Dawson stuck out a big, gnarled fist, and Brande, then Dokey, shook it. His hand was as callused and as hard as the rest of him.
“Damned glad to see you, Dane.”
With a palm-up gesture, Brande indicated the boats around them. “You invite everyone to the party, George?”
“Hell, no. Couple of these guys, Figlon on the Osprey especially, are always dogging me, hoping to pick up a couple bones I miss. The rest of them, I reckon, listened in on my ship-to-shore call to you this morning. Fucking maggots is what they are.”
Dokey looked around the deck. “I thought you might have invited Curt Aaron over for tea, George.”
“No, but the sucker sent over a list of demands.”
“Such as?” Brande asked.
“That I leave the ocean bottom as it is. It’s against God’s will to disturb nature.”
“He’s going to go off the deep end real soon,” Dokey said.
“Sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned,” Dawson said. “Maybe somebody will shoot him and put him out of our misery. Come on, let’s go forward to the wardroom and get the legal crap out of the way.”
They followed Dawson toward the bow along the side deck. Like themselves, Dawson walked with the wide stance of a sailor who knew his world might tilt on him at any moment.
Entering through the pilot house, Dawson led them aft through a hatchway into a communal mess. The walls were painted beige, and several dozen artifacts recovered from the sea bottom were displayed in deep, glass-fronted frames. A bronze urn, flattened by some unknown catastrophe, a saber with a silver-filigreed hilt, a pair of ceramic mugs labeled Lusitania, a brass lantern, a ship’s wheel.
Dawson filled chipped ceramic mugs with strong coffee, and they settled onto benches at a Formica-topped table.
“You’re pretty damned sure of what you’ve got?” Brande asked.
“You bet I’m sure.” Dawson leaned back and picked a manila envelope off a cabinet built into the bulkhead. “Sneaky took these.”
From the envelope, Dawson extracted a stack of 35-millimeter photographs. They were black-and-white. He peeled them from the stack, one by one, and passed them around.
“Sneaky” was “Sneaky Pete.” One of the first tethered exploration robot models developed by Marine Visions Unlimited, the robot had once had a more exotic name, but it had vanished in favor of the current sobriquet when a graduate student from UC-San Diego discovered that the robot’s video system captured wonderful images of a trio of nude female divers.
MVU did not yet sell its working robots, but in some cases, it did lease them. Currently, Brande had seven of the sophisticated and compact Sneaky Petes leased to research and salvage firms.
“I’ve got videotape we recorded from the video camera, too, if you want to see that,” Dawson said.
“This’ll do,” Brande told him as he leafed through the photos.
In black-and-white, the images were stark, the objects highlighted by the beams of the halogen lamps mounted on Sneaky Pete’s forehead. The areas around the objects were murky. The photographs had been taken at depths where the sun did not penetrate.
Dokey held up a photograph and turned it to Dawson. “Cannon?”
“Yeah. That was our lead contact” Dawson unparked his unlit cigar from his teeth just long enough to take a swig of his coffee.
Brande looked over at the photo. It took a trained eye and a good imagination to see a cannon in it. The bottom silt had drifted over most of it, and only the butt end, with a partial knob, was visible.
“We were trailing a side-scan sonic array,” Dawson said, “and got a ping off that chunk of metal. Came back around and got the same ping, but there was nothing else in the area. Hell, I almost decided to skip it, then thought we could take the time to send Sneaky down.”
“Depth?” Brande asked.
“Eleven hundred feet. But I wasn’t going to suit up a diver for one damned cannon. Well, I might have, just to look for traceable numbers. So we roamed Sneaky to the south and found the trench.”
“That’s where these are?” Brande asked, holding up a sheaf of snapshots.
“Right. It’s a steep canyon, and I’m estimating the bottom at maybe seven thousand feet. The terrain on the canyon side is rough, and the ingots are spread all over the side of it, about five thousand feet down.”
Brande checked the photos again. Almost all of them focused on one or two gold ingots. They were roughly forged, and all but buried in the silt. A corner here, and an edge there, protruded from the soil of the canyon side.
“How many?” Dokey asked.
“We got shots of fourteen. Looks like they’re cast at about sixty pounds. Those Spaniards didn’t want ’em light enough for anyone to carry for very long.”
“You get any pictures of an imprint?” Brande asked.
“No. Bet you they’re sixteenth century, though. South American gold. I’ve been through my whole damned library, but I can’t find one mention of a ship lost in this particular area of the Caribbean. Of course, the Spanish lost a bunch without knowing where they lost them.”
“Say we haven’t got an historical find,” Brande said, “on today’s markets, the straight gold that’s visible…”
“Will bring in better than four-point-five million,” Dokey finished.
“There’s more than fourteen ingots,” Dawson said. “Bet on it.”
“How about artifacts?” Brande asked.
“I think we’ll find something. That ship went down in heavy weather, broke up, and most of it tumbled down the canyon. Probably hooked up on a ledge or something. Broke apart in the currents over the years, and spilled everything down the side of the trench. The debris field may be scattered a mile or more wide.”
“You see anything else?”
“Maybe the lip of a goblet. Silver, I’d think. Maybe a couple of ribs from the hull, but they’re pretty well rotted out.”
Brande looked over a picture that was taken from a greater distance. When he knew that he was looking at the side of the trench, rather than down on the bottom, it looked more treacherous.
“I wouldn’t want to risk a man’s life digging into that,” he said.
“Nor would I,” Dawson agreed. “I don’t want to use my manned submersible. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you brought your toys along.”
In addition to the fact that he needed the money pretty badly, Brande thought, but did not mention that. If all he took out of it was a million dollars, he could at least meet the bills for a month. Almost. He had taken greater risks.
“MVU gets twenty-five percent,” Brande said.
“That’s what we talked about.”
“Anything of historical significance…”
“We’re in international waters,” Dawson countered.
“… will be offered to the appropriate museums at our cost of recovery. That comes off the top, before we divvy up the balance. And we have to get that cannon barrel up, so we can look for clues.”
“Goddamn, Dane. There you go again, getting all mushy.”
“Can’t help it, George. I’m a romantic.”
“Get your goddamned papers out.”
TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:04:54.
The main screen view of the A2e rocket on its pad had not changed a great deal in two hours. The first white spray of dawn was infiltrating across the tundra, but there was little differentiation between the lightly snow-frosted plain and the concrete ribbons of roads around the pad, also coated with yesterday’s snow.