Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

Just below the surface I stopped to have a rest and clear my head. I felt bitterly disappointed, I had banked more heavily than I knew on this last chance. Wearily, I laid my head against the pillar and thought with a bleak hopelessness that I would have to start all over again. And I had no idea in the world where to start. I felt tired, dead tired. And then, in a moment, the tiredness left me as if it had never been.

That great steel pillar was alive with sound. There could be no doubt about it, instead of being silent and dead and full of water, it was alive with sound.

I ripped off my rubber helmet, coughed and gagged and spluttered as some water found its way in under the oxygen mask, then pressed my ear hard against the cold steel.

The pillar reverberated with a deep resonant vibration that jarred the side of my head. Water-filled pillars don’t reverberate with sound, not with sound of any kind. But this one did, beyond all question. It wasn’t water that was in that pillar, it was air. Air! All at once I identified that peculiar sound I was hearing; I should have identified it immediately. That rhythmical rising and falling of sound as a motor accelerated and slowed, accelerated and slowed, was a sound that had for many years been part and parcel of my professional life. It was an air compressor, and a big one at that, hard at work inside the pillar. An air compressor deep down below water level inside one of the support legs of a mobile rig standing far out in the Gulf of Mexico. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t make any kind of sense at all. I leant my forehead against the metal, and it seemed as if the shuddering, jarring vibration was an insistent clamorous voice trying to tell me something, something of urgency and vital importance, if only I could listen. I listened. For half a minute, perhaps a minute, I listened, and all of a sudden it made the very best kind of sense there was. It was the answer I would never have dreamed of, it was the answer to many things. It took me time to guess this might be the answer, it took me time to realize this must be the answer, but when I did realize it I was left with no doubts in the world.

I gave three sharp tugs on the rope and within a minute was back aboard the Matapan . I was hauled aboard as quickly and with as little ceremony as if I had been a sack of coals and I was still stripping off oxygen cylinder and mask when Captain Zaimis barked for the mooring rope to be slipped, gunned the engine, scraped by the mooring pillar and put the rudder hard over. The Matapan yawed and rolled wickedly as she came broadside on to the troughs, shipping solid seas and flying clouds of spray over the starboard side, and then, stern to the wind and steady on course, headed for shore.

Ten minutes later, when I’d peeled off the diving-suit, dried off, dressed in shore clothes and was just finishing my second glass of brandy, Captain Zaimis came down to the cabin. He was smiling, whether with satisfaction or relief I couldn’t guess, and seemed to regard all danger as being past: and true enough, riding before the sea, the Matapan was now almost rock-steady. He poured himself a thimble of brandy and spoke for the first time since I’d been dragged aboard.

‘You were successful, no?’

‘Yes.’ I thought the curt affirmative a bit ungracious. ‘Thanks to you, Captain Zaimis.’

He beamed. ‘You are kind, Mr Talbot, and I am delighted. But not thanks to me but to our good friend here who watches over us, over all those who gather sponges, over all who go to sea.’ He struck a match and put a light to a wick in an oil-filled boat-shaped pottery dish which stood in front of a glassed-in portrait of St Nicholas.

I looked sourly at him. I respected his piety and appreciated his sentiments but I thought he was a bit late in striking the matches.

It was exactly two o’clock in the morning when Captain Zaimis skilfully eased the Matapan alongside the wooden jetty from which we had left. The sky was black now, the night so dark that it was scarcely possible to distinguish land from sea and the rain was a drumfire of sound on the roof of the cabin. But I had to go and go at once. I had to get back inside the house without being observed, I had to have a long conference with Jablonsky, and I had to get my clothes dry: my luggage was still in La Contessa, I’d only the one suit, and I had to have it dry before morning. I couldn’t bank on not seeing anyone until evening, as I’d done the previous day. The general had said that he’d let me know what job it was he had in mind inside thirty-six hours: the thirty-six hours would be up at eight o’clock this morning. I borrowed a long oilskin to keep off the worst of the rain, put it on over my own raincoat – the oilskin was a couple of sizes too small, it felt as if I were wearing a strait-jacket – shook hands all round, thanked them for what they had done for me and left.

At a quarter past two, after making a brief stop at a call-box, I parked the Corvette in the side turning where I’d found it and squelched along the road in the direction of the drive leading up to the general’s house. There were no sidewalks on the road, the kind of people who lived on this exclusive stretch of sea frontage didn’t have any need of sidewalks, and the gutters were swollen little rivers with the muddy water spilling over the uppers of my shoes. I wondered how I was going to get my shoes dry in time for the morning.

I passed the lodge where the chauffeur lived – or where I presumed he lived – and passed by the driveway also. The enclosed tunnel was brightly lit and clambering over the top of that six-barred gate in that blaze of light wouldn’t have been a very clever thing to do. And for all I knew the top bar might be set to work some electrically operated warning bell if sufficient weight were brought to bear. I wouldn’t have put anything beyond the lot who lived in that house.

Thirty yards beyond the drive I squeezed through an all but imperceptible gap in the magnificent eight-foot hedge that fronted the general’s estate. Less than two yards behind the edge was an equally magnificent eight-foot wall, hospitably topped with huge chunks of broken glass set in cement. Neither the hedge concealing the wall, nor the wall designed to discourage those too shy to enter by the main driveway was, I had learnt from Jablonsky, peculiar to the general’s estate. All the neighbours had money enough and importance enough to make the protection of their privacy a matter of considerable consequence, and this set-up was common to most of them. The rope dangling from the gnarled branch of the big live oak on the other side of the wall was where I had left it. Badly hampered by the binding constriction of the oilskin I waddled rather than walked up that wall, swung to earth on the other side, clambered up the oak, unfastened the rope and thrust it under an exposed root. I didn’t expect to have to use that rope again, but one never knew: what I did know was that I didn’t want any of Vyland’s playmates finding it.

What was peculiar to the general’s estate was the fence about twenty feet beyond the wall. It was a five-stranded affair, and the top three were barbed. The sensible person, obviously, pushed up the second lowest plain wire, pushed down the bottom one, stooped and passed through. But what I knew, thanks to Jablonsky, and what the sensible person didn’t, was that pressure on either of the two lower wires operated a warning bell, so I climbed laboriously over the top three wires, to the sound of much ripping and tearing, and lowered myself down on the other side. Andrew wasn’t going to have much farther use for his oilskin by the time he got it back. If he ever got it back.

Under the closely packed trees the darkness was almost absolute. I had a pencil flash but I didn’t dare use it, I had to trust to luck and instinct to circle the big kitchen garden that lay to the left of the house and so reach the fire-escape at the back. I had about two hundred yards to go and I didn’t expect to make it in under a quarter of an hour.