"Early December," he answered.
I looked at him. "The weather must have been cold."
"That time of year the temperature gets below freezing."
"Then it stands to reason that she'd have the windows on her car rolled up."
He nodded. "Sounds logical."
"What do you figure the speed of the river current?" I asked.
"About two to three miles an hour until spring runoff. Then it can hit four to five."
"Close to the pace of a walking man." suppose so."
I pointed up the road past the house. "The grade is a good ten percent. A fairly steep slope. If she blacked out before she could Turn into the driveway and the car continued another eighty yards down the road with her foot still on the accelerator, she could have driven into the river at over thirty miles an hour."
"A safe bet," the sheriff agreed. "Actually, our estimates were closer to thirty-five."
"All things considered," I said, "we're looking in the wrong place.
"You don't think she's near the end of the road?" he asked.
I shook my head. "The momentum and speed would have sent her almost to the middle of the channel. And because she must have rolled up her windows against the cold, water seeping in would have taken several minutes to fill and sink the car. Enough time for the current to carry the car a good hundred yards or more down river."
"It's been three years," said the sheriff. "I can't recall exactly whether we swept that far. I do know the divers had a hard time fighting the cur-rent and covered only the primary area around the end of the road."
This was a situation similar to the drowning of Susan Smith's two boys in Union, South Carolina. Though that tragedy took place in a lake and not a river, visibility was so poor the divers' first search missed the car. A second attempt found the boys farther out and deeper in the lake.
Underwater search is seldom a cut-and-dried affair.
"What do you suggest?" Sheriff Fulton asked.
"I propose we extend the search farther offshore and down river."
Half an hour later the gradiometer was trailing behind the boat ten feet beneath the water surface. While Walt kept a sharp eye on the instrument readings, I tied a float to the end of a rope. Next, I slipped on a pair of work gloves I usually carry on expeditions and dragged a grappling hook across the riverbed. If we were lucky and it hooked a piece of the car, the gloves would keep the palms of my hands from being rubbed raw, and the float would mark the spot.
Nearly two hundred yards from the road, Walt hit a target with a large magnetic mass. We crisscrossed it several times and received the same high readings. However, the grappling hook refused to catch its prongs in anything but river silt.
"Whatever is down there is big and it's buried," I said.
The sheriff looked up the river. "Sure seems a long way off."
I shrugged. "Perhaps, but it's the only credible target you've got between here and the end of the road."
"You couldn't snag anything with your hook?"
"After eight passes over the site and no prize, I think it's safe to say the car is buried over its roof in silt."
The sheriff looked thoughtful for a few moments. "Then I guess we'll have to get some divers and a dredge in here and see what we've got.
Walt and I left for home the next day. We never did learn whether the missing lady and her car were found in the river at our target site.
Since we still had five hours of daylight left, we deposited the sheriff and his deputies at the boat ramp and headed upriver to where I suspected Carondelet might lie. As we rounded the head of Manchester Island, the biggest dredge boat I've ever seen loomed over the river.
It had the appearance of a massive rectangular building with corrugated metal walls and a seemingly endless row of great steel buckets with jagged teeth that marched into the water and reemerged, filled with tons of riverbed silt. I felt as if I were about to lose a jackpot lottery on a technicality when I estimated that the dredge was working no more than a hundred yards from my prime search grid.
Without bothering to drop the gradiometer in the water, we headed straight for the dredge, and pulled alongside. The superintendent in charge stepped from his office and invited us on board. A tall, floridfaced man with about the same dimensions as a phone booth, he held out a beefy hand in greeting. I took his grip and heard my knuckles crack.
""What can I do for you?" he asked with a wide smile.
I explained that we were on a survey for a sunken gunboat and inquired if he was working his way down river. If so, I wanted to stop his insatiable dredge before it ate any remains of Carondelet.
His smile faded. "We're not working down river," he said. "We're working up."
Cussler's little world teetered on the edge of the abyss. There was still a chance the trench carved by the big buckets missed the wreck. I Pointed to my prime search location. "Did you dredge over in that area?" I asked.
The Superintendent nodded. "We dredged through there no more than four hours ago."
"Do you know if you brought up any wood?"
"Sure did. Even saved some of the pieces. Would you care to see them?"
Without waiting for a reply, he disappeared inside a door of the dredge and returned after a minute carrying the remains of a wooden beam, brown and slimy from long years of being immersed in water, a fire brick that could have come from a steam engine, and several pieces of heavily rusted iron that included a bracket plate, long spikes, and fragments of a steam pipe.
Walt and I exchanged looks of agonized defeat.
"What kind of a boat did you say this was?" inquired the superintendent.
"One of the most famous warships of the Civil War," I answered.
"No kidding? My boys and I thought we dug up an old barge."
Wanting to confirm that the dredge had indeed pulverized the hull of Carondelet, Walt and I set up our search grid with buoys and dragged the gradiometer from one end to the other, finishing up just before duk.
We extended our search lanes far beyond the former head of Manchester Island as added insurance. The only anomaly we found came at precisely the same site as indicated by the dredge boat superintendent where he pulled up debris. We received a number of small magnetic readings at a depth of eighteen feet. A few dives revealed the scattered remains of a large wreck. The excavation buckets had not quite dredged it all. The shattered lower hull and keel of Carondelet still appeared to be strewn about under the silt.
With nothing more to accomplish, Walt Schob and I drove back to Cincinnati, checked into a hotel, and caught a plane to our hometowns in the morning.
There has been many a night when I lay awake and stared at the ceiling, wishing we had gone straight to the selected search site instead of spending several hours hunting for the missing lady and her car. I'm almost certain we could have arrived in time to save the old gunboat's remains from being chewed to shreds by the ship-eating dredge.
A great pity we failed. It seems incredible that after nearly 110 years our attempt to find and rescue Carondelet's historic remains literally missed the boat by only a few hours. Walt and I were there, no more than a mile away, when she was destroyed.
I'll always regret that I answered Carondelet's whisper too late.
Part 6 The Confederate Submarine Hunley
I The Little Sub That Could and Did February 1864 sand crab scurried along the beach and darted into a hole. A man dressed in the officer's uniform of the Confederate States glanced at the crab briefly, then rose and brushed off the damp sand that clung to the knees of his uniform. His hair was the color of fallen autumn leaves, the eyes a light blue, set in a boyish face framed by large ears. He checked the needle of a handheld compass and jotted the readings on a scrap of paper.
"They've anchored for the night," said a sandy-haired man standing next to him. paper and slipped it into Lieutenant George Dixon neatly folded the his pants pocket. "I do believe you are right, Mr. Wicks."
They both
stared over the sea at a ship that rose and dropped on the late afternoon swells. From 4-1/2 miles away, the vessel seemed like a small, dark toy rocking against a curtain of Wedgwood blue. The sails on her yards were furled, and a wisp of smoke curled from her stack, indicating that her furnaces were being kept stoked and fired so she could move quickly should her lookouts spot a blockade runner trying to sneak into Charleston Harbor.
"What ship do you make her out to be, sir?" asked Wicks.
"The Housatonic, " answered Dixon. "A spanking brand-new Yankee sloop-of-war, fresh out of a Union shipyard. A fast ship, equal or superior to any commerce runner I know."
"Not for long," Wicks said solemnly.
Dixon smiled and nodded. "God willing, tonight's the night."
An hour after sunset, the nine-man crew of the Confederate States submarine Horace L Hunley walked onto the wooden dock in the channel behind Sullivan's Island. A pelican atop one of the pilings stared at them through a beady eye before stretching its wings and soaring across the back bay. The iron hump of the submarine with her two hatch towers and a twenty-foot pipe that extended from her bow was all that was visible above the water. She looked like some prehistoric beast asleep in a Mesozoic pond.
Two crewmen attached the torpedo to the end of the iron pipe and then checked the line attached to a reel set to pull the detonating trigger.
A heavy barb, attached to a copper canister containing a hundred pounds of black powder, was inserted over the end of the pipe like a @able on a finger. In theory, after the barb was embedded beneath an enemy hull, Hunley would back off at least 150 yards before the line reached the end of the reel and detonated the charge. But the mechanism had yet to be fully tested.
Canteens of water, a small container of food, and a lantern with a blue lens were passed to those already inside the submarine. This was a night mission that would take from sunset to sunrise. The crew members of Hunley were conditioned to enduring damp cold, a claustrophobic existence, and physical exertion that left them with aching muscles and in a stage of near total exhaustion.
The physical toll on the men during the past weeks had been immense. Five nights a week they went out in futile attempts to sink enemy warships, often barely escaping capture by Union picket boats or being carried out to sea by hostile currents- The opportunities for dying. far exceeded those for living. After cheating death on so many occasions, the crew began to look upon themselves as immortal. They took pride in being on the cutting edge of technology, of being a Part of the first submarine they knew would some night sink an enemy ship.
Seaman Frederick Collins walked back to the dock from Breech Inlet, the channel that split Isle of Palms from Sullivan's Island. He had thrown a cypress twig into the current and watched as it was carried quickly out to sea. He approached Dixon and saluted.
"The tide has turned and is running strong, sir."
Dixon returned the salute. "Thank you, Mr. Collins. Please take your place on board."
Silently, Collins followed his shipmates into the narrow twin hatches that rose above the iron spine of Hunley. They took their individual seats and placed their callused hands on the metal sheaths surrounding the crank handles. OrJy after Seaman Wicks entered and took his seat next to the rear ballast tank did Dixon snake through the forward hatch. He came to a standing position behind the boat's steering wheel, mercury diving indicator, and compass.
"Everyone accounted for?" asked Dixon.
"All in place," reported Wicks from the stern.
Dixon made a motion with his hand to the sentries standing on the dock. "Stand by to cast off." Then he motioned to Wicks behind him.
Both men threw off the hemp lines looped around the hatch towers.
The sentries pulled in the lines and pushed the submarine away from the dock with their feet. Hunley swayed in the water until Dixon gave the command to move forward. Then the eight men behind him began turning the crank that was connected to the propeller at the stern, and Hunley moved slowly toward the end of Sullivan's Island, where she joined the tidal current sweeping through Breech Inlet into the sea beyond.
For weeks they had propelled themselves toward the Union fleet, only to be turned back by bad luck. More than once they had approached so close to enemy picket boats that when Dixon raised the hatch for fresh air they could hear the Yankee sailors singing and talking in the darkness. Now, once again, they lit candles to illuminate their coffinlike container and set them in holders bolted to the iron wall.
Months of training had been endured without complaint. Now Dixon's crew was honed tough and tenacious, bound tight by shared hardship and from staring death in the eye night after night. Tonight was to be their night.
The moon was a crescent and the sea calm. Maintaining a slow rhythm as they cranked the propeller, and taking advantage of the outgoing tide, they moved along at nearly four knots for the first mile.
Blessedly, the cold interior soon turned warm from their body heat, and the walls dripped with condensation from their breathing.
Dixon, able to keep the forward hatch open because of the smooth sea, stared over the top as he steered the sub toward the lights of Housatonic.
"A great pity we can't carry a keg of beer with us instead of a paltry canteen of water," muttered Collins.
"Good thinking," replied Private Augustus Miller, a recent volunteer from a South Carolina artillery company, who had joined the crew along with Corporal Charles Carlson. Except for Dixon, they were the only nonsailors manning the submarine.
"The shaft feels stiff," said Seaman Arnold Becker to Wicks.
Without answering, Wicks reached into a metal pail of animal fat and greased the shaft where it entered the stuffing boxes that held leakage to a bare minimum. Becker's complaint was routine. He was the only one who ever whined about a sticking propeller shaft.
Time crawled as the men pushed and pulled on their crank handles.
They began working in twenty-minute shifts, four men on, four men off, to conserve their strength for the final surge against their enemy and then the long haul back to Breech Inlet. Helped by the cur-rent, they propelled the craft through the glass-smooth sea at an easy 2-1/2 knots.
Dixon kept the front hatch open and navigated mostly by sight.
The dim moonlight enabled him to read the sea for a hundred yards in front of the bow, giving him ample time to close his hatch cover should he perceive an approaching wave high enough to wash over his exposed position. The dark hull of Housatonic grew larger with agonizing slowness. Battery power was in its infancy, and it was at moments like this that Dixon wished he could have engineered a mechanical propulsion system that would work underwater without the need for air.
From his cramped vantage point he began to make out a few men walking the decks of the Union sloop-of-war. Lookouts. he assumed, watching for a Confederate attack out of the night with one of their infernal underwater machines. He dropped down and closed the hatch.
Then he turned to his crew, moving like phantoms in the flickering flames of the candles.
"We're only three hundred yards away. Rest a minute, then every man work the crank."
"A ship," murmured Seaman Joseph Ridgeway. "Are we really going to attack a Yankee ship?"
They all saw Dixon's teeth as his lips parted in a smile. "We'll not go home empty-handed this night."
"Glory to the Confederacy," said Seaman Collins.
"Glory to all of us," added Wicks. "We put that blasted Yankee on the bottom and we'll all share in the prize money."
"I make it about five thousand apiece," said Ridgeway.
"Don't spend it too soon," cautioned Dixon. "We have yet to earn it." He carefully wiped the three tiny glass viewing ports in the hatch tower that had become clouded with moisture from the humidity created by the breathing and sweating of the men inside. Through the forward port he studied Housatonic.
The ship was anchored with her bow pointing west by northwest toward Fort Sumter. Dixon observed little movement on the
deck.
Hunley was slowly approaching on an angle astern and slightly off the starboard quarter of the Union warship. There was no sign the sub had been observed.
When he spotted the floating buoys that supported the outer net around the ship, Dixon made a crucial decision. He voiced an order over his shoulder. "Mr. Wicks, fill your ballast tank to the quarter mark."
Everyone went silent and stared at each other questioningly. They all expected the lieutenant to ask for two-thirds ballast, enough to slide Hunley under the surface and out of sight of the lookouts on board Housatonic.
"begging' your pardon, sir," said Wicks. "We'll not be attacking underwater?"
"We've come too far to Miss her in water blacker than ink, Mr.