The Ironclad Covenant

by Christopher Cartwright

  And right now, they came flooding back.

  He breathed deeply, consciously making the effort to slow his rate. “Tom, was this how you found the hatchway last time they tried to trap you down here?”

  “Afraid not. Last time there was no chain.”

  “You think our shark-stick might take that padlock off?”

  Tom ran his gloved hand across the grooved padlock. “No way in hell. That’s a German made Granit. Almost indestructible. It can withstand up to six tons of pressure and hold together the same amount of tensile weight. The core is extremely pick resistant and uses disk detainers instead of pin tumblers.”

  “Meaning?” Sam asked.

  “There’s no way we’re breaking this lock.”

  “Great.” Sam glanced at his gas supply. “So, we have a little under four hours to work out how to get through this hatchway. You got any ideas?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s not go through it.”

  “That wasn’t quite my plan. I mean, it’s nice down here, but I’m kind of keen not to spend the rest of eternity entombed here.”

  “No. That’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean, then?”

  Tom swept the surrounding chamber with his flashlight. “I plan to go out the same way the diver does.”

  “Ah, Tom. I hate to mention this, but the diver’s already gone out through the hatchway there.”

  “No, he hasn’t.”

  Sam glanced at the locked chain. “You’re right. That door’s locked from the inside. That being the case, where did the diver go?”

  “I don’t know.” Tom shined his light down the horizontal passage. The silt was still and the water clear.

  “You go that way, I’ll check out down here,” Sam said, pointing to a second compartment next to the stairs.

  “Agreed.”

  Sam moved, quickly recovering his confidence, having now been given a task to concentrate his attention.

  Halfway down the stairs, he noticed a horizontal opening to another room. He guessed that it was a ventilation shaft from the main engine room when the ship was afloat, and ordinarily unable to be accessed. But now that the ship was flooded, it formed an open tunnel to another part of the ship. Sam flashed his light into the gap.

  The silt stirred and settled near the base.

  Had the diver swam through there?

  With his left hand on his flashlight and his right on the shark-stick, Sam slowly entered the gap. It traveled approximately twenty feet before opening up into a large room in the deck below. Sam swept the room with his flashlight.

  It looked empty. The silt was all still. He swam to the end of the room and turned around. His light fixed on a small section of silt beneath the opening he’d just come through. The ground was a brown murky sea through which his gaze barely penetrated. There were two small streams where the debris and iron particles were slowly filtering downward.

  Had he caused both of them?

  A small eddy started to form. Murky water swirled for an instant. What the hell is that? Sam gripped his shark-stick.

  He watched as the swirls gradually increased in diameter.

  An instant later the nose of a sea scooter pierced the debris cloud. Its electric motor whirred. The propeller blade suddenly sped up its revolutions and the rider shot out, racing through the opening into the main passage.

  Sam switched his sea scooter on and squeezed the dual triggers. “Tom. He’s heading back to the door!”

  An inaudible crackle followed as the solid bulkhead of the J.F. Johnson disrupted their close proximity radio waves.

  “Tom!” Sam shouted.

  “What?”

  Sam’s scooter raced out through the opening and turned left down the main passageway. In front of him he could see the glow of the diver disappear behind the door. “He’s heading for the locked door at the end of the passageway.”

  Tom’s sea scooter whirred behind Sam. “I’m right behind you. Don’t let him close that door!”

  “I won’t!” Sam hoped he was telling the truth.

  He watched the diver open the door up ahead and race through. The door closed. Sam gritted his teeth and mentally begged his sea scooter to go faster.

  Clang!

  The nose slammed into the slight crease between the door and its iron frame.

  For a moment the sea scooter became stuck – wedged between the door and the iron frame – until he adjusted the angle slightly and squeezed the twin throttle triggers. The machine whined as 350 watts of power were used to make its way through the door.

  Behind the door, an open hatchway indicated a set of vertical ladders leading into the lowest levels of the ship. The slightest of glows illuminated from the opening. Sam drove his sea scooter downward into a room of large mechanical pieces. Sam stopped the sea scooter. He swept his new environment with the beam of his flashlight.

  The engine room of the steamship was the largest single space inside the hull. It incorporated a room from the keel amidships – right up into the chimney at the top of the forecastle. There was room to swim down both sides of the mighty steam engine. Perfectly preserved in the icy water, the brass fittings and green casing of the engine shone in the diver's flashlight beams. It was a double action inverted triple-expansion vertical steam engine made by Joshua Hendy Ironworks in Sunnyvale, California. Three giant cylinders each larger than its predecessor allowed for re-cycling of the precious steam, producing economy of fuel. State of the art for its time. Machines like this were shrinking the globe before the jet airliner. The back of the engine was connected all the way to the stern by the propeller shaft.

  Tom brought his sea scooter to a standstill beside Sam. “Any idea which way he went?”

  “Not a clue. I followed his light into the engine room, but I have no idea where he traveled from here. He’s hiding somewhere in here. You take the left side and I’ll take the right.”

  “Got it.”

  Sam and Tom swam the length of the room on either side of the engine.

  On the opposite end of the room, they met across the prop shaft. Splitting the engine bay in two, Sam and Tom swept the entire place. Every access door and hatch had been professionally sealed since the J.F. Johnson had sunk all those years ago. They circled the room in opposite directions, carefully checking each hatch. All were permanently welded shut.

  Sam shrugged at Tom with palms upward. “I don’t get it. He can’t have just disappeared!”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  An incredulous smile formed beneath Tom’s full-face dive mask.

  He scanned the empty room. Why would the diver draw them into the old boiler-room? More to the point, why go to the effort of strengthening the place? He glanced at the heavy-duty, commercial grade underwater welding performed deep inside the hull. It was similar in quality to what could be found on an offshore oil drilling rig, where expert commercial divers lived in a pressurized habitat for weeks. So why would someone go to the effort with such craftmanship inside a ninety-year-old shipwreck?

  “I’m all out of guesses what’s so important down here, let alone where he’s hidden,” Tom said. “You got any ideas, Sam?”

  “Must be in hiding at the end of the propeller shaft?”

  Tom raked the beam of his flashlight carefully down the length of the tunnel that housed the propeller-shaft. A flicker of light twinkled off the wall at the most distant point of the tunnel. As he approached it he ran his gloved hand across the bead of a fresh weld. The welding framed the outline of a hatchway which was more recently cut into the base of the hull just near the stern on the port side of the vessel, the side on which she listed.

  Tom flashed his light toward the engine room to call Sam down to his position. Together, they turned the hatchway lock and opened the curved door outward. A current of warm water flooded over the two men from the bilge. It wasn’t hot, but compared to the near freezing water inside the J.F. Johnson the water felt like
it had come straight from a hot bath.

  Tom swam through the small hatchway into the bilge.

  He shined his flashlight around the perimeter of the rounded hull, starting along the starboard side. Littered everywhere, were the remnants of more than a few hundred damaged wooden barrels. Most were cracked and empty, but some were still intact and others still, revealed dozens of bottles packed inside. At a guess, he figured the J.F. Johnson went down with a small fortune worth of prohibited rum.

  The bilge ran the entire length of the ship, and by the looks of things, had been filled with contraband rum during prohibition.

  Tom stopped and picked up a single bottle of rum.

  He fixed the beam of his flashlight on the label. He ran his eyes across the bottle’s intricate craftmanship. The label was white with the words: Philadelphia 1876 set at the top – most likely a reference to the year Bacardi rum had earned a gold medal at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876. Below that were the words Ron Bacardi Superior and at the bottom of the label it read, Graduacion 44-5. The cork was intact, and had a foil seal with the Bacardi Bat embossed on top. Toward the lower half of the label were the words, Santiago de Cuba and below that, Habana – New York.

  He handed the bottle to Sam. “I bet you this is part of what they were after.”

  “Broken old bottles of Bacardi rum?” Sam asked, not bothering to hide his doubt. “Couldn’t they make it to their local liquor store?”

  “Not the broken bottles, but I’m sure there would be some intact ones down here.” Tom smiled. “They could try, but I’m doubting their local store has one of these lying around.”

  “It’s a rare bottle of rum?”

  “You could say that.”

  “How rare?”

  “Rare,” Tom said. “In 1912, while Emilio Bacardi traveled to Egypt to purchase a mummy for the future promotion in Cuba, his brother Facundo M. Bacardi continued to meticulously supervise the training of the third generation of Family Master Blenders back in Santiago. Meanwhile, Henri Schueg, their brother in law, began to expand the company. He opened new bottling plants in Barcelona, Spain and New York City.”

  “Get to the point. What’s this got to do with organized crime and trapping us inside this ninety-year-old shipwreck?”

  “The Habana-New York distillery was opened in New York to produce Bacardi Rum in 1916, but it had to shut down production by 1919 prior to prohibition coming into effect.”

  “Meaning?”

  Tom laughed. “So, you’re not much of a drinker. It doesn’t matter. The fact is, a bottle of Habana-New York Bacardi Rum could fetch upward of fifty thousand dollars depending on its condition and guess what? Look around you. The ice-cold waters of Lake Superior are a natural preserver, capable of maintaining everything in pristine conditions.”

  “So why have they been diving here every night for nearly three weeks?”

  “Maybe there’s a particular bottle they’re searching for. A shipment that’s so rare, it’s worth spending a fortune to steal.”

  “Of course. The J.F. Johnson would be registered as a National Historic Place and as such, would prohibit the removal of any items found within. If they got caught, it would be a criminal offence, but more importantly, they’d lose out on potentially millions of dollars’ worth of rare prohibition era rum bottles.”

  “Exactly.”

  “All right. So now we know what they were doing down here, how are we going to find our way out?”

  Tom scanned his gas supply numbers. They still had nearly three hours. It would be plenty of time to wait until the diver unlocked the hatchway – that was, assuming that’s how he reached the surface again.

  “Come on, let’s see where this thing leads.”

  He swam along the bilge, toward the bow. The J.F. Johnson was a 251-foot steel Tramp-Steamer. It would take some time to reach the opposite end of the hull. Tom squeezed the twin accelerator triggers on the sea scooter and started heading toward the bow.

  He trained the light toward the port side up ahead.

  What he saw made him take an involuntary breath. Where the bottom of the hull should have been, a giant gash now tore through at least thirty feet of the iron hull. Tom would have expected the steel hull to be bent inward, but instead the jagged edges were curved outward – meaning the J.F. Johnson hadn’t run into a reef or collided with another vessel, but the damage had been caused by an explosion from the inside. Most of that gash had been buried by the seabed of Lake Superior, but two thirds of the way along, someone had gone to the effort of digging through it.

  He fixed his flashlight at the opening. “There’s our way out.”

  There was relief in Sam’s voice. “Great. What are you waiting for. Let’s get out of this damned shipwreck.”

  Tom swam through the manmade opening within the buried ruptured hull. The tunnel continued for approximately twenty feet before expanding into what he guessed would be the open seabed of Lake Superior.

  Before he swam out the end of the tunnel he switched off his flashlight.

  Behind him, Sam asked, “Can you see the other diver?”

  Tom’s eyes went wide. “Yeah, but you’re not going to believe what else I can see!”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Sam reached Tom’s side an instant later, expecting to now be in the open, 205 feet below the surface of Lake Superior. He watched the diver’s light diminish in size, over a hundred feet away.

  “Think he’s far enough away not to notice us if I shed some light on our new environment?”

  “Not to notice our lights?” Tom asked. “Yeah, should be all right.”

  Sam switched on his flashlight.

  He shined the beam upward, expecting the light to be absorbed and disappear in the darkness of the deep water that reached toward the night’s sky. Instead it showed the ceiling of a large limestone cavern that extended due west in a gradually upward slant. Strewn throughout were potentially more than a thousand wooden barrels.

  Sam turned to meet Tom’s wide eyes. “I guess it might take our friends more than a few dives to locate the contents of a specific barrel.”

  “Yeah, no wonder they’ve been so devious about diving here. It could take months to search their massive stockpile. The first time they were to get caught removing anything from the J F Johnson and their dreams of gold would be lost.”

  “The question still remains. Where did it all come from?”

  Tom watched the last of the mysterious diver’s light dissipate into the distant cavern. “I don’t know, but I’m betting our diving friend over there has some idea.”

  Sam focused his flashlight into the cavern. “If nothing else, I’d feel better knowing we can reach the surface.”

  He depressed the sea scooter’s accelerators and the machine whirred, as though eager to get going again. The cavern continued in a gradual upward slope for approximately two miles. Their course was perfect because it graduated their ascent in such a way that they progressively decompressed in the process, removing the need for prolonged decompression stops.

  About twenty minutes into their journey, the cavern changed direction, angling in a near vertical section that appeared more like a sinkhole than a subterranean cavern. Up ahead, Sam spotted the diver’s light and guessed the man was performing a dedicated decompression stop.

  Sam switched his flashlight off. “Guess we’re in the right place. It looks like he’s preparing to surface.”

  “Looks like it.” Tom followed suit and switched his light off, too.

  Soon the diver’s light diminished in size as the diver ascended far above them. Sam waited in the dark, maintaining neutral buoyancy and their closed-circuit rebreathers concealed their very breath, he ensured nothing had given away their presence to the diver they stalked.

  The icy waters of the lake were crystal clear and devoid of sea-life and the detritus which would otherwise obscure them, so extra care needed to be taken. They had followed the man North along a subterranean tunnel for
what seemed like miles before the roof opened up above them to where they could see sunlight beyond the surface.

  Confident the diver had left the area, they increased their depth to thirty feet and stopped to make a mandatory safety decompression.

  Once it was complete, Sam and Tom silently ascended to the surface.

  Sam broke the surface first. He allowed no more than his facemask to show. He carefully turned 360 degrees in search of the other diver, or danger. Unable to spot either, he allowed himself to fully surface above the water.

  “Clear,” he confirmed.

  Tom said, “Copy. Coming up.”

  He swept the area with his eyes. They were still underground. Blue-green bioluminescent lights of firefly larvae adorned the ceiling of the grotto eight or so feet above, reflecting like stars on the slow moving shallow stream that led toward the mouth of the cavern. A lightly worn path followed the edge of the water, leading over several boulders.

  Sam listened to the silence.

  On the edge of the path was a Canadian National Parks wooden placard which read: This creek is of cultural significance to the Meskwaki First People who once inhabited the region.

  Sam glanced at the sign. “Check that out, Tom. The Meskwaki Gold Spring was never about gold. It was a secret spring that led between Canada and the U.S. waters on Lake Superior.”

  Tom grinned. “You’re right. Only there was never a spring, either.”

  “There wasn’t?”

  “No. A river that flows from the surface to underground is called a siphon.”

  Sam’s lips curled in an amused smile. “Thanks for the vocabulary lesson.”

  “Just saying…”

  Sam smiled. “What do you think happened here, back in the twenties?”