Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

‘You have been far too long, Mr Talbot,’ Captain Zaimis scolded. His small agitated figure gave the impression of hopping around in the darkness although it would have taken a monkey to hop around that pitching heaving sponge-boat without falling overboard with the first hop. The engine note was much louder now: not only had the skipper been forced to increase engine revolutions to keep a certain amount of slack on the rope tying the Matapan to the pillar, but the vessel was now pitching so wildly that almost every time the bows plunged deep into the sea the underwater exhaust beneath the stern came clear in a brief but carrying crackle of sound.

‘You have been successful, no?’ Captain Zaimis called in my ear.

‘No.’

‘So. It is sad. But no matter. We must leave at once.’

‘Ten minutes, John. Just another ten minutes. It’s terribly important.’

‘No. We must leave at once.’ He started to call the order to cast off to the young Greek sitting in the bows when I caught his arm.

‘Are you afraid, Captain Zaimis?’ Despicable, but I was desperate.

‘I am beginning to be afraid,’ he said with dignity. ‘All wise men know when it is time to be afraid and I hope I am not a fool, Mr Talbot. There are times when a man is selfish if he is not afraid. I have six children, Mr Talbot.’

‘And I have three.’ I hadn’t even one, not any more. I wasn’t even married, not any more. For a long moment we stood there, clinging on to the mast while the Matapan pitched and corkscrewed wickedly in that almost impenetrable darkness under the cavernous shadow of the oil rig, but apart from the thin whistling of the rain-laden wind in the rigging, it was a long silent moment. I changed my tactics. ‘The lives of men depend upon this, Captain Zaimis. Do not ask me how I know but I know. Would you have it said that men died because Captain Zaimis would not wait ten minutes?’

There was a long pause, the rain hissed whitely into the heaving blackness of the sea beneath us, then he said: ‘Ten minutes. No more.’

I slipped off shoes and outer clothing, made sure the life-line was securely tied to my waist just above the weights, slipped on the oxygen mask and stumbled forward to the bows, again thinking, for no reason at all, of big Herman Jablonsky sleeping the sleep of the just in his mahogany bed. I watched until a particularly big swell came along, waited until it had passed under and the bows were deep in the water, stepped off into the sea and grabbed for the rope that moored the Matapan to the pillar.

I went out towards the pillar hand over hand – it couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away – but even with the rope to help me I got a pretty severe hammering and without the oxygen mask I don’t know how much water I would have swallowed. I collided with the pillar before I realized I was near it, let go the rope and tried to grab the pillar. Why, I don’t know. I might as well have tried to put my arms round a railway petrol tanker for the diameter was about the same. I grabbed the rope again before I was swept away and worked my way round to the left towards the seaward side of the massive steel leg. It wasn’t easy. Every time the Matapan’s bows rose with the swell the rope tightened and jammed my clutching hand immovably against the metal, but just so long as I didn’t lose any fingers I was beyond caring.

When my back was squarely to the swell I released the rope, spread out my arms and legs, thrust myself below water and started to descend that pillar something in the fashion of a Sinhalese boy descending an enormous palm tree, Andrew paying out the line as skilfully as before. Ten feet, twenty, nothing: thirty, nothing: thirty-five, nothing. My heart was starting to pound irregularly and my head beginning to swim; I was well below the safe operating limit of that closed oxygen mask. Quickly I half-swam, half-clawed my way up and came to rest about fifteen feet below the surface clinging to that enormous pillar like a cat halfway up a tree and unable to get down.

Five of Captain Zaimis’s ten minutes were gone. My time was almost run out. And yet it had to be that oil rig, it simply had to be. The general himself had said so, and there had been no need to tell anything but the truth to a man with no chance of escape: and if that weren’t enough, the memory of that stiff, creaking, leaden-footed man who’d brought the tray of drinks into the general’s room carried with it complete conviction.

But there was nothing on the ship alongside, nor was there anything under it. I would have sworn to that. There was nothing on the oil rig itself: I would have sworn to that too. And if it wasn’t on the platform, then it was under the platform, and if it was under the platform it was attached to a wire or chain. And that wire or chain must be attached, underwater, to one of those supporting legs.

I tried to think as quickly and clearly as I could. Which of those fourteen legs would they use? Almost certainly I could eliminate right away the eight legs that supported the derrick platform. Too much activity there, too many lights, too many eyes, too many dangling lines to catch the hundreds of fish attracted by the powerful overhead lights, too much danger altogether. So it had to be the helicopter platform under which the Matapan was rolling and plunging at the end of her mooring rope. To narrow it still farther – I had to narrow it, to localize the search by gambling on the probable and ignoring the possible and almost equally probable, there were only minutes left – it was more likely that what I sought was on the seaward side, where I was now, than on the landward side where there was always danger from ships mooring there.

The middle pillar of the seaward three, the one to which the Matapan was moored, I had already investigated. Which of the remaining two to try was settled at once by the fact that my life-line was passed round the left-hand side of the pillar. To have worked my way round three-quarters of the circumference would have taken too long. I rose to the surface, gave two tugs to indicate that I would want more slack, placed both feet against the metal, pushed off hard and struck out for the corner pillar.

I almost didn’t make it. I saw now why Captain Zaimis was so worried – and he’d a forty-foot boat and forty horse-power to cope with the power of the wind and the sea and that steadily growing, deepening swell that was already breaking white on the tops. All I had was myself and I could have done with more. The heavy weights round my waist didn’t help me any, it took me a hundred yards of frantic thrashing and gasping to cover the fifteen yards that lay between the two pillars, and closed oxygen sets aren’t designed for the kind of gasping I was doing. But I made it. Just.

Once more on the seaward side and pinned against the pillar by the pressure of the swell I started crabbing my way down below the surface. This time it was easy, for right away, by chance, my hand found a broad, deeply-and sharply-cut series of slightly curved grooves in the metal extending vertically downwards. I am no engineer, but I knew this must be the worm that engaged against the big motor-driven pinion which would be required to raise and lower those pillars. There must have been one on the last pillar also, but I’d missed it.

It was like going down a cliff with a series of rungs cut in the rock-face. I paused every other foot or so, reaching out on both sides, but there was nothing, no projection, no wire, just the smooth rather slimy surface. Steadily, painstakingly, I forced myself downwards, increasingly more conscious of the gripping pressure of the water, the difficulty of breathing. Somewhere close on forty feet I called it a day. Damaging my ear-drums or lungs or getting nitrogen into the bloodstream wasn’t going to help anyone. I gave up. I went up.