Horse Under Water

26 The point of a pen

Take the Atlantic ocean on a cold November night and keep a brisk and chilly wind striking across it from the north. Put a fourteen-foot dinghy somewhere between the heaving waves with the swell on its port quarter, and into it put a damaged echo-sounder, underwater lighting equipment, spare open-circuit bottles and five Thermos flasks of hot wine. Upon it, too, put a Portuguese fisherman with hands sore from trying to hold a heaving boat snagged against a submerged wreck. And standing clad in black rubber suits, complete with their own private arrangement for breathing, put three men: Singleton — a career naval officer anxious to demonstrate the bungling inadequacy of a civilian intelligence organization; a professional salvage free-diver anxious to collect a bribe for betraying his employer without betraying him; and a third man, who, thinking about scribbles on a U-boat chart, just can’t forget that ballpoint pens were not on sale until after the war.