Counterpoint (13 page)

David was a well-built fellow, about 6
feet tall and although not fat, excess weight was a big problem he
was failing to address. He has far more challenged follicles than I
have, thought Max.

David’s warm and jovial nature, made
things go well. Conversation and sparkling wit caused the hours to
pass unnoticed until, exhausted, the girls drew breath and decided
they must go to bed. They would meet up again tomorrow, for
breakfast in town.

It was 2 o’clock in the morning when
they left David’s boat and another 20 minutes before the launch
from Ocean Raider would collect them from the harbour.

They walked along slowly, arm in arm,
talked out. No one was about except a lone figure of a man,
practically running. He past them on the other side of the road, by
the small park called Jumhooree Maidhaan.

A dark coloured car approached, with a
slight squeal of tyres, accelerated and swerved at the man,
knocking him over into the flowerbeds. The car stopped, the driver
got out and tried to take something off the injured man, and a
skirmish ensued.

Max ran towards them shouting. “Police!
Police!” Hearing the shout, the driver ran back to his car and with
tyres squealing loudly in the still night, drove off.

Carla was already dialling for help on
her mobile phone, calling for the police and medical services.

Max bent over the man and tried to calm
him, saying, “Lay still, police and ambulance are on their way.”
The man was too injured to struggle anymore and lay still. From the
rattling breaths and pain racked cough, Max supposed the man’s
injuries were at least broken ribs, perhaps a punctured lung,
perhaps abdominal bleeding.

The man whispered something, pain
prevented greater effort, Max leaned closer. “Please help me,” he
begged. “Me and my family.”

“I am going to help you,” assured
Max.

“No, no, more than that, come with me
in the ambulance I may need you to do something for me.”

“
Well!” Said Max
hesitantly, not actually wanting to get involved, “If I must.” Then
he added reassuringly, “Yes, of course I will. I will not leave you
until you say I can. Can we contact your family? By the way, what
is your name?”

The man chose not to reply, but lay
there, quiet and still, awaiting arrival of the ambulance. Max
asked Carla to go back in the launch on her own; he would be along
later. She understood, having heard the man’s plea.

At the hospital the grim news came, the
patient was dying, and apart from pain relief there was nothing
they could do for him. The man seemed to accept this and appeared
to rally round.

“My name is George Bryant,” he
volunteered to Max. “In these circumstances there is no one else I
can trust, and I need you to help my family as I no longer can. Get
my wallet,” he instructed. Max did so, and George pulled from it, a
crumpled colour photograph of an old truck. “This is an underwater
photo of a truck, hanging from chains attached to a ferry, which
sank in Cyprus many years ago. In the spare wheel behind the cab,
is a large fortune in smuggled precious stones.” Max tried to
interrupt, but the man ignored him and pressed on with his
story.

“I was transporting
the stuff from
Syria
when I was attacked by the man who ran me down,
his name is Manuel. With another man, he stole the wheel and
disabled my truck, so I could not follow him, but I did manage to
catch up with him as he boarded the ferry. By the time I could pay
to get on, the ship sailed and later sank outside Larnaca, due to
stability problems. This was in early June 1980. It should not have
sunk; the damn thing was brand new and on its maiden
voyage.”

“The vessel is called Zenobia.”

“The other man who drove his truck on
the ferry, with my wheel, was killed in a bar room fight soon after
he got ashore, so the location of his truck on the ferry, was not
known.”

“I believed the truck was inside the
hull and from what I was told, it was impossible to get at, because
most of the vehicles slid over when the hull hit the seabed and
were all mangled together.”

“I had lost everything and had to hide
for years, from the gang I smuggled for. They left me alone after
they caught the other man, Manuel, who stole from me, but then he
escaped from them. Last month, purely by chance I saw this photo
taken by an amateur diver. The truck looked familiar, and I bought
the copy. I enlarged the number plate and could see it was Manuel’s
truck, the man who ran me down! How he knew I had found it, I don’t
know, but I’ve been on the run ever since.”

He reached inside his wallet again. “My
family,” he said, offering a letter. On the piece of paper, a
letter from his wife, was her address.

“My request of you is to recover the
stones, if they are still there, and take what you will, but see
some goes to my family, to take care of them.” His hand grasped
Max’s wrist and looked pleading into Max’s eyes. He licked the
rising blood from his lips, swallowed it to clear his mouth and
summoned his last dregs of life. “I have to trust you or my family
will get nothing. I have ruined my life and theirs, and there is
only this good thing I can do for them, if you will help me!”

His grip tightened and then relaxed,
his breath rattled away in a sighing gasp. His focused eyes
unfocused and drifted as though looking through Max.

The man had died, but probably could
still hear, as hearing is the last of the senses to fade. “I will!”
Shouted Max, in the belief George had heard him and if so could
rest in peace. Max pulled the still gripping hand away from his
wrist, laying it by George’s side.

Max walked away and gave what
information he could to the waiting police and hospital
personnel.

Max eventually returned to the ship and
explained everything to Carla.

“So we learn to wreck dive and get the
sunken treasure,” she joked.

“Yes,” replied Max seriously. “But
first I have something for you.”

He kissed her tenderly and said. “Gosh,
I love you; I love you so much I could burst.”

“Squirt more like.” She chuckled,
pulling him into her. 20 minutes later, exhausted, they lay in each
other’s arms.

“Three squirts actually, ” he said and
drifted off to sleep.

They woke up to the sound of Carla’s
phone. It was Amy, wondering where they were for the breakfast
date. Carla explained briefly and said. “Better make it lunch
now.”

At lunch, the accident as it was
referred to was brought up again, but nothing else was revealed and
the girly talk resumed.

Max spotted a loose hair on Amy’s
shoulder and at the first opportunity plucked it off unnoticed,
saving it in a tissue.

David and Amy were leaving port the
next morning for three weeks, but wanted to meet when they
returned. Everyone agreed, same place, same time, in three
weeks.

“When shall we go to Larnaca?” Asked
Max, as they got back to the ship.

“Better speak to Sam first,” said
Carla. “See what he has for us.”

Sam had nothing for them, but thanked
them both for their part with the statuette.

He confirmed a bank transfer of £3,000
to Max’s numbered Account, for services rendered.

“Oh! By the way, it seems our clients’
agent has disappeared with the statuette. He phoned the client from
the helicopter, the client could hear the engine. Stephen said the
pilot tried to shoot him, but he killed the pilot and how could he
land the helicopter? A search for the wreck is now on, but we all
think it’s a double-cross. Anyway the Organisation is in the clear,
and we have been paid, so that’s the main thing.” Sam ended the
conversation with a cheerful “I’ll call if I need you, bye!”

Max’s eyes lit up, and he was about to
say something when he thought better of it. He rushed out of the
cabin to the radio room.

The radio room was quite a bit more
than that, it was a state of the art Communication Centre and Mark
Goodliffe, the communications officer, a 36 year old displaying
more technical degrees than the cabin wall space allowed, ran
it.

“You know that bug you built for me?”
Asked Max.

“Yes,” Mark replied.

“Well, would it still be working?”

“Theoretically, yes if no one has found
it, why, do you want to find it?”

“Yes and rather quickly before the
batteries go flat.”

“Oh! That will not happen for about
three weeks, the transmission is very powerful, but it sends a
burst transmission for 75 milliseconds every 20 seconds. I did it
that way, so it is almost impossible to detect with debugging
equipment.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, not only do you need to know the
approximate frequency, but also, you would have to sit and wait for
up to 20 seconds before you see or hear a blip on the detector. A
short blip like that could be anything, a light switch, arcing,
interference, anything.”

Max cut in. “But you could still find
it?”

“Well, yes, if we are in range and that
may be anything from a few feet if it’s in a steel safe to 1000
miles of open sea from a plane.”

Max’s hopes fell.

“Don’t look so despondent, I’ll do a
scan now and let you know in just over 10 minutes”

"Great!" Said Max and left, fingers
crossed.

Later, Mark called on the internal
phone. “Not good news I’m afraid, there is something there, but it
must be at the limit of its range, an aircraft would have a better
chance of locating the bug. Perhaps it is still in the helicopter
and is screening the signal.”

Max asked, “Can you get me some kit to
use?”

“No problem, I’ll show you how to use
it when you come to collect it.”

“Thanks,” said Max. “I’ll call you
later.”

The following day, Max and Carla flew
to Cyprus and checked into a comfortable hotel in Ayia Napa. Next
day they began their training as scuba divers, starting as an open
- water diver, then advanced open-water diver.

They dived five times on the wreck
during training and managed to identify the truck on the
penultimate dive.

A night dive was planned as the only
possibility of recovering the jewels, because the site was
constantly dived on, during the day.

To break the trail back to them, should
anything go wrong, they rented a rundown stone terraced house in
Larnaca with a garage at the back, and bought a battered red pickup
truck, all paid for in cash. Next, they hired a small boat along
with the purchase of full night-dive equipment, lifting bags, and a
wrench, suitable for lorry wheel nuts. Again, all paid for in
cash.

It was a reasonable possibility the
wheel nuts would be too corroded to fit the wrench or they might be
too corroded onto the studs to undo them. A machine shop made up a
special tool that developed enough force to twist in half a
12-millimetre diameter high tensile steel bar. If necessary, they
could shear the wheel nuts off.

They waited a couple of nights for a
moonless sky before they made the dive. It was also cloudy that
night, so only the harbour lights gave any illumination. Finding
the marker buoy for the wreck was not difficult, but judging from
its angle in the water, a moderate current was flowing.
Disconcertingly, a large cruiser had moored about 100 yards away,
but it left shortly after they tied up to the buoy.

Weighted down with high volume steel
tanks, dive lights, the flotation bags and tools, they flopped
backwards over the side of the boat into the inky blackness,
surfacing again long enough to gather up the equipment, and find
the guide rope down to the wreck.

To avoid showing lights, they entered
the water in darkness and fixed the first glow stick a few feet
below the surface. Another glow stick and reserve air would be
fixed at five metres below the surface, where they would have to
stop to decompress. They would need to stay at that depth on their
return from the seabed, to allow time for the nitrogen absorbed in
their blood, to dissipate. This would take many minutes if they
were to avoid the bends, a condition brought on when the nitrogen
dissolved in the blood, forms bubbles in blood and joints and can
result in paralysis or death.

Releasing the air from their buoyancy
jackets and lift-bags, they sank into the inky blackness again, in
a rumble of noisy bubbles.

Just below the surface, they turned
their dive lights on and followed the rope line ever deeper, into
the depths.

Max did not like this dive. It was deep
and, apart from the line that suddenly vanished into the darkness,
there was no visual reference as to their depth. Regular checks on
their dive computers strapped to their wrists, showed the depth all
right, but that was just a number in this unnatural world.

The powerful light beams seem to go no
distance at all into the black void and gently sinking down
weightlessly, gave no sense of up or down. Only the air bubbles
from their regulators, knew their way, for sure.

The current was quite strong and
constantly threatened to tear them away from the thick, slimy rope
as it slid through their lightly clenched hands.

The guide rope was attached to the
rail, at the rear of the ferry. From there, they would have to swim
halfway along the wreck, against the current to get to the truck,
which dangled over the ship's side by two old rusty chains.

The ship’s rail suddenly appeared in
the light beam below them and Carla attached a light stick to
it.

After getting their bearings, they
followed the side of the ship until they reached the first truck.
As he looked back, Max wished he had fixed more light sticks to
show a clear path back. The rail was lost in the blackness the
moment the torchlight moved away from it.