Serpent (60 page)

The ship seemed to close in on them, and Austin kept checking his depth gauge. Although they were only about two hundred feet from the surface, it seemed deeper because of the darkness. He looked upward. The bluegreen rectangle that marked the opening was diffused in the murk and eventually might have become invisible if the saturation divers hadn't placed a strobe light on the edge as a beacon. Austin glanced at the blinking pinpoint and felt reassured, then turned his focus to what lay below.

Under their feet solid objects were looming out of the darkness into the circle of illumination cast by their lights. Straight lines and

edges. Mysterious rounded shapes. Tons of debris were jammed into the horizontal space that had once been the starboard bulkhead of the Dona. When the ship was level the garage was covered with heavy metal mesh and catwalks. Now these were vertical as well. Austin and Zavala started a search pattern, moving in parallel lines, back and forth, between the vertical partitions formed by the old floor and ceiling of the garage, the type of search they would execute if they were on the surface looking for a shipwreck. They encountered dangling wires from the old light fixtures but not enough to be dangerous and they were easily avoided.

Their lights caught the glint of metal and glass and vague forms that occasionally resolved into familiar shapes.

"Hey, Kurt, is that a Rolls-Royce I see down there?"

Austin directed his light at the distinctive heavy grille sticking out of the debris.

"Probably. According to the liner's manifest a guy from Miami was shipping his Rolls back from Europe."

"Goes to show it pays to have a Rolls on every continent."

Austin glided over the Rolls and saw part of another car with unconventional sweeping lines.

"That looks like the Chrysler experimental car built by Ghia. Too bad Pitt isn't here. He'd go through hell and high water to add a oneof-a-kind to his collection."

"He'd have to go through a lot of mud, too."

The cars had tumbled on top of one another and now were largely covered by debris and silt. Austin had briefly entertained thoughts of a plan to excavate the debris, but it was an intellectual exercise only. Too dangerous, costly, and time-consuming. Any effort to dig through the cover would stir up a cloud so thick it would take days to settle.

From what Donatelli said of the truck's position, the vehicle should have fallen onto the top of the heap. It should have been visible. Could the old man have been wrong? He was under tremendous stress that night. Maybe the car was in another cargo hold. Austin groaned. It had taken a tremendous effort to cut into the garage. They had neither the time nor resources to try again. His expeditionary force was made up of assets borrowed for only a few days.

Doubts grew the longer they searched. They went over every square yard of visible debris.

"Whatever happened to the plan to refloat this thing with Ping-Pong balls?" Zavala said.

"I don't think there are enough PingPong balls in China for the job. What's your take?"

"I think Angelo Donatelli was one gutsy guy. This must be the biggest sensory deprivation tank in the world. Hard to believe we're still on planet Earth. I feel like a fly in a molasses jar."

"I'm beginning to wonder if the truck is in here at all."

"Where would it be?"

"I wish I knew," Austin replied.

"Nina is going to be disappointed."

"I know. What say we go topside and deliver the bad news?"

"Fine with me. My bladder is telling me I drank too much coffee this morning."

They powered the vertical thrusters, keeping a slow but steady pace, homing in on the flashing beacon above. As they ascended they flashed their lights ahead and above to make sure they weren't coming up on unseen obstructions. The beam from Zavala's light stabbed the blackness in a corner of the garage, moved away for a second, then came back.

"Kurt," he called out excitedly. "There's something in the corner."

They stopped their ascent. Austin saw two red eyes glowing in the inky darkness.

Having spent more than an hour in this otherworldly environment his first reaction was that they were looking at a huge sea creature who'd made the ship its lair. He pointed his light at the twin orbs, and his pulse rate ratcheted up a few beats. It couldn't be. Both men moved in for a closer look and put the full force of their lights on the corner.

"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.