Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

‘Mr Talbot?’

‘Yes. Captain Zaimis, isn’t it?’

‘John.’ The little man chuckled and explained in his lilting accent: ‘My boys would laugh at me. “Captain Zaimis”, they would say. “And how is the Queen Mary or the United States today?” they would say. And so on. The children of today.’ The little man sighed in mock sorrow. ‘Ah, well, I suppose “John” is good enough for the captain of the little Matapan .’

I glanced over his shoulder and had a look at the children. They were, as yet, no more than dark blurs against a slightly less dark skyline, but there was little enough to let me see that they averaged about six feet and were built in proportion. Nor was the Matapan so little: she was at least forty feet long, twin-masted, with curious athwartships and fore-and-aft rails just above the height of a tall man’s head. Both men and vessel were Greek: the crew were Greeks to a man and if the Matapan wasn’t entirely Grecian, she had at least been built by Greek shipwrights who had come to and settled down in Florida just for the express purpose of building those sponge ships. With its slender graceful curves and upswept bows Homer would have had no trouble in identifying it as a direct lineal descendant of the galleys that had roamed the sunlit Aegean and the Levant countless centuries ago. I felt a sudden sense of gratitude and security that I was aboard such a vessel, accompanied by such men.

‘A fine night for the job in hand,’ I said.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’ The humour had left his voice. ‘I don’t think so. It is not the night that John Zaimis would have chosen.’

I didn’t point out that choice didn’t enter into the matter. I said: ‘Too clear, is that it?’

‘Not that.’ He turned away for a moment, gave some orders in what could only have been Greek, and men started moving about the deck, unhitching ropes from the bollards on the landing stage. He turned back to me. ‘Excuse me if I speak to them in our old tongue. Those three boys are not yet six months in this country. My own boys, they will not dive. A hard life, they say, too hard a life. So we have to bring the young men from Greece … I don’t like the weather, Mr Talbot. It is too fine a night.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘Too fine. The air is too still, and the little breeze it comes from the north-west? That is bad. Tonight the sun was a flame in the sky. That is bad. You feel the little waves that are rocking the Matapan ? When the weather is good the little waves they slap against the hull every three seconds, maybe four. Tonight?’ He shrugged. ‘Twelve seconds, maybe every fifteen. For forty years I have sailed out of Tarpon Springs. I know the waters here, Mr Talbot, I would be lying if I say any man knows them better. A big storm comes.’

‘A big storm, eh?’ When it came to big storms I didn’t fancy myself very much. ‘Hurricane war ning out?’

‘No.’

‘Do you always get those signs before a hurricane?’ Captain Zaimis wasn’t going to cheer me up, somebody had to try.

‘Not always, Mr Talbot. Once, maybe fifteen years ago, there was a storm warning but none of the signs. Not one. The fishermen from the South Caicos went out. Fifty drowned. But when it is September and the signs are there, then the big storm comes. Every time it comes.’

Nobody was going to cheer me up tonight. ‘When will it come?’ I asked.

‘Eight hours, forty-eight hours, I do not know.’ He pointed due west, the source of the long slow oily swell. ‘But it comes from there … You will find your rubber suit below, Mr Talbot.’

Two hours and thirteen miles later we were uncomfortably nearer that still-distant storm. We had travelled at full speed, but full speed on the Matapan was nothing to write home about. Almost a month ago two civilian engineers, sworn to secrecy, had bypassed the exhaust of the Matapan’s engine to an underwater cylinder with a curiously arranged system of baffle plates. They’d done a fine job, the exhaust level of the Matapan was no more than a throaty whisper, but back pressure had cut the thrust output in half. But it was fast enough. It got there. It got there too fast for me, and the farther out we went into the starlit gulf the longer and deeper became the troughs between the swells, the more convinced I was of the hopelessness of what I had set out to do. But someone had to do it and I was the man who had picked the joker.

There was no moon that night. By and by, even the stars began to go out. Cirrus clouds in long grey sheets began to fill the sky. Then the rain came, not heavy, but cold and penetrating, and John Zaimis gave me a tarpaulin for shelter – there was a cabin on the Matapan , but I had no wish to go below.

I must have dozed off, lulled by the motion of the boat, for the next I knew the rain had stopped spattering on the tarpaulin and someone was shaking my shoulder. It was the skipper, and he was saying softly: ‘There she is, Mr Talbot. The X 13.’

I stood up, using a mast to support myself – the swell was becoming really unpleasant now – and followed the direction of his pointing hand. Not that he needed to point, even at the distance of a mile the X 13 seemed to fill the entire sky.

I looked at it, looked away, then looked back again. It was still there. I’d lost more than most, I didn’t have a great deal to live for, but I did have a little, so I stood there and wished myself ten thousand miles away.

I was scared. If this was the end of the road, I wished to God I’d never set foot on it.

I’d heard of those off-shore rigs before. I’d even had one of them described to me by a man who designed them, but I’d never seen one before and now that I did I realized that the description I’d had had been on the same level as my imaginative capacity to clothe with flesh the bare bones of facts and statistics.

I looked at the X 13 and I just didn’t believe it.

It was enormous. It was angular and ungainly as was no other structure I’d ever seen before. And, above all, it was unreal, a weird combination of Jules Verne and some of the fancier flights of space fiction.

At first glance, in the fleeting patches of dim starlight, it looked like a forest of huge factory chimneys sticking up out of the sea. Halfway up their height those chimneys were all joined by a deep and massive platform through the sides of which those chimneys penetrated. And, at the very right hand side, built on the platform itself and reaching up into the sky, mysterious and fragile in the spiderlike tracery of its slenderly interwoven girders, twice the height of the chimneys and outlined against the night sky in its fairy-like festoon of white and coloured operating and aircraft warning lights, was the oil-drilling derrick itself.

I’m not one of those characters who go about pinching themselves to convince themselves that things are real, but if I were I would never have had a better opportunity or reason to pinch than right then. To see that weird Martian structure suddenly thrusting itself up out of the sea would have had the most hardened topers in the country screaming to climb aboard the water wagon.

The chimneys, I knew, were massive tubular metal legs of almost unbelievable strength, each one capable of supporting a weight of several hundred tons, and on this rig I could count no less than fourteen of those legs, seven on each side, and there must have been a stretch of four hundred feet between the outer ones at the ends. And the astonishing thing was that this huge platform was mobile: it had been towed there with the platform deep-sunk in the sea and the legs thrusting high up almost to the level of the top of the derrick: arrived at the right spot, those legs had dropped right down to the floor of the sea – and then the whole huge platform and derrick, maybe four or five thousand tons in all and powered by huge engines, had risen dripping from the sea till it was safe beyond the reach of even the highest of the hurricane-lashed waves of the Gulf of Mexico.