Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo (17 page)

Rhind opened the hatch and climbed back to the main deck.
Keokuk
was out of range of the Confederate guns; his crew was now concentrating on keeping afloat.

Thirty-two wounded, but no dead. Soon there would be a death, but it would be the death of
Keokuk
As the sun set in the west, the cigar-shaped craft limped toward her anchorage off Morris Island. Commander Rhind had no illusions about the battle. He and the rest of the Union fleet had been savagely pummeled, and his ship had suffered the worst. Climbing down into the hold, he shouted to Engineer Wheeler, who was near the bow supervising the plugging of a leak.

“How bad is it?” Rhind asked.

Wheeler was covered in grease and sopping wet. Wiping his hands on a grimy rag, he walked closer. “It’s not good, Commander,” Wheeler said. “I count nineteen holes in the hull, and more than half are below waterline. The pumps are keeping up, but just barely. The engines keep cutting out, and the forward turret is useless. To make matters worse, half my engine-room crew is wounded, so we are having trouble keeping up with all of the problems that are cropping up.”

“I’ll send down some of the gun crew and deckhands to help,” Rhind offered.

At that instant,
Keokuk
rolled over a wave and the hull flexed. A bolt that held the planking to the ribs shot across the hold like a minié ball and stuck in the far wall.

“We need to anchor,” Wheeler shouted, as he ran to inspect the damage.

An hour later, four miles from Fort Sumter and two miles off Morris Island, Rhind ordered the anchor dropped. The engineers mounted a brave defense, but
Keokuk’s
short life was over. Throughout the night, the weather was calm with fair seas. And for a time it seemed that Wheeler and his crew might save the battered vessel.

Fate, however, had another plan. The winds kicked up at 5 A.M. It was nothing that a healthy ship would even notice, but
Keokuk
was far from healthy. As the vessel flexed, the cotton batting that Wheeler’s crew had stuffed between the planking became saturated, then worked loose. Keokuk began sinking farther into the water.

Rhind reacted by ordering parts of the damaged towers and smokestack cut loose, but the action did little to stop the inevitable. It was a battle that could not be won.

The sun broke on April 8, and with it came stronger winds.

“Signal for assistance,” Rhind said. “We need tugs to evacuate the wounded.”

Wheeler climbed the ladder to the main deck. From shoes to belt line, he was soaked. He had gone twenty-four hours without sleep, and his face was etched with exhaustion.

“Sir,” he said, saluting Rhind, “the water’s rising faster than we can handle.”

Rhind pointed to a trio of approaching tugs.

“Help is here, just keep her afloat until we off-load the wounded,” he said.

“It will be an honor, sir,” Wheeler said, as he made his way back to the ladder, “but I estimate we have twenty minutes and little more.”

It was 7:20 A.M. when Rhind and Wheeler stepped from the deck of
Keokuk.
As soon as the tug cast off, the ironclad began her death spasms. First she shifted bow-down, as water borne by the wind entered through her hawse pipe. Then the ironclad shuddered as the immense weight of the water settled in the lower hold and sprang the already battered planking. The second the water filled the hold,
Keokuk
burped a cloud of coal dust like the last gasp of a diseased smoker.

Then she settled to the seafloor in fifteen feet of water.

Her battered smokestack was partially visible.
Keokuk
had lived but six weeks.

PHILO T. HACKETT spit tobacco juice at a nearby anthill and watched the tiny insects struggle to free themselves from the sticky mess. At fourteen, he was too young to be chewing, but he was also too young to be hiding on Morris Island under a makeshift covering of brush and limbs. Hackett had been hiding since yesterday evening. First, he had watched the battle, then he had observed the Union ironclad struggle to stay afloat before dying.

Hackett’s father was stationed on Fort Sumter, and his mother was home, worried sick about her missing son. Crawling from his hiding place, Hackett made his way to his rowboat hidden on the lee side of the island.

Then he quietly rowed across the water to report to General Beauregard.

“I WANT THOSE guns,” Beauregard said.

Adolphus La Coste nodded.

La Coste was a civil engineer. However, in a war where all were called, he was not one to shirk responsibility. He stared at the aging lightship at the dock in Charleston.

“I think we can do it, sir,” La Coste said, “but it is not without peril. We will be operating right under the nose of the Yankees.”

“How long will it take, Adolphus?” Beauregard asked.

“With the right help, a couple of weeks,” La Coste answered.

“Whatever you need,” Beauregard said, walking away. “I want those guns.”

Outfitting the lightship with tackle and hoist required a week. True to his word, Beauregard had given La Coste all he needed. The tackle was new, the ropes unused. A half-dozen divers sat on the deck amid a pile of freshly oiled saws, pry bars, and levers. Now it was time to do the impossible.

A driving rain was making visibility nonexistent.

Diver Angus Smith climbed up a Jacob’s ladder onto the deck of the lightship. His leather gloves were in tatters and his hands cut from his labors. Smith barely felt the pain, because the cold from being immersed in the chilled water had permeated his very being. For seven nights now, Smith and the other divers had rowed out on small boats to labor a fathom below the water. To avoid being seen, they used no lights. To avoid being heard, they were careful not to bang tools against the metal. Before first light, the divers retreated; each evening they came anew. Four days into the operation, they reported to La Coste that the guns were free from their mounts and that openings in the turrets had been hewn. Tonight was the first time the modified lightship had visited the site.

“We’re doing this all by feel, sir,” Smith said. “It’s as black as night down there, but I think we have everything attached as ordered.”

La Coste nodded, then stepped into the pilothouse near a single burning candle and stared at his pocket watch. It was nearly 4 A.M. Attaching the lines had taken longer than expected. Soon it would be light, and the minute the Yankees saw the lightship on station above
Keokuk,
they were sure to come. He stepped back out of the pilothouse.

“Are all your divers out of the water, Smith?” La Coste asked.

Smith did a quick count of the men on deck. Four were sleeping, still in their diving gear; one other had disrobed and stood in his long johns, peeing over the railing on the lee side.

“They’re all accounted for, sir,” Smith said laconically.

“Power to the turnstile,” La Coste ordered.

Four Confederate sailors began walking in a circle. Their hands were gripping the oak arms of the turnstile. Slowly the thick lines were tightened until the 15,700-pound weight of the first gun was being supported only by cable and rope and chain.

The cannon rose slowly through the water. Inch by inch by inch.

La Coste stared at the wooden derrick on the bow. The wood creaked in protest as the joints rubbed, but it held fast. “Grease the fair ends,” he whispered to a sailor, who slathered animal fat on the lines. Then he staggered as the deck of the lightship settled from the immense weight being transferred. Almost imperceptibly, the cannon rose.

Wiping water from his beard, La Coste peered into the depths of
Keokuk’s
grave.

And then he saw it. The merest edge of the outer tube of the cannon.

“Harder, boys,” he said a little too loudly.

The cannon was almost at the top edge of the tower—a few more inches and it would be free. Then it stopped.

“Mr. La Coste,” a deckhand whispered, “the tackle’s together. We can’t go farther.”

Inches from salvation and miles from success. And the sky was becoming lighter.

“Damn,” La Coste said. Soon they would be visible. Once they were spotted, this operation would be finished for good. “We need to move all the weight we can to the stern. That should raise the bow enough to give us the small space we need.”

A little more—but not enough. The dangling gun muzzle clung stubbornly to the wreck. La Coste stared east—it was growing lighter. A few more minutes and he would need to abort the mission to escape detection. A span thinner than a slice of bread.

Then the sea came to the rescue.

Perhaps there was a storm a hundred miles offshore. Maybe somewhere the earth had trembled. Whatever the case, a large wave came from nowhere. It rolled across the placid surface of the water like a bedsheet being straightened.

Into the trough in advance of the wave, the lightship dropped. Then, all at once, the hull of the ship rose, and the gun came free and hung on the cable.

“Can you steer with the gun weight off your bow?” La Coste asked the captain.

“I can sure as hell try,” the captain said.

Three nights later, they came back and raised the second gun. It was not until much later that the Union found out that
Keokuk
had been salvaged.

A FEW MONTHS after the debacle off Fort Sumter, Captain Rodgers was sleeping in his cabin on
Weehawken.
He had been reassigned farther south, and the ironclad was riding at anchor in the Wassaw Sound off Georgia.
Nehant,
a second Union monitor, lay a league away. It was hot, four degrees over eighty, and the air was still. Wispy Spanish moss hung from the trees nearby, and the croak of thousands of frogs filled the air. The Union ships were waiting to intercept the newest Confederate ram.

THE PILOT OF the Confederate ironclad
Atlanta
was groping his way down the Savannah River. The channel was narrow, and to escape detection he had ordered no lights lit.
Atlanta
was unwieldy, underpowered, and deeply drafted, all the things that made a ship hard to handle. Converted from the fast blockade runner
Fingal, Atlanta
had been armored and a cast-iron ram mounted to her bow. Her firepower consisted of four Brooke-rifled guns and a lethal spar-torpedo stretching ahead of the ram. Slowly, she went downriver.

Atop
Atlanta’s
casement, ordinary seaman Jesse Merrill was standing watch. Even in the darkness, he could see the difference in the river astern.
Atlanta
was dragging her keel and churning up the river mud. The ship was dragging bottom.

Peering forward, Merrill strained to see through the mist on the river. He thought he caught the outline of another ship, but just as he trained his eyes on the spot,
Atlanta
ran aground and he was pitched forward.

“Back her up,” he heard the pilot whisper.

Spinning her prop in the mud, the big ironclad struggled to break free.

After a few minutes of rocking the ship back and forth, she was freed.

Two HUNDRED YARDS away,
Weehawken
was closest to the Confederate ram. Her lookout was struggling to stay awake and losing the battle. Time after time as he peered through the port upriver, his head nodded as sleep overtook him.

It was warm, and there was little fresh air. His head bobbed up and down.

ATLANTA
BACKED UP and started downriver again. Jesse Merrill continued to peer into the distance. There it was again. Low to the water and dark in color, he might have missed it except for the rounded sweep of the gun turret.

Climbing down from the nest, he alerted the captain.

“Take it slow,” the captain ordered. “The lookout sees a Yankee ironclad.”

Seconds later, the pilot ran
Atlanta
hard aground again.

First light poked through the view port and stabbed the lookout in the eye like a saber. Shaking his head, he wiped the slobber from his mustache, then scanned the water. Like a ghostly apparition some two hundred yards distant,
Atlanta
came into view. The lookout stared for a second, then sounded the alarm.

He continued ringing the bell for a full three minutes.

At the sound of the bell, Captain Rodgers leapt from his bed and ran to the pilothouse, still in his nightclothes. His second in command, Lieutenant Pyle, was already at his station.

“She hasn’t moved, sir.”

Rodgers scanned the water with his spyglass. “The crew is scurrying on deck,” Rodgers said. “If I had to guess, I’d say she’s run aground.”

“I took the liberty of signaling
Nehant,
the lieutenant said, “and ordered a full head of steam from the engine room.”

“Head straight at her,” Rodgers ordered.

“Guns at ready,” Lieutenant Pyle said.

“Commence firing” Rodgers said.

It was impossible to miss. The first shot from
Weehawken’s
fifteen-inch gun scored a hit. It tore apart
Atlanta’s
casement like a fireman’s ax through a flimsy front door. And the rebel ironclad was powerless to reply. The grounding had keeled her over. Even with her guns depressed as far as they would go, when she tried to return fire, her shells sailed over the treetops along the riverbank.
Weehawken’s
second volley bashed in ten square feet of
Atlanta’s
armor and blew the gun crew off their feet.

Number three tore off the top of the pilothouse. That was all it took.

The captain hauled down the flag and surrendered.

Later,
Atlanta
was taken to the Philadelphia Naval Yard, where she was refitted and returned to service as a Union navy vessel. Rodgers was hailed as a hero and promoted to commodore. As captain of the first monitor to defeat an ironclad in individual combat, he returned to Charleston to continue the fight against Fort Sumter.

EIGHT MONTHS AFTER capturing
Atlanta, Weehawken
was a seasoned veteran. Her crew was honed by combat and their on-board routine entrenched. Day after day, she lobbed shells toward Sumter. So it was nothing unusual when she anchored off Morris Island to refill her magazine.