It took just fifteen minutes in one of the workboats to cross the bay. The effect of the warm air bubbler was amazing. Not only was the bay ice-free, the air directly over it was a warm fifty degrees, while at the base it had been a bone-chilling ten below. Beyond the bay, a crust of ice rose and fell with the waves as the first inkling of summer tried to melt it away. There was a clear path out to the open ocean, where an icebreaker continuously plied back and forth to maintain a vital link back home.
The workboat passed close enough to one of the oil platforms to see that its camouflage was thin sheets of riveted metal designed to make it look like an iceberg. From fifty yards away, the only way to know it wasn’t the real thing was the massive steel support columns that peeked out from under its white skirt.
At the narrow entrance of the bay, they passed over an area of agitated water. This was the curtain of warm air rising up from the pipes that prevented ice from flowing into the harbor. For the few seconds it took to cross, Espinoza was warm for the first time since arriving in Antarctica.
He turned his attention to the ship. It was old, that was for sure, and possessed a haunted quality even if he hadn’t known it was abandoned. The hull was a mishmash of marine paint, blotchy and streaked, as if applied by children. Her upper works were mostly white, and her single funnel a faded red. She had five cranes, three fore and two aft, making her what seamen call a “stick ship.” Since containerization had taken over maritime commerce, such ships were considered outdated, and most had long since been turned to scrap.
“What a rust bucket,” Lieutenant Jimenez commented. “I bet even the rats abandoned her.”
As they got closer still, they could see that she wasn’t a small ship. Espinoza estimated her length at well over five hundred feet. Her name was difficult to make out because the paint had faded and was streaked with rust, but he could see she was called the Norego. Twenty feet of her prow was hard up on the pebbled beach. There was another workboat pulled up next to the massive bows, and a group of men standing around. One was erecting an aluminum extension ladder that looked tall enough to reach the rail, barely.
Espinoza’s boat pulled up alongside the first, and a crewman threw a line to one of the soldiers. He heaved the boat in as close as he could while another crewman lowered a gangplank that was nothing more than a twelve-foot piece of lumber.
Sergeant Lugones snapped a salute as soon as the Major’s padded boots touched the rocky beach. The sky was clear, for once, and the temperature was a relatively balmy ten below zero.
“Quite a sight, eh, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. We spotted it at first light and came out to investigate. Begging the Major’s pardon, but I thought it best you stay in bed and get some beauty rest.”
From anyone else, that would have been gross insubordination, but the gristly Sergeant had more than earned the right to tease his commanding officer from time to time.
“You’d need a thirty-year coma to help that mug of yours,” he called back, and the men who heard snickered.
“All set, Sarge,” the soldier working the ladder called over.
Espinoza was the first to climb up, with two men bracing the base in case of a wind gust. He had modified his outer gloves so he could peel back the index finger, and when he unholstered his pistol he could get his finger through the trigger guard. He peered over the gunwale. The deck was a mess of loose clutter, oil drums, and scrapped pieces of nautical gear. He saw no movement, so he climbed over and signaled for the next man to join him.
Wind moaned though the crane’s rigging, a warbling keen that sent shivers down his spine. It sounded like a dirge. He looked up at the bridge windows but saw nothing but the reflection of the sky.
Raul was at his side a moment later, followed by Lugones. The Sergeant carried a machine pistol with a powerful flashlight secured under the stubby barrel. They crossed the deck, moving carefully, and with one of them always covering the advance of the others. There were no hatches on the forward bulkhead under the bridge, so they moved to the starboard rail and proceeded aft. Here, they found a door just a few feet away. Above them were the two skeletal arms of the empty davit. A steel cable hung from each.
Jimenez undogged the latches, and when he glanced at Espinoza, who nodded, he pulled open the door. Sergeant Lugones had his weapon at the ready.
The interior hallway was dim, so he snapped on his light. The paint job inside was about as bad as the exterior. The linoleum floor was badly chipped in places and looked like it had never seen a mop.
Their breaths formed halos around their heads.
“Looks like nobody’s home.”
“A wry observation, Lieutenant. Let’s get to the bridge. If there are any answers to this mystery, that’s where we’ll find them.”
The men climbed up several decks, checking rooms as they went. Judging by the way the furniture had been tossed around, it was clear the derelict had seen some heavy weather. Beds had been overturned, and a great number of the wooden pieces had been smashed. They found no evidence of the crew, living or dead.
The bridge was broad and dim because of the rime of salt on the windows. Again, they found nobody, but on the chart table behind the helm was a piece of paper that had been placed in a plastic sleeve and heavily taped in place.
Lugones used a combat knife to cut the paper free and handed it to his superior.
Espinoza read aloud: “ ‘To anyone who finds this, we were forced to abandon the Norego when the pumps failed and the sea poured through a breach in the hull caused by a rogue wave. Chief Engineer Scott did everything in his considerable power, but they would not restart. The decision was not an easy one to make. These are treacherous waters far from any shore. But a floating lifeboat is better than a sinking ship. I pray for my men. If we don’t make it, please tell my wife that I love her and our boys very much. It is safe to assume that goes for all the men and their families.’
“It’s signed ‘Captain John Darling of the Proxy Freight Line,’ and, get this, it’s dated January of last year. This old girl’s been adrift for twenty months.”
“Think the crew was rescued?” Lugones asked.
Espinoza shook his head. “No idea. I’m wondering why the ship didn’t sink. For a captain to abandon his vessel, he should be damned sure of his reason. I want to check the engineering spaces.”
It took several minutes and more than a few wrong turns to find a stairwell that led down into the guts of the ship. As soon as Jimenez pulled the door open, a six-inch surge of icy water washed over their boots. Lugones trained his light into the stairwell. It was completely flooded. The water was thick with oil and flashed rainbow spectrums at them.
“That answers that,” the Sergeant said. “She’s flooded, all right.”
“I wonder what she was carrying.” Jimenez mused. “If I remember my salvage law, whoever finds her gets to keep not only the ship but her cargo.”
“And when did you study salvage law?” Espinoza asked sarcastically.
“Okay. I saw something on TV about it.”
“Tuck your larcenous hands back in your pockets. We’re soldiers, not scrap dealers. More than likely, this heap will drift off again at the next high tide or when another storm brews up.”
“Think we should pop some more holes in her to make sure she sinks for real this time?”
Espinoza considered Lugones’s question. “You know what? No. Let her keep wandering. If she’s survived this long, more power to her.”
A DECK BELOW WHERE the three men stood, Juan Cabrillo relaxed back into his chair. He hadn’t thought the Argentine Major, whose face he was beginning to see in his dreams, had a romantic side. That had been his one main concern—that they would use the Oregon for target practice. These soldiers were once boys who probably liked to blow stuff up. The only difference is, now they had plastique explosives rather than firecrackers. The crew had defeated the thermal imaging by cutting the heat to the “public”
parts of the ship, lowering the temperature in the rest, and letting the flooded ballast tanks shield them from the scan. The trick with the flooded staircase had been accomplished by simply closing the bottom hatch and pumping in some bilgewater.
Cabrillo looked over at Max Hanley, who was shaking his head. “What?” he said. “I told you I could hide the ship right on their doorstep.”
“This doesn’t count,” Max groused.
“The more outrageous the lie, the more easily it’s accepted. By rights, they should be suspicious as hell, and look at them. They called off the search after ten minutes, and our good Major is practically in tears.”
“I’ll give you this, Juan. You are one crafty SOB. So now what? You got us here. What’s your plan?”
“To be honest, I hadn’t thought much past this point. You did notice the piece of cargo under the tarp on the second boat?” The outside cameras had been watching the soldiers since the first group arrived at sunup.
“Seems about the right size and shape for a side-scan sonar probe.”
“Means they’re going to be looking for the Chinese wreck.”
“I assume we’re going to beat them to it?”
“See, the plan reveals itself,” Cabrillo said with the self-satisfied grin of a kid pulling one over on his parent. He really hadn’t thought much beyond getting the Oregon into position.
Max nodded toward the image of the soldiers milling around near the bow. “We’ll need to wait until that lot sods off before we can empty enough ballast to open the moon-pool doors.”
Juan nodded. “I suspect they’ll start searching today, so as soon as they pass by in the workboat, we’ll do our thing. When Tamara wakes up, ask if she’d like to join us. The least we can do is show her the fabled Treasure Ship before we destroy it.”
That was the first Hanley had heard about that, and he stared at the Chairman for a moment before seeing the logic. “It’ll be a shame, but you’re right. It can’t be helped.”
“I know. We can’t afford to give the Chinese even the slimmest chance of staking a claim down here.”
An hour later, Juan released the clamps holding the thirty-two-foot Discovery 1000. The three-person submersible didn’t have an escape trunk like her big sister, but no one had any real desire to swim in water that was just a fraction of a degree above freezing.
Cabrillo sat in the reclined pilot’s seat with Tamara on his right. Linda Ross had drawn the lucky number to accompany them, although with the temperature chilly enough for them to see their breaths in the cockpit she wasn’t sure how lucky she felt.
“Can’t we crank the heat a tad?” she asked, blowing on frozen fingertips.
“Sorry, but the bay we identified off the satellite pictures is at our maximum range. We need the endurance more than the comfort.”
“Won’t the Chinese already be there?” Tamara asked. She was bundled in an arctic parka, with another draped over her long legs.
“Nope. They went the wrong way. There are two similarly shaped bays around here. One to the north and one south. Because of the body Linda and her team found at Wilson/George, we know the wreck has to be in that direction. Those guys are going to spend the next week or so surveying fifty miles from where they should.”
For the next three hours, they cruised at twenty feet. Because of the weak polar sun, it was nearly black even this shallow. Juan relied on the sub’s sonar and lidar systems to navigate. At least the seas were calm. Had the weather been foul, running so close to the surface would have been like taking a ride inside a clothes dryer.
Linda and Juan kept Tamara entertained with some of the crazier stunts the Corporation had pulled off, making certain each story painted Max in the best light. If she suspected they were putting on the hard sell for their friend, she didn’t let on. They drank sweetened tea and ate gourmet sandwiches prepared in the Oregon’s world-class galley.
“The nav computer says we’re coming up on the bay,” Cabrillo informed his passengers. “The depth here is five thousand feet, but the bottom will come up sharply.”
Juan had been thinking about where in the fjordlike cove the Chinese ship would have been sunk. He assumed they would have been as close to shore as possible, and in the satellite pictures he had spotted what he believed to be the best area. There was a beach of sorts, or at least an area where the towering mountains and glaciers were much lower.
He steered the submersible into the mouth of the bay and plotted a course to the spot. He kept one eye on their side-scan sonar. As he had predicted, the bottom was rising at better than a sixty percent gradient. It remained featureless rock without so much as an outcropping. Had the incline below them been above water, it would have been nearly impossible to scale.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Tamara said for the third or fourth time. “Just a few days ago, I was half certain Admiral Tsai Song and the Silent Sea were just legends, and now I’m about to see her for myself.”
“If we’re lucky,” Juan cautioned. “A lot could have happened in the past five hundred years. She could have been ground into toothpicks by the ice.”
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. Do you think that happened?”
“Not really. Eric and Mark, you met them on the bridge—”
“The two who don’t look old enough to shave?”
“That’s them. They’re crackerjack researchers. They looked into archives from the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, the last time anyone took measurements of this area. The mountains around the bay were never named, but a survey team checked the glaciers and found them to be about the slowest moving on the continent. If the ship is in deep enough water, she wouldn’t have been affected even when the surface froze over.”
Cabrillo rubbed his hands together to restore some circulation. He checked their battery level and determined they had more than enough but left the heat control untouched. He would rather spend more time surveying the bottom on this trip than have to go through it all over again tomorrow.
They saw their first sign of life when a leopard seal swooped in close to the acrylic view port. It pirouetted in front of them, its body trailing a wreath of bubbles, and then it vanished as suddenly as it appeared.
“Cute little fellow,” Linda remarked.
“Not if you’re a penguin.”
Juan eyed the bottom profiler. The slope they had been traveling over was leveling out as it neared the shore, which was still about three miles away.
“Whoa,” Linda called.
“What do you have?”
“I just got a strong hit off the magnetometer to starboard.”
Cabrillo eased over the aircraft-style yoke, and the submersible swung right, not as elegantly as the seal, but she responded much better than their big Nomad. “Check out the sonar,” he said.
Directly in front of them was what to the electronics looked like a solid wall measuring three hundred and eight feet long and forty high. It was three hundred yards away—still too distant, in the poor lighting. The motors purred sedately as they neared. When it was fifty feet off, Juan toggled the floodlights mounted over the pressure hull.
Tamara put her hands to her mouth to stifle a gasp. In seconds, tears coursed down her smooth cheeks.
Though he hadn’t invested a lifetime studying the subject, Juan couldn’t help but feel emotional as he gazed across time and distance at the massive Chinese junk lying on the bottom of the Bellinghausen Sea.
The masts had long since vanished, most likely broken off by a passing iceberg, and there was a huge hole in her hull just below where her bottom had been clad in copper. Other than that, she looked perfectly seaworthy. The low salinity and frigid temperatures meant there was little life in these waters to attack the wood. She couldn’t have been better preserved if she’d been left in a windless desert.
Just above her waterline were dozens of ports. Juan asked about them because he doubted they were windows.
“For oars,” Tamara replied. “A
ship this size would probably have twenty to a side, and each one would have at least two rowers, sometimes three. She would have had probably six or seven masts that were square-rigged like all junks.”
Nearer still, they could see that the long superstructure that ran almost the entire length of the ship had been painted a buttery yellow with red trim and possessed pagoda-like architectural details.
“The Emperor would have insisted that his ships be as ornate as possible,” Tamara continued, “in order to show off the wealth and sophistication of his kingdom. Only the finest artists and craftsmen would have been allowed to work on them.”
“And you said she was loaded with treasure?” Linda asked.
“You showed me that lump of gold you recovered. And those shards of jade.”
“The crewman who survived the sinking and died near Wilson/ George must have pocketed them from the stores,” Juan said, and flew them up and over the huge ship. “It’s possible the prions hadn’t progressed that far yet, and he still had his wits about him.” Dr. Huxley had confirmed that the Chinese mummy and Andy Gangle were riddled with them.
Over the bow were two large cannons shaped like dragons. They were scaled-up versions of the pistol they had found next to Gangle’s corpse. There was so little slime on them that Juan could see teeth etched around the bore and wings carved along their flanks.
The aft deck was actually three stories taller than the main, and there was a square house dead in the middle with an elegantly sloped roof. Tamara pointed toward it. “That would be for the captain’s use.”
“His cabin?”
“More like an administrative office.”
Juan brought them down again and nosed the submersible up to where Admiral Tsai had placed the explosive charge that scuttled the ship and killed its ill-fated crew. The xenon lights threw what little of the interior they could see into sharp relief. The decks were wooden, as were the walls. The room they were looking into was too broad for them to see the far side and contained a veritable forest of support columns. Too many, in fact, and it was Tamara who recognized what they were seeing.