Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

‘I’ll guarantee it, Talbot,’ General Ruthven said quietly. ‘I know who you are. I know you’re a killer. But I won’t have even a killer murdered out of hand. If anything happens to you I’ll talk, regardless of the consequences. Vyland is first and foremost a business man. Killing you wouldn’t even begin to be compensation for the millions he’d lose. You need have no fear.’

Millions. It was the first time there had been any mention of the amounts involved. Millions. And I was to get it for them.

‘Thanks, General, that puts you on the side of the angels,’ I murmured. I stubbed out my cigarette, turned and smiled at Vyland. ‘Bring along the bag of tools, friend, and we’ll go and have a look at your new toy.’

It isn’t the fashion to design tombs in the form of two-hundred-foot-high metal cylinders, but if it were that pillar on the X 13 would have been a sensation. As a tomb, I mean. It had everything. It was cold and dank and dark, the gloom not so much relieved as accentuated by three tiny glow-worms of light at top, middle and bottom: it was eerie and sinister and terrifying and the hollow, reverberating echoing boom of a voice in those black and cavernous confines held all the dark resonance, the doom-filled apocalyptic finality of the dark angel calling your name on the day of judgement. It should have been, I thought bleakly, a place you went through after you died, not just before you died. Not that the question of precedence mattered at the end of the day.

As a tomb, fine: as a means of getting anywhere, terrible. The only connection between top and bottom lay in a succession of iron ladders welded on to the riveted sides of the pillar. There were twelve of those ladders, each with fifteen rungs, not one break or resting place between top and bottom. What with the weight of a heavy circuit-testing bridge Megger hanging down my back and the fact that the rungs were so wet and slippery that I had to grip them with considerable force to keep myself from falling off the ladder, the strain on forearm and shoulder muscles was severe; twice that distance and I wouldn’t have made it.

It is customary for the host to lead the way in strange surroundings but Vyland passed up his privilege. Maybe he was frightened that if he preceded me down the ladder I’d take the opportunity of kicking his head off and sending him a hundred and more feet to his death on the iron platform below. However it was, I went first, with Vyland and the two cold-eyed men we’d found waiting in the little steel room following close behind. That left Larry and the general up above, and no one was under the impression that Larry was fit to guard anyone. The general was free to move around as he wished, yet Vyland appeared to have no fears that the general might use his freedom to queer his pitch. This I had found inexplicable: but I knew the answer to it now. Or I thought I knew: if I were wrong, innocent people would surely die. I put the thought out of my mind.

‘Right, open it up, Cibatti,’ Vyland ordered.

The larger of the two men bent down and unscrewed the hatch, swinging it up and back on its hinges to lock into a standing catch. I peered down the narrow steel cylinder that led to the steel cabin beneath the bathyscaphe and said to Vyland: ‘I suppose you know you’ll have to flood this entrance chamber when you go looking for your Blackbeard’s treasure?’

‘What’s that?’ He looked at me narrowly, suspiciously. ‘Why?’

‘Were you thinking of leaving it unflooded?’ I asked incredulously. ‘This entrance chamber is usually flooded the minute you start descending – and that’s normally surface level, not a hundred and thirty feet down as you are here. Sure, sure, I know it looks solid, it might even hold at double this depth, I don’t know. But what I do know is that it is completely surrounded by your gasoline buoyancy tanks, about eight thousand gallons of it, and those are open to the sea at the bottom. The pressure inside those tanks corresponds exactly to the sea pressure outside – which is why only the thinnest sheet metal is required to hold the gasoline. But with only air inside your entrance chamber you’re going to have at least two hundred pounds to the square inch pressing on the outside of this entrance chamber. And it won’t stand that. It’ll burst inwards, your gasoline will escape, your positive buoyancy will be gone for ever and there you are, four hundred and eighty feet below the surface of the sea. And there you would remain until the end of time.’ It was hard to be positive in that thinly-lit gloom, but I could have sworn that the colour had drained from Vyland’s face.

‘Bryson never told me this.’ Vyland’s voice was a vicious whisper and there was a shake in it.

‘Bryson? Your engineering friend?’ There was no answer, so I went on: ‘No, I don’t suppose he would. He was no friend, was he, Vyland: he had a gun in his back, didn’t he, and he knew that when his usefulness was over someone was going to pull the trigger of that gun? Why the hell should he tell you?’ I looked away from him and shouldered the bridge Megger again. ‘No need for anyone to come down with me – it’ll only make me nervous.’

‘Think I’m going to let you go down there on your own?’ he asked coldly. ‘To get up to your tricks?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said wearily. ‘I could stand there in front of an electrical switchboard or fuse-box and sabotage the bathyscaphe so that it would never move again, and neither you nor your friends would ever know anything about it. It’s in my own interests to get this machine going and have the whole thing over as soon as possible. The quicker the better for me.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘Twenty to eleven. It’ll take me three hours to find out what’s wrong. At least. I’ll have a break at two. I’ll knock on the hatch so that you can let me out.’

‘No need.’ Vyland wasn’t happy, but as long as he couldn’t put his finger on any possibility of treachery he wasn’t going to deny me – he wasn’t in any position to. ‘There’s a microphone in the cabin, with its extension cable wound round a drum on the outside and a lead through a gland in the side of the leg that’s carried up to that room where we were. There’s a button call-up. Let us know when you’re ready.’

I nodded and started down the rungs welded into the side of the cylinder, unscrewed the upper hatch of the bathyscaphe’s flooding and entrance chamber, managed to wriggle down past it – the downward projecting cylinder which encompassed the top of the entrance chamber was only a few inches wider and didn’t give enough room to open the hatch fully – felt for the rungs below, pulled down the hatch, clamped it shut and then worked my way down the constricting narrowness of that chamber to the cabin below. The last few feet involved an almost right-angle bend, but I managed to ease myself and the Megger round it. I opened the heavy steel door to the cabin, wriggled through the tiny entrance, then closed and locked the door behind me.

Nothing had changed, it was as I had remembered it. The cabin was considerably bigger than that of the earlier FRNS from which it had been developed, and slightly oval in shape instead of round: but what was lost in structural power was more than compensated for in the scope and ease of movement inside, and as it was only intended for salvage operations up to about 2,500 feet, the relative loss in strength was unimportant. There were three windows, one set in the floor, cone-shaped inwards as was the entrance door, so that sea pressure only tightened them in their seats: they looked fragile, those windows, but I knew that the specially constructed Plexiglas in the largest of them – and that was no more than a foot in its external diameter – could take a pressure of 250 tons without fracturing, many times the strain it would ever be required to withstand in the depths in which that bathyscaphe would operate.