The Sea Hunters Part 29

I later asked Kevin, "Did you see my estimated position of the wreck site?"

"Yes," he answered. "It was marked with a little Maltese cross."

"How far was I off target?"

"Less than half a mile."

Half a mile. With our trusty side scan sonar, the crew on board Arvor III could have easily found the wreck in one day's search.

In the final a.n.a.lysis, I'd have to say we'd been had.

My involvement with the French Navy and the Alabama died hard.

Several months later, I received a telephone call from a gentleman claiming to be a deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

What could the CIA possibly want with me? I wondered. Dirk Pitt occasionally walked the hallowed halls of Langley, but I'd never laid eyes on the place.

"What is this call about?" I asked, firm in my belief that I was as pristine and white as the driven snow.

"Your glittering performance in Cherbourg last summer," he came back.

"All right, so I got a little carried away with the potato war."

"The potato war?"

"Isn't this call about my a.s.sault on a French missile cruiser?" I asked nayvely.

"I haven't heard about that one," he replied.

"Forget I mentioned it."

"My boss, who is a big fan of your books, suggested I call and brief you on the mess you caused in Cherbourg."

Now I was really intrigued. "If that rotten French admiral had given me permission to look for the Alabama, there would have been no mess."

"Believe me, the admiral wasn't too happy about your clandestine find of the Leopoldville. A good thing you took off for England. If you had returned to Cherbourg, French security forces, waiting on the dock, would have confiscated your boat and locked you and your crew up in the local slammer."

Good old Jimmy Flett, I thought. I owed him big time.

"No big deal," I said. "Hardly cause for an international incident."

"Did you know that the waters around Cherbourg are submarine testing grounds?" he inquired.

"Yes, I was aware of the areas. They're well marked on the navigation charts."

"What you could not have known, Mr. Cussler, is that the French had just completed their newest nuclear submarine and planned to test it ten days before your arrival."

"If I had known, I couldn't have cared less," I said, becoming more audacious.

"What you also were not aware of was the fact that every intelligence office and agency in a dozen different nations, the CIA, the KGB, British MI-5, the Israeli Mossad, to name a few, spent great sums of money and long hours in setting up their individual covers to covertly observe the French nuclear submarine's test program."

I began to identify with the guy who wakes up in a motel room after a night of heavy drinking, reaches behind him, and touches a warm female body. Then his eyes fall on a set of false teeth in a gla.s.s beside the bed.

"A few days before the trials are to take place," he continued, "who should sail into Cherbourg Harbor but Clive Cussler, his merry band of pirates, and a boatload of underwater detection equipment."

It all became clear. Now I felt a kins.h.i.+p to a woolly mammoth that sank in the La Brea tar pits.

"Not knowing what to make of your theatrical appearance, the French Navy got cold feet and postponed the tests of their new submarine for six months. All the foreign intelligence undercover operations were then blown away. There was no way for any of us to sit it out for another half year, so we all packed up and went home."

"I failed my country," I murmured lamely.

"Not your fault," he consoled me. "But the agency would like you to do us a big favor."

Off in the distance I heard a band playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Redemption was about to smile. "You have but to name it."

"The next time you and your NUMA crew plan a s.h.i.+pwreck expedition, would you please notify our offices at Langley of where you're going so we can operate on the other side of the world?"

I was too numb with shock to reply. I had no idea representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency did standup comedy.

Finally, I muttered, "I'll drop you a postcard."

Then he politely said, "Thank you, goodbye," and hung up.

And so ends the great NUMA follies of 1984. We didn't discover t.i.tanic. That was Bob Ballard's great accomplishment. Nor a Spanish galleon like Atocha, with gold and silver treasure spilling out of her timbers. Mel Fisher deserves the honors of that achievement. But we did find and survey several s.h.i.+ps of historic significance. I suffered no mutinies, no injuries, and no s.h.i.+pboard damage. All things considered we were extremely lucky from Aberdeen to Cherbourg to Weymouth.

I'm not sure whether that sounds like a song t.i.tle or a double-play combination for a basebol team.

Postscript There aren't many thrills that parallel that of swimming through a s.h.i.+pwreck. I've always compared it to walking through a cemetery. You can sense and sometimes visualize the ghosts of the crew who lived on board and died without anyone to record their pa.s.sing.

The currents, the gloomy visibility, the silence broken only by the hiss of your air regulator, all add to the eeriness.

Thanks to recent advances in deep-sea technology, a very few tantalizing secrets in the deep have finally been unlocked and recorded on film and video tape. We have mapped and photographed almost every square inch of the moon, but we have viewed less than one percent of what is covered by water. To find the bones of s.h.i.+ps and aircraft that have lain untouched in the depths is an experience known to a very few.

Those who seek and occasionally find go under a variety of t.i.tles.

Adventurers, oceanographers, marine archaeologists, treasure hunters, all in one form or other search for historic vessels that have disappeared into the unknown. Sometimes they're successful. More often they fail. The odds are stacked against them. But as long as they are driven by insatiable curiosity, new discoveries will continue to surface.

The lure of s.h.i.+pwrecks is a siren's son . There are literally millions of sunken s.h.i.+ps. I've often wondered how many ancient wrecks lie beneath the silt of the Nile River in Egypt. The Mediterranean is strewn with them. The Great Lakes alone have nearly 50,000 recorded s.h.i.+pwrecks, beginning with famed explorer Sieur de La Salle's s.h.i.+p Griffin, launched and vanished during 1679 somewhere in Lake Michigan, and going up to the Edmund Fitzgerald, lost with all hands on Lake Superior in 1975. The seabed between Maine and Florida contains huge fleets of sunken vessels. Well over a thousand steams.h.i.+ps rest under the banks and levees of the Mississippi River.

They all have stories to tell.

I actually walked the decks of one s.h.i.+p that vanished into the unknown.

During the spring of 1964, I took a few weeks' vacation before I was to start as creative director in charge of television production for a large advertising agency. After painting the house, I had ten days left to do nothing. My wife worked and our three children were in school. A friend persuaded me to work as a crew member"on a beautiful yacht called the Emerald Sea, which was docked behind a s.p.a.cious mansion at Newport Beach, California.

It was pleasant work maintaining miles of varnished wood and wiping the engines. I remember being surprised after a trip to Catalina Island off California. I was given a uniform and ordered to look after the pa.s.sengers while the skipper manned the helm. The guests of the yacht owner never suspected that they were served their drinks and hors d'oeuvres by an advertising executive instead of a common deckhand.

And I didn't mind at all when they tipped me fifty-dollar bills as they stepped onto the dock. I must admit it wasn't easy trading the teak decks of the Emerald Sea and the salt-water smell for a sterile office on Sunset Boulevard.

The yacht that was tied up next to Emerald Sea was a large two-deck vessel, built in the 1920s. I could look across the dock onto its s.p.a.cious awning-covered rear deck and visualize a crowd of men in tuxedos doing the Charleston with flappers in fringed dresses and bobbed hair.

There were times I could have sworn I heard the strains of a jazz band.

I believe she was called Rosewood. She was an elegant lady and oozed style whenever her elderly owner, a wealthy widow, took her out and partied on the bay.

I became friendly with one of her deckhands, Gus Munches who swore he doubled in the movies once for Errol Flynn, but looked more like Peter Lore. Gus would give me a tour of his boat, then we'd sit on the dock and eat lunch, swilling bottles of beer and swapping stories about the different boats and their owners moored about the harbor.

The scandals were often juicy.

Gus claimed he was only working on the yacht to save enough money to get him to Tahiti, where he dreamed of operating a small ferryboat between the islands.

I lost track of Gus after I put on my Brooks Brothers suit and went back to work creating hard-sell drivel urging the ma.s.ses to buy various and sundry products they could live without. Two years later, I ran into my old skipper from the Emerald Sea at a restaurant. I asked him if he'd seen Gus.

"Gus," he said sadly, "is dead."

"No," I muttered. "How?"

"He went down with the Rosewood.

"I had no idea it sank."

The skipper nodded. "The old lady who owned her died and the estate sold it to a car dealer in New Jersey. After pa.s.sing through the ca.n.a.l, the Rosewood vanished with all hands in deep water west of Bermuda. Gus was one of a crew of three on board."

"Poor old Gus," I murmured. "He never saw Tahiti."

My memory of Gus faded over the next fifteen years. After I bade a happy farewell to the advertising agency and could finally make a living as a writer, my wife, Barbara, and I stopped over in Tahiti for a vacation after completing a book tour in Australia. While Barbara was doing some gift shopping in a village on the island of Bora Bora, I walked into a little bar overlooking the island's famed turquoise lagoon.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a fellow wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, a flowered s.h.i.+rt, and a pair of ragged shorts.

He was sitting next to a striking Tahitian lady with flowing black hair and a smile sparkled by gold fillings. A thick red beard covered half his face, but I recognized him in an instant.

I stepped to his table and stared him in the eye. "Is that really you, or am I seeing a ghost?"

"Just to show you I'm alive, I'll buy you a beer," Gus Muncher said, laughing. "Just forget you ever saw me." He then introduced me to his wife, Tani"So you made it to Tahiti after all," I said, fighting a desire to pinch his arm and see if he yelled.

"Got me a fifty-foot catamaran, and make a good living carrying goods and pa.s.sengers around the islands."

"Your dream come true."

"You remembered," he said with a grin showing under his beard.

"I heard you went down on Rosewood.

"In a manner of speaking, I did."

"I'd like to hear about it."

"Not much to tell. We opened all the seac.o.c.ks and she went down like a stone in a thousand fathoms."

I stared at Gus incredulously. "Doesn't make any sense to sail a perfectly good yacht nearly five thousand miles and then scuttle her."

Gus's eyes beamed like a lighthouse. "Can you think of a better place to sink a boat for the insurance than the Bermuda Triangle?"

I should have voiced an argument about morals and legality, but sitting there in a bar overlooking spectacular scenery with an old friend who I thought had died, it just didn't seem appropriate. After two beers, Barbara found and collected me, and I bade Gus and his lady goodbye' Ten years later, I met a French official from the Society Islands and asked if he knew Gus Muncher. He nodded and sadly informed me that Gus, his wife, his catamaran, two paying pa.s.sengers, and a cargo of eighty chickens went missing in a storm off Moor'ea. A search turned up no trace.

I've always wondered if Gus slipped off the earth again or was truly on the bottom of the sea. I suppose a clue might be found if one investigated insurance-company records to see who received the settlement for the loss of Gus and his boat. I was curious, but not knowing the name of his catamaran and which marine casualty company settled any claims and to whom, I turned my back and went on to other projects. I kept his memory but let the mystery die with him.

For some odd reason, I've never been big on doing doc.u.mentaries on NUMA's expeditions. I almost never take pictures during a search. My publicity lady once insisted on giving me two little automatic Kodak cameras, thinking that by making it easy I'd finally shoot a record of events. My son, Dirk, shot about three frames, which I have yet to develop after four years.

I probably don't receive all the hoopla I should because I don't solicit the big photo publications and television programs. I once called the National Geographic to see if there was any interest in my forthcoming expedition to search for the Bonhomme Richard. During a conversation with a lady who said she was in charge of editorial a.s.signments, I was told in no uncertain terms, "We're not giving out any funds."

"I don't need funding," I replied. "I'm paying for the search out of my book royalties."

"Don't expect us to pay for anything," she announced acidly.

"Won't cost you a cent."

"Then why did you call?"

"Just to alert you that a search expedition was being launched to find John Paul Jones's famous s.h.i.+p. I thought perhaps you might be interested." "We don't fund s.h.i.+pwreck hunts."

"We've been through that," I said, exasperated.

"Call us if you find it."

"Then what?"

"We'll a.s.sign a writer and a photographer to do the story."

"I'm a writer."

"We prefer a professional," she said matter-of-factly.

End of conversation.

A few years later, I was in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C for my walk-on role in the awful movie based on my book Raise the t.i.tanic! On the way to the hotel where they were shooting a press-conference scene with Jason Robards, I stopped off at the editorial offices of the National Geographic. I walked up to the receptionist and asked to speak to any editor who could spare me a few minutes.

She was gracious enough to call four different editors and say I was in the lobby. After the last call, she looked at me sheepiswy and said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Cussler. None of them wish to talk to you."

Scorned by the National Geographic.

"If someone should ask," the receptionist murmured sweetly, "what should I tell them you wished to see them about?"

"Just tell them I ran in here to get away from a mugger and didn't know when I was well off."

Shattered and distraught, I went back to my room at the Jefferson Hotel, and except for the two hours I spent repairing a nonoperating grandfather clock in the sitting room, I cried in my pillow the rest of the night.

Not content with putting demoralizing and hilarious concerns behind me, I then alienated the Smithsonian magazine.