Chan shook himself, walked to the foredeck holding on to railings, stood next to Higgins at the bows.
The floating gantry was in place; the tug was letting go of the ropes as they approached. The Hong Kong coast was perhaps a mile to the west; the coast of China about the same distance to the north. The political frontier was closer, though, just a few hundred yards. Apart from the gantry, the tug and the launch there was no sign of man at all.
As the launch slowed only the diminished chug of its diesel interrupted the primeval silence. They were just thirty miles from Hong Kong Island, but there was no real estate here that anyone wanted to develop, no mineral wealth, no highway to somewhere important. Except at night.
The launch slowed to a bare half knot, gliding through clear blue liquid that lapped the sides. The temptation to dive in, naked, was almost irresistible. He remembered a skinny Eurasian boy and his sister, not a stitch on, diving for clams every morning and evening throughout one long hot summer, their mother’s cries echoing in his ears all the way from China, all the way underwater.
“So, here we are.” Higgins beamed.
This was what gweilos joined the force for, an adventure on some foreign shore under a tropical sun. No doubt that’s why Paddy had come east thirty-six years ago. Thirty-six? He must be the same age now that his father had been when he deserted Mai-mai and them, a careless Irishman running from responsibility. Dirty Paddy.
On the gantry platform police divers were assembling air tanks. Chan was glad to see they had brought plenty. At 120 feet one tank didn’t last long.
He jumped from the launch onto the platform, introduced himself to the two Chinese divers. They nodded respectfully to the chief inspector.
“How many regulators did you bring?” Chan asked.
“Four, one each, one for the kit we leave under the gantry, one spare.”
That was correct procedure, Chan remembered. If you dived more than thirty feet down, it was always a good idea to pause at fifteen feet to allow the nitrogen to evaporate from the blood before proceeding to the surface. But waiting for ten or more minutes at fifteen feet could be a problem after a deep dive when you wanted to use up every last ounce of air on the bottom. So good divers always left a tank rigged up with a regulator and a weight hanging from the bottom of the dive boat at about sixteen feet. That way two or more divers could hang there, sharing the air from the safety tank, for as long as the computer on your wrist required you to wait.
“I do a little diving myself.” Chan took out the laminated certificate. The two divers, professionals, exchanged glances.
“You coming down?”
“It’s up to you. Underwater you’re the bosses-that’s the rule. But if you don’t mind.”
They exchanged glances again. “It’s deep-about hundred and twenty. You been down that far before?”
“Sure.” Once, when he was training for the certificate. You had to do one deep dive. He hadn’t enjoyed it. Nor had his body.
The two divers were unsure. How to say no to a chief inspector?
“See, I’m looking at it as if it were scene of crime. I’d like to look around.”
“Oh. Okay.”
The Chinese Way was opposite to the English Way. Work justified everything.
Higgins watched from the deck of the launch and listened. After five years his Cantonese was good even if his accent was imperfect. It was what he would take away with him when he left, fluency in a Pacific tongue. Someone would hire him for something. But not yet. He wasn’t leaving until June 30, until he’d sucked every last glorious moment out of the place. With eight weeks to go he didn’t need a chief inspector drowning on his watch.
He’d heard of Charlie Chan; everyone had: a Eurasian, said to be a fanatic. If it hadn’t been for an antisocial tendency and a slight problem with authority, he’d be a superintendent by now. Even so, it was odd for a detective to assist in the retrieval of evidence under the sea. Men were trained for exactly that purpose.
Chan looked up at him, caught his stare. “A straight line, you said, due north?”
“What’s that?”
“The smugglers’ route. I guess this would be in their normal lane on the way to the PRC?”
Higgins was impressed. “Yes, that’s right. They generally fly past about a mile from the coast. I hadn’t thought of that.”
Chan raised an arm, held it out straight at eye level, pointed at China.
“They wouldn’t have been doing ninety, of course. Nothing like it. To raise something that heavy and chuck it overboard, they would have had to slow to five or less. That’s assuming they were using a snakehead in the first place. Obviously they wanted to be as near to the PRC as possible, but not actually in the PRC. Probably they would throw the most important items last-to be nearer China and less liable to detection.”
“Other items?”
“The scene of the crime in Mongkok was strangely bare. They tortured to death three adults, but there were no ropes, no handcuffs, no signs of struggle at all. Just a vat full of minced remains in the middle of an empty warehouse. No prints on the vat, of course. As a matter of fact, if someone hadn’t bungled by putting those heads in a polythene bag to float in the sea, it would have been pretty much a perfect crime. Impossible to identify the bodies without those heads. Forensic took a while to be sure there were three victims rather than two or four.”
“I see.”
Higgins raised his face to the sun. How could anyone worry about a few little murders on a day like this?
The divers lent Chan a wet suit and a full scuba kit, including buoyancy jacket, mask and fins. There was no spare diving computer; Chan would have to stay close to the others.
While they were attaching the regulators to the tanks, Chan strapped the compass to his left arm, held it out in front of him, grasping his left wrist firmly in his right hand. A direct line to the PRC beaches at the other end of Mirs Bay would be north six degrees east. He put on the wet suit, sat on a bench at the side of the gantry raft while one of the crew from the launch helped him on with the tank. He watched while the other two placed hands over mask and mouthpiece, leaned backward on the bench and splashed into the sea. Chan put the mouthpiece in his mouth, commenced breathing the pressurized air from the tank at the same time as he leaned back.
He tore through cooling strands of translucent silk. Free-falling was a pleasure in slow motion. Below him the other divers were already near the bottom. Their shapes were vague in the distance, but the dual sets of air bubbles racing to the surface provided an easy trail. Every third breath he pinched his nostrils, used his lungs to push air through the ganglia of nasal and sinal tubes that connected his nose to his ears and throat. Pressure increased by the equivalent of one atmosphere every thirty-three feet. If a diver did not perpetually equalize, his lungs would crumple like a paper bag. Chan forced a path through the tar from a thousand cigarettes. In truth it had been more than a year since his last dive.
At fifty feet the sea was cooler, the pressure of the column of water overhead more tangible. Slightly more effort was required to suck air from the mouthpiece; limbs felt heavier.
At eighty it was colder. Joints compressed under ten thousand tons of water; nitrogen was squeezed from his blood into muscles, joints, bones. There was no pain; you just knew that the body was never designed to spend time down here.
At 120 he needed the flashlight. Sunlight still penetrated, but it was attenuated, dim, alien in this other world of the deep. Checking his pressure gauge, he saw he was using up air ten times faster than in shallower water because the air compressed too. The volume that would fill your lungs at the surface was crushed to the size of a golf ball at this depth.
Using the light to illuminate the air bubbles that rose like crystal branches from their mouths, he swam toward the other divers. Drawing closer, he saw the silhouette of something unnaturally regular near where they hung in the water. From it rose a single orange line from the marker buoy that the young police divers had rigged up after they had stumbled across it.
Refraction made everything look bigger than it was, but it would be big anyway, even on the surface. He’d checked with brochures; a four-horsepower electric motor was needed to crush bones the size of the human pelvis, and the funnel that fed them to the grinding wheels had to be over twelve inches in diameter at the narrowest point. With a heavy motor and a large funnel, a cast-iron base to tolerate the vibration and a wide aperture near the bottom out of which the mince poured, the machine stood over four feet off the ground and weighed more than four hundred pounds. Lying diagonally in the gravel, it loomed out of the seabed with the two divers hanging near it. The funnel doubled the height of the machine.
The divers held index fingers against thumbs, questioning. Chan made the same sign back: I’m okay. He swam to the funnel, looked in. All the fish were gone, having feasted on whatever had remained in the machine. He tapped the funnel. The steel gave off a watery echo. Something moved. An eel shot out of the funnel, flashed toward Chan’s face; a miniature monster with silent screaming jaws, it diverted at the last instant. Chan’s heart raced, using precious air. He caught the concerned look behind the masks of his two colleagues. He showed an index finger against a thumb again. They nodded slowly.
The divers turned their attention to the mincer. They had brought down with them two heavy-duty nylon ropes with stainless steel hooks that were capable of being snapped closed at the ends. The ropes were fixed at the surface to the gantry raft. Chan watched them for a moment while they looked for somewhere to attach the hooks. Then he held out his left arm at eye level, grasped his left wrist with his right hand, started to swim north six degrees east.
It was a technique taught at advanced level: In still water every swimmer proceeded almost exactly the same distance for each flip of his fins. Chan knew that for thirty-three complete flips he covered a distance of twenty-one feet. After three complete fin strokes he was out of sight of the two divers. He remained at the bottom, following the direction that the boat must have taken. He gave himself ten minutes, too long for the amount of air he had left but sufficient if he used the spare tank dangling from the bottom of the gantry. Returning to the boat would be simple; he would ascend using the ropes they were attaching to the mincer or the two anchor lines that moored the gantry raft, whichever he saw first. He kept his eye on the compass, continued to swim north six degrees east, following a Chinese hunch.
He didn’t know why every time he dived he had the same thought as though it lurked like a shark waiting to ambush him: Charlie Chan, this is your mind. Just like the mind, the ocean bed fell away under him all of a sudden, leaving a void.
He hung at 120 feet about a yard beyond the submarine cliff edge, looking down into a fertile valley. With his torch he illuminated a steep slope on which purple coral grew. Rainbow fish darted among the coral. Farther down, in the gloom, large shapes moved. Sharks were common in these waters, but their dangers were much exaggerated. More pressing was the diminishing air supply. The needle was creeping into the red zone. He was moving his light in one last farewell arc when he saw it jammed half way down the cliff against a gray coral growth: a large steel traveling chest of the kind sold in the China Products shops in Hong Kong. A corner was badly crumpled, and much of the paint had been scraped off by the slide down the cliff. He calculated. It would take only minutes to get to the fifteen-feet level where the spare air tank hung. True, it was bad practice to leave his companions to sound the alarm for him, but evidence was evidence. He exhaled, dived downward and accelerated with a couple of fin thrusts. As he reached the trunk, the needle on his air gauge moved into the danger zone.
The trunk was not locked but tied with nylon rope. Bright green nylon rope, he noted. Then, when he checked his depth gauge, his heartbeat doubled. Without noticing he had descended to 150 feet, 10 more feet than was permitted for recreational divers. To avoid the bends, he must ascend slowly and wait at specific depths, although he could not remember which. The problem was that he did not have enough air. The needle on the air gauge was in the middle of the red zone. At this depth he had no more than a minute. Panic worked his lungs, using up more air. Charlie Chan, fool, trapped in his own mind. So what was new?
A hundred feet seemed like a good number to pause at. He waited at this depth until the needle struck the black pin at the end of the danger zone, at which point there was nothing left in the tank to suck at. With the last of the air in his lungs he swam upward, exhaling as gently as he could.
Turning, he saw two ropes suspended in the sea about ten yards to his right. He swam toward them. Remembering the golden rule, Never hold your breath, he tore open the buckle on his weight belt, let it drop. Exhaling freely now, he ascended the ropes like a cork. The ropes converged near the spare tank hanging from the boat. By the time he arrived his lungs were screaming; he was at the fatal point of sucking in water. For the split second it took for the mind to process the thought he paused on the brink of dissolving this misfit Charlie Chan in the vast and bitter sea, to have done with his irritating company once and for all. Then he grabbed the mouthpiece to the spare tank and gorged on air, the primal food.
He hung there fifteen feet below the friendly hull basking in sea-filtered sunlight, flooding his starved blood with air. Shock trembled his hands. Oxygen narcosis lightened his head. Underwater he could not stop laughing. Terror had cracked a carapace of anger he’d been carrying for twenty-three years. Whom did he think he was kidding? He loved air, light, life.
He was thinking of Moira when the others joined him. They saw the trembling in his limbs. Systematically they checked him: air tank empty; weight belt missing; heart still racing. The fixed needle on his depth gauge showed that he’d descended to 151 feet. Behavior consistent with hysteria.
They brought down a full tank of air, made him stay an extra forty minutes to burn off nitrogen. When they finally hauled him to the surface, all Chan could do was cough. He lay on the deck spluttering in frustration. He was lucky not to choke to death on old tobacco. He tried to stand up, but they kept him down, allowing him to sit only. When he finally managed to explain about the trunk, Higgins was unimpressed.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” he said.
Higgins called for help on the radio. He insisted Chan go back to Sai Kung on the second launch that was sent out from Tolo Harbor. If he developed signs of the bends, he would need to be airlifted to Hong Kong Island, where the Royal Navy had a decompression chamber.
Higgins promised that as soon as they had hauled up the mincer, they would use the launch to move the gantry exactly sixty-three feet, or ninety-six fin strokes, north six degrees east. Less than fifty yards from the PRC border. The divers would go down again to retrieve the trunk.
“Have you ever seen anyone with the bends?” Higgins said. “It’s distilled agony. One twinge in any joint, even your little finger, and you go into the decompression chamber. You’ll thank me.” He nodded to the two medics who helped Chan onto the other launch. “No point killing yourself over a few murders,” he called out as Chan went below.
Could the bends be worse than English humor? Chan reached for a cigarette. At least he’d be able to make the date with Moira. He had to admit he was looking forward to seeing her.