Jack Higgins Read Online Free PDF Page B

The best. He was a chief petty officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. Where diving is concerned, you name it, Morgan’s done it, but that was a long time ago. He was going downhill even when he first came to me. And now…”
    â€œA dead man walking.” I frowned. “You said that yourself earlier,” she explained.
    â€œThat about sums it up,” I told her reluctantly.
    â€œAnd you blame yourself? Why?”
    She was right, of course. It boiled up inside me, allthe anger, the frustration, the self-hate, the fear that had twisted in my guts down there with the Mirage.
    â€œAll right, you asked for it. The truth is that until last year, about eighteen months ago to be precise, I dived regularly myself, even when there was no need. Dived because I loved every single minute of it like that brother of yours loves flying. One day I got a call in the office at Alex. A barge had gone down in the outer harbour. The main crew were away on a job, but I went out with Morgan to size-up the situation. He went down first in a regulation suit.”
    â€œYou mean with an air hose and so on? I thought that was a thing of the past these days.”
    â€œIn most circumstances, it is. I’d always use a self-contained rig under a hundred feet. Anything over, a regulation suit. Sure, you can dive three hundred feet in an aqualung. You can also bleed from the mouth, nose and ears. I’ve seen a lot of men do just that.”
    â€œAll right,” she said impatiently. “Point taken. But what happened to Morgan?”
    â€œHe found the barge in just over a hundred feet, half-buried in thick mud. When he came up, he advised me to wait till the full crew were available.”
    â€œAnd you didn’t agree?”
    â€œI thought I could tunnel through the mud and get a hawser under her. I wouldn’t listen to him.”
    â€œWhat went wrong?”
    â€œThe tunnel caved in on me.”
    I shivered involuntarily, sick to my stomach at the memory of it. “I couldn’t move an inch. Just lay there with water rising in my suit, no light, nothing. Only the darkness and the water getting higher and higher till it was inside the helmet, touching my chin.”
    She grabbed my arm and shook me back to the present. “And Morgan went down for you?”
    â€œThat’s it. He came down and dug me out. Came down in an aqualung. My suit was so badly torn that he had to have me taken straight up. You see the length of time I’d been down at that depth I needed to decompress for around an hour and a half. Go up in stages.”
    â€œThen what happened?”
    â€œWe had a portable decompression chamber on board. A Swiss thing, just big enough for one man. He had the deck-hands put me inside.”
    â€œAnd Morgan?” she whispered.
    My mouth went dry at the thought of it. “There wasn’t any room for him, was there?” For some reason, I’d raised my voice. “He could have gone back over the side and taken his time about coming up, but there wasn’t another diver around to help and he collapsed anyway. By the time they got the boat in and tied up it was too late.”
    â€œAnd he’s been like that ever since?”
    I nodded.
    â€œAnd you don’t like diving any more.”
    â€œNot really. Oh, I’ve tried—like today, for instance. I go down through the sunlight and that isn’t so bad and then it gets deeper and the colours fade and the darkness moves in, just like it did down there in the mud last year.”
    There was sweat on my face. She put a finger to my lips and smiled. “You’ve punished yourself enough for one night. All right? Now we’ll take three nice deep breaths and go and have a drink.”
    â€œI’ll never make it to the bar.” Which was the plain truth for I felt as shaky as a kitten.
    â€œIs that a fact? Where would you suggest?”
    â€œMy room. A step across the terrace, french windows