Hendrick punched the location of the Awa Maru into the GPS receiver, then set the display up to give the heading to their ultimate destination. He turned to Captain Golubev.
“Your heading is two, two, five,” said Hendrick.
Golubev gave the order, commanding the boat to slowly make its way to conserve battery power. Hendrick looked at the clock they had set up in the conn to tell them how long they had been submerged. Only thirty hours left of battery charge. He shook his head in frustration. It might take thirty hours just to locate the ship, much less recover anything.
“How are your divers doing?” asked Hendrick quietly as he kept one eye on the GPS receiver readout.
“They’ll be ready to go once we get there,” replied Malik. “We can get them outside in half an hour.”
Hendrick nodded with satisfaction at Malik’s preparations. As the dive boss for the expedition, Malik had done all he could to insure safety with his divers. A helium-oxygen mixture, known as heliox, was used instead of air to avoid nitrogen narcosis, the narcotic effect of the nitrogen in pressurized air. The divers would be at about one hundred sixty-five feet below the surface, and Malik had conservatively gone to helium-oxygen instead of a gas mixture with enriched oxygen. Nitrogen-oxygen mixtures are used at depths up to one hundred thirty feet instead of air to balance the nitrogen narcosis and the oxygen toxicity. Because the Awa Maru was below that level, Malik had opted for heliox as a safer alternative.
Hendrick kept his eyes on the GPS receiver and watched with mounting anticipation as the readout showed that their location and the Awa Maru’s location were slowly merging. Hendrick gave Golubev a course correction, then after half an hour gave him another. A few minutes later, the liquid crystal readout displayed the same numbers that had been burned into his mind so many months before. His voice shook when he spoke to Golubev.
“Stop engines,” said Hendrick. He stared at the display once again to confirm what he hoped was true. After all the frustration, slow moving bureaucracies, vicious pirates, violent storms, and reluctant workers, they had prevailed. He let his breath out in a rush as everyone in the conn looked at him.
The Awa Maru lay directly below them.
Hendrick watched anxiously as a three-man diving team went up through the hatch and into the small chamber that formed the airlock. They all wore wet suits to retain body heat in the relatively cold water at their depth and had dive computers strapped to their wrists. The digital computers displayed current depth, maximum depth, dive time, tank pressure, and temperature. In addition they all had emergency sources of air in “pony” bottles attached to their harnesses. They had powerful battery operated lights clipped to their waist belts along with collapsible probing poles and plastic slates for writing. Normally acoustic devices were used to communicate underwater, but they had rejected them as too easily detected by the Chinese hydrophones and had opted for the writing boards instead. The entire package was bulky and unwieldy until they got into the water and the items floated around them.
The last diver slowly lowered the hatch and gently let it rest on the rim of the opening. Joe Malik quickly spun the wheel sealing the hatch. He got down from the ladder and went to the air controls that were nearby. After a brief check of the gauges, he flipped the switches that simultaneously pumped out the air while pumping in seawater.
Several minutes later, they could hear the outside hatch being opened. Their divers were on their way to first locate the ship, then in subsequent dives to clear away the layers of mud, and finally to retrieve the treasure of the Awa Maru.
Hendrick and Malik had arranged for a team of six experienced divers to join them and to do most of the work. One of the divers, named Ian Howard, was the final addition to the diving team but was clearly the best. Howard, a tall affable Englishman, was substituted for another English diver who had suddenly taken ill at the last minute. Hendrick and Malik felt lucky to have him.
Hendrick, who had dive experience, and Malik, who was a diving expert, would lend the divers a hand from time to time. Malik pumped air back into the airlock and opened the hatch, flinching under the small waterfall of residual seawater as it poured out of the chamber above him.
The two Americans lugged a large pump up the ladder and into the airlock, then shoved as much wide-diameter hose into the chamber as possible. Malik shut the hatch and pumped water in as before. After a few minutes, they heard the outside hatch open and the divers take their mud “vacuum cleaner” out of the airlock.
Malik went over to recheck the decompression chamber installed inside the submarine with great difficulty by the Russian shipyard workers. It was large enough for eight people: the six divers, Malik and Hendrick if need be. Because the atmospheric pressure inside the submarine was the same as at sea level, the divers’ decompression would be instantaneous when returning from a dive. They would have to immediately go to the decompression chamber. The chamber allowed the helium gas to dissipate in a diver’s bloodstream by gradually decreasing the pressure on the diver over a long period of time. The helium-oxygen mixture required longer decompression times than for air, but Malik had wanted to avoid any toxic reactions from the gas mixture at all costs.
Joe Malik had also insisted on two portable decompression chambers, which were packaged in two relatively small boxes, one box containing the control console and the other, larger box holding the chamber itself. The chamber was packaged like a Jack-In-The-Box and would hold one man.
Hendrick and Malik had installed one additional decompression chamber for emergencies by attaching it to the outside hull, but wouldn’t need it if everything went right. In an emergency, the divers could decompress in the external chamber then quickly make their way inside the submarine without having much gas dissolve in the bloodstream during the short trip from the external chamber to the interior of the vessel.
The divers established a search pattern radiating outward from the submarine as it lay on the bottom of the sea, and began the search in sectors out to a distance of three hundred meters, or almost a thousand feet. It quickly became a slow, laborious process, but thoroughness, Malik felt, was better than jumping about and trusting to luck. They couldn’t use sonar to do any seabed mapping as they had done before. The sonar sounds would be a dead giveaway of their presence and their location as well. Magnetometers were ruled out also due to the proximity of the submarine’s hull. The divers had to locate the sunken wreck the old fashioned way: by poking around through the muck.
For the next twenty-four hours, the divers, hampered by low visibility caused by the large amount of silt in the water, tried to find the Awa Maru with no success. They quickly found a large mound of mud to one side of the submarine, the kind of mass in the seabed that a sunken ship would make. Excitement grew until the divers determined that it was only a rock formation and not the long sought Japanese freighter.
Hendrick and Joe Malik watched the time go by in frustration. The captain, with a worried eye on his battery charge, cut back on the lighting and all electrical loads. The air became stale and seemed to perfectly mirror the dimly lit interior. The atmosphere in the sub turned to gloom along with their hopes of a quick find of the sunken ship. Hendrick had the sinking feeling that finding a wreck, when one is almost totally blind, would be very difficult indeed, even with good GPS coordinates to rely upon.
Malik gave Hendrick a decisive look. “All right. I’m calling it. One more dive, then we go get a recharge on our batteries.”
Hendrick nodded and looked at his watch. In a few hours, night would fall. They could then move from the area and surface with lessened risk of detection.
Malik jerked his thumb over his shoulder down the corridor. “The last team that came back didn’t find anything.” One three-man team had entered the decompression chamber, and the second team was resting, waiting for the next dive. Hendrick nodded with the moderate level of disappointment they had become accustomed to throughout the long day. Hendrick picked up the search chart and scann
ed it for the areas they had already covered. In over twenty-four hours they had covered only about ten percent of the area. At that rate it would take them nine more days to cover the entire area. He knew he had to be patient, but he wasn’t. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize where they were in relation to the wreck. The sonar image of the sunken ship played in his mind, and he placed the submarine at various positions relative to the ship. One of the positions felt better than the rest. He opened his eyes and pointed to a sector on the chart that was on the opposite side of the sub to the area already covered.
“We should look here,” he said to Malik.
His partner screwed up his face in annoyance. “What’s this? Another inspiration?” He knew Hendrick operated more from instinct than from a set plan. “You know, every time you pull this instinct crap, you’re right only twenty-five percent of the time. You’d do better if you flipped a coin, or threw darts at the chart.”
“Yeah, but when I’m right, it’s a beautiful thing to behold,” replied Hendrick with a grin.
Hendrick pointed to the chart once again and made a circle around the sector he wanted to search. Malik knew better than to argue for long.
“All right. All right,” he said in surrender. “Let’s get you into a wet suit so you can get out there once at least.”
“Once? You always were an optimist, Joe,” said Hendrick as he walked over to the room that housed the divers’ equipment. He walked in, joining Ian Howard, in preparation for the dive. Malik wanted to match Hendrick up with the best diver of the group to keep his partner out of trouble.
A little while later, Hendrick, Howard and a third diver came out of the room dressed in their wet suits and already breathing the heliox. Malik ushered them up into the airlock and carefully closed the hatch beneath them. Moments later, the chamber began to fill with the chilled water from the Taiwan Strait. The airlock filled slowly to lessen the noise generation, and it took a full two minutes to evacuate the air and pump the small room full with water.
The water went to the ceiling without hesitation in an inexorable flow, leaving only a few bubbles sticking stubbornly to the edges of the overhead hatch. Hendrick stood halfway and turned the wheel to open the outside hatch. He braced himself with his legs and pushed the heavy metal lid upward and outward. He half expected that the hatch would squeak on its hinges, but it remained silent until it hit the end of its travel, emitting a dull sound as the hatch hit its stops. Hendrick nodded to himself. Joe Malik was right to grease the hinges before they left port.
Hendrick pushed himself upward and felt himself get free of the submarine and its confining interior. The sea around him, however, was pitch black. It was twilight and little light penetrated to his depth. Although underwater diving produced claustrophobic reactions in many people, he had never felt that way while swimming through the open sea. He did have a few misgivings when inside the close quarters of a sunken wreck. Maybe it has something to do with divers, spearguns, and shark attacks, he thought suddenly. The horrifying incident at the wreck of the Han Gao tried to surface in his mind, but he refused to give in to it.
Howard cleared the hatch and immediately switched on his light, illuminating the murky world around them. Hendrick pulled his light around from its holding place under his tanks and switched it on also, giving more form to the silt filled water that brushed by them at a speed of two knots. Hendrick estimated the visibility at ten feet. Ian Howard grabbed Hendrick’s arm and pointed downward. Hendrick nodded and followed him to the where the search lines had been set up.
The first divers who had been sent out had set up ropes that radiated outward from the submarine forming the search area for the Awa Maru. The ropes were necessary to prevent divers from getting lost in the limited visibility. Each rope extended outward about a thousand feet supported at periodic intervals by metal poles with wide flat stands that wouldn’t sink into the mud. The rope was terminated by a metal pole driven into the seabed.
Each sector was identified by flags strung from the ropes with letters printed on them so a diver would know at all times exactly where he was. The flags also had numbers on them, indicating the distance from the submarine itself. As an additional precaution, the third diver snapped lines to their harnesses, which unwound from reels attached to the submarine. That diver also stayed with the reels to insure that the lines didn’t get snagged. In addition he was in a good position to call for help if an emergency arose.
Hendrick and Howard picked up the mud vacuum cleaner, then worked their way to the port side of the submarine and located the sector that Hendrick wanted to try. They began the methodical work of poking about with long metal poles to determine what was hidden below the thick mud that coated everything in the Taiwan Strait. They worked the thirty-foot width of the sector with increasing efficiency and after fifteen minutes they were making good progress. Several times they struck objects in the mud and excitedly started up the cleaner to pull away the mud, pumping it toward the stern of the sub and allowing the current to slowly take it away from their search area. Each time, however, they found a rock.
They reached the end of the guide ropes and Hendrick felt disappointment surge within him. In his mind he could hear Joe Malik ranting about following Hendrick’s instinct and not methodically searching the area from one end to the other. He stared into the darkness beyond the marked off search area and lifted his light up to pierce the black water. The familiar sight of floating silt greeted him and in the distance he saw a wall of mud. He squinted at it then grabbed Ian Howard by the arm. Howard looked in the direction Hendrick pointed then gave him a surprised look. They both scrambled over to inspect the object in the distance.
The sea floor rose up thirty feet and extended on either side as far as their lights would penetrate. They got to the top of the mound and began probing with their metal poles. On the third try Hendrick’s pole hit something hard under the mud, but he refused to let his emotions jump, and routinely set about clearing the mud away from the object. He shoved the intake tube of the mud pump into the silt with a vengeance and in a few minutes he was down to the hard object beneath the mud. Howard pointed his light down the small canyon they had made in the silt. Hendrick kept working the intake tube around until he had cleared an area a yard in diameter. He squinted at it in the harsh beam from Howard’s light. The object was flat and smooth. Hope leaped up in him like a skyrocket, although he kept telling himself that rocks can be gray, flat, and smooth also.
Hendrick worked the intake tube of the mud pump quickly and methodically, widening the area until the front edge of the tube hit an obstruction. Hendrick cleared the mud away like a madman, then stared at the object below him as Howard played his light over it. The obstacle he had hit with the intake tube was an edge that protruded up from the smooth flat surface. Hendrick pulled off his glove and felt the protrusion as well as the flat surface. He was sure that it was metal. He worked to clear the mud away from the other side of the protruding edge and quickly found that the flat surface ended at the edge with nothing else beyond it.
Hendrick didn’t know whether to be disappointed, or elated. What was this thing? He worked his way along the edge, clearing the mud until he hit another piece of metal that extended horizontally outward from the flat surface. He cleared the mud from around this next object and gaped at the first recognizable shape they had found during their search. The object was long, thin, and round and was attached to something below the flat surface.
It was a post that had held lifelines, which had run along the edge of the deck! Hendrick backed away from his find as he suddenly visualized the entire ship lying below him.
They had found the Awa Maru.
CHAPTER 10
The Vault
KURCHATOV
TAIWAN STRAIT
Steve Hendrick looked over the image of the Awa Maru created many months ago by sonar. It clearly showed that the ship had broken in two with the two halves settling into the shape of a T. Hendrick had be
en lucky enough to find the aft section, and after the uneventful recharging of their batteries in the middle of the Taiwan Strait, they began searching for the bow half of the wreck. Based on the sonar image and the orientation of the stern half, they knew exactly where to look for the forward half of the ship.
They found it in two dives and began the arduous process of clearing away enough mud to enter the vessel. The excitement among the divers was palpable, and it rubbed off on their Russian crew. They began to sing a particularly boisterous song in loud voices until a mortified Captain Golubev hushed them up with some well-chosen Russian epithets, which Hendrick couldn’t follow.
Hendrick and Malik had decided some months before on a salvage plan for the vessel, and based on information from several sources, some of it tenuous at best, they had determined the location of the most valuable treasure on the ship. They speculated that the forty tons of gold reported to be on the ship, was in cargo hold Number Four in the aft section. While that was one of their prime targets, the initial priority was the smaller treasure such as diamonds and other precious stones that could be easily carried away. First, they reasoned, pay for the expedition’s expenses then go for the profit, although the supposed one hundred fifty thousand carats that were on board would easily pay the freight and make them rich besides.
They had prioritized the order in which they were going to search for each type of valuable with diamonds and jewelry first, then the gold, platinum, and silver. Even the strange treasure of the fossilized remains of the Peking Man, found in China and first identified as a fossilized human by Davidson Black in 1927, made the list, but was near the bottom. Also near the bottom of the list was the reputed many tens of millions of dollars in U.S. bank notes, the condition of which was highly suspect after over sixty years of submersion in the sea. Certainly the diamonds and the gold would be in the best condition, and these were the prime targets of their initial search.
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