Gold Sharks (33 page)

“That's all we want right now,” Greg replied truculently.

“It was bound to happen. Any story with the faintest hint of treasure in these parts is unstoppable.” Alex tried to sooth him. “Anyway, you get on with the business of finding it and I'll do the bit of keeping the dive area secure, OK?”

“Sorry mate, a bit tense this morning. Anyway please keep in touch and who knows it may be payday today.” Greg's tone was more cheerful as he rang off and turned his attention back to the GPS.

“We're nearly on the site Big J. I suggest we put her on auto hold now.”

The tug was equipped with multiple thrusters and extended drive legs, giving it the ability to hold the same position within a few metres in most operational sea conditions.

Bearing in mind the discovery of what they suspected to be live torpedoes, they elected to send the robotic camera to survey the wreck before taking any unnecessary chances. Facing into the light breeze, the tug hove to as men busied themselves with the winch and soon had the brightly coloured robot camera lowered into the water. Guided by Big J, it only took a minute to reach the seabed then deftly manoeuvred in into the position where the photograph of the suspected torpedo had been taken. They were in the early stages of slack water so the sea conditions were near perfect. The monitor cleared and with the aid of the lamps attached to the camera the seabed could be seen in sharp focus in the crystal clear water. Boulders silhouetted in the artificial light littered the scene as the camera nosed slowly towards its target. Suddenly a wall of encrusted metal appeared. Big J stopped the camera.

“We'll have to be careful now. I'll go up a couple of metres and then work around in a circle, see if we can find that tube again.”

No one spoke as the robot camera raised two metres before moving off to the left.

“Three metres. That will do. Now right again,” Big J muttered to no one in particular. “Four five six,” he counted quietly as a small bead of perspiration trickled down his forehead. “Now up two and left, there!” he shouted. The rest of the onlookers cheered

“Well done!” Greg banged the big man on the shoulder.

The camera hovered one metre from the torpedo tube with its deadly ordnance protruding from it.

“That's a torpedo no doubt about it boys.” Big J confirmed. “Well we've certainly found the same wreck; now we better see if we can find anything to identify it.” He started to manoeuvre the camera again.

“I think we should take the risk of sending down a dive team,” John interrupted. “We could be hours skimming around with the camera and the tide is only good for about five hours. What do you say?”

“OK by me.” Big J looked up from the screen. “But just be bloody careful; don't touch anything until we have a full picture of the whole wreck, particularly if there any more live torpedoes lying about.”

“Thanks,” John replied with a wry smile as he moved out of the control room. “Come on boys, let's get the first team in the water.”

Within minutes the first four divers were assembled by the ramp.

“Now remember boys, observation and report only. We want to get a full picture of the situation and firm evidence that it's our wreck before we send down any clearing equipment, understand?” They all gave the OK dive signal before entering the water.

John set the timer on his watch; he had calculated that by using a gas-air mixture at that depth they would be able to work safely around the wreck for about fifteen minutes, allowing them to surface without decompressing.

The next four divers were already standing by the rail waiting to replace their colleagues. For them, the time ticked by slowly as they waited on the surface. For the men on the bottom, it seemed to pass unnaturally quickly.

Working in pairs, they each carried small marker buoys attached to coiled light lines; these would release once they had identified a particular part of the wreck, allowing the next diver to land directly on the chosen section.

The first pair of divers found rusting metal debris almost immediately. Following the trail for a few metres, they came to a confusion of the rusting old ship's beams and the jagged remains of its moulded plating. It was obvious that the wreck had suffered considerably from the ferocious tides and currents that moved relentlessly back and forth year in, year out. Consequently there was no recognisable ship-like shape to be seen.

The second pair of divers set out at right angles from the others and soon found the rocky ravine seen by the robot camera in the previous search. It took some time before they came across the nose of a submarine. Buried, in a wide crevasse, it appeared to have escaped the worst effects of the erosion.

They hovered a metre from the tip of the torpedo and released their first marker buoy; satisfied that it was secure, they turned left and headed on a parallel course hoping to find more of the wreck. They swam several metres when their hopes were suddenly fulfilled by the sight of a mountain of jumbled beams and even the curved shape of a submarine hull. With their submerged time almost at the limit, they released their second buoy and returned to the surface.

The other pair also found a similar mass of wreckage towards the end of their submerged time, released their marker buoys and surfaced.

Excitedly they clambered aboard the dive ramp. The surface watchers craned their necks to see and to listen.

“Its bloody amazing! There must be two or more ships in a heap down there!” one shouted.

“We found your torpedo all right,” another shouted.

Then another voice boomed, drowning out the others. “OK boys, just get yourselves stripped down and tell me exactly what we've got down there,” Big J ordered, asserting his authority over the situation.

Gathered in the wheelhouse John and the other divers related all they had seen at the wreck site. Big J listened carefully and patiently to each diver until they delivered all they had seen. His vast experience easily separated the unintentional excited exaggerations from the simple facts until he had a reasonably clear initial picture of what they were dealing with on the seabed.

“Well done boys. I want you to take a couple of hours' rest now. You may just be needed for one more dive before the tide turns.”

Big J turned to John.

“I think we should risk sending down the ‘Hair Dryer' with the next group to try and clear a patch in the middle of the wrecks. That way we may get a better feel for the situation, OK?”

“That makes sense,” John agreed.

Without being asked, Greg dispatched two men to prepare the machine and its compressed air hose, ready to be lowered over the side with the next team.

The “Hair Dryer” as the divers on the tug familiarly knew it, was in fact a Micro Blaster - a compressed air driven fan - which blows sediment away from the wreckage to be taken away by the current, leaving any heavier items uncovered. The larger version, known as “Big Blaster”, could gouge into quite hard sediment.

The new team followed the lines down and settled on the bottom in the middle of the wreckage. Two of them manned the “Hair Dryer” and immediately set to work, carefully blowing away the sand and mud at their feet. The others circled carefully, expanding the perimeter of their working area; that was when the first shark appeared on the scene.

Of all the numerous species that exist today, the Tiger shark is considered by some authorities to be the most ferocious and aggressive.

Concentrating on the jumble of silt-covered rubble and broken metal fragments, the diver did not notice the great beast cruising at the edge of his vision. It drifted past silently, the almost imperceptible movement of its tail fin propelling it efficiently through the water.

The stream of regularly exhaled bubbles from his pressure helmet had quickly attracted the shark's attention to the diver. One beady eye concentrated on the source of the bubbles. The shark was familiar with divers but had never seen them here, in its own private territory. It paused, unsure of what to do, and then, sensing little or no threat from the intruder for the moment, drifted silently out of sight.

f

Over the next thirty-six hours, the teams of divers gradually built up a picture of both the position and nature of the wrecks beneath them; they knew that there were at least two ships, the lower one a submarine, with the stern half of a surface ship laid diagonally across it.

They had not been able to enter the nose of the submarine but by flashing a light into a small hole in its pressure hull they had been able to ascertain that there was at least one other unexploded torpedo inside.

As yet there was no trace of any gold.

“We have a pretty clear picture of the wrecks now but to make any further progress we're going to have to set-up a full saturation dive.” Big J looked around at his eager team.

“Its OK by me,” one said.

“And me,” another joined in. “Until we pull away some of the stuff covering the sub we're never going to make any real progress and for that we are going to need the cutting gear and, above all, a lot more submerged time!”

“OK then,” Big J confirmed with a wide grin. “We go for it. Let's rig for a full saturation dive!”

In order to spend long working hours at great depths it is necessary to avoid repeated and arduous decompression time, so a technique known as saturation diving is used. This requires the divers to remain permanently under pressure for the dive and continue to live in a pressurised environment until the end of the job. With decompression periods in these circumstances taking as long as seven days, they need to be certain of their target before embarking on such an arduous project.

Most of the sophisticated equipment had been prepared in anticipation of the dive. The dive bell, which could hold six divers, would be lowered on a cable with an umbilical cord supplying air and communications. From there the divers could work wearing thermal dry suits and pressure helmets fitted with two way radios, providing communication via the bell, both to the surface and with each other. At the end of each dive period, the men would return to the bell, which was then sealed and returned to the surface, craned aboard the mother ship and clamped to the onboard “pressure vessel”, allowing the divers to transfer safely to the pressurised living accommodation. The “pressure vessel” was in effect a miniature submarine, its internal pressure maintained at around ten atmospheres.

It was equipped like a rather cramped apartment- and there they would have to eat, sleep, watch videos and pass their time between dives until they were eventually depressurised.

They divided into two shifts of four divers working two hours per shift during the slack water period. The dive bell with the first four men was swung out over the side of the tug and started its descent to the wrecks.

Big J agreed that John would lead the underwater team and Greg take over the cargo vessel, which would be manoeuvred close alongside the tug to make best use of its powerful lifting gear.

Eight divers led by John would form the saturated group. Divided into two teams, they would each work one two-hour shift per tide; Hal would lead the second team. Rod, the tall Australian diver, happily agreed to be the eighth man - only seven of Big J's team were currently fit to go into saturation. The remaining six divers would act as safety and surface support.

One knot of tide was still running as the bell stopped some five metres above the stern of wrecked submarine. The first job would be to drag away some of the remains of the surface ship, which lay diagonally across the sub, in the hope that this would offer access to any areas still intact.

Guided by commands from the divers, cables were lowered and the work of looping chains around the solid beams and plates began. The first large steel plate was lifted about one metre before it collapsed in a cloud of oxidised flakes of metal, leaving the water filled with an impenetrable fog of silt and minute debris.

The shark, watching from the cover of the rocks, retreated nervously.

The slight current soon cleared the water and the divers returned to their task. After two and a half hours the next shift of divers was lowered to the wreck.

“I think you should carry on working away at the middle section. I suspect that we're very close to the sub's pressure hull,” John advised.

“OK, see you later,” was all Hal said as he moved with the others into the site.

Progress was slow and it was two more days before they reached the submarine's pressure hull and discovered, that at that point at least, it was still intact.

w

Dick had agreed originally to act as ferryboat but after Dick's call confirming that the Golden Lily men were going to attempt some kind of search for the gold. Alex converted his role into “”. Dick, fired both by the generous fee proposed and the excitement of playing a more important role in the actual dive operation, enthusiastically agreed.

Fortunately, earlier that morning he had persuaded Annie to stay ashore and with his friend's family. This meant that she would be safe and out of harm's way.

“Running stores in all weathers back and forth to the divers is not the best place for the child,” he'd convinced her earlier.

On the run back to shore at the end of the first evening, he decided to stop and refuel at the little fishing village just south of Manila - it would save him a few miles and the fuel was a bit cheaper.

He didn't spot the three powerboats at first; it was the men loitering on the quay that alerted his attention. He pulled up to the fuelling berth as a wizened old man appeared from a shack near the rusting pump. Dick nudged the boat gently against the coir fenders and grabbed the mooring line.

“Hello there,” the old man greeted him cheerfully, “twice in one week; business must be good!”

Dick smiled as he unscrewed the fuel cap.

“It is and about time too - been lucky enough to get a couple of decent charters.”