Mark of the Devil (10 page)

His thoughts still on the meeting that morning with Good and Hammersmith, Matt sat quietly as
Native Diver
continued past the end of the St. Johns River jetties for approximately two miles before turning to starboard on a heading of 174 degrees, or just east of due south. The green glow of the tiny radar repeater and compass head provided the only light in the topside operating area. Without running lights, the only other illumination was a brilliant display of stars overhead, a sliver-thin moon peeking over the horizon and lights along the shore. Several miles to the east, just on the horizon, they could make out the glittering gaudiness of a cruise ship steaming south in the normal traffic lanes.

“Coast Guard catch us out here without running lights,” Park said, “they’re gonna be pissed.”

Matt chuckled as he pulled the jacket’s collar closer around his throat, shielding it from the rush of cold air created by the boat’s forward motion. While the night was dead calm, unusual for mid-October, the damp rawness of a slight mist, beginning to rise from surface waters still relatively warm from summer’s touch, stung the exposed skin on his face and hands. “They catch us out here on that barge and submarine, if that’s what it is, they’re really gonna be pissed after they told you ‘hands off.’ Anything on the radar, like the AFI catamaran?”

“That’s a negative.”

“How much farther?”

“About seven miles,” Park answered after quickly checking the radarscope. “Oughta be picking up the radar reflectors on those two buoys marking the barge in another mile or two.”

“Wish to hell we had those full facemasks and communications gear. Lot easier talking to each other than trying to use hand signals down there. How long is it gonna take ‘em to fix the bad comm unit on that one facemask?”

“A good two weeks,” Park answered. “Had to go to the manufacturer. Sent both units to have a hands-free capability installed, but Steve Jr. did get the sonar and fathometer fixed.”

“At least maybe we won’t run aground. I’ll be getting the gear together,” Matt said, swinging up and over to the ladder leading down to the main deck, an involuntary grunt of pain escaping his throat. Since he’d removed the rolls of adhesive supporting his bruised ribs, each sudden movement felt like he was being twisted and wrung out “Give a yell when we get there, and I’ll slip a line onto one of the buoys.”

The combination of darkness and initial cold of nighttime waters against his skin sent involuntary shivers through Matt’s body as he and Steve Park inched their way down the buoy line toward the bow of the sunken barge. Busy equalizing the pressure in his ears and sinuses and adjusting the air volume in his BC jacket, Matt ignored the chill, allowing his body to acclimate to its own heat inside the wetsuit.

The pale greenish glow of chemical light sticks protruding from the tops of their respective BCs provided the only illumination within a sea that seemed unusually devoid of life as they touched bottom just forward of the barge. Though each carried a 25-watt, pistol-grip halogen/xenon dive lamp attached by stretch lanyards to their BCs, lamps guaranteed to blast even the sun out of its orbit, they waited until they were on the bottom before switching them on. As soon as Matt turned on his light, a swirl of sand welled up in front of him and a small stingray darted off into the gloom.

As he swung the light around, the bead-like eyes of two nurse sharks, resting on the sand beneath the canted bow of the barge, lit up. They blinked as the sharks shrugged off his intrusion and went the way of the stingray.

With Park motioning to him to hurry, Matt set his compass on a south-by-southeast heading and finned his way slowly away from the barge. His body only a foot or two above the sand bottom, he scanned the light’s horizon for the first sign of the object he’d found on his first dive. Suddenly, he pulled up, folded his legs beneath him and allowed his body to drop, knees first, to the sand. Holding the light in front of him, he pointed for Park to look. Scribbling with an underwater stylus on a small writing slate, he wrote for Park to read, “BY LAW NO PROP-WASH EXCAVATION—AFI NO CARE!”

Before them was a large, irregular shaped sand dune some eight to ten feet high that had not been there before. It stretched into the darkness in both directions. Pushing off the bottom, Matt maneuvered his way up and over the dune, angling down the opposite slope until…“Oh, shit!” he shouted into his mouthpiece.

Rapidly paddling his hands and fins, Matt immediately forced his body to the side to avoid two tube-like protrusions that threatened to rip away his facemask and mouthpiece as well as the front of his BC. It took him a moment to realize they were gun barrels, extending from a partially cleared gun turret and slanting upward 10 to 15 degrees as though preparing for battle. Unless he was mistaken, it appeared the turret lay at a slight angle to the right.

Park worked his way around Matt, focused a yellow-cased, 35-millimeter underwater camera, and snapped several pictures of the sand- and mud-encrusted weapon. Each push of the shutter release was accompanied by an explosion of light from the attached strobe. Looking back, Park drew a question mark in the water with an index finger.

Matt studied the barrels for a moment, then extended both arms. With fists closed as if grasping handles, he turned himself into a human machine gun, firing at an imaginary aircraft.

With a hand signal indicating he understood, Park moved up and over what Matt quickly identified as the partially uncovered, gray conning tower of a submarine. Additionally, if his perspective of his own horizontal position to the sea bottom was anything to go by, the tower definitely leaned to the right. In his nautically oriented mind, the tower and whatever lay beneath had a 10-to 15-degree starboard list, its forward area angled slightly upward toward the surface.

Swinging his light in a slow, 45-degree arc as Park snapped one photo after another, Matt identified the large black object he’d seen on his first dive. The snorkel! Only now, instead of rising from the sand, it rose from the top of the tower on two thick, gunmetal gray pipes. It was much larger than he’d first imagined. Extending approximately six to eight feet above the tower, it dwarfed everything around it.

Matt quickly scribbled on the tablet and held it up for Park to see: “SNORKEL—FRESH AIR INTAKE—WHAT I SAW ON 1
^ST
DIVE.” Park nodded as Matt aimed his light at the top of the equipment with its waffle-grid surface.

In addition to the snorkel and an extremely confined bridge area about seven to eight feet forward for conning the ship while on the surface, there were small, watertight covers spotted at various locations along the top of the tower. He decided these were mini-hatch covers from which periscopes and whip antennas could be raised and lowered, all now presumably hidden within the submarine’s hull. Just forward stood a doughnut-shaped RDF antenna for radio direction finding.

Matt moved forward and dropped down toward the hatch on the bridge floor. Due to its small diameter, Matt knew what he saw on the deck to be more than an escape hatch, a handwheel mounted in the center for rapid opening and closing, a similar wheel on the interior. What intrigued him most was a white, quarter-inch nylon line tied to the wheel. Visually following Steve Park’s light beam up the line, Matt noted a tube-shaped device secured at the opposite end. At night, however, from his 60-foot-deep vantage point, he was unable to make a guess what the object was or at what approximate depth it was floating. The only thing that seemed clear was it didn’t appear to be on the surface. Looking at each other, Matt and Park both made an arms-out, palms-up, hell-if-I-know gesture.

Bending closer to the hatch, Matt examined the handwheel. With Park hovering just above, their own bulk plus dive gear making it too crowded for both to fit into the narrow space, Matt pointed to deep scratch marks on the wheel’s four, heavy-duty spokes and along the side of the wheel itself. Whatever had been used, it had cut through the paint and exposed bare metal, now shining in the glare of his light. On his tablet, he wrote, “CLEAN CUTS—RECENTLY MADE.”

With the fingers of one hand spread and bent downward, imitating some kind of claw-like mechanism, Park lowered his hand over the wheel and twisted, mimicking the turning of the wheel.

Matt wrote on his tablet, “SHALL WE?” He pointed with his thumb at the wheel to indicate entry.

Park backed off, throwing up both hands to indicate
stop.
He immediately doubled his right hand into a fist and extended his right arm in front of his chest, a diver’s signal for
danger!

Matt looked at Park for a moment, then at the hatch, finally writing on his slate, “STAY HERE. ME—CONTROL ROOM.”

Park snatched the slate and stylus, quickly writing, “NO, DAMN IT!” before giving the tablet back to Matt.

With what little room was left on the tablet, Matt wrote, “YES, DAMN IT!” Handing the slate to Park, Matt braced himself with his feet against the side of the bridge, took hold of the hatch wheel with both hands, and tried to turn. At first, nothing. A second jerk, however, broke the seal of the thick rubber gaskets below, indicating there was equal pressure on each side of the hatch. But air or water pressure?

Slowly turning, no more than a quarter turn each time and working around the nylon line with each complete turn, he felt the gaskets fitted along the underside of the hatch edge gradually work lose from the coaming beneath. Not certain what to expect, he ran his fingers along the raised lip of the hatch after each quarter turn, feeling for a sudden intake of water past the edge or telltale signs of air bubbles escaping from inside, but there was neither. He could only assume the submarine was already flooded.

After what seemed a lifetime, the wheel stopped turning and the hatch cover tilted up and back on its hinges, the nylon line now floating from the highest part of the wheel. The deepest black Matt had ever seen stared back at him until he stuck the light through the opening into the conning tower. In addition to the external housing for the periscopes’ control panels, a ladder extended down through the tower and through another hatch, this one open.

Though he’d only been on one or two submarines in his life, and then as a visitor of the ship’s commanding officer on each occasion, he knew the space beyond had to be the control room. He tried to picture the interior layout of the captured U-boat he’d been through at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, but if this was a 21-class submarine as Sam Gravely had described, there’d be little comparison. The only way to know was to go down, take a quick look, and get the hell out as fast as he could.

Upending himself, arms stretched over his head in an effort to make his body as long and narrow as possible, Matt slowly wedged his way through the hatch, careful not to snag the straps holding his air tank. Once past the hatch, he hand-walked his way headfirst down the ladder, following the beam of his light until he passed through the second hatch. Shifting quickly to an upright position, he allowed his body to sink feet-first to the deck before slowly swinging the light beam around the compartment.

“I’ll be damned!” Matt muttered into his mouthpiece. He had pushed his way through God-only-knew-how-many sunken wrecks, their skeletons crammed with enough undersea growth and slime and fish to make him wonder if they had ever been part of the above-water world, but this? It was as though the crew had simply walked away and left the ship in a time capsule. No growth, no fish, no trace of human existence! Only one answer. The submarine was airtight until whoever or whatever made the scratch marks on the handwheel topside and allowed the sea its initial entrance. And he knew, that could only have been within the last two or three days at most.

As he moved the light around, the nearest object was a periscope, its handles splayed outwards as if the ship’s captain had just used it. And strangely enough, looped over the handles and around the periscope was a leather strap, at the end of which hung a set of binoculars. Lifting them, he immediately saw in the glow from his light the word
Zeiss
printed on the top of one of the telescopic tubes. The temptation to take the binoculars entered his mind, but it was the feeling of eyes, hundreds of them, staring at him, that sent an involuntary shiver along his spine and forced him to let the binoculars fall free. Slowly he directed the light in a wide arc, allowing the beam to play along the bulkheads. Gauges, some with and many without their protective glass covers, seemed to glare at him from piping, from banks of electronic equipment, from every conceivable space in the compartment.