A Death in Geneva (29 page)

“Hopleaf?” Tooms stomach was shaking with laughter beneath the wetsuit. They checked one another's diving gear; they were ready for the water. The slings were secured to the second work chariot. The
crane operator tested the double load, raised the submersibles a foot above the deck . . . rigging sound, raised them higher, then up over the railing into the center well. The blue-and-gold hulls grew smaller, seemingly more fragile, as they dropped through the shadows between the hulls. The operator again jockeyed his controls, testing their buoyancy on the surface. They rode well and were rafted either side of the catamaran's work boat.

“A nice breeze, surface is calm; your expedition is underway, Dr. Tooms.” She and Tonasi stepped easily into the creases of the two slings the crane had returned from the well and rode down to the surface. The slings returned for the other team.

“Taking on ballast, going to operational buoyancy.”

The trim tanks filled with bay water until the submersible rode with only the panel fairing, the tip of the rudder, and the divers' heads and shoulders above the surface.

“Propulsion.”

“Propulsion.” The work chariots' propellers responded instantly to the command of the electric motors. They eased forward, clear of the work boat. A Towerpoint photographer worked both still and motion picture cameras recording the official start.

“This ain't the Mediterranean. Turbid's an understatement, more like minestrone soup. Use your heads. Stick to the game plan; get used to traveling surfaced”—Tooms bellowed his instructions—“then we'll take 'em down and run them through their paces.” They slid out into the bay.

Constant shoreline erosion and influx of river sediment combined with the rich marine plant and animal life to create the murk which limited visibility beneath the surface. The low yield of ambient light, the apparent contradiction with the bay's bountiful yields, were central to Phase One of the expedition. Visibility targets would be arrayed above the nylon grids to be suspended just above the bay floor. The submarine photography would be taken systematically, then shipped to the institutes to be processed and catalogued by date, time, location, and reading. In parallel, during Phase One, the divers would collect subsurface water samples, and measure the dissolved oxygen, salinity, and temperature . . . the ingredients of the minestrone.

The water swirled past Leslie's shoulders; the submersible felt easy in her hands. She cut away from Head and Tooms, scanning
the navigational displays arrayed across the instrument panel. She was running northwest, paralleling the Western Shore, with the luminous, magnified bubble face of the magnetic compass swinging between 330 degrees and 335 degrees. The miniaturized gyrocompass was a showpiece product of Towerpoint ocean engineering, shipped out to Malta during the fitting out for the expedition. The submersible's heading appeared in the form of a grid display on the center of the panel, with high-intensity yellow-green light beaming the readout across two feet of water to the eyes of the pilot.

To the right of the gyrocompass, a second rectangular display, in high-intensity orange for contrast, gave the submersible's location in relation to the network of sonar buoys, which had been anchored at the trapezoidal corners of the expedition's site as soon as the
Towerpoint Octagon
had steadied on her anchors.

The hard sole of her neoprene boot pressed down on the starboard rudder control. The grid displays flashed the new headings; the compass swung through 355 to 0 to 15 degrees. The motor fed more power, with increased throttle. The pressure and gurgle of the surface water increased. The work chariot was now at four knots, maximum speed. She throttled back, then gave the submersible maximum speed again. The displays held steady. She was satisfied; it was sound.

At the end of the first hour, the two work chariots lay still in the water on either side of the work boat, five hundred yards from the catamaran. Following a conference, the teams were underway again, the first to the north, the second to the south to minimize collision risk.

Tonasi gave his mask a reflex adjustment with the “submerge” signal of the communications light. They were a third of a mile from the main channel in forty feet of water. The light of the subsurface faded rapidly as the submersible dove to twenty-five feet. She held at that depth, steering a course from south to west. The cool pressure of the bay forced past them, the rhythmic inhale/exhale of their regulators, the flickering readouts of the instruments, and the nudging play of the foot and hand controls shaping the submarine world in which they were traveling.

She surfaced, running at three knots, the blue and white catamaran a small dark triangle to the north. Tonasi pushed out of his seat and turned against the flow of the water. He pressed his mouth close to the side of her head. “She's good! She's good!”

The pilot gave a vigorous nod, swung the work chariot toward the main channel, still running on the surface. Another dark form was
on the horizon. Tonasi saw it at the same time she did. She altered course, jerked her thumb down, hit “submerge,” and the chariot dove. She leveled at fifteen feet, the bright green-and-orange displays playing before her as they pushed through the dark-green wall of water. They ran for five minute before she surfaced again.

The loaded black-and-ocher hull of the ladened, oncoming ore carrier lay ahead, off to the right. She altered course, went down to fifteen feet and leveled. The run continued in the blindness. Her pulse thumped against the wetsuit. She bit on the mouthpiece, held her breath steady, eyes locked on the displays, suppressing the urge to surface.

The first faint throbbings of the big ships propeller and machinery cut through the rush of the water. The noise built quickly, steadily, as the submersible pressed ahead. Her left foot punched the rudder control. The compass spun from 30 back to 355 degrees. The water darkened. The thrashing of the propeller crashed in their heads as the first turbulence of the passing hull enveloped the chariot. They rolled sideways, down into the darkness, leveling at forty feet with another fifty feet still beneath them in the main channel. She brought the chariot around to 270 degrees, eased back on the joystick bringing the chariot on a gliding ascent to the surface. The ship's green-and-black stack spewed a trailing black smoke which half obscured the stern.

“Japanese.” He was again at her shoulder. She spat out her regulator, pushed her mask back on her forehead. The submersible was running surfaced for the catamaran. “Handles better than I had expected, Filippo, sensitive—”

“I was up, on my feet, both hands on the cargo deck from the first sound of the screws . . .”

She twisted against her back tanks to look at him. “And?”

“Okay, okay. Locked my legs against the curve of the cockpit; I can work.” He gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Here the bastards come.” The catamaran crew had spotted them; the work boat was closing rapidly.

“One or two more dives—plenty of battery!” She had to shout over the boat's diesel exhaust. “We have time?” She checked her watch, shaded her eyes against the sun.

“Plenty of time. We lost you for a while, there. Glad to hear no problems. Dr. Tooms and the second sub made one dive, had to haul her out of the water again. Steering wasn't answering the way it should.”

“They alright?”

“Yep, nothing too serious.”

“Thank you for keeping an eye on us; we're off again.” The boat skipper gave her a thumbs up, backed, and swung in a return loop for
Octagon.

In the murk of the bay, the external lights of the submersibles had one purpose, to assist in the mating and decoupling with the dock. The chariot took the descent slowly, touched forward first, settled on both of the semicircular cradles. Tonasi was in the water working his way forward, around the hull, clamping the four mooring hooks. With the lights extinguished, the darkness was almost total. They felt their way across the grating toward the glow of the trunk, emerged in the dry, bright interior of the habitat.

Leslie hung up the intercom, threw a blanket across her shoulders, slumped onto a bunk and stared at the deck, exhausted by the run. “They should keep up there for a few minutes. Tooms was babbling away more than unusual.”

“Paulo did well.” Tonasi yanked off his hood, combed his hair with his fingers, and rubbed his eyes and whiskered face. “Take time to repair that pin, fucked up until tomorrow, next day maybe? We've got time, don't we, Les?”

“We have to move. Tooms is excited, unpredictable. His last words were that he would stay above, but, I don't trust him—”

“He's a pig, full of pig shit!” Tonasi was at the far end of the habitat. “A pig! How much longer?”

“Two days. We strike on the third.”

He rolled one of the white cylinders to the center of the deck space. “Two fucking days. He'll be the first!” They were on their knees, warriors with impassive expressions. “Up on the bunk, have to turn her over, panel's on the other side.” Tonasi braced one leg against a steel upright. They eased the fifty-kilo antiship mine onto its back. He studied the streamlined form, sucking in air, approving through his broken teeth.

The mine was new, designed for the U.S. Navy's SEAL teams. Its bloodlines ran back for more than four decades to the early days of the Second World War . . . to the limpets strapped to the waist of a swimmer, clamped to the bilge keels of the enemy's ships. The limpets had left no trace. Their victims had sunk or been scuttled no matter how good the submarine nets or the deck watches.

Tonasi removed the access panel, set it on the deck. His mind lingered over his suppressed hatred of Tooms. The screwdriver spun in
his fingers. He released the timing mechanism from “lock-storage.” Malta, the
Matabele
should be in Capri by now. “
Matabele
in Capri?” His eyes flicked to hers with the question. “Take this.” She held the timer, keeping her fingers away from the numbered wheels.

“Angelo said two to three weeks.”

“He will do it faster. She's in Capri.”

“You are right Filippo. They should have her there.”

She passed the plate back, watched as his scarred brown fingers set it in place, tightened the screws, turned to the second, propeller-activated timer. He removed packing from the tapered end of the mine. A circular shroud housing a small, bronze, three-bladed propeller was freed by his action. He turned the propeller slowly with one finger, studied a second set of dials. “Not hard to build . . . see, the shaft, gland seal, direct drive of the timer from the push of the water.” He set to work on the second, delayed-timing mechanism: this one elapsed knots rather than hours. “Minex Bravo, Les, this explosive.” He patted the shape. “Makes TNT look like sneezing powder, go through a tanker like a bullet.”

Her mind went to the night kill in Geneva. She had seen his eyes beneath the mask . . . intensity, not emotion. The bullets were of no significance to him when he had closed for the kill. His young life was soaked in the acrid smoke of high explosive. For him, each murder was justified by the act itself, each shedding of blood, a retribution for a great, dimly defined evil.

Tonasi finished with the dual activators. “Thirty-two hours, right, Les?”

“Strike plus thirty-two. We want the first to blow in the open ocean, after the strike on the second. They detonate together.”

“She'll blow.”

“You can handle the mines?”

“She'll blow. You get me there. These were designed to be delivered by swimmer vehicles—not heavy when you're in the water. These grips, I keep the fat end facing me. The mine rides on the pallet, magnets down, insulated by the wood . . . for how long? Ten minutes? Fifteen minutes? When we submerge, I hit the activators.” His hand skipped from one to the other. “When the tanker takes us and we start to close, I cast off the last tie-down, wait . . . until we have the hull. When I hit ‘surface,' the mine will be on the hull. She'll blow.”

Chapter 13

T
he
Towerpoint Partner
slid under the twin spans of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at 10:00 A.M. on July 3, four bells clanging in the wheelhouse, precisely on schedule for the down-bay rendezvous. She and her sister ship, the
Towerpoint Mayan,
had been designed and built for the Chesapeake-Campeche run, the ultramodern, hybrid creations of Starring's naval architects.

The streamlined bow of the nine-hundred-ninety-foot ship pushed cleanly through the bay with only the thinnest of curling white bow waves peeling off to port and starboard. To hold to schedule, she was loafing along at twelve knots, half her normal operating speed, only token demand on the fifty-thousand-shaft-horsepower gas turbine power plant driving her single, twenty-four-foot, five-bladed bronze-alloy propeller. At the foot of her bow, beneath the water's surface, the hull extended forward in a protruding bulbous nose shaped to mold the flow of oncoming water encountering the enormous hull.

Above the waterline, the tanker and her sister looked like no other ships in the world. Their paint was the Towerpoint scheme, midnight-blue with block-gold lettering on hull and stacks, white superstructure. From the forward lookout mast, the main deck stretched back eight hundred feet, its surface curving upward from sides to centerline to sculpt the housing for the six cylindrical holds which carried the liquefied
natural gas. This long white housing was topped by port and starboard catwalks and bordered by deck cranes and machinery for the loading and offloading of her cargo.