Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (54 page)

Burlingham hailed the
Liberty Star
again. “Good afternoon, there, Skipper,” he said. “The way it’s looking now, I just wondered is it possible for you to clear us to the west, over?”

The voice from the
Liberty Star
, a different one this time, said he would have to refer to his charts.

Burlingham surmised that whoever had chartered the
Liberty Star
had not told the captain what they were looking for; that as far as the captain knew, the sonar techs were out there running bottom surveys; that, until now, they had the whole Atlantic Bight to themselves. The
captain was probably dumbfounded that a confrontation appeared to be taking shape out in this lonely patch of ocean.

The
Liberty Star
continued toward the northwest corner of the box, and the radio on the bridge of the
Navigator
sat silent. Four miles, then two, then one and a half.

Watching from the bridge, Burlingham reminded Tommy, “If they push me, I’m getting out of the way. I’m not going to put myself in a close-quarter situation just to suit your priorities.”

“Can we say it another way?” suggested Tommy.

The question epitomized what bothered Burlingham about Tommy. The man was always groping for exceptions. In Burlingham’s mind the Rules were clear: The vehicle now sat on deck recharging; the tech crew was in the sack doing the same; we have nothing in the water; we cannot be the privilege vessel. But Tommy pushed. “If they try to come through, can we say we’re preparing to put equipment in the water? Or I think we’re going to have it in the water in fifteen minutes?” He suggested that maybe within the Rules were maneuvers Burlingham could perform if he thought about them ahead of time. “Like a game of chess,” said Tommy.

That idea intrigued Burlingham. He wouldn’t cheat and he wouldn’t lie, but he would try to outwit. In specific situations, he had some leeway under the Rules to move and countermove his ship so that he was properly positioned to be the privilege vessel. “But it was a challenge for me,” said Burlingham, “to do what Harvey wanted me to do without severely bending the Rules.”

He got back on the radio. “Yes, sir,” he said as politely as possible. “I just wondered, have you decided what your intentions are in passing outside our work area? The way we’re working at this point we may be going anywhere unexpectedly, and so if you enter our immediate work area, the possibility of an
in extremis
situation may arise.”

The phrase came right out of the Rules,
in extremis
, meaning If you enter this box, that will put our two ships at close quarters and we may collide. “If the situation were reversed,” Burlingham said later, “I probably would have taken that as a threat.”

This time, the captain of the
Liberty Star
responded much more quickly. “We’ll be continuing on this course for a brief period of time,”
said the captain, “until we get to the northern limits of the area you specified, at which time we’ll alter course to our starboard and lead you to our port hand. Over.”

The captain still had not confirmed whether he intended to pass “a mile from the
Navigator
” or “outside the box,” a big difference, because the box was over three miles wide. “He’s trying to cut in as far as he can,” said Tommy.

Burlingham was back on the radio. “Roger, I just want to make sure I understand; when you reach the limit of our work area, you’ll be turning, I assume, down a course of 180 made good and skirting just the western boundary of our work area, is that correct?”

“We’ll plan on leading you approximately one mile to our port hand, which should be about the western boundary.” Still an evasive answer, but then he asked a question that helped Burlingham. “Do you have any tethered buoys in the water at this time? Over.”

The sonar fish pulled by the
Liberty Star
flew too high to snag one of the $8,000 transponders forming Scotty’s subsea navigation grid, but the captain did not ask how high off the bottom the buoys floated.

“Yes,” said Tommy, off the air. “I think we ought to say yes.”

“
Nicor Navigator
back,” said Burlingham. “That’s roger, we do have tethered items in the water at this time.”

“Roger, are all these tethered items within the parameters of the box you gave me, over?”

“That’s roger, Skipper. They’re all within our delineated work area. Roger. I just want to check one more time,” added Burlingham. “You are saying that you will skirt our western edge of the operation area?”

“That’s affirmative,” said the captain.

The
Liberty Star
was now no more than a mile from the northwest corner of the box. Bob had plotted her location every fifteen minutes.

T
OMMY WENT BACK
to the COM shack and called Robol. He had fans blowing on the SAT COM phone, but the COM shack broiled in the July heat, cooking the electronics, and Robol’s voice kept fading in and out. Between the crackles, Tommy picked up that Robol thought the crisis at sea was not yet imminent, that he still wanted an artifact; he did not want to go to court and try to claim the site based only on the
sonagrams. Tommy had interlopers towing a big sonar fish right toward the center of the site, and Tommy didn’t trust them to keep outside the box that Burlingham had described. If Robol thought this crisis was not yet imminent, then before they got cut off, Tommy wanted a few words from Robol to convey in the strongest language possible their legal claim to the site, however uncertain that might be.

Robol replied, “You can say you’ve entered an action.”

Tommy liked the sound of that; it was true, yet the words might stump someone else. “Okay, we’ll use those words, ‘entered an action,’” and he wrote down the phrase for Burlingham to repeat on the radio. But Robol was not finished. “And tell them you are rescuing a vessel in marine peril.”

The words came right out of the law books. When someone discovered a ship and tried to recover it, it was called “rescuing a vessel in marine peril or distress,” and it didn’t matter if the ship was sinking or sunk or had been sunk for a long time, the one who discovered the ship was rescuing valuable property from the ravages of the sea and returning it to the stream of commerce. A sea captain may not interpret the phrase that way, but that’s what the law said, and that was the beauty of the phrase. Barry was in the van while Tommy was talking to Robol. “I realized that if we could use the actual legal terminology and be absolutely truthful at the same time, it would send them a signal they wouldn’t understand.”

Tommy and Barry returned to the bridge to coach Burlingham on what to say, but Burlingham was reticent; he already thought that some of his comments to the captain could have been interpreted as an oblique threat. They told him that “rescuing a vessel in marine peril or distress” was the legal terminology; it could mean a lot of things. Maybe the ship was sinking and the cargo and tackle had to be saved before she went to the bottom; but maybe she had been sunk for a long time and continued to corrode and deteriorate due to the water and the pressure and the salt of the deep ocean.

Finally, Burlingham said, “All right, I can say that.”

The
Liberty Star
approached the northwest corner of the box and began to alter her course to starboard, heading south. Tommy feared that after proceeding along the western edge for a short distance, the
captain would suddenly cut inside the box, swinging the sonar fish close enough to image the Galaxy wreck site. Burlingham again hailed the other captain on the radio.

“I would just like to advise you of something,” said Burlingham. “You may possibly want to copy it down.” He began reading slowly. “We have entered a court action in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. We are currently in the process of rescuing a vessel in distress. We advise you that any action you take which would endanger or interfere with our rescue operations could result in your being found in contempt of court. I am concerned for the safety of your vessel and ours.”

Burlingham repeated the statement twice, until the other captain said, “Good copy.”

They signed off, but within minutes the captain of the
Liberty Star
was back on the radio, asking for the “entity” on board the
Nicor Navigator
, the date the action was entered, the name of the vessel in distress, and the period of rescue.

“I guess I have a personal concern as a fellow mariner,” the captain continued. “If a vessel is in distress, I would think the Coast Guard would be desirous of having that information passed along to us to assist in your search efforts. Over.”

Burlingham caught the sarcasm; the captain was probably smiling at those gathered on his bridge as he said it. “Roger,” said Burlingham. “The term ‘distress’ is a legal term with precedence behind it. We’ll get back to you with those answers shortly.”

When Burlingham called back a few minutes later, he identified the “entity” as “Columbus-America Deep Search Inc.” They had filed on May 26, 1987. The vessel in distress was “an unidentified, wrecked, and abandoned sailing vessel.” For the period of rescue, Burlingham answered, “Initial recovery is underway. This portion of the operation is partially dedicated to formulating a total and comprehensive plan. Dates and times will be filed with the court as the recovery proceeds.”

Then Burlingham said, “We’re just wondering what entity is on board your vessel.”

“Stand by,” said the captain, and when he came back, he said, “Our response to your last: the trustees of Columbia University.”

The
Liberty Star
proceeded along the western edge of the box, by Bob’s calculation weaving inside the boundary and back out again three times. By midafternoon, she had reached the southwest corner of the box, where her course altered from due south to southeast, and she proceeded in that direction until evening, when she swung in a large arc, east northeast, north, northwest, and headed back toward the box. At ten-thirty that night, she passed within half a mile of the southwest corner of the box and continued on course to the northwest, disappearing from radar the following morning.

U
NTIL LONG AFTER
the
Liberty Star
had turned below the box and headed back to the northwest, Moore and Scotty worked on the vehicle. At 8:15 on the morning of July 5, they launched for the second time at the Galaxy site, and Moore stopped the vehicle a hundred feet down to test the systems. The lights and the cameras worked, and the Mesotech was operating again, but the thrusters were too weak to land, and the manipulator joints too stiff to reach out and grasp. Moore ran the vehicle to the bottom anyway, for they had yet to find the ship.

By midmorning, they were on the first track line, with Scotty still refining his navigation grid. For an hour and a half, he guided Moore in zigzags, several meters one way, then several meters another way. Just before noon, they were watching the black-and-white monitors in the control room when suddenly small pieces of debris appeared, although the lighting at that height was too dim to tell what it was. “You could barely tell you were looking at anything,” said Bob. But it was not white sediment or sea cucumber rings or geology. After lunch Moore eased the vehicle lower, and they ran a second track line and then a third. And then a little after five in the afternoon they saw what they had been looking for, what Bob and Doering thought they had detected in the speckled sonagrams, what Tommy knew right away was missing from the wreck site at Sidewheel: piles of coal.

Because the cameras could see only a twenty-foot patch of ocean floor at a time, they could not tell how much coal littered the site, but the coal fields looked extensive. The whole site seemed enormous, far bigger than Sidewheel, and covered with debris. It was more like what
Tommy thought they would find. “We didn’t have to look at it very much,” he said, “to know that it had very good odds of being the
Central America
.”

They ended the dive at six-thirty in the evening, and the vehicle had just begun its ascent when the
Liberty Star
appeared on radar sixteen and a half miles out. She came at them again from the northwest on a bearing roughly southeast, trolling at 1.6 to 1.8 knots and aimed at a point a few miles off the southwest corner of the box. Tommy told Craft to get the vehicle on deck as quickly as possible, put the batteries on the charger just long enough to get them up for another dive, then be ready to send the vehicle back down.

With the
Liberty Star
steaming toward them and the vehicle on deck, Moore stood topside, trying to adjust the joints on the manipulator. Each had to be oiled and finely tuned, but the pressure at eight thousand feet was two hundred times greater than at the surface, and the temperature was thirty-eight degrees instead of ninety-two. Joints that moved fluidly on the surface jerked and vibrated or froze at depth, and the only way Moore could tune them was to open the brain box on deck, adjust three tiny screws for each joint so it flopped like a noodle, then send the vehicle back down to see how close he got. It usually took several trial-and-error dives to figure all that out, but Moore didn’t have several dives. He had one: a few hours to change to a thinner oil and tweak the screws so that below he could at least straighten the elbow and close the jaws. As a backup, Bryan and Tod mounted what everyone called the crab trap, a three-foot-wide metal screen that would hang from the bottom of the vehicle. If Moore couldn’t get the manipulator to work, he would try to scoop something in the trap. Until they brought up an artifact from that site eight thousand feet below, they had little more legal claim to Galaxy than did the treasure hunters aboard the
Liberty Star
.