Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (47 page)

The meeting lasted for half the day, a heated debate, with Patton waxing passionate for the million dollar insurance policy and Jim Turner and Bill Arthur waxing only slightly less so. The lawyers Kelly and Loveland agreed: Spend a million bucks, get a piece of the ship, take it to court, file your claim, and then you’re safe; you’ve eliminated your biggest risk. Not to spend the money now was foolish.

Tommy had heard what he wanted to hear. The partners were still with him, even if he had to dip into their pockets again to protect the site. Now he could tuck that ace away and pull it out only if he needed it, and he wouldn’t need it to ward off Spence. The rumors Tommy had heard in the deep-ocean community concerned someone far bigger than the self-taught underwater archaeologist from Charleston.

Shortly after the meeting, Tommy heard a second rumor that someone was mounting an expedition to find and salvage the
Central America
that summer. But the rumor was so vague, so many times removed, Tommy couldn’t be sure, and he didn’t know who it might be. His sources were friends in the business or new suppliers with whom he was just forming a relationship, so he had to be cautious: Information can flow two ways. The somebody who told Tommy that another party was trying to lease a big winch might be the same somebody who told the party renting the big winch something about Tommy. “It’s kind of tricky,” said Tommy, “because our main product is information.”

One more thing Tommy wondered: Was he hearing about himself? Was he the competition? Was he about to commit a million dollars in a mad race to beat himself to sea? He had to consider that, but even before the first rumor, he had been careful to expose nothing that could be narrowed to him, the Atlantic Bight, or the
Central America
. He had meticulously crafted the fuzzy brackets with Brockett, and because he knew what Brockett had put out, he was almost certain that what he was now hearing was not his own echo bouncing back through the industry.

T
HE FIRST TIME
Ted Brockett went to sea with tools he had designed at his office—cleverly designed, he thought—one came back smashed, two came back with the aft sections broken off, and one never came back. At sea, he realized, you didn’t delicately pick something up off
the deck and quietly place it in the water. “It gets swung around and bashed on the ship,” he said, “and beat up against the crane and dropped on the bottom.”

The experience had taught him a lesson in deep-ocean design: Make it dumb. Skip the frills, the high-tech niftiness, and make it as dumb as you possibly can, because only dumb will survive the sea.

“That was the approach we took with the vehicle frame for Harvey,” said Brockett. “It had to be dumb, and it had to be simple.”

Brockett had to design the framework for the design engineer to hang all of their ingenuity on, and the more Brockett listened to Tommy and thought about this vehicle, the more he realized that the key to its design was flexibility. One day it had to be a passively towed camera sled, long and skinny, to reacquire the target; and the next day it had to be squat and strong enough to sit on the bottom and work in the debris field, pick up ceramic cups and small gold coins, or thousand-pound anchors, and put them into a basket or tie ropes around them and bring them back to the surface. And the day after that it had to be tall and thin enough to drop through a narrow hatch and look around for gold.

For weeks, Brockett had thought and sketched, and each thought got simpler, each sketch more refined until his thinking and his sketching evolved into something that looked like a child’s Erector set: discrete module frames changed at will by removing a few bolts. “It was very crude,” said Brockett, “and it looked ugly as sin, I don’t deny any of that, but it allowed us to reconfigure it and have thrusters on one day and not have thrusters on the next day, and to be tall and skinny or short and fat.”

And that’s what Brockett was working on, refining his sketches into drawings, arranging and rearranging on paper all of the pieces to this simple but homely underwater marvel, when Tommy called him on March 20. Tommy had just heard the third rumor, and he was shifting to the E-Plan.

T
HE RUMORS WERE
still no more than that, and Tommy didn’t even have a name, but now he had heard the same story three ways from three independent sources, people in the industry calling with bits of information like, “Somebody’s been looking at equipment for a job off the East Coast,” and the equipment was a winch that held seventeen thousand
feet of cable, which Tommy knew could only be used in a deep-water sonar search. At one time it even seemed like there might be two other groups planning expeditions, people looking for equipment or specific capability, hiring expertise to do things for that type of operation at those depths.

“I was looking for three independent sources,” said Tommy, “and I finally got the third right around March 20. But it wasn’t like somebody I knew well had talked to the guy who was going out. So I did a lot of fretting because I couldn’t verify it. Everybody around me was saying it couldn’t be done, we couldn’t leave that early, but I decided we couldn’t take the chance, we had to get to sea.”

Tommy worried little that someone else would find and recover the
Central America
that summer. But if a competitor was poised to mount an expedition earlier than August, he saw two problems: First, if the competitor somehow imaged the Sidewheel site, it complicated the legal issues so that Columbus-America could lose control of the site or have to share the recovery with the competitor; and second, if the competitor was a typical treasure hunting group, it would try to raise money through the media by claiming to have found the
Central America
, which might scare off Tommy’s investors.

Tommy had wanted to go to sea with good operating capability toward the end of July and then have August and September to verify the ship as the
Central America
, thoroughly photograph and document the site, and retrieve some of the gold. Now he had to announce to the partnership that he had decided to halt plans to build the full-up vehicle he and the engineers had designed, to forget about recovering significant amounts of gold that summer and just rush to sea in two months. The E-Plan. They had to be in the water by June 1.

The lawyers had explained to Tommy that before he could claim the Sidewheel site he had to have an artifact to take into court, and that single requirement became the design goal for what Tommy now called the Emergency Vehicle: maybe not find gold, maybe not even explore the ship, just retrieve an artifact and bring it to the surface and take it to court.

Brockett already had told Tommy that trying to build any kind of vehicle before the end of the summer was a futile exercise; now Tommy said he needed the vehicle in May. Brockett called in every I.O.U. of good
will he had with his suppliers. “I know I’m being ridiculous,” he told them, “but here’s the drawing, have it to us day after tomorrow.” John Moore flew to an ROV trade show in San Diego, looking for ways to build the components and assemble them more quickly, and every commitment he could get from every manufacturer was “no faster than ninety days.”

Hackman later remembered Tommy coming to him about this time and asking how long he thought it would take to build a simple vehicle that could go down eight thousand feet, relocate the site, and bring back one artifact. That’s all Tommy wanted. Hackman said, “Two years.”

I
N
A
PRIL, AFTER
weeks of phone calls and faxing, Don Craft found Tommy another mudboat out of Louisiana, the
Nicor Navigator
. One of the crew described her as, “Like a big, giant, long tugboat.” She was sixty feet longer than the
Pine River
. Her deckhouse bunched up on the bow, and from there back ran a flat deck open all the way to the stern. On that wide-open deck, Craft had to create a control room for the techs, a laboratory for Bob Evans, a communications shack for Tommy and Barry, sleeping quarters for the tech crew, storage, large and small repair shops, and install a winch, a crane, a deployment arm, a handling ramp, Star Fix satellite navigation electronics, and a dynamic-positioning system.

Part of what made the deep ocean an “impossible barrier” was the inability to anchor the surface ship. Anchor chain had to be five times longer than depth, and you needed four or five of those anchors for a two-hundred-foot ship. In only two thousand feet of water, that would require about fifty thousand feet of anchor chain to keep your ship from drifting, and how did you set all five of those anchors so that the ship lay positioned precisely over the spot you wanted to work?

Dynamic positioning had become the key to all work in the deep ocean: Despite winds, currents, and seas, a combination of navigation systems, interfacing computers, and two or three large propellers would keep a ship constantly nudging its way back to a prescribed spot. Ship captains used it to berth supertankers. The deep-water folks used it to keep a ship stationary at the surface while their vehicle worked below.

Craft got quotes from the four major DP manufacturers ranging from $750,000 to $2.5 million to convert the
Nicor Navigator
into a dynamic-positioning vessel. Craft figured he could do it for a lot less, but every expert in the business told him no. Then rubbernecking at a workboat show in New Orleans, he discovered the Robertson DP system and decided it would work on the
Navigator
. He had Hackman draft the specs, sent them to the Robertson facility in Norway, and the Robertson engineers put a system together, flew it into the United States, and installed it in less than a month, all for $130,000.

In New Orleans, Craft also found a “crackerjack yard foreman” to ramrod the ship conversion. He told the foreman he wanted it all done right, but he wanted it all done fast. Get it on, bolt it down, wire it up, test it out. Five days after the
Navigator
went on charter May 5, they took her into the gulf at the mouth of the Mississippi and ran sea trials for a day and a half on the new DP system. Everything checked out, and the
Navigator
held station. Three days later, the captain eased the
Navigator
back into the gulf and aimed her bow at the Florida Keys. Three and a half days after that, Craft had the
Navigator
docked at the Atlantic Marine shipyard on the St. Johns River about ten miles out of Jacksonville, the navigation and dynamic-positioning systems wired in, the crane pedestal beefed up, the crane mounted, a new winch in place, the deployment arm and blocks installed, and five huge shipping containers, the Elder vans, bolted to the deck starboard and port.

“The primary objective throughout the mobilization period,” said Craft, “was to get the stuff on the ship, and get the ship to sea, on site, to be there before somebody else got there.”

Moore had shipped a tractor-trailer load of aluminum and electronics from Seattle to Jacksonville, and other shipping containers were arriving from Columbus. He and the rest of the techs were in the yard, beginning to assemble the vehicle, when Tommy, Bob, and Barry arrived on the 18th of May. Two other members of the tech team had already joined them in Columbus and were now in Jacksonville.

One was an underwater acoustics expert and software wizard Tommy had worked closely with on the search cruise the previous summer. Alan Scott, thirty-seven, had a master’s degree in underwater acoustics from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and for ten years
had worked for the navy as a civilian. He would be the navigator, the one responsible for getting all of the navigation and DP computers talking to each other, so he could direct the ship’s captain to the proper point on the ocean and guide Moore along the bottom to the shipwreck site.

Scotty stood out on a ship because he always looked crisp. When everyone else at sea was rumpled and wrinkled and unshaved, with tiny holes fraying along the elastic neck of their T-shirts, Scotty looked fresh and starched right down to a part in his hair and a crease in his jeans. His mind was as orderly. Craft knew Scotty from other deep-water jobs, and he marveled at the younger man’s intellect. “I once sat at a table where Scotty and another tech had a conversation,” he recalled, “and I listened to them very, very intently, very carefully for ten minutes during this interchange, and I never once understood a single thing they said to each other.” Craft had seen Scotty and another tech take apart two PCs, then put them back together and do things with them at sea that Craft knew had never been done before. But Craft didn’t care how good a guy was at the computer. “He has to be able to take care of himself and help take care of the ship,” said Craft, “or he’s more a pain in the ass than all his expertise is worth.” Which is why Craft not only respected Scotty for his skill, but also liked having him on deck. Scotty was a dedicated runner, thin, strong, and he performed on deck like a seaman, “one of the happy guys,” Craft called him. “You would’ve thought he’d been a deckhand all his life.”

The other member new to the tech team was an old acquaintance of Tommy’s from the
James Bay
days, John Doering. Tommy, Barry, Bob, and the other techs thought of the search for the
Central America
as an adventure of ideas and technology; to Doering it was a treasure hunt. “I don’t make any bones about being a treasure hunter,” said Doering. “That’s what I am and what I do.” Tommy had brought Doering in for two reasons: One, he knew how to run the crane for launch and recovery; two, he had an eye for underwater artifacts coupled with a drafting background—he could look at worn, bent, broken, corroded, collapsed, dilapidated, silt-covered, storm-tossed ship wreckage on the bottom of the ocean, somehow reconfigure it in his head, and understand what he was seeing; then he could draw pictures of what the original looked like.