Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (53 page)

One big factor was that the vehicle wasn’t ready to launch, and if they sat on top of the site while they worked frantically to get it ready, they would be giving away their target, which they currently had no legal way to protect. Tommy surmised that the track lines of the
Liberty Star
would run twenty-five to thirty-five miles, which meant that on each track, she would drop over the horizon, sail beyond radar, and not be seen again for a day to a day and a half. He could use that to his advantage. If he knew exactly where she was, where she was headed, and how fast she was headed there, he could calculate how much time
he had to get onto Galaxy, launch the vehicle, find out as much as he could, recover the vehicle, and get back over the horizon before the
Liberty Star
returned.

On July 2, the
Liberty Star
hit the south end of her track line, turned, and headed north, still keeping west of the Galaxy site. The following day, Tommy instructed Gross to fly out again, plot the position and bearing of the
Liberty Star
, then shoot a roll of film with a telephoto lens and drop it near the
Navigator
. When Doering developed Gross’s pictures, they confirmed what Craft thought he had seen through binoculars two days earlier: Something shrouded in a tarp sat on the back deck, and it appeared big enough to be a deep-water ROV. Whoever was on the
Liberty Star
was prepared not only to run track lines and listen with sonar, but also to drop an underwater robot on anything that sounded interesting.

T
OMMY COULD HAVE
gone to court with an “artifact” and avoided all of these worries if he had followed one piece of advice Hackman had offered half in jest before he left the ship three weeks earlier: Fake the artifact.

“I always explore all possibilities whatever I’m doing,” said Hackman, “and cheating is always a possibility. So I said, kind of jokingly, ‘Let’s go get some driftwood and tie it to the vehicle and bring it back up and say, “Here, we found it, we’ve retrieved a piece.”’ And his comment was, ‘That’s a very interesting possibility, but this project will be so scrutinized that I would never try to get away with anything.’ We were out there alone and nobody would ever know what we did, but he was always looking at the big picture, so he will not chance anything like that. I’m probably the fourth most knowledgeable person about this project, and I have yet to see anything that’s even remotely shady, illegal, unethical, or immoral.”

Tommy would not break the rules, but he would forsake sleep to study every one, dissect it, examine the parts, and search for fresh interpretations. “We have to be smarter than everybody else in order to compete and still have integrity,” he said. “We have to see every angle and think of all the options.”

For three days now, they had charted the movements of the
Liberty Star
. Tommy had sequestered himself in the COM shack, studying the
plotting sheets, and he could see the pattern of her track lines clearly now. He calculated that by the time she completed the track she was on and shifted east again for the next track, then headed back south, she would be aimed right for the western edge of the Galaxy site. He could stay away from the site only hours longer. Then he would have to pull up on Galaxy and sit motionless above it, a stationary blip in the path of the
Liberty Star
, and the confrontation would begin.

S
INCE THE
L
IBERTY
S
TAR
appeared on the horizon, a supply boat had picked up Ted Brockett for another job, so they were short one knowledgeable head and two skilled hands. But the rest of the crew continued to work on the vehicle through the night, night after night, napping only when they could no longer function without sleep. At one stretch they stayed awake for thirty-six hours.

The vehicle had grown from a helpless creature that could barely see and hear, into a deep-ocean exploration system with five cameras for eyes, a sonar for ears, an eighty-pound telemetry unit to talk, seventy-pound thrusters to walk, a sixty-pound manipulator to pluck, a thirty-pound brain to command, hundreds of pounds of batteries for a heart, and hundreds of feet of hydraulic hoses and electrical cables, the arteries and nerves, to connect it all. But when they tested it on deck, circuit breakers blew, signals scrambled inside the cable, and the manipulator hung like a useless appendage. By the night of July 3, it still was not ready to go to the bottom, yet sometime the next day, the
Liberty Star
would be on top of Galaxy, and the only hope Tommy had of stopping it was to be on the site, doing the best he could with the system he had.

Under the glare of the deck lights that night, they dropped three acoustical pingers around the Galaxy site to form a subsea navigation grid, so Scotty could calculate the vehicle’s position on the bottom. By two o’clock on the morning of the 4th, Scotty had the grid in place and calibrated well enough to read ranges. Eight minutes later, they launched the new vehicle. “We had no choice,” said Tommy.

A little past three-thirty, the vehicle reached bottom; on the monitors, they saw the white sediment of the ocean floor. A half hour later, they began searching for the ship in ten-meter zigzags. For an hour they saw nothing. Then the cameras passed over mysterious six-foot rings
cut into the floor by sea cucumbers. In five minutes, they had drifted beyond the rings and once again saw only white sediment.

While the vehicle probed at eight thousand feet below, Tommy, Barry, and Bob huddled with Craft and Burlingham on the bridge. In a few hours, the
Liberty Star
would appear on radar about twelve to fifteen miles to the northwest on a heading that would cross the Galaxy site. This time Tommy did not want Burlingham to slide back over the horizon to avoid detection: Robol had advised Tommy that Admiralty Law required the one claiming a ship to stay on top of that ship; Tommy could rest his crew and repair his equipment, but he could not leave the site, or he risked losing control. On the bridge that morning, he told Burlingham that if the
Liberty Star
tried to enter the waters above Galaxy, he had to stand fast and, if necessary, drive her off. But Burlingham refused.

Burlingham had his own law, the sea captain’s International Rules of the Road, and if another ship towing equipment needed to pass over the site, the Rules forbade him to squat motionless on top of it
with nothing in the water
. When the vehicle below lost power, they had to recover it, and the moment it hit the deck of the
Navigator
, the
Navigator
became the “burden” vessel and the
Liberty Star
became the “privilege” vessel. Then Burlingham had to give way, and the Rules didn’t care if he was resting his crew or mending his equipment, or that giving way might compromise a recovery effort under Admiralty Law. If that vehicle was not legitimately in the water at the end of a long cable, Burlingham would allow the
Liberty Star
to run right over the Galaxy site.

Robol got on the phone with Burlingham to explain the legal ramifications, but Burlingham did not trust lawyers who were sitting on their behinds in their offices back onshore, when he was two hundred miles at sea in command of a ship and responsible for the lives of twenty men and another sea captain he couldn’t predict. The Rules were clear: If you the captain of the give-way vessel encountered another vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver, you gave way, or you the captain lost your license. Maybe paid a fine. Maybe went to jail. Not the lawyers, you the captain. They didn’t have to explain things in simple terms to Burlingham; he was as smart as any of them. He just went to college to be a sea captain instead of a lawyer or an engineer, and no lawyer or
engineer was going to tell him to do something at sea that he as a sea captain knew should not be done.

With a confrontation unfolding at sea, Tommy’s first thought was: Keep everybody on board this vessel from fighting, and especially don’t alienate the captain of your own ship. “You can’t say, ‘The hell with your license, Burlingham. What the hell does your license have to do with anything?’ You’ve got to be sensitive to that.” But Tommy also had little time for tact. With Burlingham and the others on the bridge, he started talking like this: “We got these problems. Okay? You believe that way. I believe this way. Okay? Here they come. Now, what are we going to do?”

If Burlingham would not stand fast, the only way they could keep the
Liberty Star
from dragging her sonar fish across the Galaxy site was somehow to persuade the other captain to skirt their work area; the only way they could do that was by carefully stringing together words that might imply that they had a stronger position than they had but when laid out one word after the other still were true. They all talked, and Tommy laid out a scenario: what Burlingham would say, how the
Liberty Star
might respond, what Burlingham would say back.

Burlingham was willing to listen, but he told Tommy that if the two ships squared off, he would not lie to the other captain. Tommy could arrange the words in a way that perhaps left a few things unsaid or merely implied, but Burlingham would not lie.

Tommy didn’t want him to lie; he wanted to tell them nothing, whether they had equipment in the water or out of the water or what kind of equipment it was or what they were doing with it. He wanted to reveal nothing that would arouse their suspicion any more than it had already been aroused. When he thought of oblique responses to questions they were sure to ask, he turned to Burlingham and said, “Is that okay to do that?”

Burlingham often responded, “No, I can’t.”

Sometimes Tommy then said, “Okay, if we can’t do it that way, how about doing it this way?”

But once in a while, Tommy told Burlingham, “Well, we might have to.” A couple of times tempers got so hot, they had to clear the bridge.

“Burlingham was in a tough situation,” admitted Tommy. “You’re not supposed to use the Rules of the Road to play cat-and-mouse games. It’s just that if we didn’t do what we were doing, we were going to get run over.”

One thing everyone realized: They had to say something, because in about three hours the captain of the
Liberty Star
was going to see another vessel on radar, this time perched motionless in the middle of his track line. Then the captain would be on the radio asking what’s going on, and Burlingham would have to respond. Tommy wanted the scenario to unfold another way; he wanted to take the offensive, be the one to break the silence and ask the captain to stay clear of their work area. That was part of his strategy. One thing he insisted on is that they decide on a plan and resolve all of their differences before they got on the radio; and once they got on the radio this time that only Burlingham speak.

While the strategy sessions continued through the early morning, the
Liberty Star
appeared on radar just twelve miles to the northwest. The vehicle was still down, moving slowly over the ocean floor, searching for the site; but after five hours the batteries were too low to continue, and the tech crew was exhausted from being up all night. They ended the dive at 9:30 and began bringing the vehicle back to the surface. During their first dive on Galaxy, they had seen nothing on the ocean floor but the curious rings carved by sea cucumbers.

A
T TWELVE-THIRTY
, the
Liberty Star
reached five miles out, and Burlingham broadcast a
sécurité
call, a message to all vessels within range, although he and Tommy knew that the only vessel within the sound of his voice was the
Liberty Star
.

“Sécurité, sécurité, sécurité,” Burlingham began. “Research vessel
Nicor Navigator
, Whiskey, Yankee, Quebec 7-4-5-8. We are a gray-hulled research vessel working in the area bounded by latitude 31° 43′ north, 31° 43′ north, 31° 40′ north, 31° 40′ north, longitude 76° 22′ west, 76°22′ west, 76° 18′ west, 76° 18′ west. We are conducting underwater operations. We request all vessels transiting near us to please keep clear of the work area.” The coordinates circumscribed a box three
nautical miles north to south by a little over three nautical miles east to west.

A few minutes later, they heard on the bridge, “
Nicor Navigator
, this is
Liberty Star
. We’re a research vessel to the north of you there. We’re doing bottom surveys, and I reckon we’ll pass a mile from you. Is that all right? Over.”

Even if the
Liberty Star
cleared the
Navigator
by a mile, she would be inside the box, and the sonar fish following two and a half miles back could easily image the target.

Off the air, Tommy said, “Absolutely not, we’ve got gear in the water!” The vehicle might be on deck, insisted Tommy, but the three transponders they had deployed for the subsea navigation grid were tethered to weights on the bottom and hovered around the site. They rose no more than fifty feet, and the sonar fish was flying probably at about three hundred feet, but still the transponders were
gear in the water
. They just weren’t connected to the ship.

“
Nicor Navigator
back,” said Burlingham on the radio. “If you’re going to clear our area from the coordinates that I just gave on the radio, that will be clear of us. If you’re going to come inside these coordinates, our gear does extend in various directions and we’d appreciate it if you could stay outside our work area.” He repeated the coordinates. But as soon as Burlingham had signed off, they realized they had made a mistake. They didn’t know on which side of the box the
Liberty Star
would clear them, and with the currents running strong to the west, if she tried to clear to the east, the currents would still drive the sonar fish through the box and over the site.