Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (72 page)

They stopped the vehicle thirty feet beneath the surface on the port side, its lights intermittently visible beneath the waves. Crouching on his hands and knees, Bryan lifted himself over the bulwark onto the hero boards just as the ship dropped away and a twelve-foot sea hit broadside, ripping his hand from the platform. The wave exploded off the ship, jerking him up the cable, but he held tight to the cable, and the wave fell away as Tod dropped onto the boards next to him. Some waves were so big, the ship could not rise above them; it plunged, and the waves rolled along the sides, taking them under. Burlingham was the last of the three onto the boards, poised between Bryan and Tod to run the recovery. By then, Doering had fought his way across the deck to the crane, and everyone else on the tech crew was holding tight to the bulwark with one hand and hanging on to Tod, Bryan, and Burlingham with the other.

The waves swelled, and white patches of foam clung to them as they broke into the light and slammed the hull, the foam and the waves blasting into spray high above the ship. With the vehicle just below the surface, Burlingham signaled to Doering to begin swinging the crane toward him. As the crane drew near, the three men on the hero boards moved quickly, now high above the water blasted by the wind, now holding on, water up to their chests. They opened shackles, cut through tape, and sorted out cable lines. Spray stung their eyes, and wire leads blew stiff in the wind just out of reach, but in fifteen minutes, they had
shut down the power, disconnected the cable, and hooked the vehicle to a wire coming off the crane. Then Burlingham signaled to Doering to start winding in the wire.

The vehicle broke the surface in a trough, then disappeared in the swell of the following wave. Doering had the crane lowered over the water, winching the vehicle higher, until it was snug against the tractor tires at the top of the boom. With the elbow of the crane straightening, raising the vehicle from the water, the ship rolled far to port. As soon as Burlingham felt the ship coming back on its roll to starboard, he shouted to Doering to start swinging in with the crane.

The ship began to roll back to starboard, and the crane began to turn, and then Tod heard a loud pop and saw the vehicle hurtling at him. He threw himself over the rail and scrambled aft, as the vehicle skimmed the water and crashed into the deployment arm, the electronics sphere exploding and gold sparks showering the deck. The gear at the base of the crane had blown apart, and the crane was again at the will of the sea.

The ship rolled back to port, the vehicle twisting out over the water at the top of the crane, and then the ship rolled back to starboard and the vehicle crashed again into the deployment arm. Flashes lit up the port side and more sparks shot into the air.

The batteries inside the vehicle’s battery packs ripped loose from their brackets, and the packs broke open, spraying oil across the deck. To try to control the swing, Bob reached up with a boat hook and snagged a tag line coming off the side of the crane. As the vehicle swung toward the ship, the line he had snagged slackened, and other techs grabbed hold and heaved together, stumbling and sliding on the oil-slick deck, trying to haul the line toward the starboard rail. But before they could pull it that far, the vehicle began its outward swing, dragging six of them back across the deck.

Doering was trying to raise the crane high enough so that on its next swing in, the vehicle would clear the rail and he could drop it on deck. But the crane’s motor suddenly died, and the knuckle locked in that bent position with the swing gear gone and the crane flapping back and forth and the two-and-a-half-ton vehicle slamming against the side of the ship.

Doering could not control the crane. He jumped from the seat and grabbed on to the tag line with the others. The vehicle swung in again
and crashed into the deployment arm, turned slightly on the swing outboard, then missed the arm on the next swing and crashed into the side of the ship.

Moore disappeared under the forecastle, found the circuit breaker for the crane, and restarted the motor. When he rushed back into the storm, he saw people running back and forth in the unnatural brightness of the night deck.

“Harvey was in the thick of it, running back and forth,” said Moore, “and that’s what I was really worried about, was them being there instead of out of the way. They were sucking up and running across the deck, and then when it went to swing outboard, they were running back across the deck. They never had time to take one of the tag lines and get it made around something so they could control it. You cannot reach out and grab something that weighs five thousand pounds and stop it from whipping around.”

Moore jumped onto the crane seat. The rain drove in sideways. The ship heeled to port, and with Moore in the seat, the crane swung out, flinging the vehicle at the height of its arc over the water, and then the ship suddenly righted and the vehicle flew back toward the ship and again slammed into the deployment arm. Moore couldn’t control the swing, but if he could straighten the knuckle, on the next swing the vehicle might be just high enough to clear the bulwark; and once it was over the deck, he could let cable out and try to drop it, trapping it inside the rails. But Moore had never operated the crane, and when he looked at the panel of levers with black knobs he saw that the labels had rubbed off: He couldn’t tell which lever straightened the knuckle.

On the next roll to port, Moore waited until the crane reached its zenith, jammed the lever he thought might control the knuckle, and the knuckle began to straighten, raising the vehicle as it swung back toward the ship.

Tommy and Bob stood five feet from the starboard rail, still tugging at the tag line, still trying to coax it around a cleat on the starboard side. Bob heard a loud thud and then voices shouting, and when he looked up, he saw that the vehicle, twisting wildly on the boom, wasn’t going to crash into the deployment arm this time but had skipped over the port gunwale and was flying across the deck.

Tommy ducked and stumbled forward. Bob dropped the tag line and dived inside an empty aluminum cube pinned against the starboard rail. The vehicle swept the space where they had stood, then twisted at the end of the boom and began its swing back across the deck, over the gunwale, out across the water.

Moore had tried to drop the crane as the vehicle came over the deck, but the crane moved too slowly. By the time it was low enough to trap the vehicle, the vehicle had cleared the rail, was outside the ship, and had swung back into the deployment arm. Moore raised it again, so it would clear the rail coming in and he could try once more to drop it on the deck.

The ship rolled to port and the crane swung out. As the vehicle stopped at the end of its swing, Moore began to lower the crane, and as the vehicle came in this time, it bounced off the gunwale, continued across the deck, and had begun its outboard swing when Moore slammed a lever, dropping the whole boom down on top of the vehicle.

The vehicle slammed into the deck, skidded toward the port rail, hit, skidded back toward the center of the deck, then headed again toward the port rail and crashed into the base of the deployment arm, where it stopped. Suddenly, the tag line went limp.

Despite the wind and the waves and the falling rain, the night seemed still. No one spoke. Exhausted and shaking, they stood in the rain, not moving. Bob’s left lens was covered in blood from a gash in his forehead, but he was coherent and otherwise uninjured. Everyone else was unharmed: Burlingham, Moore, Scotty, Doering, Bryan, Tod, and Tommy.

“It was the strangest feeling,” said Tod, “just a rush. We all looked around and everybody made it alive, and we started laughing. Maybe we were all delirious, I don’t know. Then for some reason, I remember looking over, and I saw Harvey, who was shaking from the cold. I’ll never forget that, because he had the biggest smile on his face.”

Although much of the vehicle had been destroyed and the artifact drawer was smashed closed, they had the vehicle safely aboard, and no one left the deck until they had it tied down. The ship was rolling so hard that that took another three hours, one foot at a time, removing and reattaching lines as they went, until the vehicle was snug in its parking place and anchored to the deck with half a dozen lines. Then
Burlingham took the bridge in seas running twenty feet and blue water coming over the forecastle. With the vehicle strapped tight to the deck, the
Arctic Discoverer
traveled through the storm at eight knots, headed due west for Wilmington.

T
OMMY HAD A
large cache of antique gold strapped to the deck of the
Discoverer
and photographs and film of a lot more gold lying in piles back at the site. He had solved the problems of finding and recovering the treasure of the
Central America;
now ahead were the problems of trying to keep it. In his failure-mode thinking he could conjure infinite ways that the treasure still could be lost, destroyed, or defaced or otherwise diminished in value. Two groups already had tried to run him off what everyone had thought was the
Central America
site, and a federal judge had warned them away. But others still might try, and of course there were far more subtle ways to lose the treasure than having someone try to drag a sonar fish across your work site or broadside your ship. This was the one that concerned Tommy most: Now that he had found the treasure, someone might try to take it away.

Weeks earlier, after they saw the sidewheels at Galaxy II and found the bell and then the gold and knew that this was the
Central America
, Tommy, Barry, and Bob had begun planning what they would do with the treasure once they brought it to the surface. “There’s no precedent,” said Bob, “for taking several tons of gold in small parcels off the ocean floor, moving it to shore, and securing it.” That was the immediate problem: where to secrete the gold on the ship, when to remove it, how to carry it off with no one seeing, and where to take it for safekeeping. On the way into Wilmington, they refined the plans they had begun earlier, but those procedures and times they would divulge not even to the rest of the tech crew.

The next problem was less immediate and more subtle. The Columbus-America Discovery Group was now a partnership of 160 people, most of whom did not know one another. They had supported Tommy even when competitors appeared on the horizon and costs went up, their shares were diluted, and Tommy returned from the site with little more than stoneware and coal; the partners had believed in him and his ideas and had sent him back out to try again. Benjamin Franklin once said
that three could keep a secret if two of them were dead. The partners deserved to know and needed to share in the stories about the gold. But how did Tommy keep 160 people quiet until he could return for the rest of the treasure?

In Wilmington after the storm, Tommy and Barry wrote a series of letters to the partners, one reconstructing the recovery of the bell, one describing a bar of gold they had brought to the surface, and another telling the story of two gold coins they had found. “As for the bar of gold,” they wrote, “our preliminary information indicates that only a few like it are still known to exist, because the government melted down most of them during and shortly after the Civil War.” They told the partners that the coins were “uncorroded as expected, but portions of them are stained with reddish orange rust.”

In each letter, Tommy closed with an admonition. “It may seem impossible to keep a lid on our discoveries until next summer,” began one final paragraph. “Keep in mind that our Partnership has done other things that are still considered impossible. The next few months will really test our resolve to contain the information about our gold recoveries in order that we may continue to operate efficiently when it really counts. We all must be patient until the rest of the gold is in hand. Once this critical-path goal is met, then we can safely go public with our discoveries.”

Tommy had decided that revealing the recovery of only one bar and two coins offered the perfect compromise: It provided the partners with a sense of wonder and excitement and allowed them to enjoy their role in the accomplishment; it also gave Tommy the ideal cover if the information that they had found gold did leak out. Anyone in the deep-ocean community who heard third- or fourthhand that Tommy claimed to have recovered one gold bar and two gold coins from the
Central America
would immediately assume that he had “salted” the site: either placed a tiny amount of treasure on some ship, then recovered what he had placed, or merely said that the treasure came from the site and used it to show to potential investors to raise more cash to continue the search. To the deep-ocean community, the logic was simple: The ploy might dazzle potential investors, but if the treasure really was there, no one would leave it to come back to later.
So if Tommy’s story ever leaked out to competitors, they wouldn’t believe it anyhow.

W
HEN HE RETURNED
to Columbus in late October, Tommy scheduled a meeting of the partnership for Saturday, November 26, at the Columbus Athletic Club. About one hundred people attended, partners and their spouses. Wayne Ashby described the gathering as “a very excited and happy group of investors.”

Tommy stood at the podium, his black beard thick from months at sea. The lawyer Bill Arthur thought he had lost a lot of weight since the last time they had seen each other. “He was all blue twisted steel,” remembered Arthur. “I don’t think there was
any
fat on him.” A few feet from Tommy sat the bell from the
Central America
. Bob and Tod had wrestled the three-hundred-pound artifact out of its wet storage, covered it with damp towels, and with some help had set it on top of its storage box and carted it into the room to display for the partners. On a table in front of Tommy sat a two-and-a-half-gallon aquarium filled with water, and in the water sat a bar of gold weighing twenty-five pounds.