Dick Francis's Front Runner

30

Christmas Day dawned sunny and calm, and Henri and I were out on the beach by seven o’clock in our swimwear and T-shirts. Even though the sun had only just peeped over the eastern horizon, the temperature was already in the mid-twenties, which gave every indication of a very warm day to come. As Quentin had said, it really was going to be a hot Christmas.

We walked up the beach towards Martin and Theresa’s place and found the dive boat was already there with a hive of activity going on around it. Bags of diving gear were being loaded on board from the beach, along with eight scuba air tanks. Martin Reynard was directing operations while two other men appeared to be doing all the work.

‘Morning,’ said Martin as we approached. ‘Merry Christmas.’

Henri gave him a kiss on the cheek.

‘This is Truman Ebanks,’ Martin said, pointing at a large dark-skinned man standing on the sand. ‘He’s our dive master. And also Carson Ebanks.’ Martin pointed at the man on the boat. ‘He’s the captain and our safety officer.’

Truman was passing the gear to Carson.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Are you brothers?’

‘No, man,’ said Carson in a deep resonant voice.

‘I thought both being called Ebanks...’

He laughed. ‘Lots of people hereabouts are named Ebanks. Those that ain’t Boddens.’ I loved the way his local accent gave the words a rhythm, almost as if he was singing them.

‘I suppose we must be related somehow,’ Truman said with a similar lilt, grinning with his large white teeth showing brightly against his dark face, ‘but from way back.’

The equipment was almost fully loaded when Bentley came walking down the beach to join us.

‘I thought I’d come too,’ he said to Martin. ‘Just for the ride.’

Henri clearly wasn’t happy.

‘Fine,’ Martin said. ‘Let’s get going.’

I thought for a moment that Henri wasn’t going to come, so I took her hand and squeezed it. She smiled at me and shrugged her shoulders in acceptance.

‘OK,’ she said.

The dive boat consisted mostly of a single flat platform that ran right through from bow to stern, with the driver position situated in the centre, a bench down each side with dive-tank holders behind, and an overhead awning that provided shade to most of the boat. The bow had been run aground on the sand and Martin, Bentley, Henri and I now climbed a short ladder to get on board. Truman then pushed us off the beach into deeper water.

The trip out was wonderful with the movement of the boat causing a refreshing breeze to blow into our faces, keeping us cool.

From out at sea, I could assess the whole sweep of Seven Mile Beach with its array of hotels and condominiums stretching away into the distance in both directions.

‘Do most people live near the beach?’ I asked Henri.

‘Nowhere is that far away,’ she said, ‘but this is certainly the busiest end. Three-quarters of the whole population live in George Town or West Bay. Most of the eastern half of the island is just deserted mangrove swamp.’

‘Here you are, Jeff,’ Martin said, placing a blue mesh bag full of gear by my feet. ‘All you need is in here. Take the yellow guest tanks. The yellow will make it easier for Truman and me to keep an eye on you.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

All the scuba tanks I had ever used before had been a uniformly boring grey aluminium that came with the dive boat, but here we had eight smart brightly painted ones, two each in white, yellow, red and light blue. I’d heard of personalized number plates, of course, but I’d never come across personalized dive tanks before. The red ones had HENRI painted in large black letters down them; the white had MARTIN, the blue had THERESA, and the yellow, GUEST.

Bentley, it seemed, really was only there for the ride, as he obviously wasn’t planning on getting wet. He hadn’t brought any swimmers with him.

‘Where are we diving?’ Henri asked. ‘I don’t want to go too deep.’

‘The wall first, then Kittiwake after,’ Martin said. ‘It will be good to do Kittiwake without the usual mass of tourists getting in the way. No one else dives on Christmas Day.’

‘What is Kittiwake?’ I asked him.

‘The USS Kittiwake. It’s a retired naval ship that was deliberately sunk here in 2011 to provide an artificial reef and a dive site.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ I said. I’d never dived on a wreck before. ‘How deep is it?’

‘It sits on the seafloor at about sixty feet. But we’re going to do a wall-dive first. That will be a deeper but a shorter dive.’

Like every diver the world over, I’d heard of the Cayman Wall, that point where the shallow shelf on which the island sits ends and the surrounding deepness begins. It is characterized by an abrupt and almost vertical falling away of the seafloor down into the Cayman Trench, the deepest part of the Caribbean at a depth of over twenty-five thousand feet. But, of course, we would only be exploring the very top of the ‘wall’.

‘I’ll skip the first dive,’ Henri said. ‘It’s too deep for me.’

I watched as Martin and Truman began to pull on a wetsuit each.

‘Do we actually need a wetsuit?’ I asked. ‘I’ve done all my diving in the Red Sea without one.’

‘It may be hot up here in the sunshine,’ Truman said, ‘but it’s still wintertime. The water will be cool a hundred feet down.’

I pulled the wetsuit out of my mesh bag and started to put it on.

‘I must have a photo,’ Henri said, laughing, as I grappled with the black neoprene outfit that was none too big for me. She took my iPhone and snapped away on it as I struggled to pull up the long zip at the back.

‘Very funny,’ I said to her, pulling a face.

I felt like the Michelin Man.

‘It’s Theresa’s,’ Martin said. ‘It’s the largest spare one I could find.’

Even though Theresa was only an inch or so shorter than I, she was considerably less substantial around the waist. But I managed to do it up in the end with some extra help from the giggling Henri.

Next out of the bag came a BC, a buoyancy compensator, a short jacket that has an air bladder between the inner and outer layers, which, when connected to a tank, could be filled with air to make a diver neutrally buoyant, so that he neither floated up nor sank down but remained level in the water as if weightless.

I attached the BC to one of the yellow tanks and connected the regulator to the valve, checking that the pressure in the tank was well above 2,500 pounds per square inch. The pressure gauge, together with a depth indicator, was housed in a console about eight inches long that was attached by a length of high-pressure hose to the tank’s valve.

I next tested the two mouthpieces, breathing through both the primary and the emergency alternate.

All seemed fine.

It had been several years since I had last been diving and I was pleased that at least I hadn’t forgotten how to set up the equipment.

‘You’ll need a weight belt,’ Truman said to me. ‘The air trapped in the neoprene will make you float otherwise.’

‘You’d just bob round on the surface like a cork,’ said Martin, laughing. ‘Ten to twelve pounds should be enough.’

I attached several rectangular lead blocks to a two-inch-wide belt and placed it around my waist. Next I tried on the flippers and the mask.

I was ready.

The note of the engine dropped away as we arrived at the first location and the boat was tied to one of the coloured buoys that mark every dive site in Cayman waters.

‘Have fun,’ Henri said as Carson carried my heavy gear over to the boarding ladder. I had decided that going down the ladder was a preferable means of entry for my still-delicate abdomen to jumping off the side.

I sat on the bottom step, put on the BC, flippers and mask, and slipped gently into the clear blue Caribbean water. Martin and I were acting as dive buddies, hence we would constantly check one another for safety, but, after so long a break from the water, I was pleased that Truman, the dive master, was also coming with us.

As we descended the buoy’s anchor line I equalized the pressure in my ears by frequently holding my nose and blowing air into my sinuses. We arrived at the bottom almost at the point where the sandy floor disappeared over the top of the wall into the abyss.

‘Remember to continually check your depth,’ Truman had told us in the pre-dive briefing. ‘It is far too easy to go over the edge and down too deep. One hundred feet maximum. Bottom time no more than fifteen minutes.’

I reached around for the hose to the console and looked at the depth reading on the indicator. Seventy feet. Theoretically, therefore, I could go some thirty feet down the wall face, but I was happy staying up near the top where there was plenty of bright coral.

Truman had also told us to be aware that we were diving in a designated marine park and that we should not touch or remove anything. But looking was all I was interested in doing anyway.

What a delight it was to be down here exploring a world so different from the one above the surface that it could have easily been on another planet, yet it was, in fact, just a few short yards from life as we knew it.

Back in the 1940s, Jacques Cousteau had perfected the open-circuit scuba equipment we were now using, solving the problem of a diver having to inhale air at a low pressure by attaching a gas regulator to a highly pressurized tank. But he probably had no idea at the time that he would also be creating a whole new leisure industry.

The ability to breathe underwater must have been a dream of human beings since they first walked on dry land, and here we were doing it.

I checked the pressure in my tank. It was fine, a little below 2,000 psi.

I looked around for Martin.

He was below me, his white tank clearly visible against the darkness beneath. He and Truman were some way down the wall but I was happy remaining close to the lip. I was enchanted by the multi-coloured anemones swaying in the gentle current, and by the shoals of black-and-yellow-striped sergeant major fish, or the beautiful cobalt blue angelfish as they nibbled away at some invisible food on the surface of the coral.

Truman swam up to join me and placed his thumb and index finger together, making a circle in the universal dive signal for OK. He was asking if I was all right. I answered in the affirmative by repeating the signal. He pointed at his watch and then held up his open right hand. I repeated the OK, indicating that I’d understood. Five more minutes.

I again checked the pressure in my tank. It had now dropped to 1,700. To be on the safe side, it needed to still be above 800 when I surfaced.

No problem.

After the five minutes, the three of us ascended slowly towards the surface, stopping for prearranged decompression safety stops at forty and twenty feet. The last thing any of us wanted was to get the ‘bends’, the agonizing, hugely dangerous and potentially lethal condition that can occur when a sudden reduction in pressure causes bubbles of gas to form within the body in the same way that they do in a bottle of fizzy drink when the top is rapidly unscrewed.

‘That was fabulous,’ I said to Henri as I sat on the bottom step of the ladder to take off the heavy equipment. ‘I’d forgotten how much fun diving could be.’

She used my iPhone to snap more pictures of me.

‘You’ll break the lens,’ I said, laughing.

When the three of us were back on board, Carson manoeuvred the boat the few hundred yards to the Kittiwake dive site, where we again tied up to the buoy.

‘I’m definitely coming with you on this one,’ Henri said, opening her dive bag. ‘I’m not staying on the boat again with Bentley. He didn’t take his lecherous eyes off me for a second while you were under. I kept moving away to the other end of the boat, and he kept following me.’ She shivered with disgust.

So Henri and I would be dive buddies on this dive, with Martin pairing up with Truman.

I helped Henri zip up the back of her wetsuit. Whereas I looked like I was bursting out of mine in all the wrong places, she looked fantastic with the tightness of the neoprene showing off her amazing curves to perfection.

‘Wow!’ I whispered in her ear. ‘I could go down with you all day long.’

‘Stop it,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t give Bentley ideas.’

It wasn’t me who would be giving Bentley ideas, her wetsuit would have done that. He just sat on the opposite bench, watching us, and I wondered what was going on in his head.

I switched my BC from one yellow tank to the other, while Henri attached hers to one of the red ones. Soon we were set to go.

‘Bottom time for this dive will be a max of thirty minutes,’ Truman said, giving us the briefing. ‘You may go inside the wreck if you want, but be careful not to snag your gear on the hatches. And don’t go in on your own in case you get stuck. Maximum depth is sixty-four feet so no decompression stops are required. Nevertheless, rise and surface slowly. Have fun, everybody.’

Carson again carried my BC and tank to the steps, and I was soon descending once more into the magical and alien underwater world, following Henri down the buoy’s anchor line.

We swam away from the line and the shape of the ship soon came into view.

The USS Kittiwake had been a submarine rescue craft for the US Navy and had served all over the world since being commissioned in 1946. Perhaps its most memorable task had been to recover the ‘black box’ flight recorder from the ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger, which had blown up over the Atlantic during launch in January 1986.

Now Kittiwake sat rather forlornly on the sandy seafloor, its superstructure already beginning to show the effects of the marine life that had begun to colonize the grey steel hull.

Henri and I first went into the ship’s bridge through the windows from which the glass had been removed. Then we ventured deeper into the vessel, moving down companionways to the lower decks. At one point we were even able to surface in a compartment where there was an air pocket.

It was an eerie feeling, moving through these watery spaces where once over a hundred men had lived and worked; past the mess deck where the tables at which they had eaten still remained in rows, bolted to the steel floor; along the corridor of the officers’ quarters and into the captain’s cabin.

I checked my watch. We had been down now for fifteen minutes and I had developed a splitting headache that was thumping away behind my eyes. I reckoned I must not be used to the continuous pressure changes in my nasal passages.

I went on following Henri deeper into the structure, but I was beginning to feel decidedly unwell.

I grabbed Henri’s flipper and indicated that I would like to go back to the surface by first pointing at myself and then putting my thumb up. At first she thought I was liking the dive and giving it the ‘thumbs up’ but she soon realized something was amiss when I next rotated my hand horizontally from side to side at the wrist and pointed at my head.

We exited the ship through one of the holes that had been cut in the hull and started to go up slowly.

But, halfway to the surface, I was attacked by a giant sea monster that swallowed me whole and blacked out my world entirely.