Clive Cussler - Serpent

"Well, I'll be damned," they said in unison.

43 DECADES BEFORE AUSTIN AND ZAVALA cut their way into the Andrea Doria's garage a ship's officer presciently pictured the dire consequences of an armored truck weighing several tons crashing around in the hold during a storm at sea. To head off that possibility the vehicle was lashed by .strong cables passed over the truck's body and bolted to the floor. More than fifty years later the cables still held the truck in place at a right angle to the vertical wall that had once been the garage floor.

The black body was mottled with .rust, and the tire rubber had softened into an evi-llooking mush. The chrome still held a dull shine, though, and the truck itself was in one piece. After as thorough an inspection as they could make, Austin and Zavala left the hull and went back into the open sea. The saturation divers had retreated to the dry comfort of the pressurized bell. Austin didn't blame them. Saturated trimix is eight times as difficult to breathe as air from a scuba tank.

Austin called McGinty. "Tell Mr. Donatelli we've located the truck."

"Goddamn! Knew you could do it. Is it accessible for salvage?"

"With a little luck and the right equipment. I've got a shopping list."

Austin quickly laid out the gear he wanted.

"No problem. There's a fresh crew coming down. They'll bring the stuff with them."

The bell rose to the surface, and the divers inside exchanged places with a team living in the decompression chamber. When the bell returned, the equipment Austin ordered was secured to its exterior. Austin had talked by radio to the replacement divers before they left the ship and outlined the plan. The divers popped from the bottom of the bell and swam over to the hole in the hull. Austin and Zavala re-entered the ship first. The saturation divers followed with their umbilical lifesupport hoses trailing behind. One of them carried an oxygen cutting torch.

Austin regretted not having direct contact with the divers. He would have liked to hear their comments when they saw the truck hanging from the wall at a right angle. Their animated arm waving was almost as enjoyable. After their initial reaction they got right to work on the truck's rear doors. They wouldn't yield to a crowbar or the mechanical claws of the Hard Suits.

Donatelli had said the assassins who killed the armored truck guards simply slammed the doors. They were probably rusted shut rather than locked, Austin guessed. The torch blazed to life, and the diver drew its scalpellike flame along the lock and hinges, the rust exploding in a shower of sparks. They tried the crowbar again, both saturation divers putting their backs .to it. The doors fell off, and a brownish cloud of rotting debris, flushed out by the intruding seawater, enveloped the four men. When it settled and the water was somewhat clear again, Austin edged forward and probed the truck's interior with his light.

The space was piled with metal strongboxes that had fallen off shelves. The swirling water had cleaned away the clothing, hair and remnants of tissue so that the grinning skulls caught in the beam of the light looked freshly scrubbed, not green with algae as they might otherwise have been. The bones had all tumbled in a heap onto one side of the truck with the other debris. Austin moved aside to make room for his partner.

Zavala was silent for a moment. "Looks like the charnel house you see under the old churches in Mexico and Spain."

"It's more of a slaughterhouse," Austin said grimly. "Angelo Donatelli's memory is pretty good. Those strongboxes are probably for the jewels that were being shipped." He willed himself to avoid the sightless eyes. "We'll deal with that stuff later."

He gestured to the saturation divers, and they swam closer to inspect the inside of the truck. In telling the divers about the stone slab earlier, Austin had warned, "You'll also come across some human bones. I can tell you later how they got there. Hope you're not superstitious."

The divers stared into the truck and shook their heads, but their stunned reaction was temporary. The NUMA divers were pros. They swam into the truck without further hesitation and started moving the boxes and bones aside. Within minutes they had exposed a solidlooking corner of a blackishgray object.

The long lost talking stone.

While the divers tidied up the interior, Austin and Zavala scudded back to the diving bell and returned with a block and tackle attached to the Kevlar tow line that went up to the ship. The bones had been respectfully placed in a neat pile. The strongboxes were stacked out of the way except for one the divers had set aside. With great ceremony a diver opened the box to display its contents. Light glittered off a breathtakingfortune in diamonds, sapphires, and other precious stones.

Austin heard Zavala's sharp intake of breath. "That stuff must be worth millions."

"Maybe billions if the other boxes are as full. This confirms that the motive was murder, not robbery." He signaled the saturation divers to move the box, and he set the double block and tackle he was carrying just inside the door. Zavala had been carrying a metal loop. The saturation divers attached this wire collar around a protruding end of the slab, then affixed the line to the pulley.

Austin knew that the center of lift should be maintained directly above the center of gravity. He also knew this ideal seldom occurred. It was like telling someone to lift with his legs, not his back. Good advice, but of little use when the load is in the back of a closet or under the cellar stairs. The Kevlar cable went through the hull, then angled to the truck. The block and tackle would translate its force into a more lateral pull while doubling the pulling capacity.

Austin was dealing with a number of unknowns. One was the weight of the slab. An object is buoyed up by the water it displaces. Austin knew the slab would be lighter in water, but since he could only guess at its original weight, this didn't do much good. He'd asked McGinty for two tackles rigged with a continuous fall, which can lift twice as much as a single tackle. It was revved for a right-angle luff. Technical jargon meaning that they'd done everything they could to compensate for the awkward pulling system.

The next problem, after they'd yanked the slab out like a dentist extracting a tooth, was preventing it from plummeting to the bottom. The solution was ocean salvage tubes, a fairly new concept. The elongated bags of nylon fabric were designed for salvaging boats. With a lifting capacity up to one and a half tons each they might be able to hoist the entire armored truck to the surface.

The saturation divers used the block and tackle to movethe slab to where they could lash an uninflated bag to each side of the stone. Austin went through and inspected the whole crazy setup, especially the fragile cables holding the truck to the wall, then gave the signal. Using a hose coming from the bell, the saturation divers pumped air into the tubes, which plumped out as quickly as sausages on a skillet. They fed the air in gradually to build up positive buoyancy. The slab lifted like a magician's assistant floating in midair. Keeping the lift line attached in case of an emergency, the divers nudged the slab out of the trick until it floated through the door.

Austin thought this was one of the strangest sights he had ever seen. It was like a painting by Dali, where everything is askew. The black slab floating in space over the abyss like a magic carpet in the immense inkdark chamber. The divers dangling like newborn salamanders from their umbilicals. The seaworn armored truck hanging off the wall at a right angle.

Flanked by Austin and Zavala, who illuminated the way with their lights, the divers swam the slab toward the opening. It was delicate work, especially with the current running through the wreck, but at last the slab was directly under the hole they'd cut in the hull.