Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (71 page)

For another hour they filmed and photographed the scene, panoramic sweeps of piles of gold, and tighter shots of crevices choked with bars and strewn with coins, much of the treasure draped with orange sea stars and sprouting stalks of gorgonian coral. Since recovering the last artifact, they had shot over a hundred more photographs before Tommy directed Moore to recover a coin. Then they shot several more photographs, after which Moore plucked a large brick from the edge of the pile. They continued to shoot and retrieve until bottomside computer problems forced them to end the dive. Before the vehicle ascended, Moore recovered a cluster of eight coins directly in front of the vehicle. In plastic trays, each separated from the other, they now had twenty-seven gold artifacts, and for every artifact they had collected, they had shot nearly ten photographs.

When the vehicle came to the surface at six o’clock that evening, Bryan and Tod put it on the tugger and pulled it forward under the awning with the front of the vehicle facing away from the bridge. Then Tommy ordered the tech crew to leave the deck and the men on the bridge to step back from the windows while Bob removed the plastic trays from the artifact drawer and took them into his laboratory, which he then locked; no one else was allowed to touch the few pieces of gold, no one else was allowed to look at them; no one else was even permitted into the room.

“The whole notion of not letting anybody handle the gold but Bob Evans just drove people crazy,” recalled Tommy, “absolutely drove them crazy. But that way there’s one guy entirely responsible for it, to make sure we’ve got a solid pedigree for the gold.”

E
ARLY THE FOLLOWING
morning, the tech crew was on deck, dismantling the subsea computer and rebuilding it with parts delivered the night before. Milt had returned to the beach on the delivery boat to resume his teaching responsibilities at the University of South Carolina. All day the rest of the crew worked in seas rocking four to eight feet and winds gusting to twenty knots. That evening, they prepared to
launch again, but Tommy himself canceled the dive when the weather appeared to be dropping. At sunup the next day, Burlingham had the thrusters down and the
Discoverer
on station. An hour later, the crew stood on deck, ready to launch. But as Doering raised the vehicle from the deck and rotated the crane slowly over the water, a gear at the base of the crane cracked under the weight and a moment later blew apart. Doering had no way to control the crane. It swung out over the water with the vehicle rocking at the top of the boom, and then the ship began its roll back to starboard, and the vehicle skimmed the waves and crashed into the bulwark. The ship’s roll then shifted to port, and the vehicle again flew out across the water, and again it came crashing back against the side of the ship. Before they could get tag lines onto the crane and harness its swing, the vehicle had collided with the bulwark several times.

Tommy examined the damage and decided to lower the vehicle a hundred feet to see if the systems still operated. The weather wasn’t perfect, but it was decent, and it could be the best they would see for a long spell. Using the tag lines to control the crane’s swing, the crew paid out on the lines, the boom rotated slowly outboard, and Doering lowered the vehicle into the water. From the control room, Moore tested the systems, and except for reduced power with a lost battery pack, everything seemed to work. By noon they had contact with the bottom, but no one knew how long they would be able to stay. Although the vehicle was big and heavy, it was no match for the side of a ship and the roll of the sea. It had hit hard, and a system testing out at the surface could still blow suddenly.

On the bottom they fired the cameras every thirty seconds, but within a half hour, they started losing hydraulic pressure; then part of their subsea navigation blew. The cameras, strobes, and lights still worked, but after two hours on the bottom and 187 stills, the topside software died; and then the power began to drop, and they lost more of their navigation. The dive ended at three in the afternoon.

While the tech crew worked on the bottom, Burlingham, Tod, and Bryan had repaired the base of the crane, and it held when they recovered the vehicle that evening and swung it on board. For the next two days, with the weather just shy of marginal, everyone worked on the
vehicle. The collisions against the side of the ship had destroyed one battery pack and blown fuses in the other two. Other parts of the vehicle were dented and hoses were ripped, and the rotating base had to be removed and welded again. Tommy still wanted hundreds more photos of the Bank of California area, but one of his objectives on the next dive was to recover gold.

E
ARLY THE MORNING
of the 6th, a squall of twenty-knot winds passed over them in the dark, but by daybreak the sea again had dropped, and the ship now rocked gently in three-foot blue swells. The weather was as close to calm as they had seen in almost two weeks. At 11:35, they launched the repaired vehicle, watching the crane closely. Once the vehicle was in the water, Doering lowered it a hundred feet and held it while Moore checked the cameras and tested the systems. Then they sent the vehicle to the bottom. Within an hour of launching, the weather started to change again, the gentle blue swells rising higher and darkening.

In the southwest quadrant of the gold spill, adjacent to the gargoyle, sat a perfectly rectangular arrangement of gold bars. Tommy wanted complete photo and video coverage of this composition and the immediate surroundings, including more studies of the gargoyle. Scotty recorded every move in the dive log: “lead in photo, pan left, photo #12 end pan left, back to center … pan right, end pan #41, start dead zone, end dead zone, trolley outside of box, start blow, photos while blowing. …” By locking the camera angle, extending the camera boom, and very slowly rotating the vehicle a short distance, the photos later would appear as though the camera had traveled in a straight line.

As the dive continued throughout the afternoon, the swells topside gradually sharpened and turned gray, but Burlingham couldn’t tell how far they would rise. When the weather shifted at this time of year, the sea typically ran up to six or eight feet and the winds peaked at twenty to twenty-five knots, as they had for the past few weeks. He could still recover in those conditions, but he never knew. Sometimes when the weather turned, it looked like a storm front sweeping across the sea but was really a localized squall that would rock the ship for only an hour or two and continue toward land. If it was a mere squall, they could leave
the vehicle down and recover when the squall passed. But sometimes what looked like a simple squall was really a storm that would pummel the ship for five days.

Just before five o’clock, at Tommy’s direction, Moore slowly opened the artifact drawer. Inside were the rectangular plastic trays with handles and large, numbered compartments, so Bob could catalog the recovery of each bar and coin before it was even touched by the manipulator. Moore removed the trays, placing them at the edge of the gold pile. Using a fingertip touch, like he was playing the flute, Moore moved the master arm on his console, and the manipulator on the vehicle reached out over a pile of coins, bent downward at the wrist, and paused, almost like it was contemplating the pile, then dropped carefully, spread its Teflon jaws, closed them, paused again, and lifted a single coin. When Moore opened the jaws again above the tray, the coin dropped and a tiny cloud of sediment rose. They shot each scene three or four times, then Moore plucked a coin or a bar from the scene, slowly cleaning up a discrete concentration at the edge of the gold spill.

A
T SUNSET, OUT
beyond the far edge of the Gulf Stream, Burlingham saw clouds building: highs chasing lows across the sea, the dark clouds erupting between the two fronts, then arching upward and stretching along the horizon. Although Burlingham monitored these waters on a weather fax every four or five hours, localized disturbances often materialized so suddenly they never appeared on the fax; sometimes they did appear, but you couldn’t tell what was behind them. Burlingham estimated this squall line was as close as twenty-five miles, and to him it looked thick, sweeping toward the ship. As the last light of day faded over Wilmington nearly two hundred miles to the west, the
Arctic Discoverer
began to rock over choppy, darkened waves, her bow lifting higher and higher. Then the temperature dropped, and the canvas awning on the foredeck began to undulate and snap in the wind.

Burlingham radioed the control room. “You’d better bring it up now.”

Tommy heard the warning but continued to work. He needed to recover a significant amount of gold, yet do it carefully. With another 125 photographs of the site, they had finished the sweeping panoramic
shots, a magazine-quality rendering of the treasure. By six o’clock, they had recovered seven artifacts. Then Moore trained the vehicle’s thrusters on a portion of the pile, sending a stiff current downward, and they filmed and photographed the roiling sediment as it blew up off the gold. Thirty minutes later, they had recovered seven more artifacts. Moore dusted an adjacent area, and a half hour after that, they started recovering more artifacts, three within a minute. By 8:00
P.M.
, they had picked up seventeen more, thirty-two altogether. Now they were down to taking two, and sometimes only one, tight photographs of each setting before Moore reached out with the manipulator and grasped another piece of gold.

At 8:00
P.M.
, Burlingham recorded in his log that the wind had risen sharply to a steady twenty to twenty-five knots, the seas more consistent now at six feet. And according to the latest weather fax, the disturbance he had seen along the horizon at sunset was no squall but a frontal system that had formed suddenly and appeared huge: The sea and the wind could still double in size and intensity. When the storm hit, Burlingham wanted the vehicle on deck, not hanging off the side of the ship.

He radioed the control room again. “Harvey,” he said, “this front’s going to be on us in two hours. We should start recovery operations immediately.”

“We’re onto something important,” said Tommy.

“Fine,” said Burlingham. “We’re going to be running ten- to fifteen-foot seas.”

Burlingham didn’t need to tell Tommy what that meant. Ten-foot seas made recovery almost impossible. And once the storm hit, it would be too late to begin. The winch took an hour and a half to wind eight thousand feet of cable to the surface. Then they had to raise the vehicle through the air-sea interface with the crane and swing it onto the deck, and that would take another half hour, especially in rough seas. But Tommy decided to stay down just a little longer, take a few more pictures, recover a little more gold, hope that the storm was less intense than it appeared or perhaps farther away. “Those were tough decisions,” he said later. “Burlingham didn’t know what we were trying to get, and we all knew that this might be the last dive of the season.”

At the center of the ship, the heavy insulation that kept the control room cool and dry also deadened the sound and feel of the sea. The tech crew could hear only the dull, intermittent hum of the thrusters and feel only the slightest rise as the ship lifted over the incoming waves. Other than the slight rocking, they had no sense of the approaching storm.

In the next twelve minutes, they photographed and recovered seven more artifacts, three of them coins cemented together, and placed them safely in a compartment in the plastic tray. As they worked, a violet fish two feet long with black buttons for eyes hovered above two shiny coins, sometimes nibbling between them. A long upright spike rose from the back of the fish’s head, and the last two-thirds of its body flowed like fine ribbon before a fan. The eerie moan of the thrusters changing azimuth seemed to accompany the silent rippling of the fish.

For another hour, they remained on the bottom. When they had secured the seven artifacts, Tommy had Moore rotate the vehicle and aim the forward thruster at a rippling in the sediment. Moore ran the thruster for a quick dusting, and from under the sediment appeared another pile of coins and bars. They photographed and filmed this pile, recovered a bar from the edge, then pulled the cameras back for long shots of the area and more angles on the gargoyle. After a while the fish departed, and only the deep-ocean sentries watched in silence. In the dark blue background, a white crinoid sometimes appeared, swimming with tentacles like a wispy tangle of pipe cleaners, each waving up and down as though to the sound of a harp.

T
HE STORM SPUN
across the water toward the ship, the winds bucking the north flow of the Gulf Stream, kicking up high, jagged waves that collided with the cross swells still left from the early-morning squall. In the control room, six monitors cast a bluish light into the darkness, and the tech team watched Moore continue to probe with the vehicle in the quiet of the deep Atlantic, until they had photographed the small area 250 times and filled the artifact trays with forty gold coins and bars.

By nine o’clock that night, the seas had reached eight feet and the wind blew at near gale, foam from the cresting waves beginning to streak the surface of the sea. Thirteen minutes later, Tommy ordered the vehicle shut down and the team to begin recovery.

“They stayed down about an hour and a half, two hours after we told them we saw it coming,” remembered Tod. “But what was amazing was the strength of the squall. When we finally did start to come up, the waves had already built from three feet to eight feet, and it was dark. By the time we got it up to the surface, we were in about twelve-foot seas and forty-knot winds and it was raining.”

At ten-thirty the vehicle neared the surface. By then the wind had intensified to full gale, and the waves had grown by over half since they ended the dive and started winding in the vehicle. When the recovery team ventured onto the deck, they saw waves, some approaching fifteen feet, breaking over the side of the ship, and the rain came out of the darkness sideways across the deck, suddenly sparkling as pellets in the white lights.