Morgens hadn’t intended salvaging the Blauwe Duif. The Blauwe Duif had sunk in over sixty feet of water and the local salvage operators couldn’t work at those depths. Normally they would just mark the wreck and leave her there. Unfortunately, the insurers had good grounds to claim compensation not only for the loss of the Blauwe Duif, but also for her cargo. An attempt to salvage the Blauwe Duif, or at the very least, her cargo, would have to be made. Morgens hoped that Admiral Simpson’s divers, with their up-time dive equipment, could do the job. “That was the original intention. However, since our last meeting, I have spoken with Admiral Simpson of the USE Navy and he has offered the use of his up-time divers.”
* * *
Morgens wasn’t being totally untruthful. He had talked to Admiral Simpson as soon as he heard of the sinking of the Blauwe Duif, but it hadn’t been about borrowing Al and Sam Morton to salvage the ship and cargo. No, he’d approached the Admiral about getting rid of the mines before they caused him any more problems. With the war over, Morgens expected traffic through the Øresund to return to normal, which was an average of more than ten ships a day over the summer and autumn. Unfortunately, the wreck of the Blauwe Duif was blocking the only channel through the minefield, and every day it remained blocked was costing the tolls commission a small fortune.
Admiral Simpson had responded to his request for help with the less than satisfactory news that the USE Navy didn’t have any mine clearing capability. Morgens had pressed him, but the best he’d been able to get out of the admiral was a promise to get his engineers onto the problem right away. In the meantime he had offered Morgens the Morton brothers—the heroes of the defense of Lübeck. Even as Morgens spoke Al and Sam Morton were in the Copenhagen armory examining several uncompleted mines. Their inspection was interrupted by a messenger. They were to report to Johannes Verlacht’s office immediately.
Johannes Verlacht was the former senior engineer aboard the SSIM Monitor, which had been lost to a spar torpedo during the attack on Copenhagen. He could easily have obtained a new assignment on one of the remaining ironclads, but he’d been seduced by the contents of the Copenhagen armory.
He was drooling over the plans for King Christian’s wooden submarine when Sam and Al knocked on his door. “Come in!” he called. When he saw who had knocked he gestured towards the chairs arranged around the office. “There’s been a change of plans. Grab a chair and sit down.”
Sam fell into a chair. “What do you mean there has been a change of plan? Don’t they want us to clear the mines from the Øresund?”
Johannes waved for Al, who was still standing, to sit down. “The powers that be have decided that it is more important that you salvage the Blauwe Duif’s cargo.”
“But what about the mines,” Al protested. “We just spent the whole morning learning everything we could about the things.”
“That’s good to hear,” Johannes said, “but you will have to pass that information on to whoever gets assigned the task in your place. Right now it is more important that the Blauwe Duif’s cargo be recovered.”
“Why?” Sam protested. “What’s so special about the ship’s cargo?”
“Its value,” Johannes said. “The Øresund Tolls Commission has decided that they want to recover the more than three million dollars worth of salt the Blauwe Duif was carrying.
“The Danes have hard hat rigs,” Al said. “Why can’t they use those?”
Johannes shook his head in gentle negation. “The Danes have exactly one hard hat rig, and with the publicity surrounding the king’s adoption of it as a method of execution, you are unlikely to find anyone willing to use it.”
Al winced. One of King Christian’s wartime creations had been a hard hat diving system. From what he’d heard, it had been as faithful a reconstruction of an up-time hard hat system as local materials allowed, except for one little detail. The air supply had lacked a non-return valve. When, during the first demonstration dive, the air hose had broken lose, the pressure of the surrounding water had attempted to squeeze the contents of the dive suit—in other words, the diver—through the only opening in the suit, which had been the coupling in the helmet where the air had entered.
“So we get nominated for the job?” Sam asked.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Can we use the Danish hard hat rig?” Al asked.
Sam turned to his brother. “What? Are you serious?”
“Do you want to move a whole ship’s cargo using SCUBA?”
Sam paused for a few seconds before shaking his head. “At sixty feet it’d be a real pain.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Al said. “It won’t be ideal, but we could work split-shifts: one working in the hard hat rig in the morning while the other does the afternoon shift.” He turned to Johannes. “Would we be allowed to use the king’s rig?”
“After we add a non-return valve,” Sam added.
“We can only ask,” Johannes said, “But how is your non-return valve attached?”
“Usually they are screwed in between the helmet and the whip hose,” Sam answered.
Johannes shook his head slowly. “I think you’d better check out the king’s hard hat rig before you make any more plans.”
* * *
Al had difficulty holding onto the contents of his stomach. Their guide had taken them to where King Christian’s latest execution device was displayed. The human remains had been removed from the dive helmet and were now sitting beside the helmet in a large glass jar of alcohol, still in the shape they’d assumed when they attempted to fill the helmet. It was probably one of the most gruesome sights he’d ever seen.
He turned from the gruesome sight and concentrated on the much safer sight of the dive equipment. He immediately identified a problem with the whip hose. “I think I know why Herr Verlacht suggested we look at the dive rig. They clamped the hose to the helmet.”
“We can probably work around that, but I’ve spotted a major problem.” Sam pointed to a mark in the helmet. “Have a look at this. It looks like they cut it open to get the body out.”
“I did wonder how they did that.” Al bent down to examine the helmet a bit more closely. The copper had been carefully cut, and then just as carefully repaired. He straightened up and turned to his brother. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’d trust this helmet.”
“I don’t want to use it either, but what do we do?” Sam asked. “The admiral ordered us to give the Danes ‘all assistance.’”
Al shrugged in resignation. “I guess we ask them to make us a couple of new rigs, with non-return valves.”
“It’ll take ages for them to make two new rigs,” Sam protested.
“Yeah,” Al agreed. “I doubt the artificers in Copenhagen are going to be any quicker than Asmus Brockmann was back in Lübeck.”
“We could ask for the rigs he made to be sent to Copenhagen.”
Al liked the thought of using their old hard hat rigs, but he knew it wasn’t possible. “Matt and Miquel need them to clean up the little mess we left blocking the River Trave. The Lübeck city fathers would raise merry hell if we tried to shut down that operation to help the Danes.”
Sam’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah, well, you do realize that leaves us salvaging the Blauwe Duif’s cargo using SCUBA?”
Al had realized that, and he wasn’t any happier than his brother. “It’s all we’ve got until they can make some new hard hat rigs.”
Grantville, the office of Kitt and Cheng Engineering
Louie Tillman didn’t like public speaking, even if it was only to an audience of two, but with a career in the U.S. Navy that lasted thirty-two years and included two tours on minesweepers he was the best qualified person to lead the minesweeper project. Fortunately, Jason Cheng and John Kitt were good listeners, and being engineers, easily absorbed the technical details. “And that is an ‘O’ sweep—so called because it uses something called an Oropesa float.” He illustrated the end of his prepared presentation by
drawing a circle around the float in the diagram of the “O” sweep he’d drawn on the meeting room’s blackboard. “Can you build one?”
Jason nodded. “It all looks pretty straight forward enough, except for the explosive cable-cutter, but I’ve got a few ideas for that I’d like to try. However, I do think it’d be a waste of resources to build all of the sweep gear here in Grantville. We’ll probably need the services of one of the Grantville machine shops to make the explosive cable-cutter, but we can design everything else so that it is well within the capabilities of the naval yard in Lübeck.”
“Will they be able to follow your engineering drawings though?” Louie asked. “We don’t want to get everything built and find you can’t connect the explosive cutter to the rest of the sweep.”
“We haven’t had any trouble with the local craftsmen, so I don’t envisage any problems in Lübeck. Not with Derek Modi there to supervise,” John said.
“I’d forgotten about Derek being in Lübeck,” Louie said. “He had something to do with the rolling mill there, didn’t he?”
Jason nodded. “He got it built on schedule, and on budget.”
Louie whistled in admiration. During his career in the Navy he’d seen many a project manage to be completed either on schedule or on budget, but very few of them, and certainly nothing as complex as a rolling mill, had been both.
The Øresund, off Helsingør, a couple of days later
SCUBA was not the best way to salvage a cargo of over four thousand casks of salt from a ship sixty feet underwater. If they’d been using hard hat equipment they could have stayed underwater long enough to recover all of the casks in a few days, albeit a few very long days. But working at sixty feet they were draining their SCUBA tanks down to the reserve in only twenty minutes. That meant they had less than twenty minutes of working time per dive, and with mandated surface intervals between their dives of up to three hours to keep their accumulated nitrogen levels manageable, they were going to be lucky to accumulate seventy-five minutes of actual working time per day.
Sound travels easily underwater, so Al and Sam had no difficulty hearing the warning bell that signaled the minesweepers were about to detonate a mine. They carried the one hundred and forty-four pound casks they were holding—which under water felt as if they only weighed twenty-four pounds—to the cargo net and dropped them into it before heading for the fifteen foot decompression stop, where they would stay for three minutes. According to their dive tables they didn’t need to make this decompression stop, but their dive tables hadn’t been created with their workload in mind. With no decompression chamber available, they were erring on the side of caution.
Back on the surface Al passed his fins to the crewman who’d appeared at the ladder the moment they surfaced. “This is getting old fast,” he said to his brother.
“It’s the third time today we’ve had to cut a dive short,” Sam agreed as he passed up his fins to the waiting Jörgen Ibsen. “Still, I’d rather not be in the water when they detonate a mine.”
“True.” Al had no idea what the lethal radius of the shockwave from a mine might be, and they might be taking safety to the extreme by leaving the water while a mine was detonated, but it was better than finding out the hard way that they were too close. He climbed the ladder onto the sailing barge that they’d been allocated as their diving tender and reached down to give his brother a hand up. “You want to catch the action?”
“Why not? It’ll help pass whatever surface interval Henrik insists we take before we can go down again,” Sam said as he started to remove his dive gear.
There were three whaling boats on the water, with the closest no more than fifty yards away. Two of them were lying parallel some fifty feet apart, their full complements of rowers doing just enough to hold their position against the current. A hundred yards or so behind them, the third whaler, with only two pairs of rowers, was also maintaining its position while two rifle-armed crewmen watched on. The front whaleboats each had an end of a weighted rope, which was supposed to find mines by snagging the mooring lines. The ringing of the bell that had brought Sam and Al out of the water was a warning that they’d found a mine.
The mines they were finding were sixty gallon Bordeaux wine barrels that had been suitably modified. Each barrel had been about two-thirds filled with gunpowder before a wooden plug was put in place. This created a cavity that served as a buoyancy chamber as well as somewhere to put the fusing mechanism. Outside the mine there were five horns, which were the contact fuses. Anything striking those horns with enough force would activate the fuse, causing the mine to explode. Or at least, that was the theory.
Henrik Mortensen rang the dive tender’s bell and lowered the flag that announced they had divers in the water. This was the signal the whaleboats had been waiting for. Almost immediately a man waiting at the stern of one of them slid into the water and, with what looked like a simple carpenter’s saw in hand, dived under the surface. He popped up some ten yards from the whalers to take on air before diving down to continue sawing through the mooring line. A couple of additional trips to the surface for air later a mine popped up, to be followed by the swimmer, who’d wisely swum away from the mine before surfacing. While he was being picked up the current carried the mine away from the whaleboats.
It only took a couple of minutes for the mine to drift a hundred yards, and as soon as it was a safe distance away from the sweeping whaleboats the marksmen on the third whaler opened fire. It took five shots before it exploded in a cloud of white smoke and water.
With the excitement over, Sam and Al wandered back to where they’d stowed their equipment. Henrik had been totaling up their bottom time, and the dive tender’s skipper had good news for them. “I’m calling an early end to the day. All this coming and going has stuffed up the schedule so badly that you can’t start the next dive before it’s time to knock off for the day.”
Al was happy to call it a day. They might have spent less than fifty minutes actually moving the heavy salt casks from the hold to the cargo nets, but he was still exhausted. “How many did we do today?” he asked Henrik.
Henrik called out to one of the men operating the boom crane that was transferring the results of the latest dive onto a waiting lighter. “How many did they do this time?”
“Thirty-three.”
“And ninety makes a hundred and twenty-three,” Henrik said. “At your current rate of progress, and taking into account things will take longer the deeper you go into the holds, I can see it taking over a month to salvage all of the casks.”
“Shit!” Sam muttered. “What’s the bet they have the new hard hat rigs finished just as we remove the last cask from the wreck?”
Next day
Someone had been busy overnight. Instead of the disorganized arrangement of the first day of combined operations, today they were organized. Al and Sam were scheduled to make five dives lasting no more than twenty minutes, with the first surface interval of the day being two hours forty minutes and the others lasting three hours. It made for a long day, but with the sun shining for over seventeen hours a day, it was silly to waste any sunlight. Some smart fellow, and Henrik made sure Al and Sam knew who that fellow might be, had suggested to the crews of the whaleboats that they synchronize schedules. The rowers could rest when Al and Sam were diving, and sweep for mines when the divers were on the surface. It meant they didn’t have to wait for the divers to surface before detonating a mine, and Al and Sam could keep to their dive plan, maximizing their bottom time. It was a mutually satisfactory arrangement.
Al and Sam were in the middle of their second surface interval when the warning bell sounded. They glanced at each other, and then at Henrik, who was already making his way to the dive tender’s bell. They might have agreed to dive to a schedule, but they were still acknowledging that there were no divers in the water, just in case something went wrong. It was all being done in accordance with the latest Occupational Health and Safety regulations, but with
it being their lives on the line, neither Al nor Sam were complaining.
Everything seemed to be going well. The diver had entered the water and started cutting the cable. They watched him dive another three times before the mine popped up. They covered their ears when it came time for the marksmen to detonate the mine. Nothing much happened with the first shot. Al wasn’t even sure where it hit, but there was no such problem with the next shot.
KAABOOM!
Al uncovered his ears and smiled at his brother. “Now that never gets old.”
After lunch they spent another sixteen minutes moving salt casks, before enduring another boring three hour surface interval. During this time the whaleboat crews found another two mines, bringing the total found over two days to seven. It didn’t sound like many, but they were sweeping the edges of what should have been the safe navigation channel.
That day ended with a total of seventy-three minutes of bottom time, in which they managed to offload another one hundred and eighty-six casks.
Al looked at the tally Henrik was keeping and wanted to weep. There were something like forty-three hundred casks of salt aboard the Blauwe Duif, and in two days of diving, they’d barely scratched the surface of the task at hand.
* * *
The days fell into a pattern. Al and Sam were fitting in five dives a day, and moving up to two hundred casks a day. Meanwhile the whaleboats were slowly expanding the cleared channel, finding and destroying at least three mines a day.
There was no real excitement on the twelfth day when, during Al and Sam’s second surface interval of the day, the whaleboats found yet another mine. Everything was running according to the established procedure as the swimmer went in and cut it free, and once it drifted a safe distance away, the marksmen on the following whaleboat fired at it.