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For him the turning of a few screws was the end of the job. For the rest of the time he
would be a useless supercargo. It would be easier to get rid of him. But that couldn't be
done yet. He would have to be kept on just in case the weapons had to be used. But he
was a depressing little man and a near hysteric. Largo didn't like such people near him.
They lowered his spirits. They smelled of bad luck. Kotze would have to be found some
job in the engine room where he would be kept busy and, above all, out of sight.
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Largo went into the cockpit bridge. The captain was sitting at the wheel, a light
aluminum affair consisting only of the bottom half of a circle. Largo said, «Okay. Let's
go.» The captain reached out his hand to the bank of buttons at his side and pressed
the one that said Start Both .» There came a low, hollow rumble from amidships.
A light blinked on the panel to show that both engines were firing properly. The
captain pulled the electromagnetic gear shift to « Slow Ahead Both « and the yacht
began to move. The captain made it « Full Ahead Both « and the yacht trembled and
settled a little in the stern. The captain watched the revolution counter, his hand on a
squat lever at his side. At twenty knots the counter showed 5000. The captain inched
back the lever that depressed the great steel scoop below the hull. The revolutions
remained the same, but the finger of the speedometer crawled on round the dial until it
said forty knots. Now the yacht was half flying, half planing across the glittering sheet of
still water, the hull supported four feet above the surface on the broad, slightly uptilted
metal skid and with only a few feet of the stern and the two big screws submerged. It
was a glorious sensation and Largo, as he always did, thrilled to it.
The motor yacht, Disco Volante , was a hydrofoil craft, built for Largo with SPECTRE
funds by the Italian constructors Leopoldo Rodrigues of Messina, the only firm in the
world to have successfully adapted the Shertel-Sachsenberg system to commercial
use. With a hull of aluminum and magnesium alloy, two Daimler-Benz four-stroke
Diesels supercharged by twin Brown-Boveri turbo superchargers, the Disco Volante
could move her hundred tons at around fifty knots, with a cruising range at that speed
of around four hundred miles. She had cost £200,000, but she had been the only craft
in the world with the speed, cargo-, and passenger-space, and with the essential
shallow draft for the job required of her in Bahamian waters.
The constructors claim of this type of craft that it has a particular refinement that
SPECTRE had appreciated. Having high stability and a shallow draft, Aliscafos , as
they are called in Italy, do not determine magnetic field variation, nor do they cause
pressure waves both desirable characteristics, in case the Disco Volante might wish,
some time in her career, to escape detection.
Six months before, the Disco had been shipped out to the Florida Keys by the South
Atlantic route. She had been a sensation in Florida waters and among the Bahamas,
and had vastly helped to make Largo the most popular «millionaire» in a corner of the
world that crawls with millionaires who «have everything.» And the fast and mysterious
voyages he made in the Disco , with all those underwater swimmers and occasionally
with a two seater Lycoming-engined folding-wing amphibian mounted on the roof of the
streamlined superstructure had aroused just the right amount of excited comment.
Slowly, Largo had let the secret leak out through his own indiscretions at dinners and
cocktail parties, through carefully primed members of the crew in the Bay Street bars.
This was a treasure hunt, an important one. There was a pirates' map, a sunken
galleon thickly overgrown with coral. The wreck had been located. Largo was only
waiting for the end of the winter tourist season and for the calms of early summer and
then his shareholders would be coming out from Europe and work would begin in
earnest. And two days before, the shareholders, nineteen of them, had duly come
trickling in to Nassau by different routes from Bermuda, from New York, from Miami.
Rather dull-looking people to be sure, just the sort of hard-headed, hard-working
businessmen who would be amused by a gamble like this, a pleasant sunshine gamble
with a couple of weeks' holiday in Nassau to make up for it if the doubloons were after
all not in the wreck. And that evening, with all the visitors on board, the engines of the
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Disco had begun to murmur, just when they should have, the harbor folk agreed, just
when it was getting dark, and the beautiful dark blue and white yacht had slid out of
harbor. Once in the open sea, the engines had started up their deep booming that had
gradually diminished to the southeast, toward, the listeners agreed, an entirely
appropriate hunting ground.
The southerly course was considered appropriate because it is among the Southern
Bahamas that the great local treasure troves are expected to be found. It was through
the southerly passages through these islands the Crooked Island, the Mayaguana and
the Caicos passages that the Spanish treasure ships would try to dodge the pirates
and the French and British fleets as they made for home. Here, it is believed, lie the
remains of the Porto Pedro , sunk in 1668, with a million pounds of bullion on board.
The Santa Cruz , lost in 1694, carried twice as much, and the El Capitan and San
Pedro, Both sunk in 1719, carried a million, and half a million, pounds of treasure
respectively.
Every year, treasure hunts for these and other ships are carried out among the
Southern Bahamas. No one can guess how much, if anything, has been recovered, but
everyone in Nassau knows of the 72-lb. silver bar recovered by two Nassau
businessmen off Gorda Cay in 1950, and since presented to the Nassau Development
Board, in whose offices it is permanently on view. So all Bahamians know that treasure
is there for the finding, and when the harbor folk of Nassau heard the deep boom of the
Disco's engines dying away to the south, they nodded wisely.
But once the Disco was well away and the moon had not yet risen, with all lights
doused, she swung away in a wide circle toward the west and toward the rendezvous
point she was now leaving. Now she was a hundred miles, two hours, away from
Nassau. But it would be almost dawn when, after one more vital call, Nassau would
again hear the boom of her engines coming in from the false southern trail.
Largo got up and bent over the chart table. They had covered the course many times
and in all weathers. It was really no problem. But Phases I and II had gone so well that
double care must be taken over Phase III. Yes, all was well. They were dead on course.
Fifty miles. They would be there in an hour. He told the captain to keep the yacht as
she was, and went below to the radio room. Eleven-fifteen was just coming up. It was
call time. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]