“The guy is such an asshole!”
Not unusual to find one aboard a vessel like the Viking.
“What pisses me off most,” Jeth added, “is that we spent—what, more than two hours?—rigging for this dive, and they don’t have to do a damn thing but anchor, put on their tanks, and swim down to the wreck.”
That seemed to be their plan. As dive plans go, though, it was a bad one.
Tomlinson, Jeth, and I were suited, tanks on, fins in hand, ready to roll off the stern. But we waited, watching the Viking rocket toward us, throwing geysers of white spray. The boat came in much too close and fast, Augie backing the throttles at the last moment and sledding away. The wake he created hit us like a freight train. It nearly tossed Arlis over the transom.
“You low-life Yankee ’bagger! I’ll gaff you like a fish if I see you at the marina!”
Arlis was in a mood.
The Viking’s flybridge towered above us; Augie appeared smug and professional up there, looking down. The boat was equipped with a PA system for communicating with dock-hands, and we watched him put the microphone to his mouth. “You’re anchored on my wreck and this is the last time I’m warning you. The wreck my boat found and we’re claiming it. Legally.” His voice boomed over waves; his Wisconsin accent magnified, as he added, “You people will learn not to mess with us. One of you already found out.”
I assumed he meant me. But why the nasty, knowing slyness?
When Arlis replied with his middle finger, Augie looked pleased. “My uncle talked to our lawyers this morning and that’s what he said to say if you were here. Admiralty law. Look it up. The laws of marine salvage and a thing called the law of finders. Which means you’re trespassing…dumbasses.”
I looked at Tomlinson who was smiling and shaking his head as he spit into his face mask. “It’s called the law of finds, not finders,” he said quietly. “Nothing to worry about. The wreck’s ours, if we do this right. I’ve got the whole business scoped; all this deal needs is for us to add water.”
He glanced up at Augie and tried to lighten the mood. “Cheeseheads,” he said. “It’ll take evolution another three hundred years before they should be allowed to mate south of Chicago.”
I was watching Augie maneuver the sportfisherman into the wind, preparing to anchor. Oswald had disappeared belowdecks and reappeared carrying two BC dive systems, as Augie hit a button and their anchor plummeted into the water. Immediately, he killed the vessel’s engines and hurried down the ladder to his pile of scuba gear.
Augie hadn’t set the anchor by hand; he didn’t wait until his boat swung tight on its line, an indicator that the anchor would hold—temporarily, anyway.
It looked like they were both going in the water. No one above to make sure the boat was still there when they surfaced.
I looked from Jeth to Tomlinson, then Arlis. Even the old man managed a bitter smile.
“Augie doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing, does he?”
Jeth said, “He’s dangerous in a way that gets other people hurt.” His tone suggesting that we should get moving before Augie had a chance to hurt us.
We got in the water, Jeth, then Tomlinson following me on the surface as I pulled myself along the safety line toward the red and orange buoys that outlined the wreck below.
I ’d just found something interesting when, above, Arlis fired the engines and gave the emergency recall signal.
The object I had found was metallic looking, heavy, and shiny. It was buried in the sand, only a rectangular edge showing. Hard to say with confidence because of the murky water, but it appeared to be golden in color. No barnacles, no benthic growth, and it hadn’t tarnished.
Gold is one of a very few metals that retains its pure color after long submersion in saltwater. What else could it be?
Gold.
I had made a couple of attempts to dig the object free when I heard the diesels start. The staccato bursts were jolting.
Emergency. Arlis repeated the pattern, revving the engines. Unmistakable.
The visibility was so poor that I had to hold my dive watch against my face mask to see the luminous numbers. We’d been on the bottom less than twenty minutes.
I touched my hand to the bottom. We weren’t dragging.
I gave two sharp tugs on the rope that was our search line. Tomlinson and Jeth both gave two sharp tugs in reply. They were okay.
What could be wrong?
So far, the dive had gone without a hitch, even though conditions were awful. We were only six feet apart, spaced incrementally along the rope, yet I couldn’t see anything but the yellow cones of my partners’ flashlights through the murk.
Which was okay. The plan was still workable because we were using a keep-it-simple-stupid search technique.
The search line was connected to the anchor line. Kick slowly over the bottom and the rope would rotate us in a circular pattern, like pencils in a protractor or spokes on a wheel. Complete a circle, then move farther out toward the circle’s perimeter. Gradually, we’d progress to the end of the rope, covering the wreck site in orderly six-foot swaths.
Easy.
It was the best way I knew to explore a wreck in near-zero visibility. And we were on a wreck, there was no doubt about that now—the remains of a boat, not a plane.
Our signal for Come look was three sharp tugs on the rope. Jeth had been the first to call. He was on the inside lane of the perimeter, holding his flashlight close to something he wanted us to see. Frozen in a swirl of lucent silt was the boat’s propellers, both still connected to driveshafts. There were a few barnacles on the props and some new benthic growth—but not much, considering the pitting done by electrolysis.
This wreck had been insulated by sand. Buried, then uncovered by the recent hurricane. I had no doubt about it now. Anaerobic: the word for an environment that has no oxygen so cannot support the crawling, boring, sessile creatures that destroy wood and bone and scar metal.
The gilded rectangle of metal I’d just discovered also had no barnacle scars. I’d used my left hand to dig around it, but sand collapsed into the hole. Tried again using my blunt-tipped dive knife. Contact with the object made a distinctive soft tink.
It was definitely metal. Soft metal.
The thought came into my mind again: Gold?
Silly. Scuba divers don’t find gold lying on the bottom of the seabed. That’s fairy-tale stuff. Except, of course, for Mel Fisher, and Kip Wagner, and Alan Eckert, and…
I had found a couple of old-style bottles. They were in my mesh dive sack. And a corroded blob that was handgun-sized.
But gold?
Jeth had found German coins here, so why not? I used my knife and dug faster around the object, trying to expose enough to get a grip on the thing before the sand collapsed once again.
That’s when Arlis started the engine and gave the emergency signal. Diver’s recall—we had to surface immediately.
I had no way to mark the object. An inflatable buoy would’ve been swept away by waves. So I left it. I gave a sharp tug on the rope followed by a steady pull—time to surface—then followed the rope, hand over hand, toward the pale pulsing strobe light that marked where our search line and the anchor line intersected.
I was on the outside perimeter of our search wheel. I moved slowly over the bottom, aware that Tomlinson was only a body length in front of me; Jeth a body length ahead of him. I stopped for a moment and jettisoned a squirt of residual air from my BC to maintain negative buoyancy. I wanted to make certain I didn’t ram Tomlinson from behind.