Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Front Runner

Back in the 1940s, Jacques Cousteau had perfected the open-circuit scuba equipment we were now using, solving the problem of a diver having to inhale air at a low pressure by attaching a gas regulator to a highly pressurized tank. But he probably had no idea at the time that he would also be creating a whole new leisure industry.

The ability to breathe underwater must have been a dream of human beings since they first walked on dry land, and here we were doing it.

I checked the pressure in my tank. It was fine, a little below 2,000 psi.

I looked around for Martin.

He was below me, his white tank clearly visible against the darkness beneath. He and Truman were some way down the wall but I was happy remaining close to the lip. I was enchanted by the multi-coloured anemones swaying in the gentle current, and by the shoals of black-and-yellow-striped sergeant major fish, or the beautiful cobalt blue angelfish as they nibbled away at some invisible food on the surface of the coral.

Truman swam up to join me and placed his thumb and index finger together, making a circle in the universal dive signal for OK . He was asking if I was all right. I answered in the affirmative by repeating the signal. He pointed at his watch and then held up his open right hand. I repeated the OK, indicating that I’d understood. Five more minutes.

I again checked the pressure in my tank. It had now dropped to 1,700. To be on the safe side, it needed to still be above 800 when I surfaced.

No problem.

After the five minutes, the three of us ascended slowly towards the surface, stopping for prearranged decompression safety stops at forty and twenty feet. The last thing any of us wanted was to get the ‘bends’, the agonizing, hugely dangerous and potentially lethal condition that can occur when a sudden reduction in pressure causes bubbles of gas to form within the body in the same way that they do in a bottle of fizzy drink when the top is rapidly unscrewed.

‘That was fabulous,’ I said to Henri as I sat on the bottom step of the ladder to take off the heavy equipment. ‘I’d forgotten how much fun diving could be.’

She used my iPhone to snap more pictures of me.

‘You’ll break the lens,’ I said, laughing.

When the three of us were back on board, Carson manoeuvred the boat the few hundred yards to the Kittiwake dive site, where we again tied up to the buoy.

‘I’m definitely coming with you on this one,’ Henri said, opening her dive bag. ‘I’m not staying on the boat again with Bentley. He didn’t take his lecherous eyes off me for a second while you were under. I kept moving away to the other end of the boat, and he kept following me.’ She shivered with disgust.

So Henri and I would be dive buddies on this dive, with Martin pairing up with Truman.

I helped Henri zip up the back of her wetsuit. Whereas I looked like I was bursting out of mine in all the wrong places, she looked fantastic with the tightness of the neoprene showing off her amazing curves to perfection.

‘Wow!’ I whispered in her ear. ‘I could go down with you all day long.’

‘Stop it,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t give Bentley ideas.’

It wasn’t me who would be giving Bentley ideas, her wetsuit would have done that. He just sat on the opposite bench, watching us, and I wondered what was going on in his head.

I switched my BC from one yellow tank to the other, while Henri attached hers to one of the red ones. Soon we were set to go.

‘Bottom time for this dive will be a max of thirty minutes,’ Truman said, giving us the briefing. ‘You may go inside the wreck if you want, but be careful not to snag your gear on the hatches. And don’t go in on your own in case you get stuck. Maximum depth is sixty-four feet so no decompression stops are required. Nevertheless, rise and surface slowly. Have fun, everybody.’

Carson again carried my BC and tank to the steps, and I was soon descending once more into the magical and alien underwater world, following Henri down the buoy’s anchor line.

We swam away from the line and the shape of the ship soon came into view.

The USS Kittiwake had been a submarine rescue craft for the US Navy and had served all over the world since being commissioned in 1946. Perhaps its most memorable task had been to recover the ‘black box’ flight recorder from the ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger , which had blown up over the Atlantic during launch in January 1986.

Now Kittiwake sat rather forlornly on the sandy seafloor, its superstructure already beginning to show the effects of the marine life that had begun to colonize the grey steel hull.

Henri and I first went into the ship’s bridge through the windows from which the glass had been removed. Then we ventured deeper into the vessel, moving down companionways to the lower decks. At one point we were even able to surface in a compartment where there was an air pocket.

It was an eerie feeling, moving through these watery spaces where once over a hundred men had lived and worked; past the mess deck where the tables at which they had eaten still remained in rows, bolted to the steel floor; along the corridor of the officers’ quarters and into the captain’s cabin.

I checked my watch. We had been down now for fifteen minutes and I had developed a splitting headache that was thumping away behind my eyes. I reckoned I must not be used to the continuous pressure changes in my nasal passages.

I went on following Henri deeper into the structure, but I was beginning to feel decidedly unwell.

I grabbed Henri’s flipper and indicated that I would like to go back to the surface by first pointing at myself and then putting my thumb up. At first she thought I was liking the dive and giving it the ‘thumbs up’ but she soon realized something was amiss when I next rotated my hand horizontally from side to side at the wrist and pointed at my head.

We exited the ship through one of the holes that had been cut in the hull and started to go up slowly.

But, halfway to the surface, I was attacked by a giant sea monster that swallowed me whole and blacked out my world entirely.

I woke up lying on my back with a man kneeling beside me, forcing a plastic mask tightly over my nose and mouth.

Oxygen mask, I thought, knowingly. I’d had one of those on before, in hospital in London.

Was I back in the same hospital?

No. I couldn’t be. I was all wet and I was lying in the sun.

So where was I?

My brain was scrambled and drifting, like the swirling of a fog.

Was I drunk? I couldn’t remember being drunk — but, then again, I couldn’t remember anything.

I tried to move but my limbs seemed to have minds of their own.

‘Thank God he’s awake,’ said a female voice from somewhere over my head.

Henri, I thought. That was Henri. I recognized her voice. And it was Carson who was fitting the mask.

Suddenly, the fog in my head cleared and I could remember everything, including the sea monster.

‘What happened?’ I tried to say. The mask was so tight on my face that I couldn’t properly enunciate the words.

‘Just you rest, man,’ Carson said. ‘You have the bends, man. We’re getting you ashore real quick.’

The throbbing in my head continued in perfect time with my heartbeat. I also felt sick, waves of nausea washing over me every few seconds.

I was lying on the platform of the dive boat with a rolled-up towel under my neck. Henri came and kneeled down next to me, opposite Carson. She took my left hand in hers.

‘You really frightened me,’ she said.

I’d really frightened myself.

‘What happened?’ I tried to say again.

‘You passed out as we were on our way up and then you started sinking back down again. I grabbed you and hauled you up to the surface, forcing my alternate air line into your mouth to breath through. I thought your own tank must have emptied. Luckily there was enough air left in it for me to inflate your BC, which kept you up. Carson then dived into the water to help pull you out.’