The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  It was at Heathrow Airport in October 1989 that Proksch finally slipped up. His forged passport was spotted to contain a fatal flaw: a stamp showing passage through Heathrow’s Terminal 2 on a date it was known to have been closed. The fact that he was carrying $400,000 in his suitcase, along with photographs of Hitler and naked women engaged in sexual acts with prominent Austrian politicians, didn’t help his cause, nor did the fact that the man whose identity he had stolen – one Alfred Semrad – was also a serial criminal, with a rap sheet containing nineteen charges. Proksch and his girlfriend were placed on the next plane to Vienna, where the police were waiting to arrest him, but not before one last desperate attempt to escape was foiled when they caught him trying to board a flight to Germany after he had managed briefly to slip away from their custody.

  Proksch’s luck had truly run out. One by one his ministerial friends were forced from power, most because of their direct connection with him and/or the Lucona affair. In total, some sixteen politicians, lawyers and top officials were removed from their posts, prosecuted or convicted. Two of the most powerful, Gratz and interior minister Blecha, were forced to resign in disgrace when the parliamentary inquiry brought fresh attention to how they had protected Proksch. Others weren’t so lucky.

  Defense minister Karl Lütgendorf, who was a shareholder in Zapata and believed to be ultimately responsible for giving Proksch the explosives he used to blow up the Lucona, died in an apparent suicide in 1981. Few believe he took his own life. When he was found dead in his car, the door was open and the engine was running, while the gun he was holding in his left hand wasn’t registered to him nor were there any fingerprints found on it. No suicide note was found either. The surest sign of foul play, however, was that the single shot through the mouth that killed him went through his clenched teeth.

  An altogether different but equally unpleasant fate awaited Proksch now that he was under the control of the Vienna Regional Criminal Court and Judge Hans Christian Leiningen-Westerburg.

  Our hired support vessel, the aptly named MV Valiant Service, got under way from Singapore for the search operation on 12 January 1991, four days later than scheduled. The basic plan was for us to complete the equipment mobilization and testing in Singapore and then steam to the island of Malé to pick up the judge and the other three experts waiting for us there before heading out to begin the search. However, nothing was really going to plan. The mobilization was turning into a nightmare and we were falling seriously behind schedule.

  Generally, there are two types of problems that can crop up the first time a new spread of equipment is being mobilized on a ship or at sea. The first type is basically a routine one that can be solved with the resources you have on hand at the time. These can still be painful, expensive problems to solve but the key is that they are solvable. While we had plenty of those during the mobilization, causing our departure schedule to slip several days, they were all sorted out at the dock. The second type of problem is far more serious because it is potentially unfixable. These are the fundamental design or engineering flaws for which there is no short-term solution and which can bring a project crashing to a halt. Throughout the mobilization we were struggling with just such a problem, a real doozy, which jeopardized the entire search.

  The problem was that our brand-spanking-new side-scan sonar wasn’t communicating properly over the 10,000-metre cable we needed to reach the 4,000-metre depth of the wreck, and the sonar technicians troubleshooting the problem for three straight days had run out of ideas. This was a seriously complicated problem and we had exhausted every option available to us, bar reducing the overall cable length (and thus increasing the electrical signal strength) by cutting short sections off – say 250 metres at a time – to see if reliable communication could be established over a shorter cable. I hated this idea, though, and frankly would have found it easier to cut off the ends of my fingers. Once a length of sonar tow cable is cut, it can never be spliced back together, and the last thing I wanted was for our cable to be too short to reach the wreck. No, it was clear to me that this was a fundamental problem that only the original engineers, Irv Bjorkheim and Larry Robinson, could solve.

  It was a tough call to make, but I saw no other option but to ring Larry and Irv at home and demand they get on the next plane out from Seattle to join us. The sonar they had built for us, which I had christened Ocean Explorer 6000, was controlled by a mixture of digital and analogue circuitry, with Larry responsible for the digital design and Irv the analogue. Because the cable communication fault was essentially a digital problem, we really needed Larry more than Irv, but in the end Irv agreed to come too – in part because Larry had a heart condition and was generally a very nervous individual. Irv, in contrast, was completely unflappable and far better conditioned to step into the pressure-cooker environment that would greet them when they arrived.

  Unfortunately, all the front-end testing we had planned to do in port of the new Ocean Explorer 6000 and the ROV (Don Dean got the naming rights for this system and called it the Magellan 725) was now going to have to be performed en route during the transit to Malé. This was exactly the worst-case scenario we had all feared when the company accepted the five-month deadline set by the court. The risk that the project could end in failure had just increased dramatically. The only good news was that Larry and Irv were on the first available flight, while Judge Leiningen- Westerburg and the experts were relaxing in one of the Maidive Islands resorts, completely oblivious to the fact that we were now operating by the seat of our pants. A simple summary of our status upon departure from Singapore was that the Ocean Explorer was inoperable and the Magellan 725 was still only partly assembled. Generally, long ocean voyages following a mobilization are spent fine-tuning and relaxing, but not in this case. We were in for a very busy and anxious 2,000-nautical-mile voyage to Malé.

  The first chance we had to test the Ocean Explorer was two days out of Singapore, at the northern end of the Malacca Straits, which separate the Malay peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The Straits are a notorious area for pirate attacks, so we waited to pass through the narrowest section before attempting the first launch of the Ocean Explorer towfish,* in about 300 metres of water. Because pirates tend to prey on slow-moving ships with little freeboard, exactly like the Valiant Service when she was in sonar-towing mode, the marine crew was on high alert during the test. However, the watch didn’t last very long, because the sonar failed after just forty-five minutes. Although this first test was mostly a failure, some useful sonar data was collected, which was a sign that Larry and Irv’s efforts were starting to pay off.

  The next test, three days later in deeper water just south of Sri Lanka, was more promising. This time the Ocean Explorer spent a few hours working at a depth of 4,200 metres before we pulled her back on board. This was the first real indication we had that the sonar was up to the job of finding the Lucona, and it was a huge relief to all of us. We were roughly 450 nautical miles out of Malé; less than two days from picking up our clients for a potentially make-or-break project. We weren’t out of the woods just yet, but the anxiety levels on board started to diminish. Our spirits were also lifted by progress with the Magellan, which was essentially being built on board the Valiant Service by a few of our crew during the transit. Power had been switched on to the ROV – a major milestone for any new system – and while still not 100 per cent functional, it was closer than ever before.

  Just a few miles before entering Malé harbour, we conducted one last test to see whether Larry and Irv’s final tuning of the electrical circuits had had the desired effect. The proof in the pudding for side-scan sonars is whether they can produce good-looking sonar imagery, and I was finally pleased by what I was seeing, so I felt it was safe to allow the two tired engineers to disembark, their rescue work now complete. A couple of others from the team were getting off in Malé too, none more important than my boss, Don Dean. Don had been responsible for directing the overall project to date,
and we all looked up to him as an inspired leader, especially when offshore. While I felt very fortunate to be taking the reins from him, I did wonder how I would handle the full responsibility of the project with him gone.

  I knew I had the technical knowledge to run the search and the capacity to lead a team, but measuring up to Don was a very tall order. As we stood side by side on the fantail of the Valiant Service, recovering the Ocean Explorer after its last test, the late-afternoon sun was descending towards the horizon while surf from the Indian Ocean gently washed the breakwaters protecting Malé harbour. Even viewed from the deck of a noisy working boat, the setting seemed so amazingly serene and calm that I couldn’t help but feel confident that things would turn out all right. Despite the frenetic, chaotic last five months, we were finally ready to begin the search for the Lucona.

  As we left Malé harbour for the search area with Judge Leiningen-Westerburg and the other three experts on board, two additional things occupied our thoughts. One was the scores from the American football play-off games. The other, more seriously, was the Persian Gulf War, which had kicked off days before with the start of the aerial bombing campaign. There was no television on board and commercial Internet had yet to come of age, so we relied on faxes from our home office and the BBC World Service for all our news. Even though the war had just begun, we had already been put on notice that the US Navy might need us in case any aircraft went down near our location. With the Ocean Explorer and Magellan mobilized, we were in control of the only combined search-and-recovery spread for deep-water operations to 6,000 metres anywhere in the world.

  We arrived in the search area at six a.m. on 23 January 1991, precisely fourteen years to the day since the Lucona went down. As then, the seas were calm, which I took to be a good omen. Our pared-down operations team numbered ten in total. We split into two equal shifts of four crew each, with me supervising the midnight to noon shift and Bill Lawson taking the opposite twelve-hour shift. That left two of the crew free to concentrate on getting the Magellan ready if and when it was needed. In addition to Judge Leiningen-Westerburg and the naval architect Gerhard Strasser, two explosives experts, Major Ingo Wieser and Colonel Heinz Hemmer, had also joined the ship in Malé and were beginning to settle into a routine.

  By the standards of the offshore industry in 1991, the Valiant Service was a small (57 metres long, 471 gross tons), run-down platform supply vessel that had the bare minimum of accommodation standards, which meant that the judge and three experts had to share a minuscule four-man cabin. It had double bunk beds but the floor space was so small that only one person could get in and out of them at a time. Even though this was the best cabin on the ship, bar the captain’s, Leiningen-Westerburg claimed that it was worse than the jail cell Proksch was locked up in.

  The area of sea floor designated for the search encompassed approximately 430 square nautical miles, more than double that originally estimated by the court. This increase came about as a result of a search probability analysis that Eastport had commissioned from Daniel H. Wagner Associates, an American firm who were experts at determining optimal search areas and probability maps based on proprietary computer simulations. Finding a single 75-metre-long ship within an area the size of London, Sydney or Bangkok might seem an impossible task, especially as the search was taking place below 4,000 metres of water and the ship’s hull was probably shattered into pieces. My plan, however, was to conduct the search on a systematic basis to ensure that the entirety of the designated area was scanned. The cardinal sin of any search is leaving gaps, or ‘holidays’, in the coverage – expanses of sea floor, however small, effectively unsearched. To prevent this I’d have to make sure that each swath of seabed scanned by the sonar was overlapped by the adjacent swath, just like a gardener mowing his lawn. In fact, ‘mowing the lawn’ is what we call this method of searching.

  I decided on a grid of thirteen equally spaced search track-lines that would each take about nine hours to run. With time for turns at the end of each, I estimated the search would take eight or nine days to complete. Whether the Ocean Explorer sonar could operate that long without failure was an obvious question mark in our minds, seeing that the longest time we had ever had it working at depth was barely three hours. Nevertheless, as the sonar was launched and began its long descent to towing depth, I was excited that this moment – one that I had thought about for years and that had occupied all my waking (and some sleeping) hours for the last five months — had finally arrived.

  I chose line number 4, just on the northern edge of the central high-probability box, to begin the search, as Wagner’s analysis indicated there was a good chance the wreck could be located somewhere along this line. While I wasn’t counting on us being lucky enough to find it on the very first line, my plan was to start on the high-probability lines before progressing towards the south-eastern side of the box, which we felt was more promising than the north-western side. After line 4 was finished, we’d jump a line over to number 6, then number 8 and so on.

  Searching every other line as opposed to adjacent lines in sequence would make the long turns at the end of each easier and safer to negotiate, especially given that the pilots driving the ship had no prior experience making the type of turns we required. We would also cover more of the sea floor right from the start of the search by leaving the intervening odd-numbered track-lines, and the overlaps they produced, until later. This meant the sequence of lines we’d be searching would be 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12, before heading in the opposite direction to search lines 9, 11, 7 and 5, with the outside low-probability lines (1, 2, 3 and 13) to be searched last if the wreck still hadn’t been found. My search strategy was born out of a desire to be as efficient as possible by maximizing the rate at which the sea floor was being scanned, thus giving us a marginally greater chance of finding the wreck sooner rather than later. While this was mathematically sound, I could just as easily have started with line number 5, which would have made the next eight days of my life very different.

  After the first two lines (numbers 4 and 6) were completed, we hadn’t found the wreck but we had a pretty good idea of what the seabed terrain looked like. The dominant features were two rock ridges, roughly 200 metres high, situated at opposite ends of the SW—NE-trending search box. Thankfully the central area, coinciding with Wagner’s highest probability, was essentially flat and rock-free. This was another extremely good omen, for as long as the wreck was located within the centre of the search box, we’d have no problem detecting it against the flat, homogenous sea floor. And even if we were unlucky and the wreckage was lost within the rock ridges, we’d still have a fighting chance of picking it out from the rocks because of the amazing sensitivity of the Ocean Explorer sonar.

  One of the incredible things about towing a sonar in such deep water was how far behind the ship it was located. In order to get the sonar to the correct height off the seabed – we were aiming for an average altitude of 350 metres in water depths of 4,200 metres – over 9,000 metres of our 10,000-metre tow cable would need to be strung out behind the ship, with the sonar attached at the very end. This meant the sonar could be as far as 4.5 nautical miles behind the ship, making it very difficult to keep track of its precise position as it passed over potential targets. The US NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS) had just become operational, in December 1990, but it wasn’t yet fully functional, as ‘blackout’ periods where no satellites were visible was a common occurrence. One benefit of the start of the Gulf War, however, was that the US Department of Defense had stopped degrading the accuracy of GPS, because they needed it to be widely available to keep accurate track of military forces and equipment, whether on land, sea or in the air. This meant that our GPS was now ten times more accurate than before and we could determine the position of the Valiant Service to better than ten metres.

  As we began the fifth day of the search without seeing any targets that could represent Lucona’s wreckage, Dr Strasser asked about the Ocean Explorer’s ‘blind spo
t’ and whether we could have passed directly over the wreckage without seeing it. Strasser had obviously been doing his homework to be aware of this particular trait of side-scan sonars, which means they are unable to see targets directly beneath them, or at nadir. The cause of the blind spot stems from the geometry of the sonar’s transducers and the footprint of the acoustic beam, which is what creates the map-like 2-D images of the sea floor. As the transducers and resulting beams have to be pointed at an angle in order to sweep the seabed in a sideways direction, this leaves a physical gap at nadir, which the sonar cannot effectively scan. Our problem was that the size of this gap was unknown and very difficult to estimate with a reasonable degree of precision.

  My sense was that the judge was growing nervous that nothing had been found so far, and this was what prompted the question from Strasser. Even though we had completed only 40 per cent of the designated search box, the lack of any solid targets had left Leiningen-Westerburg discouraged, and he must have been feeling the pressure of having taken the decision to conduct the search against the advice of those in Vienna who predicted nothing would be found. Because you never know when or where a wreck will be found, there is a definite psychological aspect to the search, where confidence can ebb and flow depending on your state of mind. One moment you can feel utterly convinced you are looking in the wrong place or that the wreck will never be found, and then literally in an instant it pops up on your screens, leaving you to laugh at your negative thoughts. To me it was a bad sign that the judge was showing his nerves so early in the game. His anxiety raised the tension levels on board and made me worry whether he’d have the stomach to see the search through to the end. Some good news was definitely needed very soon.