The Sea Hunters

by Clive Cussler

  Going to the local movie theater was particularly interesting.

  After paying for our tickets, we were sent upstairs to the balcony.

  Neither of us had ever seen a balcony-only theater before.

  Leaning over the railing in the front row, we could see that the downstairs seating section hadn't been used in thirty years. The aisles and seats were buried under decades of dust. No fancy snack bar with hot buttered popcorn and jumbo Pepsis here. What we got were two girls standing on opposite sides of the balcony shining flaswights on trays of goodies strapped around their necks. I asked one of the concession girls why the main floor was deserted.

  She looked up at me from the glow of her flashlight. "Why, sir, it's not safe down there."

  Not safe from what? I didn't have the guts to ask why my body was more secure from harm in the balcony.

  Strolling back to the boat, Bill and I came upon a crowd in front of a small building. We walked up to a bobby controlling the crowd and inquired as to the fuss. "The building you see is Aberdeen's maritime museum," he explained proudly. "The Queen Mother will arrive any minute to officially open it."

  Since Bill and I figured this was as close as we were going to get to an invitation to Buckingham Palace, we stood on the curb while everybody waved little British flags and shouted, "Hooray for the Queen Mum. Hooray for the Queen Mum." A delightful old lady in her eighties at the time, she waved graciously and disappeared into the museum.

  My other memorable experience in Aberdeen happened at the only phone booth on the docks. After standing in a British queue for an hour, I finally stepped inside and dialed the trucking company in London, ranting and raving over my tardy equipment. When I was informed that it was loaded on a truck whose final drop-off point was Aberdeen and was now somewhere in Wales, I became twenty degrees above steamed.

  Adding to my wrath, a young fisherman, impatient to use the phone, began pounding on the door. Since I was only three minutes into my conversation, I ignored him. Then he pushed the door open and tried to pull me out. I was intent on yelling obscenities at the trucking company dispatcher and didn't Turn and notice that he was thirty years younger and built much broader than me, wore all black, and had an earring in his ear-these were the days before it became a fad. I was several inches taller, but if it came to a contest in brute strength, he could have likely picked up the booth with me inside and thrown it in the harbor.

  Fortunately, a couple of factors worked in my favor. One, I was already madder than hell at the trucking company and didn't care if he had muscles like tree trunks, and two, I was cold sober while the obnoxious fisherman was dead drunk.

  More on impulse than common sense, I placed my outspread hand in his face and gave a mighty heave. He staggered backward across a narrow alley and struck a brick wall, cracking his head. He stood there, holding up the wall with a glazed look in his eyes, just staring at me. I now recognized that this was a guy you don't tease when he's eating, so I finished my call and hastily departed.

  Our equipment finally arrived, which made me happy. No more irate phone calls or nasty confrontations out of that dockside phone booth.

  After everything was loaded aboard and tested, we sailed out of Aberdeen and headed due south toward St. Abb's Head, eighty miles away.

  The day was breezy under a pewter sky of high clouds. On the way to the Pathfinder site, we took a short detour and spent four hours searching for the U-12, a German submarine rammed and sunk by H.M.S.

  Ariel in 1915. A British sonar sweep failed to find her in 1977, but we obtained a good reading for a submarine about two miles from where the Adn-dralty charts put her. The image showed her sitting upright with a nice shadow outlining her conning tower.

  Considering the find to be a good omen, we continued to the search grid I had outlined off St. Abb's Head. I gave the latitudes and longitudes to Jimmy, who converted them on his Loran navigation chart.

  The sea became rough and poor Bill was barely able to function at the side scan recorder. He swallowed ten different brands of pills and plastered his entire body with Transdenn Scc)p patches to prevent seasickness. His nausea overcame the finest remedies on the market.

  I've always thought he could make a fortune hiring himself out as a guinea pig to pharmaceutical companies. If they could come up with a medication to cure Bill's motion sickness, they could rule the world without bothering to spend zillions buying Washington.

  We set the side scan for one-thousand-meter lanes and began mowing the lawn in the late afternoon, running north and south with the tide, which is the only way to go. The seabed read smooth and flat, interspersed with gravelly ripples. The bottom in this area was also very clean and free of trash and debris. The hours passed. Colin fixed dinner in the galley. Bill, of course, wasn't hungry.

  At 8:20 the next morning, Jimmy announced, "We just passed over a rise on the bottom."

  Because his fathometer scanned directly under the hull while the sonar sensor was dragged fifty yards astern, everyone gathered around the recorder, waiting for a peculiar object to appear. There is a hypnotic attraction in staring down on the reddish-brown smudges that slowly materialize on paper. Expectation and anticipation never seem to fade.

  I've seen men and women sit over a machine until their eyes turned red and swelled shut.

  The image of a man-made object lying on a level bottom slowly revealed itself at the outer edge of the thousand-meter range. The object read vague, but it was there. We made another pass and switched the sonar to record a lane of only two hundred meters, obtaining a picture of a badly shattered ship, broken in three sections, lying at slightly different angles to each other. The stern section was the only part of the wreck that had distinguishing features.

  We made five more passes, and on the sixth we defined a small naval gun lying beside the wreck. Next we attempted to lower our underwater video camera over the side and get a picture, but the current was so strong and the seven-foot waves tossed us around so badly the video screen revealed little more than bluffed images of jagged wreckage. In retrospect, I realize we could have easily lost the camera if it had hung up on the wreck.

  Identification according to archaeological standards was not positive in the sense that we didn't find a sign saying, THIS IS THE PATHFINDER.

  But the dimensions measured on the side scan recording closely matched those of Pathfinder The discovery of a small naval cannon also adds to the evidence. And finally, there is no other shipwreck within ten square miles in any direction.

  When we sent in a report of our findings to the Admiralty, they were more than pleased to update their charts with our wreck position, since it was the only one of proven accuracy. H.M.S. Pathfinder's twisted and rusting remains lie lonely and forlorn under a white-capped sea thirty miles off St. Abb's Head at 56 07 21 by 02 09 15 in 155 feet of water. There are strong currents in this area, and diving is hazardous.

  Now it was on to the infamous terminator of Lusitania.

  Bill prayed for deliverance and was answered. The waters turned to glass for the voyage across the North Sea to ThyborOn, a small fishing port on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark. On the way over we searched for several of the warships sunk during the great Jutland naval battle in 1916. After only three passes, we recorded the H.M.S.

  Hawke, a British cruiser that was torpedoed by U-9. She was found very close to the position reported by fishermen and Admiralty charts. One of the few times this circumstance occurred, Hawke's outline was quite distinguishable and her calculated dimensions were on the money. Her hull is relatively in one piece, but her superstructure appears crumpled on one side of the wreck.

  Moving on, we searched for the wrecks of H.M.S. Defence and H.M.S.

  Warrior, two British heavy cruisers, and the German light cruiser Wieshaden. The first two were a wash. Nothing resembling shipwrecks were found within five miles of where they were supposed to be. A large anomaly was hit over the approximate position of Wieshaden, but we couldn't get close enough
for a more detailed view, due to fishing nets floating all around the area. The practice is called gill fishing. The Danish fishermen, in particular, found that fish tend to gather around shipwrecks and geological rises on the seabed. So they drop nets attached to floats around the protrusions, leave them for a few days, and then pull them in, hopefully filled with fish.

  After Colin's belly-filling dinner, which always included boiled potatoes, Jimmy and I usually poured scotch while Bill played movies over the video monitor. One has to be the most boring movie ever made, a Kipling story titled Kim, with Peter O'Toole. Some old Indian Hindu beggar wanders around India for fifty years looking for a river.

  Rivers are a dime a dozen in India. We could only believe that he was overly picky.

  The British still have great affection for their lost empire in India.

  Bill and I fell asleep, but the Scots thought it was marvelously entertaining. On the other hand, our favorite flick for the North Sea crossing was Stephen King's Creepshow. They thought it disgusting.

  Different cultures, different taste in films.

  We no sooner docked in ThyborOn than the sea turned nasty. Other than complain, there was little choice but to wait for calmer weather.

  Bill and I walked into the town bank and converted a few traveler's checks to Danish kroner. mile we were standing at the counter, the whole bank felt as though it were rocking back and forth.

  Too many days at sea does that to you. Your equilibrium takes a while to adjust to a floor that doesn't roll.

  I often wondered why anyone would want to live in Thyboron. The town is pretty and clean and picturesque, the people are courteous and friendly, but the wind blows so hard eleven months out of the year that all trees within five miles of the coast grow horizontally. Though it was June and the sun shone bright, the wind chill factor reminded me of a Telluride, Colorado, ski slope in January.

  While waiting for the sea to calm, Bill and I conferred with the local fishermen and drank beer with the town officials. Sitting on the beach and gawking at all the gorgeous blonde Scandinavian girls sunning in the sand, wearing only bikini bottoms and no bras, quickly became our favorite pastime. You'd have thought they were in Acapulco the way they lay there without a single goose bump, while we big chicken foreigners were bundled in heavy coats and sweaters.

  One afternoon, I took a walk along the quay and was observing the fishermen unloading their catch after returning to port. Out of the corner of my eye, I happened to catch Bill on the opposite dock from me, panning the harbor with his video camera. The instant his lens was aimed in my direction I began jumping up and down and doing all sorts of crazy gyrations. I was too far away to be recognized, and he didn't notice me through his viewfinder.

  Later, during dinner, he began running the tape on the monitor.

  As the camera panned the opposite dock, I pointed to the wildly dancing figure and said, "What's that guy doing?"

  Bill stared. "I didn't catch that before. He looks like he's in a spastic fit."

  Jimmy, John, and Colin gazed quizzically at the crazy image on the monitor. "No fisherman I know would act like that," said John matter-of-factly.

  "How odd," I said, fighting off laughter. "Maybe he's one of those dock entertainers who dance for money."

  Colin swallowed the bait. "I never seen any dock dancers."

  I strung the joke for another five minutes before Bill wised up.

  "If I didn't know better, I'd say that looks like Clive."

  So there I am, recorded for all time, making an absolute ass out of myself.

  Generally, the time ashore proved productive. I met with Danish diver-archaeologist Gert Norinann Andersen, who had spent a great deal of effort searching for lost ships along the Jutland Coast. His wreck projects operated on even a smaller shoestring than mine. His only piece of detection gear was a grappling hook, which he and his partner dragged up and down the shoreline. A deal was struck between the quiet Dane and the demented American. If we helped him look for several wrecks he had yet to discover, he'd use his findings to put us in the ballpark of U-20. As it turned out, it was a profitable arrangement for both sides.

  The weather was still rotten, but with Andersen and his diving partner on board, we headed south to the site where U-20 grounded sixty-eight years before. The seas rolled with six-foot waves that Arvor brushed aside as if she were on a Sunday cruise up the Thames.

  Thanks to her stabilizers, violent pitch and roll were kept to a minimum. Poor Bill Shea went ashen and retired to his stateroom less than a mile out of Thyboron, and we didn't see him again until we docked that evening.

  Two hundred thousand years from now, it's doubtful whether Denmark as we know it today will exist. The sea is eroding the coastline at an incredible rate. Concrete bunkers and gun emplacements the Germans built during World War II to repel invasion are already sitting in ten feet of water a hundred yards from shore. This erosion is a boon to marine archaeologists and wreck hunters. Hundreds of ships that ran aground up and down Jutland and were buried under the beach for the past five hundred years now lie exposed out in the water.

  We anchored near Vielby Beach. The site was not difficult to pinpoint because older residents remembered seeing U-20's conning tower rising above the water some distance from the beach. Several told of how they stood and watched as she was blown up. A few sweeps with the side scan sonar and we had a target. The Danish divers went over the side and soon returned. They had found the wreck, but rough seas were kicking up sand on the bottom and visibility was reduced to only one or two feet. About 1 P.m the wind died and the sea calmed and cleared enough to see five feet. Everyone dove and surveyed the wreck.

  Andersen produced an excellent sketch showing her final disposition.

  U-20 now lies nearly four hundred yards from shore in seventeen feet of water. When the sea isn't restless, she is an easy dive. The lower section of her hull lies exposed. The conning tower and various pieces of debris are scattered around in the sand. The diesel engines still sit in their mounts, and the Danish divers found a propeller shaft coupling with an engraved brass plaque, giving the manufacturer and date it was installed in U-20. There it was, signed, sealed, and delivered. A certified identification.

  I would have liked to dive on the wreck and recover artifacts for display at maritime museums in the United States, but archaeologist Andersen and the Danish government did not approve. So I came away with only side scan recordings and a drawing by the divers.

  The broken corpse of U-20 has far more significance for Germany, England, and the U.S. than Denmark. I'm sure that if someone took the time and made the effort to apply for a permit for a survey and artifact-retrieval project, the Danes would grant it.

  I also hope the country acknowledges the tremendous contribution Gert Nonnann Andersen and his associates have made on behalf of Danish marine archaeology. Without his fortitude, U-20 would still lie undiscovered. In my book, he gets all the credit while I felt privileged just to work with him.

  It was now my Turn to repay the favor.

  Sweeping the coast between U-20 and ThyborOn, we located several wrecks the Danes later surveyed and identified. Two of them were historically significant: the Royal Swedish steamship Odin, run aground in 1836, and the Alexander Nevski, a Russian steam frigate that was stranded while carrying the crown prince in 1874. According to the records, everyone was saved from both ships, including the Russian crown prince.

  We returned to ThyborOn and bade goodbye to the Danes after several rounds of good Danish beer. The next morning we found a large sailboat tied to the Arvor Since every space was taken along the dock, yachting courtesy dictated that the owner of the sailboat ask permission of Arvor's skipper to moor his sailboat to the outside of our boat and walk across our deck to and from the dock. Permission as a rule was always granted.

  The problem? There was no request.

  Jimmy Flett, a kind gentleman, said nothing and graciously allowed the yachtsmen passage over his deck. The sa
ilboat's crew consisted of two married couples, German to the core. They'd stare at our motley crew and babble in their guttural language, which grates on the ears.

  My dad, tried to teach me German but it would have been easier to build a nuclear bomb in the bathroom. He never spoke the language after coming to America. The only words that stuck in my brain were nasty, and of little use for tuning into their conversations.

  They played some crazy Kraut rock and roll during all hours of the night and day with the volume set somewhere between Thunderclap and Nuclear Detonation. The women wore your average, garden-variety brief bathing suits. But the men advertised their pubic hair in string bikinis. Our crew of good conservative Scotsmen were not entertained.

  They were wishing for the sound of bagpipes.

  I saw it as my duty to prevent another Battle of Jutland by engaging in sadistic foreplay. The Cussler with a song in his heart had a fiendish plan. When the Germans began blasting their rock and roll across the harbor, I counterattacked with my Dixieland jazz tapes.