hull I checked my time elapse and air reserves. Quickly I calculated our working time, allowing for my two previous descents which would necessitate additional decompression. I reckoned we had seventeen minutes” safe time before beginning the ascent and I set the swivel ring on my wristwatch before preparing for the penetration.
I used the jettisoned cannon as a convenient anchor point on which to fix the end of the nylon line and then rose again to the opening, paying it out behind me as I went.
I had to remove Sherry North from the gunport, in the few seconds while I was busy with the line she had almost disappeared into the hole in the hull. I made angry ssigns at her to keep clear, and in return she made an unladylike gesture with two fingers which I pretended not to see.
Gingerly I entered the gunport and found that the visibility was down to about three feet in the murky soup.
The shots had only partially moved the blockage beyond the spot where the cannon had lain. There seemed to be a gap beyond but it needed to be enlarged before I could get through. I used the jemmy bar to prise a lump of the wreckage away and discovered that it was the heavy gun carriage that was causing most of the blockage.
Working in freshly blasted wreckage is a delicate business, for it is impossible to know how critically balanced the mass may be. Even the slightest disturbance can bring the whole weight of it sliding and crashing down upon the trespasser, pinning and crushing him beneath it.
I worked slowly and deliberately, ignoring the regular thumps on MY rump with which Sherry signalled her burning impatience. Once when I emerged with a section of shattered planking, she took my slate and wrote on it
“I am smallerh” and underlined the “smaller” twice in case the double exclamation mark was not noticed when she thrust the slate two inches from my nose. I returned her Churchillian salute and went hack to my burrowing.
I had now cleared the area sufficiently to see that my only remaining obstacle was the heavy timber bulk of the gun carriage which was hanging at a drunken angle across the entry to the gundeck. The jemmy bar was totally ineffective against this mass, and I could abandon the effort and return with another charge of gelignite tomorrow or I could take a chance.
I glanced at my time elapse and saw that I had been busy for twelve minutes. I reckoned that I had probably been using air more wastefiilly than usual during my recent exertions. Nevertheless, I decided to take a flier.
I passed the torch and jemmy bar out to Sherry, and worked my way carefully back into the opening. I got my shoulder under the upper end of the gun carriage, and moved my feet around until I had a firm stance. When I was solidly placed, I took a good breath of air and began to lift.
Slowly I increased the strain until I was thrusting upwards with all the strength of my legs and back. I felt my face and throat swelling with pumping blood and my eyes felt ready to jump out of their sockets. Nothing moved, and I took another lunghil of air and tried again, but this time throwing all my weight on the timber beam in a single explosive effort.
It gave way, and I felt like Samson who had pulled the temple down on his own head. I lost my balance and tumbled backwards in a storm of falling debris that groaned and grated as it fell, thudding and bumping around me.
When silence had settled, I found myself in utter darkness, a thick pea soup of swirling filth that blotted out the light. I tried to move, and found my leg pinned. Panic rushed through me in an icy wave and I fought frantically to free my leg. I took only half-a-dozen terrified kicks before I realized that I had escaped with great good luck. The gun carriage had missed my foot by a quarter of an inch, and had fallen across the rubber swimming fin. I pulled my foot out, of the shoe, abandoning it, and groped my way out into the open.
Sherry was waiting eagerly for news, and I wiped the slate and wrote
“OPEN underlining the word twice. She pointed into the gunport, demanding permission to enter and I checked my time elapse. We had two minutes, SO I nodded and led the way in.
Flashing the beam of the torch ahead I had visibility of eighteen inches, enough to find the opening I had cleared. There was just sufficient clearance to allow me through without fouling my air bottles or breathing hose.
I paid out the nylon line behind me, like Theseus in the labyrinth of the Minotaur, so as not to lose my direction in the Daurn light’s warren of decks and companionways.
Sherry followed me along the line. I could feel her hand touch my foot and brush my leg as she groped after me. Beyond the blockage, the water cleared a little, and we found ourselves in the low wide chamber of the gundeck. It was murky and mysterious, with strange shapes strewn about us in profusion. I saw other gun carriages, cannonballs strewn loosely or in heaps against angles and corners, and other equipment so altered by long immersion as to be unrecognizable.
We moved slowly forward, our fins stirring up fresh whirlpools of dirt and mud. Here also there were dead fish floating about us, although I noticed some of the red reef crayfish scrambling away like monstrous spiders into the depths of the ship. They at least had survived the blast in their armoured carapaces.
I played the beam of the torch on the deck above our heads, looking for the entry point to the lower decks and the holds. With the ship lying upside down, I had to keep trying to relate the existing geography of the wreck to the drawing I had studied. About fifteen feet from our entry point I found the forecastle ladder, another dark square opening above my head, and I rose into it, my bubbles blowing upwards in a silver shower and running like liquid mercury across the bulkheads and decking. The ladder was rotted so that it fell to pieces at my touch, the pieces hanging suspended in the water around my head as I went on into the lower deck.
This was a narrow and crowded alleyway, probably serving the passenger cabins and officers” mess. The claustrophobic atmosphere reminded me of the appalling conditions in which the crew of the frigate must have lived.
I ventured gingerly along this passage, attracted powerfully to the doorways on either hand which promised all manner of fascinating discoveries. I resisted their temptation and finned on down the long deck until it ended abruptly against a heavy timber bulkhead.
This would be the outer wall of the well of the forward hold, where it pierced the deck and went down into the ship’s belly.
Satisfied with what we had achieved, I turned the beam of the torch on to my wrist and realized with a guilty thrill that we had overrun our working time by four minutes. Every second was taking us closer to the dreaded danger of empty air bottles and uncompleted decompression stops.
I grabbed Sherry’s wrist and gave her the cut-throat hand signal for danger before tapping my wristwatch. She under, stood immediately, and followed me meekly on the long slow journey back through the hull along the guiding line. Already I could feel the stiffening of the demand valve as it gave me air more reluctantly now that the bottles were almost exhausted.
We came out into the open and I made certain that Sherry was by my side before I looked upwards. What I saw above me made my breathing choke in my throat, and the horror I felt turned to a warm oily liquid sensation in my bowels.
The pool of Gunfire Break had been transformed into a bloody arena. Attracted by the tons of dead fish that had been killed by the blast, the deep-water killer sharks had arrived in their scores. The scent of flesh and blood, together with the excited movements of their fellows transmitted to them through the water, had driven them into that mindless savagery known as the feeding frenzy.
Quickly I drew Sherry back into the gunport and we cowered there, looking up at the huge gliding shapes so clearly silhouetted against the light source of the surface.
Amongst the shoals of smaller sharks there were at least two dozen of the ugly beasts that the islanders called Albacore shark. They were barrel-bodied and swing-bellied, big powerful fish with rounded snouts and wide grinning jaws. They swirled about the pool like some grotesque carousel, with their tails waggling and their mouths opening mechanically to gulp down shreds of flesh. I knew them for greedy but stupid animals, easily discouraged by any aggressive display when not in feeding frenzy. Now they were in intense excitation they would be dangerous, yet I would have accepted the risk of a decompression ascent if it had been for them alone.
What truly appalled me were two other long lithe shapes that sped silently about the pool, turning with a single powerful flick of the long swallow tail, so that the pointed nose almost touched the tip of the tail, then gliding away again with all the power and grace of an eagle in flight.
When either one of these terrible fish paused to feed, the sickle-moon mouth opened and the multiple rows of
