Raise the Titanic! (13 page)

The President shook
hands with Seagram and Donner in the doorway of his study at Camp David.

“Sorry to ask you up here at seven in the morning, but it's the only time I could squeeze you in.”

“No problem, Mr. President,” said Donner. “I'm usually out jogging about this time anyway.”

The President stared at Donner's rotund frame with amused eyes. “Who knows? I may have saved you from a coronary.” He laughed at Donner's woeful expression and motioned them into the study. “Come, come, sit down and make yourselves at home. I've ordered a light breakfast.”

They grouped themselves about on a sofa and chair in front of a spacious picture window overlooking the Maryland hills. Coffee came with a tray of sweet rolls and the President passed them around.

“Well, Gene, I hope the news is good for a change. The Sicilian Project is our only hope of stopping this crazy arms race with the Russians and Chinese.” The President rubbed his eyes wearily. “It has to be the greatest display of stupidity since the dawn of man, particularly when you consider the tragic and absurd fact that we can each blow the other's country to ashes at least five times over.” He gestured helplessly. “So much for the sad facts of life. Suppose you tell me where we stand.”

Seagram looked bleary-eyed across the coffee table, holding the copy of the Defense Archive file. “You are, of course, Mr. President, aware of our progress to date.”

“Yes, I've studied the reports of your investigation.”

Seagram handed the President a copy of Brewster's journal. “I think you'll find this an absorbing account of early-twentieth-century intrigue and human suffering. The first entry is dated July 8, 1910, and opens with Joshua Hays Brewster's departure from the Taimyr Mountains near the north coast of Siberia. There, he spent nine months opening a lead mine under contract with his employer, the Société des Mines de Lorraine, for the czar of Russia. He then goes on to tell how his ship, a small coastal steamer bound for Archangel, became lost in fog and ran aground on the upper island of Novaya Zemlya. Fortunately, the ship held together and the survivors managed to exist within its freezing steel hull until they were rescued by a Russian naval frigate nearly a month later. It was during this sojourn that Brewster spent his time prospecting the island. Sometime during the eighteenth day, he stumbled on an outcropping of strange rock on the slopes of Bednaya Mountain. He had never seen that type of composition before, so he took several samples back with him to the United States, finally reaching New York sixty-two days after he left the Taimyr Mine.”

“So now we know how the byzanium was discovered,” the President said.

Seagram nodded and continued. “Brewster turned all his samples over to his employer save one; that he kept purely as a souvenir. Some months later, having heard nothing, he asked the United States director of the Société des Mines de Lorraine what had become of his Bednaya Mountain ore samples. He was told they had assayed out as worthless and had been thrown away. Suspicious, Brewster took the remaining sample to the Bureau of Mines in Washington for analysis. He was astounded when he learned it was byzanium, hitherto a virtually unknown element, seen only rarely through a high-powered microscope.”

“Had Brewster informed the Société as to the location of the byzanium outcropping?” the President asked.

“No, he played it shrewd and merely gave them vague directions to the site. In fact, he even suggested that it lay on the lower island of Novaya Zemlya, many miles to the south.”

“Why the subterfuge?”

“A common tactic among prospectors,” Donner answered. “By withholding the exact location of a promising find, the discoverer can negotiate a higher percentage of the profits against the day the mine becomes operational.”

“Makes sense,” the President murmured. “But what incited the French to secrecy back in 1910? What could they possibly have seen in byzanium that no one else saw for the next seventy years?”

“Its similarity to radium, for one thing,” Seagram said. “The Société des Mines passed Brewster's samples on to the Radium Institute in Paris, where their scientists found that certain properties of byzanium and radium were identical.”

“And since it cost fifty thousand dollars to process one gram of radium,” Donner added, “the French government suddenly saw a chance to corner the world's only known supply of a fantastically expensive element. Given enough time, they could have realized hundreds of millions of dollars on a few pounds of byzanium.”

The President shook his head in disbelief. “My God, if I remember my weights and measures correctly, there are about twenty-eight grams to the ounce.”

“That's right, sir. One ounce of byzanium was worth one million four hundred thousand dollars. And that's at 1910 prices.”

The President slowly stood up and gazed out the window. “What was Brewster's next move?”

“He turned over his information to the War Department.” Seagram pulled out the folder on the funds for Secret Army Plan 371-990-R85 and opened it. “If they knew the full story, the boys over at CIA would be proud of their ancestor organization. Once the generals of the old Army Intelligence Bureau saw what Brewster was onto, they dreamed up the grandest double cross of the century. Brewster was ordered to inform the Société des Mines that he had identified the ore samples and bluff them into thinking he was going to form a mining syndicate and go after the byzanium on his own. He had the Frenchies by the balls, and they knew it. By this time, they'd figured that his directions to the outcropping were off the mark. No Brewster, no byzanium. It was that simple. They had no choice but to sign him on as chief engineer for a piece of the profits.”

“Why couldn't our own government have backed a mining operation?” the President asked. “Why let the French into the picture?”

“Two reasons,” Seagram replied. “First, since the byzanium was on foreign soil, the mine would have to be operated in secret. If the miners were caught by the Russians, the French government would get the blame, not the Americans. Second, the Congress in those days penny-pinched the Army to death. There were simply not enough funds to include a mining venture in the Arctic, regardless of the potential profit.”

“It would seem the French were playing against a stacked deck.”

“It was a two-way street, Mr. President. There was no doubt in Brewster's mind that once he opened the Bednaya Mountain Mine and began shipping the ore, he and his crew of men would be murdered by paid assassins of the Société des Mines de Lorraine. That was obvious from the Société's fanatical insistence on secrecy. And one other little matter. It was the French and not Brewster who masterminded the Little Angel Mine tragedy.”

“You have to give them credit for playing a good game,” said Donner. “The Little Angel hoax was the perfect cover for eventually killing off Brewster and his entire crew. After all, how could anyone be accused of murdering nine men in the Arctic when it was a matter of public record that they had all died six months earlier in a Colorado mining accident?”

Seagram continued, “We're reasonably certain that the Société des Mines spirited our heroes to New York in a private railroad car. From there, they probably took passage on a French ship under assumed names.”

“One question I wish you'd clear up,” the President said. “In reading over your report, Donner here stated that the mining equipment found at Novaya Zemlya was ordered through the U.S. government. That piece doesn't fit.”

“Again, a cover story by the French,” Seagram replied. “The Jensen and Thor files also showed that the drilling equipment was paid for by a check drawn on a Washington, D.C., bank. The account, as it turns out, was under the name of the French ambassador. It was simply one more ruse to cloud the true operation.”

“They didn't miss a trick, did they?”

Seagram nodded. “They planned well, but, for all their insight, they had no idea they were being led down the garden path.”

“After Paris, then what?” the President persisted.

“The Coloradans spent two weeks at the Société office, ordering supplies and making final preparations for the dig. When at last all was in readiness, they boarded a French naval transport in Le Havre and slipped into the English Channel. It took twelve days for the ship to pick its way through the Barents Sea ice floes before it finally anchored off Novaya Zemlya. After the men and equipment were safely ashore, Brewster shifted the Secret Army Plan into first gear and ordered the captain of the supply ship not to return for the ore until the first week in June, nearly seven months away.”

“The plan being that the Coloradans and the byzanium would be long gone by the time the Société des Mines ship returned.”

“Exactly. They beat the deadline by two months. It took only five months for the gang to pry the precious element from the bowels of that icy hell. It was body-breaking work, drilling, blasting, and digging through solid granite while stabbed by fifty-degree-below-zero temperatures. Never, during the long winter months high along the Continental Divide of the Rockies, had they ever experienced anything like the frigid winds that howled down across the sea from the great polar ice cap to the north; winds that paused only long enough to deposit the terrible cold and replenish Bednaya Mountain's permanent ice sheet before sweeping on toward the Russian coast just over the horizon to the south. It took a frightful toll on the men. Jake Hobart died from exposure when he became lost in a snowstorm, and the others all suffered terribly from fatigue and frostbite. In Brewster's own words, ‘it was a frozen purgatory, not fit to waste good spit on.'”

“It's a miracle they didn't all die,” the President said.

“Good old hardy guts saw them through,” Seagram said. “In the end they beat the odds. They had wrested the world's rarest mineral from that wasteland, and they had pulled off the job without detection. It had been a classic operation of stealth and engineering skill.”

“They escaped the island with the ore, then?”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Seagram nodded. “Brewster and his crew covered over the waste dump and ore-car tracks and concealed the entrance to the mine. Then they hauled the byzanium to the beach, where they loaded it on board a small three-masted steamer dispatched by the War Department under the guise of a polar expedition. The ship was under the command of a Lieutenant Pratt of the United States Navy.”

“How much ore did they take?”

“According to Sid Koplin's estimates, about half a ton of extremely high-grade ore.”

“And when processed…?”

“A rough guess at best would put it in the neighborhood of five hundred ounces.”

“More than enough to complete the Sicilian Project,” the President said.

“More than enough,” Donner acknowledged.

“Did they make it back to the States?”

“No, sir. Somehow the French had figured the game and were patiently waiting for the Americans to do the dangerous dirty work before stepping on the stage and snatching the prize. A few miles off the southern coast of Norway, before Lieutenant Pratt could set a course east onto the shipping lane for New York, they were attacked by a mysterious steam cutter that bore no national flag.”

“No identification, no international scandal,” the President said. “The French covered every avenue.”

Seagram smiled. “Except this time, if you'll pardon the pun, they missed the boat. Like most Europeans, they underestimated good old Yankee ingenuity; our War Department had also covered every contingency. Before the French could pump a third shot into the American ship, Lieutenant Pratt's crew had dropped the sides on a phony deckhouse and were blasting back with a concealed five-inch gun.”

“Good, good,” the President said. “As Teddy Roosevelt might have said, ‘Bully for our side.'”

“The battle lasted until almost dark,” Seagram went on. “Then Pratt got a shot into the Frenchman's boiler and the cutter burst into flames. But the American vessel was hurt, too. Her holds were taking water, and Pratt had one killed and four of his crew seriously wounded. After a consultation, Brewster and Pratt decided to head for the nearest friendly port, set the injured men ashore, and ship the ore on to the States from there. By dawn, they limped past the breakwater at Aberdeen, Scotland.”

“Why couldn't they have simply transported the ore to an American warship? Surely that would have been safer than shipping it by commercial means?”

“I can't be certain,” Seagram replied. “Apparently, Brewster was afraid the French might then demand the ore through diplomatic channels, thereby forcing the Americans into admitting the theft and giving up the byzanium. As long as he kept it in his possession, our government could claim ignorance of the whole affair.”

The President shook his head. “Brewster must have been a lion of a man.”

“Oddly enough,” Donner said, “he was only five-feet-two.”

“Still, an amazing man, a great patriot to go through all that hell with no personal profit motive in mind. You can't help but wish to God he'd made it home free.”