“What’s that?” Jayden handed the binoculars back up front. Carter focused them on the ship as he answered.
“Maybe the safe is buried in the mud somewhere in the wreckage trail and none of us will ever find it.” At this Jayden shook his head while exhaling a long breath, and Carter continued. “Or there never was any map to Noah’s ark, it was just a hoax, or something that got misconstrued and passed down more and more incorrectly from generation to generation.”
“Like that old kids’ telephone line game?”
“Exactly. Or, maybe the safe is there but it rusted open, ruining the parchment inside.”
“That last possibility would be definitive, at least. It would make our client happy to say for sure what happened.”
“True.” Carter nodded from behind the glasses. Their client. The only one at the moment, but success with her represented a large payday. Carter was unique in that he insisted his clients pay only half the total fee up front, and the other half only on successful completion of the job. This was both because he wasn’t really doing this work for the money. He’d inherited a fortune from his grandfather, and after a ten-year stint in the Navy as a commissioned officer, decided not to re-up as expected. Instead, disillusioned with the wartime looting of priceless historical artifacts he’d seen in the middle east and elsewhere, he opted to started a private company dedicated to the preservation and safekeeping of historical artifacts so that they might be conserved indefinitely for the greater good.
In this case, that meant recovering a scroll supposedly left in one of the safes not already salvaged aboard the Titanic, and returning it to the client, one Ashley Miller, great grand-daughter of late antiquities collector, Charles Miller. Ashley had explained to Carter that Chronopoulos Dimitrios’ brother, Apostolos, survived in a life boat and met with Miller in New York, to relate that his brother had gone to retrieve the map from the safe as the ship was sinking but never returned. Carter also pointed out to Jayden that providing proof the safe was no longer aboard the wreckage of the famed ocean liner, or nearby on the ocean floor some 12,500 feet down, would also be satisfactory.
The helicopter’s radio crackled to life and the pilot spoke into the transmitter, asking if they were clear for approach. A reply came back in the affirmative, and the pilot looked over at Carter. “We’re going in."
Five minutes later they hovered over the ship, an immense iron vessel with the name R/V Deep Pioneer stenciled in black paint over the white hull. A helipad marked with a yellow circle and letter “H” was situated on a raised platform above the stern. A heavy equipment crane was visible on the aft work deck, while the bridge was about two-thirds of the way towards the bow. The entire ship did not have one large flat deck, but was a complex series of structures with multiple levels, catwalks, machinery, towers, and interior spaces.
Carter and Jayden had spent many a night on vessels of this type, and it wasn’t the ship itself that held his interest as he peered out from the helicopter’s window. It was the one that lay two and one-third miles below it, the wreck of the Titanic. The coordinates of the wreck site were well known, so reaching the general location was not a major problem. But inside the Deep Pioneer was an array of sophisticated electronics that allowed the vessel to precisely detect the presence of the fated wreck far below. Side-scan sonar, bottom profiling imagers, magnetometers, pingers, sub-bottom profile data and more. In addition, as requested by Hunt, there was both a deep-dive capable Remotely Operated Vehicle, or ROV, as well as a two-person submersible capable of withstanding the immense pressures at the depths the Titanic now inhabited.
Neither Hunt nor Jayden had ever dived on this, quite possibly the most famous shipwreck in the world, and despite the fact that it was here only as the result of a terrible tragedy, he couldn’t deny the excitement he now experienced. Besides, he consoled himself, he was attempting to do a service by locating a document that, if genuine, would be beyond priceless and of limitless inspiration for the entire human population.
The location of Noah’s Ark… Despite the fact he was about to land in a helicopter on a ship at sea, the notion of what he was really searching for was too intoxicating to set aside. The irony was not lost on him that the Titanic itself was once an ark of sorts, a vessel meant to safeguard its passengers, yet one that had failed in that purpose.
An exchange of technical radio chatter snapped Hunt from his thoughts, and then their craft was descending to the ship’s helipad. Hunt glanced at the wind sock and was glad to see it hanging limply in the mostly still air. The skids touched down smoothly on the pad and all three of them unbuckled out of their seatbelts. Buzz informed them that he was going to refuel the helicopter before he would be taking off back to Newfoundland.
Carter and Jayden stepped out of the craft into the cool air of the North Atlantic. Behind them was only empty sea, while in front of them stretched the entire research vessel. While it wasn’t the busy hive of activity Carter had imagined, it wasn’t empty, either. Technology and automation meant that crew sizes could be smaller. Hunt knew, for example, that although the water was far too deep here to anchor, that the ship was kept in position over the wreck site by a GPS-controlled system of thrusters that maintained specific coordinates automatically. But there were people out and about, especially on the aft deck, and one of them came trotting up the helipad stairs to greet them now.
A bearish man looking to be in his mid-fifties with a full white beard, very broad shoulders and carrying two hard hats stepped up onto the pad and extended a hand. “Cliff Jameson, Operations Manager for the Deep Pioneer. You must be the specialists hired by Ms. Miller?”
Carter nodded and shook Jameson’s hand, noting his vice-like grip. “Carter Hunt, and this is my friend and business partner, Jayden Takada.”
Takada and Jameson shook hands. “Nice to meet you both. First off, put these on. You probably know this, but you need to wear them whenever you’re not in an inside area of the ship.”
Carter and Jayden donned the protective gear and then Jameson continued. “The way I understand it, you have a background in historical artifact preservation, and you…” He turned to Jayden. “Are the submersible and ROV expert.”
Jayden nodded. “We can both do a little of everything, but that about sums it up.”
Hunt nodded as well and then Jameson pointed down to an area on the aft deck. “Let me talk to your helo pilot for a minute to get him squared away with the refueling process. Meet me down the bottom of those stairs in five, and we’ll get you started, okay?”
Hunt and Takada descended the steps from the helipad down to the main aft deck. The sounds of various machinery cranking, men shouting instructions and ropes clinging against metal poles greeted their ears as they walked across the deck to the indicated stairwell. They took it down the equivalent of one floor to a lower deck that was still exposed to the air, but with a metal catwalk above it. Here there were two cranes on either side positioned on the rails, as well as an ROV and a mini-submersible in their respective cradles. Jayden noted aloud to Hunt that an identical ROV berth sat empty.
Behind them, a closed door with tinted glass opened and a man wearing a hard hat emerged from a dark room lit only by the indicator lights and screens of various electronics. “Hey there! You fellas look a little lost!” This man, a skinny individual with long brown hair tied in a ponytail offered a hand, which was shook by first Jayden and then Hunt.
“John Wilcomb, Submersibles and ROV Control Room Supervisor. Call me Johnny.”