Serpent nf-1 Page 37

  "I know they were the world's greatest explorers up until the fifteenth or sixteenth century. They circumnavigated Africa and went as far as Cornwall on the English coast and Cape Verde. On one voyage they supposedly took thousands of people on sixty ships."

  "I rest my case," Austin said with exaggerated smugness.

  "Not so fast, Perry Mason. The doubters will say these inscriptions are interesting, but who's to say they are authentic? Years ago inscriptions in Brazil supposedly described a Phoenician expedition in 531 B.C. The consensus was that they were forged. It sounds crazy, but you'll get people saying the antiquities looters could have been carving this stuff to sell to gullible collectors. Sure, you could make a case that the 'ships of Tarshish' undertook transatlantic voyages, but you need more substantial and substantiated proof to get anyone in the scientific community to accept it."

  "What about the astrolabe you and the professor found?"

  "Even that wouldn't do it, Kurt. They would say someone with Cortez or a Spanish hidalgo brought this thing in, an Indian stole it and stuck it in an old temple. Close but no cigar until you know for sure how it got there."

  "Did the writing indicate what the ships were carrying?"

  "We've been saving that for last," Orville said, giggling like a schoolboy.

  "Oh, yes. We brow what their cargo was," Chi said. "The Mayan writing says it was mainly copper, jewels, gold, and silver."

  Austin looked like someone shaking off a head punch. "You're saying the ships were loaded with treasure?"

  Chi nodded.

  "This wasn't a routine trading expedition," Austin said, his green eyes flashing. "Carthage was under siege by the Romans. The Carthaginians would have done everything they could to make sure the Romans didn't get their hands on the royal treasury."

  Any idea what happened to the treasure?" Zavala asked.

  "Unfortunately none of the carvings goes beyond the one you saw of the safe arrival of the ships," Chi said.

  Nina frowned. All this talk of treasure is exciting," she said with impatience, "but the dazzle of gold and jewels should not keep us from trying to find the answer to the question of why my expedition was massacred in Morocco."

  "Nina's right," Austin said. "Let's concentrate on the thread that connects these inscriptions to the other discoveries overseas. Christopher Columbus. We know that hundreds of years after these stones were carved Columbus heard tales of a great treasure." He pointed at the screen. "Could this be what he was looking for?"

  "I hate to throw cold water on your theory," Orville countered. "The rumors Columbus was following could have had their basis in the real riches held by the Aztecs. As we know the Spaniards hit the jackpot later:" He paused. "You say Columbus was sailing a definite course. Do I understand he was following a map?"

  "Not exactly" Austin said. "You remember that news clip Nina asked you to dig out of your files?"

  "Oh, yes, the article from my Fortean file about the stone artifact."

  "Columbus mentioned that he was being guided by a 'talking stone.' "

  "Now I remember. The carved monolith they found in Italy It was being shipped in an armored truck Headed right here to the Peabody, in fact."

  Austin said, "That stone could be the key to this whole mess. Treasure and assassinations."

  "What a shame we can't take a look at it."

  "Who says we can't? NUMA has tackled deeper and more difficult projects."

  "Let. me see if I follow your line of thinking," Orville said with disbelief. "You're planning on diving more than two hundred feet into a wrecked ocean liner in God knows what condition to retrieve a massive stone artifact from a locked armored car?"

  Zavala winked at Austin. "With any luck we can do it between breakfast and lunch and celebrate at dinner"

  "Hmm," Orville said with a smirk. He leaned forward and pointed his finger at the two NUMA men "And they say I'm a nutcake."

  Nantucket Shoals

  39 THE MINI-SUBMERSIBLE WAS BARELY a few fathoms below Nantucket Sound's blue-green waters, and Austin was already having second thoughts about diving with Zavala. His misgivings had nothing to do with Zavala's skill as a pilot. There was hardly a craft in, on, or above the water Joe couldn't operate. It was his offkey singing. As the crane lifted the two-passenger craft off the deck and into the water Zavala had broken into a Spanish rendition of "Yellow Submarine."

  Austin barked into his microphone, "Do you know any other songs?"

  I'm taking audience requests."

  "How about singing `Far Far Away'?"

  Zavala's quiet laughter came over the earphones. "Gee, I haven't heard that one since I was a muchacho. "

  "Desperate times call for desperate measures."

  "No problema. It sounds better with a guitar anyway. Where do you want to go, amigo?"

  "How about down for starters?"

  Zavala's wave of acknowledgment was visible through the observation bubble that was so close Austin could have reached out and touched his colleague on the shoulder if not for the plexiglass that enclosed their heads. The twin domes were mounted at the front of the minisub, jutting at an angle from its flat green ceramic surface like the bulbous eyes of a frog.

  The Deep Flight 11 was unlike most deep ocean submersibles and bathyscaphes which tended to be shaped like a fat man, rotund and thick around the waist. It looked more like a futuristic fighter plane than an undersea vehicle. The fuselage was rectangular and flat, with the leading and trailing edges tapering like the business end of a chisel. The sides were perpendicular to the flat top and bottom with sharp edges as if canvas had been stretched over a frame.. The wings were stubby and squared off and equipped with fixed running lights. Thruster fans were mounted behind the wings and observation domes. At the front were a pair of manipulator arms and a movable spotlight.

  Unlike the crew of a traditional submersible, who sat upright as if at a desk, Austin and Zavala lay prone, Sphinx-like, face forward, strapped into form-fitting pans, elbows set into padded receptacles. They had dual controls, including a joystick for elevation and another for speed. Zavala handled the sub while Austin took care of the other systems such as lights, video, and the manipulator arms. He kept an eye on the heads-up digital display that contained compass, speedometer, and odometer and controls for depth gauge, air-conditioning, strobe unit, and sonar. The craft was slightly buoyant and, dove by moving through the water and adjusting the elevators in its tail section like an airplane.

  Their bodies were elevated at a thirty-degree angle to simulate the natural position of a person swimming. This attitude also made rapid descents and ascents less frightening. The space was adequate for Austin's six-foot-one height but snug around his broad shoulders. Still, he had to admit, even with Zavala's serenade it was a pleasant way to scout out a wrecked ocean liner.

  The wreck was marked by a red spherical buoy. Zavala put the sub into a slow series of descending circles around the buoy line which ran down one hundred eighty feet from the surface to a length of chain attached to the third port-side lifeboat davit. Normal descent to the highest part of the wreck took three to four minutes. With its five-knot speed the minisub could make the trip in a fraction of that time, but Austin wanted to get a feel for the environment they would be working in. He asked Zavala to ease them to the bottom.

  The deepening water filtered the colors out of the sunlight streaming down from the surface. The red tints disappeared first, then on through the spectrum. At five fathoms all hues had been lost except for a cold bluish green. In compensation for the artificial dusk, the water became as dear as fine crystal as the sub broke through the warmer layers of thermocline where particles of vegetation were held in suspension. The sub corkscrewed lazily into the sea around the anchor line. A huge dark mass loomed from the pale bottom sand and filled their vision.

  With the excellent visibility the sub had been running without lights. At a depth of one hundred twenty feel. Zavala flattened their trajectory, slowed the minisub's spe
ed to a crawl, and switched on the craft's belly light. The ship lay on its side. The large circle of illumination transformed a section of the hull below them from black to a cadaverish grayish green broken here and there with leprous splotches of yellow and rust stains like dried blood. The patina of marine growth, made up of millions of sea anemones, stretched off into the dimness beyond the reach of the light.

  Austin found it difficult to imagine that this huge dead leviathan was once one of the fastest and most beautiful ships afloat. It is possible to stand before a building as tall as the Doria was long and not be awed by its size. But if that same seven-hundred-foot tower is tuned horizontally and placed by itself on a flat empty plain, its immensity becomes breathtaking.

  Lying on its starboard or right side, hiding the fatal gash from the Stockholm's sharp beak, the Doria looked like a monstrous sea creature that had simply lain down to rest, had fallen asleep, and was now being reclaimed by the sea. The mini. sub switched on its video camera and glided toward the stern, staying a short distance above the rows of portholes. Dwarfed by the massive hull, the craft resembled a little bug-eyed crustacean checking out a whale. Near the sixteen-ton portside propeller

  Zavala made a sharp turn and passed over the sharply etched black rectangles that once served as windows to the promenade deck. When open water appeared he dropped the sub down to a depth of two hundred feet and pointed the craft back toward the bow on a path parallel to their earlier course: The multi-tiered decks were a ninety-foot-high vertical wall off to their left. They moved past the three swimming pools that had once cooled passengers according to class on their transatlantic passage, scudding along the lifeboat deck whose davits didn't work any better now than they did in 1956.

  Dozens of fishing nets had become snagged on the hook-like davits. The nets veiled the decks like great shrouds draped over an immense bier. The mesh was coated with a hoary cloak of marine growth. Some nets, held aloft from the wreck by their buoys, were still snaring fish from the schools of large pollock and cod that darted dangerously close. Noting the rotting bones caught in the mesh, Zavala wisely kept the mini-sub at a respectful distance from the still dangerous nets.

  The ship's great red-and-white smokestack had fallen off, leaving an immense square shaft down to the engine room. Other openings marked uncovered staircase wells. The superstructure had slipped off and lay in a jumble of disintegrating debris on the sea bottom. With its distinctive stack and superstructure gone the Andrea Doria looked more like a barge than a ship. Only when they glided by the remnants of the wheelhouse and saw the massive booms, winch heads, and bollards intact on the foredeck did they began to get the sense that this was a huge passenger liner. It was hard to believe a vessel this big could ever sink, but that's what they said about the Titanic, Austin reminded himself.

  They had been as reverent as mourners at a funeral, but now Austin broke the silence. "That's what thirty million dollars looks like after a few decades at the bottom of the sea."

  "Hell of a lot of money to pay for an oversized fish, catcher," Zavala said.

  "That's just for the hull. I didn't count the millions in furnishings and artwork and four hundred tons of freight. The pride of the Italian navy."

  "I can't figure it," Zavala said. "I know all about the thick fog, but both these ships had radar and lookouts. How in all of those millions of square miles of ocean did they happen to occupy the same space at the same time?"

  "Plain lucky. I guess."

  "They couldn't have done better if they planned out a collision course in advance."

  "Fifty two people dead. A twenty-nine-thousand-ton ocean liner on the bottom. The Stockholm heavily damaged. Millions in cargo lost That's some planning."

  "I think you're telling me it's one of those unsolved mysteries of the sea.'

  "Do you have a better answer?"

  "Not one that makes any sense," he replied with a sigh that was audible over the mike. "Where to now?"

  "Let's go up to Gimbel's Hole for a looksee," Austin said.

  The minisub banked around as gracefully as a manta ray and headed back toward the bow, then cruised evenly about halfway down the length of the port side until it came to a jagged four-sided opening.

  Gimbel's Hole.

  The eight-by-twenty-foot hole was the legacy of Peter Gimbel. Less than twentyeight hours after the Doria went under, Gunbel and another photographer named Joseph Fox dove on the liner and spent thirteen minutes exploring the wreck. It was the start of Gimbel's fascination with the ship. In 1981 he led an expedition that used a diving bell and saturation diving techniques. The divers cut away the entrance doors into the First Class Foyer Lounge to get at a safe reported to hold a million dollars in valuables. Amid great hoopla the safe was opened on TV, but it yielded only a few hundred dollars.

  "Looks like a barn door," Zavala quipped.

  "This barn door took two weeks to open with magnesium rods," Austin said. "We don't have that long."

  "Might be easier to raise the whole thing. If NUMA could raise the Titanic, the Doria should be a cinch."

  "You're not the first one to suggest that. There have been a pile of schemes to bring her up. Compressed air. Helium-filled balloons. A coffer dam. Plastic bubbles. Even Ping-Pong balls."

  "The Ping-Pong guy must have had some cojones." Zavala whistled.

  Austin groaned at the Spanish double entendre. Aside from that astute observation, from what you've seen, what do you think?"

  "I think we've got our work cut out for us:"

  "I agree. Let's go topside and see what the others say"

  Zavala gave him a thumbs up, tweaked the motor, and lifted the nose of the sub. As they quickly ascended with the power from four thrusters, Austin glanced at the gray ghost receding in the gloom. Somewhere in that huge hull was the key to the bizarre series of murders. He put his grim thoughts aside as Zavala broke into a Spanish chorus of "Octopus's Garden." Austin thanked his lucky stars that the trip was short.

  The Deep Flight broke the surface in an explosion of froth and foam. Through the water-streaked observation bubbles a gray-hulled boat with a white superstructure was visible about a hundred fifty feet away. The minisub was as agile as a minnow underwater. On the surface its flat planes were susceptible to the wave motion, and it rocked in the slight chop being kicked up by a freshening breeze. Austin didn't normally get seasick, but he was starting to feel green around the gills and was happy when the boat got under way and rapidly covered the distance between them.

  The boat's design was typical of many salvage and survey ships whose main function is to serve as a platform for lowering, towing, and hauling various instruments and vehicles. It had a snub tugboat's bow and a high forecastle, but most of the sixty five-foot length was open deck. At either side of the deck was an elbow crane. An A-frame spanned most of the twenty-two-foot beam at the stern where a ramp slanted down to the sea. Two men in wetsuits pushed an inflatable down the ramp into the water, jumped into it, and skimmed over the wave tops to the minisub. While one man manned the tiller the other secured the sturdy hook to a grommet at the front of the submersible.

  The line led to a deck winch that pulled the minisub closer, the boat maneuvering until the Deep Flight was on its starboard. A crane swung over and lowered tackle that was attached by the men in the inflatable to cleats on the sub. The cable went taut. The sub and its passengers were lifted dripping from the sea, swung over the deck, and lowered onto a steel cradle. The operation was handled with Swisswatch precision and dispatch. Austin would have expected nothing less than perfection from one of his father's boats.

  After the revealing session at the Peabody, Austin had called Rudi Gunn to fill him in and request a salvage vessel. NUMA had dozens of ships involved in its farflung operations. That was the problem, Gunn explained. The agency's boats were flung all around the globe. Most carried scientists who had stood in line for a spot on board. The nearest ship was the Nereus, still in Mexico. Austin said he didn't need a fullbl
own salvage ship, but Gunn said the quickest he could get something to Austin was a week. Austin told him to make a reservation and hung up. After a moment's thought he dialed again.

  The voice like a bear coughing in the woods came on the line. Austin told his father what he needed.

  "Hah!" the older man guffawed. "Chrissakes, I thought NUMA had more ships than the U.S. Navy. Can't the admiral spare you one dinky boat from his fleet?"

  Austin let his father enjoy his gloat "Not in the time I need it. I could really use your help, Pop."

  "Hmm. Help comes with a price tag, lad," the old man said slyly.

  "NUMA will reimburse you for any expenses, Pop."

  "I could give a rat's ass about money," he growled. My accountant will find a way to put it down as a charitable donation if he doesn't get sent to Alcatraz before then. If I get you something that floats, does that mean you'll wrap up whatever nonsense Sandecker's got you involved in and get out here to see me before I'm so damned senile I don't recognize you?"

  "Can't promise anything. There's a good chance of it."

  "Humph. Finding a boat for you isn't like hailing a cab, you know. I'll see what I can do." He hung up.

  Austin laughed softly. His father knew exactly where every vessel he owned was and what it was doing, down to the smallest rowboat. Dad wanted to let him wriggle on the hook. Austin wasn't surprised when the phone rang a few minutes later.

  The gruff voice said, "You're in luck. Got you an old scow. We've got a salvage vessel doing some work for the navy off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Not one of your big research vessels, but she'll do fine. She'll put into Nantucket Harbor tomorrow and wait for you."

  "Thanks, Pop, I really appreciate it."

  "I had to twist the captain's arm, and I'll lose money on this job," he said, his tone softening, "but I guess it's worth it to get my son out here in my declining years."

  What an actor! Austin thought. His father could whup his weight in wildcats. True to his word the senior Austin had the boat in Nantucket the next day. The Monkfish was hardly a scow. It was, in fact, a medium-sized, state-of-theart salvage vessel less than two years old. An added bonus was Captain John McGinty, a hard-boned, ruddy-faced Irishman from South Boston. The captain had dived on the Andrea Doria years before and was delighted to work on her again.