Flood Tide

  "The perfect choice. She's ideally equipped for intricate salvage work."

  "She should arrive on site and be in position over the wreck within four days."

  "You planned and arranged all this before you knew if Gallagher could lead us to the wreck?" Pitt asked incredulously.

  "Again, anticipation."

  Pitt's admiration of Sandecker never ceased. "You're a tough man to keep up with, Admiral."

  "I always hedge my bets."

  "I can see that."

  "Good luck, and let me know how it goes."

  With Julia in tow, Pitt spent the day talking to local divers about water conditions and studying charts of the lake bed in the general location of the Princess Dou Wan. The following morning at the crack of dawn, they parked the car at Manitowoc's yacht basin and walked along the dock until they found the Divercity and her crew waiting for them.

  The boat, a twenty-five-foot Parker with a cabin, was powered by a 250 Yamaha outboard. Functional and electronically well equipped with a NavStar differential global-positioning system interfaced with a 486 computer and Geometerics 866 marine magnetometer, the Divercity also mounted a Klein side-scan sonar that would play a key role in seeking out the remains of the Princess Dou Wan. For a close-up identification, the boat carried a Benthos MiniRover MK II underwater robotic vehicle.

  The experienced crew consisted of Ralph Wilbanks, a big, jolly man in his early forties with expansive brown eyes and a bristling mustache; and his partner, Wes Hall, easygoing, soft-spoken and smoothly handsome, who could have doubled for Mel Gibson.

  Wilbanks and Hall greeted Pitt and Julia warmly and introduced themselves. "We didn't expect you this early," said Hall.

  "Up with the birds, that's us," Pitt said, nodding humorously. "How was your trip from Kenosha?"

  "Calm water all the way," answered Wilbanks.

  Both men spoke in a soft Southern accent. Pitt liked them almost immediately. He didn't need a drawing to see they were a professional, job-dedicated pair. They watched amused as Julia jumped from the dock, landing on the deck with the finesse of a limber cat. She was dressed in jeans and a sweater under a nylon windbreaker.

  "She's a fine, no-nonsense boat," said Pitt, admiring the Divercity.

  Wilbanks nodded in agreement. "She does the job." He turned to Julia. "I hope you don't mind roughing it, ma'am. We're not equipped with a head."

  "Don't worry about me," Julia said, smiling. "I've got an iron bladder."

  Pitt looked across the water of the little harbor at the seemingly endless lake. "Light breeze, one- to two-foot waves, conditions look good. Are we ready to cast off?"

  Hall nodded and unwound the mooring lines from the dock's cleats. Just as he was about to climb on board, he pointed down the dock at a figure awkwardly approaching and waving wildly. "Is he with you?"

  Pitt found himself staring at Al Giordino, who was stomping across the wooden planks on a pair of crutches, his wounded leg encased in a plaster cast from ankle to crotch. Giordino flashed his celebrated smile and said, "A pox on your house for thinking you could leave me onshore while you got all the glory."

  Happy to see his old friend, Pitt said, "You can't say I didn't try."

  Wilbanks and Hall gently lifted Giordino over the side and sat him on a long cushion that lay on a raised hump in the middle of the boat. Pitt introduced him to the crew as Julia fussed over him and pressed a cup of coffee in his hand from a thermos she carried in a picnic basket.

  "Shouldn't you be in a hospital?" she asked.

  "I hate hospitals," Giordino grumbled. "Too many people die in them."

  "Is everyone aboard who's coming aboard?" Wilbanks inquired.

  "All present and accounted for," replied Pitt.

  Wilbanks grinned and said, "Then let's do it."

  As soon as they cleared the harbor, Wilbanks pushed the throttle forward and the Divercity leaped ahead, bow clear of the water, until she was skimming the waves at nearly thirty miles an hour. While Julia and Giordino sat aft, enjoying the view and the beginning of a spectacular day under a sky decorated with clouds drifting overhead like a grazing herd of white buffalo, Pitt gave Wilbanks his chart with an X marked twenty-five miles just south of east from the Gallagher's house. He had enclosed the X within a five-mile-by-five-mile search grid. Wilbanks then programmed the coordinates into the computer and watched as the numbers came up on the monitor. Hall busied himself studying the photos and dimensions of the Princess Dou Wan.

  It seemed hardly any time had passed before Wilbanks slowed the boat and announced, "Coming up on lane one in eight hundred meters." He used the metric system, since the equipment was set up for it.

  Pitt helped Hall drop over the magnetometer sensor and the side-scan sonar towfish, trailing them behind the stern of the boat on tethered cables. After tying off the cables, they returned to the cabin.

  Wilbanks steered the boat toward the end of a line displayed on the monitor that led to a search grid with parallel lanes. "Four hundred meters to go."

  "I feel like I'm taking part in an adventure," said Julia.

  "You're going to be sadly disappointed," Pitt laughed. "Running search lanes for a shipwreck is downright tedious. You might compare it to mowing grass on an endless lawn. You can go hours, weeks or even months without finding so much as an old tire."

  Pitt took over the magnetometer duties as Hall set up the Klein & Associates Systems 2000 sonar. He sat on a stool in front of the high-resolution color video display unit that was mounted in the same console as a thermal printer that recorded the floor of the lake in 256 shades of gray.

  "Three hundred meters," Wilbanks droned.

  "What range are we set for?" Pitt asked Hall.

  "Since we're hunting for a large target five hundred feet in length, we'll run thousand-meter lanes." He pointed to the lake-bed detail that was beginning to unreel from the printer. "The bottom looks flat and undisturbed, and since we're operating in fresh water, we should have no problem spotting an anomaly that fits the target's dimensions."

  "Speed?"

  "The water's pretty calm. I think we can run at ten miles an hour and still get a sharp recording."

  "Can I watch?" asked Julia from the cabin doorway.

  "Be my guest," said Hall, making room for her in the cramped quarters.

  "The detail is amazing," she said, staring at the image from the printer. "You can clearly see ripples in the sand."

  "The resolution is good," Hall lectured her, "but nowhere near the definition of a photograph. The sonar image translates similar to a photo that's been duplicated and then run through a copy machine three or four times."

  Pitt and Hall exchanged grins. Observers always became addicted to watching the sonar data. Julia would be no different. They knew that she would gaze entranced for hours, enthusiastically waiting for the image of a ship to materialize.

  "Starting lane one," Wilbanks proclaimed.

  "What's our depth, Ralph?" Pitt asked.

  Wilbanks glanced up at his depth sounder, which hung from the roof on one side of the helm. "About four hundred ten feet."

  An old hand at search-and-survey, Giordino shouted from his comfortable position on the cushion where he lay with his cast propped up on a railing. "I'm going to take a siesta. Yell out if you spot anything."

  The hours passed slowly as the Divercity plowed through the low waves at ten miles an hour mowing the lawn, the magnetometer ticking away, the recording line trailing down the center of the graph paper until swinging off to the sides when it detected the presence of iron. In unison, the side-scan sonar emitted a soft clack as the thermal plastic film unreeled from the printer. It revealed a lake bed cold and desolate and free of human debris.

  "It's a desert down there," said Julia, rubbing tired eyes.

  "No place to build your dream house," said Hall with a little grin.

  "That finishes lane twenty-two," Wilbanks broadcast. "Coming around on lane twenty-three."

  Julia look
ed at her watch. "Lunchtime," she announced, opening the picnic basket she had packed at the bed and breakfast. "Anybody besides me hungry?"

  "I'm always hungry," Giordino called out from the back of the boat.

  "Amazing." Pitt shook his head incredulously. "At twelve feet away, outside in a breeze with the roar of the outboard motor, he can still hear the mere mention of food."

  "What delicacies have you prepared?" Giordino asked Julia, having dragged himself to the cabin doorway.

  "Apples, granola bars, carrots and herbal ice tea. You have your choice between hummus and avocado sandwiches. It's what I call a healthy lunch."

  Every man on the boat looked at each of the others with utter horror. She couldn't have received a more unpalatable reaction if she had said she was volunteering their services as diaper changers at a day-care center. Out of deference to Julia none of the men said anything negative, since she went to the bother of fixing lunch. The fact that she was a woman and their mothers had raised them all as gentlemen added to the dilemma. Giordino, however, did not come from the old school. He complained vociferously.

  "Hummus and avocado sandwiches," he said disgustedly. "I'm going to throw myself off the boat and swim to the nearest Burger King-"

  "I have a reading on the mag!" Pitt interrupted. "Anything on the sonar?"

  "My sonar towfish is trailing farther astern than your mag sensor," said Hall, "so my reading will lag behind yours."

  Julia leaned closer to the sonar's printer in anticipation of seeing an object appear from the printer. Slowly, the image of a hard target began to move across the video display and the printer simultaneously.

  "A ship!" Julia shouted excitedly. "It's a ship!"

  "But not the one we're after," Pitt said flatly. "She's an old sailing ship sitting straight up off the bottom."

  Wilbanks leaned around the others to peer at the sunken ship. "Look at that detail. The cabins, the hatch covers, the bowsprit, they all show clearly."

  "Her masts are gone," observed Hall.

  "Probably swept away by the same storm that sank her," said Pitt.

  The ship had passed behind the range of the towfish now, but Hall recalled its image on the video screen before zooming in, freezing the target, and comparing synchronous magnifications. "Good size," Hall said, studying the image. "At least a hundred and fifty feet."

  "I can't help wondering about her crew," said Julia. "I hope they were saved."

  "Since she's relatively intact," said Wilbanks, "she must have gone down pretty fast."

  The moment of fascination quickly passed, and the search for the Princess Dou Wan continued. The breeze had slowly veered from north to west and dropped until it barely fluttered the flag on the stern of the boat. An ore ship passed a few hundred yards away and rocked the Divercity in its wake. At four o'clock in the afternoon, Wilbanks turned and looked at Pitt.

  "We've got two hours of daylight left. What time do you want to pack it in and head back to the dock?"

  "You never know when the lake will turn ugly," Pitt answered. "I suggest we keep going and finish as much of the grid as we can while the water is calm."

  "Gotta make hay while the sun shines," Hall agreed.

  The mood of anticipation had not diminished. Pitt had requested that Wilbanks begin the search through the center of the grid and work east. That half had been completed, and now they were working west with over thirty lanes to go. The sun was lingering over the western shore of the lake when Pitt called out again.

  "A target on the mag," he said with a tinge of excitement in his voice. "A big one."

  "Here she comes," said Julia, electrified.

  "We've got a modern steel ship," Hall acknowledged.

  "How big?" asked Wilbanks.

  "Can't tell. She's still showing on the edge of the screen."

  "She's huge," Julia muttered in awe.

  Pitt grinned like a gambler who hit a jackpot. "I think we've got her." He checked his X on the chart. The wreck was three miles closer inshore than Gallagher had estimated. Actually, an incredibly close guess, all things considered, Pitt thought.

  "She's broken in two," Hall said, pointing at the blue-black image on the video screen as everyone, including Giordino, pushed in for a closer look. "About two hundred feet of her stern lies a good hundred and fifty feet away with a large debris field in between."

  "The forward section looks to be sitting upright," added Pitt.

  "Do you really think it's the Princess Dou Wan?" asked Julia.

  "We'll know for certain after we get the ROV down on her." He stared at Wilbanks. "Do you want to wait until tomorrow?"

  "We're here, ain't we?" Wilbanks retorted with a smile. "Anybody have any objections against working at night?"

  No one objected. Pitt and Hall quickly retrieved the sonar towfish and magnetometer sensor, and soon they had the Benthos MiniRover MK II robotic vehicle tethered up to the control handbox and a video monitor. At seventy-five pounds, it only took two of the men to lift it over the side and lower it into the water. The bright halogen underwater lights of the ROV slowly vanished in the deep as she began her journey downward into the dark void of Lake Michigan. She was attached to the Divercity and the control console by an umbilical cable. Wilbanks aimed an eye on the computer screen of the global positioning system and adroitly kept the Divercity floating motionless above the wreck.

  The descent to four hundred feet took only a few minutes. All light from the setting sun vanished at 360 feet. Hall stopped the MiniRover when the bottom came into sight. It looked like a lumpy blanket of gray silt.

  "The depth here is four hundred thirty feet," he said as he swung the ROV in a tight circle. Suddenly, the lights illuminated a large shaft that looked like a giant tentacle reaching out from a sea monster.

  "What in hell is that?" muttered Wilbanks, turning from his computer positioning screen.

  "Move toward it," Pitt ordered Hall. "I think we've come down on the forward cargo section of the hull, and we're looking at the overhead boom of a loading crane on the forward deck."

  Working the controls of the MiniRover's handbox, Hall slowly sent the ROV along one side of the crane until the camera revealed a clear video image of a hull belonging to a large ship. He worked the ROV along the sides of the hull toward the bow, which still stood perfectly upright, as if the ship had refused to die and still dreamed of sailing the seas. Soon the outline of the ship's name became visible. It looked to have been painted crudely on the raised white gunwale atop the black bow slightly aft of the anchor, which still fit snug in its hawsehole. One by one the letters slid past the screen.

  A doctor will tell you that if your heart stops, you're dead. But it seemed everyone's heart paused for several seconds as the name of the sunken ship passed under the MiniRover's cameras.

  "Princess Yung T'ai," Giordino shouted. "We got her!"

  "The queen of the China Sea," Julia murmured as if she was in a trance. "She looks so cold and isolated. It's almost as if she was praying we'd come."

  "I thought you wanted a ship called the Princess Dou Wan," said Wilbanks.

  "It's a long story," Pitt replied with a big grin, "but they're one and the same." He laid one hand on Hall's shoulder. "Move aft, keeping at least ten feet from the side of the ship so we don't entangle our tether and lose the ROV."

  Hall silently nodded and worked the little joysticks on the handbox that controlled the camera and vehicle movement. Visibility was nearly fifty feet under the vehicle's halogen lights and showed that the exterior of the Princess Dou Wan had changed very little after fifty-two years. The frigid fresh water and deep depth had inhibited marine growth and corrosion.

  The superstructure came into view, looking surprisingly fresh. None of it had collapsed. Only a light coat of silt adhered to the paint, which had dulled somewhat but still appeared surprisingly fresh. The Princess Dou Wan looked like the interior of a haunted, abandoned house that had not been dusted for half a century.

  Hall ma
neuvered the MiniRover around the bridge. Most of the windows had been smashed from the force of the waves and the pressure of the deep. They could see the engine-room telegraph standing inside, its pointer still set on FULL AHEAD. Only a few fish lived in her now. The crew was no more, most all swept away by frenzied waves when she went down. The MiniRover crept alongside the ship on a horizontal course a short distance from the main promenade deck. The lifeboat davits were empty and twisted out, grim evidence of the chaos and terror that occurred that violent night in 1948. Wooden crates, still intact, were lashed down on every square foot of open deck. Her funnel was missing aft of the bridge, but could be seen where it had fallen beside the hull when the ship drove herself into the soft bottom.