Vatican FileSS

Brandt and Gerbler had located four dominant boxes intact on the lake bed. The lower box felt as though it were badly disintegrated. Consensus was that this box had suffered the landing rather poorly and could’ve fragmented as the barge hit bottom. To identify each of the four intact boxes, and establish reference points to the field, Gerbler chose to name the boxes Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Brandt would have labeled the boxes A, B, C and D but as Gerbler was first to make the identification move, Brandt acquiesced to the “elder man.”
He pulled the tag-pad from his belt and scribbled each of the names, affixing one to each of the boxes. A touch of irony considering the Nazi origin of the contents, Brandt thought. Might’ve been better had it ended up in the Vatican Bank with the rest of the Nazi hoard.
One box had spewed its content about the silted lake-bed, several gold bars that lay scattered about, each covered in black slime. Brandt attached a fifty pound lift-bag to one bar, slipped a loop onto the bag and released it so that it made an ascent along the yellow ‘anchor’ line. Brandt also brought two even larger lift bags to the lake bed, along with a harness net. To prevent an out-of-control lift, he tried matching the lift capacity of the bag to the weight of the unopened box, the two bags being the result of a pre-dive ‘best guess’ estimate. He ran his hands around the edges, sensed the approximate sizes, and visualized the contents to be gold bars.
Brandt set about attaching a five hundred pound lift bag either side of the only remaining box but needed sufficient clearance beneath it for him to slide the harness. Both divers were familiar with lift-bag salvage . . . never be above or below the load . . . never exceed the recommended safe ascent rate. Stop and decompress at forty feet, thirty feet, twenty feet and ten feet.
Brandt took a breath, then gave thumbs up to Gerbler, but the box remained fixed to the lake-bed.
We need pontoons; pontoons will get it to the surface, Brandt thought. But the nearest pontoons were in Ramstein. Even if they were flown in, their size would attract unwanted attention. He knew better than struggle any longer with the box. It defied the lift-bags and remained stuck on the lake-bed, and struggling would only result in a quicker depletion of their air supply. He pointed at the box and Gerbler made hand signs suggesting they return with a crow-bar and pry the thing open, allowing the contents to be raised by regular lift-bags a few pieces at a time. It would be a slower process, but far easier than raising an intact, sealed box. He looked toward the surface, his eyes straining through the murky face of his dive mask, tried tracking the anchor line but the yellow polypropylene securing the box to the tree trunk had faded from sight in the weak glow of his light beam as it struggled to pierce the blackness of the water. Aside from a few feet of anchor line, each diver’s peripheral awareness of ascending bubbles was the only indication of which way was up.
The slightest movement resulted in their dive-fins acting like large fans, each gentle motion stirring up an opaque wall of silt and creating black clouds that forbad any penetration by the beams from the flash lights; visibility was now only three feet in the cold murky water of Lake Como.
Brandt was aware of the deep trench that descended to over one thousand four hundred feet at its deepest point. Gerbler signaled to Brandt, pointed to the surface then tapped on his air gage. It indicated near empty. Gerbler lit up the face of his compass, pointed in the direction of the backup tanks some fifty feet north, then set off through the grave-like blackness. After what seemed an eternity, Brandt, sensed the urgency and began swimming a little faster.