Читать книгу Deeper into the Darkness онлайн

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We clipped a reel onto the downline and reeled out as we moved across what turned out to be a gap of 5–8 metres until we arrived at a solid wall of rusted steel. We had arrived at Pathfinder’s starboard side, the hull disappearing down into the silty seabed. Shining my torch up the hull plating here, I could see where the wall of steel ended at the horizontal main deck above me.

We rose up this vertical wall of steel until we were able to pop over the bulwark onto the main deck at just under 60 metres, and here we tied off the reel line. The other divers wouldn’t need to go all the way to the seabed and rack up unnecessary deco – they would just come down to the reel and then move straight across to the main deck. I looked up the downline and thought I could see the faintest trace of their torches far above us as they descended.

We appeared to have arrived halfway along the ship, between the bridge and the stern. We moved off slowly on our scooters, forward along the starboard side of the hull, past the open circles where her three smokestacks had stood on top of a slender superstructure that was one deck level high. Dotted along the starboard side of the deck were lifeboat davits – some of these still with the original ropes hanging from them despite more than 90 years on the bottom.