“And you think Rolf Adamson is crazy,” she said and laughed.
“What I really think is that single-minded obsessive and very rich people can be dangerous. They start to believe that just because they think something is right and true makes it so. What Senator William Fulbright once referred to as the arrogance of power.”
“So how are we supposed to fight against that?” Finn responded wearily. “He’s got everything and we’ve got nothing.”
“In the same speech Fulbright quoted an old Chinese proverb: ‘In shallow waters dragons become the prey of shrimp.’ ” He shrugged. “He was talking about Vietnam and American vulnerability in a war we didn’t know how to fight, but maybe the same thing applies here; we can do things Adamson can’t. We can fly under the radar while he’s always in the spotlight.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better and change the subject at the same time.”
“I’m not sure I even know what the subject was.”
“Your approval of Wonder Bread. Which is disgusting, by the way.”
“We couldn’t all be brought up in whole-grain heaven in… where was it, Columbus?”
“That’s right,” she answered. She looked out over the sea, then turned to Hilts, a serious expression on her face. “Are we kidding ourselves about this? A ship that’s been missing for half a century, evidence of something that’s just a myth to the rest of the world? Why us when no one else has managed to find it over the last two thousand years?”
“I used to know a guy who bought lottery tickets all the time. I told him he was crazy, the odds were stacked against him, he didn’t stand a hope in hell. Didn’t faze him in the least. You know what his response was? He said, ’Somebody’s gotta win, and you can’t win if you don’t play.’ He was right.”
“Did he ever win?”
“Not that I know of.” Hilts smiled. “But the point is, he could have. He was in the game, not just on the sidelines. He was a player. That’s what we are.”
“You’re a romantic, Virgil; an incurable romantic.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He blinked, then blushed furiously.
“Hilts,” he answered. “Just Hilts.”
They finished lunch and then loaded the magnetometer array into the inflatable.
“You seem to know what you’re doing,” said Hilts, watching as she stowed the equipment in the stern of the little boat.
Finn shrugged off the compliment. “I’ve used them before on my mother’s digs in Mexico and Belize, usually on land. They’re really nothing more than sophisticated metal detectors.”
They took the boat out to the reef line then turned and began to cruise parallel to the little island, keeping just outside the broken line of white water that marked the coral shoals where the Acosta Star had gone down, at least according to Tucker Noe. They made one run to calibrate the magnetometer pod dragging behind them, accounting for the presence of the Widgeon, then turned and came back along the same line. They found what they were looking for with remarkable ease. The ping in Finn’s headphones was almost deafening.
“Are you sure?” asked Hilts.
“It’s something pretty big. Either Tucker Noe was right and it’s the Acosta Star or it’s leftovers from the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“Not something organic?”
“Not unless the reef is made out of cast iron instead of coral,” she answered, shaking her head.
Hilts took out the Garmin portable GPS locator Mills had lent him and took a reading that identified their exact location, then tossed out a lead line to get some idea of the depth they were looking at. The line slacked at slightly less than fifty feet.
“How can it be that shallow?” asked Finn. “We know they’ve had other divers here before-nude ones from Katy, Texas. Surely they would have spotted something this big.”
“Maybe not,” said Hilts. He pointed to the lead line, dragging away to the north, pulling out of his hands. “We’re at the tag end of the reef and there’s quite a current; we’re almost in the channel. Sport divers wouldn’t come this far unless they were looking for something in particular.”
The small waves lapping at the side of the rubber dinghy were cold. Finn looked up. The sun was dying in the west, somewhere beyond Cuba now; the further side of the afternoon. It was still light enough to dive, but not for long. It would take the better part of an hour to get suited up and prepared, and they’d already had a hectic day. She trailed her hand in the tropical water. Beneath her fingers the wreck of the giant ship waited silently, as it had for half a hundred years, secrets still locked within her wave-torn, coral-encrusted hull. She looked to the south; there was a deepening streak of silvery gray. Storm clouds were gathering over the distant horizon.
“Tomorrow?” said Finn.
“Tomorrow,” Hilts answered. “If the weather holds.”
32
They reached the wreck at fifty-five feet, following the anchor line from the dinghy on the surface down to where it stood hard against the current, the cast aluminum mushroom of the anchor itself tangled in the old twisted cables of a lifeboat davit amidships on the starboard side. The wreck was gigantic, a massive torpedo shape in the green-blue water, the dark hull clear against the white sand of the ocean floor. It seemed to stretch forever, the stern hard against the reef, the weed-and-shell encrusted bow jutting out slightly into the long sandy chute leading to the channel. The wreck was corkscrewed, the bow tilting downward, the amidships section and the stern still intact but rolled slightly to one side. From where the line came down from the dinghy it was easy to see why the huge hulk had remained undiscovered for so long. High above they could see the choppy surface just off the reef. The weather had turned ominous overnight, but they’d decided to chance the dive anyway.
Hilts pointed upward and his voice echoed electronically in Finn’s earpiece. “She must have been rolled against the reef wall during the hurricane when she sank,” he said. “Over the years the tidal surge and the current carved out that lip-and-groove formation.”
Finn saw what he was pointing to; it was as though the water had scooped out a bed for the sunken ship to sag into, the overhang of coral throwing a long, broad shadow that would hide her from view. She could feel the suck and pull of the surge against the rebreather unit snugged onto her back plate. With the tide ebbing it was easy enough to counter, but she knew it would get steadily stronger as the dive wore on.
“Let’s get going,” she said. They’d been up since first light, planning the dive against the deck plans. They’d assumed, correctly from the looks of it, that the upper superstructure of the deckhouse, sundeck, boat deck, and promenade decks had pancaked into each other as she sank, like a building imploding, crushed by the weight of the two large funnels as they collapsed. According to the news reports there had been an explosion in the boiler room, but by the looks of the twisted plates and the hull it was the bow section that had torn away.
“Can you tell where we are?” Finn asked. She turned slowly in the warm water, looking up and down the confusing length of the immense vessel. Her weight belt kept her poised, negatively buoyant in the blue-green ocean. She moved her arms back and forth in a slow, sweeping gesture, just enough to keep her upright. At a guess she would have said they were somewhere ahead of where the bow funnel had been, partway between it and the forward mast.
“Somewhere just behind where the bridge would have been,” Hilts answered.
“That means we have to head back toward the stern,” she said. “According to the plans the main gangway doors and the lobby were a hundred and sixty feet from the bow.”
“Fifty feet back,” Hilts said with a nod. He unclipped a Sea Marshall Diver’s Beacon from his vest, attached it to the anchor line and set the pulse light flashing. If either one of them got turned around or the weather turned bad quickly, the light and the 121.5-megahertz signal being transmitted from the device would lead them back to the anchor line.