Hatteras Blue (31 page)

He smiled tightly against his mask, remembering a time when he'd been like that. Believing that all you had to do was what was right and that life would reward you for it.

Only the world didn't play by those rules. And it seemed you only found out what the rules were when the game was almost over. Certainly he was in deep now, for stakes far higher than a ton of gold.

He was playing with the man behind him for all their lives.

He checked his gauge. They were descending, but too slowly. He pushed the nose farther down. The rush of water increased and he put a hand to his mask to keep it on.

But now, he thought, I'm old enough to know. I've got one last chance at the jackpot and this time I know how the wheel is rigged. You've got to follow the reward and not the right because the right always lies with someone else, the one with the best lawyer. The smart man always goes for the cash.

The gold below them, like everything else under heaven, belonged to whoever was smart enough, fast enough, and strong enough to take it and hold it against the rest.

The U-boat loomed up below. He kept
Charlene'
s nose down, aiming just aft of the conning tower. It grew swiftly. At the last moment he pulled the stick back and they skimmed over the deck, missing it by inches, and then dove again the last twenty feet to the bottom. The vehicle slammed into the sand. It plowed along the bottom for several yards before it stopped, nose up. He forgot to turn the motor off and the prop made a frantic chuk-chuk-chuk against the seabed before he cut it with a chop, already levering himself out of the cockpit.

Caffey was off-loading the extra tanks when he got to the stern compartment. Keyes joined them in pulling out canvas lift bags and cargo nets. Heavily loaded, the three divers made for the U-boat's side, swimming as fast as their gear permitted.

The blown-open hole yawned ahead. A school of spadefish milled aside as they approached, flashing silver and black. Galloway looked after them. Today the water was clearer than before. The sea was lit through, even this deep, with the wavering blue of the rising sun. The two other divers swam gracefully, steadily, trailing him in the gloom. Streams of silver-blue bubbles burst at short intervals from their regulators, soaring upward, expanding to great shimmering umbrellas as they rose.

He cached the lift bags just outside the pressure hull, and motioned to Keyes and Caffey to do the same with everything but one set of spare tanks apiece.

Galloway paused when he reached the interior. It was dark after the bright sea, black as the pit of a mine. He clicked on his light. Its dimness surprised him. He'd forgotten to change batteries. But it would do, now that he knew the layout of the wreck.

When the others joined him he pushed onward. Through the engine room, the generator room. He barely gave the remains by the periscope a second glance.

The compartment was just as they'd left it. He peered into the empty battery cell, sweeping his faint beam from side to side. Behind him he heard Keyes's spare tanks hit metal. Something felt odd to him. Perhaps it was the sameness. So much had happened topside in the few hours just past that he found it hard to accept that nothing had happened here. The metal box lay as he'd left it, tilted on its side, the heap oi powdery rubbish silted beside it.

Except for that, nothing had changed here, 180 feet beneath the surface of the sea, since 1945.

He grimaced, angry at his wandering mind. They had to work, and work fast. He swung his legs around to slide down.

It felt like a lightning strike at the base of his back. The sudden, unanticipated agony knifed through the beginning glow of nitrogen rapture like a bayonet through a soap bubble. Red patterns kaleidoscoped behind his retinas. He slowly straightened his body till the pain backed off, then dug his fingernails out of his gloves and his teeth out of his mouthpiece. At least this time he hadn't spat it out

He pointed to Keyes and then to the open hole.

The light blue eyes narrowed behind the mask. They flicked from Galloway to Caffey.

Keyes slid feet first into the cell, still watching them as he dropped down. Galloway leaned over the access. He sent the yellow spot of his light over the other's back, steadying it on the metal grid that formed a floor.

Keyes was bent double in the low compartment, digging at a section of grating. He lifted first with his fingers, then braced his knees against the curved portion of the hull and strained. The grid remained in place. He crawled to another and pulled at it. It too refused to move. Fastened, Galloway-thought, holding the beam steady. Or more likely corroded, welded tightly over the ballast channel by rust.

—Wait, signaled Caffey suddenly. He drove himself out of the compartment with powerful strokes of his fins, sending water roiling back into Galloway's face. He was back in seconds with the hammer they'd passed on the way in.

Keyes flinched when it clanked down beside him. He hefted it, then lifted it high and drove it down. No good. Water blunted the stroke to that of a healthy infant; it bounced off the grating with a hollow clink.

Keyes reversed the hammer head, leading with the ball. Two shorter blows made the central grating shudder. Particles of rust floated free. He dropped the tool and tugged. It came up with a screech and he heaved it aside and reached down.

His hand reappeared, dragging out a pig of metal.

It was flat gray-black in their focused lights, unmarked and uncorroded. All three of them looked down at it in Keyes's gloves.

Keyes let it sag to the deck. His right hand moved to his leg, came back with an unsheathed knife. He scraped at the bar like a whittler at a stick. Thick strips of what looked like hardened tar corkscrewed down through the water. At last he stopped and lifted it to their lights. One entire face of the pig was scraped clean.

It was the color of the sun.

Keyes turned it to and fro before his mask. At last he boosted it the final foot to Caffey's eager hands. Its weight pulled Jack off balance and he scrabbled at the deck to keep from falling in. Behind his mask, as he fondled the thing, were the eyes of a boy loved for the first time. They were tranced, dazed with the presence of something so long dreamed of he'd despaired of attaining it. Galloway smiled just to see him.

Another bar came up, and a third. Looking down, he saw that Keyes was hefting each before heaving it upward. The stack grew rapidly to three and then four high around the perimeter of the hole.

Galloway reached out for one then. Joy ran through him like the lightning jolt of coke. It was here, gold, the stuff of tales and dreams, of his fortune and his future. He stripped off a glove and sank his thumbnail through tar into the hardness beneath. He tried not to think of those who had trusted last in the heavy metal that lay in growing stacks around them. Who had tried to buy off their murderers with cash. Who had laid their rings and baubles aside to step into the showers.

He looked at his pressure gauge. Time for a tank change. He signaled to Jack. They changed out and lowered a set to Keyes. He was handing up bars more slowly now, feeling far back under the gratings before dragging them out into the light.

Galloway tried to think as he cinched the new tanks. Now they had to get the stuff out. He hadn't planned on doing it all in one dive. They'd just have to lug the bars out one or two at a time.

Keyes handed up a brick and made a circle with his fingers. The last one. He pulled himself out of the well and motioned impatiently to the stack, then to the hatch leading aft.

Tiller picked up a bar and felt himself grow heavy. Each brick, barely a foot long, weighed over twenty pounds. Just outside the hull, he thought, would be the best place to spread out the nets. They could lay the bars directly on them, attach the air bags, inflate them, and go back for more. He picked up another, clutched them both to his chest, and started aft, kicking hard to keep from sinking to the floor.

The three men settled to work. They moved fast, driven by the sweep hands of watches and the luminescent faces of gauges. They passed and repassed one another in the silent, silted corridors. Their lights played over mechanisms and bulkheads. Occasionally they picked out for an instant a heap of whitened bone, hand pointing now to an empty trove.

Galloway counted ten trips for himself and stopped, sucking hard at his regulator, near the periscope well. He sank to the deck beside it. His breath creaked and roared in his ears. The depth narcosis was growing
stronger.
It disorganized his thoughts,
filled
him with a mindless gay carelessness. He fumbled for his air gauge
and
flogged his mind into motion. Not much bottom time left. He forced himself into movement again, biting into rubber at a renewed torment in his back.

This was no torn muscle. The boom that had slammed into his back when he was pulling Caffey free had broken something. And the ceaseless activity since then had made it worse.

But you can't stop now, Tiller-me-boy, he told himself. Every bar you tote is one-third yours. Ten trips so far, two bars each, three divers working. What was that—sixty? He'd give one each to Jack and Bern. So eighteen, he thought, are mine! He tried to work ouf the value of 400-odd pounds of pure gold, but narcosis was making reading an air gauge impossible, not to mention arithmetic.

He was pretty sure it would make him rich.

He lunged gasping through a fuzzy cloud shot with pain. Night and fog darkened his brain. Lift ... haul ... wrestle clumsily between jagged plates of steel... drop a weight onto the straps of the lift net... and go back. He came clearly to himself once out on the sand, lashing up a netful of yellow metal. Neither Caffey nor Keyes was in sight. Two of the lift bags lay scattered where he had dropped them. So three were filled and gone. He smiled at his mental ability and aimed the bubbles from his regulator into the mouth of the gaily colored bag. A few breaths sufficed to balloon it out. He let it go and watched it for a moment, his mind vague, as it rose majestically toward the brightness far above. Then he dropped from consciousness again into a region of drunken greedy instinct.

Some time later he came to himself again in the battery compartment, alone. He peered stupidly into the hole. It was empty. Won, he thought, exultation a bursting si^n in his chest, a crazy grin wrapped around his mouthpiece. Safe home with the big prize, the golden reward, the payoff. Dick or Jack must have gotten the last bar. Strange, he thought drunkenly, they didn't let me know. They must have their heads in the bag too.

Something grated behind him, but he ignored it. He was rubbing his cheeks. They felt like wood. His mind meandered. His hand floated up to his eyes. He stared dully at the round black thing on his wrist. It was important, but he couldn't remember what it did.

Maybe, he thought vaguely, you've been down too long.

The idea didn't particularly worry him. Now that he had the gold it seemed an absurd fancy that he could get the bends. No. That couldn't happen to Lyle Galloway III.

Just then he noticed that he was getting very little to breathe. He dragged harder at the regulator, but got less air with each try. Reserve, his brain supplied at last. He reached back and rotated the valve. Air flowed over his tongue again and he sucked it in greedily. That meant only a few hundred pounds remained, though, and that would go fast at this depth. In fact it would be barely enough to get him out to
Charlene.
Urgency penetrated his fogged mind. He spun clumsily, then paused. His hand light was too dim now to see much, but something was different at the far end of the compartment. One of the bags, or something else they'd discarded, lay in a heap near the hatch. He swam up to it.

It was Jack Caffey. His eyes stared up through a flooded mask He was motionless except for the gentle sway of one arm. From the side of his wet suit a curl of blood twisted like dark filigree around the hilt of Keyes's knife.

Galloway raised his light slowly to the hatch. He tugged gingerly at the dogging wheel, then braced his arm and pulled hard, ignoring the pain. But he knew already that it didn't matter. Keyes had locked it from the other side.

• • • ® •eighteen

W
HEN THE ORANGE FIN HAD DISAPPEARED, the last ripple of wake merged with the sea, she pushed herself slowly to her feet. Feeling more alone than she ever had felt before, Hirsch stared around the horizon. She prayed for a mast, a plane. For any sign of help or intervention...

Nothing broke the empty circle of sea. Nothing met her eyes beneath the blue bowl of sky except a few high clouds and the new-minted penny of the sun, hanging just above the distant sawblade of the horizon.

She was alone. She sat down again and rubbed a hand across the fresh yacht white. The smoothness of the new paint was reassuring.

On it lay the gun. She looked down at it, exploring her bruised cheek with her fingertips. She'd fired one just once in her life. In the crime lab, her last semester at school. She hated guns. She was afraid of them. But she was more afraid of Straeter.

Not as much as she had been, though. Something new was growing in her. Something grim and determined. Yes. If she had to, she could use it.

And Tiller?

We won't think about Tiller, she told herself. He's sold out. We just won't think about him anymore, ever.