Undersea Prison (11 page)

The duty officer licked his lips as he stared unblinkingly at Charon. ‘You have a transfer.’

‘Transfer?’ Charon echoed. The odd expression on the officer’s face warned him that all was not entirely well. ‘I’ve only got two months left to do, sir. Where they transferring me to? Disneyland?’

The inmates at the table chuckled.

‘Styx. Undersea,’ the officer said dryly.

The chuckling ceased.

‘That’s very funny,’ Charon said, grinning broadly and looking at his pals. ‘You nearly got me goin’ for a moment there, I tell yer.’

The officer’s expression remained blank. ‘You got twenty minutes to pack your sack before we leave.’

Charon’s grin hung on in there but it was becoming a struggle. ‘You’re pushin’ this joke pretty far, ain’t yer, sir?’

‘It’s no joke,’ the officer said. ‘You can either go easy, or we can do it the hard way,’ he said. The severe-looking accompanying guard took a step closer, a restraining system in his hands.

Charon’s smile dropped off his face as his colleagues got to their feet and stepped back. ‘I got two months left to do.’

‘I don’t make the orders, son. I got a relocation order here for you signed by the governor himself and no matter how weird it is - and I agree with you that it
is
pretty goddamned weird - I’m gonna carry it out. Now let’s get going.’

‘But I’m white-collar. I processed a coupla bad cheques. There has to be some kinda mistake.’

‘I’m sure someone’s sortin’ it out right now. But until they do you’re comin’ with me,’ the officer said, nodding to the other guard who came forward to join him. Together they manhandled Charon through the room.

‘This is crazy!’ Charon shouted. ‘You can’t put me in undersea . . . For God’s sake! I wanna speak to a lawyer!’

 

A small fishing boat puttered over a rolling black ocean in a growing squall at a minute to midnight. The lights of Galveston Island on the east coast of Texas were little more than a faint glow behind it. The top of a wave broke over the bows and struck the front window of the wheelhouse that was only slightly roomier than a phone kiosk and looked as though it had been stuck on the deck as an afterthought. Paul stood inside, bathed in a fluorescent green glow, his hands gripping the wheel tightly, his eyes flicking between the darkness ahead and a radar tube at his side. Several blips blinked on the glowing circular screen with each sweep of the scanner, the nearest of them only a few hundred metres away. For a second he thought he saw an even brighter object on the periphery of the screen, mixed in with the rain and the rolling swell, and he maintained an unblinking stare on the same spot until it appeared again.

Paul leaned out of the open door, keeping a hand on the wheel, and was immediately pelted with rain and spray as he looked aft for Stratton and Todd. Both were wearing glistening yellow sou’westers and were dragging a heavy bundle to the stern. ‘We’re coming up on the perimeter buoy!’ he shouted.

Stratton and Todd paused to squint at him, unsure what he had said.

‘Perimeter buoy!’ Paul repeated, cupping a hand around his mouth.

Stratton gave him the thumbs-up and crouched to carry out a final check on the contents of the bundle before clipping it shut. It contained a mixed-gas partial re-breather diving system with extra-large gas bottles and a full-face mask, a set of extra-long glide fins, a digital depth gauge with a pre-programmed ascent schedule and depth alarms, a strobe system, a flashlight, an inflation jacket with an expandable bladder that could reach the size of a VW Beetle when filled and a transponder which he turned on. A small, intense blue LED light blinked slowly on and off and Stratton closed the flap of the bag and clipped together a single large buckle, yanking it hard to ensure that it was secure.

‘How long will that set give you?’ Todd asked, blowing through one of his clenched hands to warm it.

‘Ten hours,’ Stratton said.

‘Is that how long it takes to decompress?’

‘There’s a couple of hours to play with.’

Todd shook his soaked head inside his yellow hood. ‘First you have to swim and find this thing, then open it, turn it on, put the mask on and all that. It sounds impossible.’

‘The toggles glow in water - that’ll make it easy to find. One tug and the bag opens. The set’s already pressured up. All I have to do is put the teat in my mouth and breathe.’

Todd remained unconvinced. ‘And you’ve got to do all that on one breath.’

‘The main umbilical’s only thirty metres from the ferry dock,’ Stratton said, attaching the end of a long nylon line to a strongpoint on the bag. ‘I should be able to make that.’

‘Without a face mask?’

‘I can’t miss the umbilical. It’s a metre thick. This line’ll be looped around the bottom of it. I find the umbilical, I find the line, I find the bag.’ Stratton was running through the scenario in order to convince himself as much as Todd that it was possible.

‘And what about your decompression stops? You have to hang about at certain depths for hours.’

‘I’ll be going up the umbilical, attached to it by the line. The depth gauge is pre-set to the dive stops. I simply tie myself off at each depth and wait. It’ll be boring but it’ll work.’

‘You’ll either drown or freeze to death.’

‘It’s a living.’

‘You’re bloody mad - with all due respect.’

‘Truth is, if I have to depend on this lot to get out of there I’m screwed anyway.’

‘I can’t tell when you’re joking or being serious.’

‘I lost track years ago.’

‘So why’re we going to all this trouble?’ Todd persisted.

‘Every op has to have emergency RVS.’

‘What?’

‘Rendezvouses to head for if everything goes wrong . . . even if they’re tough to get to.’

‘Impossible, more like.’

‘Don’t dramatise. It irritates me.’

Todd looked apologetic. ‘Sorry . . . You’re right. It’s not impossible - just very, very dodgy.’

‘As long as it’s
theoretically
possible it allows them to blame me if I don’t make it.’

Todd looked bemused. ‘Who?’

‘Them who tell us what to do.’

‘Sorry, I’m confused.’

‘For us, on the ground, it’s all about how we’re going to do the job. For the suits who send us out it’s all about win or lose, success or failure, blame and responsibility, medals and demotions.’

‘But no one expects you to pull this off anyway. The person who ordered it will surely take the fall.’

‘He’ll take the blame. But then there’s the blame and the
real
blame. If I screw up it’ll be my fault . . . Check that line can pay out without catching on anything.’

Todd obeyed but remained puzzled. ‘Then you’re even more insane,’ he decided.

‘Perimeter buoy port side!’ Paul called out from the bridge.

Stratton went to the side of the boat to see the large red metal buoy holding firm in the heavy sea just ahead. Below the flashing beacon was an illuminated sign warning anyone against trespassing beyond it.

‘Less than a mile,’ Stratton said, tidying up the bag and ensuring that all was ready. He peered into the darkness, the wind whipping at him, his oilskins flapping open noisily to reveal a black wetsuit beneath.

Todd joined him in the search, shielding his eyes from the swiping rain.‘You been doing this work long?’ he asked.

‘Breaking into prisons?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘A bit.’

‘Is that why you’re so cynical?’

‘No. That came early on.’

‘I’d like to get the chance to be that cynical . . . I mean, working for who we do . . . I’m just a tech,’Todd said. ‘One day I might get a chance to do a task . . . not like this, of course. I’d never do what you do . . . So how did you get to do this kind of stuff, anyhow?’

‘I got a call one day.’

It was obvious that Stratton did not want to elaborate but Todd could not resist taking advantage of such a rare opportunity, standing beside a real operative who was actually responding somewhat to him. ‘You’re SF, I suppose.’ He immediately felt uncomfortable asking the question. Prying into an operative’s background was not advisable but he decided he had started so he was going to finish. ‘Paul and I reckon you’re SBS . . . only because this is a dive task and we know the SAS don’t really do water - nowhere near as serious as this.’

Since the briefing a week before Todd had spent many hours with Stratton, sorting out equipment and going over the plans and countless procedures.The man was not exactly a chatterbox.They talked about nothing outside of the operation. Todd accepted that Stratton was on a different level - way above his - had different friends, and moved in very different circles. Nevertheless he felt comfortable with him despite how little they appeared to have in common. Stratton didn’t make him feel inferior in the way so many other superior types in the SIS seemed to enjoy. Stratton made his underlings feel as if they were every bit as essential a part of the team, which of course they were. The point was, he made them
feel
like they were. That was the difference. When they cocked up, as Paul had done by forgetting to pack the bundle’s transponder, an essential element to Stratton’s own survival, Stratton simply took the quickest and simplest course to correct the error without undue fuss.What was more, he made you feel just sufficiently bad about yourself to ensure that it never happened again. You wanted to work harder for him. It was the quintessence of leadership and Todd wondered if he could ever be like that one day.

‘Sorry,’ he said, filling the silence after his question.

‘I get a bit carried away . . . Good luck, anyway.’

‘You’ll always need that . . . In fact, we might need a little right now,’ Stratton said, looking towards the wheelhouse. ‘Paul!’ he shouted, banging on the side of the small cabin.

Todd wondered what had triggered Stratton’s sudden concern and he peered into the rain-soaked blackness. He immediately saw the tiny lights breaking through the weather, a green and red one either side of a patch of white signifying it was a vessel of some kind, the red on the right-hand side indicating it was approaching.

Paul quickly stuck his head out of the bridge door to look ahead. ‘I had short-range on. It just came on screen. It’s big.’

‘Is the support barge showing yet?’ Stratton shouted.

‘Dead ahead - three hundred metres. What do we do?!’

Stratton looked ahead as he thought, gauging the wind and water. ‘Push over to port!’ he shouted back to Paul. ‘Make them follow us. Give it all you’ve got! They won’t be able to turn as close to the barge as we can because of the sub-sea cables. Make a chase of it!’

Paul turned the wheel, the bows coming about sluggishly against the swell.

‘Perimeter security?’ Todd asked.

‘Who else?’

‘Do you think they’ll shoot - if we don’t stop, I mean?’

‘We’re about to find out,’ Stratton said, squinting ahead. ‘There’s the barge,’ he said, gauging the distances between them, the barge and the security boat as its glowing wheelhouse became clearer.

Several lights came into view dead ahead followed by the outline of an enormous black rectangular box, like a square island, so large and heavy as to be unaffected by the swell.They were crossing the tide which was against the security vessel, thus improving their chances of getting to the barge first.

‘We’re aiming too close,’Todd said, alarm in his voice. ‘We’ll be pushed into it!’

Stratton did not appear concerned as he watched the security boat, still gauging the distances. He banged on the wheelhouse. ‘The anchor cables!’ he shouted.

‘I know!’ Paul replied. ‘I know what depth we have!’

Stratton was more or less confident that Paul knew what he was doing. He was a careful young man, inexperienced but nonetheless someone who paid close attention to detail. Stratton had checked the anchor-cable angles from the corners of the barge and expected Paul to have done the same, especially since he was the driver.

Paul swung the boat out at the last minute and steered a wide berth round the first corner of the barge. A large wave suddenly shoved them within feet of the massive structure but by that time they were past the submerged cable. The good news was that the security boat was now out of sight.

The barge was a welded and riveted rectangular mass of metal the size of a tennis court, an uninhabited automated service vessel for the prison, held in position by a series of cables anchored to the sea bed. It contained fuel, potable water, emergency oxygen supplies and back-up generators. A structure in the middle bristled with various types of communication antennae. Fixed atop a stubby gantry was a giro-stabilised satellite dish fighting to maintain its position.All the various pipes and conduits were channelled into a single umbilical cord over a metre in diameter that snaked down from the centre of the barge to the prison a hundred and fifty feet below.

The small fishing boat bobbed its way along the side of the barge, the top of which was several metres above Stratton’s head. As they closed on the next corner Paul pushed the bows out to avoid the mooring cable he knew went down at a steep angle. But a heavy swell reversed the manoeuvre and the boat heaved over towards the barge. Stratton grabbed up a pole and held it at the ready as Paul struggled to turn the vessel away from the barnacled steel wall.

‘We’re going to hit as we take the corner,’ Stratton called out.Todd searched around for anything he could use, found an old oar and hurried to Stratton’s side with it.

As the boat reached the corner it was slammed into the side of the barge.The gunwales cracked loudly, several pieces smashing off. Stratton and Todd did what they could to push the boat off but their efforts were hardly effective. The boat scraped along the barge as the nose went past the corner. Everyone’s thoughts went to the cable that was just below them.The wind and tide were running along the edge of the barge around the corner. As the midway point of the boat reached the corner of the barge the bows started to make the turn around it. It looked as if the boat was going to break in half but the stern suddenly pushed out to follow the corner around. As the stern approached where the cable was attached a huge swell lifted the boat up and completed its turn. The crunch of the propeller being ripped off by the cable never came and they shot down the side of the barge towards the next corner.