Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (48 page)

The last member of the tech team to arrive was Don Hackman, who showed up a few days later wearing navy shorts and a light blue shirt.

F
OR THE NEXT
week, the techs stored navigation grid equipment, sorted out parts of the vehicle, wound thirteen thousand feet of cable onto the winch, equipped the laboratory and the shop and the communications shack, and installed the computers and the monitors in the control room. Bob set up his laboratory with equipment and reference works to study samples of sediment and wood fragments at the site, and to collect and catalog the artifacts. Doering and Hackman created a darkroom in one of the shower stalls, so they could immediately develop and analyze the film. Scotty worked to get the Star Fix navigation system talking to the Robertson DP. Barry helped Tommy draft letters to the partners and consulted with a public relations firm out of New York. Tommy seemed to be always on the phone.

Moore and the rest of the techs sat in the yard surrounded by unopened boxes of electronics and stacks of four-foot cubes framed in aluminum. They would have no quiet warehouse to assemble the vehicle, no controlled atmosphere to test it. They would have to mount all of the parts and route all of the cables and hoses and connect all of the electronics and hydraulics in the yard, at the dock, and on the back deck of the
Navigator
as it headed out. The vehicle’s first test would have to be at sea. As the techs worked, welders and machinists and carpenters and electricians hustled around them from the dock to the ship and back to the dock again.

“It was absolutely nuts,” said Brockett. “It was a madhouse.”

Every morning, in the middle of the chaos, a nice man, a squeezyhuggy, grandfatherly type, showed up at the ship asking for a list. This was Bob Hodgdon, the logistics expert who could find anything. A long time ago, Hodgdon had decided to become a logistics expert, because he hated to wear long pants. He and Craft knew each other from earlier top-secret operations for the government.

Hodgdon had arrived in town a week earlier than everybody else, and he did the same thing he had done back when he managed logistics for the CIA’s covert attempt to raise the Russian submarine: got out the yellow pages of the local phone book to see what goods and services were available, then visited the shops to find out what they could do and
what they had on hand—machine shops, welding shops, rigging shops, electronics shops, electrical shops, even grocery stores. Then each morning, he walked around the yard and the shop, collecting everyone’s parts list, and he returned each evening in a van loaded with welders and wrenches and hammers, transistors and resistors and capacitors, computer chips and screws and wire in a selection of gauges, nails, bolts, fuses, tape, saws, vises, circuit breakers, filters, floats, potting material, radiator hoses, heater hoses, hydraulic fittings, pipe cutters, filling the ship with everything they might need at sea.

W
HILE THE
E-P
LAN
mobilization continued into late May, the lawyers flew to Jacksonville to meet with Tommy and decide one thing: Should they file an admiralty claim with the court? If they did, they had to reveal their coordinates. If they didn’t, they risked someone else’s finding the ship and filing a claim first.

As soon as Tommy had returned from the sonar search the previous summer, he had met with Kelly and Loveland to begin brainstorming on legal matters. The two lawyers advised Tommy on how to file a claim and where to find outside counsel experienced in the ancient laws of admiralty. They kept coming back to this problem: Before a court could award the
Central America
to Tommy, the court had to have jurisdiction over the shipwreck; before the court could have jurisdiction over the shipwreck, Tommy had to bring the
Central America
into the courtroom. This, of course, was impractical, so the law allowed for a bit of fiction: Tommy could bring an artifact from the
Central America
, a stanchion perhaps, or an anchor, or a bell, or maybe some part of the rigging, into the courtroom and have it represent the ship. A federal marshal would then “arrest” the artifact, the court would assume jurisdiction over the site, and the court would award the
Central America
to Tommy. But there was a catch: The site had to lie within three miles of the beach; that was the physical boundary of the court’s district. The
Central America
lay at the far reaches of the Economic Zone, almost two hundred miles offshore. No one had ever tried to recover an historic shipwreck so deep it lay beyond the three-mile boundary. Tommy could bring a piece of the
Central America
into the courtroom, but no one knew what would happen next.

After studying the problem for some time, Kelly and Loveland recommended filing the claim in the Eastern District of Virginia, which sat in Norfolk. Besides having case law that seemed to favor their claim, Norfolk had a good harbor with good facilities for ship repair. There was a historical connection, too: Most of those who survived the sinking of the
Central America
had sailed into Norfolk.

Kelly and Loveland then searched
Martindale Hubbell
, the state-by-state reference on lawyers, reading the biographies of lawyers who practiced admiralty law in Virginia. They needed someone with experience, but they didn’t want an old hard-nosed, ham-fisted trial lawyer who would try to pound precedent into the judge’s ear. There was no precedent. The case was unique. They needed someone who could foresee at once the future of five areas of law—international, maritime, conflicts, procedure, property—and understand how their natural progression would affect jurisdiction over shipwrecks far at sea. Someone who could deftly remove from the judge’s thoughts that single sticking point about the three-mile limit, examine it for the judge logically and equitably while at the same time ever so delicately rotating it for a fresh perspective. They needed someone with a creative legal mind, someone articulate, quick on the feet, someone who projected honesty and fairness and sensibility. They needed someone who could persuade a federal judge to do what no federal judge had ever done: accept jurisdiction over a wreck site on the far side of the Gulf Stream, two hundred miles at sea.

If they had created the perfect lawyer for what they needed as Norfolk counsel, Kelly and Loveland likely would never have thought to include everything that came in the package of Rick Robol, a short, wiry man with a straight nose and a puckish grin.

Robol was thirty-four, an admiralty litigator practicing in Norfolk for eight years. He had graduated first in his class at the University of Virginia, received a Fulbright fellowship to study international law and comparative government in Italy, and had gone on to Harvard for his law degree. He was Phi Beta Kappa at Virginia, a Moot Court National Oralist at Harvard, and managing editor of the
Harvard International Law Journal
. After law school, he had clerked for the chief judge of the Eastern District of Virginia in Norfolk, the same court in which Kelly and Loveland hoped to press Tommy’s claim to the
Central America
. At Harvard, Robol
had won the Addison Brown Prize for a treatise on admiralty jurisdiction. In that treatise, written almost ten years earlier, he had examined the need for federal courts to extend their admiralty jurisdiction beyond the three-mile territorial limits and into international waters.

In the fall of 1986, Robol flew to Columbus to meet with Loveland, Kelly, and Tommy. Wayne Ashby was also at the meeting, and he seemed to have the only misgivings about the admiralty lawyer. After he met Robol, Ashby leaned over to Loveland and whispered, “This guy’s too young.”

Loveland leaned over and whispered back, “He’s older than Tommy.”

Robol confirmed that the Eastern District of Virginia would be their best forum. Around the country, it was known as “the rocket docket”—no waiting for five years to be heard. The judges knew admiralty law well, and the decisions that had come out of that district generally supported what Columbus-America was trying to do. Robol saw Tommy’s case as the next step in the evolution of jurisdictional law: If exploration in the deep ocean were to go forward, then the law had to go with it; someone had to assume jurisdiction over what was happening, or chaos would ensue. All Robol had to do was make an enduring leap seem but a small and natural step.

One more thought they discussed: Could Robol use the dozen sonar images of Sidewheel to persuade the court to skip the artifact requirement, assume jurisdiction over the ship right now, and grant it to Tommy? Robol thought that someday the law might recognize telepossession, but it wasn’t there yet. The leap was too big, and he didn’t want to argue to the court that having a sonar image of a ship was the same as having a piece of the ship, especially of a ship sunk on the other side of that three-mile boundary.

He had told Tommy, “If you want the legal right to recover that site, you have to have an artifact.” Even then, Robol was concerned that the court might assume jurisdiction over just that artifact and not the rest of the shipwreck. “We didn’t know what was going to happen,” said Robol. “It was not apparent that the court would take jurisdiction over the shipwreck, that they would apply that fiction to something beyond the three miles. That was the major conceptual leap forward that was so important to us.”

Although filing a claim on the site meant they also had to file their coordinates, they decided there was greater advantage in having an early audience with the judge and in filing with a court of their choosing. To lessen the exposure of including their coordinates, they would file two sets: one general set for the public, and one precise set under seal for the judge.

When they met again in Jacksonville just before the
Navigator
set to sea, Robol talked with Tommy. He knew the threat of competition had forced Tommy to go to his Emergency Plan and that his vehicle was no more than a bunch of parts still in boxes on the back deck of the
Navigator
. But he reiterated that retrieving an artifact was so important that even if interlopers did appear at the site, and even if they did try to interfere, “even if it is on the brink of crisis,” said Robol, he would not ask the court to assume jurisdiction over the site until Tommy had raised an artifact.

As is customary under admiralty law, Robol sued the shipwreck itself:
Columbus-America Discovery Group v. The Unidentified, Wrecked and Abandoned Sailing Vessel, her engines, tackle, apparel, appurtenances, cargo, etc., located within a circle having a radius of 10 miles, whose center point is at coordinates 31 degrees 52 minutes North latitude and 76 degrees 21 minutes West longitude
.

Robol filed the complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia in Norfolk on May 26. That night down in Jacksonville, the
Nicor Navigator
departed Atlantic Marine, the ship secured for rough seas and the bridge alerted to watch and record all traffic.

ABOARD THE
NICOR NAVIGATOR

E
ARLY
S
UMMER
, 1987

B
ILL
B
URLINGHAM STOOD
five-foot-four, but he seemed six-foot-two. You could be talking to him, looking down, and somehow feel you were looking up: He had a seventeen-inch neck, with matching forearms and chest. Only thirty-three, yet a sea captain for twelve years, he also had a commanding presence, bright blue eyes, tussled blond hair, and a thick reddish blond mustache. He read constantly and had so many arcane bits of information rattling around in his skull that he was the only one on the ship who could beat “Info” Bob Evans at Trivial Pursuit. He was a “hands-on” captain, said one of his crew, a captain who worked alongside the men, and Tommy liked that. Tommy also liked that Burlingham was strong willed but not closed minded.

Burlingham was the captain of the ship, a graduate of New York Maritime Academy, and another of the men from the deep-ocean community who had worked with Williamson and Brockett on government projects, one of the names Craft kept in his little book of good people to call for the next operation. When the owner of the
Nicor Navigator
insisted Craft keep a Nicor captain on board, Craft told Tommy and Tommy said fine, but Bill Burlingham will be in charge of the ship.

The
Navigator
ran through the night at ten knots, the night breezes bringing in the cool salt smell of the Atlantic. Under bright lights, the tech team moved back and forth between the shop van and the two aluminum cubes Brockett had bolted together for their initial close-in sonar and camera runs. Far into the night, music blared from the deck speakers, accompanied by the wet hiss of spray arcing from the bow.

By sunrise the following day, they had entered the deep blue ribbon of the Gulf Stream. Though occasional squalls of moderate wind and rain blew through, all that day and throughout the next night the weather remained fair, the seas to four feet, the breezes light. Large swells came in from the southeast as the bow of the
Navigator
plowed through on course to a deep-water site 120 miles out, where they would test the crane and the winch.

But at the test site late the following morning, the crane swung too far and they couldn’t stop it, and the winch took six hours to wind in three thousand feet of cable, five and a half hours longer than it should have. By eight o’clock their first night of operations, Burlingham had set his course back to Jacksonville.

Three days later, on the evening of May 31, they departed Atlantic Marine for the second time, destined for the same deep-water test site. This time, the crane held, and the winch wound the cable back in at a good pace. But Hackman was watching the cable come in when suddenly it began crossing over itself and heaping up on one end, like a bird’s nest in a casting reel, and he realized that now the weight of the cable had crushed the steel drum. In all of his years as an engineer working in the ocean, Hackman had never seen that happen. With no winch to wrap their electronics cable smooth and tight, they couldn’t operate.