Hammond Innes - Levkas man

I looked at him. "You knew it referred to me?"

"Van der Voort is not a very common name-not in England, anyway."

"But this is from the Daily Telegraph presumably, of March twenty-eighth. It wasn't something you happened on by accident."

"No. No, I'm afraid I was curious-I asked a young friend of mine to check the newspaper files for me."

"I see." I put the cutting back between the pages and closed the book. So Interpol had been informed. That meant that Kotiadis knew, had known probably since we had left for Samos, certainly since our return to Meganisi. Zavelas, too, I thought, remembering how he had watched me that first evening. "Well, if I make a balls of this dive …" I laughed, an attempt to dispel the tension. "Solve a lot of problems, wouldn't it?" But it wasn't Kotiadis that worried me, or any information about my background that had been passed on to Interpol. It was the dive I was scared of-the dive and what I might find down there. Trembling, I reached for the jacket of the wet suit Sonia was holding out to me and struggled into it. By the time I had zipped it up she had dumped the cylinder on the deck beside me. It was heavy, 72 cubic feet of air compressed to 2250 p.s.i., and the stem indicator showed that it was full. It should last me an hour if I controlled my rate of breathing-if I didn't panic in that cave entrance and start sucking in air like a locomotive. I held out my hand for the demand valve and she handed it to me, watching as I screwed it on and checked that it was working properly. Then she helped hoist the tank on to my back, passing the straps over my shoulders as I settled the Aveight and secured it in position. Watch, depth meter, diving knife, torch and mask; finally, the heavy lead-weighted belt. I was all set then, the mask pushed up on my forehead, the gum pad in my mouth. I cracked the valve and heard the air hiss as I drew a shallow, tentative breath. It was okay. Everything was okay. Except for my heart, which was thumping nervously as I thought about that cave.

Slowly I waddled backwards to the ladder. The whole outfit seemed to weigh a ton as I manoeuvred myself outboard, wishing to God Bert was there, if not to dive with me, at least to give me moral support. Again I tested the air supply, checked the stem indicator. Tank full. Air coming easily. I started down the ladder. "Good luck!" Sonia was wearing a bright artificial smile. I didn't say anything, thinking of all the women down through time who had seen men off into danger with that same bright smile. I pulled the mask down over my face, down over my eyes and nose, my teeth grinding on the gum pad teats as I began to breathe through the mouthpiece. I had no confidence, only a feeling of fear. And I was still afraid when I hit the water.

I had gone in backwards, both hands holding the mask to my face, the way Bert had taught me, the masts and their two faces v;hirling against the sky to vanish abruptly as the sea closed over my head. Then I turned over onto my belly in a froth of bubbles, hanging there in the water, blind and weightless now^ and sinking slowly as I exhaled, the beating of my heart seeming unnaturally loud. The froth of bubbles drifted away and the bottom leaped into vision, clear in the glass pane of the mask and looking nearer than the 18 fathoms in which we had anchored. It was rock and sand, with weed waving, and I was alone. Nobody else in all that wet world. The shape of the boat, etched in shadow, moved lazily with the weed, and the kedge warp was a pale line looping down to the anchor, which lay on its side like some forgotten toy.

I was still trembling, my heart pounding loud in my waterlogged ears. Not because of the aqualung, the unfamiliarity of dependence on compressed air-I was already breathing gentlv and regularly. It was the dim buttressed shape of the underwater shore at the extreme edge of visibility, the knowledge that I had to penetrate into the interior of the rock, squeezing through a narrow hole into flooded galleries that had already nearly cost an experienced diver his life. The fear of that had been with me all night, had been building up throughout the morning.

I lav face downwards, my head back, staring: ahead through the sunlit flecks that hung suspended like dust in the water to the dark wall that edged the shelf, trving to stop the trem-blinsr. to kev mv nerves to action. Mv left hand came out, an involuntary flipper movement to hold myself on an even keel, looking white and verv close, the diving watch staring at me. the dial enormous against mv wrist.

It ^vas the sight of that watch that got me started. The movable dial had to be set. That was the first thing-the time check. I twisted the bevelled edge until the zero mark was on the minute hand. The time was 09.47. In theory the cylinder on my back contained at least 60 minutes of air. but only if I were careful and controlled my breathing the way an experienced diver would. That was what I was doing now, the periodic hiss of the demand valve as I took in short, shallow breaths, followed by the blatter of bubbles behind mv head as I breathed out. But would I be so in command of my breathing inside that cave? I thought I had better work on the basis of minimum duration-30 minutes. That meant being out of the cave by 10.17. And something else I had to remember, not to hold mv breath if I came up in a hurry. That way vou could rupture vour lungs as the pressure lessened and the compressed air in the lungs expanded.

I was still looking at the dial of my watch, magnified by the water, and the sight of the second hand sweeping slowly round the dial made me realize that time was passing and every minute spent hanging around was a minute of underwater time wasted. Mv reaction to that was immediate, a sort of reflex. I jack-knifed, diving down and heading for the shore, arms trailing at my side, my legs scissoring so that the flippers did the work and bubbles trailing away behind me as I exhaled to make depth.

A school of small-fry changed from dingy grey to a glitter of silver as they skittered away from me to re-form like soldiers on parade beyond my reach, all facing me, motionless, watchful. A rock grew large in a sea of grass, a starfish flattened against it and somebody's discarded sandal lying forlorn and alien in this world of water. And everything about me silent, so that the hiss of air as I cracked the demand valve to breathe in was unnaturally loud. And every time I exhaled, the rush of bubbles past my head sounded like the burbling wake of an outboard motor.

The silence and the loneliness pressed on my nerves and at that rock I turned to stare back. I could just see Coro-mandel's hull, a dark whale shape bulging from the ceiling of my wet world. The depth meter on my right wrist showed 32 feet. Everything was deadened as the pressure built up on my eardrums. With thumb and forefinger pressed into the hollows of the mask, pinching my nose, I blew my ears clear. Instantly the noise of my breathing, the pops and crackles, the hiss of the demand valve, were preternaturally loud.

Reassured by the dim outline of the boat, I turned and flipper-trudged to the underwater cliffs, gliding weightless along great fissured rocks. Like flying buttresses, Bert had said. But it was the dark, gaping mouths of the fissures that held my gaze. I was thinking of octopuses and groupers big as sharks, my imagination filling the black cavities with all the monsters of the deep.

It was the loneliness, of course. In my two previous dives I had been following Bert. Not only had he been there to instruct me, to give me confidence, but he had kept ahead of me so that I had had him always in my field of vision, a fellow human being who was both nurse and companion. Now I had nobody, and I had to penetrate the deepest of those yawning fissures, negotiate a hanging slab of rock, and then find my way up through flooded caves and blow holes.