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“We got a hit!”
Dane Maddock looked away from the view through the forward windscreen—a vast, limitless expanse of deep sapphire blue water, dazzling in the afternoon sun—and over to the console where his friend Corey Dean sat hunched over the display of a laptop computer. Before Maddock could ask Corey to elaborate, the imposing six-and-a-half-foot tall form of Maddock’s partner and soon-to-be brother-in-law, Uriah “Bones” Bonebrake, appeared in the doorway behind him.
“Did we find it?” Bones asked, eagerly.
“Not sure what we found,” Corey said, peering at the screen. “It’s big.”
“That’s what she said,” Bones quipped.
Corey studied the image a few seconds longer, then leaned back with a disappointed sigh. “But it’s not big enough.”
“That’s what she said to Maddock,” Bones said.
Maddock, who had long ago developed an immunity to his friend’s off-color put downs, heard the note of disappointment in Bones’ voice. “What are we looking at, Corey?”
Corey turned the screen so Maddock could see it from the helm station. The image was orange and grainy, a computer-generated visual interpretation of sound waves bouncing off the sea floor. To an untrained eye, it looked like so much static, but Maddock had seen enough side-scan sonar profiles to recognize the straight lines of a manmade object. Corey however was the expert.
“It’s in several pieces. Whatever it was broke up before it reached the bottom. This largest piece is what got my attention. It’s long and narrow—”
Maddock leveled a finger at Bones. “Don’t say it.”
Bones just kept grinning.
“I’d say about a hundred feet in length,” Corey said. “The Waratah was five hundred feet long. There’s not enough debris to indicate a ship that large.”
Maddock stared at the image intently. “Judging by the shape, I’d be more inclined to say we’re looking at an aircraft. Anything like that on the charts?”
“Let me check.” Corey tapped in a few commands, then managed a hopeful grin. “Nope. We’re the first to record anything here.”
‘Here’ was the waters of the continental shelf about two hundred miles off the tip of South Africa. Maddock and his treasure-hunting crew—Bones and Corey, along with Willis Sanders and Matt Barnaby—were plying the waters of the southern hemisphere aboard his 80-foot motor yacht Sea Foam, halfway around the world from their usual stomping grounds in the Atlantic, to investigate the almost legendary disappearance of the S.S. Waratah.
In 1909, the Waratah, a five-hundred-foot-long cargo-liner with 211 passengers and crew aboard, had left Durban for Cape Town, on its way to London, and promptly vanished. Subsequent searches for the missing ship had only deepened the mystery.
Early on, it was believed that the Waratah was still afloat, abandoned and adrift, but extremely high seas prevented Royal Navy search vessels from entering the area where the ship was thought to be. Ten days later, the Australian government received a cable notifying them that a ship believed to be the Waratah had been spotted, steaming toward Durban, but that ship, whatever it was, never reached port. Three days after that, two different ships reported seeing bodies in the water near the mouth of a river two hundred miles southwest of Durban, but none were positively identified as passengers from the missing vessel. In 1912, a life-preserver with the name of the ship washed up in New Zealand, and thirteen years after that, a pilot flying over the same section of coast reported a wreck that he believed was the Waratah. Subsequent attempts to locate the wreck had failed to produce anything remotely definitive, but despite, or perhaps because of those failures, the quest to find the Waratah had taken on an almost mythic quality. Some had taken to calling it Australia’s Titanic.
Maddock thought it was a fool’s errand, but a wealthy action-adventure novelist with a passion for finding lost shipwrecks had come to him with a lucrative contract to conduct yet another search for the legendary vessel, this time in open water rather than along the coast where all previous expeditions had focused their attention. It was an offer Maddock couldn’t reasonably refuse. Even if the search yielded no results, which was the most probable outcome, it was a valuable connection that might lead to other, more rewarding expeditions.
Now it seemed, the deal had produced some unexpected, if unrelated fruit.
“Finding the Waratah was always a long shot, but maybe we can solve another maritime mystery that slipped through the cracks.” He pulled the throttle controls back, reversing the screws. “Might as well get some pictures before we go.”
Bones grinned. “I’ll get Uma prepped.”
Uma was Bones’ nickname for their ROV—remotely operated underwater vehicle. Although Maddock and Bones, along with their fellow crewman Willis Sanders, were all former Navy SEALs and experienced divers, there were limits to what they could accomplish with SCUBA equipment. Uma could go places that they simply could not. Places like the ocean floor nearly half-a-mile beneath Sea Foam’s hull.
By the time Maddock had the boat positioned above the location Corey had identified, Bones was ready to put Uma in the water. The little submersible was equipped with a high-resolution digital video camera and a powerful searchlight, but there was very little to see during the descent. The screen displaying Uma’s video feed remained an unchanging black, so Maddock kept his eye on the horizon. The seas were thankfully calm, but the area they were in, at the boundary between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, was known for rogue waves, one of which had probably been responsible for sinking the Waratah. Conditions under the water would be even more challenging since the collision of oceans created extraordinarily strong submerged currents. Bones was uncharacteristically subdued, focused intently on piloting Uma into the depths.
It took about fifteen minutes for the little submersible to reach the bottom and another five to locate the wreck. Maddock now turned his attention to the video screen, watching as Uma’s searchlight and camera revealed the submerged landscape. The sea floor was uniformly flat and everything was a dull beige, the color of sediment. Then, with almost no warning, the wreck appeared.
“As usual, Maddock,” Bones announced. “You were half-right,”
Maddock saw immediately what his friend meant. Although lightly dusted by an accretion of sediment, there was no mistaking what they were looking at: not one, but two airplane fuselages, though it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The aircraft were entangled like conjoined twins.
Corey shook his head in disbelief. “How did that happen?”
“Probably a mid-air collision,” Maddock said. “Looks like the smaller plane almost took the tail off the bigger one.”
Bones moved Uma in closer, revealing broken struts and the stubs where the wings had been sheared off. The smaller plane was about one-third the size of the other, and appeared to have been a biplane with an open cockpit. The larger aircraft actually did look more like a ship at first glance, with a wide-body that seemed better suited to riding on the high seas than cruising at high altitude, but part of one wing remained attached, complete with a single engine nacelle, sprouting three twisted propeller blades.
“Talk about a blast from the past,” Corey said. “Those are vintage. How old do you think they are?”
Maddock shook his head. “Hard to say. Bones, try blowing some of that silt away. See if you can find any identifying marks.”
Bones brought the ROV in even closer, until it was practically sitting in the crumpled cockpit of the smaller biplane, then turned it around and hit the thrusters, sending out a blast of water that stirred up the sediment. Uma shot away, but Bones quickly brought her back around and shone the spotlight into the cloud rising above the wreck. It only took a few minutes for the current to sweep away the sediment, revealing the instrument panel and old-fashioned stick controls. There were actually two seats in the cockpit, but both were empty. Either the crew had bailed out before the crash, or their bones had long since dissolved away.
Seeing nothing distinctive enough to make an identification of the aircraft, Bones pulled Uma back and then cautiously piloted her through the gaping hole in the top of the larger plane’s fuselage.
Maddock felt a chill as the bulkheads comprising the plane’s interior seemed to close around him. Unlike the cockpit of the smaller biplane, this felt much more like a place where men had died, sealed into a coffin for burial at sea. The interior reminded him a little of the cargo bay of a modern military transport plane, which perhaps contributed to his sense of foreboding. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but he felt strangely anxious, and had to resist the urge to tell Bones to back away.
Uma moved down the length of the cargo bay, the camera scanning every shadowy corner for anything that might help identify the aircraft but as with the smaller plane, there were no distinguishing features.
“Might as well wrap it up,” Maddock said. “We can get some more exterior shots and send them to Jimmy. Maybe he can do some computer magic and get us a positive ID.”
If anyone could identify the wrecked airplanes from photographs, it was Maddock’s old pal Jimmy Letson. Jimmy was both an ace investigative reporter and a computer whiz, and frequently helped Maddock out with research into subjects ranging from ancient shipwrecks to diabolical global conspiracies.
“Wait a sec,” Bones said, backing Uma up and tilting her down a few degrees. “Look at that.”
The image on the screen showed a misshapen triangle, made of what appeared to be black metal, lying on the deck, partly buried in silt.
“What is that?” Corey said. “A piece of the propeller?”
“It looks more like an axe head,” Maddock said. “The wooden handle probably rotted away.”
“Close.” Bones brought the ROV in even closer until the object almost filled up the screen. “It’s a tomahawk.”
Maddock glanced over at his friend, skeptically. “You’re sure?”
“Trust me on this, kemosabe.”
Maddock almost regretted having raised the question. Bones, a Cherokee Indian, was not likely to make a mistake about that.
Bones traced the outline of the object on the screen. “You can tell by the curve of the blade, and this spike on the back end. They don’t really make ‘em like that anymore.”
“What I mean is, what’s a tomahawk doing on an old airplane off the coast of South Africa?”
“Looks like there’s an engraving on it,” Corey said, peering at the close-up. “Can’t make out what it says. A name maybe? And that looks like a date on the bottom. Nineteen-fifty-eight. Wow. You’re right, Bones. That is old.”
Maddock stared at the screen for a minute. “That’s not a nine. It’s a seven. Seventeen-fifty-eight.”
Corey looked again, wide-eyed. “Holy crap.”
Maddock nodded. “I think we should bring it up.”