Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (66 page)

On one TV monitor, they could see the cable still feeding off the big drum out on deck and Tod sitting in a chair next to the drum watching the level-wind. Cool white fluorescent tubes lit the control room until Tod alerted them that the vehicle was within two hundred feet of the seafloor. Then they turned out the lights, and the room was dark except for the glow of monitors and readouts from the digital displays. At 13:33, they had visual contact with the bottom.

By a little after two in the afternoon, they had checked all of the vehicle’s systems and begun the first track line, but less than a half hour later, Scotty noticed that the
Arctic Discoverer
had drifted off track. One of his computers registered zero for the forward thruster. Scotty ran up to the bridge and found that someone had laid a book on top of the primary on-off button. He removed the book, reset the button, and the ship crabbed back over to its position and continued on line, traveling at about half a knot.

The Mesotech sonar swept into the darkness a hundred meters out, far beyond the range of the cameras. A target would show first on the Mesotech, then about three minutes later, the vehicle would pass over
it, and to the rear the target would appear on the SIT camera in a flood of light.

The previous summer on Sidewheel, they had all squinted for three days and a dozen track lines before they had finally glimpsed the stern of the ship fifteen feet away. This year, they hoped that the brighter lighting and more sensitive cameras, and Scotty’s improved navigation system, would help them locate the ships much faster. But no one was prepared for it to happen as fast as it did.

Not a half hour after they got the ship back on track, Moore saw on the Mesotech some small targets off to port. Scotty was briefing Burlingham on how they had set up this track line when Moore called out the heading of the vehicle and the bearing of the targets, and Scotty turned to record those in the navigation log. As he was completing the notation, Moore called out more targets, with heading and bearing, and Scotty again was writing as fast as he could, archiving the data, so they could find their way back to this spot. Suddenly, Moore was calling out more and more targets. “I’m getting sonar action,” said Moore, “and now I’m getting more sonar action! We have got some really major action coming here!”

Scotty was trying to write it all down as fast as Moore called it out, and at the same time he and Burlingham were trying to watch what was coming up on the TV monitors, which now everyone was watching. Moore was talking fast, describing all of the targets showing up in the sonar sweep, and then he yelled, “Whoa! We’ve got a biggie here! I mean it looks like we’ve got something SERIOUS!”

Into the glare of light now glided the first of the smaller targets Moore had seen on the Mesotech a few minutes earlier: three white artifacts in the sediment.

“Cultural deposits here,” said Moore. “Yep, we got a plate, it looks like.”

Someone else said, “A bottle maybe.”

“Looks like a bottle or something there, yeah,” said Moore. “Got coal. Fiiirst ruuun,” he said, laughing, “and we’re coming across something. This is a huge area, too.”

“Can you see out beyond a hundred meters on there?” asked Tommy.

“Not really,” said Moore. “This is sixty to seventy meters. I’ve turned it up to make sure I don’t miss anything.”

The big object he had seen on the Mesotech would be coming under the SIT camera on the port side, but just as the vehicle reached the target, it started to twist to starboard. Moore talked to the vehicle. “I don’t want you to rotate that way. Over the other way, over the other way.”

“Remember that one last year, John?” said Bob, referring to the early dives on Sidewheel. “Where we went over the stern and barely saw it?”

And suddenly, a huge bulbous shadow began to grow at the lower left corner of the monitor. Bob had just said, “and barely saw it,” when someone yelled, “Look at this! Look at this!”

“Whoa!” yelled Doering. “WHOA, WHOA!”

Bob looked up at the monitor. “Whooaaa.”

And then Tommy said, “Oh, my God!”

I
T HAD HAPPENED
so fast, no one was prepared.

“Here we go!” yelled Moore.

“Oh, you know what that is!” said Doering.

“You know …,” started Moore, and like a chorus everyone in the control room shouted, “WHAT THAT IS!”

A huge paddle wheel was nudging into view, lying in the silt, the bottom portion partially buried, metal spokes fanning out from the center, a twisted pile of iron lying on part of it, all casting dark shadows onto the sand.

“You know what that is!” Doering said again.

“NO SHIT!” yelled Moore.

They had hardly had time to realize what they were seeing when Bob suddenly called out to Moore, “You better get up RIGHT NOW!”

“I’m pulling up right now,” said Moore.

Bob had studied the sonagram of that site for months. He knew it better than he knew his closet. If his calculations were correct, the vehicle was only seconds from colliding with something that cast a long sonar shadow on the sonagram.

“In fact,” said Bob, “you’re over about a ten-meter high spot, so I’d GET IT UP!”

Just as Moore raised the vehicle, a forged-iron crank gear the size of a file cabinet suddenly turned white in the glare of the vehicle lights not two feet below the vehicle. It perched at the end of an iron shaft that ran thirty feet up from the center of the collapsed wheel.

“Oh, shit!” yelled Moore. “No sh … !”

The drive shaft of the starboard paddle wheel, snapped loose and sticking up at the precise center of the ship, had nearly snagged the vehicle. On the ocean floor, looking like the cage off an antique electric fan, lay the starboard paddle wheel of an old steamer, the iron spokes still radiating from the center and only the wood of its paddles missing. As the vehicle drifted slowly by, the wheel cast a weblike shadow onto the ocean floor that danced in the lights; rusticles dripped from its undersides and sea stars lay draped across its spokes.

Every man in the room knew that no matter how precisely Scotty could tune the navigation system, or how meticulously Bob could render geometry and trig, or how skillfully Moore could fly the vehicle, or how clearly Milt could focus and light the cameras, no one ever, ever, ever hit a deep-ocean target on the first track line with a camera. Ever. They had a greater chance of winning the Ohio State Lottery than they did making a shot like that in the deep ocean.

“The best excitement was when we went over the paddle wheel,” said Moore, “because, I mean, it was totally unexpected!”

Tommy was trying to process this sudden information and all of its ramifications at once. He didn’t know if they should even be seeing sidewheels. After the perplexing exploration of Galaxy the previous summer, when the search among the debris teased more than taught, when the progress proceeded in loops instead of along straight lines, Tommy had prepared himself for asking a lot of new questions and doing a lot of poking, trying to understand this interesting anomaly that Bob had discovered. And then fate had dealt him a scene that looked about the way a schoolboy would envision a sidewheel steamer would look after 131 years at the bottom of the sea. Big rusty sidewheels. Yet in Tommy’s analytical mind, even this discovery only increased the odds; it did not prove this was the
Central America
. He knew that another sidewheeler had sunk in the Atlantic Bight and that by his and Bob’s calculations, it might be within their probability area. That, too, had to
be checked out. “All that’s racing through your mind in about half a second,” said Tommy, “and you’re just going, ‘Oh—my—gosh.’”

After a few minutes to consider what had to be done first, Tommy said, “We might have to put into effect those procedures we talked about.” Burlingham was the only one in the control room who was not part of the tech team, and after a few minutes of seeing a few pieces of what might be the
Central America
, Tommy already was getting concerned about security. Nothing against Burlingham, just that to do his job as captain of the ship, he did not need to know what the site looked like on the bottom. “Need to know” was a phrase Tommy used often.

“They had mentioned something about it beforehand,” said Burlingham. “It was in an oblique manner but obviously solely directed at myself.”

Burlingham took the hint. “I’m outta here,” he said.

With Burlingham gone, Scotty called up to the bridge to reverse direction, and as the ship sidled back along the same track line, they waited for twenty minutes, called up to the bridge again to stop the ship, then repositioned the vehicle directly above the center of the site. With the new lights, even at that height, they could make out the big pieces gnarled in the midsection and decide where to explore from there.

“We’ll turn around …,” said Moore, as he ran the small thrusters on the vehicle and the vehicle slowly rotated to the right to reveal another huge wheel on the port side, “and we’ll have a look over at this big bad boy, standing upright.”

The starboard wheel they had first seen had tumbled outward onto the ocean floor; the port wheel had started to collapse but still clung to what was left of the side of the ship, the gears holding it up not yet corroded enough to release their grip.

Tommy watched the screen and said little. “These pictures are incredible.”

“I must say,” laughed Moore, “I’m rather impressed myself.”

“The lights you got on here,” said Tommy, “are also incredible.”

“That’s because they’re where we put them,” said Moore, “and not where most people put them.”

Mindful of the starboard wheel shaft poking up, Tommy told Moore to lower the vehicle slightly for some closer flyovers. With the tech crew
staring at the monitors, Moore flew the vehicle around the site, ten meters north, ten meters east, ten meters south, ten meters west. And for the next four hours, the vehicle waltzed above the ship.

A
MIDSHIPS LOOKED LIKE
a country junkyard in winter, quiet, serene, buried in white; like piles of old tractors and old cars surrounded by grayed and weathered fence posts, all under an inch or two of snow. But in these piles were old engines and boilers and water tanks and gears, all under an inch or two of deep-ocean sediment, like the resting place of a once proud steamer that had succumbed to the fury of the sea and accepted her fate with dignity and grace. Her sleekness, her blackness, the yellowed patina of her decks, the broad red stripe running stem to stern along her lower wale had all crumbled and turned to blue ash. Her spiderwebs of shrouds and the majesty of her sail and her real muscle, the enormous steam engines with piston strokes ten feet down, had disappeared or lay in disarray. Thin lines of blue and gray now ran at odd angles through the whiteness, long pipes perhaps, things of metal in odd shapes, some rectangular, broken, crisscrossing in piles.

As the vehicle flew slowly above the site, the black-and-white SIT camera relayed images topside of things that the tech crew the previous summer had only hypothesized might be found at the final resting place of the
Central America
. Since no one knew what a wood-hulled steamer should look like after nearly a century and a half at the bottom of the sea, the piles of coal and period artifacts at Galaxy had seemed more important than the absence of sidewheels and boilers and pipes. Galaxy was convincing until something more convincing appeared. Now that had happened in a rush: huge piles of angular metal strewn between two giant paddle wheels at an enormous site that they already had seen held at least a few of the trappings of a large passenger ship. Bob Evans’s instinct the moment he saw the site on the sonagram had proved correct. After months of probing on Galaxy, they couldn’t say for certain it was the
Central America
, only that there was nothing they had seen on the site to tell them it was not the
Central America
. Within seconds and after but a glimpse, they knew that Galaxy II was no longer a test site.

By the end of the dive, calm had settled over the control room. The vehicle performed as they had hoped, the DP system functioned perfectly,
and they were seeing the remains of what they now were almost certain was the SS
Central America
. A few hours earlier, they had wondered if the vehicle would work, if they could find the site, and how long they would stay there before they moved on to Galaxy to dig in the coal. Suddenly, everything had changed. When they had completed the four-hour survey at twenty-five feet, Tommy ended the dive. “That was really convincing seeing the sidewheels,” he said, “but I’m thinking, ‘How do we explain this to the world?’”

Tommy had examined every possible scenario, and he had contingency plans for each, but with all of the pressures of disgruntled partners, thruster problems, vehicle design, competitors, buying a ship, money dribbling in, wondering where the gold was on Galaxy, wondering if the gold was not on Galaxy but on a new site, he hadn’t spent a great deal of time wondering what he would do if on the first dive they landed on top of cast-iron sidewheels the size of a farmhouse. He had to guard that information carefully. If this was the
Central America
, then somewhere on that site lay hundreds of millions of dollars in gold, and that much money made people think crazy thoughts and do crazy things, and Tommy didn’t have time to diverge on all of the scenarios that could arise if they returned to port and twenty men knew everything that was happening in that control room. He knew from working at Battelle it was easier to control the information itself. He decided that not even Bryan and Tod would be allowed inside the control room during a dive.

“I went out on deck and talked with them,” said Tommy, “and I explained to them that we couldn’t have everybody on the ship know, that we had to draw the line somewhere. I told them they would have to share that responsibility with Burlingham, and they did a good job, although I know it was difficult for them.”