Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (55 page)

Six hours after Doering had pulled the vehicle from the water with the crane, he lifted the vehicle off the deck and lowered it back into the water. It was 2:40 on the morning of July 6. They now had the
Liberty Star
in sight about four miles due west of the box, and they watched her still angling slowly toward them. As the vehicle neared the bottom,
Moore, Scotty, Doering, and Bob sat in the control van for the dive, and Tommy, Barry, Burlingham, and Craft stood on the bridge, tracking the movements of the
Liberty Star
.

W
HEN THEY SAW
the huge debris field at Galaxy on the second dive, they had chosen the artifact to present to the court: a lump of coal. “Coal is a perfect first artifact,” thought Bob. “It’s fuel to the ship. It was only twenty dollars a ton or so, but nonetheless it had a defined value. And it’s an object undeniably from a ship.” Tommy counseled with Robol, who agreed: Legally, the fuel from an old steamship could serve as an artifact to represent the steamship. The coal was also plentiful, piled high, away from the core, not too valuable, and unbreakable. With a catch-as-catch-can scoop and an unpredictable manipulator sporting ten-thousand-pound crushing strength, Bob did not want the first retrieval attempt focused on a teacup.

Within two hours of reaching the bottom, Scotty had guided them closer to the site, until they had debris again on camera. With the thrusters still malfunctioning, Moore could not land the vehicle, so he would have to cock open the jaws of the manipulator and try to grab something on the fly. With the vehicle gliding slowly through the water four feet above the floor, Moore twice saw tall piles of debris, reflexively dove the vehicle into the pile, and tried to close the jaws as it hit. Sediment curled up before the cameras, obscuring the scenes. As the water cleared, Moore could see both times that the jaws hadn’t closed, but he couldn’t tell if anything had caught in the scoop.

For the next two hours, they continued running the monotonous track lines, seeing nothing more on the cameras. And then suddenly looming in front of the vehicle was a pile of coal strewn with pieces of pipe, perhaps from the steam engines. Moore estimated the pile was six feet high. Scotty radioed Burlingham to change direction slightly and increase his speed. Moore waited until the pile was only a few feet away, then he dove the vehicle as fast and as hard as he could. The monitors exploded with sediment roiling through the water, and Moore blindly tried to snap the manipulator jaws closed.

“We weren’t sure if we got it or not,” said Bob, “but Moore really plowed into that thing.”

It was now almost ten o’clock in the morning. No one had been to bed the night before, and all four men in the control room were exhausted from staring at the monitors for the last six hours. Moore could see that the manipulator jaws were open and empty again, but he thought they might have snagged a lump or two in the crab trap.

Bob radioed Tommy in the COM shack that they were ready to recover, but Tommy said to bring the vehicle up only a safe distance from the bottom, then leave it deployed over the side. Three hours earlier, the
Liberty Star
had stopped in her southeast track line and for some reason had turned due south, where she now dawdled. Tommy didn’t know what she would do next, but he wanted the vehicle in the water to give Burlingham an advantage under the Rules.

An hour later, they saw the
Liberty Star
stop her dawdling to the south and suddenly sweep an arc 180 degrees, to the east and then north, and then head back toward the box at a speed five times faster than when she had been towing. Within an hour of turning, she was less than a mile off the southwest corner of the box, and Tommy was on the phone again with Robol.

With a tape recorder running, Burlingham radioed the captain and advised him that the
Liberty Star
was approaching the box he had described earlier. He wanted to know the captain’s intentions. The captain radioed back that his ship was not inside the work area and would not enter. Burlingham reminded him that the
Navigator
had equipment in the water and that unless the two ships remained at a substantial distance the
Navigator
’s equipment and the equipment trailing behind the
Liberty Star
could cross, become entangled, and break, perhaps destroying deck equipment or endangering personnel.

The
Liberty Star
continued north, hitting the southwest corner of the box, her speed now down to only twice the pace of normal towing. Burlingham met her at the corner, aiming the bow of the
Navigator
at the
Liberty Star
’s broadsides half a mile away, and as the
Liberty Star
steamed up the western edge of the box, Burlingham crabbed sideways, nimbly sidestepping with his dynamic-positioning system up the boundary, always keeping the
Liberty Star
just beyond the edge.

“I’m sure they found it hard to believe what we were doing,” said Burlingham. “The
Liberty Star
was designed for the space shuttle booster
retrieval system, so it was decked out to the nines. We were strictly a mudboat.” But the mudboat was only camouflage; the
Navigator
could hover in one spot or inch sideways left or right; and her navigation system was far superior: The
Liberty Star
navigated on a system accurate to within hundreds of feet, sometimes only hundreds of yards; Burlingham at all times knew where he was within fifteen feet.

When the
Liberty Star
hit the northwest corner, she suddenly looped back to the southeast and feinted toward the inside like she would cut through the middle of the box, but there she encountered Burlingham’s bow. She continued turning 360 degrees, dropping just inside, then went north again for a short distance, turned sharply east, and followed the northern edge of the box.

“It’s hard for anyone to even understand the situation we’re in,” said Tommy. “We’re supposed to be just sitting there doing our jobs and the other people interfere, that’s the way the court likes to see it, but it became impossible to try to do that.”

Tommy worried that if the treasure hunters on the
Liberty Star
persuaded their captain to nick the Rules just enough to force that sonar fish across the Galaxy site, then they might become co-custodians of all the gold on the
Central America
. “Yeah, they violated the Rules of the Road,” said Tommy, “but now they know what we know about the site.”

The vehicle still dangled in the water nearly eight thousand feet below. At two o’clock in the afternoon, Tommy saw the
Liberty Star
approach the northeast corner of the box. As the captain executes his turn, thought Tommy, Burlingham can keep the
Navigator
virtually still on the water, and that’ll give Craft just enough time to get the vehicle on deck so we can see if there’s anything in that crab trap. He told Craft to raise the vehicle and keep it just below the surface.

W
ITH THE
L
IBERTY
S
TAR
in the middle of her turn, Craft ordered Tod and Bryan out on the hero boards over the side of the ship with knives and marlin spikes, ready to transfer the weight of the vehicle from the cable to the crane. Then he pointed his index finger upward and ran it in tight circles, signaling to Doering to take in the line. Dipping into small waves with the roll of the ship, the vehicle broke the surface and came up snug against the tractor tires at the end of the boom. With the
vehicle stabilized, Doering raised the boom, and the vehicle rose from the sea in a rush of water. The manipulator arm still stuck out, the jaws frozen open with nothing in them. As the vehicle reached eye level and the water coming off slowed to drips, they could see the crab trap underneath, and that, too, was empty. If Moore had scooped up anything by crashing the vehicle into piles of coal, it had washed out somewhere in the wait at the bottom or in the eight-thousand-foot ascent. No one was surprised, but everyone had hoped.

The afternoon was hot, the sky cloudless, the sun high. The
Liberty Star
had completed her turn and was pointed south. Doering was swinging the vehicle over the rail when the sunlight suddenly sparkled off something more than the droplets of water cascading from the vehicle. The sparkle caught Doering’s eye. Before he set the vehicle down on deck, he yelled, “Get that!” Wedged into a corner of the vehicle’s lower frame was something shiny and black. As the vehicle met the deck and the line slackened, one of the techs reached into the frame and pulled out a chunk of anthracite coal almost six inches across.

“How a piece of rock wedged in an aluminum frame could make it all the way to the surface without falling out with the vibrations and the air-sea interface, I don’t know,” said Doering. “But it did.”

Bob dropped the tag line he held on the vehicle and examined the lump. It obviously had come from a ship at the bottom of the sea, for cemented to it were the white calcareous tubes of marine worms.

Headed south along the eastern edge of the box, the
Liberty Star
hit the southeast corner and turned west to run along the southern boundary. By midafternoon, she had circumnavigated the entire box, the
Navigator
inside and Burlingham nosing the intruders to the edge all the way around. The
Liberty Star
now turned back to the southeast along her original bearing and disappeared off radar late that night.

N
O ONE COULD
explain how the lump of coal made it all the way to the surface tucked into a corner of the vehicle frame, but no one cared. They had an artifact from the ship, and now they had to get that artifact to the courthouse so the U.S. marshal could “arrest” it and the judge could award them the site and warn away the
Liberty Star
. But the courthouse was in Norfolk, three hundred miles away, and the
Liberty Star
circled
the shipwreck site like a shark. They couldn’t leave. A supply boat would take two days to pick up the lump and deliver it to Norfolk, and Steve Gross already had tried to land out there in the smoothest seas he had ever seen. He would not try it again. But Tommy had another idea for Gross. “It was a pretty crazy thing I was asking him to do,” admitted Tommy. He wanted Gross to fly out in the Sea Bee and snatch the artifact from the air.

With the SAT phone still fading in and out, Tommy explained his plan to Gross back in Wilmington. The idea was simple: All Gross had to do was risk his life in a maneuver that inside territorial waters was strictly forbidden by the FAA. Tommy would have the artifact hanging off the stern of the ship on breakable line, and Gross would align the Sea Bee on a run parallel with the stern, ease his altitude down to a few feet off the water, drop his speed to just above stall, fly within a few feet of the ship, snag the artifact with a grappling hook trailing a hundred feet behind the plane, then goose the engine before he augered in. It was just the sort of low-tech engineering solution Tommy loved.

But as Gross listened to Tommy, his mind passed Tommy’s and now he started thinking about what he was going to do with this thing hanging off the tail of the Sea Bee once he got back to shore. He couldn’t fly to Wilmington and land at the airport, dragging the artifact along the runway at a hundred miles an hour. Even if the package survived, he couldn’t stop in the middle of the runway, alight from the cockpit, and pull the thing in. He figured right away that the options narrowed to one: Fly back and land in the Cape Fear River. The problem was that the Cape Fear River in a lot of places was no deeper than six inches. To land in it, Gross had to read the charts and know where he was, and to do that he had to be able to see. He needed daylight to land in the Cape Fear River.

Darkness descended over Wilmington about eight-forty-five, but Gross needed more than the last gray shafts of evening to see where he was going. At the extreme, he had to be looking for a place to drop into the river no later than eight-thirty. It was now after three o’clock in the afternoon and he was in his shorts in his room at the Cricket Inn talking to Tommy on the telephone. If he hustled to the airport, he might be able to get the Sea Bee into the air by shortly after four o’clock. He
started thinking, “So going out there at four, it’s going to be six before I get there, and screw around an hour, it’d be seven, and get back at nine. That’s too late to land in the Cape Fear River and know what I’m doing.” But he told Tommy he would try, and he told Tommy to have everything ready when he got there so he didn’t have to screw around for an hour. Then he raced to the airport and lifted off in the Sea Bee at 4:09 with an ETA at the ship of 6:05.

To give them a second chance if the first attempt failed and the artifact ended up back on the bottom of the ocean, Tommy and Bob decided to cut the lump in half. It was a hefty chunk that filled an outstretched hand; its two halves would weigh over a pound apiece. Bob took the coal into the workshop and found it so hard that only a hacksaw would cut through it. When he finished sawing the lump an hour later, he threw a couple of handfuls of Styrofoam peanuts into a large plastic mayonnaise jar, lowered one of the pieces into the jar, and packed it full with more Styrofoam peanuts, so it would float if it ended up in the water. Then he wrapped it in layer after layer of duct tape, incorporating a harness they could use to string the whole package onto a thin nylon rope. They would make a loop of the rope two hundred feet around, then stretch the loop from the ship a hundred feet out to the Zodiac, the top part of the loop taut so Gross could snag it with a grappling hook.

From four thousand feet up, Gross saw the light softening along the horizon to the east, and he worried about making the pickup in time to get back to the river. On the back deck of the
Navigator
, Tod and Bryan launched the Zodiac and Bob strung the jar onto the nylon loop. Doering tied the loop to the head of the crane with heavy fishing line, then straightened the elbow until the crane was as high off the deck as he could get it.