Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo Page 11

  “Make for the Yank ship,” Warley shouted to the pilot.

  The pilot began his course adjustment, but just then the Confederate ram Resolute, in full retreat, crossed abeam. Manassas struck her around the wheelhouse.

  “Back off,” Warley shouted.

  While still entangled with Resolute, the Union vessel slowed and poured shot into the side on Manassas before continuing upstream. Once they were free of Resolute, Warley ordered a course to midstream, where he had spotted a Union paddle wheeler.

  The outline of the familiar ship appeared in the blackness.

  “She’s the U.S.S. Mississippi,” Warley shouted.

  In a war that pitted brother against brother, there was no time for sentiment. The U.S.S. Mississippi was the last ship Warley had served on before resigning his commission in the Union navy. Now Warley was bent on sinking her.

  In the foretop of the U.S.S. Mississippi, artist William Waud spied the sinister-looking ship approaching. He would later draw her as a lead-colored wet whale, with the smokestack high in the air the only feature that might define it as a ship. At this second, there were pressing matters. Waud shouted to Lieutenant George W. Dewey, later to become famous for his destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay.

  “Here is a queer-looking customer off our port bow,” Waud yelled.

  Dewey corrected course in an attempt to run down the Confederate vessel, but his paddle wheeler was going upstream against the current and his pilot had little control.

  He ordered his guns to fire, but the shots glanced off Manassas’s back.

  “TAKE HER AT the wheelhouse,” Warley shouted to the pilot.

  Manassas had the current on her side, but the pilot’s aim was poor in the blackness.

  They came in on Mississippi’s quarter.

  “Fire the gun,” Warley shouted, as they struck the Union ship.

  The single cannon in the bow belched once as Manassas rammed into the Union ship. The shell entered through the broken hull planking and lodged in a cabin belowdecks. The U.S.S. Mississippi answered the attack with fire of its own. Dewey watched Manassas back away into the blackness.

  Fear and anger ran through the Confederate fleet as the Union navy steamed upriver. With a few more weeks of preparation, they might have stood a fighting chance. As it was, the saber thrust of the Union navy was cutting through their defenses with indescribable ease. Most Confederate rams were grounded on the side of the river by their captains, and their crews escaped into the swamps. The mighty Louisiana, crippled by uncompleted construction and faulty propulsion, lay tied up alongside the shore. She was firing her guns, but the design of her gun ports was faulty, and she had only a limited range in which to fire.

  A Union ship came abreast and poured shot into her hull.

  Things were no better on Manassas. The Mississippi River had become a boiling inferno. Clouds of smoke rolled across the river, illuminated by bursts of light from muzzle flashes from the passing ships. Shells flew through the air in a rain of lead, and the flames of burning ships made for a macabre scene of destruction. A large orange-tinted moon had risen, but it was hidden behind the thick, choking smoke.

  OVER THE NOISES of the engines, Warley could hear the shouts of the Union gunners, as they went through their firing drills. Still, Warley would not back down.

  “To port,” he shouted to his pilot.

  Aboard the Union ship Pensacola, Executive Officer F. A. Poe viewed Manassas advancing. Ordering a course correction to avoid the ramming, he waited until the last second, then ordered his guns fired into the Confederate ram. The shells exploded on Manassas’s back. Only a few inches to starboard and they would have entered the pilothouse through the port.

  By now, the majority of the Union fleet had passed, and Warley ordered Manassas downstream. He was intent on attacking the mortar boats downstream to take fire off the Confederate forts. His decision would prove deadly. Once Manassas came into the range of Fort St. Philip, the batteries, mistaking the Confederate ram for a disabled Union ship, opened fire on their own countrymen.

  “Get us out of here!” Warley shouted to the pilot, an order to steer upstream.

  Manassas, underpowered to begin with, struggled hard to make headway against the current. And then Warley thought he’d found salvation. A Union vessel appeared in the gloom. Warley thought she was Farragut’s flagship Hartford, and he made his way toward her. But salvation would not be his. The vessel was not Hartford but Brooklyn, a worthy target but not what Warley had hoped for. Brooklyn was entangled with part of the remaining chain obstruction and was struggling to free herself. The Union vessel was stuck under the guns of Fort Jackson, and if she didn’t free herself soon, the guns now finding their range would turn her into tinder.

  “Resin in the boiler,” Warley shouted down in the engine room.

  The increase in power came seconds later. Warley ordered the pilot to ram Brooklyn. Had not the Union navy ordered chain armor mounted to their vessels before the battle, the blow from Manassas’s ram would have sunk the Union ship. As it was, the blow was deflected and caused minimal damage. Warley ordered the pilot to back off.

  The battle had raged for hours. The sky to the east was beginning to lighten.

  Warley noticed the Confederate vessel McRae involved in a one-sided fight with several Union ships. Manassas came to assist and chased the Union ships upriver. The crew was weary from the hours of battle. Manassas had taken numerous hits at close range. Many were injured. But Warley was still game. He ordered the pilot upriver around Quarantine Point, where most of Farragut’s fleet was waiting.

  “We are losing steam,” Dearing shouted up to the pilothouse.

  “We’re barely making headway,” the pilot shouted to Warley, as he stared out the tiny forward port at the approaching Union ships.

  Warley stood silently for a moment. They had fought the good fight, but now his ship’s systems were failing. His ship was dying, and he was forced to face this fact. From the gun deck, Warley heard the low cries of a wounded sailor. To the front was an advancing enemy he was ill-equipped to fight.

  “Run her aground on shore,” he said quietly.

  The pilot steered for the bank.

  “Prepare the men to make shore,” Warley shouted.

  Manassas was run ashore, and the crew was evacuated. Climbing up the bank, Warley watched as Mississippi came abreast and pounded the abandoned ram with all the force of her guns. The rising sun had lightened the sky to a gray half-light. Warley watched as his command was pounded with shot.

  Suddenly, a shell from Mississippi exploded against the stem just below the waterline, and the lower hold quickly began to flood. With the weight from the water, Manassas’s bow became light. She drifted away from shore with the current.

  Now a ghost ship, Manassas floated a few dozen yards downstream of Warley and the crew. The gunners on Mississippi reloaded and fired. Screaming across the water, the shot parted the planks of Manassas’s hull.

  As Manassas drifted downriver, Lieutenant Reed of McRae launched a last-ditch effort to save her. Rowing alongside in a small boat, he climbed aboard, only to find that Warley and his crew had cut through the steam pipes with axes. The ship had been rendered unusable. Reed had no choice but to abandon the ship and return to McRae.

  Captain David Porter, later a distinguished admiral, in command of the mortar fleet, saw Manassas coming down the river, seemingly intent on destroying the mortar vessels, but he soon discovered that Manassas was never going to harm another ship.

  “She was beginning to emit some smoke from her ports of holes,” he reported, “and was discovered to be on fire and sinking. Her pipes were all twisted and riddled with shot, and her hull was also well cut-up. She had evidently been used up by the squadron as they passed along. I tried to save her, as a curiosity, by getting a hawser around her and securing her to the bank, but just after doing so, she fairly exploded, her only gun went off, and, emitting flames through her bow port, like some
huge animal, she gave a plunge and disappeared under the water.”

  The career of Manassas had been short, but she led the way for armored ships. The first ironclad to do battle, she was soon followed by the Monitor and Merrimack/Virginia. Thanks to her, naval warfare would never be the same.

  II

  They Don’t Come Cheaper Than This 1981, 1996

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE UNSUCCESSFUL CONCLUSION of the 1981 Hunley expedition, I was sitting at my desk staring at the NUMA team’s graduation picture, a photo of everyone we always take before we head for home. I studied it carefully. The faces of so many dedicated and hardworking people brought back warm memories. Then, for some unknown reason, I counted those staring back at me. There were seventeen, excluding me. Seventeen! I began to wonder if all these bodies were critical to finding a shipwreck lying in no more than thirty feet of water. It seemed to me that three people could have achieved the same results.

  The simple fact is—and this has been proven time and time again by our government—there comes a time when too many people get in one another’s way. Bureaucracy breeds bureaucracy. Feeding and housing a large search team requires support people. Once breakfast is consumed, a large crew needs at least four rental cars to ferry themselves and their equipment back and forth from the boat dock. And let us not forget the vital use of transportation for the younger members of the expedition team to make whoopee in town after dark.

  More and more, it seemed that smaller might be better.

  Warming to the idea, I planned the next expedition to the Mississippi River to search for ships sunk during Admiral David Farragut’s battle past the forts and his ultimate capture of New Orleans in 1861.

  This time, there would be only two of us representing NUMA.

  WALTER SCHOB, AN old faithful standby of NUMA, arranged to come with me on the expedition. All we brought was our Schonstedt gradiometer to detect ferrous metal and a golfer’s rangefinder. Walt met me at the Denver airport, where he had flown from his home in Palmdale, California, and was quite surprised when I rolled up to the gate in a little shuttle with my right ankle sticking out the side in a cast.

  The day before I was to meet him, I was jogging behind my house on a path through the woods when I stumbled and twisted my ankle. There was little doubt a bone was broken, because I actually heard the snap. After limping up the path to the house, I found that my wife had gone grocery shopping. With no choice, I drove myself to the doctor, using my left foot for both brake and accelerator.

  According to orthopedists who have looked at it twenty years later, the ankle bone didn’t mesh right and should have been screwed in place, or whatever it is they do in the twenty-first century to squeeze the parted bones together. As I aged, it developed arthritis. My advice is whatever you do, never get old.

  The airline obliged me with a front-row seat facing the bulkhead so I could extend my foot. Incredibly, a fellow with another broken ankle sat across from me. Odd how misery loves company. His break was worse than mine, as his cast ran almost to his knee. Mine came only part way up my calf.

  I always recall this flight because Walt had his carry-on bag sitting against the bulkhead at his feet. Now, you have to understand—Walt has a perverse sense of humor. When the flight attendant came along and asked him to move it under the seat or to an overhead bin, he said, “No, thank you, it’s fine right where it is.”

  The flight attendant, with red hair and penetrating dark eyes, was rather attractive except for the fact that her hips brushed both seats as she walked down the aisle. She gave him a stem stare. “I’m sorry, FAA regulations. The bag has to be stowed.”

  Walt stared back with an innocent expression. “There is no FAA regulation concerning a bag under my feet against the bulkhead needing to be stowed.”

  “You stow it, sir, or the plane won’t take off,” she said in a voice filled with crushed ice.

  “I’ll comply,” said Walt, “if you quote me the regulation, the section and paragraph.”

  I might mention that Walt is an air accident investigator. If anyone knows FAA regulations, it’s him.

  Now flustered, she said, “Then you leave me no choice but to get the pilot.”

  This lady was not going to take no for an answer.

  Walt smiled politely. “I’ll be more than happy to meet our pilot. I’d like to know his experience and flying time before we take off.”

  Did I mention Walt is a retired air force colonel with several thousand hours’ piloting fighters?

  She stormed off to the cockpit and returned with an exasperated pilot, who wanted to get the plane off the ground. In the meantime, Walt had stowed his bag and was reading a copy of an air accident investigative report.

  “Do we have a problem here?” asked a grandfatherly-looking uniformed man with gray hair.

  I looked up with my favorite dumb expression. “Problem?”

  “The attendant says you won’t stow your bag.”

  “I did.”

  “Not you, him!” snapped the frustrated flight attendant, aiming a manicured finger at Walt.

  Without looking up from his reading, Walt said calmly, “It’s stowed.”

  As I said: perverse. But you have to like Walt. You can’t excite him. I’ve never seen him mad. With his ready smile and Andy Devine voice, he charms everyone—most of the time.

  AFTER LANDING AT the New Orleans airport, we rented a big station wagon, a model now extinct, and made the seventy-five-mile drive down the river to Venice, Louisiana, the last town at the end of the road in the heart of delta country. From here it’s another twenty miles by boat to the Gulf of Mexico.

  There’s not much to see in Venice: fishermen, boat dealers and part suppliers, a couple of miles of boat docks. We wondered why a huge parking lot was filled with acres of pickup trucks. Our answer came when a Bell Long Ranger helicopter approached, hovered, and settled to the ground. It was emblazoned with the company name, Petroleum Helicopter, Inc. A small army of offshore oil riggers poured to the ground. They had left their trucks parked when they were ferried out for their rig rotation.

  We checked into a motel, the only motel at the time. The oil field workers must have had some rather exciting parties, judging from the damage to the place. I have always been amused recalling the Plexiglas sign screwed into the wall above the television. It said:

  No BATTERY CHARGING OR DUCK CLEANING ALLOWED IN ROOM.

  My shoestring expedition was off to a good start.

  Our saving grace was a terrific little restaurant called Tom’s that was in the town of Buras. Tom’s specialty was Gulf oysters, and after shucking them, he’d pile them outside the restaurant. Back then the mound was nearly as high as the restaurant’s peaked roof. I still recall with fondness the chili-vinegar sauce his mama made. Nothing ever enhanced an oyster like that sauce. I was so impressed that when Dirk Pitt was chasing villains through the delta in the book Deep Six, I had him stop to eat at Tom’s.

  We chartered a small fifteen-foot aluminum skiff from a local Cajun fisherman named John who lived in a mobile home near the river with his wife and tribe of kids. John treated Walt and me with great suspicion the first day and never said a word during the search. He was kind enough, though, to provide me with a lawn chair, so I could sit holding the gradiometer’s recorder in my lap with my ankle in a cast propped up on the gunwale, sticking over the bow like a battering ram.

  The second day, John opened up a little. By the third day, he had opened the floodgates of his personality and begun to regale us with a string of Cajun jokes and stories. I wish I could remember them. Some were semi-jolly.

  As we cruised up and down the Mississippi, trailing the gradiometer astern, I watched the needle on the recorder’s dial and listened to the sound recorder for any potential ferrous anomaly. With John in the stem of the skiff, steering, Walt sat in the middle, eyeing the shore with his rangefinder and keeping us in relatively straight lines until we neared the shore and he could guide John by eye.

&n
bsp; The first day of the expedition, we concentrated on Manassas. The Civil War charts of the river were routinely matched to scale with modem charts and showed me that the east and west banks had not changed much over a hundred and twenty years. Only the bend on the east side in front of Fort St. Philip had filled in for a distance of fifty yards or more. I was quite sure Manassas had gone down near the west bank, because not only was it reported that the abandoned and burning ironclad had drifted past the mortar fleet, causing great concern, but Admiral Porter had tried to put a hawser on the vessel and save it as a curiosity. Unfortunately, at just that moment, there had been an internal explosion and Manassas had sunk into the river.

  Walt, John, and I began our runs from the east bank and worked across the river to the west from Venice to the bend below Fort Jackson. I way overextended the search grid, because I wasn’t going to take any chances of missing Manassas. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve found that old contemporary reports are not necessarily the gospel truth.

  The hours dragged by as we slowly approached the west bank, dodging big ocean cargo ships coming and going to New Orleans. This part of the river was devoid of any shipwrecks. I failed to receive more than the occasional one- or two-gamma reading, suggesting that we were passing over nothing larger than a steel drum or anchor. We were pretty discouraged as we made our final run, brushing the edge of the little rock jetty that ran along the west bank below the levee.

  Abruptly, halfway into the last lane about a quarter of a mile above Boothville-Venice High School, the recorder screamed and the needle went off the dial, as we crossed over a massive anomaly. The hit was not in the river, but alongside and beneath part of the levee. Normally under a foot of water, the area between the jetty and levee was dry because the river was low this time of year. This enabled Walt to jump from the boat and walk the gradiometer sensor along the base of the levee as I received a prolonged reading on the recorder.