Fear is the Key

I said, as if a great light had suddenly dawned upon me: "Have you — were you the people responsible for the loss of this bathyscaphe? My God, it was you! How in the-"

"You didn't think we brought you here just to discuss the diagrammatic layout of this vessel?" Vyland permitted himself a small pleased smile. "Of course it was us. It was easy. The fools moored it on a wire hawser in ten fathoms of water. We unhitched it, substituted a frayed hawser so that they would think 'that it had broken its moorings and that the tide had carried it out to deep water, then we towed it away. We made most of the trip in darkness, and the few ships we saw we just slowed down, pulled the bathyscaphe up on the side remote from the approaching vessel and towed it like that." He smiled again — he was spoiling himself this morning. "It wasn't difficult. People do not expect to see a bathyscaphe being towed by a private yacht."

"A private yacht. You mean the-?" I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling, I'd almost made the blunder that would have finished everything. It had been on the tip of my tongue to say the Temptress — but no one knew I'd ever heard that name, except Mary Ruthven, who'd told me. "You mean the general's private yacht? He has one?"

"Larry and I certainly haven't one," he grinned. "Larry and I " — an off-beat phrase, but there was nothing in it for me, so I let it pass. "Of course it's the general's yacht."

I nodded. "And equally of course you have the bathyscaphe somewhere near here. Would you mind telling me what in the world you want a bathyscaphe for?"

"Certainly not. You'll have to know anyhow. We are — ah — treasure-hunting, Talbot."

"Don't tell me you believe this Captain Kidd and Black-beard nonsense," I sneered.

"Recovering your courage, eh, Talbot? No, it's rather more recent than that and very close to here."

"How did you find it?"

"How did we find it?" Vyland seemed to have forgotten his urgency; like every criminal who ever lived he had a streak of the ham in him and wouldn't pass up the chance of basking in the glow of his own glory. "We had a vague idea where it was. We tried trawling for it — in the days before I met the general, that was — but had no success. Then we met the general. As you may not know, the general provides his yacht for his geologists when they plod around setting off their little bombs on the bottom of the ocean tuning in with their seismographic instruments to find out where the oil strata are. And while they were doing this we were plotting the ocean bed with an extremely sensitive depth recorder. We found it all right."

"Near here?"

"Very near."

"Then why haven't you recovered it?" Talbot giving his impression of a salvage specialist so engrossed in a problem that he has forgotten his own circumstances.

"How would you recover it, Talbot?"

"Diving for it, of course. Should be easy in those waters. After all, there's a huge continental shelf here, you have to go a hundred miles out from any point off the west coast of Florida before you even reach five hundred feet. We're close inshore here. Hundred feet, hundred fifty?"

"The X 13 is standing in how much, General?"

"One-thirty feet low tide," Ruthven said mechanically.

I shrugged. "There you are then."

"There we are not." Vyland shook his head. "What's the greatest depth at which you can expect divers to perform really useful work, Talbot?"

"Perhaps three hundred feet." I thought a moment. "The deepest I know was by U.S. divers off Honolulu. Two hundred and seventy-five feet. U.S. Submarine F4."

"You really are a specialist, aren't you, Talbot?"

"Every diver and salvage man worth his salt knows that."

"Two hundred and seventy-five feet, eh? Unfortunately, what we're after is in the bottom of a big hole, a deep chasm in the sea bed. The general's geologists were very interested indeed when we located this hole. Said it was just like — what was it, General?"

"The Kurd Deep."

"That's it. The Hurd Deep. In the English Channel. Deep valley in the sea-bed where the Limeys dump all 'their old explosives. This one here is four hundred and eighty feet in depth."

"That makes a difference," I said slowly.

"Doesn't it now? And how would you get at that?"