Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (40 page)

Craft reminded the officer of a provision under federal law that held the navy liable if a ship ran over lobster pots not in the way of safe navigation. The same applied to fishing nets and other commercial operations. Craft told the officer they had a day rate of over twenty thousand dollars and a scientific need for the information that was so big Craft couldn’t even estimate the dollar cost. He said he would certainly appreciate it if the officer would try to get their situation reconsidered. The officer said he would pass it on, but if he were Craft, he wouldn’t get too optimistic.

By now, Craft was feeling cantankerous. He thanked the young officer, and then he said, “By the way, this same situation came up on
the West Coast not long ago, and the navy spent $250,000 to pay the claims. What is the name of the OTC out here, so we know how to properly address this?”

The officer informed Craft that the names of navy personnel, especially the officer of tactical command, could not be released. He said he would be in touch. Three hours later, the hunter-killer group disappeared over the horizon.

But they still had the
Joe Christmas
in tow. They finally understood that the skipper had no intention of leaving. He had a new pump, a fresh supply of insulin, a little hootch, nowhere else to go, and a couple of friends who saw things just about the way he did. His only beef was that the Coast Guard had forgotten the cigarettes he had ordered with the insulin.

Tommy radioed the Coast Guard again, and the Coast Guard agreed to send out a cutter to escort the skipper back to the beach. A day and a half later, the cutter arrived at 3:00
A.M.
, and the last thing the crew remembered hearing from the skipper was, “Oh wow! Look at those blue lights, man! Where’d you guys come from?” Then the cutter put the
Joe Christmas
in tow, and together, like a mother duck and her ugly duckling, they putted back to Charleston.

Tommy had twenty days left to image the
Central America
.

A
FTER THE WEATHER
cleared and the swells and the wind subsided, they finally had the SeaMARC calibrated and tuned and the two crews coordinated on the towing. For the next two weeks, even with the
Joe Christmas
in tow and with interference from the navy, they had run thirty-mile track lines.

Mowing the lawn, they called it: moving through the water at one to two knots, back and forth, overlapping each track so as not to miss anything, thirty miles down, five hours to turn around, crab over twenty-five hundred meters, then thirty miles back. The tow fish flew a few hundred meters above the ocean floor, its ears listening for a sonar return, a bounce of its sound waves off a solid object anywhere within its range of five thousand meters.

Enclosed at the head of the back deck, the control room was filled with racks of electronics, recorders, and computers. Williamson ran two towers a day, the day tower from noon to midnight, the night tower from
midnight to noon. On each tower was a pilot who controlled the altitude of the tow fish by winding in or paying out on the winch; a navigator who monitored the ship’s navigation computers; a sonar operator who watched the charts rolling out of the recorders; a SeaMARC technician who recorded each change in the settings; and a watch leader, who had to ensure that no one got so involved in his own little project that the fish crashed into a mountain or the seafloor. It had happened before.

As the SeaMARC passed slowly and silently over the ocean floor a mile and a half beneath the surface of the sea, five graphic recorders, looking like large IBM Selectric typewriters, ran full time, the sonar operator continuously tuning them and changing the paper and the stylus belts. Like the fan belt on a car, the stylus belts whirred around two small spools, the tiny metal styli hypnotically zipping a faint gray line across the paper chart every four seconds. The room smelled of ozone and graphite from the styli burning the special coating off the paper, and the recorders sat covered in black dust.

If a target appeared on the bottom, the styli would spark several times and leave dark marks on the paper. The tech monitoring the recorders would alert navigation he had contact and note the time of contact in the log book and in the margin of the strip chart. Immediately, someone would bring a ruler and try to gauge its length. The paper moved slowly on, the stylus belt still etching a line every four seconds, more sparks coming off the styli, the figure taking shape as they watched, and then the figure would begin to taper off and the styli would go back to laying down faint gray lines as the darkened image scrolled by.

When the SeaMARC had passed a target, they radioed the bridge for the ship’s speed, plotted its position, checked the altitude of the tow fish, checked the gain on the signal, read the cable gauge for how many feet of tow line they had out, and recorded all of it in the logs. Later they could return to that spot for a closer look.

“No target acquisition data has any validity unless it’s repeatable,” noted Craft. “You have to be able to go back to the same spot; otherwise, you haven’t learned anything when you see a target.”

T
HE
S
EA
MARC
SENT
back to the surface far more information than the EPC recorders could reproduce in shades of gray with a stylus belt and
paper. Tommy wanted to recapture some of that lost information, for it might reveal enough to help him distinguish the
Central America
from other shipwrecks.

As the SeaMARC flew above the ocean floor and shot signals back to the EPC recorders, simultaneously the computer started to paint a color version of the same target. Then they could off-load the information to an optical disk and later recall the target, manipulate it, blow it up, subdivide the screen into four different images, paint one black and white like conventional side scan, tweak the intensity of the colors and the scaling ratios on the other three, and determine that
this
target is not what they’re looking for. Or that maybe this one
is
what they’re looking for.

On the optical disk, a gray sketch no bigger than a thumb on the strip chart could be blown up to a picture the size of a man’s head. And each tiny pixel, only a pinprick in the picture, could be assigned a color according to a narrow range of density, and that color could be further subdivided into 256 intensity levels, so they could tell what the target was made of. By the time they had blown up, colored, thresholded, filtered, highlighted, and otherwise stretched the information on that target, what appeared to be a thumb print on the strip chart might look like a steamship with paddle wheels on the computer screen.

Will Watson was monitoring the EPC recorders late one night when they acquired their first large sonar target, an anomaly on the seafloor that could be the
Central America
. Tommy was in the control room, and Watson motioned him to come over. “Here’s our first target.”

“Harvey said, ‘Wow,’” remembered Watson, “and you just saw the sparkle in his eye. He knew at that moment that this system could find old wooden-hulled shipwrecks on the seafloor.”

For twelve hours one tech team watched the strip charts roll by; then they switched, and the other tech team watched them roll by for another twelve hours. Then they switched again. Ten to twenty times a day the styli drew the black-and-white image of an anomaly, something that stood out against the sediment on the ocean floor. But most anomalies they quickly discarded: cargo containers ripped loose in a storm, a German U-boat sunk in World War II, sailboats and fishing boats gone down, clumps of fifty-five-gallon drums lined in concrete and filled with
radioactive waste. “Lots of junk down there,” said Williamson. Every two or three days, one of the two tech teams would see a single target about the right size, about the right density, that could be the wreck of the
Central America
.

Williamson, who was watch leader of the night tower, likened the operation to flying a helicopter, the pilot trying to fly at a uniform height above the bottom, continuously jockeying with the winch, cable in, cable out, compensating for currents or subtle variations in the ship’s speed, trying to find that sweet spot where the water flowing by the long arc of cable did not push it up too high or allow it to sag too low, but kept the SeaMARC at a constant altitude, flying straight and level. Williamson had been doing this for a long time, and he never got bored.

Craft could be in the control room three minutes before tears from the pain of boredom came to his eyes. “If the gear’s in the water and everything is operating properly,” said Craft, “the people on watch are sitting in there watching rolls of paper go by. When they paint a target, it’s a big event.”

The lucky shift was the one on duty when they reached the end of a track line and had to turn the ship around. This maneuver took five or six hours, and the techs had nothing to do in the control room until the ship was back on track and headed down another line. If the turn came during daylight, they got their sunglasses and headed up to catch a few rays on Steel Beach, the helo-pad that stretched out over the back deck.

The techs got along pretty well, but Will Watson noticed a subtle transition at sea. After a few weeks, every guy out there had his main-spring torqued good and tight. Watson figured it all had to do with loss of control. Onshore, you had control; offshore, everything unfolded any way it damn well pleased and you went along—with the weather, with equipment breaks, with lack of sleep, bad food, tedium, worrying over wives and girlfriends—until your mind entered an altered state, where a normal, easygoing person became suspicious, impatient, and sometimes paranoid. When you got back to the beach and gradually resumed control over your life, you couldn’t believe you ever felt that way about something so insignificant.

One afternoon three or four weeks into the survey, a few of the techs were watching paper roll by in the control room, while several others
were sunning themselves on Steel Beach or fishing for mahimahi, when suddenly they heard gunshots.

One of the techs had been standing on the back deck yelling for help, and a couple of guys in the control room had raced out and found him hooked into a seven-foot white-tip shark that was angry and thrashing blue water white. He didn’t know what to do. Lettow pulled the line in enough to take a turn around the mooring bitts. Then the tech picked up an aluminum gaff with a five-foot handle, and he gaffed the shark, landing the point in the shark’s eye. The shark popped its tail, rose up out of the water, and bit off three feet of the gaff. The tech leaped back several feet, the aluminum stub in his hand, and then with three other techs watching wide eyed and slack jawed, he dived his hand into his vest and drew out an opera-size .22 revolver and started blasting the shark.

“None of us would have felt very good the whole trip,” said Lettow, “had we known he had a gun.”

With a meat hook stuck in its jaw, one eye gaffed, and a couple of hard thumps from the bullets, the shark glared up at them with its one good eye, jerked its head, snapped the cable, and swam away.

When Craft heard about the incident, he was furious. He had three rules when he sailed: No drugs, no alcohol, no guns. No excuses. No conditions. Ever. He told everyone an hour before departure, and he warned them he would
not
proceed as a court of law, that he would search lockers, even if he only
thought
someone may have violated these rules. The drugs, the alcohol, the gun would then be confiscated, and the owner would be dumped on the dock at the next port o’ call. Craft was already mad that Charlie the cook had managed to keep his liquor supply hidden.

“As soon as I found out about it, I crawled aboard him,” said Craft. “I’ve always operated on the theory that to be effective, discipline must be swift.” Craft threatened to kill him if he ever pulled a stunt like that again. “He was a real kook,” said Craft. If they had been headed into port during the next few days, Craft would have bounced the guy and his expertise off the ship. He didn’t care if the guy was God’s gift to sonar. But they were so far behind already, they couldn’t afford a trip in, or they would lose another two or three days.

They never saw the gun again, but they caught the same guy later hoarding Popsicles, eating five or six of them a shift, claiming he had had only two, then secreting little stashes of them in the backs of freezers around the ship. When confronted, he claimed they belonged to him. Will Watson took them away and passed them out to the other techs. It was ninety degrees out on the water, they didn’t have a whole lot to look forward to anyhow, and those Popsicles made life a little more tolerable.

W
HEN
W
ILLIAMSON CAME
on the night tower, he analyzed the data from the previous twelve-hour shift. No one questioned Williamson’s eye. He could see things in a sonar return no one else could see. As he reviewed the strip charts, he would call out targets for the techs to bring up on the computer screen, and they would play with the image: blow it up, filter it, alter the colors, measure it. The strip charts still were the first stage of elimination, where they could approximate length and width; where they could draw inferences about wood and steel. But with the computer they could see things in a target no one had ever seen.

At last the weather had moderated and the sea was calm, only gentle swells rocking the
Pine River
as they mowed the lawn up and down the search map. They had now completed half of the track lines on the search map; yet, because those lines ran through the cells of much higher probability, they had already covered eighty-six percentile on the probability map, and they had imaged hundreds of anomalies. Williamson dismissed most of them because they obviously were too short. He eliminated most of even the larger targets for being too round, too hard, or apparently some form of geology. The few left became key targets. Williamson called this short list the “hit parade” and every target on it had a reasonable possibility of being the
Central America
. He next arranged the hit parade in order, according to each target’s resemblance to the models Tommy had developed of what the wreck of the
Central America
would look like after 130 years on the ocean floor. And from the moment he saw it, one stood out, even on the strip chart: It appeared to be a sidewheel steamer, resting upright on the bottom, a dark humped shadow amidships indicating paddle wheels. Williamson designated the target “Sidewheel.”