Night of Error
‘Thanks, Prof.,’ I said warmly.
‘Forget all this and enjoy your leave now. The South Atlantic is waiting for you when you return.’
He turned and strode away, jauntily waving his stick. I looked after him with affection; I thought he would be genuinely sorry to lose me if the deal with Campbell came off and I went to the South Pacific instead of the South Atlantic. He would once more angrily bewail the economic facts of life which drew researchers into industry and he would write a few acid letters to the journals.
I turned to Geordie. ‘What do you make of that?’
‘Norgaard vanished just about the same time that Mark kicked the bucket. I wonder if …’
‘I know what you’re thinking, Geordie. Is Norgaard still alive? I do hope to God Campbell comes through – I want to do some field work in the islands.’
‘You had something to tell me,’ he reminded me. But I had decided to save it up.
‘I’ll tell you and Campbell together. Come with me to see him.’
V
Campbell was less crusty than at our first meeting. ‘Well,’ he said, as we entered his suite, ‘I see you’re not entirely a hardened criminal, Trevelyan.’
‘Not a stain on my character. The coroner said so.’ I introduced Geordie and the two big men sized one another up with interest. ‘Mr Wilkins is willing to contribute a ship – and skipper her, too.’
Campbell said, ‘I see someone has faith in your crazy story. I suppose that getting hurt added to your conviction.’
‘What about you?’ I asked.
He ignored this and asked what we would drink. ‘We must celebrate a successful evasion of the penalty of the law,’ he said, almost jovially. He ordered and we got down to business. I decided to keep the Kane episode to be revealed at the proper moment and first hear what Campbell had to say.
‘I knew my hunch about your South Americans would work out,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a pretty good intelligence system – you have to in my line of work – and I find that Suarez-Navarro are fitting out a research ship in Darwin right at this moment. It’s new business and new territory for them, so my guess is that they are heading your way.’
I looked at him blankly. That didn’t mean a thing to me.
I think he enjoyed my lack of comprehension because he left me dangling for a while before elucidating. ‘Suarez-Navarro is a South American mining house, active in several countries,’ he said. ‘I’ve tangled with them before – they’re a crowd of unscrupulous bastards. Now, why would a mining house be fitting out an oceanographical research ship?’
‘Nodules,’ said Geordie succinctly.
‘How unscrupulous are they?’ I asked. ‘Would they stoop to burglary?’ I didn’t mention murder.
Campbell folded his hands together. ‘I’ll tell you the story and let you judge for yourself. Once I had a pretty good set-up in South America, never mind just where. The mines were producing well and I ploughed a lot back in the interests of good labour relations. I had a couple of schools, a hospital and all the civilized trimmings. Those Indian miners never had it so good, and they responded well.
‘Suarez-Navarro cast an eye on the operation and liked the look of it. They went about things in their own smelly way, though. They had a trouble-shooter, a guy called Ernesto Ramirez, whom they used for that type of operation. He pitched up, got at the government, greased a few palms, supported the Army, and then suddenly there was a new government – which promptly expropriated the mines in the interests of the national economy – or that’s what they said. Anyway, I never got a cent out of it. They just took the lot and Ramirez vanished back into the hole they dug him out of.
‘The next thing that happened was that the government wanted somebody to run the mines, so Suarez-Navarro offered to take on the job out of the kindness of their hearts and a hefty percentage of the profits. I had been paying 38 per cent tax but Suarez-Navarro got away tax free since they claimed it was really government property anyway. They had a sweet set-up.
‘They closed the schools and the hospital – those things don’t produce, you see. Pretty soon they had a strike on their hands. If you treat a man like a man he kind of resents going back to being treated like a pig – so there was a strike. That brought Ramirez out of his hole fast. He called in the Army, there was quite a bit of shooting, and then there was suddenly no strike – just fifty dead Indians and quite a few widows.’
He smiled grimly. ‘Does that answer your question about the scruples of Suarez-Navarro?’
I nodded. It was a nasty story.
Campbell seemed to go off at a tangent. ‘I’m attending a conference here in London, a conference on mineral resources.’
‘That’s how I found you,’ I murmured, but he took no notice.
‘It’s a Commonwealth deal really but various other interested parties have been invited to send observers. Suarez-Navarro have two – you can’t keep them out of anything – but another one arrived last week. His name is Ernesto Ramirez.’ Campbell’s voice was hard. ‘Ramirez isn’t a conference man, he’s not a negotiator. He’s Suarez-Navarro’s muscle man. Do I make my point?’
We both nodded, intently.
‘Well, I’m going to hammer it home really hard. I’ve found Kane for you.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ I said.
‘You were going about it the hard way. I put someone on to watch Ramirez and was told that a man called Kane had a two-hour talk with him yesterday. We had Kane followed to where he’s in digs and I have the address.’
I reeled it off.
It was effective. Campbell said, ‘What?’ disbelievingly, and Geordie gaped at me. I enjoyed my moment.
‘Kane came to visit me this morning,’ I said, and told them both what had happened. ‘I suggest you get him down to the docks and have a serious talk with him,’ I said to Geordie.
Campbell frowned and then his great smile broke on his face. ‘No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask him a damn thing. Don’t you see what’s happening?’
Geordie and I shrugged helplessly. We weren’t quick enough for Campbell in matters like this.
‘Ever heard of industrial espionage? Of course you have. Every big outfit runs a spy system. I do it myself – don’t much like it, but I’ve got to keep up with the hard-nosed bastards in the business.’ He actually looked as if he enjoyed it very much. ‘Now let’s reconstruct what’s been happening. You got hold of something you shouldn’t have – from the point of view of Suarez-Navarro. Ramirez hotfoots it to England – he arrived the day before Kane came to see you, so it’s a cinch they came together. Kane comes to you to find out if Mark’s stuff has arrived yet, and he knows it has because you tell him so yourself. He spins you a yarn as cover – it doesn’t really matter what it is. Then Ramirez tells his boys to snatch the stuff but you surprise them in the middle.’ He lifted his eyebrows. ‘Does that make sense so far?’
Geordie said, ‘It makes sense to me.’
I said nothing. I was a little more doubtful, but if this served to keep up Campbell’s interest I was all for it.
He continued, ‘But something goes wrong – they leave the diary and one nodule. Ramirez doesn’t know this, but he does know you’ve contacted me and that all sorts of enquiries are out – including questions in court about nodules. Oh yes, I bet he was there – or someone for him. He must have had a shock when you came to see me. You see, he’d keep a tail on you as a matter of routine just to see if you did anything out of the ordinary – and you did. So what does Ramirez do now?’
‘I’ll buy it,’ I said. ‘What does he do?’
‘He lays Kane alongside you again,’ said Campbell. ‘You gave him the perfect opportunity – you practically invited Kane to come back. It’s Kane’s job to find out what, if anything, is in the wind. But what Ramirez doesn’t know is that you were suspicious of Kane right from the start, and this gives us a perfect opportunity. We string Kane along – employ him, feed him any information we want him to know and keep from him anything we don’t want him to know. We also keep him underfoot and don’t lose him again. That’s why you mustn’t ask him any awkward questions – not right now, anyway.’
I thought about it for a long time. ‘Does this mean you’re coming in with us? Putting up the finance?’
‘You’re damn right it does,’ snapped Campbell. ‘If Suarez-Navarro are going to all this trouble they must be on to something big, and I’d like to stab them in the back just for old times’ sake. I’ll put up half a million dollars – or whatever it takes – and I ask only one thing. That we get there, and do it, before they can.’
Geordie said gently, ‘It was a good idea of mine, wasn’t it?’
‘What’s that?’ asked Campbell.
‘Geordie’s recruiting a private army,’ I explained. ‘As he gets older he gets more bloodthirsty.’
A look passed between them for the second time that made me feel like the outsider. Without saying a word they were in full accord on many levels, and for a moment I felt very inexperienced indeed.
Campbell said, ‘There’s another thing. My doctor is troubled about my health, the goddam quack. He’s been pestering me to take a sea voyage, and I’m suddenly minded to accept his advice. I’m coming along for the ride.’
‘You’re the boss,’ I said. I wasn’t surprised.
He turned to Geordie. ‘Now, what kind of a ship have you, Captain?’
‘A brigantine,’ said Geordie. ‘About two hundred tons.’
Campbell’s jaw dropped. ‘But that’s a little sailing ship! This is supposed to be a serious project.’
‘Take it easy,’ I said, grinning at Geordie who was already bristling at any slight to Esmerelda. ‘A lot of research vessels are sailing ships; there happen to be a number of sound reasons.’
‘All right. Let’s hear them.’
‘Some of the reasons are purely technical,’ I said. ‘For instance, it’s easier to make a sailing ship non-magnetic than a powered ship. Magnetism plays hell with all sorts of important readings. But the reasons you’ll appreciate are purely economic.’
‘If you’re talking economics you’re talking my language,’ he growled.
‘A research ship never knows exactly where it’s going. We might find ourselves dredging a thousand miles away from the nearest land. Station keeping and dredging take power and fuel, and an engine powered ship would need a hell of a lot of fuel to make the round trip.
‘But a sailing ship can make the journey and arrive on station with close on full tanks, given careful management. She can keep on station longer and no one need worry about whether there’ll be enough fuel to get back. You could use a powered ship to do the job but it would cost you – oh, a million pounds plus. Geordie’s boat will be fine.’
‘The day’s not been wasted,’ Campbell said. ‘I’ve learned something new. I reckon you know your job, Trevelyan. What will you need in the way of equipment?’
So we got down to it. The biggest item was the winch, which was to be installed amidships, and storage space for 30,000 feet of cable below it. There was also to be a laboratory for on-the-spot analysis and all the necessary equipment would take a lot of money, and a lot of refitting.
‘We’ll need a bloody big generator for this lot,’ said Geordie. ‘It looks as though it’ll take a diesel bigger than the main engine. Lucky, isn’t it, that charter tourists take up so much space with luxuries.’
Presently Campbell suggested lunch, so we went down to the dining room to do some more planning over grilled steaks. It was arranged that I should concentrate on collecting equipment while Geordie prepared Esmerelda and got his crew together. Very little was said concerning the location, or the availability, of the strange treasure we were after, and I knew that I alone could come up with anything of use there. I had some heavy studying ahead of me as well as all the rest.
‘If you take on Kane it’ll mean we’ve got him in our sights,’ said Campbell, harping back to his favourite subject. ‘Not that it makes any difference. Ramirez is sure to have other scouts out. I’ll be watching him too.’
I’d been thinking about Kane.
‘Your review of the situation was very well in its way, but it was wrong on one point.’
‘What’s that?’ said Campbell.
‘You said that Kane spun me a yarn as cover, and that it didn’t matter what it was. That’s not entirely so, you know – we have independent evidence. The death certificate states the cause of death as appendicitis. Kane and Schouten both told the same lie and I’d like to know why.’
‘By God, you’re right,’ said Campbell. ‘We’ll get it out of Kane as soon as he’s served his purpose.’
Geordie grunted. ‘We’re going into the Pacific,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ll get it out of Schouten. At all events, we’ll be at the root of it.’
THREE
It was nearly three months before we got away. You can’t begin a scientific expedition as though you were going on a picnic. There were a million things to do and we were kept busy on a sixteen hour day, seven days a week. The first thing I did was to hand in my resignation from the Institute. Old Jarvis didn’t take it too well, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it so he accepted the situation with reluctance. I wished I could have told him what I was doing but that was impossible.
Geordie assiduously recruited his crew and soon they began to turn up. He had kept on four of his own lads and had of course taken on Kane in place of one of the men he let go. Of the other six that he added, all were faces that I hadn’t seen since I had been a boy during the war, tagging around after my dad’s gang.
Ian Lewis detached himself from his croft with alacrity and Geordie made him first mate; he’d had years under sail and was almost as good as a professional. Ex-corporal Taffy Morgan came along; one night during the war he had killed six Germans with a commando knife in utter silence, earning himself the M.M. Danny Williams had also won the M.M., although I never found out what for since he was reticent about it. There was the burly bulk of Nick Dugan, an Irishman from the Free State. Bill Hunter turned up – he had made a name for himself as an underwater demolitions expert and was the only other regular sailing man among the team. And there was Jim Taylor, another explosives wizard – he had been very near my father when he was killed.
They were now all into their forties, like Geordie, but seemed as tough as ever. Not one had lost his fitness and there wasn’t a paunch among the lot of them. Geordie said he could have recruited twenty-five but he’d picked the best of them, and I almost believed him. I was confident that if we ran into trouble we could handle it.
Geordie was confident too, of welding them into a good sailing crew. What any of them lacked in knowledge they’d soon pick up and the enthusiasm was certainly there – although for the time being they knew nothing of the complications in which we were entangled. It was a straight research and survey trip to them all, including Kane, and any hints Geordie may have given his special team they kept strictly to themselves. As Campbell had predicted, Kane was sticking as close to us as a leech; Geordie had simply told him that there was a berth for him if he cared to cross the Atlantic with us, and Kane had jumped at the opportunity.
Campbell had gone back to Canada. Before he left he had a long talk with me. ‘I told you I had a good intelligence service,’ he said. ‘Well, so have Suarez-Navarro. You’ll be watched and they’ll know everything you do as soon as you do it, even apart from Kane’s spying. It can’t be helped. We’re deadlocked and we know it. So do they. It’s a case of we know that they know that we know, and so on. It’s a bastard of a position to be in.’
‘It’s like a game with perfect information – chess, for example. It’s the man who can manoeuvre best who wins.’
‘Not quite. Both sides have imperfect information,’ he corrected me patiently. ‘We don’t know how much they really know. They might have the exact location of the nodules we’re after, and only have to drop a dredge to prove their case, but perhaps they’re behind us in planning and need to stop us somehow first. On the other hand, they don’t know how much we know. Which is precious little. Maybe as much as, or no more than them. Tricky, isn’t it?’
‘It would take a logician to sort it out. Talking of knowing, have you made any progress with the diary?’
Campbell snorted. ‘I gave it to a top-flight cipher expert and he’s having his troubles. He says it isn’t so much the peculiar shorthand as the sloppy way in which it’s written. But he says he can crack it, given time. What I wish I knew was how Suarez-Navarro got on to this in the first place?’
My own thoughts were that Mark, cheated out of Campbell’s involvement – I guessed that’s how he would see Campbell’s loss, only in terms of his own disappointment – had approached them himself. But I still didn’t know enough about how Campbell viewed Mark to say so. It hung between us, a touchy subject that we both carefully avoided.
So he went off to Canada to further his own progress, we speeded up ours as much as possible, and it was with great relief that I heard Geordie announce one day that we were at last ready for sea. All he needed to know was where to head for.
I said, ‘Do you know the Blake Plateau?’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘It’s just off the coast of Carolina. We’ll test the winch and the rest of our gear there, and it’s a long enough voyage for you to pull your crew together. I don’t want to go into the Pacific to find that anything doesn’t work for some reason or other. If there’s anything wrong we can get it fixed in Panama – they’ve got good engineering shops there.’
‘Okay. But why the Blake Plateau?’
‘There are nodules there. I’ve always wanted a closer look at Atlantic nodules.’
‘Is there any place where there aren’t any?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘They won’t form where there’s heavy sedimentation, so that cuts out most of the Atlantic – but the Blake Plateau is scoured by the Gulf Stream and nodules do form. But they’re poor quality, not like the ones in the Pacific.’
‘How deep?’
‘Not more than three thousand feet – deep enough to test the winch.’
‘Right, boy. Let’s go and scoop up some poor quality wealth from the bottom of the sea. We should be away in a few days now.’
‘I can’t wait,’ I said. I was in fact boiling with impatience to be gone.
II
We made a fair and untroubled crossing of the Atlantic. Geordie and Ian, together with the regular crew members, soon got the others into a good working pattern and spirits ran high. Kane, we were pleased to notice, fitted in well and seemed as willing and above-board as the others. Knowing that they were all curious as to our purpose I gave occasional rather deliberately boring lectures on oceanography, touching on a number of possible research subjects so that the matter of manganese nodules got lost in the general subject. Only two people retained an interest in what I had to say, and to them, in semi-private, I spoke at greater length about our quarry. One was Geordie, of course, and the other, not too surprisingly and in fact to my satisfaction, was Bill Hunter. Already our diving expert, his interest and involvement might well be crucial.
One afternoon they both joined me in the laboratory, at my request, to learn a little more. A quiet word from Geordie to Ian made sure that we weren’t going to be interrupted.
Geordie picked up a nodule which I’d cut in half – I had brought a few on board to help my explanation along.
He pointed to the white central core.
‘I suppose you’ll tell me again that it’s a shark’s tooth in the middle of this rock. You never did get around to explaining that, did you?’
I smiled and held up the stone. ‘That’s right, it is.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘No I’m not – it happens often. You see, a shark dies and its body drifts down; the flesh rots or is eaten, the bones dissolve – what bones a shark has, it’s cartilage really – and by the time anything reaches the very bottom there’s nothing left but the teeth. They are made of sodium triphosphate and insoluble in water. There are probably millions of them on any ocean bottom.’
I opened a small box. ‘Look here,’ I said and gave him a larger white bone. It was as big as the palm of his hand and curiously convoluted.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a whale’s earbone,’ said Bill, looking over his shoulder. ‘I’ve seem ‘em before.’
‘Right, Bill. Also made of sodium triphosphate. We sometimes find them at the core of larger nodules – but more often it’s a shark’s tooth and most frequently a bit of clay.’
‘So the manganese sticks to the tooth. How long does it take to make a nodule?’ Geordie asked.
‘Estimates vary from one millimetre each thousand years to one millimetre each million years. One chap estimated that it worked out to one layer of atoms a day – which makes it one of the slowest chemical reactions known. But I have my own ideas about that.’
They both stared at me. ‘Do you mean that if you find a nodule with a half-diameter of ten millimetres formed round a tooth that the shark lived ten million years ago? Were there sharks then?’ Geordie asked in fascination.
‘Oh yes, the shark is one of our oldest inhabitants.’
We talked a little more and then I dropped it. They had a lot to learn yet and it came best in small doses. And there was plenty of time for talk on this voyage. We headed south-south-west to cut through the Bahamas and the approach to the Windward Passage. Once in the Passage we kept as clear as possible of Cuba – once we came across an American destroyer on patrol, which did us the courtesy of dipping her flag, to which we reciprocated. Then there was the long leg across the Caribbean to Colon and the entrance to the Panama Canal.
By then we had done our testing. There were minor problems, no more than teething troubles, and generally I was happy with the way things were going. Stopping to dredge a little, trying out the winch and working out on-station routines, was an interesting change from what we had been doing and everyone enjoyed it, and we remained lucky with the weather. I got some nodules up but there was a lot of other material, enough to cloud the issue for everyone but Geordie. Among the debris of ooze, red clay and deposits we found enough shark’s teeth and whale’s earbone to give everyone on board a handful of souvenirs.
Both Geordie and Bill were becoming more and more interested in the nodules and wanted to know more about them, so I arranged for another lab. session with them one day. I’d been assaying, partly to keep my hand in and partly to check on the readiness of my equipment for the real thing.
‘How did the Atlantic nodules turn out?’ Geordie asked. On the whole he did the talking – Bill watched, listened and absorbed.
‘Same old low quality stuff that’s always pulled out in the Atlantic,’ I said. ‘Low manganese, low iron and hardly anything else except contaminants, clay and suchlike. That’s the trouble in the Atlantic; there’s too much sediment even on the Blake Plateau.’
‘Why does manganese behave this way – why does it lump together?’
I laughed. ‘You want me to give you a course of physical chemistry right now? All right, I’ll explain it as simply as I can. Do you know what a colloid is?’
Two headshakes.
‘Look. If you put a teaspoon of sugar into water you get a sugar solution – that is, the sugar breaks down right to the molecular level and mixes intimately with the water. In other words, it dissolves. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘Now what if you have a substance that won’t dissolve in water but is divided into very fine particles, much smaller than can be seen in a regular microscope, and each particle is floating in the water? That’s a colloid. I could whip you up a colloid which looks like a clear liquid, but it would be full of very small particles.’