Fear is the Key (27 page)

At exactly seventy-six fathoms our searchlights
picked up the bed of the sea. No rock or coral
or sponge bars here, just little patches of greyish
sand and long black stretches of mud. I started
the two motors again, advanced them almost to
half speed, trimmed the planes and began to creep
forward very slowly indeed. We had to move
only five yards. Bryson's estimate had been almost
exactly right; with 625 metres showing on the
tow-wire indicator I caught a glimpse of something
thrusting up from the bed of the sea, almost out
of our line of vision to the left. It was the tailplane
of an aircraft, we had overshot our target
to the right, the nose of the plane was pointing
back in the direction from which we had
come … I put the motors in reverse, started up the
tow-wire drum, backed about twenty yards then
came forward again, angling to the left. Arrived
at what I judged to be the right spot, I put the
motors momentarily into reverse, then cut them
out altogether. Slowly, surely, the bathyscaphe
began to sink: the dangling guide rope touched
bottom, but this lessening of weight failed to overcome
the slight degree of negative buoyancy as it
should have done, and the base of the observation
chamber sank heavily into the black mud of the
ocean floor.

Only fifteen minutes had elapsed since I'd turned
down the intake control of the carbon monoxide
absorption unit but already the air in the cabin was
growing foul. Neither Vyland nor Royale seemed to
be affected; maybe they thought that that was the
normal atmospheric condition, but they probably
didn't even notice it. Both of them were completely
absorbed in what could be seen, brightly
illuminated by the for'ard searchlight, through our
for'ard observation window.

I was absorbed in it myself, God only knew.
A hundred times I had wondered how I'd feel,
how I'd react when I finally saw, if ever I saw,
what was lying half-buried in the mud outside.
Anger I had expected, anger and fury and horror
and heartbreak and maybe more than a little of
fear. But there was none of those things in me,
not any more, I was aware only of pity and
sadness, of the most abysmal melancholy I had
ever known. Maybe my reactions were not what
I had expected because my mind was befogged by
the swirling mists of pain, but I knew it wasn't
that: and it made things no better to know that
the pity and the melancholy were no longer
for others but for myself, melancholy for the
memories that were all I would ever have, the
pity a self-pity of a man irretrievably lost in his
loneliness.

The plane had sunk about four feet into the mud.
The right wing had vanished – it must have broken
off on impact with the water. The left wing-tip
was gone, but the tail unit and fuselage were still
completely intact except for the riddled nose, the
starred and broken glass that showed how the
DC had died. We were close up to the fuselage,
the bow of the bathyscaphe was overhanging the
sunken cabin of the plane and the observation
chamber no more than six feet distant from those
shattered windows and almost on the same level.
Behind the smashed windscreens I could see two
skeletons: the one in the captain's seat was still
upright, leaning against the broken side window
and held in position by the seat belt, the one in
the co-pilot's seat was bent far over forward and
almost out of sight.

‘Wonderful, eh, Talbot? Isn't that just something?'
Vyland, his claustrophobic fear in momentary
abeyance, was actually rubbing his hands
together. ‘After all this time – but it's been worth
it, it's been worth it! And intact, too! I was scared
it might have been scattered all over the floor of
the sea. Should be no bother for an experienced
salvage man like yourself, eh, Talbot?' He didn't
wait for an answer but turned away immediately
to stare out of the window and gloat. ‘Wonderful,'
he repeated again. ‘Just wonderful.'

‘It's wonderful,' I agreed. I was surprised at the
steadiness, the indifference in my own voice. ‘With
the exception of the British frigate
De
Braak
, sunk
in a storm off the Delaware coast in 1798, it's
probably the biggest underwater treasure in the
western hemisphere. Ten million, two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars in gold specie, emeralds
and uncut diamonds.'

‘Yes, sir.' Vyland had forgotten he was an urbane
top executive and he was back at the hand-washing
again. ‘Ten million, two hundred and––' His voice
trailed off slowly, faltered to a stop. ‘How – how
did
you
know that, Talbot?' he whispered.

‘I knew it before you ever heard of it, Vyland,'
I said quietly. Both of them had turned away
from the window and were staring at me, Vyland
with a mixture of puzzlement, suspicion and the
beginnings of fear, Royale with his one good, cold,
flat, marbled eye wider than I had ever seen it.
‘You're not quite so smart as the general, I'm
afraid, Vyland. Neither am I for that matter. He
caught on to me this morning, Vyland. I've worked
out why. Do
you
know why, Vyland? Do you want
to know why?'

‘What are you talking about?' he demanded
hoarsely.

‘He's smart, is the general.' I went on as if I
hadn't heard the interruption. ‘He saw when we
landed on the rig this morning that I only hid my
face until I was certain that a certain person wasn't
among the reception committee and that then I
didn't bother any longer. Careless of me, I admit.
But that tipped him off to the fact that I wasn't
a murderer – if I were I'd have hidden my face
from everybody – and it also tipped him off to the
fact that I had been out on the rig before and was
frightened someone there would recognize me. He
was right on both counts – I wasn't a murderer, and
I had been out on the rig before. In the early hours
of this morning.'

Vyland had nothing to say, the shattering effect
of my words, the limitless avenues of dark possibilities
they were opening up had him completely
off balance, too confused even to begin to put his
conflicting thoughts into words.

‘And the general noticed something else,' I went
on. ‘He noticed that when you were telling me
about this salvage job that I never once asked the
first, the most obvious question in the world –
what was the treasure to be salvaged, what kind of
vessel or aircraft the treasure was in, if any. I never
once asked one of those questions, did I, Vyland?
Again careless of me, wasn't it, Vyland? But you
never noticed. But General Ruthven noticed, and
he knew there could only be one answer – I already
knew.'

There was a pause of perhaps ten seconds, then
Vyland whispered: ‘Who are you, Talbot?'

‘No friend of yours, Vyland.' I smiled at him,
as near as my aching upper jaw would allow.
‘You're going to die, Vyland, you're going to die
in agony and you're going to use your last breath
on earth cursing my name and the day you ever
met me.'

Another silence, deeper even than the one that
had gone before. I wished I could smoke, but
it was impossible inside that cabin, and heaven
only knew the air there was foul enough already,
our breathing was already unnaturally quickened,
and sweat was beginning to trickle down our
faces.

‘Let me tell you a little story,' I went on. ‘It's not
a fairy story but we'll start it with “Once upon a
time” for all that.

‘Once upon a time there was a certain country
with a very small navy – a couple of destroyers,
a frigate, a gunboat. Not much of a navy, is it,
Vyland? So the rulers decided to double it. They
were doing pretty well in the petroleum and coffee
export markets, and they thought they could
afford it. Mind you, they could have spent the
money in a hundred more profitable ways but
this was a country much given to revolution and
the strength of any current government largely
depended on the strength of the armed forces
under their control. Let's double our navy, they
said.
Who
said, Vyland?'

He tried to speak, but only a croak came out. He
wet his lips and said: ‘Colombia.'

‘However did you know, I wonder? That's it,
Colombia. They arranged to get a couple of secondhand
destroyers from Britain, some frigates, mine
sweepers and gunboats from the United States.
Considering that those second-hand ships were
almost brand new, they got them dead cheap:
10,250,000 dollars. But then the snag: Colombia
was in a state of threatened revolution, civil war
and anarchy, the value of the peso was tumbling
abroad and Britain and the United States, to whom
a combined payment was to be made, refused to
deliver against the peso. No international bank
would look at Colombia. So it was agreed that
the payment be made in kind. Some previous
government had imported, for industrial purposes,
two million dollars' worth of uncut Brazilian diamonds
which had never been used. To that was
added about two and a half million dollars' worth
of Colombian gold, near enough two tons in 28-lb
ingots: the bulk of the payment, however, was in
cut emeralds – I need hardly remind you, Vyland,
that the Muzo mines in the Eastern Andes are the
most famous and important source of emeralds in
the world. Or perhaps you know?'

Vyland said nothing. He pulled out his display
handkerchief and mopped his face. He looked
sick.

‘No matter. And then came the question of
transport. It was supposed to have been flown out
to Tampa on its first leg, by an Avianca or Lansa
freighter but all the domestic national airlines were
temporarily grounded at the beginning of May,
1958, when the new elections were coming up.
Some members of the permanent civil service were
desperately anxious to get rid of this money in case
it fell into the wrong hands, so they looked around
for a foreign-owned freight airline operating only
external flights. They picked on the Trans-Carib
Air Charter Co. Lloyd's agreed to transfer the
insurance. The Trans-Carib freighter filed a false
flight plan and took off from Barranquilla, heading
for Tampa via the Yucatan Strait.

‘There were only four people in that plane,
Vyland. There was the pilot, a twin brother of
the owner of the Trans-Carib Line. There was
the co-pilot, who also doubled as navigator, and
a woman and a small child whom it was thought
wiser not to leave behind in case things went
wrong at the elections and it was found out the part
played by the Trans-Carib in getting the money out
of the country.

‘They filed a false flight plan, Vyland, but that
didn't do them any good at all for one of those
noble and high-minded civil servants who had
been so anxious to pay the debt to Britain and
America was as crooked as they come and a creature
of yours, Vyland. He knew of the true flight
plan, and radioed you. You were in Havana, and
you'd everything laid on, hadn't you, Vyland?'

‘How do you know all this?' Vyland croaked.

‘Because I am – I was – the owner of the Trans-
Carib Air Charter Co.' I felt unutterably tired, I
don't know whether it was because of the pain or
the foul air or just because of the overwhelming
sense of the emptiness of living. ‘I was grounded
at Belize, in British Honduras, at the time, but I
managed to pick them up on the radio – after they
had repaired it. They told me then that someone
had tried to blow up the plane, but I know now
that wasn't quite true, all they had tried to do was
to wreck the radio, to cut the DC off from the outer
world. They almost succeeded – but not quite. You
never knew, did you, Vyland, that someone was in
radio contact with that plane just before it was shot
out of the sky. But I was. Just for two minutes,
Vyland.' I looked at him slowly, consideringly,
emptily. ‘Two little minutes that mean you die
tonight.'

Vyland stared at me with sick terror in his eyes.
He knew what was coming all right, or thought
he knew: he knew now who I was, he knew
now what it was to meet a man who had lost
everything, a man to whom pity and compassion
were no longer even words. Slowly, as if at the
expense of great effort and pain, he twisted his
head to look at Royale, but, for the first time ever,
there was no comfort, no security, no knowledge
of safety to be found there, for the incredible was
happening at last: Royale was afraid.

I half-turned and pointed at the shattered cabin
of the DC.

‘Take a good look, Vyland,' I said quietly. ‘Take
a good look at what you've done and feel proud of
yourself. In the captain's seat – that skeleton was
once Peter Talbot, my twin brother. The other is
Elizabeth Talbot – she was my wife, Vyland. In
the back of the plane will be all that's left of a
very little boy. John Talbot, my son. He was three
and a half years old. I've thought a thousand times
about how my little boy died, Vyland. The bullets
that killed my wife and brother wouldn't have got
him, he'd have been alive till the plane hit the
water. Maybe two or three minutes, the plane
tumbling and falling through the sky, Vyland, and
the little boy sobbing and screaming and terrified
out of his mind, and his mother not coming when
he called her name. When he called her name over
and over again. But she couldn't come, could she,
Vyland? She was sitting in her seat, dead. And then
the plane hit the water and even then, perhaps,
Johny was still alive. Maybe the fuselage took
time to sink – it happens that way often, you
know, Vyland – or had it air trapped inside it
when it sank. I wonder how long it was before
the waters closed over him. Can't you see it,
Vyland, three years old, screaming and struggling
and dying and no one near him? And then the
screaming and struggling stopped and my little boy
was drowned.'