Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo Page 36

  The volunteer NUMA team assembled in Beach Haven in July of 1986. Most came from Long Island, New York. A1 and Laura Ecke came with their thirty-four-foot boat. Dr. Ken Kamler acted as team physician and diver, along with Mike Duffy, a seasoned oceanographer. Zeff and Peggy Loria also came along to lend a hand, set up logistics, and run things when I had to go home a day early to begin a book tour. My good old pal, dependable Bill Shea, who suffered the seasickness of the damned on our voyages around the North Sea, also came along.

  We gathered at a motel on the beach, a short drive from the marina where the Eckes’ boat was docked. The lady at the desk stood nearly six feet tall, her blond hair pulled back into a tight bun. She stared at me through steely piercing eyes that I swore were focusing on a calendar hanging on the wall directly behind my head.

  “Ja, vas du you vant?”

  I should have known I was in for it. She had the face of the town rat catcher.

  “I have a reservation. My name is Cussler.”

  She snapped open a ledgerlike book with razor precision and perused the names. “Ja, Cussler, a good German name. You will fill out the register.”

  I signed.

  “Your credit card.” It was a demand, not a request.

  She made an imprint and handed back the card, but not before biting one corner as if it were a counterfeit coin. “Now the orders.”

  I looked at her. “Orders?”

  “You will not drink alcohol in your room. You will have no parties in your room. You will not bring animals into your room. You will not smoke in your room. You will not make loud sounds or play loud music in your room. You will not eat in your room.”

  “Can I watch TV in my room?”

  “Twenty-five cents for ten minutes. There is a slot next to the power button.”

  “Can I use the bathroom?” I said, in a pathetic attempt to beleaguer her.

  “If you are hygienically neat.”

  “But can I sleep in the bed?”

  A dark scowl crossed her face as she caught on. “If you do not adhere to the orders, you will have to stay somewhere else.”

  “My friends are here.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  I couldn’t resist one more. “What time do we fall out in formation for roll call?”

  “Here is your key. Room 27.”

  “That’s upstairs,” I complained. “I’d prefer a room on ground level.”

  “We do not play musical chairs,” she said, her hostility rising.

  I could see it was a lost cause, so I picked up my luggage and hiked up the stairs. The room was dark when I entered. Hanging over the bed was a print of a man standing behind a desk. I walked closer, thinking he might have a spit curl over one eye and a clipped broom mustache.

  But, no, it was Elvis Presley. I’d never seen a picture of him standing behind a desk before.

  I unpacked and met the rest of the gang at dinner. We met several local divers, but none were familiar with Akron. The first three days we encountered miserable weather and stayed ashore. I might have risked the rough seas. I had certainly run search lanes dragging detection gear through much worse in the North Sea, but except for Bill, who would go despite his suffering, this was not a crew who relished eight- to ten-foot waves.

  An unforeseen problem was Ecke’s boat. Though a nice and comfortable craft for short day trips, it had only one engine. If it faltered in a gale, forget it.

  Stormy weather or not, since I was a California beach bum and enjoyed body surfing, I put on my swim trunks and headed to the beach, thinking the storm might kick up some good waves. Never having surfed the East Coast, I was stunned to find that the waves didn’t come up much above my knees, a condition that ranges from the Florida Keys until Long Island, New York. I went back to the motel, sat under an umbrella by the postage stamp-sized pool, and read the New York Times.

  At last, after we enjoyed the preeminent lifestyle of Beach Haven in the rain for three days, the sun appeared, and our jolly band of sea hunters set sail from the dock at Little Egg Harbor and cruised out to sea. With only one engine, the boat drove through the waves with the sensation of a hacksaw cutting marble. It took us four hours to run the twenty-seven miles to our search grid.

  The instant we arrived, Captain Ecke peered at some dark clouds on the eastern horizon and proclaimed, “We have to return to port. There’s a storm coming.”

  “Storm, hell!” I protested. “We just got here.”

  I argued, pleaded, and begged, finally cajoling him into remaining on station. The storm, as I predicted, continued north and we had calm seas for the search. The sidescan sonar went out and we began running lines. After four hours, not so much as a beer bottle could be seen protruding from the surface. Then the sonar recorded a strange anomaly, and I sent Mike Duffy and Dr. Kamler over the side to investigate. Ten minutes later, they surfaced and said the anomaly was nothing but a grotesque rock. Could the sands have buried Akron? I didn’t think so. The divers said the bottom had the consistency of gravel and seemed quite firm.

  With a four-hour trip back to port staring us in the face, I called it quits for the day. We pulled up anchor and chugged home. Later, before we all headed out to a seafood restaurant for dinner, Ecke and I sat at a patio table and studied the charts to see if there was a discrepancy in the positions given by the navy salvage ships. No gleam of joy could have pierced the dismal gloom when I realized Harold had mistakenly converted the Falcon’s logbook coordinates to the wrong LORAN coordinates. We had searched over a mile away from where we were supposed to be.

  When I called Harold on the error, he became indignant and shrugged his shoulders, as if the entire wasted day were a voyage down the lazy river in the noonday sun. Since he was supplying the boat, I bit my tongue and slinked off to the restaurant, wondering about the meaning of life.

  The weather looked good the next morning, so we tried again. Déjà vu. We had no sooner arrived at the search grid than Harold swept his hand toward another front of storm clouds and turned the boat back to shore. These flights of fancy were beginning to get to me, but this time Harold had a point. The Coast Guard hailed us over the radio and urged us to find a safe harbor.

  We sailed into the Beach Haven Channel just as the squall struck with fifty-mile-an-hour winds. Harold was in Nirvana. I’ve never seen a man in the throes of ecstasy before. He seemed to experience an unrestrained joy from motoring four hours out and four hours back without accomplishing anything. Still, I had to hand it to him. Being a fireman, he was as hardy as they come.

  The third day was the charm. Clear sky and calm seas. We arrived at the proper coordinates and began searching. We quickly began to record debris scattered around the seafloor eighty feet under our keel. The divers went down and found a galley stove from the dirigible, as well as twisted duraluminum beams. No more were we broken and saddened souls.

  I had to fly out the next morning to begin a tour for my latest book. The crew, bless them, then went out again with Zeff Loria running the sidescan, and found the aircraft’s lower fin lying on the bottom. Divers searched a small part of the seven-hundred-foot debris field and found piles of twisted beams and support frames half-buried in the seafloor. No aircraft were visible, since none were aboard when Akron crashed into the sea. There were few intact artifacts left from the great zeppelin, whose hull was only a hundred feet shorter than Titanic. Her career was short, but she and her sisters had made a lasting impression on the history of lighter-than-air aircraft. It was sad and unfortunate that the great airships could not have been a major stepping-stone into air transportation, but most all met with tragic fates. Now the graves of Akron, Macon, and Shenandoah are all accounted for. I wish that someday professional archaeologists would return to Akron, retrieve her artifacts, and put them on display in the museum at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

  One final note on a very strange story related to Akron. Not long after she was launched, the dirigible was scheduled to fly over a football game in Huntingt
on, West Virginia. The date was October 10,1931. As thousands watched, a huge zeppelin cruised over the Ohio River and approached the stadium at only three hundred feet. Then, to the spectators’ horror, it suddenly crumpled and crashed to the ground. Several men were seen to escape in parachutes. After a thorough search, however, rescuers were stunned to find no sign of the Akron. No victims or wreckage could be found. Later investigation revealed that the flight by the navy dirigible over the stadium had been canceled. Not only had Akron not crashed in full view of a horde of sworn witnesses, but she had been over a hundred miles away at the time, and no other lighter-than-air craft were reported missing.

  The eerie apparition has never been explained.

  PART THIRTEEN

  PT-109

  I

  PT-109 1943

  IT WAS ANOTHER DAY OF TROPICAL HEAT AND HUMIDITY, the type of smothering air that brings on a festering malaise of listlessness and diminished expectations. Even the fact that the crew of PT 109 was due a night in port was doing little to add enthusiasm to what had become an endless war against sweat and insects. The crew was battle-weary and dulled by exhaustion.

  They dreamed of home fires and cool breezes.

  “Maybe we can scrounge up some bread,” said Raymond Albert.

  Albert was from Akron, Ohio, twenty years old and always hungry.

  “To make some Spam sandwiches?” radioman John Maguire said dubiously.

  “No more Spam,” Albert said. “Perhaps we can shoot a few fish and have fish sandwiches.”

  Just then the sounds of an approaching shore launch filtered into the cove where PT-109 was moored. Seated behind the bosun’s mate was a slim, sandy-haired man who usually sported a broad smile. This afternoon, however, no smile was visible.

  “Maybe Kennedy’s brought some fresh rations” Maguire said hopefully.

  “If he had fresh food,” Albert said, “he’d look happy. He doesn’t look happy.”

  PT- 109 LOOKED USED and abused, but it was not the result of a long life. The trim eighty-foot vessel had first met water in July 1942, just over a year before, in the polluted waters near her factory in Bayonne, New Jersey. Constructed of plywood by ELCO, the Electric Boat Company, she had first been assigned to the PT Boat Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island, before traveling through the Panama Canal on a transport ship. Eventually reaching Noumea in the South Pacific, she had been towed to the Solomon Islands and joined the fighting near Guadalcanal. Powered by three twelve-cylinder Packard engines and sporting a total of four torpedo tubes, she was finished in a dark-green paint scheme that allowed her to hide under a canopy of foliage when not on patrol.

  After training at Melville, John F. Kennedy assumed command in April of 1943.

  THE BASE FOR PT-109 was named Todd City in honor of Leon E. Todd, the first PT-boat crewman based at Lumberi to die. The island where Lumberi was located was named Rendova. To the east of Rendova was the Solomon Sea; to the west, New Georgia Island. To the north lay Gizo Island and the Japanese base at Gizo Town, which fronted Blackett Strait. West of Gizo was the tall, tree-covered mountain named Kolombangara that formed the opposite edge of the strait. Rendova was almost uninhabited until the navy base was established, and the jungles nearby were still wild. Brightly colored parrots flitted from one coconut palm to another, while lizards climbed atop the rotting coconuts at their bases. Flies and winged beetles took to the air. When the sun was setting, bats and night birds could be seen taking Hight. The waters near Rendova were warm and teeming with life. Coral reefs poked up through the crystal-clear water, and tropical fish abounded.

  It could be considered paradise, save for the war raging nearby.

  LIEUTENANT (JG) JOHN Fitzgerald Kennedy climbed from the shore launch, clutching a folder holding orders and operational information. A handsome man at twenty-six years old, he had been raised with privilege. After a childhood in Massachusetts, he had attended boarding school at Choate, followed by graduation from Harvard University. Son of the former ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joseph Kennedy, he had little in common with the men who served under him.

  Still, his crew had found their well-heeled skipper both friendly and approachable.

  A stem taskmaster when that was warranted, he also showed leniency with regulations he found arbitrary or unsound. And while he was tasked with maintaining at least a reasonable sense of navy decorum, he was more concerned with matters that pertained to crew readiness and operations. There was one other thing that endeared him to his men—there was no job he would not do himself. When cargo needed to be loaded, he helped. When the boat needed scraping or painting, he reached for a tool.

  Those who had served under other PT-boat skippers rated Kennedy a favorite.

  “GATHER ‘ROUND,” KENNEDY said as he climbed the gangplank. “I have our orders.”

  Ensign Leonard Thorn from Sandusky, Ohio, the second in command, shouted down to the sailors in their bunks. Thorn was a large man with light hair and a blond beard. Built like a football player, he had an eternally positive attitude that flowed forth like waves of warmth. Once the crew filtered abovedecks and stood milling on the stern, he turned to Kennedy.

  “Men are assembled, sir.”

  Kennedy glanced around and nodded.

  “We’ve been ordered to go out tonight,” Kennedy said, staring at his men.

  “Damn,” someone said under his breath.

  Grumbling could be heard as the men scattered, but all in all they took the news surprisingly well. There was a war in progress, and war demanded unusual measures. Personal desires gave way to sacrifice, weariness to preparation, fear to duty. They had a job to do—and they’d do it.

  Still, not a single man could envision the horror they were about to face.

  “WIND IT UP,” Lieutenant Kennedy said, a few minutes before half past four the afternoon of August 1.

  A rumble filled the air as the first of the trio of Packard engines was started. Down in the engine room, Motor Machinist First Class Gerald Zinser waited for the word to engage the drive.

  Behind the helm, Lieutenant Kennedy revved the Packard, then adjusted it back to an idle. Satisfied with the sound, he called down for the drive to be engaged. Then he carefully steered PT-109 away from shore. Slowly the boat made way up the channel. The sun was low in the sky, and the light through the haze cast a pale orange glow over the heights of Rendova Peak.

  Seaman Second Class Raymond Albert was on the stem deck. He could see sand crabs scurry from the water’s edge as the noisy PT boat idled past. Overhead a small flock of green parrots flitted past, changing directions in midair before heading across Lumberi to find refuge in the tall palms. The wake angled toward shore and washed against the mangrove roots lining the rim of the water.

  Ensign George Ross was a friend of Kennedy’s who had hitched a ride on PT-109 for the night. Formerly the executive officer of PT-166, a vessel sunk by friendly fire on July 20, Ross was without a boat and wanted to take part in the action. Kennedy offered to let him operate the aged thirty-seven-millimeter army antitank gun that PT-109 had been tasked with testing. The gun was crudely lashed with planks onto the foredeck, and Ross was staring at the placement and wondering if it would remain on board after it was fired. There was little Ross could do about it now, so he raised his eyes and stared off the bow.

  Fifty yards ahead, several bottlenose dolphins leapt in the air, looking for all the world like a flowing arc of wet gray paint. Staring to port, Ross watched the water a hundred yards ahead boil as a school of baitfish danced across the top of the water. To starboard, Ross thought he caught the glimpse of a shark’s fin piercing the surface, but when he looked more carefully, he could see nothing.

  “ENSIGN THOM,” KENNEDY shouted above the noise of the engines.

  “Sir,” Thom said, approaching from the stairs leading belowdecks.

  “Go below and tell Zinser that engine three feels sluggish.”

  “Yes, sir,” Thom said as he went belowdeck
s.

  “SKIPPER REPORTS NUMBER three feels sluggish,” Thom shouted over the din.

  Zinser was wiping his hands with a rag. He pointed at a round glass bowl attached to an engine.

  “Seems to be okay now,” Zinser said. “There was some gunk in the fuel.”

  “I’ll let him know,” Thom said, as he started to leave.

  “Mr. Thom?” Zinser said.

  Thom turned around and smiled at Zinser. “Yes, Zinser?”

  “We’re going to see action tonight, aren’t we?”

  The enlisted men respected Thom. One reason was because he was as open and honest with the crew as the rules allowed. “Word is the Express is running. We are going to try to sink a few.”

  Zinser nodded. “What’s the chance we get tomorrow night off?”

  “Hard to say,” Thom said. “I guess that depends on tonight.

  Thom had never spoken truer works, but neither he nor Zinser knew that yet.

  THOM WENT TO the helm station and touched Kennedy’s shoulder. “Zinny had some bad fuel.”

  “Yeah,” Kennedy said, “she’s smoothed out now.”

  Thom stared at the sky. The last flicker of light was washing down the side of the distant peak. In the Solomon Islands, it grows dark quickly. One moment there is waning sunlight, and within half an hour the first stars can be seen. It was as if a switch had been flipped off.