Bloody Passage. Jack Higgins
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sky it was going to be cold down there this morning. I slipped my arms through the straps of a fully charged aqualung, found a face mask and went back outside.
I had an inflatable with an outboard motor on the beach beside the jetty, but I didn’t bother with it. Simply pulled on the mask, waded into the sea and struck out toward the entrance to the cove. I did this most mornings. So much so that it had become a habit, mainly because of the fascinating wreck I’d discovered about a hundred yards beyond the point.
There was a heavy sea mist rolling in toward me pushed by the wind and it started to rain again, not that that bothered me. There wasn’t much of a current and it took little effort to reach the appropriate spot. I dropped under the surface, paused to adjust my air supply and went straight down.
Visibility was excellent in spite of the grey morning and the water was clear as glass. At fifty feet I entered a neutral zone, colours muted, a touch of autumn and then a ship’s stern moved out of the gloom.
I hung onto a rail with some care for they were covered with black mussels and her plates were encrusted with dog’s teeth, a razor-edged clam quite capable of opening you up like a gutting knife.
The name across the counter was clearly visible, S.S. Finbar. I’d checked up on her after that first discovery. A Clydeside freighter of three thousand tons. Strayed from a Malta convoy in the summer of 1942 and sunk by Stuka dive bombers.
She was tilted slightly to one side, her anti-aircraft gun still in place on the foredeck and remarkably well preserved. I moved toward it and paused, hanging on to the rail, adjusting my air supply again.
There was a sudden turbulence in the water and I glanced up and saw an Aquamobile descending, two divers hanging on behind. It drifted to a halt ten or fifteen feet above me. The divers were wearing bright orange wetsuits and black masks. One of them waved cheerfully, dived down and hung on to the rail beside me.
I leaned close, putting my mask close to his. The face seemed oddly familiar, which didn’t make much sense and then he reached over and in one quick gesture ripped my air hose away from my mouth.
The whole thing was so unexpected that I took in water at once. I started to struggle, instinctively clawing for the surface and he moved fast, grabbing for my ankles, pulling me down.
I was going to die and for what, that was my final thought as everything started to go. And then I became aware of the other diver dropping down, towing a spare aqualung, holding its air hose out towards me, silver bubbles spiralling out of the mouthpiece. It seemed to grow very large, to completely envelop me, then I blacked out.
I surfaced to a world of pain, my head twisting from side to side as I was slapped into life like a newborn baby. I suppose I must have cried out because somewhere, someone laughed and a voice said, ‘He’ll live.’
I opened my eyes. I was lying in the bottom of an inflatable boat. Justin Langley was bending over me wearing an orange wetsuit, his long blond hair tied at the nape of his neck in a kind of eighteenth-century queue. Gatano, in a similar suit, worked the outboard motor.
Langley smiled. ‘You don’t look too good, old stick.’
I tried to sit up and he pushed me down without the slightest effort. At the same moment his friend called, ‘We’re here,’ and cut the engine.
A Cessna seaplane drifted toward us through the mist, we slid in under the port wing and bumped against a float. I tried to sit up and Langley shoved me down again. There was a hypodermic in his right hand now and he smiled.
‘Go to sleep like a good boy and we’ll try to see you don’t get airsick.’
Whatever it was, it was good. I felt the needle going in, but he probably enjoyed that part. And then, total darkness. A split second in time that must have been in reality five or six hours before I returned to life again.
It was cold and damp and very dark. I was walking, supported on either side, descending some steps that seemed to go on forever. When we finally stopped, there was only a narrow circle of light. I was aware of Langley’s face looming very large, serious now and two men on their knees levering a round iron grid out of the floor. It was very dark down there and quiet.
Langley slapped my face. It didn’t hurt at all. He said, ‘Still with us?’ And then he turned and nodded to the others. ‘Down he goes.’
I didn’t attempt to struggle, I was incapable of that. A rope or a strap of some sort was looped around me and I was lowered perhaps ten or fifteen feet into darkness. There was a clang as the iron grid was replaced, footsteps echoed away.
I became aware of two things almost in the same instant. That I was only wearing the bathing shorts I had put on that morning and that when I stretched out my arms on either side, I immediately touched damp stone walls.
Not that it mattered, not then, for as yet, nothing touched me. I slumped down in a corner, knees to my chest in the fetal position and drifted back into my drugged sleep.
2
The Hole
It was the cold which brought me awake more than anything else and I crouched there in the dark corner, trying to get my bearings. A ray of sunlight drifted out of a channel in the stonework high above my head. I squinted up at it, tried to get to my feet and lost my balance for the excellent reason that I was wearing leg irons and the foot of steel chain between my ankles restricted movement more than a little.
I lay there in the darkness thinking about it for a while, considering the possibility that the whole thing was simply a particularly vivid nightmare, when the iron grating at the top of the shaft was removed and Justin Langley peered in.
Gatano’s battered face appeared at his right shoulder, something which at that stage of the game didn’t surprise me in the least. He laughed hoarsely. ‘He don’t look so good to me, Mr Langley.’
‘A good hot meal inside you, that’s what you need, old stick,’ Langley called. ‘Try this for size.’
He lowered a large biscuit tin on a length of string. It contained a bottle of water and a plate of some kind of cold stew that smelled like a newly opened tin of inferior dog food.
I crouched there like some dumb animal, helpless with rage. Gatano called, ‘Hey, you down there.’
When I looked up he was urinating into the hole. I tried to toss the plate up in his general direction, a futile gesture as I got most of the dogmeat back on my own head.
Langley chuckled. ‘You’ll change your mind, old stick. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, you’ll eat it. I promise you.’
My voice, when I answered him, was so calm, so much outside myself that I hardly recognized it as my own. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What’s it all about?’
The iron grid clanged into place shutting out all light and I sank down into the corner. Some sort of complicated revenge for that evening in Almeria? But that didn’t make any kind of sense. The divers, the seaplane, this place. It was all too elaborate. There was some hidden meaning here, a deeper purpose and I drifted into sleep again thinking about it.
Most men spend their lives trying to claw their way out of one kind of a hole or another, but mine was something very special indeed. A stone shaft fifteen feet deep and four feet square and unclimbable, especially in those leg irons. It was only possible to lie down corner-to-corner, but it was so damn cold that I usually preferred to curl up in as tight a ball as possible.
No blankets and definitely no sanitary arrangements so that by the third day, the stench in that confined space had to be experienced to be believed. I could mark the passage of time simply enough by the light which filtered in through the narrow channel in the stonework above my head and there was always the daily ration lowered in the biscuit tin, although after that first day, it was never possible to see who was up there. I tried calling a few times, but nobody ever answered, and after a while I gave up, for it was obviously the