Алистер Маклин - Santorini

Talbot looked over the side to where a man, torch in his hand pointing downwards, sat with his legs dangling through the rectangular hole that had been cut in the fuselage.

‘We’re going to get a lot more than our feet wet before we get there. We’ve got to pass first through the compartment under the flight deck and that will still have a great deal of water in it.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Montgomery said. ‘I mean we don’t have to. We just drop down through the hole we’ve made in the fuselage.’

‘That’s fine, if all we want to do is to confine ourselves to the cargo hold. But you can’t get into the flight deck from there. There’s a heavy steel door in the bulkhead and the clamps are secured on the for’ard side. So if we want to get at those clamps you have to do it from the flight-deck side, and to do that you must pass through the flooded compartment first.’

‘Why should we want to open that door at all?’

‘Because the clamps holding the atom bomb in place have padlocks. Where is one of the first places you’d look if you were searching for a key to the padlocks?’

‘Ah! Of course. The pockets of the dead men.’

‘Enough, Captain,’ the man on the fuselage called out. ‘Deck’s clear.’

Montgomery centred the winch and applied the brake, then checked the fore and aft securing ropes. When he had them adjusted to his satisfaction he said: ‘Won’t be long, gentlemen. Just going to have a first-hand look.’

‘Van Gelder and I are coming with you. We’ve brought our suits.’ Talbot checked the level of the top of the jagged hole in the nose cone relative to the surface of the sea. ‘I don’t think we’ll be needing our helmets.’

They did not, as it proved, require their helmets, the compartment under the flight-deck was no more than two-thirds full. They moved along to the opened hatch and hauled themselves up into the space behind the pilots’ seats. Montgomery looked at the two dead men and screwed his eyes momentarily shut.

‘What a bloody awful mess. And to think that the fiend responsible is still walking around free as air.’

‘I don’t think he will be for much longer.’

‘But you’ve said yourself you don’t have the evidence to convict him.’

‘Andropulos will never come to trial. Vincent, would you bang open that door and show Captain Montgomery where our friend is.’

‘No banging. Maybe our friend doesn’t like banging.’ Van Gelder produced a large stilson wrench. ‘Persuasion. Aren’t you coming, sir?’

‘In a moment.’ They left and Talbot addressed himself to the highly distasteful task of searching through the dead men’s pockets. He found nothing. He searched through every shelf, locker and compartment in the cockpit. Again, nothing. He moved aft and joined Montgomery and Van Gelder.

‘Nothing, sir?’

‘Nothing. And nothing I can find anywhere in the flight-deck.’

Montgomery grimaced. ‘You were, of course, looking through the pockets of the dead men. Sooner you than me. This is a very big plane, the key – if there ever was a key – could have been tucked away anywhere. I don’t give much for our chances of recovering it. So, other methods. Your Number One suggests a corrosive to cut through those clamps. Wouldn’t it be easier just to use an old-fashioned hacksaw?’

‘I wouldn’t recommend it, sir,’ Van Gelder said. ‘If you were to try I’d rather be a couple of hundred miles away at the time. I don’t know how intelligent this armed listening device is, but I would question whether it’s clever enough to tell the difference between the rhythmic rasping of a hacksaw and the pulse of an engine.’

‘I agree with Vincent,’ Talbot said. ‘Even if it were only a one in ten thousand chance – and for all we know it might be a one in one chance – the risk still isn’t worth taking. Lady Luck has been riding with us so far but she might take a poor view of our pushing her too far.’

‘So corrosives, you think? I have my doubts.’ Montgomery stopped to examine the clamps more closely. ‘I should have carried out some preliminary test aboard, I suppose, but I never thought those clamps would be so thick nor made, as I suspect they are, of hardened steel. The only corrosive I have aboard is sulphuric acid. Neat sulphuric, H2SO4 at specific gravity 1800 – vitriol, if you like – is a highly corrosive agent when applied to most substances, which is why it is usually carried in glass carboys which are immune to the corrosive action of acids. But I think it would find this a very tough meal to digest. Patience and diligence, of course, and I’m sure it would do the trick, but it might take hours.’

Talbot said: ‘What do you think, Vincent?’

‘I’m no expert. I should imagine Captain Montgomery is quite correct. So, no corrosives, no hacksaws, no oxyacetylene torches.’ Van Gelder hoisted the big stilson in his hand. ‘This.’

Talbot looked at the clamps and their mountings, then nodded. ‘Of course. That. We’re not very bright, are we? At least I’m not.’ He looked at the way the clamps were secured to the side of the fuselage and the floor: each of the bases of the four retaining arms of the clamps was fitted over two bolts and were held in place by heavy inch-and-a-half nuts. ‘We leave the clamps in situ and free the bases instead. See how stiff those nuts are, will you?’

Van Gelder applied the stilson to one of the nuts, adjusted the grip and heaved. The nut was big and tightly jammed in position but a stilson wrench affords great leverage: the nut turned easily.

‘Simple,’ Van Gelder said.

‘Indeed.’ Talbot looked at the length of the retaining arms, which projected at ninety degrees from each other, then gauged the width of the hole that had been cut overhead. ‘What’s not so simple is getting the bomb up through the hole. With those arms in position there’s just not enough clearance for it to go through. We’ll have to widen the hole. You can do that, Captain?’

‘No bother. Just means that we’ll have to lower the fuselage down to its previous position. I’m coming around to Van Gelder’s view about taking zero chances. I want as much water as possible in this compartment to dissipate the heat of the torches. It’ll take a couple of hours, maybe longer, to do the job, but better two or three hours late down here than twenty years early you-know-where.’

Van Gelder said: ‘Do I undo those nuts now?’

‘No. We’re stable enough at the moment. But if the fuselage returns to its previous position of being almost submerged and then the weather blows up – well, I don’t think it would be a very clever idea to have an armed atomic mine rolling about all over the shop.’

‘I don’t think so, either.’

Talbot and Van Gelder were back aboard the Ariadne and having coffee in the deserted wardroom when a seaman from the radio-room entered and handed Talbot a message. Talbot read it and handed it to Van Gelder, who read it twice, then looked at his captain with a certain thoughtful surprise.

‘Looks as if I have been casting unjust aspersions on the FBI, sir. It further looks as if they do work at night.’

‘Even better, it seems as if they have no compunction about waking others, such as bank managers, in the middle of the night and making them work also. One gathers from the message that Andropulos’s mysterious friend George Skepertzis, does know the even more mysterious Kyriakos Katzanevakis and Thomas Thompson.’

‘If GS deposits one million dollars each in the accounts of KK and TT and has given them smaller sums on previous occasions one gathers that they are more than passing acquaintances. Unfortunately, it seems that the one person who could identify them, the bank clerk who handled the accounts of all three men, had been transferred elsewhere. They say that they are pursuing enquiries, whatever that means.’