Cradle of Solitude (17 page)

The next day dawned cool and clear. Annja and Garin were up with the sunrise and waiting on the wharf when Jimmy Mitchell pulled up in a dilapidated Ford pickup truck.

He greeted them with enthusiasm and then led the way to the dockmaster's office where the equipment was delivered the night before. It took about two hours to sort through the boxes, unpack the equipment and confirm that it was all in good working order. One of the scuba tanks turned out to have a bad regulator so Annja switched that out for one of the spares she'd ordered. When they were finished, they loaded it all on a pair of dollies and moved it down to the wharf so they could load it onto the boat.

Their first look at the
Kelly May
wasn't encouraging.

She was a fiberglass fishing trawler with a small wheelhouse set two-thirds of the way back from the bow. A boom mast covered in flaking paint rose up behind the wheelhouse. Normally used to drag fishing
nets, it would be used on this voyage to drag the magnetometer. The hull was faded, the name on the side of the boat barely legible, but Jimmy Mitchell stood there gazing at her proudly.

“Forty-two feet in length and fourteen feet abreast, with a six-foot draft. She'll do twelve knots while carrying fifteen tons of cargo,” he said with a smile.

Yeah, but does it float? Annja felt like asking.

Garin seemed to have the same hesitation she had.

When Mitchell fired up the engines a few minutes later to warm them for the day's activity, much of Annja and Garin's anxiety was relieved. She might not look like much, but even a nongearhead like Annja could tell that engines were masterfully maintained. They purred with a throaty hum that spoke of power just waiting to be used.

That was good, as she intended to make use of every bit of it.

It took them another hour to load all the equipment and finish filling the tanks with fuel, but by nine that morning they were headed out onto the river to start their search.

Annja gathered her two companions together over the chart table in the wheelhouse and went through the plan she'd put together to find what they were looking for. Satisfied they all knew their assignments after twenty minutes of discussion, they sat back to enjoy the short trip downstream to the target area.

After they had arrived in the general location where the university team had recorded their earlier finding, it was time to get the search under way in earnest.

The magnetometer looked like a miniature rocket, with a blunt nose, long tube-shaped body and a set of fins in the rear. It was four feet long and weighed some
where in the neighborhood of twelve pounds. After assembling it, Garin launched the magnetometer over the side while Annja played out the line until it was being towed roughly fifty feet behind the boat at a depth of about one hundred and fifty feet. The device was designed to pick up variations in the earth's natural magnetic field. Large quantities of iron, like that used in the construction of the CSS
Marietta,
would alter that field and show up on the device's screen. The accompanying GPS would allow them to note the exact coordinates and reveal the width and length of the debris field, as well.

As they began the long, slow process of trawling up and down the river, searching for an anomaly with the magnetometer, Jimmy spoke up.

“So tell me about this boat we're looking for.”

Annja glanced up at him and then back down to the dials on the magnetometer's control box. “The CSS
Marietta.
She's an old Confederate ironclad built back in 1862.”

“Cool,” Mitchell said, and then, completely unselfconsciously, asked in the same breath, “What's an ironclad?”

Annja laughed good-naturedly. “Basically, it's a steam-propelled wooden warship that's fitted with iron plates for protection.”

Mitchell thought about that for a minute. “So they took a steamboat and stuck it in a suit of armor?”

It wasn't exactly the way Annja would have explained it, but it worked just the same. “Yes,” she told him, “that's pretty much it.”

She went on. “There were several different types built during the Civil War, but the most common was the casemate ironclad. Think of it as an armored box,
with slanting sides, built to protect the guns and crew from enemy shot. They often had a reinforced bow that was used to ram enemy vessels, as well. The
Marietta,
the ship we're looking for, was a casemate ironclad.”

“That means it should light up the magnetometer like a Christmas tree,” Garin put in.

Annja nodded. “That's the hope, anyway.”

As if on cue the magnetometer began beeping and a section of the screen suddenly bloomed with color. Hearing it, Mitchell slowed the boat to a crawl, letting the magnetometer get a good long look.

The men turned expectant gazes in her direction, but after studying the readings for a moment, Annja had to shake her head. The object, while certainly iron, was too small to be the
Marietta.

More like somebody's old hot-water heater, she thought to herself, and quelled the sense of disappointment that threatened. She guessed there had been plenty of junk dumped into the river over the years and they were likely to get a lot of false positives before they found the real target.

To try and limit that as much as possible, Annja moved the gamma setting from three to nine, ensuring that they would only pick up larger concentrations of iron, and signaled to Mitchell to get the boat moving again.

By midafternoon they'd stopped four more times. Each time Annja had suited up in wetsuit and scuba gear and, with the help of a diving sled outfitted with high-powered spotlights, had gone down into the murky water to take a look. Each time she'd been filled with anticipation, her heart pounding as her diving fins pushed her through the dark toward the unknown. Each time she'd been disappointed. So far she discovered an
abandoned station wagon, an industrial-size boiler, a pile of cast-iron sinks and, much to her surprise, a steam locomotive. The train had just been sitting there on the river bottom, the round bulb of its front light looking like an eye gazing back at her out of the gloom. Seeing it sent her imagination into overdrive and she found herself wondering what train it was from and how it had come to be here, at the bottom of the Savannah River. When she surfaced, she made a note on the charts, indicating the find, and made a mental note as well to return to the spot one day to learn more.

For now, though, they still had an ironclad to find.

They were on the very edge of the target area, just finishing off their complete pass, when the magnetometer's alarm went off for the fifth time that day. The display showed a good-size target, so Annja zipped up her wetsuit and prepared to dive again.

“Want me to take it this time?” Garin asked.

Annja was tempted but, after a moment's consideration, shook her head. She wanted to be the first to see the
Marietta
's final resting place; call her selfish, she didn't care.

“Thanks, but I've got it,” she told him.

“Suit yourself. Remember to use one of the strobes if you get into trouble—white for marking the wreck and red for an emergency.”

“Right. Wish me luck,” she said as she put her mouthpiece between her teeth and went over the side for the fifth time that day. When she surfaced, Garin handed the light sled down to her, waited until she'd turned it on to check how much battery power was left and then played out her dive rope behind her as she sunk beneath the surface.

The weights on her belt helped her resist the river's
current and took her to the bottom fairly quickly. They'd loaded the exact location into the GPS unit she wore on her wrist, so it was a simple matter of following the signal to the site.

Except there was nothing there.

Or rather, nothing that looked to her like the wreckage of a Civil War ironclad.

She began swimming in a wide circle, moving through the target area methodically. At this point in the river a wide ridge rose up about ten feet along the bottom, just large enough that she couldn't see over it and long enough that she couldn't see past it in the gloom. She kept it close on her left, keeping it as a reference point so she wouldn't get confused in the murky water.

Damn, it's dark down here, she thought.

She'd almost reached the end of the ridgeline when she saw something sticking out of the muck at the point where the ridge rose up from the river bottom.

Something that looked far too symmetrical and round to be natural.

Annja shone the light directly at it.

The open mouth of a Civil War–era cannon gaped at her.

With a grunt of surprise, she understood what had been eluding her for the past several minutes.

The hurricane must have pushed the wreckage deep into the silt of the river bottom, where it had become lodged against the current. Over time, spring floods and the occasional high-water storm had deposited more and more debris atop the wreck, until it was essentially entombed in the earth, forming the underwater ridge she'd been swimming beside.

Better yet, based on the size and shape of the ridge,
it appeared that the
Marietta
might have remained reasonably intact, despite the force of the water.

Annja felt her excitement grow at the realization.

If the ship was intact and she could find a way inside, they might still be able to recover Ewell's Rifle and continue the search for the treasure!

She gave a powerful kick and began swimming along the length of the ridge, looking for some way inside the hull she knew was hidden beneath.

It didn't take long.

A shelf jutted out from the rounded side of the ridge and a school of fish shot out from beneath when her light washed across it. When she moved in for a closer look, pointing her light like a beacon into the darkness, she found herself staring at the algae-encrusted edges of a wide hole that led farther into darkness.

At some point in the distant past, a hole had been gouged through the casemate armor that surrounded the hull. Annja didn't know if it happened when the ship ran aground or prior to that, during the battle itself that had forced the CSS
Marietta
to heave to or risk sinking with all hands on board, but it didn't really matter. The hole provided a way inside the vessel and that's what she needed to allow her to search inside the ship for what they come here for.

But first, she had to tell the others….

She pulled one of the white emergency flare lights off her belt and clipped it to the edge of the hull. She gave the top a twist, activating the strobe inside it, and then pushed off for the surface, rising through water suddenly lit up with the pulsing white light of the flare.

The wide smile on her face must have given her news away, for her two companions took one look at her and began whooping and hollering like a couple of two-year-olds. Annja swam over to the boat, passed the light sled up to Mitchell and then accepted Garin's hand to help pull her aboard.

“Talk to me,” he said to her, grinning like a baboon.

Glad I'm not the only one,
she thought.

“She's down there all right, almost completely buried in the mud at the river bottom. Thankfully, she appears to be mostly intact!”

“So what do you think? Can we get inside?” Garin asked.

Annja nodded. “I found a hole about three-quarters of the way along the hull that's wide enough for us to swim through.”

“Did you try to get inside?”

“Not yet, but it doesn't look like it will be a problem. I could see down to the lower deck from where I stood outside the gap and it looks like there is room enough
to move around inside. That doesn't mean a bulkhead somewhere hasn't been crushed or the captain's cabin, where what we need was stored, is still accessible, but at least it gives us a chance.”

Garin nodded. “All right. Take half an hour to rest and then we'll go down together.”

She didn't want to wait. She wanted to simply switch tanks and dive immediately, but she knew he was right. The ship had been there this long and it wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, so there was no reason to take a chance with safety. Tired divers made stupid mistakes and mistakes were something they couldn't afford.

She used the downtime to grab some water and a quick snack out of the cooler they'd brought along. Rehydrated and feeling energized after the quick sugar rush, Annja prepped the underwater camera she'd be using to take pictures of their incursion inside the vessel and then changed out her previous breathing tank for a new one. When Garin was finished going over his own gear, they decided they'd been cautious enough and got ready to dive.

Annja explained their intentions to Mitchell.

“We're going to use the dive line to get us back to the wreck, but after that we're going off of it. I don't want to take the chance of having the line get held up on something inside the wreck and end up with one of us trapped down there.”

Mitchell nodded. “Got it.”

“We shouldn't be down there for more than an hour. If we run into any trouble we'll signal with a red strobe. You're not to leave the boat, though. Call for help if you think we're having difficulty.”

“Roger that. Stay out of trouble and we won't have to worry about any of that,” he replied, not knowing that
trouble had a tendency to find Annja and not the other way around.

She smiled, gave him a thumbs-up and disappeared over the side of the boat.

Garin was waiting for her just beneath the surface. She swam by him, knowing he'd follow her down as planned. The strobe light she'd placed near the wreck had started to dim but was still strong enough for her to focus as she descended. Minutes later she was hovering just outside the opening, Garin at her side.

The dive line was attached to her belt with a carabiner. She unclipped it and then hunted around for a moment until she found a spot on the wreck where she could attach it. That way they would maintain a link to the boat above, but still be free to move around inside the wreckage without worrying about the line getting snagged on a piece of equipment or preventing them from getting through a tough spot.

Garin flipped on the handheld spotlight he carried, then signaled that he was ready. Annja did the same with her own light, then slipped through the opening and led the way inside the wreckage.

Most of the Confederate ironclads had nearly identical interior layouts, with three decks running throughout the structure. The first deck, known as the gun deck, was the portion of the main deck that was located inside the protective casemate armor. The guns were located there and, as one would expect, it was also where the crew spent most of their time. Meals were taken on foldaway, tables and hammocks were slung between the guns for sleeping.

The berthing deck, just below the gun deck, was a mezzanine-style deck, with its aft compartment fitted around the engine and its accompanying boiler. The
forward compartment was divided into several areas, including additional crew quarters, the galley, paymaster's office, wardroom, sick bay and the captain's cabin.

The third and final deck, the orlop deck, housed all the stores. Dry provisions were near the bow, the magazine at midships and the wardroom stores usually near the rear. Just aft of this deck were the water tanks, boiler room and engine room, with all the machinery you would expect in such an area.

Shining their lights around the interior, it was clear that the ship was resting on her side. The “floor” they were hovering over was actually the port side of the vessel and anything that had not been bolted down at the time of the hurricane had been strewn about the chamber in a tangled mess. Most of it appeared to be the smashed remains of wooden furniture, which puzzled her for a moment until she remembered that the ship had been used as a regional headquarters in the months before the hurricane.

She glanced around, orienting herself with her mental understanding of the expected layout and then pointed to her left, indicating they were to move in that direction.

Garin nodded to show he understood.

Parker's second clue instructed them to find the Lady in distress, which they had determined was the CSS
Marietta,
and to then “take Ewell's Rifle from her crest.” A ship's crest, also known as a coat of arms, was usually located in the captain's cabin so it made sense to start there given they didn't have any indication that it would be found elsewhere. That meant they had to go down one more deck and then move forward, toward the bow of the vessel, until they located the right cabin.

They moved through the open space of the gun deck
until they came to a square opening in the “wall” on their right that Annja recognized as a ventilation shaft. Once covered by a metal grate, the shaft would have allowed cool air from above to filter down belowdecks where it was desperately needed.

It was wide enough to allow them to pass through without difficulty and they used it now like a doorway to swim from the gun deck to the berthing deck just beyond.

They found themselves staring at a large metal tank that filled most of the space from the floor to the ceiling.

Boiler room, Annja thought to herself.

She shone her light beyond it, where she could see a convoluted series of metal shafts, pipes and gears, marking that space as the engine room. Garin had already turned his back on the equipment and was moving toward the open doorway at the other end of the room, so Annja had no choice but to follow, despite her desire to poke about and examine the engine. If she started, she knew she'd be there all day.

They passed through the wardroom, with its officers' bunks, and the galley with its tangled heap of cookware, before coming to a narrow corridor with open doors on either side. The second room they checked turned out to be the captain's cabin.

It was bigger than the others they'd seen, with a bunk bed built against the bulkhead and a narrow desk nailed to the floor just beyond.

The ship's crest, a large wooden plaque cut into the shape of a shield, hung above the desk.

Her excitement growing, Annja swam over to it.

Up close, it was unlike any crest she'd seen before. Most crests were carved from a single block of wood,
so that each of the items that made up the crest were actually part of the whole. In this case, however, the flat surface of the shield was one piece of wood, with each of the adorning items making up the coat of arms having been carved separately and added one at a time.

At the top of the crest were two crossed rifles, in this case a pair of Enfield muskets, one of the most common weapons carried by Confederate soldiers throughout the war. A cavalry saber ran vertically through the space behind the center of the crossed rifles, the tip of its blade pointing at the object beneath them, which happened to be the statue of a horse rearing up on its hind legs. Underneath that, at the bottom of the crest, was a ship's wheel. A linked chain, perhaps representing a ship's anchor chain, ran around the edge of the entire device.

Garin followed her over, waited patiently for Annja to finish her examination, and then reached up to remove one of the rifles from the top of the crest, only to have Annja put out a hand to stop him.

Even through his face mask she could see him giving her an impatient look.

We came for the rifle, so that's what I'm taking with us, his eyes seemed to say.

But Annja knew better.

Motioning for him to wait a moment, Annja turned her attention back to the crest and ran her fingers over the statue of the horse.

Take Ewell's Rifle from her crest…

Richard S. Ewell had been a Confederate general who fought well under Stonewall Jackson and had taken command of Second Corps when the former fell in battle. He'd made a fateful mistake at Gettysburg, failing to push for the heights of Cemetery Hill despite the
discretionary orders he'd received from Robert E. Lee telling him to engage if he found it to be “practicable.” The second day of fighting at Gettysburg might have been radically different if he'd done so.

Ewell's Rifle hadn't been a firearm, Annja remembered, but rather the trusted horse on which he rode into battle.

A horse like the one in front of her now.

Unable to find a switch or a lever that might release the horse from its position on the crest, Annja grasped it with one hand and tried to turn it. She felt something click beneath the pressure she was exerting and the statue came free in her hand.

Garin had been hanging back, watching her, but when the horse came free in her hand he crowded close, wanting a look for himself. She passed it over to him and let him examine it for a moment, before taking it back. When doing so, she noted that it felt heavier than something that size would normally weigh, signaling to Annja that there was more there than met the eye. She'd have to examine it more closely once they got it up to the surface.

Opening the dive bag at her waist, Annja dropped the statue inside. A glance at the dive computer on her wrist told her they'd been down for twenty minutes at this point. At their current depth, that meant they were now at the halfway mark.

Plenty of time to get back to the top, she thought.

She signaled to Garin that they were ready and followed him back through the wreckage the same way they'd come in until they reached the gun deck and the opening in the hull through which they'd entered the ship.