Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (34 page)

Tommy knew of Stone’s work, and he had wondered for some time if the same methods Stone used to monitor enemy subs and rescue people lost at sea could find a ship sunk long ago and now resting on the bottom. His letter in 1984 requested a summary of Stone’s background. Tommy kept the letter vague, simply planting the seed that he might need Stone’s services. When Stone sent Tommy the company literature, Tommy called, and they kept in touch by phone over the next year, Tommy learning more about search theory from Stone and eventually revealing to Stone that he was looking for a shipwreck. Then in the early summer of 1985 Stone planned to attend his twentieth college reunion at Antioch, which was in Yellow Springs, Ohio, only fifty miles west of Columbus. “I called up Tom,” said Stone, “and suggested that it’d be a good time to get together.”

Stone arranged for them to meet in a private classroom with desks and blackboard. When Tommy and Bob arrived, Stone made an innocent mistake that many others would make, though no one would make it more than once. Tommy had not discussed the target of his search other than to describe it as a shipwreck, but Stone knew that no one
would spend the time or the money to look for a shipwreck unless there was something valuable on board, so he assumed the ship had sunk with a substantial treasure. Early in the conversation, he referred to Tommy as a “treasure hunter.”

“He bristled,” recalled Stone, “and he corrected me rather sharply, so I tried to strike that from my vocabulary.”

Tommy was friendly but slow and methodical in his speech, careful to present only the information Stone needed to determine if his system would work for this kind of search. To help them Stone would have to have the best information they could produce, but this was the core of the project, the most secret information they had, and before he would let any of it out, Tommy had to get a sense of how far he could trust Stone.

First, Stone had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, then Tommy explained a little more of the project, that a ship had sunk in a hurricane and about sixty of the survivors had given their stories to the press. Based on those stories, they had created a matrix broken into time segments. He wanted to know if Stone could apply search theory to that information and mold it all into a probability map marking the areas where they should concentrate their sonar search.

As Stone listened, one thing impressed him: Tommy’s commitment to the science. “He was going about this in careful scientific fashion. He wasn’t in it strictly for the money. That came through strongly, and it’s very consistent with the way he’s acted ever since.”

Still, Stone was skeptical about how well organized they had their information and whether he could turn history into mathematics. In his cursory explanation, Tommy only alluded to the historical data Bob had gathered from the old articles. Bob now carefully unfolded part of the Data Correlation Matrix, the handwritten original, smeared with erasures where information had been plugged into the wrong time slot or Bob had found better data on the same event. Bob told him that that matrix was a working copy and that if Stone found it valuable, he would send him a better draft on a Lotus spreadsheet.

Stone perused the matrix and asked how many accounts they had. Bob told him that fifty-nine survivors and sea captains of other vessels had made statements to reporters onshore. Of those, he had gleaned thirty-three that offered information concerning weather, the condition
of the ship, or the ship’s location at various times, things that he felt would help them locate the wreck site. “It didn’t mean a lot to me until I got a chance to sit down and read it carefully,” said Stone, “and then I realized what an incredibly careful job he had done.”

Bob told Stone that from the historical accounts, they had pulled the coordinates of the ship shortly before it sank. He asked Stone how he would use that piece of information. Stone sketched on the blackboard, explaining basic search theory. “The trick to doing all these things,” he said, “is to take all of the uncertainties and all of your knowledge and quantify them, whether they come from objective or subjective sources.” The second step was to combine the numbers in analytically correct fashion to produce a probability distribution of the target location. Stone told Bob he would start with the last known position and factor in a number of variables like wind and current, which he would throw into a computer to create a range of probability.

Bob said, “Okay, I’ve got another piece of information here. We know that survivors were picked up sometime later by another ship and that ship estimated its position. How would you use that piece of information?”

Back when Stone and Tony Richardson were finding people lost at sea for the Coast Guard, Richardson had pondered different ways to use whatever data they had. “So I pulled that out of my hip pocket,” said Stone, “and explained how we could go backward in time.” That would be a new scenario and he would take the coordinate of the rescue ship and run everything in reverse, back to the site of the sinking.

By the end of the meeting, Stone had only one reservation about the idea. “Tommy’s had trouble getting money together,” said Stone, “and I’m asking myself, Suppose I do all this work for him and he doesn’t pay the bill. I can’t even sue him. He probably doesn’t have any assets, right?” But if Tommy would agree to pay for the first set of analyses in advance, Stone concluded he could turn their historical information into a probability map, which would give them the most efficient way to search for the
Central America
.

T
HE LAWYERS
K
ELLY
and Loveland filed the Certificate of Limited Partnership with the Franklin County Recorder, which required them to disclose the names of the partners, and no sooner had they filed than
a reporter for Columbus’s newsweekly,
Business First
, routinely checking new filings, saw the roster of elite Columbus citizens and was on the phone calling them for an interview. She called Tommy, and he didn’t want to talk to her; but worse than that he didn’t want to appear evasive. All he could do was steer her away from the romantic and the sensational toward the scientific. “I’m really a scientist,” he told her. “We’re combining multidisciplinary efforts—historic research, ocean engineering, marine geophysics, deep-water biology, and side-scan technology.” On June 24, 1985, the words Tommy dreaded appeared in the headline on the front page: “TREASURE HUNT ATTRACTS PROMINENT EXECUTIVES.” Although the article never mentioned the
Central America
, it revealed far more about the project than Tommy wanted known, and the three investors quoted used phrases like “take a flier,” “crap shoot,” and “sunken treasure,” the swashbuckling tone Tommy had always been careful to avoid. One compared the project to
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and said it was “top secret stuff.”

This was Tommy’s first brush with the media, and he saw how quickly the public’s perception of the project could be skewed if he did not control the release of information. If the media whipped the public into a froth with “visions of tall sailing vessels, swashbuckling pirates and treasure maps,” as the article had opened, then everyone would perceive the project as a treasure hunt, and he would be embroiled in the same problems he had seen topple the treasure hunters. Tommy needed someone to help him convey to the public the serious and scientific aspects of the project; he needed someone to help him communicate with investors and suppliers, and with the science and history and archaeology and technology communities; he needed someone to take all of the deep-water shipwreck theories he and Bob and Robbie had roughed out in the concept paper and distill them into one clear, comprehensive document for the average, intelligent investor. He needed a writer, someone good at communicating ideas, someone who understood the media, someone he could trust. Someone like his old friend Barry Schatz.

After Tommy left Key West in 1979, Barry had spent six months in Mexico and Central America. To a journalism colleague he wrote from San Cristobal, “Here I am holed up in the seven-thousand-foot
level of the Sierra Madre range, going to gory bullfights and generally rolling in the mud and the blood and the beer.” He had published a lengthy magazine piece on Haiti and one on Quebec, written several short stories, and committed himself to a novel. After six months of wandering, though, he had returned to Florida, this time Gainesville, where he finished his degree at the University of Florida, studying creative writing. He had thought about applying to law school but instead enrolled in a master’s program in Latin American Studies. He now served as an editor at the University Presses of Florida while pursuing his master’s half-time.

Over the past three years, Tommy had called Barry occasionally to tell him about working at Battelle and about his interest in recovering deep-ocean historic shipwrecks, but he had given Barry few details. When he phoned in late June 1985, he told Barry he had preliminary funding for the deep-ocean project, and he asked if Barry could come to Columbus. “Harvey needs people to think with,” said Barry, “so he called and asked if I would help out with the press stuff.” Tommy emphasized that there were no guarantees. “It’s an exciting project,” he said, “a project that I believe in.” And he could pay Barry a small wage. But it could all be over in six months. Barry didn’t care; the idea sounded intriguing, and after four years in Gainesville he was ready to move on.

When Barry arrived in Columbus, Tommy took him to meet his new friend and confidant, but even Barry’s own leanings toward the bohemian did not prepare him for Bob Evans. “He was so disorganized it was amazing,” said Barry. “He could keep stuff in his head, but he could not find his shoes.”

Bob had no misgivings about Barry. “It was a very dynamic, very productive relationship,” said Bob, “right from the outset. I immediately felt like he really could contribute to the project.”

Barry spent the next two weeks working twelve- to sixteen-hour days, trying to unravel and recast the technical language of the original concept paper into a project game plan. Then together, Tommy, Barry, and Bob dissected every sentence, searching for nuance. The words had to inform but not reveal too much, be clear but not condescending, emphasize technology but not mire in the technical, express confidence but not certainty, sound adventurous but not swashbuckling, make the project seem challenging but not impossible.

“We had convinced investors to put up at least enough money to find out if it really was viable,” said Bob. “So this was the actual act of creating the go-ahead plan. All those concepts had to be refined and reduced to words.”

They stripped it of all flash; this was not a treasure hunt. It was a scientific pursuit, logical and thorough. It would not be used to attract financing; it would be distributed to those who already had invested to assure them that they had bought into a sound operation. More than anything else, Tommy wanted the document to emphasize that finding something of value on the bottom of the deep ocean did not have to be a roll of the dice, as so many had described it. “That was the theme,” said Tommy. “If you were going to do one of these, how would you do it so it wouldn’t be blue-sky?” Throughout the treatise, the theme surfaced: By methodically identifying and quantifying risk, they could allocate the resources and the time to solving the most difficult problems and thereby achieve the highest probability of success.

Day and night, they brainstormed, wrote and rewrote, made graphs and charts, reduced three paragraphs to one, distilling it all into one simple document. It was their manifesto, with methodology, risk analyses, and flow charts. The concept paper grew into “A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Historic Shipwreck Recovery,” or as Tommy, Bob, and Barry called it, “the Blue Book.” For partners and financial dealings, they named their company Recovery Limited; but for the public, they took the name Columbus-America Discovery Group.

W
ITH SOME OF
the seed money, Tommy had rented an old, three-story, redbrick Victorian on Neil Avenue, a street lined for blocks with trees and other old Victorians. The house had been built for entertaining, with twin formal parlors at the entry, leaded windows, and a fireplace in every room. A carved oak staircase led to the second floor and then on to the attic, where the original owner had installed a dance floor among the eaves for Sunday afternoon teas. Tommy used the house as an office, a place to work, to meet with investors; a place for Barry to live. After they finished the Blue Book, every Tuesday night and sometimes several other nights a week, Tommy, Barry, and Bob convened in the formal dining room to discuss the direction of the project. They called the meetings “round tables.”

The round tables began at seven and often ran till long past midnight. They were the intellectual heart of the project, where the three men dreamed out loud. To help him ruminate, Bob stuck to his Wild Turkey neat, and Barry joined Tommy in sipping warm tequila. Tommy sometimes had a short agenda of things he wanted to cover, but typically he got no more than halfway down the list before their thoughts had drifted elsewhere. Rather than steer them back to the agenda, Tommy encouraged the divergence. He wanted an atmosphere like Battelle’s, but with even less red tape and more personal motivation, “Where you really get into the guts of it,” said Tommy, “the power to make something succeed. And the key to it is to find people who like to think like that.”

Barry came to the round tables as a journalist and insatiable traveler, with a head full of Latin American writers like Borges and Paz, a gourmand’s palate, a writer’s eye for detail, childhood experience with Tommy’s way of thinking, and ready to embrace a new adventure. Bob now played keyboard in a nighttime blues band organized by an ex-con; packed inside his head was a sizable understanding of fossiliferous strata from the Paleozoic to the Cainozoic, experience with the intricate variations in syncopation from jazz to rhythm and blues, a near photographic memory, a penchant for historical sleuthing, and training in the scientific method. Tommy brought the perspective of an engineer and inventor with knowledge enough to impress the heads of top-secret government efforts, an instinct for quantifying risk, an obsession with experimenting, and a brain still searching through the junkyard of ideas for spare parts to hook together to create something no one had ever seen before.