs, not his back. Good advice, but of little use when the load is in the back of a closet or under the cellar stairs. The Kevlar cable went through the hull, then angled to the truck. The block and tackle would translate its force into a more lateral pull while doubling the pulling capacity.
Austin was dealing with a number of unknowns. One was the weight of the slab. An object is buoyed up by the water it displaces. Austin knew the slab would be lighter in water, but since he could only guess at its original weight, this didn't do much good. He'd asked McGinty for two tackles rigged with a continuous fall, which can lift twice as much as a single tackle. It was revved for a right-angle luff. Technical jargon meaning that they'd done everything they could to compensate for the awkward pulling system.
The next problem, after they'd yanked the slab out like a dentist extracting a tooth, was preventing it from plummeting to the bottom. The solution was ocean salvage tubes, a fairly new concept. The elongated bags of nylon fabric were designed for salvaging boats. With a lifting capacity up to one and a half tons each they might be able to hoist the entire armored truck to the surface.
The saturation divers used the block and tackle to movethe slab to where they could lash an uninflated bag to each side of the stone. Austin went through and inspected the whole crazy setup, especially the fragile cables holding the truck to the wall, then gave the signal. Using a hose coming from the bell, the saturation divers pumped air into the tubes, which plumped out as quickly as sausages on a skillet. They fed the air in gradually to build up positive buoyancy. The slab lifted like a magician's assistant floating in midair. Keeping the lift line attached in case of an emergency, the divers nudged the slab out of the trick until it floated through the door.
Austin thought this was one of the strangest sights he had ever seen. It was like a painting by Dali, where everything is askew. The black slab floating in space over the abyss like a magic carpet in the immense inkdark chamber. The divers dangling like newborn salamanders from their umbilicals. The seaworn armored truck hanging off the wall at a right angle.
Flanked by Austin and Zavala, who illuminated the way with their lights, the divers swam the slab toward the opening. It was delicate work, especially with the current running through the wreck, but at last the slab was directly under the hole they'd cut in the hull.
'Wish I could talk to these guys and tell them what a great job they're doing,' Zavala said. He tried to signal a 'well done' with his mechanical claw, but it didn't quite make it. 'Guess we'd better not high-five until we get out of these suits. Which I hope will be damned soon.'
'Shouldn't be more than a few minutes before we can turn the rest of the job over to McGinty. Hear that, Cap?'
The conversations between the Hand Suits were communicated to the deck so the men on the topside could keep tabs on what was going on below.
'Bet your ass,' McGinty harked. 'I heard the whole skinny. Got a case of Bud on ice. Get that thing out of the wreck, and we'll do the rest.'
The saturation divers had to stay at depth or they'd come down with the bends. Once the load was out of the wreck, Austin and Zavala would take over and guide it to the surface. When the slab was near the surface they'd tend it until the crane could finish the job.
'What's the weather like up there?' Austin asked.
'Sea's still flat calm; but the Nantucket fog factory has been going full tilt. Fog bank is rolling in with stuff so thick you could fry it up like dough.'
Both Austin and the captain would have been even more concerned if they knew what the fog hid. While Austin and the others had struggled to pull the stone slab from the armored truck and haul it to the surface, a large ship whose gray hull made it practically invisible was approaching the Monkfish, traveling just fast enough to keep pace with the moving wall of fog. The oddly shaped vessel was six hundred feet long, with a deep V shaped bow and wide back, and it was powered by six water jets that could send it skimming over the sea at forty-five knots, an amazing speed for a ship that size.
Austin responded to McGinty's weather report with a 'Finest kind, Cap,' borrowing one of Trout's expressions from his fishing days. He signaled the saturation divers to put more air into the lift tubes. Slowly the load began to rise through the hole. The saturation divers stayed with the stone, making sure it didn't oscillate when it hit the stronger current flowing over the wreck Austin and Zavala remained just inside the wreck, off to one side so they wouldn't be under the slab if it came down in a hurry. They had a clear view of both divers, one on either side of the slab, keeping pace with its ascent with slight flutters of their fins. A picture-perfect operation. One for the books.
Until all hell broke loose.
One of the divers jerked in a wild ungraceful dance, his arms and legs flailing like an epileptic in a grand mal. Then he doubled over, clawing at his umbilical. Just as suddenly he regained control of his body, floated in place for a moment, then jackknifed in a dive that took him back through the hole into the innards of the Andrea Doria.
The whole mad sequence took only a few seconds. Austin had no time to react. But as the diver swam closer, Austin saw what had happened. The man's umbilical trailed uselessly behind his suit. The diver had switched to his emergency tank What the hell happened? The hose couldn't have been cut on the ragged edge of the hole. Austin had been watching the whole time. The diver swam toward him, the exposed part of his face white as marble. Austin cursed himself for not insisting on total underwater communication. The man jabbed the water above his head.
