The sight sent a chill up Summer’s spine. “She looks intact and quite accessible. Al, do you think you can get a Creepy Crawler on her?”
“Problem solved,” Giordino grinned. “While the AUV was running its grid, I had the machine shop fabricate a harness with a timed release. The AUV can carry the crawler to the site and circle a few minutes until the timer activates. The crawler will deploy a transponder when she bails out, which will allow us to walk all over the Maine. If your stone was left on the ship, we just might find it.”
“How do you know,” Pitt asked, “that it wasn’t blown to bits in the explosion or ended up in the harbor?”
“The fact is, we don’t know if it was destroyed in the explosion,” Summer said. “As for it ending up in the harbor, Perlmutter told us the refloating of the Maine was very well documented. They even dredged all around the wreck site. There was no indication of its recovery.”
“So what makes you think it’s still on the ship?” Giordino asked.
“Two items give cause for hope. First, the recovery team was focused on refloating the ship. The Maine’s powder magazines were located forward, so the bow section suffered the worst damage. The engineers spent the bulk of their effort there, cutting away the damage and installing a bulkhead. The work crews in the stern just cleared away mud in the search for human remains. I’d like to think they would have left in place a heavy old stone.”
“Assuming,” Pitt said, “it was carried on the stern of the ship.”
“Our second point of hope there is the archeologist, Ellsworth Boyd,” Summer said. “Though he died in the blast, his body was recovered intact, indicating he wasn’t near the epicenter. As a guest, he would have had a stateroom in the stern. If he wasn’t near the worst of the explosion, there’s hope that the stone wasn’t either.”
“I think I like my odds in Las Vegas better,” Pitt said, shaking his head. “All right, you might as well get to it.”
Giordino chuckled. “Don’t worry, boss. I have a good feeling that Herbert won’t let us down.”
34
Giordino’s release system worked as advertised. Two hours later, they were watching in fascination as the Creepy Crawler scurried up a rise of sand and clawed its way onto the deck of the Maine. The crawler’s video camera showed a bare metal hulk, covered in only a light blanket of marine growth.
Giordino guided the crawler across the steel deck footings, now absent the inlaid teak that originally graced the ship. He battled with the crawler’s low level of lighting and an annoying time delay between his movements on a joystick and the device’s reaction, but he soon had it scurrying about the wreck.
The Maine’s remains were a ghostly tomb of corroding steel, the decks starkly empty. The robot crept into the stern superstructure, which had housed the officers’ and captain’s quarters. Where paneling and carpet once covered the interior, now there were only gray steel bulkheads. Most of the hatch doors had been dogged open, allowing free view of the empty cabins that had been home to sailors now long dead.
Giordino maneuvered the crawler down a companionway to the berth deck and into an empty wardroom. There was little to see other than some small cut-glass lighting fixtures that still clung to their ceiling mounts. Finding nothing that resembled a large stone, Giordino guided the crawler back to the main deck and exited the aft structure. He had bypassed the engine room and some coal bunkers, which everyone agreed were unlikely storage places for the stone.
“I think we’ve seen all there is to see.” He stretched the tired fingers that were operating the joystick.
“Nothing remotely resembling the stone,” Dirk said. “It probably didn’t survive the explosion.”
Summer nodded. “I guess we’ll never know the full Aztec tale.” She turned to Giordino. “Thanks for the effort, Al. If nothing else, you’ve captured some amazing footage of the old battlewagon.”
“All in a day’s work,” he said, sharing in their disappointment.
“How are you going to get your crawler back?” Dirk asked.
“I’ll send it walking toward Key West. If we’re still in the neighborhood in a few days, we can pick it up on the fly.”
As he spoke, the crawler caught a leg on a twisted ventilator that was pressed against the aft superstructure. Giordino had to reverse course in order to free the device.
“Hold up.” This came from Pitt, who had been standing silently behind the others, watching the video.
“Go back to where you got hung up.”
Giordino reversed the crawler a few steps. “Something catch your eye?”
“There, against the bulkhead. Can you zoom in with the camera?”
Giordino nodded and tapped a keystroke. The video display enlarged, revealing a metallic object wedged between the bulkhead and the damaged ventilator.
“It’s a gun,” Giordino said.
He finessed the camera controls to focus on the weapon. Pitt stepped to the monitor for a closer look. It was an open-frame revolver, showing only slight corrosion on the barrel and grip though missing its original wooden stock.
“It looks like a Lefaucheux,” Pitt said, “a French cartridge revolver that was a common sidearm with the Union cavalry during the Civil War.”
“It looks to be wedged pretty tight under that mangled ventilator,” Giordino said. “It must have gone unseen when they cleaned up the ship for refloating.” He brought the crawler a step closer, magnifying the image even more.
“What is an old French revolver doing on the Maine?” Summer asked.
Nobody had an answer until Giordino refocused the image. In fuzzy letters, a faint engraving could be seen on the barrel.
“‘F. de Orbea Hermanos, Eibar 1890,’” Pitt read. “That would be the manufacturer.”
He turned to Summer with an arched brow. “You were close. The correct question would be, what is an old Spanish revolver doing aboard the Maine?”
35
Have you found your way to the bottom of the pile yet?”
St. Julien Perlmutter looked up from his table in the central research room of the National Archives to see the smiling face of the facility’s chief military records archivist.
“Very nearly, Martha, very nearly. I apologize for the heavy workout. The files on the Maine are more extensive than I anticipated.”
“Lord knows, I can use the exercise.” Martha rested a hand on one of her ample hips. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can pull for you.”
“Martha, my dear, you are pure ambrosia,” Perlmutter said with a smile.
It was his third day in the research room, poring through century-old documents. Although already familiar with the Maine’s sinking, he was fascinated at reading the official inquiry into the disaster and its supporting documentation, including vivid accounts by survivors and reports of the ship’s damage from Navy hard-hat divers. Possible causes for the explosion, ranging from a smoldering coal bunker to a bursting boiler, were all dismissed by the inquiry board in favor of a suspected external mine.
At first, Perlmutter found no mention of the archeologist Ellsworth Boyd, so he jumped ahead to records of the salvage and refloating of the warship in 1912. Detailed engineering reports, rich with black-and-white photographs, documented the construction of the cofferdam around the wreck, the removal of human remains, and the refloating of the ship and her second sinking.
Throughout the reports, Perlmutter found no mention of Boyd’s artifact.
He perused a remaining file of naval communiqués related to responses in Havana immediately after the explosion. He was nearing the end of the folder when he found a letter from the chief forensics officer at Brooklyn Naval Hospital addressed to General Fitzhugh Lee, the Consul General of Cuba. The narrative was brief:
March 18, 1898
Dear General Lee,
Enclosed under seal is a copy of
Dr. Ellsworth Boyd’s recent autopsy report, as requested.
Yours obediently,
Dr. Ralph Bennett
U.S. Naval Hospital, Brooklyn
Perlmutter studied the letter, wondering why an autopsy would have been performed on Boyd. His research instincts told him there was more to the story. Closing the file, he called to Martha.
“All finished?” she asked.
“I’m done with these materials but I’m afraid the quest continues. Can you see what Uncle Sam is holding in the way of some nineteenth-century diplomatic correspondence?”
“Certainly. What did you have in mind?”
“The file of one General Fitzhugh Lee, while engaged as Consul General to Cuba, in the year 1898.”
“Let me check. Those might be at the Library of Congress.”
The archivist returned a few minutes later, beaming. “You’re in luck, Julien. We have a file for him in the archives bearing the dates 1896 to 1898. I put a rush order to have it pulled, but it will still take an hour or two.”
“Martha, you are a peach. Two hours would allow an enjoyable lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill. Can you join me?”
“Only if we make it an hour,” she replied with a blush. “I am on the federal payroll, you know.”
“The most civil of servants,” Perlmutter said, standing and bowing. “After you, my dear.”
When they returned an hour and a half later, the files were waiting in the archivist’s bin. Refreshed from a lunch of oyster stew and crab cakes, Perlmutter dove into the records.
The correspondence from Fitzhugh Lee, a Civil War veteran and nephew of Robert E. Lee, was voluminous. The papers covered his 1896 appointment to the post in Havana by President Grover Cleveland until his evacuation from Cuba in April 1898 at the onset of the war with Spain.
Perlmutter skimmed through a hoard of letters describing growing tensions with the Spanish ruling force and growing resistance from the ragtag Cuban rebels.
Working through a flurry of communiqués surrounding the Maine’s destruction, he was surprised to find a copy of Boyd’s autopsy. The one-page document, a simple narrative of the examination, revealed a startling discovery. Boyd had not died from the Maine’s explosion. Instead, his death was attributed to a gunshot wound to the chest, in conjunction with evidence of partial drowning.
Perlmutter sniffed for more clues and found them an hour later in the form of a letter from the Maine’s captain, Charles Sigsbee, to Lee. The handwritten letter said, in part:
I am in receipt of the report on Dr. Boyd. It would seem to confirm Lieutenant Holman’s report of a skirmish on the quarterdeck immediately after the explosion. Holman believes there was a brief fray over Boyd’s crate. He didn’t realize that Boyd was mortally wounded but had assumed he was abandoning ship to board the steamer. I have no way of confirming your suspicions about those responsible, but perhaps that can be ascertained with the apprehension of the steamer. This might also affirm the supposition that the Maine was destroyed on account of Dr. Boyd’s relic. It seems a sad vanity that war will accrue on account of the treasure from a long-deceased empire. C. D. Sigsbee.
“Treasure?” Perlmutter muttered to himself. “It’s always treasure.”
He waded through Lee’s remaining papers, discovering another clue: a War Department communiqué to Lee dated a week after the Maine’s sinking. Lee was informed that the USS Indiana had engaged the steamer San Antonio in the Old Bahamas Channel off Cuba’s northeast coast.
The Indiana’s captain reported with regret that the vessel was sunk in deep water during an attempted apprehension. While the contraband was lost, a survivor, Dr. Julio Rodriguez, disclosed his assessment of the suspected repository site before he succumbed from wounds received during the engagement. The location was marked classified and sent to the War Department for strategic evaluation.
Perlmutter put down the letter, aghast at the implications. He now had more questions than answers. But he knew the Pitts’ pursuit of the Aztec stone carried considerable significance.
He perused the remaining documents in the file, nearly overlooking a one-page letter on White House stationery dated 1908. It was clearly misfiled, he thought, recognizing the sweeping signature of the President at the bottom. But perusing the shortly worded Executive Order, he felt a tightening in his throat.
An hour later, he bundled the Lee papers and carried them to the return counter, where Martha was finishing with another customer.
“I am most grateful for your assistance, Martha,” he said. “That should conclude my studies for today.”
“Find anything astounding that will bring you back tomorrow?”
“Indeed.” Perlmutter’s eyes were aglow. “A whole new cause for the Spanish–American War.”
36
It might be meaningless, but I thought it was worth passing along.”
Rudi Gunn’s blue eyes glistened on the ship’s video conference monitor as he waited for a reply a thousand miles away.
“Any input is helpful,” Pitt said, “when you’re chasing gremlins.”
“When you told me about the depressions at the heart of the toxic zones,” Gunn said, “I had Dr. McCammon in the geology department scan the region for seismic events. Within the past six weeks, there has been an event near each of the three sites, measuring 4.0 on the moment magnitude scale, or just under 3.0 on the Richter scale.”
“That sounds significant,” Giordino said, pacing in front of the screen.
“Not necessarily. There are about a thousand seismic events a day around the world, but in this instance there appears to be a correlation.”
“I assume the seismic readings could be registering an underwater explosion,” Pitt said.
“Absolutely. About six hundred to eight hundred pounds of TNT could produce an equivalent reading. Dr. McCammon showed me similar readings from known land-based mining operations.”
“That’s another shred of evidence that someone is blasting open the thermal vents,” Pitt said.
“There are a limited number of underwater mining systems in operation,” Gunn said, “but we haven’t tracked one to the Caribbean yet. Most seem to be deployed in Indonesia.”
“Given the environmental damage they’re causing,” Pitt said, “it’s little wonder they are flying under the radar.”
“One more thing,” Gunn said. “You mentioned you were headed back to the site of the sunken drill ship?”
“That’s right. Al and I noticed some bottom tracks that matched with marks we found around the vents.”
“We checked that area for seismic events and found there was a small rattle in the region just four days ago,” Gunn said. “Your hunch may be a good one.”
“We’re nearly there, so we’ll know soon enough. Thanks, Rudi.”
Gunn nodded and his image vanished from the monitor. Pitt turned to Giordino seated next to him. “Is the Starfish prepped for business? I’d like to start with another look at those tracks we saw near the Alta.”
“Standing by and ready to go.”
Twilight had settled over the ocean when the Sargasso Sea arrived at the spot of the Alta disaster. The surface waters were surprisingly crowded. Less than a half mile away, the lights of another vessel could be seen, standing on station. A second vessel appeared to be just east of it.
Pitt turned to the research ship’s captain. “Do we have identification of the vessels?”
The captain peered into a large radarscope, which typically provided a neighboring vessel’s name with its location and heading via a satellite tracking system called AIS. He looked up at Pitt and shook his head. “No identification is registering. They must have their AIS systems turned off.”
Pitt nodded. “Try them on the radio and advise them we will be deploying a submersible in the area of the wreck.”
The captain hailed the nearby sh
ips but received only radio silence. “Do you want to wait and deploy in the morning?”
“No, we’ll go as soon as you are on station. After all, it’s always dark on the bottom.”
Thirty minutes later, Pitt headed to the stern deck cradle of the Starfish but was stopped along the way.
“Mr. Pitt?”
Pitt turned to find Kamala Bhatt stepping out of a side lab carrying a binder. “We just pulled a water sample when the ship stopped. I ran a quick test to check for methyl mercury.”
“What did you find?”
Pitt didn’t have to ask, he could see the answer in her eyes.
“The numbers are off the charts.”
37
Clad in a blue jumpsuit, Pitt crawled through the hatch of the deepwater submersible. Squirming into the pilot’s seat, he was surprised to find his daughter at the copilot’s station. “You nudge Al out of riding shotgun?” he asked.
“Why should he have all the fun?” she replied. “Of course, it will cost me a box of cigars when we make port. On top of that, I had to tell Dirk that you weren’t deploying for another hour to get him out of the way.”
“What kind of a daughter do I have?”
She smiled. “One who likes to get wet.”
They completed a predive checklist, then radioed the bridge that they were ready to deploy. Giordino activated a crane that lowered the Starfish into the water. With lights ablaze, the submersible sank slowly beneath the surface.
Pitt eyed his daughter as she reviewed the readouts on the console and radioed the ship that they were proceeding to descend.
“I don’t think we’ve taken a ride together,” he said, “since I taught you how to double-clutch my ’33 Packard.”