The Titanic Secret, Page 2

  “When he retired, he decided to record secrets and stories. I must say, had he not been so good as a detective, he could have been a pulp fiction writer. Tales of his exploits read like adventure books. He also knew that while some of what he wrote about must never see the light of day—and those journals were likely burned upon his death—he felt that other stories could be made public at some future date when those most involved were long dead and the legacy had been relegated to the ‘dusty corner of history.’ Those are his exact words.

  “These files he placed in trust with his attorney with detailed instructions as to when and with whom they could be shared. Much of it was straightforward, like ‘Thirty years after the death of so-and-so, please see that his surviving children are given this envelope. If they are deceased, please see that it is given to a grandchild.’ That sort of thing.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “There were other files that he left up to the attorney’s discretion as to who to share the information with, although Bell did specify the year in which to make the disbursement, usually some benchmark important to the tale, although I’ve seen a few that just give a date with no explanation.

  “So now, we spring ahead decades after Bell’s death, and his attorney built a practice into what is now Gitterman, Shankle, and Capps. My current employer and one of the city’s largest law firms. And to this day we continue to honor our commitment in seeing the last few Isaac Bell files find their proper home.”

  “And you think that’s me?” Pitt still didn’t quite get the connection.

  “Yes, well, when the date on this particular file came due, one of the senior partners had the honor of reading it first. He wasn’t sure what to do, but his secretary knew that I was something of a Titanic buff. My namesake uncle was part of the recovery operation. He once told me you were the man who raised the Titanic. He was a hoist operator on one of the support ships. The Modoc.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Pitt said. “I thought your name rang a bell. Tommy Gwynn. You don’t look much like him, I have to say.”

  “I know. Right? He was huge.”

  Pitt caught the tense the lawyer used. “Was? What happened?”

  “He left NUMA a short time after the Titanic operation and worked as a crane operator here in New York. There was an accident at a construction site. Uncle Tommy and two other men were killed. That was eight or nine years ago.” Councilor Gwynn paused for a moment, grief darkening his eyes before he thrust it aside. “Back to the story. The senior partners tapped me to find the right person to share this with and I immediately thought of you once I’d read it and did some digging into the lives of Brewster and the rest of his miners—”

  “They called themselves the Coloradans,” Pitt interjected.

  Gwynn nodded eagerly. “Bell mentioned that. There’s no family left for any of them, since all but one never married except—”

  “Jake Hobart.” Now that he was thinking again about that long-ago mission, more and more details were flooding Pitt’s mind.

  “That’s right. Hobart was married, but his wife is long dead, and they didn’t have children. Since no one remains from the time the mineral was mined and put aboard the Titanic, I figured why not give it to the guy who found it in the end? Bell’s journal doesn’t change the basic facts, but I thought you might be interested in the backstory of how the events unfolded more than a hundred years ago.”

  From a deep pocket inside his trench coat, the young attorney withdrew a sheaf of yellowed papers in a sealed plastic bag. The first page just had a simple two-word title. The Coloradans. Pitt was about to open the bag when Blankenship interrupted.

  “Just so you know, we’re only five minutes away.”

  “Okay,” Pitt said, so engrossed in what Gwynn had to tell him, he hadn’t realized how swiftly they’d crossed the East River.

  Thomas Gwynn said, “I told you I didn’t mind meeting on the fly like this, but what’s so important about some turtles at a riverside construction site in Queens?”

  “Not some turtles,” Pitt corrected. “The Turtle. In the cargo space behind you is a leather overnight backpack and a waterproof dive bag. Could you hand me the bag?”

  Gwynn leaned over the rear bench to recover the bag and handed it to Pitt. Pitt had already slipped off his leather shoes. He held one up so both driver and passenger could see it. “My wife got me these as an expensive practical joke, thinking I would never wear Italian loafers, but they’re more comfortable than sneakers.”

  From the dive bag he removed a pair of shin-high rubber boots and an insulated high-vis windbreaker. He jammed his feet into the galoshes and contorted his way into the jacket while penned in by the Suburban’s confines.

  “Here’s a story for you,” Pitt said when he clicked on his seat belt once again. “Following the battles of Lexington and Concord during our Revolutionary War against the British, an inventor living near New Haven named David Bushnell proposed building a submersible craft that could be used to affix mines to the underside of the English ships blockading New York Harbor. None other than George Washington himself liked the proposal and agreed to fund it.

  “All that summer, and into the fall, Bushnell and several dedicated woodworkers, metalsmiths, and self-taught engineers built the submarine. About ten feet tall and barrel-shaped—or, as once described, resembling two turtle shells that had been fused together—it was made of iron-banded wood like the staves of a barrel and powered by a pair of hand-cranked screws. It also had an auger that was designed to bore into a ship’s hull so an explosive charge could be affixed. It had a foot-pedal bilge pump and windows in a metal . . . Well, I guess conning tower is the best way to describe it. All in all, it was ungainly, awkward, and utterly brilliant.

  “And also, a total failure,” Pitt added. “In the summer of 1776, after a lot of sea trials and testing, one Sergeant Ezra Lee was selected to be the Turtle’s pilot. Finally, in September of that year, Lee launched the Turtle at the British flagship HMS Eagle, which was at anchor below Governors Island at the mouth of New York Harbor. It took Lee two hours to maneuver the submersible, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the upward-facing drill to bite deep enough into the Eagle’s hull to set the explosives. In retrospect, it’s pretty easy to see that maintaining the Turtle’s stability while drilling in that exact location was practically impossible given the tides and currents.”

  “Not to mention the poor guy must have been exhausted,” Blankenship said.

  Pitt nodded. “The Turtle was thought to have only enough air for a half hour. He could replenish his supply by surfacing as he crossed the harbor, but by the end of his attempt at boring into the Eagle he would have been delirious from too much carbon dioxide.

  “They tried attacking a different ship a month later with the same result. Not long afterward, the British sank the Turtle’s support ship on the Jersey side of the harbor. Bushnell claims he salvaged the little sub, but its fate was lost to history.”

  “Until now?” Thomas Gwynn hazarded.

  “Exactly. Interesting, it wouldn’t be until almost a hundred years later that a submarine was successful at sinking an enemy warship. That was the Confederate sub Hunley, which rammed a torpedo into the USS Housatonic during the Civil War.”

  They were approaching a large construction zone in a commercial section of the city. The ground was mostly broken-up asphalt. The nearby buildings were brick or metal and windowless. Several old smokestacks were silhouetted against the skyline. Dumpsters and rusted equipment littered the alleys between buildings, and most vertical surfaces were desecrated with multiple layers of graffiti, none of which could be considered art. The fine mist that had hung in the air all day became heavier. Not yet a rain, it was a perfect gloomy pall for the forlorn district.

  Just ahead, a long corrugated metal fence blocked further access to the neighborhood. A temporary guardho
use had been set up next to an open gate. The metal shack’s bank of fluorescent ceiling lights looked especially bright in the gathering murk. Hidden by the fence was a large crane. Its spindly boom was visible as it reached for the sky.

  Blankenship braked at the gate. The guard begrudgingly left the warm confines of his little metal hut and stepped out and over to the idling SUV.

  The Secret Service agent jerked a thumb toward his passenger. “That’s Dirk Pitt, the head of NUMA. He’s expected.”

  “Sec,” the guard said. He returned to the guardhouse and consulted a clipboard that he probably should have carried with him but hadn’t bothered to. He looked up, caught Blankenship’s eye, and nodded.

  The worksite was vast, at least ten acres. Much of what had stood here before had been dismantled and carried away, and a huge amount of polluted fill had been hauled out for decontamination. A massive stone and brick seawall held back the waters of the East River, which were flowing by on both the meltwater channeled from the Hudson via the Harlem River at the very top of Manhattan Island and an ebbing king tide that was escaping through the river from Long Island Sound.

  Vic Blankenship looked around. “When I was a kid, this was all warehouses and old manufacturing plants. Smelled awful even on a good day.”

  “The state archeologist told me,” Pitt said, “that from the time of the Civil War until about 1913, there was a plant here to convert coal into gas. The ground was saturated with contaminants that were never removed. The next generation of industry simply capped the old sludge and built anew.”

  Gwynn asked, rather unnecessarily, “And here’s where they found the Turtle?”

  “As I understand it, an excavator was removing overburden when the bucket hit stone. Not unusual, since all the old foundations were left behind when newer buildings were put up. The operator cleared an area around the granite blocks. It turns out it was a sump below the foundation of a building that had been here around the time of the Revolutionary War. The cavity had a stone lid that the machine slid aside. The inside was filled with fly ash and oil that was still somewhat liquid, and sticking out of it was this brass dome. He managed to open it and peer inside. He didn’t know exactly what he’d found, but he told a supervisor, who eventually found someone who recognized the Turtle from a replica he’d seen at a museum in Connecticut. Archeologists from the state and city level were brought in.”

  “And NUMA?” Thomas asked.

  “Not really. We heard about the find, naturally. I’m here because, as a lover of archeology, I’m curious. I’m just using my NUMA credentials to get access to what’s otherwise a closed site.”

  “Is anything going to be happening today?”

  “Absolutely. Today they’re going to attempt to pull the Turtle out of the hole it’s been resting in for nearly two hundred and fifty years.”

  They parked the Suburban next to several other cars, mostly sedans and pickup trucks. The trucks belonged to the workmen, the cars, no doubt, to the archeologists and techs overseeing the discovery of the nation’s first submarine.

  The site that had been dug out was easily two football fields long and a hundred feet wide. Some material had been left in place along the old seawall to buttress it against the gray river just beyond. At the bottom of the twenty-foot-deep excavation were large earthmovers, dump trucks, shipping containers for other gear, and dozens of portable pumps with hoses snaking up and out to a separate containment pond that had been purposely dug to store contaminated seepage for later cleanup.

  It didn’t appear that anyone was working. The site felt abandoned except for the big crane that was maneuvering a large section of steel closer to the seawall. A couple of hard-hatted workers were atop the wall waiting to guide the steel into place. There was a raised platform at the edge of the construction zone. They couldn’t see where the Turtle lay buried because blue plastic tarps had been erected over the dig to protect the craft from the elements. The tarps rippled in the chilling wind.

  The precipitation ratcheted up a notch and now fell as a light rain. The ground at the lip of the site was a muddy morass. Blankenship declined to join Pitt in his trek across to a raised platform holding a half dozen people, but young Gwynn joined him.

  As they neared the gathering, Pitt could hear voices rising and tension mounting.

  “I don’t care who gave you authorization. Until my office is satisfied that this site is secure, no one is going down there. Your toy boat’ll just have to wait.” The speaker was a man wearing a hard hat and a safety orange vest over a Carhartt coat. Pitt noticed that he was from OSHA, the government watchdog for workplace safety.

  Facing off against him were a man and a woman dressed in civilian attire, although they wore proper boots. Pitt correctly guessed that these two were the archeologists, who were doubtless concerned that the submersible needed to be conserved as soon as possible.

  It was the woman who spoke for them. “It will only take a few hours. We’ve excavated the ash and tar from the pit. All that’s left is bracing up the hull and rigging the crane.”

  “Lady, I don’t care,” the OSHA inspector fired back. From his tone, Pitt could tell that he loved throwing his weight around.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Hi. I’m Dirk Pitt. Are you Dr. Lawrence?”

  The female academic turned to him. “Susan Lawrence. Yes. I’m sorry, who are you?”

  “Dirk Pitt. I spoke to someone in your office about coming today to see the Turtle. I’m the Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency.”

  She nodded sharply. “Yes, I recall now. I am sorry to say, but it seems you wasted a trip from Washington because our site just got shut down by OSHA.”

  Pitt didn’t mention he was playing hooky on the last day of a UN conference to be here. He turned his attention to the OSHA supervisor. The safety inspector nodded to one of his guys, who, in turn, grabbed two hard hats off a table and handed them to Pitt and Gwynn. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “The problem is, the contractor was supposed to leave twenty feet’s worth of earth in place next to the seawall, with a sixty percent grade down to the bottom of the pit. As you can see—as you all can see,” he said with special emphasis, “there’s barely ten feet of ground remaining, and its face is perfectly vertical. There isn’t enough fill to backstop the seawall and it’s in danger of breaching. It looks like they’re attempting to shore it up with steel plating, but until I see and go over the engineering specs on that plan, I’m declaring this site too dangerous.”

  “You must understand,” the male archeologist pled, “the Turtle’s entire hull is exposed to the air, and every moment we delay could cause irreparable damage.” He then remembered another detail and he went ashen. “By God, we left the hatch open. You must let us at least reseal the hatch.”

  The OSHA inspector said, “Look, I’m not an idiot. I know how these things work. I’ve been to a lot of sites around the city where you guys are called in, but I can’t let you down there until I’m satisfied that it’s safe.”

  Another of the group chimed in. He was dressed like the construction guys but neater, as if he’d never faced the mud and slop found at a typical work zone. He looked like someone from the front office. “Come’n, John. Our engineers sent the changes in the specs to the city three weeks ago. Someone there gave us temporary approval.”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to change anything until a final review. Besides, you dug out the remaining material before you had your steel protection up over the existing seawall.”

  “Well, okay, that was a screwup,” the man admitted. “The contractor dug much faster than we . . .”

  Pitt was tuning out the conversation. He knew how this would ultimately end. The jobsite was going to be shut down for the foreseeable future. The Turtle would undoubtedly suffer some degradation, but ultimately he didn’t think the world’s earliest example of an
attack submarine would be damaged too severely. And who knew? Depending on the schedule, maybe he could still sneak up to see it hoisted from its two-hundred-fifty-year-old cocoon.

  He watched the men working the steel out on the seawall. He would have assumed that the OSHA inspector would have ordered them off the structure, but he had to be enough of a pragmatist to know that placing the heavy metal caps over the existing wall could be done much faster than in-filling the massive excavation to the original design specifications.

  The steel structural members were about fifty feet long and L-shaped. The two leaves of metal were each at least an inch thick. The shorter leg would rest atop the seawall, and likely be bolted directly into the cement. The longer section would dangle nearly thirty feet down along its face and well into the riverbank’s muck and ooze. Pitt’s gut told him, and likely the OSHA guy would agree, that this was an acceptable alternative to leaving twice as much contaminated soil in the work zone to buttress the old seawall.

  The crane was swinging one of the huge steel pieces across the site and over the wall as Pitt watched. Two men in hard hats were on the wall ready to guide the piece into place with ropes hanging from each end. This was a bread-and-butter-type maneuver for ironworkers, something these guys had probably done thousands of times on high-rises and bridges all over the city.

  One worker patiently waited for the hundred-foot rope to gently be lowered so he could reach it. His partner might have done the same, had a gust of wind not suddenly hit the plate, twisting his rope so that it started floating away out over the East River.

  Pitt never knew why the guy leapt for it. The wind would have died down and the line would have eventually come back to him. He would later come to realize that the workmen had been told to get the job done before the contractor incurred more delays and penalties.