Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (49 page)

Burlingham headed back to Jacksonville for the second time. Replacing the drum would be expensive and require three or four months
for delivery, but Hackman thought he could solve the problem in a couple of days for pennies: Roll two steel half cylinders and weld them over the old drum. It was Battelle’s creed at work: Give me a farm kid who can fix a tractor with a coat hanger tonight and have it back in the field at sunrise tomorrow. They arrived at Atlantic Marine around seven on the evening of June 3, and Hackman and the shipyard crew started immediately on the winch, working throughout the night and all the following day.

While the
Navigator
sat dockside, Tommy chartered a plane to run a surveillance flight over the Atlantic. If anyone slipped into their search area while the
Navigator
was in port, he wanted to know about it. Bob Evans flew with the two pilots, calling out the coordinates, until they had completed an air search of that part of the Atlantic. They returned after dark, and they had seen nothing.

By midnight of the second day, they had started winding the cable back onto the repaired winch. At 3:30
A.M.
on June 5 the cable was on and the drum seemed sturdy. Burlingham shifted from shore power to ship power and secured the vessel to sea, and for the third time in ten days, a river pilot guided the
Navigator
out of the Atlantic Marine headed for blue water.

“We were exhausted,” said Tommy, “just totally exhausted going to sea.”

At 6:15, with the sea buoy abeam and the sun rising ahead, the
Navigator
entered a calm sea, and Tommy told Burlingham to direct his course for a second test site. From the moment they had departed Jacksonville the first time ten days earlier, Tommy had expected Burlingham to call him at any moment and say that the bridge had just spotted another vessel in the vicinity, not clipping by at ten to fifteen knots, obviously headed somewhere, but creeping along at one to two knots and displaying the colors and shapes of a vessel with an object in tow, obviously searching for something.

On the back deck sat a stack of welded aluminum cubes and myriad unopened cartons and crates filled with electronics and cameras and cables and thruster parts and manipulators and sonars and transponders and batteries and glass spheres and junction boxes and barrels of hydraulic oil and piles of brackets and various computer items, the
makings of an ROV they hoped could dive to the bottom deeper than any ROV had ever been and retrieve an artifact.

Moore and Brockett were up early, continuing their work on the back deck. After thirty straight hours of rebuilding the winch drum, Hackman had turned in and slept till midmorning, when he joined them again. He had arranged his Battelle schedule to spend three weeks at sea, but now as he watched Moore and Brockett working among the boxes of parts, he wondered why he had come at all.

“Here I am, doing what I vowed I would never in my life do: go to sea with something that hadn’t been tested. It not only hadn’t been tested, it hadn’t even been bolted together, and that never works. It’s just too hostile an environment; there’s just too many things that can go wrong; it’s too dangerous. You can’t build complex systems and assemble little electronic things on a rough ship, and you can’t test things at that depth that have never even been wet before. You never, ever do that.”

T
OMMY HAD SWITCHED
their destination from the first test site to the second test site partly because the second site was close enough to monitor the Sidewheel area on radar. They could build their equipment, test it, and keep an ear to the target area at the same time. If another ship came into the area, they could move quickly to set up over their primary target and try to protect it. Halfway out, Tommy switched the destination again, to a third test site, cutting the distance to Sidewheel in half, so now they could see with their own eyes anything entering the patch of water above their primary target.

As Tommy had learned more about his competition, he kept simplifying the vehicle design. “If we run out of time,” he reasoned, “we’ve got to move from the E vehicle to the E-square vehicle, and then if we run out of time on that, we’re going to end up with the E-cube vehicle, which is what we did. That’s all we could get going.”

The E-cube vehicle now sat on deck, a drastically stripped-down version of a drastically stripped-down version of the vehicle parked inside Tommy’s head: a simple sled with just video and close-in sonar. Moore couldn’t even run both at the same time.

At the third practice site, from the morning of June 6 through the morning of June 10, they tested the dynamic-positioning systems and
the navigation systems and the systems on the camera sled. They launched and recovered the sled seven times. The crane now rotated smoothly under control and the winch recovered evenly and Hackman’s rebuilt drum held strong against the pressure of thirteen thousand feet of steel cable. They now shifted their operation a few miles to the Sidewheel site to begin their search for the
Central America
.

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of June 12, Scotty gave Burlingham the range and bearing for the first track line, and Burlingham made way to the starting point, shifted the
Navigator
into DP mode, and about one o’clock they deployed the vehicle. An hour and a half later, the vehicle had reached the bottom and Burlingham commenced the first track line.

The control room was cool, air conditioned for the computers, and dark except for digital readouts and the light blue glow of the Mesotech sonar screen. At Scotty’s direction, Burlingham tapped in new DP coordinates every several minutes to keep the ship creeping forward along a prescribed bearing at half a knot. Nearly nine thousand feet below, the sled glided through the darkness with the Mesotech sonar sweeping ahead a hundred meters.

When they reached the end of the first track line an hour later, they had seen nothing. Scotty called Burlingham on the intercom and adjusted the range and bearing for the next track line, and in forty-five minutes, Burlingham had turned the ship 180 degrees, shifted his course slightly, and headed back for the second run.

After another hour of sweeping the darkness, nothing had appeared on the screen. Burlingham turned for a third run, and Tommy and Barry left for the COM shack. As Scotty monitored the navigation readouts, Bob, Doering, Brockett, and Hackman stood or sat in the dark and watched the Mesotech screen. Moore had his hand on the controls, keeping the sled flying over the bottom a few meters up. When the
Navigator
reached the final stretch of the third run they still had seen nothing.

Afternoon turned to evening. Moore raised the sled a few hundred meters from the bottom, and the techs repaired to the galley for supper. When they returned to the control room, Scotty continued to call up new ranges and bearings for Burlingham, and Burlingham ran the track
lines, until they had crossed the area several times, and still nothing had appeared on the Mesotech. They decided to extend each track and overrun the target by half a mile.

Nearing midnight, Tommy and Barry were in the communications shack, when they heard Scotty’s voice on the intercom. Using Tommy’s term for historic shipwreck, he said, “We have a possible cultural deposit here.”

When Tommy and Barry left the control van hours earlier, the atmosphere had been subdued; when they returned, Hackman, Brockett, and Moore acted like they’d been bungee jumping off a railroad bridge, about as giddy as grown men will allow themselves to be, and Burlingham had turned the ship for a repeat of the last track line. They had seen the ship, and up close on the Mesotech, it looked even more like a sidewheel steamer.

“It showed up right about eighty meters or so out,” Brockett told Tommy.

“Just before you came in,” said Hackman, “it was a perfect boat shape, just absolutely pointy at the ends and everything, just absolutely perfect.”

Bob was telling Tommy how they were going to try to get the vehicle to swing back near the target for another look, but before he could finish, the sonar began to paint again. Hackman watched the screen over Moore’s head.

“That’s the way it came on first,” he said, “that very first bleep.”

“That’s exactly how it came in,” agreed Moore. “Right at eighty meters it started.”

Everyone watched the blue monitor as the sonar swept the darkness and thick, irregular blotches of white appeared on the screen to the right, then moved to the left, immediately splitting into two bowed but roughly parallel lines, which continued sweeping back.

“That’s where the boat shape comes,” said Hackman.

Moore was laughing. “This is where there’s no doubt in anybody’s mind what you’re looking at!”

Brockett pointed a pen on the sonar screen at a slight hump right about midships. “I didn’t notice that,” he said. “You can see a little bit of a wheel right there.”

“That’s a wheel there,” said Hackman. “There’s no doubt about that. In this next sweep, I think we can see the mast.”

Tommy was still analyzing the little hump Brockett called a wheel. “Where’s the wheel?” He touched his finger to the screen. “Right here?” He was skeptical. He asked Hackman, “What mast do you see? You mean that thing?” He pointed at the screen again.

“Yeah,” said Hackman. “Last time through—”

“That’s standing up too straight for a mast,” interrupted Tommy.

The spots continued painting, now narrowing to form the stern of the ship. Brockett noted in a sly voice how much this image resembled the SeaMARC image from the previous year. He accused Moore of having created the Mesotech readout over the winter to match the SeaMARC sonar images. “He’s been waiting for the right moment to put it on the screen.”

“Good one!” laughed Moore.

It was now after midnight. Tomorrow they could find the site again with the Mesotech, get a tighter fix on its position, then go in for a closer look with the camera. At 2:45 the morning of the 13th, the vehicle was back on deck with the batteries hooked up to the charger, and the tech team had turned in. The
Central America
had not moved for 130 years. For the night she would go nowhere.

B
OB
H
ODGDON HAD
chartered the
Seaward Explorer
to bring out more vehicle parts, pick up Don Hackman, and drop off two new deckhands. Early the next afternoon, the supply boat came alongside, Hackman transferred for his trip in, and the deckhands, Bryan Anderson and Tod Steele, boarded the
Navigator
.

“I told Tod that his primary duty was to take care of Old Dad,” said Craft, “to make sure that I did not sweat! And he looked like he’d been kicked right in the face.”

Tod looked like he’d been kicked in the face ever since the supply boat cleared Cape Fear. The sea had begun to rise, some rollers chopping into waves, enough to make someone not accustomed to the bounce feel like a rotten spot had sprouted midbrain and was spreading outward. Bryan Anderson was twenty-nine and a sailor. He had raced sailboats to Bermuda across blue water in seas so high that the boat
foundered in the trough because the wind could not reach the sails. Tod was twenty years old and had never seen the ocean.

Tommy had needed two more tech crew members to handle deck lines and help launch and recover the vehicle, and he couldn’t advertise. He had to find two men they already knew and persuade them to come to sea without telling them what they would be doing or how long it might last.

They thought first of Bryan Anderson, whom Barry had befriended at the University of Florida. Bryan had earned his bachelor’s degree in fine arts with an emphasis on drawing. He was now a mechanic at a Gulf gas station. Barry had called Bryan because Bryan was good with his hands and he knew engines, and he had sailed on blue water. Plus, Bryan, who wore small, round, tortoise-shell glasses, had a calm way about him and was modest with a sense of humor. Perfect attributes for a shipmate.

Barry told him that a supply boat was waiting in Wilmington to bring parts and groceries out to a ship two hundred miles offshore, and if Bryan could get up there tomorrow, he could catch the supply boat out. Barry described the job only as “the opportunity of a lifetime.” Bryan quit the Gulf Station, stuffed his go-to-sea duffle with T-shirts and shorts, grabbed his grandfather’s blues guitar, and flew to Wilmington. Waiting for him at the airfield were Bob Hodgdon and Tod Steele.

Tod Steele was a polite young man, reared in the steel community of Youngstown, Ohio. His sister Paula had become the home office backbone of the Columbus-America Discovery Group, responsible for the payroll, the bills, the insurance, and the partnership filings. Tod had just finished his sophomore year at Ohio State and was visiting his sister at the old Victorian, when Tommy called from the
Navigator
looking for a deckhand. Tod thought, “Who would turn down a chance to go out on a boat?”

“Yeah,” he told Tommy. “What should I bring?”

“An extra pair of shoes,” said Tommy, “’cause your feet get wet.”

Tod had four hours to catch the last flight out of Columbus that could get him to Wilmington in time to jump the supply boat. He cleaned out his dorm room, dumped it all on Paula’s living room floor, packed a small duffle, and Paula drove him to the airport.

The first leg of the trip out on the
Seaward Explorer
was a two-hour excursion from Wilmington to the mouth of the Cape Fear River. Tod thought being on a boat was all right. At the mouth, they swung east, and for the first time, Tod saw the ocean. Then darkness fell, and about the time the
Seaward Explorer
passed the tower at Frying Pan Shoals forty miles out, that rotten spot in the middle of Tod’s brain had spread to the outer reaches of his cranium, which coincided with him finishing a dinner of greasy pork roast and a salad with anchovy dressing.