Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (39 page)

Ted Brockett, who had designed the sled for the tow fish, understood Tommy’s concern, but he sympathized with Williamson. “Harvey was always underfoot,” said Brockett. “If something wasn’t working right, he’d get in there with a calculator and a pencil and he’d be designing, calculating the stresses. He was down to the nuts and bolts on
everything
, so I spent a fair amount of time soothing egos and trying to keep these two guys calmed down. Nobody was throwing punches, but the discussions got fairly heated, and on a small boat when you can’t get away from each other, those things tend to build.”

O
FFSHORE NO ONE
functions at 100 percent. Williamson figured you could take anyone who performs well on the beach and put them in a small ship at sea and their productivity would drop by 90 percent. Ships the size of the
Pine River
pitched and rolled. They were powered by diesel engines, which were noisy and belched fumes that filled the head when the head already felt light from the rocking of the ship. Anyone who said they never got seasick was lying; seasickness incapacitated some people, greatly reduced the abilities of others, and dropped the productivity
in all. Every crewman had a wave train out there somewhere with his name on it. A storm like Andrew produced enough wave trains with enough frequencies to nauseate the entire crew. When you haven’t slept well for days, and the engines are groaning and causing the hull itself to vibrate, and the very place you plant your feet is slick steel constantly in motion, and the entire space you have is much less than half the size of a football field, and crowded into that space are twenty other men, at least half of whom you’ve never seen before, and you’re trying to get your work done in a sailor’s three point—two feet on the deck, one hand holding on—you get to where you just can’t tolerate certain things.

“Little insignificant things,” noted Williamson. “Like you can’t stand the way somebody ties their shoes.”

Food takes on a special significance at sea; it becomes almost sacred, certainly symbolic. Because after the weather has gone to hell, after the job has bored everyone senseless, after all of the knees and foreheads have been banged against pitching steel and all the little niggling personal habits of everyone on board have wound everyone else’s internal strings as tight as a banjo’s, food is the only thing left that makes life aboard ship tolerable. In his hands the cook holds the morale of the ship.

On the
Pine River
that summer, first the food was bad, then, as the storm ended and the sea lay down, and they finally could tow straight track lines, they ran out of food altogether. And the cook’s hands shook so bad he couldn’t hold a spatula, let alone the ship’s morale.

Charlie was his name, and he wasn’t a terrible cook; he was an okay cook, but he was an old army cook, a former prisoner of war in Korea who still cooked like he was mess captain at a concentration camp. One of the techs was a strict vegetarian; most of the others tried to stay in shape, and they watched what they ate. They requested a lot of fish, fruit, and vegetables. Charlie was a little guy, high strung and irritable, and he deep-fried everything. One of the techs said he couldn’t fix a chocolate sundae without bacon grease. Three times a day they came into the galley and had to face Charlie the cook. One moment he was friendly, “Yo, how’s it goin’?” and the next he seemed about that far from relieving your neck of your head. Craft knew that Charlie had stashed several pints of his favorite beverage around the ship, but he couldn’t find the stash and he couldn’t catch him nipping.

“He was a low-level drunk throughout the day,” said Craft, “getting just enough to keep himself percolating along, and occasionally he would get a little over that, and then he would be totally helpless.”

Ten days into the sonar search, Charlie ran out of steaks to deep-fry for dinner and started deep-frying chicken. The crew ate deep-fried chicken every night for three nights. “People were getting zits and everything,” said Tommy. “It was horrible.” Finally, the techs took a stand: They would not eat deep-fried chicken one more night. When Charlie heard this, he started serving deep-fried chicken every meal. Even breakfast. Then someone looked in the freezer and realized there was no food left, except for twenty-eight cases of chicken.

“There was no flour to make bread,” said Craft. “There was no cereal left, no juices, no Cokes, no meat, nada. Chicken was it.”

Using a bogus list as the inventory for the ship’s food stores, Charlie had slipped by Craft, the skipper of the ship, and the company’s port captain, and loaded only as much food as he needed to feed the crew for as long as
he
intended to stay at sea, which was about fourteen days.

Charlie locked himself in his bunk and was afraid to come out. Rumors circulated among the crew that they were heading in to reprovision, but Tommy calculated that if they returned to port now, they would lose another six days. He couldn’t go to port, and Williamson agreed. Williamson told the crew he would eat saltines, but they had to finish the job. Tommy called his shore support in Wilmington for a boat to haul groceries and a new cook out to them, but the only boat shore support could find to sail two hundred miles offshore was a shrimper called the
Joe Christmas
.

When Tommy and Bob and Barry had gathered at the round tables and dreamed up ways to accomplish the impossible, they foresaw many difficulties. They studied how others had failed, and they calculated all the ways their own project could fail, and then they set about minimizing their risks. They knew weather could get them, they knew suppliers would be a problem, they knew they might have competition. But in their wildest failure-mode nightmares, they had never come face to face with the
Joe Christmas
.

When they found out their food was on a shrimp boat with a top end of about five knots, Ted Brockett and Will Watson caught some
bluegreen dolphin on a red bass plug, but that was not enough to feed everybody. The crew still had no food, except chicken. Then someone had the idea of using the chicken to catch one of the sharks that constantly circled the ship. John Lettow fashioned a hook out of stainlesssteel rod, and they fastened it to lightweight aircraft cable, and they wired on a whole chicken and threw it overboard.

“There’s like a stream of fat coming off the back of the chicken,” remembered Tommy, “and a shark came up and put his mouth on the chicken, and then he just kind of rolled over and opened his mouth and let the chicken out and swam away. They eat garbage cans and everybody knew that, only they wouldn’t eat this chicken.”

As the shark rolled over and swam away, somewhere in the Atlantic Bight between Charleston and the
Pine River
wandered the
Joe Christmas
, now one day overdue, both her captain and his mate drunk, trying to chart a course but off by a full degree, which had them meandering toward a coordinate sixty miles to the east of the
Pine River
. After they were a day overdue, Tommy had to hire a pilot to fly out and find them.

When the tech crew saw her, no one could believe she had ever set sail. The
Joe Christmas
was forty feet stem to stern and belonged in bays and harbors, fishing for scallops. Brittle shrimp and lobster shells formed scales across a deck that hadn’t been sprayed and cleaned of fish parts for months. Tommy got a whiff when she was still half a mile away. “That boat just stunk to high heaven,” said Tommy. “It made everybody sick.”

Charlie the cook didn’t care what the boat smelled like. They hardly had a line on the shrimp boat before he was aboard and hunkered in down below, and no one on the
Pine River
ever saw him again.

The tech crew was in the middle of a track line and couldn’t stop. Tommy and Craft figured they could transfer the groceries with the two boats moving slowly in tandem, but the shrimp boat skipper, into the sauce and happy to be alive, couldn’t get the hang of it. The techs had to stop in the middle of the track line, record where they had ended, winch in nine thousand feet of cable, and let the tow fish dangle, until they could resume after the
Joe Christmas
departed.

In an hour they had swung the cargo slings and pallets of food over with the crane, and with everyone expecting the skipper to cast off,
his demeanor changed from happy to be alive to terrified of beginning the long trek back to the beach in the dark. He got on the radio and screamed, Oh my God, that he was sinking, that all of a sudden water was rising in the bilge and his pump wasn’t pumping fast enough to keep it out. An engineer from the
Pine River
replaced the skipper’s jerry-rigged pump with a regulation pump, and the water disappeared.

Hours had now passed since the new cook and the groceries had arrived safely on board, but the skipper wouldn’t leave. He yelled that he wasn’t too sure about that new pump, water still seemed to be coming in from somewhere, and now his steering felt loose.

“It’s like a huge curse came on us,” said Tommy. They couldn’t leave the skipper out on the ocean with vision and judgment impaired. But they had track lines to run. Who was going to make up for the time if they didn’t cut the ropes?

It was now almost midnight on June 17. They took the
Joe Christmas
in tow, headed back to the last track line, and the following afternoon resumed where they had left off. For the next two days they ran their track lines and monitored the recorders now that the system seemed to be working, all the while hauling behind them a stinking shrimp boat, her soused skipper, his soused mate, and their soused new friend. “They were all over there getting shit-faced,” said Watson. He could hear them screaming at each other, and then they’d get on the radio and yell obscenities.

Then the skipper notified Tommy he was diabetic. He hadn’t figured on getting lost, so his supply of insulin had run out. Without his insulin he could lapse into a diabetic coma and die. Tommy radioed the Coast Guard, and as he was wondering how much this exercise was going to cost his partners, a Coast Guard Lear jet flew out and dropped a spare bilge pump, syringes, and a refrigerated bottle of insulin.

T
HE OCEAN AROUND
the intersection of latitude 33 and longitude 77 is a lonely patch of water: not much to see, not many visitors, an occasional freighter passing through bound for somewhere else. Days went by without a glimpse of another hull. No birds, a few sharks, some dolphin flashing silver in schools. Not much else. Even the bottom is monotonous, mile after nautical mile of nothing but sediment.

The afternoon after the Coast Guard dropped the pump and the insulin, John Lettow was on the day tower watching four EPC recorders while reading a book. Lettow looked at the recorders, read a couple of sentences, looked at the recorders, read a couple of sentences, his eye rhythmically bouncing from one to the other in a kind of half beat. “You’re clicking in a way that you become syncopated with the machinery,” he said.

That afternoon he was deep into a new book, Tom Clancy’s
The Hunt for Red October
. “This is pretty ironic,” he said. “Clancy’s describing this elaborate system for identifying submarine sonar signatures that the navy uses to track enemy submarines, and he’s discussing the increase in Russian sub activity off of our coastline as the
Red October
was making its break to come to the U.S.”

About that point, Lettow glanced up at the recorders, and right where the stylus belt sweeps the paper he saw puffs of black smoke. So much energy had suddenly shot back into the recorders from somewhere that it overloaded the system and burned the paper black.

Lettow turned down the gain on the recorders to stop them from smoking and pressed the button on the intercom. “Bridge, we got any rainstorms on the horizon?”

The bridge said, “No.”

“Any ships passing close by?”

“No.”

“Any marine life out there splashing around?”

“No.”

“Well, then,” figured Lettow, “we’re having some problems with the sonar.” Whatever the source, it was destroying their data along this track line.

Snapping shrimp clicking backwards in big schools sometimes smoked the paper. Lettow had seen that before. Rain falling faster than about a half inch every hour would also do it. But neither seemed to be the problem.

Five minutes later, two destroyers steamed over the horizon and a fast-attack nuclear submarine surfaced nearby, a hunter-killer group engaged in antisubmarine warfare, and they surrounded the
Pine River
. The crew went out on deck to look at them, and Lettow figured out
what had happened. The navy had picked up their sonar signal coming off the SeaMARC, and they couldn’t recognize the signature—it’s a prototype—so they crept closer. Whatever the reason, they had wiped out the sonar records coming up from the SeaMARC, creating big gaps in the track line. The
Pine River
was still towing the
Joe Christmas
, and if the navy continued its maneuvers in the vicinity, Tommy would lose even more days of search time.

Don Craft got on the radio and tried to call the task force commander; he had been a task force commander himself, so he knew the procedure. But even though he got through to one officer and then another, they wouldn’t put him through to the commander. Sometimes they wouldn’t even answer. Meanwhile, one of the destroyers cruised up abreast of them no more than a quarter mile away, and every time its radar came around, the computers in the control room on the
Pine River
crackled and went dark.

Craft got on the SAT COM and called the CINCLANTFLT Watch Officer at Mayport Naval Base outside Jacksonville. Craft told him they were trying to run a sonar survey and the navy ships on maneuvers were destroying their sonar returns. He wondered if the exercises could move somewhere out of range. The officer said he would see what he could do, but he wasn’t too optimistic. When Craft did not hear back, he called again, and the officer gave him a negative; he said that the task force commander would continue his operations, and that the navy really wasn’t concerned about Craft’s survey; the officer doubted that what they were doing was truly a survey anyhow.