polypropylene cord, so he decided to try what he mentally called ‘Plan B’. He’d worked it out in his hotel room the previous evening, but it had depended absolutely on the topography of the seabed.
If the bottom was fairly flat, and his progress outwards from the concrete anchor had confirmed that, he could use the cord itself to try to snag the wreckage. Using the anchor as the centre of a circle, he could start to swim around the perimeter, just above the seabed, and any projecting object would catch the cord. It wasn’t a bad plan, and it was the only one he had apart from repeatedly swimming back and forth from the anchor weight on a series of different compass headings, so Elias looped the end of the cord around his wrist, ascended until he was about five feet off the bottom, and began swimming slowly counter-clockwise.
He’d swum only about fifty feet when he felt a sudden tug on his left arm, but when he investigated the obstruction, it turned out to be just a rocky outcrop projecting some six feet above the seabed. No matter, Elias thought, that just proved the plan was working, so he lifted the cord over the rock, swam back out to the perimeter of the circle as defined by his cord, and started off again.
The sixth time it happened he found the Learjet’s wing.
Chapter 17
Friday
According to O’Reilly, the third site looked more promising: a scatter of metallic debris in a more or less straight line some one and half miles off the north-western tip of Andikithira, and lying in only fifty feet of water.
‘This could be it,’ O’Reilly said. ‘I can’t get a clear indication of shape, but there are a couple of large objects that could be engines, a lot of smaller bits of dispersed debris, and one flat section that might be a piece of a wing.’
‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘we’ll check it out.’ He turned towards the Merlin’s rear compartment where Lieutenant David Crane, the ship’s diving officer, had been sitting patiently ever since ‘Spook Two’ had lifted off the deck of the
‘Damn right I do,’ Crane replied. ‘Anything to get out of this paraffin budgie for a while.’
‘The water’s only about fifty feet deep. Do you need to wear a wetsuit?’
Crane shook his head. ‘No. At that depth it’s just as easy if I free-dive down for a quick look-see. If it is the plane we want I’ll come back up and get properly suited-up.’
Richter helped Crane don the aqualung and weight belt, and then the diving officer sat in the open side doorway of the Merlin as it hovered about five feet above the surface of the Mediterranean, put on his fins and mask, and gripped the mouthpiece between his teeth.
‘Ready?’ Richter asked.
Crane nodded, gave the diver’s ‘OK’ sign – circling his thumb and forefinger – then straightened up and dropped straight down into the circle of rotor-disturbed water immediately below the helicopter. He reappeared briefly on the surface, waved an arm at the aircraft hovering above, then turned face down, lifted his legs and disappeared smoothly beneath the waves.
The wing stuck straight up out of the sand on the seabed, reminding Elias of that black monolith on the moon in
Well, Elias reasoned, Plan B had worked pretty well so far. He could use it to find the remainder of the wreck as well. He studied the wing for a few moments before looping the polypropylene cord over a broken spar. Then he swam away from the wing, paying out the cord as he went. Just before he reached the full extent of the rope, Elias noticed a vaguely mushroom-shaped object hovering above a pile of rocks and he stopped dead in the water.
Seconds passed as he peered carefully at the hazy object, before suddenly recognizing it for what it was – a diver’s lifting bag, partially inflated, and attached to something on the seabed. It was then he realized that he had almost certainly found the rest of the aircraft.
Elias checked his watch, mentally calculating decompression times, then swam over to the lifting bag. The rope securing it, he saw at once, had been looped through two adjacent holes on the side of what was obviously an aircraft fuselage, covered in marine growth and barely distinguishable from the rocks around it.
He swam round to one end of the fuselage, peered inside and stopped short as the powerful beam of his torch revealed the three bodies sitting directly in front of him. Elias stared and shuddered, and immediately decided that he was as close to them as he was prepared to get. Fuck Stein’s instructions about careful placement – he was now going to just arm the explosives, toss them inside the wreck and get the hell away from the grisly open tomb on the seabed.
Elias knelt down, pulled the string specimen bag around in front of him and extracted the detonators and the four demolition charges. Conscious of the power contained in these objects, he followed Stein’s instructions to the letter. Removing the diving knife from its calf sheath, he used the point of the blade to make a tiny hole at one end of each of the four charges.
Then he replaced the knife, opened the small plastic box containing the pencil detonators and pulled out four of them. He pushed the detonators deep into the plastic explosive through the holes that he had just made, then snapped the end of the first one. Nothing terrible happened, so he felt able to breathe again, and repeated the action with the other three. He tossed the four charges into the remains of the fuselage, without even waiting to see where they fell, then picked up his torch and began to follow the cord that would lead him back first to the wing, and then to the concrete anchor, and finally up to his aqualungs suspended beneath the boat.
Before, he had swum with lazy, energy-conserving strokes. But now, with the explosives planted and chemicals fizzing inside the detonators, he swam as fast as he was able, conscious that the clock was already ticking.
Richter was still peering through the door of the Merlin when David Crane resurfaced. The pilot spotted the diver at almost the same moment, and swung the big helicopter to starboard to pick him up. From behind Richter, the aircrewman stepped forward and began paying out the winch cable, the orange lifting strap dangling from its end.
Seconds later, the aircraft was established in the hover some thirty feet above the surface of the sea. Crane waited until the metal hook on the cable had touched the water, earthing it, before swimming the ten feet or so to the lifting strap. He pulled the strap over his shoulders, settled it under his armpits, gave a thumbs-up signal and dropped his arms down beside his body as the aircrewman began hauling in the winch cable. Fifteen seconds later he was standing inside the rear compartment of the Merlin, water dripping everywhere, and removing his aqualung.
You can’t converse in the back of a Merlin, or any military helicopter, because it’s just too noisy, but as Richter looked inquiringly at Crane, the diver shook his head. As soon as the man had attached his safety harness and plugged his headset into the intercom, Richter asked him the question.
‘What was it?’
‘You might not believe this,’ Crane said, ‘but it was metal chairs and a couple of tables.’
‘What the hell are we talking about here – some kind of mermaid’s picnic?’ O’Reilly demanded. ‘What do you mean?’
‘About twenty metal-framed folding chairs and two round tables,’ Crane replied. ‘Probably dumped from some pleasure-boat during a drunken party.’
