Sam looked at the map in a new light. Suddenly everything made more sense. The unnamed ship marked on the map was the CSS Mississippi and all the topographical locations were noted in relation to the ship. “Find the ship and we find the gold.”
“Right.”
“But no one’s been able to find the ship. Maybe they burned it?”
“No. After they buried the gold, they headed north into Saskatchewan. But the environment was lethal to the unprepared men of the ironclad -- almost all of whom were Southerners, used to the warm weather of the Southern States. It was the end of summer.
“As winter approached, the temperature dropped quickly. The bulk were killed off quickly from an attack by a local Sioux tribe. Those few who escaped, later died from a mixture of starvation, hypothermia, bear attacks, and rattle snakes.”
“But someone survived as you know this story?” Sam said.
“Yes. Two people. An Irishman named Robert Murphy and a Southern landowner named William Chestnut. They agreed to split the gold between them. The Great Sioux War finally ended in 1877.”
“But neither could find the gold?” Sam asked.
“No. They had the map, but never saw the CSS Mississippi again.”
Sam smiled, staring at the map. “Are you going to tell us how you know all this?”
David grinned. “Because, for more than a century my family has searched for the wealth of the Confederate treasury. The gold that my great, great, grandfather, William Chestnut, helped bury.”
Chapter Fifty
Sam watched what had to be a ten-pound walleye jump out of the lake, silver flashing, making a splash in the still water. He turned back to the fire and asked, “If this treasure has been buried since 1863 and Jack Holman spotted it back in the 1930s, what’s everyone been doing for the past nine decades?”
“Why didn’t my grandfather find it?”
“Yeah.”
David said, “Because he didn’t have Holman’s journal.”
“Sure, but neither did you until yesterday. So, what changed three weeks ago, that sent everything into catastrophic motion?”
David’s thick brow narrowed in a way similar to his father’s. “You’ve already dived the J.F. Johnson, so I’m assuming you know about the Meskwaki Gold Spring and my family’s dark past?”
“Yeah. Your grandfather, Stanford stole the tunnel from the previous group of rumrunners after Al Capone was indicted.”
“Yeah, my father became a lawyer and went on to become the legal arm of the family business. Bright and motivated, he was appointed District Attorney in Minnesota by the time he was thirty-five. He then ruthlessly targeted any other organized crime enterprises throughout the region, getting a name for himself as an honest man, making the State safe for families, business, and the lives of its citizens.”
“Taking off from the perfect runway into politics, he became a senator.”
“Right.”
“Did you enter the family business?”
“No. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no angel. It was simply a case that by the time I came along, the Perry family were already wealthy and powerful in their own right. There was no need for me to enter the illegitimate part of the business.”
“So you got to… what? Enjoy your life?”
“Something like that.” David smiled. “That much you know. William Chestnut’s son, Stanford, moved to Minnesota and entered the bootlegging business, later turning to full-blown organized crime, shipping various forms of contraband. Robert Murphy’s family remained in Saskatchewan. There, the Murphy’s started a small crime empire. By the time Prohibition came into effect in the US, Murphy’s son, Rory, had set up a distillery and was mass producing rum.
“By the time Stanford entered the game, Rory was already the head of a dangerous and powerful family. Through their mutual fatherly connections, the two men became business partners. Stanford grew jealous, as the Murphy family always seemed to be more successful.”
Sam tilted his head. “A bitter feud erupted between the families?”
“Yes, but not only that, Stanford became obsessed with the buried Confederate gold and determined to beat Rory to it.”
Sam took that in. “Stanford died years ago, and Rory must have, too. So who is your family still quarrelling with?”
“The head of the Murphy’s family is now a woman named Rachel. Three weeks ago, she came to my father, certain that he knew where the gold was. The Murphy scion threatened to reveal everything about our family’s dark past unless he handed over the location of Jack Holman’s wreck.”
“Why would she think your father would know that?”
“Because my grandfather, Stanford, murdered Jack Holman. Stanford knew that Holman worked for the Murphy’s, and if he wanted to steal the operation running out of the Meskwaki Gold Spring, he would need to remove Holman from the equation. After sinking the aircraft into Dog Lake to hide the evidence, he realized that in doing so, he buried the only link to the Confederate treasury. To protect my father and myself – not to mention to end this century old feud – I set about trying to locate the damned treasure before Rachel Murphy reveals everything.”
“How did your father attempt to deal with her?”
“By blackmailing her, of course. She has deep ties with a New York crime syndicate. My dad was a powerful, cunning man. Years earlier, he had assisted with the appointment of the New York District Attorney. The man owed him big time. My dad had him keep tabs on her illegal connection to organized crime, without ever arresting her for it.”
“Your dad wanted full control.”
“Right. So when he saw the note you brought up about Stanford stealing the Meskwaki Gold Spring, my father saw it as a threat that she was going to try and take over his business. He headed to New York to set things in motion, but she must have had him killed first.”
Sam recalled the young, vivacious Senator who had replaced Senator Arthur Perry. She looked stunning. It was hard to imagine her being a brutal killer. “You know that Rachel Murphy was the Gubnatorial appointee to replace your father at the Minnesotan Senate?”
David took a deep breath. His face hardened, his eyes filled with defiance. “She’s won everything – but won’t stop there. As Senator, she now has the power to destroy me. I have to find that gold, before more lives are ruined.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Crosby Municipal Airport – North Dakota
The six-seat, high-performance, single-engine, Cessna Centurion 210, took off on runway 30.
At the controls, Sam angled the aircraft for its maximum rate of climb, leveling out at five thousand feet, and setting a course due east. Despite being summer, the air was cold and dense, making the controls sharp and responsive. Next to him, Tom made notes and inserted coordinates into the search grid. In the rear two seats, Virginia and David stared out the windows, maintaining a visual vigil in case they happened to pass directly over the top of the remains of the Confederate ironclad.
The familiar hum of the aircraft’s Continental engine and the low level sibilant whine of the breeze on the fuselage of the small plane filled Sam with the feeling of happiness and home that only three things could give him. Flying, sailing, and diving. He thought of David Perry and considered how perhaps they weren’t so different in their tastes.
He looked over his shoulder, back at Tom and Virginia and felt grateful for his time in the military, and for all he had learned before he left the marines. He could see their toughness, mental calm, and physical agility and was glad to have them as his friends. He knew that the experiences and challenges they had faced together had shaped him as a person and was sure it was the same for them.
He could just as easily have lived in his father’s shadow in the business world and had an easy life. David Perry did, and Sam considered how David seemed to hate his father for it, never having a good relationship. Sam Reilly was always his own man. For that, his father had admired and respected him.
“Where did you
get this plane again?” Tom asked, leaning over.
“A friend of mine owns it,” Sam answered as casually as he would if someone lent him their car to go to the local store.
“Really?” David asked, betraying a hint of incredulity. “And I thought my dad had rich connections. You just borrowed a friend’s plane?”
“Ira runs an aerial survey business up here in North Dakota now,” Sam said, as though that answered everything.
Virginia said, “You really don’t have to play by the same rules as the rest of us, do you?” Her eyes turned toward David. “You don’t count either, your family ran an organized crime syndicate for close to nine decades and everyone owes your father something.”
David shrugged. It was a reasonable point, and there was no need to argue against it.
Sam set the trim, so that the aircraft naturally remained straight and level. It was the same way you set the sails on a yacht. His eyes glanced at Virginia over his shoulder. She had a mischievous grin on her face and shook her head at him.
“I met Ira down South after Katrina. He was flying sorties mapping hurricane damage for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and I was running logistics for Homeland. We had a few beers together, found stuff in common. He said if I was ever up North to look him up.”
“And this is his Cessna?” she asked.
“It’s a Cessna Centurion, modified for survey. From here, I can scroll through the monitor to view digital video, LIDAR, infrared and gamma electromagnetic remote sensing and readouts for electromagnetic and gravity.”
“It’s already all systems go.” Tom said, having already switched the machine on, recording both digital video and LIDAR.
“What’s LIDAR?” Virginia asked Tom.
Tom leaned over his shoulder to talk to her. “It’s like radar only it uses pulses of light instead. Radar uses radio waves, sonar uses sound waves, LIDAR uses light. It’s used in cars with assisted braking and lane keeping tech, and for surveys. It’s good for us because the structure of a boat in this environment will stand out on the light spectrum compared to the wilderness.”
“Holman had to divert south around here for a squall for two hours, which was when he noted seeing the wreck of the ironclad,” Sam said. “Elise has done the numbers, isolating an area of 500 square miles of uninhabited National Park, and there’s not much there for anyone to visit. There are little estuaries that run off the river all over the place throughout, so there’s plenty of places the ship could have ended up high and dry. Those river boats hardly drew anything, so it could be anywhere depending on the rainfall that year.”
“Wouldn’t someone have noticed it from the air since then?” Virginia asked. “Surely planes have been over here since the 1920s.”
“I’m guessing it must not be visible from the air anymore, but the LIDAR will penetrate the foliage of trees and give us a better chance of finding anything,” Sam answered.
“I’m setting a standard north-south grid trawl plan for us on the GPS,” Tom said.
“Got it,” said Sam, finding and switching on the display unit. He dialed up the brightness.
Tom said, “Its gyro mounted to adjust for speed, pitch, and yaw so just stick on the yellow line.”
“Understood,” said Sam.
Tom scrolled through the specifications screen on the monitor in front of him. “It’s got an inertial measurement unit built in, which will talk to the data recorder and give us exact latitude and longitude of anything we find. Your friend’s old Cessna has a few tricks up its sleeve!”
“Like I said, Ira’s a good guy. And I figure if Homeland Security contracts this little plane, I’m sure it will be good enough to find a lost boat in the woods.”
After three hours, they had covered the designated search area. The LIDAR had produced a couple of log cabins, and a disused ranger’s station that looked to have been mostly burned down in a forest fire at some point, but no boat.
“We’ve got about an hour’s fuel left Tom, what do you think?” Sam asked
“I think Elise had to be wrong about something eventually, who knew?” Tom answered with a broad smile, unperturbed as always.
“I think we can short-cut back from here if we take a north-east heading around that knot of hills down there.”
“Copy that,” Tom nodded. “I’ll look back over the footage and make sure I didn’t miss anything.”
Sam rolled the Cessna in a wide turn and set a new course on a bearing just outside of the designated search zone. The four rode in silence, wondering what they would do next.
It was at that exact moment the LIDAR sensor blipped.
“Oh man!” Tom shouted. “Have a look at this!”
Sam’s eyes darted toward the LIDAR display monitor. An unmistakable shape of a pyramid stood atop the hull of a large ship. The image could have been of anything, but Sam was as certain he’d found the CSS Mississippi than as he would be if the LIDAR screen had located its nameplate.
A grin reached his lips. “Well done, everyone. We’re about to get to the bottom of a hundred and sixty-year-old mystery.”
Tom dropped an electronic pin on the map readout from the scanner, and checked the GPS reading on his watch to verify the coordinates – writing them down. The four occupants of the plane eagerly craned out the port side window of the tiny aircraft. Each tried to visualize what the wing-mounted sensor had picked up, but all they could see was the verdant green foliage of the thick woods below.
“Got it marked?” Sam asked, his face beaming with delight at his friend.
Tom matched his grin. “You bet.”
Sam searched the map, locating a level meadow about three miles to the west. “I’m going to try to put us down in a relatively flat field to the west of here. Who’s ready to go for a hike?”
Chapter Fifty-Two
The only available landing site turned out to be closer to a five-mile trek from the suspected shipwreck. Sam studied his hand-held GPS and plotted a course. There was no vehicle access anywhere nearby, and it turned out to be roughly a two-hour hike to reach.
Sam, Tom, Virginia and David made the trip on foot, slogging down thickly wooded, low hills, which they followed to a large flatland with densely forested marshes. The trio’s desert boots sunk into the swampy ground, and the foliage became nearly impenetrable the closer they got to the final resting place of the ship. They were pushing through virgin scrub with no sign of mankind anywhere to be seen.
Insects bit them and buzzed in their ears. It was midsummer, and they were feeling every degree of the hot and humid wetlands. Their progress was reduced by trying to slog over the soft, uneven terrain. The stilled air was thick with birdcalls of ducks and water-fowl.
Sam wished they’d come closer and eat all the bugs that were attacking him.
“I still can’t believe Elise was finally wrong about something!” Tom said as he held up a branch for the rest of them to clamber under.
“Well, she wasn’t off by much” Sam replied. “She probably couldn’t find any accurate estimates of what the prairie potholes did that year.”
“Prairie potholes?” Tom asked.
“What we’re in. They’re the areas of low lying land across the northern states cut by glaciers ten thousand years ago. The glaciers scarred the land and left potholes known as kettles that hold water in the springtime each year. They support most of the agriculture up here ---in some places farmers rely entirely on them. The thing is though, between winter snowmelts, river estuaries and annual rainfall differences, who can say where water collected from year to year?”
It took nearly two hours before they reached the base of a small ravine. The climb up the canyon was a hundred feet of loose rocks and soft, earth-sliding hell.
Reaching the crest first, Virginia turned around and shouted, “Didn’t you say the CSS Mississippi was an ironclad?”
Sam felt doubt rise like bile in his throat. “Yeah, why?”
“I hate to say this, but I think we’ve
found the wrong shipwreck.”
“What are you talking about?” Sam asked.
He immediately picked up his pace to the peak, until he could clearly see down into the gorge below. Sam kicked an innocent bush, cursing in a low, muffled voice. Right there below him, was a dilapidating paddle steamer from 150 years ago…
Chapter Fifty-Three
Sam ran his eyes across the old paddle steamer. To the right of him, Tom shook his head with a combination of amusement, disappointment, and astonishment. “Well, would you look at that?” Tom’s booming laughter filled the air.
“Yeah, I’m looking.” Sam growled.
A paddle steamer? Really?
The damned thing looked like it belonged popped right out of an old western movie. Sam half expected the sound of an antique player piano to start playing honkytonk, envisioning a few cowboys sitting around a table with a deck of cards, reeking of tobacco and strong whiskey. The ship had three decks layered like a birthday cake. In ascending order from water level: he noted what constituted the main deck, the boiler deck, and the hurricane.
A series of old boxes lined the main deck where freight had once been stored. The boiler deck looked like it contained the cabins. The pilothouse jutted from the hurricane deck, in what Sam recalled the old-timers refer to as the Texas.
Twin smoke stacks rose amidships; once they carried sparks away from the ship’s powerful boilers. Like other steamboats of its era, it had been painted white, with a red stern paddle wheel. The paint had faded, and in most places, had been stripped by the sun. Otherwise, it looked like it belonged in a museum of a bygone period of the far west Missouri River.
A small forest of Hybrid Polar, American Elm, and Flowering Dogwood trees surrounded the vessel as though by purpose, creating a canopy through which the paddle steamer had been hidden for probably some 150 or more years. A few Eastern Redbud’s, still in full blossom, were growing from within the ship.
David stumbled to the top, bent over to catch his breath. “What’s the problem?” he asked.
The Ironclad Covenant Page 20
