a) Stefan and Roberto
Stefan and Roberto were subdued and even apprehensive on the day they joined Vlade and his friend Idelba on her tugboat. They had agreed to take Mr. Hexter, and that turned out to be a lucky thing, as with him along there was a certain amount of caretaking they needed to do. Without him they would have had nothing to do, and the whole point of their expeditions was to do things. But they were out of control of this one. And the stakes felt kind of high. It was hard not to worry.
Idelba picked them up on the Twenty-sixth aquaculture dock next to the Skyline Marina, and as her tug grumbled up to them the boys stared at each other round-eyed: her boat was huge. Out on the ocean they had not perceived that. Not containerclipper huge, but city huge, as long as the whole dock, meaning seventy feet long, and about three stories tall at the bridge, with broad flaring taffrails and a squared-off stern. “Wow,” Mr. Hexter said, peering up at it. “A carousel tug. And named the Sisyphus! That’s very cool.”
Idelba and one of her crew opened a passage in the side of the hull and lifted over a staircase on a hinge. The boys helped Mr. Hexter up it and onto the tug, then up narrow stairs to the bridge. Idelba appeared to have only one crew member aboard, a man who nodded to them from the wheel, which was set in a broad console at the center of a big curve of window. The wheelhouse. The view of the East River was amazing from this high up.
Vlade came up with Idelba after they had cast off, and the tug’s pilot, a skinny black man named Thabo, pushed the throttle forward and they shoved upriver. Ebb tide meant nothing to this brute, it had more than enough power to get upriver at speed. Given how heavy and squat it was, the speed was kind of awesome.
“No chance of hiding this baby,” Vlade remarked when he saw the looks on the boys’ faces. “We’re just going to have to sit there and be obvious.”
“People poke around the Bronx all the time,” Idelba said. “No one will give us a second glance.”
“Do we have a permit?” Mr. Hexter asked.
“To do what?”
“To dredge in the Bronx. Didn’t that use to be off-limits without a permit from the city?”
“Yeah sure. That’s still true. But my permit is good citywide, so if anyone asks, we’ll be fine. And the truth is, no one is going to ask. The river police have enough to do.”
“Both of them,” Vlade added.
Idelba and Thabo laughed at this. The boys’ inclination toward secrecy relaxed, and they began to feel more comfortable. Idelba invited them to go down to the main deck and wander around. Mr. Hexter said it was okay to leave him up on the bridge, so they flew down the stairs and ran around the deck to see the water from all perspectives, particularly the white V of their wake, curling away from the deep white trough behind their broad stern. The power of the motor vibrated their feet, and it was thrilling to feel the wind pour through them, especially after racing forward to lean over the bow and look down at the stiff bow wave skirting up over the brown-blue of the East River.
“This has got to be the most powerful machine we have ever been on,” Roberto said. “Feel that motor! Check out this bow wave! We are killing this river!”
“I sure hope we find something today,” Stefan said.
“We will. The signal was strong, and we were right on top of it. There’s no doubt about it.”
“Well,” Stefan said dubiously, “there is some doubt.”
Roberto refused to accept this, shaking his head like a dog. “We found it! We’re right on top of it!”
“Hope so.”
As they approached their buoy they spotted the snag it made on the surface and pointed it out to the adults up on the bridge. The tug cut back and canted to a new level, which left the bow distinctly closer to the water. After that they hummed on like more ordinary craft.
“There’s no way our buoy will anchor this beast,” Stefan pointed out.
“True,” Roberto said.
When the tug came up to the flaw on the river and they could see their buoy riding down under it, Thabo came down and pushed a fat button on the bow that apparently released an anchor, and it must have been a monster in its own right, because when it hit the bottom the bow lifted up again almost as far as it had when going full speed. The muffled rattle of the anchor chain stopped, and Thabo waved up to Idelba on the bridge.
“What if the anchor gets stuck down there?” Roberto asked Thabo.
Thabo shook his head. “She looking at the bottom with radar. She put it down someplace nice. Seldom a problem there.”
The Sisyphus floated on the ebb and then dipped in place, indicating that the anchor was holding them against the flow. Idelba cut the motor and then they were floating at ease, on anchor over their site.
“Man, I wish I could go down again!” Roberto said.
“No way,” Stefan said. “It wouldn’t do any good.”
“We’ll see what you got down there,” Thabo promised.
Idelba and Vlade and Mr. Hexter came down to the deck, and Vlade helped Idelba and Thabo deploy the dredge tube over the side. Vlade got Roberto and Stefan involved in moving the segments of the tube to the rear and latching them onto the long snake they were making. It was about four feet in diameter, and its nozzle was a giant circular steel maw, with claws like ice ax tips curving in from its circumference like marks on a compass rose. When they had about thirty feet of tubing screwed together, Thabo attached the nozzle end to a cable, then pulled it up to the end of a hoist arm by pushing buttons on the hoist mast. The boys helped crank the hoist around until the arm at the top had pivoted out over the water, taking the nozzle with it. Then Idelba let the nozzle cable down by pushing another set of fat buttons, and the tube and cable disappeared down into the murk, nozzle first.
“Here, come check this out,” Vlade said to the boys.
Idelba and Mr. Hexter were regarding a console that featured three screens. The tube and cable appeared on all three screens as a kind of snake dropping to the bottom, clear in the sonar and radar images, murky in the light of the underwater lights that Idelba had dropped on other cables, running off reels suspended over the side of the boat.
“Is that your diving bell?” Idelba asked, pointing to a conical shape on the bottom.
“I guess so,” Roberto said, struggling to comprehend the image. “I guess we left it behind after Vlade got me out of it.”
Idelba shook her head darkly. “Crazy kids,” she said. “I’m amazed you’re still alive.”
Roberto and Stefan grinned uncertainly. Idelba was definitely not amused, and Mr. Hexter was looking at them with alarm. Out there in the wind and sun he looked like he must have years before.
“We’ll move that little death trap out of the way and get the suck on,” Idelba announced.
She and Thabo worked their remote controls, manipulating the equipment in the murk as if they were down there seeing everything, if not perfectly, then at least well enough to bonk around and get done what they wanted. Vlade was helping them on the sonar and radar, obviously very comfortable with all the gear. Roberto and Stefan glanced at each other and saw they both were feeling far out of their league but still in their element. This was how it was done; this was stuff they wanted to learn. Mr. Hexter was leaning over them with his hands on their shoulders, taking in everything and asking questions about what they were seeing down there, and noting things he saw that they weren’t sure were really there, but it was cool. He was obviously into it.