Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (65 page)

From the marina, Tommy called Dean Glower. “These investors are not that patient,” Glower told him. “You’re a great guy, it’d be nice to see a good guy win, but you’re not there yet. You’re gonna lose your investors if you don’t come up with some real cargo.” Tommy finally
decided they could wait no longer; they had to go to sea with the faulty thrusters and continue trying to work out the problems.

Craft waved good-bye from the dock. He wasn’t going on this trip; Burlingham could direct launch and recovery, and Craft had been with the
Discoverer
seven days a week since he first saw her dockside encrusted in Goose Bay ice back in February. It was now the end of August.

ABOARD THE
ARCTIC DISCOVERER

L
ATE
S
UMMER
, 1988

T
HE NIGHT OF
August 28, a tug nudged the
Arctic Discoverer
from the dock, guided her into the river, and set her free to find her own way the short distance to the mouth of the St. Johns River. With the sea buoy abeam at eight o’clock, Burlingham took her into the Atlantic and set his course for the first test site at Galaxy II. Tropical Storm Chris had just blown through, freshening the air and leaving the sea still high but dropping quickly.

The
Discoverer
traveled through the night at just under ten knots, the breeze riffling the white canvas tarp stretched across the foredeck, the air ducts on the forecastle spinning into a blur. Her bow cleaved the incoming seas, rising slightly and falling to rise again in fine fashion. The techs liked her seaworthiness. She was solid, and because of her rounded hull, her ride was far smoother than the
Navigator
’s; the techs
watched the shelves of computers in the control room and saw nothing quaking.

All day and throughout the night on the 29th they steamed northeast toward Galaxy II, the winds now light and the seas small. Mid-morning on the 30th, Burlingham halted their advance to test the new dynamic-positioning system. This time, the long shafts of the thrusters oscillated in sync, and the wide props spun at varying speeds, and the
Discoverer
held station.

In the afternoon, Burlingham and the deck crew hooked a spare aluminum cube to the end of the cable, launched the cube with the crane, and ran ten thousand feet of cable off the winch, allowing it to stretch and unkink. Then they recovered the cube and rewrapped the cable even and tight. By midnight they had secured the forward thruster and again were underway the last few miles to the test site at Galaxy II.

The following day, they drifted near Galaxy II in calm seas, working on the vehicle and continuing to fine-tune the thrusters. Burlingham kept his eye on the weather, which so far had been benign. “The last day of September you ought to be shutting down, getting ready to head in,” said Burlingham. “So we’re a bit behind schedule here on the first.”

With Don Craft gone, Burlingham would be directing the deck evolutions during launch and recovery, and he wanted everything safe and smooth; as safe and as smooth as anything could be at sea. For the next three days, they prepared and tested deck equipment for the first launch.

The biggest equipment on the
Discoverer
’s deck was the port-side deployment arm, a stout T-head ten feet tall and weighing four tons. The deployment arm arced out over the water, and one morning Tod’s job was to climb to the top and install a four-hundred-pound block, or pulley. While Doering fired up the crane to lift the block, Tod started up the rungs, but halfway, he realized he had forgotten the teasing wire and climbed back down to the deck. What happened next conjured nightmares in him for months. He had walked no more than five steps toward the workshop when suddenly the four tons of steel shot down toward the water, blew a piston, and flipped backwards onto the deck, blowing every light below and knocking plaster off the ceiling. Topside, there was a fresh divot in the steel deck. The whole incident was over in less than three seconds.

That was what worried Burlingham. You could prepare for a thousand contingencies at sea, but the sea had a thousand and one ways to beat you, and the last always occurred when you were carefully watching for one of the others. It could happen even on a calm day, with the sun shining, the wind at rest, and the crew performing routine work, like hanging a block off the deployment arm. Burlingham discovered that in the salt air, the lever that controlled the arm had rusted and stuck in the down position; when Doering switched on the battery pack for the first time, the power came up suddenly, and the arm dropped to obey the command of the rusted lever, blew apart with the force, and crashed back onto the deck. If Tod had not forgotten the teasing wire and climbed down to get it, he would have been crushed under eight thousand pounds of steel.

To withstand the harsh demands of the sea, equipment had to be heavy and the lines to move that equipment had to be strong, and still the rusting, the rotting, the pitching and pulling of the sea strained that heavy equipment and those strong lines sometimes beyond the breaking point. And when the equipment failed or the lines parted, just like the crashing of the deployment arm, it happened suddenly. John Moore had seen parted lines kill men on deck so fast it cut their last thought in two. On a derrick barge in the North Sea the crew was handling tonnage over the side, and one sailor was standing where he shouldn’t have been, and a line parted and zipped him up the middle between the legs, cut him in half the long way. Deck lines stored so much energy that when they snapped, they hit you before you could hear them coming. “It’s over,” said Moore, “before you even know it’s happening.”

Sometimes it was a surprise; sometimes the danger was there and you knew it but could do nothing about it; sometimes you saw the potential ahead of time and prepared for it. The next near miss on the
Discoverer
came during a controlled experiment. Tommy had had half a dozen new blocks specially designed and built for that season, and he wanted Burlingham to test them. The heavy new blocks were the pulleys over which the lines would run to launch the vehicle. Although manufacturers rated the blocks to a specified load, the manufacturers were sometimes wrong, so Tommy wanted Burlingham to run tests at sea. Rarely did one fail, but if a block was not going to hold under
extreme force, Tommy wanted to know it before he had the block, the vehicle, and half the crew in a tense situation.

With each new block secured near the stern and the men safely out of the way, Burlingham ran the line through the testing block and torqued it tighter and tighter until the line was as taut as it would have to be during launch and recovery; then he tightened it more for a safe margin. On one test, a block exploded, and the energy in the line that was suddenly released launched the block like a ball bearing in a high-powered slingshot. A yellow blur shot past the foredeck and over the forecastle, so far out across the ocean not even the watch on the bridge saw it land. If the block had hit one of the deckhands, the impact would have turned him to jelly.

N
OW INTO EARLY
September, still drifting near the test site, they continued to experiment with the vehicle on deck, tracing glitches in the electronic and hydraulic and computer systems they had created for a robot that would perform the way Tommy had originally envisioned. No more emergency vehicles. This would be what Tommy called “the full-up vehicle,” a robot that could stay on the bottom for a long time and carefully explore and document and record, and later selectively recover and store and bring to the surface. And as they worked to ready it for the first test dive, they basked in sunshine and bobbed in friendly seas. Bob Evans wrote to his new wife, “We continue to have technical difficulties and haven’t had the sub in the water yet. The weather has been beautiful and I hope we don’t use it all up fixing and readying equipment.”

At noon on the third day of floating above the test site, the winds rose from light to fifteen knots and the seas from calm to three feet. Then the gale hit.

On September 5, the winds shot to thirty-five knots and the seas to ten feet, and all the next day the winds continued at gale force, with furious squalls soaring to fifty knots, blowing the crests of the waves into spindrift, as the seas nearly doubled in size. Burlingham stood in the wheelhouse twenty-five feet off the waterline and saw walls of water cresting just below his ankles.

With four tag lines, they had lashed the vehicle to the deck under a heavy tarp, but the pounding of the foredeck twice ripped it loose, and
they had to venture onto the pitching deck to resecure it with a dozen heavy canvas straps. Twenty-foot seas exploded off the bow and crashed onto the forecastle, then flooded down and across the deck in gray-green sheets.

With jolts and spasms, fall in the Atlantic already was arriving, and each new preview of the season to come would hit a little harder and stay a little longer. After two days, this one began to subside. By noon on the 7th, the wind had dropped to twenty-five knots and the seas to twelve feet. But even with the storm passing, the seas remained far too rough to launch. During the next three days, the seas gradually diminished to three feet and the winds to less than ten knots. Tommy had about three weeks left to find the
Central America
before the weather dropped and did not lift again till the following summer.

T
O RELOCATE THE
Sidewheel site the previous summer, Bob had had the navigation numbers from fifteen high-resolution passes to use for his calculations; later for Galaxy he had had the numbers from three passes. But because the sonar techs in 1986 had thought Galaxy II was geology, no one had pinpointed the navigation. Bob had a single high-resolution image shot from one direction, and even that was skewed because the
Pine River
had already passed the target before the crew started to run the navigation records; no one knew if the sonar fish was even behind the ship. Now he had to provide Scotty with a coordinate close enough to the actual site that they could fly the vehicle within twenty feet of it after no more than a few days of running track lines.

Since he had rediscovered the Galaxy II image in March, Bob had wondered how he could relocate that target, and for months he had worked at the problem, taking the few numbers he had to work with and carefully assuming where he had no choice but to assume. It was high school mathematics, mostly geometry and trig, in pencil on graph paper, the way Bob did all of his calculations.
Speed down slope, about 1.3 knots; speed up slope, maybe 2.1 knots. At slower speeds the sonar techs probably had less cable out so the fish would sink; when they picked up speed, they probably had more cable out so the fish would keep close to the bottom; so the distance the fish dragged behind the ship was probably proportional to the speed of the vessel
. He calculated that when the fish imaged Galaxy
II, it was 1,835 meters, or a little over a mile, behind the ship. He calculated further to allow for the fish just coming out of a turn, and when he finished he had a coordinate. Then he worked it all another way, and then another way, each time reweighting his assumptions. And each time, he produced coordinates that fell within 160 meters of each other, creating an elliptical probability area for the target.

Except for Tommy, Bob, and Barry, everyone on the ship thought they were stopping at another site to test equipment on their way to the coal pile at Galaxy. “We didn’t want to start working on the coal pile until we were sure we could stay there,” said Moore. But Moore also sensed that Tommy’s interest in this new site was far greater than it should be for just another test site with a burned-out, eroded hull on the bottom.

At seven o’clock on the morning of September 10, they were still working on the vehicle. The winds had all but died and the seas were down to a foot or two. “May try to launch today,” Burlingham wrote in his log. But they didn’t drop the thrusters and crank them up until twelve hours later, and by the time they got the ship holding station over the site, it was eight o’clock in the evening, and Tommy decided he did not want to launch. Two hours later, Burlingham disengaged the DP system, and they began drifting with the thrusters still down.

At midnight Burlingham recorded in his log, “Standing by as before.”

S
EPTEMBER
11, 1988: 131 years ago today, Addie Easton had huddled in the dining saloon of the
Central America
and watched Ansel remove his coat and join the other men in the bailing lines. Seawater in the hold had risen and doused the fires beneath the boilers, sending hot steam through the engine room, burning the firemen and the haulers, extinguishing the lamps, and silencing the big steam engines forever. The steamer had slid into the trough of the sea, and her giant paddle wheels had slowed and then stopped and hung motionless at her sides, like Ferris wheels in winter
.

At eleven-thirty that morning, the techs launched the vehicle without incident and went to the galley for lunch while they waited an hour and a half for the vehicle to reach the bottom. After lunch, they began to collect in the control room, Moore in the pilot’s seat, Scotty behind him at the navigation computers, Doering to Moore’s left in
the copilot’s seat, Milt Butterworth just to the right of Scotty, scanning the audiovisual monitors. Burlingham sat next to Scotty, learning Scotty’s intricate navigation system. Bob Evans perched behind them against the wall, where he could see all of the monitors at once, and Tommy sat in a chair in the middle, his toes touching the carpet and his knees pumping.

The control room was small with a low ceiling of acoustical foam. The air was kept cool for the computers, no higher than sixty-five degrees and often five degrees cooler. On dive days you could tell the tech crew from the deck crew because the tech crew wore jeans and sweatshirts to keep warm. On three sides, stacked floor to ceiling, computers, monitors, and digital displays filled the room. At the electronic heart of the control room was Scotty’s new logging system, which would keep track of all the computers. It would correlate navigation information from topside with information from the subsea grid. It would record every photograph and every video frame and store the crew’s comments on each. Using the logging system, they could easily return to an artifact seen in the debris on an earlier dive.