Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo

by The Sea Hunters II

  “Engine room,” Captain Ilbery shouted into the speaking tube, “I’ve lost starboard propulsion.”

  He repeated his pleas, but no one answered.

  TWELVE DEAD, INCLUDING Brody. Their bodies were boiled—their skin cooked from their bones. Three African shovelers had been spared, but they did not understand the words that came out of the copper tube. They held their shovels in their hands, frozen in horror.

  JOE CONQUER PEERED through his telescope as the cargo vessel came into view. Wiping water from the lens, he stared again. She was an ungainly vessel, with a squat black superstructure and yellow decks. Her single stack was black, with a band of white in the center.

  As Conquer watched, she heeled to one side and hung there for a few moments.

  FATE CAN COME in many packages. For Waratah, it would arrive on a rogue wave.

  His ship was already wounded, and Ilbery knew this. The best he might hope for was to ground her on shore or limp back to Durban on a single engine. He waited for a clear spot, then spun the wheel to the stops.

  A mile distant from the struggling ship, the rogue wave was gathering force. Fifteen, then twenty feet in height, and she kept growing. A half-mile away, the surface tension of the water should have broken, but it did not. The thousands of gallons of seawater that should be sliding down the leading edge of the wave rose higher and higher, as if stuck together with glue. A single object lay between the wave and shore.

  “Mother of God,” Ilbery managed to say.

  Waratah was struggling to turn on a single engine and was just past the halfway point of the arc. Captain Ilbery looked out the side window. He saw death and he knew it. The seconds ticked past as he awaited the arrival of fate.

  From where he stood on the cliff, Conquer could see the cargo ship and the sea behind. He watched in horror as a giant curled wave raced toward the stricken vessel. He held his breath as it slammed into the vessel.

  Clinging to the metal ladder leading from the cargo hold, Cheatum felt Waratah lurch hard to starboard. Farther and farther she heeled over, until she passed the point of no return. The upper decks went awash, and thousands of gallons of water flooded into the holds. Cheatum lost his grip on the wet metal rung and fell the twenty feet to what had moments before been the inside of the upper deck. His neck snapped like a twig, and then there was only blackness with a tiny pinpoint of growing light.

  No one had time to react. Not the frightened passengers in the dining room, not the passengers in their cabins. The few crewmen lucky enough to have been on deck were tossed into the water and not trapped in the ship. Their deaths would take longer.

  Captain Joshua Ilbery was shaking his fist at the wave when Waratah flipped on its end beams. His head struck the ship’s binnacle, shattering the glass and removing his scalp from his skull. He drowned minus his hair. Waratah filled with water and plunged down. Flipping upright as she sank, she settled on the bottom on her keel.

  JOE CONQUER COULD not believe his eyes. Three minutes had elapsed from the time the wave had struck the ship to the time the last part of her hull had slipped beneath the waves. It was as if a hole in the sea had opened and swallowed the ship whole. Wiping the lens again, he scanned the water. A few pieces of debris, a shiny spot where oil had spilled. Then the storm increased, and the surface of the sea was swept clean. Folding up the telescope, he made his way back to his tent a few minutes ahead of the approaching wall of rain. Using a quill pen, he wrote a report of what he had witnessed.

  WHEN THE SHIP failed to reach Cape Town, authorities hoped for the best but feared the worst. Waratah was known to be unstable, and the hurricane that had raked the coast at the same time was one of the worst in the last decade. The 211 passengers were mourned, and at Lloyd’s of London the bell was rung. The mystery of what became of Waratah remained unsolved.

  SIXTEEN YEARS LATER

  Lieutenant D. J. Roos talked to himself when flying. He found comfort in uttering his motions aloud, as if he were verifying his actions with heaven’s copilot.

  “Richer fuel mixture,” he said, twisting the knob.

  The throbbing from the engine evened out.

  Roos was piloting an experimental South African air force plane on a mail run from Durban to East London, and the aircraft was performing almost flawlessly.

  “I think I’ll take her out to sea a bit,” Roos said aloud.

  It was a glorious day, and Roos was happy. The skies were clear, with unlimited visibility, and the sea below showed nary a wave. Days like today happened maybe once a year—crystal-clear skies and the Indian Ocean appearing as a pond. Roos stared at the water out of the side window. A dozen T-shaped images appeared in the water below.

  “Hammerheads,” Roos said quietly, as he continued along the coast.

  Lighting a cigarette, Roos puffed contentedly.

  “Fuel three-quarters, manifold temperature dead on,” he said.

  A whale, a small sailboat, and ten minutes passed. Roos pushed the yoke forward and descended two hundred feet. He smiled to himself and watched the water again.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  A ship came into view—two hundred feet below the water. It looked close enough to touch. The ship sat upright, as if it were steaming for a port it would never reach. This was a sea mirage, and Roos knew it. He turned the plane and circled around.

  “Damn,” he said.

  Sure enough, it was a ship, and a big one. Must be close to five hundred feet, Roos thought, and the smokestack is still attached. He adjusted course and passed down one side. The decks must be yellow, he thought, that’s why it looked like the sandy bottom. Must have sunk in a storm, he thought. Marking the position on his chart, he turned the plane around and continued to New London. Then he reported his findings.

  The next day on his return trip, the seas were rougher and the bottom not visible.

  He passed over the area three times, but he couldn’t find the phantom ship.

  II

  Is It Here or Is It There? 1987-2001

  THE QUESTION THAT HAS BEEN ASKED FOR MORE THAN ninety years is what happened to Waratah and the 211 people she had on board. From the time she sailed into oblivion during a storm off the east coast of South Africa, her ultimate fate has never been far from the minds of dedicated marine historians. And yet, since the day she vanished in 1909, no one seemed interested in launching a search for her until Emlyn Brown and I met up during my book tour in South Africa in 1985.

  I was speaking at a book conference in Cape Town when Emlyn came up to me and asked if I was familiar with Waratah. He seemed mildly surprised that I had researched the ship’s disappearance in the hope that someday I might go out and search for it. We later met at the Mount Nelson Hotel and discussed the possibility of joining forces for a search. The meeting led to a friendship that remains strong to this day. Emlyn is one of the nicest men I’ve ever met. I couldn’t have been luckier in finding someone like him to run the show. Courteous, determined, and dedicated to finding the legendary ship, he formed a branch of NUMA as a closed South African corporation in 1990.

  Emlyn believed the freak wave phenomenon—that a tremendous wave smashed over Waratah and took her to the bottom. He theorized that the rapidly sloping continental shelf and the power of the Agulhas Current, combined with a severe gale, caused a series of gigantic waves that engulfed Waratah and drove her to the bottom. That she wasn’t a stable ship must not have helped during her struggle with a sea gone berserk.

  Over many years, Brown pieced together every scrap of data pertaining to Waratah, with an emphasis on the reports surrounding her loss. Although maritime historians believed she went down much farther north due to sightings by other ships that survived the tempest, Brown bet his cards on the observations of Joe Conquer and D. J. Roos. Both men met not long after Roos claimed to have seen a ship lying on the bottom off the mouth of the Xora River, and they compared notes. They agreed on a location, and Roos drew a map with an X marking the spot.

  They
put the final resting place of Waratah four miles off the Xora River where its waters met the sea off Transkei Coast. This area is known as the Wild Coast, an inhospitable shoreline where severe ocean conditions prevail.

  Roos followed up with several flights over the next few years but never again found the sea visibly clear enough to reveal a shipwreck on the bottom. Engine trouble and poor weather conditions also worked against him. Unfortunately, he was killed in a car accident, and his map was missing for several years before his family found it in the back of a desk drawer.

  In 1977, a routine sidescan sonar survey by a South African university recorded an unknown wreck 360 feet deep several miles off the Xora River. The contact caused much speculation, but most historians ruled it out as Waratah.

  After an unsuccessful sonar survey in the southern area preferred by historians, Brown became more certain than ever that the reports by Conquer and Roos of a wreck they swore they saw off the Transkei Coast pointed to the Waratah.

  Believing wholeheartedly that the legendary ship could be found, I funded Emlyn’s searches, beginning in 1987, when he conducted an intense sidescan survey of the area surrounding the wreck six miles offshore. Making several passes, Emlyn’s crew estimated that the vessel’s dimensions were quite similar to those of the long-missing ship.

  Emlyn came back early in 1989 and attempted to lower cameras over the wreck. But little was accomplished, because the powerful five-knot Agulhas Current swept the cameras past the wreck and left him with only blurred images of the seafloor.

  Later that year, he returned aboard the survey vessel Deep Salvage I. Using a sophisticated diving bell, Captain Peter Wilmot, master of the vessel, descended to the wreck and captured vague video footage of the hull. But again, the current was too much for the bell, and Wilmot’s video images fell far short of making a positive identification.

  This was proving one tough mystery to solve.

  Not one to give up against the odds of a Las Vegas keno game, Emlyn plunged forward. In 1991, he was on site with Deep Salvage I again, only this time he was accompanied by the world-famous scientist Professor Hans Fricke and his sophisticated submersible Jago, which was capable of diving to depths of nine hundred feet. It was inside Jago that Professor Fricke became the first person to observe and film living coelacanths in the ocean.

  History repeated itself. The current again bedeviled operations during the ten-day mission, and Jago was never even launched.

  Back to the drawing board.

  In 1995, Emlyn was approached by Rehan Bouwer, a professional technical diver who believed he could reach the wreck during a carefully calculated Trimix dive, using a combination of three different breathing mixtures.

  The first attempt was defeated by foul weather, and not until January 1997 did Emlyn and Bouwer’s expert divers make another attempt. Pushing mixed-gas decompression tables to the limits, Bouwer and Steve Minne, the two-man team that had successfully dived on the cruise liner Oceanos that sank almost within sight of Emlyn’s wreck, dropped deep into the restless sea.

  They were unable to reach the bottom, the unrelenting current sweeping them thirty-six feet over the wreck. At that depth there was little light from above, and they had to rely on dive lights. They didn’t see much, but there was no doubt in their minds that the vessel they’d drifted over was the size of Waratah. She was lying upright with a slight list. Most of her forward superstructure appeared gone, as if destroyed by a monstrous wave. During the thirty-five-second flyby, Minne was certain that the upper bulwark of the stem could have been that of Waratah.

  The dive plan allowed a descent time of only three minutes to reach the seafloor at 340 feet, where they spent twelve minutes. This was followed by a complicated decompression ascent lasting two hours. During the drift-decompression stops, the five-knot current dragged the divers far downstream from the wreck site before they could be retrieved. Rarely had technical deep diving been so severely tested without the slightest mishap.

  Over the next two days, the dive team conducted three more descents but could not come close enough to positively identify the elusive ship on the bottom.

  Sadly, Rehan Bouwer was later lost in a diving accident in June of 1998.

  Undaunted, Emlyn teamed up in 1999 with Dr. Ramsey and his crew from the Marine Geoscience Unit to conduct a high-resolution sidescan sonar image of the wreck off the Xora River. Everyone was certain their highly sophisticated equipment would produce the final proof that the wreck was indeed Waratah. The expedition members set sail in June, which in the Southern Hemisphere is wintertime.

  Astounding imagery was captured by the Marine Geoscience team, and all the early indications pointed to a high probability that the wreck was indeed Waratah. Closer inspection of the sonar imagery suggested that the dimensions and various features of the wreck seemed quite similar to those contained in the Waratah’s shipbuilder plans.

  A black-and-white camera was mounted on the sidescan and towed seven meters above the wreck. This seemed to be the only plausible way of beating the strong current. For fear of losing an expensive sensor and camera, the gear was not swept as close as Emlyn might have liked. Yet Emlyn found good images that matched portholes, deck machinery, and winches, as the camera flew over the stem section like a kite.

  Confident that the wreck was indeed Waratah, and dogged in his stubbornness to prove once and for all that the lost ship was within his grasp, Emlyn initiated what he thought would be the final expedition. For this mission, he hired the services of Delta Oceanographic and their two-man submersible, which flew from the United States especially to close the final chapter on Waratah.

  Excitement began to mount when the team arrived over the wreck site. All systems were tested and okayed, the weather was clear without more than a four-knot wind, and the sea was calm. Since all attempts over the past eighteen years had been plagued by technical problems and adverse weather conditions, Emlyn could not believe his luck. Incredibly, even the notorious current seemed to have slackened. Seeing the flat sea, Emlyn thought it might be a sign. Conditions were too good not to have been touched by the wand of good fortune.

  He and Dave Slater, the submersible pilot, slipped through the hatch and settled into their cramped positions. The crane lowered them into the water, and divers unhooked the lift cable. Once free, Slater took the sub down to the seafloor. Visibility was more than one hundred feet as the upright image of the ship’s superstructure came into view. Elation began to cool and was replaced by concern as they moved closer to the wreck. What they saw did not square with what they thought they should have been seeing.

  Through the submersible’s ports they recognized a military armored tank standing on the bottom. Their mood quickly became one of shock and disbelief.

  “It is not the Waratah—I repeat, not the Waratah,” came the voice of Slater over the radio to the stunned team above on the survey ship.

  They moved alongside the hull and rose even with the main deck. Tanks, with their guns pointed into the gloom, and rubber tires could be seen still secured where they had been tied down when the ship left port. At first Emlyn naively wondered how Waratah could have been carrying tanks when World War I was still six years away when she sank. Surely this was not possible. It was difficult to accept the hard fact that this was not the 1909 British mail ship Waratah.

  It proved the eye sees what it wants to see. The general characteristics and dimensions of the two ships were very similar. The diver accounts and sidescan sonar recordings had all been misinterpreted. What Emlyn had discovered after all this adversity was most likely a World War II cargo ship that had been torpedoed by a German U-boat. As it turned out, that is exactly what she was.

  Eleven tanks were counted, and scattered dumps of small arms. Emlyn and Slater searched for a name or some identifying clue that would reveal the identity of the sunken cargo ship, but none was found.

  Disheartened, Emlyn and his team returned to Cape Town. His later research showed that the name o
f the ship he had thought was Waratah was actually the 4,926-ton Nailsea Meadow. She was transporting a cargo of tanks and other military hardware for General Montgomery’s Eighth Army on a voyage north toward the Suez Canal to Egypt when she was torpedoed by the U-196 in 1942. Like so many ships found by NUMA, she was not where she was supposed to be. Documented records put her four miles north of her actual watery grave.

  So where was Waratah? Why has all the evidence gathered over years of intense research pointed to this location? The thinking now is that the old liner lies much closer to shore, a theory I’ve always held because it seemed unlikely to me that Roos could have seen Waratah from the air through 350 feet of water—150 to 200 feet maybe, but not beyond the length of a football field, plus the yardage of the goalpost and then some.

  There is little doubt that Joe Conquer witnessed a ship with a black hull and khaki-colored upper deck superstructure roll over and sink in a violent storm. If he and Roos are correct, then Waratah lies much closer to shore than where Emlyn found Nailsea Meadow.

  Emlyn’s efforts have not been abandoned. He remains focused, and we are both more determined than ever to get to the bottom of the mystery. Early in 2001, Emlyn conducted a helicopter surveillance survey over the waters off the Xora River where we think Waratah is most likely to be found. His primary objective was to establish boundaries for an extensive sidescan sonar search to be held later in the year when the weather settled down.

  I still have great confidence in Emlyn and his NUMA team. The search will continue, but, for now, Waratah retains her secrets, and the mystery lives on.