Among the more ridiculous and unsubstantiated fictions perpetuated by people who don't know what they are talking about is the particularly half-witted one that death by drowning is peaceful, easy, and, in fact, downright pleasant. It's not. It's a terrible way to die. I know, because I was drowning, and didn't like it one bit.
My ballooning head felt as if it were being bumped full of compressed air, my ears and eyes ached savagely, my nostrils, mouth and stomach were full of sea water, and my bursting lungs felt as if someone had filled them with petrol and struck a match.
Maybe if I opened my mouth, maybe if I relieved that flaming agony that was my lungs, I took that one great gasping breath that would be the last I would ever take, maybe it would be quiet, pleasant, and peaceful. On the form to date, I couldn't believe it.
The door was jammed. After beating the fuselage, it would have been a miracle if it hadn't jammed. I pushed the door, I pulled at it, I beat at it with my clenched fists. It stayed jammed. The blood roared and hissed in my ears, the flaming vice around my chest and lungs, crushing the life out of me.
I braced both feet on the instrument panel, laid both hands on the door handle, and thrust my legs, twisting my hand, using the power and leverage a man can use only when he knows he is dying. The door handle sheared, the thrust of my legs carried me backwards and upwards toward the after end of the fuselage, and suddenly my lungs could take no more.
Death couldn't be worse than this agony. The air rushed out through my water-filled mouth and nostrils, and I sucked in this one great gasping breath, this lungful of sea-water, this last I would ever take.
It wasn't a lungful of water, it was a lungful of air. Noxious compressed air laden with the fumes of petrol and oil, but air for all of that. This marvellous mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, petrol and oil trapped in an air pocket under the undamaged part of the helicopter's fuselage, the only part undamaged by the impact of whatever had hit us.
The water level was around my neck. I took half a dozen deep whooping breaths, enough to ease the fire in my lungs and the roaring, hissing, and dizziness in my head to tolerable levels. Then, I pushed myself backwards and upwards to the extreme limit of the fuselage.
The water was at chest level now. I moved a hand around in the blind darkness to try to estimate the amount of air available to me. Impossible to judge accurately, but enough, I guessed, compressed as it was, to last for ten to fifteen minutes.
I moved across to the left of the fuselage, took a deep breath, and pushed myself forward and downwards. Eight feet behind the dead pilot's seat was the passenger door, maybe I could force that. I found it right away, not the door, but the opening where the door had been.
The impact that had jammed the door on the right-hand side where I'd been had burst this door open. I pushed myself back to the upper part of the fuselage again and helped myself to a few more deep breaths of that compressed air. It didn't taste so good, as it had done the first time.
Now that I knew I could go at any time. I was in no hurry to leave. Up above, guns in hand, the Russians on the trawler would be waiting, and if there was one outstanding attribute that characterised the attitude of the SVR, it was a single-minded thoroughness. Where those men were concerned, a job half done was no job at all.
They would have come from the trawler via an inflatable with an outboard motor. It would probably be sitting directly over the spot where the helicopter had gone down, and the crew wouldn't be sitting around with drinks in their hands congratulating themselves on their success, they'd be lining the side with searchlights or flashes and waiting to see if anyone would break the surface. With their guns in their hands.
If I ever got back home, if I ever contacted my superiors again, I wondered dully what I would say to them. What I'd already given away to the unknown enemy, and if that hadn't been obvious, after the fake constables had set the bugs in Alexis's caravan, and now I'd lost Watts his life and the police a valuable helicopter.
After my superiors had finished with me, my days as an investigator would be finished and finished for ever. With the kind of references, I'd be given, I would probably never work again. Not that it would make any difference to those faceless Mandarins now. There was a heavy debt that had to be paid, and the matter was out of their hands now. On the form to date, I thought bleakly, there wasn't one bookmaker in the land who would have given odds of one in a thousand of that debt ever being repaid. Only a fool bet against a certainty.
I wondered vaguely how long the men up top would wait – my conviction that they would be waiting was absolute. And then I felt a dry salty taste in my mouth that had nothing to do with steadily deteriorating quality of air. It was pretty foul by this time, but a man can survive a surprisingly long time in foul air, and there was enough oxygen left in that heavily tainted atmosphere to last me for a few minutes yet.
The question was not how long they would wait, but how long I could wait. Or had I already waited too long? I could feel the panic in my throat, like some solid lump in my windpipe, completely obstructing my breathing and had to make a conscious physical effort to force it down.
I tried to recall all I could from my training. How long had I been under water, and how deep down was I? How long had that dive down from the surface of the sea to the bottom taken?
Under those conditions, time loses all meaning. Say forty seconds. Just over half-way down, I'd taken my last gulp of air before the water in the fuselage had flooded over my head. And then a minute, probably a minute and a half, fighting with that bloody door. Since then, a minute to recover, half a minute to recover, half a minute to locate the open door, and then how long? Six minutes, seven? Not less than seven. I couldn't reckon on a total of less than ten minutes. The lump was back in my throat again.
How deep was I? That was the life-or-death death question. I could tell from the pressure that I was pretty deep. But how deep? Sixty feet? Ninety feet? One-hundred-and-twenty feet? I tried to recall the charts of Cape Ore I had seen during the briefing for this assignment. There were four-hundred-and-eighty-feet in the deepest channel, and the channel was pretty close to the southern shore at this point, so the water was steep-to. God above, I might even be in one-hundred-and-fifty-feet.
If I was, well that was it. finish. How did the decompression tables go again? At a hundred-and-eighty-feet who has been under water for ten minutes, requires eighteen minutes for decompression to stop on the way up.
When you breathe air under pressure, the excess nitrogen is stored in the tissues. When you begin to surface, this nitrogen is carried by the lungs and eliminated in respiration. If you can rise too rapidly, respiration can't cope with it, and nitrogen bubbles form in the blood, causing the agonising and crippling diver's bends.
Even at a hundred-and-twenty-foot, I'd require a six-minute halt for decompression on the way up, and if there was one certain fact in life, it was that decompression stops were out for me. I'd be broken man. What I knew for certain was that every additional second I remained there would make the bends all the more agonising and crippling when they finally struck. All at once, the prospect of surfacing beneath the steady guns and the pitiless eyes of the men above seemed positively attractive compared to the alternative.
I took several deep breaths to get as much oxygen as possible into my bloodstream, exhaled to the fullest extent, and took a long final breath to fill every last cubic millimetre in every last nook and cranny in my lungs, dived under the water and made for the surface.