Десмонд Бэгли - The Vivero Letter

I was looking for the air cylinders Rudetsky and I had pushed off the raft and I found them spread out to hell and gone. Finding the manifold that had followed the cylinders was a bit more tricky but I discovered it under the coils of air hose that spread like a huge snake, and I smiled with satisfaction as I saw the spanner still tied to it by a loop of rope. Without that spanner I’d have been totally sunk.

Heaving the cylinders into one place was a labour fit for Hercules but I managed it at last and set about coupling up the manifold. Divers have very much the same problem of weightlessness as astronauts, and every time I tried to tighten a nut my body rotated around the cylinder in the other direction. I was down there nearly an hour but finally I got the cylinders attached to the manifold with all cocks open, and the hose on to the manifold outlet with the end valve closed. Now all the air in the cylinders was available on demand at the end of the hose.

I swam up to the cave, pulling the hose behind the, and popped up beside the ledge holding it triumphantly aloft. Katherine was sitting at the further end of the ledge, and when I said, ‘Grab this!’ she didn’t do a damn thing but merely turned and looked at me.

I hoisted myself out of the water, holding the end of the hose with difficulty, and then hauled in a good length of it and anchored it by sitting on it. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I demanded.

She made no answer for some time, then said cheerlessly, ‘I’ve been thinking about Fallon.’

‘Oh!’

‘Is that all you can say?’ she asked with passion in her voice, but the sudden violence left her as soon as it had come. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’ she asked more calmly.

I considered it. ‘Probably,’ I said at last.

‘My God, I’ve misjudged you,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘You’re a cold man, really. You’ve just left a man to die and you don’t care a damn.’

‘What I feel is my business. It was Fallon’s decision — he made it himself.’

‘But you took advantage of it.’

‘So did you,’ I pointed out.

‘I know,’ she said desolately. ‘I know. But I’m not a man; I can’t kill and fight.’

‘I wasn’t brought up to it myself,’ I said acidly. ‘Not like Gatt. But you’d kill if you had to, Katherine. Just like the rest of us. You’re a human being — a killer by definition. We can all kill but some of us have to be forced to it.’

‘And you didn’t feel you had to defend Fallon,’ she said quietly.

‘No, I didn’t,’ I said equally quietly. ‘Because I’d be defending a dead man. Fallon knew that, Katie; he’s dying of cancer. He’s known it ever since Mexico City, which is why he’s been so bloody irresponsible. And now it’s on his conscience. He wanted to make his peace, Katie; he wanted to purge his conscience. Do you think I should have denied him that — even though we’re all going to die anyway?’

I could hardly hear her. ‘Oh, God!’ she breathed. ‘I didn’t know — I didn’t know.’

I felt ashamed. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m a bit mixed up. I’d forgotten you didn’t know. He told me just before Gatt’s attack. He was going back to Mexico City to die in three months. Not much to look forward to, is it?’

‘So that’s why he could hardly bear to leave here.’ Her voice broke in a sob. ‘I watched him looking over the city as though he were in love with it. He’d stroke the things we brought up from here.’

‘He was a man taking farewell of everything he loved,’ I said.

She was quiet for a time, then she said, ‘I’m sorry. Jemmy, I’m sorry for the things I said. I’d give a lot not to have said them.’

‘Forget it.’ I busied myself with securing the hose, then began to contemplate what I’d do with it. The average diver doesn’t memorize the Admiralty diving tables, and I was no exception. However, I’d been consulting them freely of late, especially in relation to the depths in the cenote , and I had a fairly good idea of the figures involved. Sooner or later we’d have to go to the surface and that meant decompressing on the way up, the amount of decompression time depending on the depth attained and the length of time spent there.

I had just spent an hour at nearly a hundred feet and came back to sixty-five and I reckoned if I spent another hour, at least, in the cave, then I could write off the descent to the bottom of the cenote as far as decompression went. The nitrogen would already be easing itself quietly from my tissues without bubbling.

That left the ascent to the surface. The longer we spent in the cave the more decompression time we’d need, and the decompression time was strictly controlled by the amount of air available in the big cylinders at the bottom of the cenote . It would be unfortunate, to say the least, to run out of air while, say, at the twenty-foot decompression stop. A choice between staying in the water and asphyxiation, and going up and getting the bends. The trouble was that I didn’t know how much air was left in the cylinders — Rudetsky had been doing the surface work on the raft and he wasn’t available to tell me.

So I took a chance and assumed they were half full and carried on from there. My small back-pack bottles were nearly empty, but the ones on Katherine’s harness were nearly full, so that was a small reserve. I finally figured out that if we spent a total of just over three hours in the cave I would need an hour and three-quarters, decompression — a total of five hours since we had dived under the bullets. There could possibly have been a change up on top in five hours. I grinned tightly. There wasn’t any harm in being optimistic — Gatt might even have shot himself in frustration.

I consulted my watch and considered it lucky that I’d made a habit of wearing the waterproof and pressureproof diver’s watch all the time. We’d been down an hour and a half, so that left about the same time to go before vacating the cave. I stretched out on the hard rock, still weighing down the hose, and prepared to wait it out.

‘Jemmy!’

‘Yes.’

‘Nobody ever called me Katie before — except my father.’

‘Don’t look upon me as a father-figure,’ I said gruffly.

‘I won’t,’ she promised solemnly.

The light went out — not with a last despairing glimmer as the batteries packed in, but suddenly, as though a switch had been turned off. Katherine gave a startled cry, and I called out. Take it easy, Katie girl! Nothing to worry about.’

‘Is it the batteries?’

‘Probably,’ I said, but I knew it wasn’t. Someone had turned the light off deliberately or the circuit had been damaged. We were left in a darkness that could be felt physically — a clammy black cloak wrapped around us. Darkness, as such, had never worried me, but I knew it could have peculiar effects on others, so I stretched out my hand. ‘Katie, come here!’ I said. ‘Let’s not get too far away from each other.’

I felt her hand in mine. ‘I hope we’ll never be that.’

So we talked and talked in the blackness of that cave — talked about every damned thing there was to talk about — about her father and his work at the college, about my sports of fencing and swimming, about Hay Tree Farm, about the Bahamas, about my future, about her future — about our future. We were forgetful enough in that darkness to believe we had a future.

Once she said, ‘Where did the wind come from so suddenly?’

‘What wind?’

‘Just before we ran for the cenote .’

I came back to the real and bloody world with a jerk. ‘I don’t know. Rider was telling me there was a hurricane off-coast. Maybe it swung inland. He was keeping an ear open for the weather forecasts, I do know that.’ The crash of the chopper and the chase in the forest seemed to have happened an eon before.