A doctor will tell you that if your heart stops, you're dead. But it seemed everyone's heart paused for several seconds as the name of the sunken ship passed under the MiniRover's cameras.
“Princess Yung Thi,” Giordino shouted. “We got her!”
“The queen of the China Sea,” Julia murmured as if she was in a trance. “She looks so cold and isolated. It's almost as if she was praying we'd come.”
“I thought you wanted a ship called the Princess Dou Wan,” said Wilbanks.
“It's a long story,” Pitt replied with a big grin, “but they're one and the same.” He laid one hand on Hall's shoulder. “Move aft, keeping at least ten feet from the side of the ship so we don't entangle our tether and lose the ROV.”
Hall silently nodded and worked the little joysticks on the handbox that controlled the camera and vehicle movement. Visibility was nearly fifty feet under the vehicle's halogen lights and showed that the exterior of the Princess Dou Wan had changed very little after fifty-two years. The frigid fresh water and deep depth had inhibited marine growth and corrosion.
The superstructure came into view, looking surprisingly fresh. None of it had collapsed. Only a light coat of silt adhered to the paint, which had dulled somewhat but still appeared surprisingly fresh. The Princess Dou Wan looked like the interior of a haunted, abandoned house that had not been dusted for half a century.
Hall maneuvered the MiniRover around the bridge. Most of the windows had been smashed from the force of the waves and the pressure of the deep. They could see the engine-room telegraph standing inside, its pointer still set on FULL AHEAD. Only a few fish lived in her now. The crew was no more, most all swept away by frenzied waves when she went down. The
MiniRover crept alongside the ship on a horizontal course a short distance from the main promenade deck. The lifeboat davits were empty and twisted out, grim evidence of the chaos and terror that occurred that violent night in 1948. Wooden crates, still intact, were lashed down on every square foot of open deck. Her runnel was missing aft of the bridge, but could be seen where it had fallen beside the hull when the ship drove herself into the soft bottom.
“I'd give anything to see what's inside those packing boxes,” said Julia.
“Maybe we'll find one that's broken open,” said Pitt without taking his eyes off the screen.
The hull aft of the superstructure had been ruptured and spread open, the steel twisted and jagged from when she had broken up from the battering of the giant waves. The stem section was completely torn away when the ship plunged under the water. It was as if a giant had squeezed the ship apart and then tossed her broken pieces aside.
“Looks like mementos from the ship are scattered in a debris field that leads from one part of the wreck to the other,” observed Giordino.
“Can't be,” said Pitt. “Every nonessential piece was stripped off before she was to go to the scrappers. At the risk of sounding like an irrepressible optimist, I'm betting we're looking at an acre or more of fabulous works of art.”
On closer inspection the cameras on the MiniRover revealed a sea of wooden crates that had been spilled between the broken sections of the ship when she sank. Pitt's prediction was confirmed when the ROV soared over the debris field and honied in on a strange shape materializing out of the murk. They all stared astonished as a poignant artifact from the distant past slowly rose and met the camera lens. The walls of a large crate had burst open like petals of a rose, exposing a strange shape standing in eerie solitude.
“What is it?” queried Wilbanks.
“A bronze life-size horse and rider,” Pitt muttered in awe. “I'm not enough of an expert, but it must be the sculpture of an ancient Chinese emperor from the Han dynasty.”
“How old do you reckon it is?” asked Hall.
“Close to two thousand years.”
The effect of the horse and rider standing proud on the bottom was so profound, they all gazed solemnly at its image on the screen for the next two minutes without speaking. To Julia it was as if she had been carried back in time. The horse's head was turned slightly in the direction of the MiniRover, its nostrils flared. The rider sat stiffly upright, his sightless eyes staring into nothingness.
“The treasure,” whispered Julia. “It's everywhere.”
“Steer toward the stern,” Pitt said to Hall.
“I've got the tether at its maximum length now,” Hall replied. “Ralph will have to move the boat.”
Wilbanks nodded, measured the distance and direction on the computer, and moved the Divercity, dragging the Mini-Rover until it was sitting atop the detached stern section. Then Hall deftly steered the ROV past the ship's propellers, whose upper blades rose from the silt. The huge rudder was still set on a direct course ahead. The lettering across the stern could be distinctly seen to identify the vessel's home port as Shanghai. The story was the same—the bent and shredded hull plates, the disemboweled engines, the scattered art treasures.
Midnight came and went as the first humans to lay eyes on the Princess Dou Wan in fifty-two years studied the two broken hulks and their priceless cargo from every angle. When they finally decided that there was no more to see, Hall began reeling in the MiniRover.
No one tore his gaze away from the screen until long after the MiniRover ascended toward the surface and the Princess Dou Wan was lost to view in the black void. The ship was once again alone on the bottom of the lake, her only companion an unknown sailing ship that rested only a mile away. But the solitude was temporary. Soon men, ships and equipment would be probing her bones and removing the precious cargo she had carried so far across the world and jealously guarded through the years since she steamed from Shanghai.
The ill-fated voyage of the Princess Dou Wan had not ended, not quite yet. Her epilogue was still to be written,
HISTORIAN ZHU KWAN
SAT AT A DESK ON A STAGE IN THE middle of a huge office and studied reports gathered by an international army of researchers hired by Qin Shang. The Princess Dou Wan project took up half of one floor in the Qin Shang Maritime office building in Hong Kong. No expense was spared. And yet, despite the massive effort, nothing of substance had been found. To Zhu Kwan, the loss of the ship remained a mystery.
Zhu Kwan and his team scouted every maritime source for leads while Qin Shang's survey-and-salvage ship kept up its search of the waters off the coast of Chile for the elusive passenger liner. Built in his Hong Kong shipyard, the vessel was a marvel of undersea technology and the envy of every maritime nation's oceanographic science and research institutions. Named the Jade Adventurer rather than a Chinese name to make documentation simpler when operating in foreign waters, the ship and its crew had previously discovered the wreck of a sixteenth-century junk in the China Sea and salvaged its cargo of Ming-dynasty porcelain.
Zhu Kwan examined a description of works of art from a private collection of Chinese art owned by a wealthy merchant
in Peking that had disappeared in 1948. The merchant had been murdered, and Zhu Kwan had tracked down his heirs in what turned out to be a successful hunt for an inventory of the lost art. He was studying a drawing of a rare wine vessel when his assistant's voice came over the speakerphone.
“Sir, you have a call from the United States. A Mr. St. Julien Perlmutter.”