The pilot had used the flight control system to auto-transition the helicopter into the hover, and was now flying the aircraft hands-off, waiting for further instructions from Mike O’Reilly, who was the senior officer and therefore the aircraft captain. And O’Reilly wasn’t saying much presently because his entire attention was concentrated on the displays directly in front of him. Below the helicopter a cable snaked vertically downwards into the blue of the Aegean and at the end of it dangled a Flash lightweight folding acoustic dipping sonar from Thales Underwater Systems which was capable of searching depths down to two thousand feet. It was the data received from this sonar which O’Reilly was analysing.
‘Anything yet?’ Richter leaned closer to Sobs in the cramped rear compartment, still trying to get used to the slight warble in his voice caused by the throat microphone.
He had spent nearly a thousand hours flying Sea Kings before he had made the jump sideways to train on Sea Harriers, but he had always sat in one of the front seats, so what went on in the aircraft’s darkened rear compartment was a complete mystery to him. Essentially, the observer in the back of a Merlin fights the aircraft. He tells the pilot where to go and what to do when he gets there, and not for nothing are ASW helicopter pilots referred to as ‘taxi drivers’. That was one reason why Richter himself had switched to fixed wing: he had quickly got tired of sitting twiddling his thumbs and looking out at different-coloured bits of various oceans while the guys in the back had all the fun.
O’Reilly dragged his eyes away from the display and began hoisting the sonar body from the water. He glanced sideways at Richter. ‘Yes, there’s quite a lot of stuff down there, but we can eliminate most of it for reasons that I won’t bore you with. I’ve marked three contacts that I’d like to have another look at, but first we should do a general survey of all the waters around the island.’ O’Reilly checked to make sure that the sonar body was inboard. ‘Pilot, jump three five zero, distance two thousand yards.’
‘Roger that,’ another voice spoke on the intercom, and Richter sensed the increasing vibration as the pilot wound on the power and the Merlin began to climb out of its hover.
It became obvious fairly quickly that Krywald was not a natural sailor. The water in the harbour was almost flat calm, but outside the protection afforded by the jetties it became fairly choppy. By the time they were a mile or so off-shore Krywald was looking distinctly green, his eyes fixed determinedly on the distant horizon and his replies faint monosyllables to anything either of the other two men said.
Elias wasn’t drawn to Krywald, but he sympathized with him. The gulf that exists between somebody who is seasick and someone who isn’t is enormous. It’s said that there are two stages in the condition: in the first you’re afraid you’re going to die, but in the second you’re afraid you’re
But they were now a long way from anywhere Krywald was likely to find a tree. Elias glanced back over his shoulder towards the rocky outline of Crete, around eighteen miles distant and still just visible through a slight heat haze, then gazed ahead at the open water.
Before starting up the engine back at Chora Sfakia harbour, Elias had taken the only chart he could find in the boat and marked on it the co-ordinates ‘McCready’ had supplied to Krywald. The position indicated was pretty much mid-way between the two islands of Gavdopoula and Gavdos, so Elias didn’t think they’d have any trouble finding it. They were even then passing abeam Gavdopoula, the smaller and more northerly of the two islands, so the chart was now almost superfluous. Elias realized he could navigate the rest of the way just by using his eyes.
On the chart itself, which lay on the wooden bench seat in front of him, Elias had placed one of the two GPS units that Krywald had supplied. As he gazed down at the squat black box, which looked something like an over- sized mobile telephone, he noticed the co-ordinates in the display change. The boat was moving steadily south- south-west at about eight knots: Elias glanced at his watch and calculated that they should reach the dive site within about thirty minutes.
In fact, this estimate was slightly pessimistic, and just under twenty-two minutes later Stein headed to the bow of the boat to toss the concrete block serving as an anchor over the side. Elias watched as the rope vanished over the gunwale, waiting for the tell-tale slackness that would signify that the anchor had reached the seabed, then instructed Stein to cleat the rope down and switched off the engine.
The open boat swung gently around in a circle, its bow now secured by the anchor rope. Elias checked the GPS once again, cross-checking it with the co-ordinates provided, then pulled off his shirt and shorts to reveal a pair of black swimming trunks. He next attached the lead weight to the end of the polypropylene rope and measured out lengths of it using an old diver’s trick – from the average man’s left shoulder to his outstretched right hand was about three feet or one metre.
Using this crude but surprisingly accurate method, he identified the depths at which he wanted the four extra aqualung cylinders to be located, and swiftly secured them in turn to the rope. He then lowered the weight, the rope and the cylinders over the side and tied down the rope securely to a set of cleats on the port-side gunwale. It was crucial to his own survival that the compressed-air cylinders were located at the correct depths, so he took extra care in paying out exactly the right amount of rope before securing it.
Ten minutes later Elias zipped up the jacket of his wetsuit, shrugged the aqualung onto his back, secured the weight belt around his waist and checked all his equipment twice, from the knife strapped to the calf of his right leg to the mask pushed up to rest on his forehead. Then he turned to Stein. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said.
‘I know you don’t, but it’s really very simple. Once you’ve found the aircraft, all you need do is position these charges, activate the detonators, and get back up to the boat. Then we’re out of here and on our way back to the States.’ Stein bent down and opened the neck of the rucksack he’d placed on the seat beside him. He pulled out a plastic-covered packet and tossed it from hand to hand. ‘This is what’s called an M118 Composition Block Demolition Charge,’ Stein explained. ‘Usually they contain four half-pound sheets of C4 plastic explosive, and they’re normally used as cutting charges to slice through steel bridge supports, building girders or metal beams, that kind of thing. These are a bit bigger in fact, each containing about six kilos of plastic, because we don’t want anything left intact down there.’
Elias looked uneasily at the packet as Stein offered it to him. ‘How stable is it?’
‘Very,’ Stein replied. ‘Watch this.’
He hefted the package of explosive in his hand a couple of times, then smashed it down on the wooden bench with all the force he could muster. The explosive flattened out slightly, but otherwise didn’t react in any way. Elias had instinctively crouched down low in the stern of the boat, but gradually eased himself back to an upright position.
‘You can hit this stuff with a hammer or even fire a bullet into it, and it still won’t do a goddamn thing,’ Stein continued. ‘You have to use a detonator. Good reaction time there, though it wouldn’t have done you any good. If this baby had gone off you could use the biggest bit left of this boat as a toothpick.’
‘Christ,’ Elias said. ‘Don’t do things like that. What’s this C4 stuff made of anyway?’
‘Basically, it’s RDX,’ Stein said, ‘with a polyisobutene plasticizer added. The C4 looks like uncooked pastry, and you can perfectly safely mould it into pretty much any shape you want, which is why the military use it so frequently. It’s got a shelf-life of years, and it’s cheap, reliable and goes off with a hell of a bang.’
‘And underwater?’ Elias asked. ‘Is it waterproof, or what?’
Stein nodded. ‘Water doesn’t affect it at all. Now the detonators are real easy.’
He reached again into the rucksack and pulled out a plastic box about the size and shape of a child’s pencil case. He opened this and pulled out a long thin object, itself similar in size to a pencil. ‘This is a three-hour detonator,’ he explained. ‘Normally C4 is triggered by an electrical detonator powered by some kind of battery or current generator, but in these circumstances we obviously can’t go that route.
‘This detonator has a battery installed at the end you insert into the explosive, with two contacts that will actually carry the current. All you have to do is snap the end off each detonator, right here where the metal is pinched in. That allows sea water to seep inside and starts a chemical reaction which slowly eats away at a membrane about halfway down the detonator itself. Behind that membrane is a water-activated switch: once the membrane’s pierced, the switch completes the circuit to connect the battery, and everything goes bang.’
There was little that Inspector Lavat could usefully do to assist Hardin and his team in their search for the
