Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (52 page)

F
OR TWO DAYS
after they made the camera run along Sidewheel, Bob and Doering studied sonagrams while the rest of the tech crew tested equipment and rendezvoused with the
Seaward Explorer
twice more for fuel. The weather was calm, the sea rising no more than a foot.

On the 25th of June, Tommy decided not to dive again until they had reconfigured the vehicle for better photo and recovery work. He wanted thrusters to position the vehicle, additional cameras to take color video and stills, and a manipulator to retrieve an artifact. As soon as the tech team upgraded the E-cube vehicle to the E-vehicle, he wanted to use Sidewheel as a test site to practice with the thrusters and the manipulator and to learn more about deep-water, wooden ships. Then he
wanted to move on to Galaxy, study the site, select an artifact, get everything poised to file a claim in court, and begin to explore.

For the next five days, the tech team worked and ate, and slept once in a while. Scotty hid in the control van with microprocessors and a soldering iron. Moore and Brockett dismantled the camera sled and combined the old aluminum modules with new modules to enlarge the skeleton, then began to route hydraulic lines and electrical wires and computer cables for the new capability. The weather now was nearly optimum, light airs and small seas; they could work with both hands. On the 27th, a shallow storm front blew through, packing winds to forty knots and seas to twelve feet, but then the sea lay back down, and for the next three days the winds held steady at ten knots, the seas two to four feet. Throughout each day and long into the night they worked on the vehicle, making it bigger, heavier, more complex. And then just before midnight on June 30th, a clear night with stars shimmering, they saw a glow moving slowly along the horizon to the northeast.

T
HE BRIDGE HAD
picked up the target on radar three hours earlier, a ship sixteen miles out. Burlingham disengaged the engines of the
Navigator
and estimated the other ship’s speed at one to two knots. “Out here, you don’t do two knots,” said Burlingham. “There’s no reason for you to do two knots.” Cargo ships and tankers traveled through running ten to fifteen knots on a constant heading, and if you extended that heading in a straight line toward the coast it would intersect with a port in the United States, or it would lead across the Atlantic in a conventional shipping lane. The heading of this boat led nowhere.

From the same direction as the radar blip, they now could see the glow of her deck lights, faint at first but brightening, like the moon rising slowly over the curvature of the earth. Tommy was napping in his bunk in the Elder van when Burlingham woke him up. “There’s something out here that looks like a city,” said Burlingham. “I suspect it isn’t a freighter.”

On the bridge, Craft had a pair of binoculars trained on the glow, and he could see the mast. From the highest point gleamed a large red circle, and below that a white circle, and below that another red circle: RAM lights, Restricted Maneuverability, a signal that the ship was towing
another vessel. But Craft could see none of the side lights or the stern light required on a surface tow. Whatever followed was submerged, and the only submerged vessel anyone would tow out there was a deep-water side-scan sonar.

Tommy no longer had to guess whether or how or when the competition might arise. It was now, that ship was who, and he had one advantage: He knew they were out there, but they didn’t know he was; on their radar he was just another ship passing through. Quickly, he decided several things: Keep them at the edge of radar range until they depart the area and watch for them coming back; call Rick Robol; continue studying the sonar images; assemble and test the vehicle; stay away from Galaxy until we’re ready to launch. As long as Burlingham kept the
Navigator
below the radar horizon, the other bridge couldn’t tell who they were or what they were doing. It was a game of hide-and-seek, and the other crew didn’t even know they were it.

All that night and throughout the next day, the bridge kept the
Navigator
just out of radar range, periodically creeping up to the edge to get a fix on the other ship, then dropping away. The ship moved slowly, sometimes erratically, so Tommy knew they were at the beginning of their search, still coordinating the boat crew and the tech crew and adjusting to whimsical currents. He wasn’t sure yet in which direction they would strike out in long track lines, but he found it suspicious that they had begun their search within a few miles of the Sidewheel coordinate Robol had filed with the court. Maybe Sidewheel would occupy them for a few days, just long enough for Tommy to get his vehicle into the water and back up with an artifact.

The second morning, with the other ship straightening her track lines, Tommy had Steve Gross fly out, determine her heading, and take two coordinates an hour apart. When he got the second lat-long and had the bridge plot it on the maneuvering board, he realized that if the vessel continued on course, the sonar fish behind her could pass close enough on the first track line to image not the Sidewheel site but Galaxy.

T
OMMY WATCHED THEM
still miles from the target but moving closer to Galaxy on the radar. Burlingham, Craft, and the Nicor captain were with him on the bridge, along with Barry, Bob, and Brockett. The day
before, Tommy didn’t want the other crew to know the
Navigator
even existed; today that was less important than keeping them away from the site. He told Burlingham to point the bow of the
Navigator
on an intercept course with the other boat. “Harvey was concerned about not doing anything illegal and not putting the ship at risk,” remembered Brockett, “but he was adamant about not letting those guys survey the target.”

The
Navigator
closed quickly, until an hour later they could just see the other ship off to starboard. Craft watched her again through binoculars. Her lines were distinctive; she was all white with a broad stripe fanning back off both bows, then arcing and plunging into the water. Craft couldn’t make out the color of the stripe, but he recognized her lines.

“It’s the
Liberty Star
,” he said. “She’s out of Cape Canaveral.”

Four years earlier, out of professional curiosity, Craft had inspected the
Liberty Star
. She had a sister ship, the
Freedom Star
, both built for Morton Thiokol, both operated out of Cape Canaveral, both booster pickers for the space shuttle program. During gaps in the launch schedule, both were available for charter. Tommy wanted a closer look at her back deck, to see what capability she had on board.

They had closed to about eight miles, the
Navigator
running to the southwest on an intercept course with the other vessel heading south southwest. Once they got within a mile or two of the other vessel, Burlingham could do nothing to force or even encourage the captain to alter his course. Burlingham was even uncomfortable with his bow aimed at another vessel still eight miles away, because the other captain had had them on radar for at least a half hour, and that other captain knew their course and that that course would intercept his own within an hour.

On the bridge, they suddenly heard on the hailing channel, “This is the motor vessel
Liberty Star
, calling the unidentified Nicor workboat on my port. Come back.” The captain had recognized the Nicor Company’s broad orange stripe around the wheelhouse.

Tommy told Burlingham not to answer. He had learned from the lawyers that the law was unclear on what happened if an interloper attempted to recover the same ship. If the interloper interfered in a certain way, the court might split the award between them. “The idea
was to make sure they didn’t get to that point,” said Tommy. Even if the vehicle wasn’t ready, he wanted to maneuver ahead of the
Liberty Star
and set up over the Galaxy site.

The other captain hailed them again, this time calling them the “unidentified gray-hulled workboat to my port.”

No law required them to answer, but what Craft called “the Rule of Common Sense to Protect Your Own Ass” dictated that you let the other captain know what you intended to do, so he would not endanger you while you were doing it. “It’s just good practice to answer such a request in a civil, courteous, and technically correct manner,” said Craft.

They decided that Craft should be the only one to talk. He was older and wiser and had been around the sea for forty years. But before Craft responded, Tommy wanted to anticipate every possible turn the conversation might take. He wanted Craft to understand the importance of giving up nothing over the radio while at the same time not appearing to be evasive. They might ask this, they might ask that, what are you going to say? Do you feel comfortable saying it this way? What about talking about it like this?

Tommy called it forging an understanding, getting others to diverge quickly, present their best thoughts, and from their different perspectives distilling the best strategy. Craft called it chaos. “Until you personally stand in the wheelhouse of a vessel and watch and listen to the alleged decision-making process of Harvey, Barry, and Bob Evans, you do not understand what true chaos is.”

The captain of the other boat hailed again. The two boats were closing now, the
Navigator
steaming at about ten knots, overtaking the other vessel traveling at one and a half knots. Tommy called down to the back deck and had Bryan and Tod throw tarps over the vehicle and arrange the tarps to make the vehicle look a different shape. He told Burlingham not to let anyone on the
Liberty Star
see anything other than the bow of the
Navigator
.

As Tommy stood ready with pens and paper to write Craft notes, Craft picked up the radio. “This is the research vessel
Nicor Navigator
, Whiskey, Yankee, Quebec, 7-4-5-8, calling motor vessel
Liberty Star
. Request you go to Channel 8.”

When they had switched frequencies to get off the hailing channel, Craft said, “Hello, Skipper. You’re trying to get ahold of us. What can I do for you?”

“We’ve got a deep tow behind us,” said the other captain. He gave his course. “We were just tracking you here, wondering what your intentions are.”

“We don’t plan to cross behind your path,” said Craft, “and we understand that you have equipment in tow.”

In giving his course, the other captain had confirmed something the bridge of the
Navigator
had just realized might be happening: Either the
Liberty Star
had changed course or the bridge had slightly miscalculated her original heading. She now appeared to be on a bearing that would take her far enough west of Galaxy that the site would not lie within the swath of her sonar fish.

Even under Craft’s Rule of Common Sense, he had provided all of the information the other captain needed to proceed safely. Then they heard the captain’s voice again. “Say, are you boys out of Florida or Charleston or up Norfolk way?”

Tommy started writing notes to Craft, who made a face like all those notes were only distracting him. He got back on the radio.

“Uh, can I help you with anything there, Skipper? We got something to chat about?”

“No, that’s all right, Captain. This is the motor vessel
Liberty Star
, out.”

Burlingham kept his bow aimed at the other vessel, slowed, and let the
Liberty Star
continue on its track line until it disappeared over the horizon. Craft recorded in his log, “Liberty Star is rigged for deep water survey and may have a deep water ROV on board.”

Tommy wanted to know the
Liberty Star
’s speed; her bearing; the length of her track lines; and how long she took to turn, realign on the next track, and begin again. He needed to understand her search area so he could predict where she might go, but he wanted to avoid making her crew suspicious. His greatest advantage now was that he knew what they were doing, and they still knew little about him.

During the day, Tommy insisted that Burlingham keep the
Navigator
within radar range of Galaxy, but at night the crew shut down the deck lights, blacked out the windows, and hunted for the
Liberty
Star
. Even before they captured her on radar, they saw her glow projecting far into the night sky, like a small city two hundred miles at sea. “Man, they were lit up,” said Barry. “On a clear night, it was just dazzling.” With his ship blacked out, Tommy crept up to the edge of radar range and plotted her, then fell below the horizon and came up again. Even if the other bridge saw something on radar, it was but a pinpoint along the rim. “We were just close enough to the edge that it would be inconsistent,” said Tommy. “They wouldn’t see us every sweep.” The other crew had no way of knowing that the same ship they had encountered on an earlier afternoon now stalked them from just beyond radar range.

The military might call this maneuvering ECM, or Electronic Counter Measures warfare. Craft called it “a childish and asinine game of cowboys and Indians using radar instead of cap pistols.” Craft went to sea to do a job, and he did it as efficiently and as safely as he could in a reasonable amount of time. “I didn’t give a hoot who else came out there and looked,” said Craft. “We had x number of places to look for the
Central America
, and the faster we did that, the sooner Harvey would be in a position to go to court and claim the ship. I have never been able to figure out his reasoning.”

But Craft had never sat in a law office and talked to lawyers for hours about everything Tommy had to do to protect the site. He hadn’t met with dozens of investors one or two at a time face to face and promised them he would use their money wisely. He hadn’t spent ten years of his life trying to figure out how to do this. Tommy’s decisions often stupefied people, until they learned more of the factors he had rattling around in his head at the time he decided.