LC 04 - Skeleton Crew

by Beverly Connor

  "Sure. When?"

  "I'm taking Harper out, I thought you might like to go. Bobbie, you want to be her partner?"

  "Sure. Where are we diving?"

  "Gray's Reef. The water's clear, and it's a good place to get a little diving time in. We'll go early in the morning."

  Lindsay stood and made her way across the barge and dumped her trash into a large barrel. The sun was setting and the darkness was coming quickly. The music had grown louder. A group of archaeologists were in one corner arguing with some of West's people about the disposition of the Kennewick Man. That was an argument she didn't want to get into. She turned and watched some couples dancing.

  "Care to dance? I heard you're good." It was Francisco Lewis.

  There weren't many division heads who could pull off dancing rock-and-roll without looking ridiculous, but Lewis was one of them. He was a good dancer. After a minute or two, more couples joined in, including Harper and Trey. She and Lewis danced one more, then walked over to the side of the boat.

  "Trey tells me you found out some interesting things about our skeleton." Lewis leaned with his forearms on the side of the boat and his hands clasped, staring out at the waves lapping at the barge.

  "Yes. I'll finish it up tomorrow afternoon. I'm going diving in the morning."

  "I'm glad you're enjoying this dig. I wanted you here rather than teaching."

  "Why?" Lindsay leaned against the railing with her back to the ocean and looked at the lights of the cofferdam.

  "Because of your broad range of experience with skeletal remains, and because of your imagination. This is the kind of site that requires imagination as well as knowledge."

  Lindsay wasn't sure she agreed with that, but she was glad to be here. "I am grateful to have been asked to come."

  Lewis was quiet for a moment, seeming to stare out at the horizon. As Lindsay started to leave, he turned around and spoke again. "I know you thought that Gerri Chapman was being brought in to replace you in the department, but that was never the case. If you had known me, you would have realized that. You see, most people think I'm only after the spotlight-and power. They're wrong. I also love good research, and I'm as curious about things as you are. I like to have people of ability-stars, if you will-around me."

  Lindsay looked over at him and laughed. The lights on the barge reflected in Lewis's dark eyes as he spoke about himself.

  "I admit that I like to be the brightest star, but it's no good being one if there aren't other bright stars in your constellation."

  "I'm not going to call you Cisco."

  When Lewis smiled, she fully expected to see the lights of the dam twinkle off his teeth.

  "No, I don't expect you would," he said and left to join the discussion about whether Kennewick Man was Indian or Caucasoid.

  Lindsay turned toward the ocean and looked out at the water. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of John West standing against the wall watching her. She walked over to him.

  "Care to dance?" she asked.

  "I don't dance," he said.

  "I can teach you." She held out her arms and he came forward. "Put your arm around my waist like this."

  He did and pulled her close. "Like this?"

  "That's it."

  "I can do this part well. It's the movement where I have trouble."

  "Then let me lead." Lindsay led a few steps and West followed. "See, that wasn't so bad."

  "It would be much better just to stand here like this."

  "No, I think once you get used to the movement, you'll like it better."

  "You may be right."

  They danced several more steps until the music stopped.

  "There's still some shrimp left. Have you eaten?" she asked.

  "I'm not hungry. I'd rather just relax here with you."

  The argument in the corner of who should be the rightful receiver of the ancient bones, the Native Americans or the archaeologists, grew louder. John and Lindsay looked over at them. She thought she heard Steven Nemo's voice saying something like, "That was nine thousand years ago. How do you know he wouldn't have been offended by their ceremonies as much as our analysis?" The response was lost to the sound of a wave.

  "Maybe we should go to the other end of the boat?" West said.

  I think that would be a good idea."

  They walked along the port side of the barge to the aft where the noise of the party became an indistinct mixture of sounds. The cofferdam stood beside them like an island, only nine feet above the water. The barge was anchored close so that a gangplank stretched across to the dock of the dam. They were so close that Lindsay could hear the pumps running.

  "Do the pumps always run?"

  The breeze from the land was chilly and Lindsay shivered.

  "Yes." From behind, John wrapped his arms around her.

  "What would happen if they stopped?"

  "The dam would fill back up with water. The ocean is very persistent. We have to maintain a constant expenditure of energy to keep it at bay. Don't worry. The dam is constantly guarded, and I have backup pumps."

  Lindsay shivered again, but this time from her thoughts.

  "The ocean wouldn't come gushing in, would it?"

  She felt his chest vibrate with a laugh.

  "No, even if the pumps stopped, it would fill very slowly. The only way the ocean would rush in is if there was a serious breach in both the inner and outer bulkheads, and we would discover any problem long before it got to that point. You have to trust the physics."

  "The whole thing is really quite magnificent. You should be very proud of it."

  "I am. The success of this dam is my future."

  John's body was a welcome warmth in the cool night air and she felt content just to let the moment last. She knew that something good was happening between her and John. She made a conscious effort not to think about how it would all end if they had a confrontation about Indian burials. That issue was a gulf between them that both of them ignored-but how long could that last, considering what she did for a living?

  It was two o'clock in the morning and most of the party had broken up when Lindsay made her way down the hallway to her cabin. Somewhere she had made a wrong turn, for when she opened the door to what she thought was her room and flipped the light switch, the glow illuminated a room filled with computer equipment, wallpapered with maps, and cluttered with data-filled notebooks. She turned to go and met Nate coming through the door.

  "Well, this is a nice surprise."

  "I appear to be lost," she said.

  "Well, damn. I thought maybe you came to change my bandage."

  "This looks like a command center." She gestured to the trappings.

  "My dissertation. Want a Cook's tour?" He grinned like a kid.

  "Sure."

  Nate stepped in and turned on his computer. "I'm developing a computer simulation of ocean wind and currents. Look." He pointed to a map. "This is a map of the major ocean currents and wind directions-the blue lines are the currents, the red is wind." The map had several others hanging behind it, which he flipped through. "There are seasonal differences and drifts over decades." He turned his head as if to see if she was paying attention. "We've collected oceanographic data for the past hundred years. The Spanish archives have quite a bit of data from the past and I've recorded those as well."

  "What are you doing with it?"

  "Right now, developing a model to predict where to find shipwrecks. Watch." He sat down at the computer and punched keys on his computer and started putting in data. "Say it was reported that a ship went down in 1770 off the coast of Georgia, and we find some artifacts but not the ship. Knowing what the ocean conditions were at that time and what they are now, I can come up with several possibilities of where to find her. Or"-he raised a hand before she spoke-"if we have some idea where she sank, I can use the same variables to figure where she may have drifted to."

  "That's an awful lot of variables," said Lindsay.

 
"Yes, that's what makes it so difficult. And I don't have complete data. I received a lot from the archives of seafaring countries, a bunch more from sea floor core drilling that's really good."

  Lindsay picked up an open notebook filled with what looked like map data points. "And you put all those numbers into the computer?"

  "Yes, and a lot of other data about the relative energy of a particular spot on the ocean floor."

  "I'm not good with computers, but doesn't that take a lot of memory?"

  "You bet it does. It's another reason that the biology people are pissed at us. You know Easterall, the biologist?"

  "Sure do. The would-be Nobel Prize winner whom UGA got by building him a new research facility and buying a state-of-the-art supercomputer."

  Nate grinned wickedly. "Don't you just love celebrity faculty? The supercomputer was supposed to be for all research faculty to use, of course," he said.

  "Yeah, sure," said Lindsay. "If you can get time on it."

  "Precisely. Easterall hogged all the time, filling it up with his rain forest data-which I have to admit, is a worthwhile project."

  True, thought Lindsay, but in the meantime, all the other faculty who had massive amounts of data to analyze had to take a back seat. Lindsay knew part of Easterall's work was here on St. Magdalena, but she really didn't know what his people did here.

  "What did you do to make him mad?" Lindsay asked.

  "Not me"-Nate looked at her innocently-"Cisco. Here have a seat." He pulled out a chair.

  Lindsay sat down, a hint of a smile playing around her lips. Having been indefinitely put on hold herself for only a few hours of computer time she had requested a couple of years ago, she was interested to hear what Lewis had been up to since he arrived at UGA.

  "Cisco," continued Nate, "turns out to be a better politician. He really is good. Have you ever seen him work?"

  Lindsay shook her head.

  "He gets everything done before he even meets formally with the university bigwigs. He starts with politicians, businessmen, and alumni. He shows them numbers-how many people he's going to put to work, and how he can make it pay, and how we are doing something no other state but Texas has done. When he has their support, he meets with university officials. By then, it's almost a done deal." Nate's grin broadened. "All he needs is some initial financial support to go along with the private money he's already raised, and a whole lot of computer time. The upshot of it is, I get to plug my data into the supercomputer and Easterall has to wait."

  Lindsay laughed out loud. "I'll bet he hated that."

  "He's still fuming. He's got those guys over at St. Magdalena spying for him. The fax machine gets so much use, I'm surprised it hasn't gone up in smoke. We kind of like to feed them rumors to keep 'em going."

  "I see. That's where the story came from that Lewis is going to make St. Magdalena a theme park."

  "You got it. That was my idea. Carolyn had a friend slip the idea to one of the graduate students in Botany, and she faxed it to Tessa."

  Lindsay closed her eyes and shook her head. At least they weren't putting whipped cream in one another's shoes. "You know, you might make the poor woman stroke out."

  "No, we're just aiming for them to look like fools."

  "Is there that much animosity?"

  Nate sobered for a moment and nodded his head. "What do you think? We needed a lot of space and had to build the warehouse for the ship timbers. Cisco arranged to have the biology people moved into less than half the building space they had before we came, and shack up at the ranger station so Harper and some of the other crew could have their apartments. He especially wanted Harper to work at the site, so he arranged to get the largest suite for her."

  "I can see why Tessa was so upset by the thought that I might be moving in." Lindsay stood up and yawned. "I need to find my way back. This has been an interesting conversation. Your work is fascinating. I'll look forward to reading your dissertation."

  "I'm pretty excited about it. There's a lot of applications it can be put to besides archaeology." He got up, closed the door and pointed to a schematic of the ship. "That's the barge. We are here." He pointed to a room. "You are here, with Bobbie, right?" Lindsay nodded. "Always become familiar with a ship you're in, especially if you plan to do any wreck diving. Always know how the wreck is oriented. You'll find one of these maps behind your door as well."

  Lindsay didn't plan to do any wreck diving, but she thanked him for the advice. As she walked down the narrow hallways, she realized that the silver galleon was the wreck Nate was going to find with his program. All he needed was the sea floor location of some artifacts from the galleon or some idea where she sank. And that's why Lewis got so much support for the project. You show anyone credible evidence that you can find a billion dollars' worth of treasure and you have their attention. What's the rain forest or the Nobel Prize compared to that? For the first time ever, Lindsay felt sympathy for Easterall and his students. They had reason to be angry. Further, there's no way a secret can be kept about a sunken galleon loaded with that much gold, silver, and jewels. Someone had to have told Eva Jones. Lindsay knew it.

  Bobbie was already asleep when Lindsay climbed in her bunk and pulled the covers over her. She drifted off to sleep, then abruptly awoke and sat up. She realized that Hardy Denton purposefully bid too low because he wanted to be sure to win. He was to have been Jones's spy at the dig, to keep her informed about what the archaeologists found and what they knew. No wonder he was so angry. Lindsay lay back down with an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  Chapter 12

  THE FINAL RESTING place of the Estrella de Espana was under five feet of sand and silt, deep in the middle of a vast sandy desert on the ocean floor in part of the featureless plain that makes up most of the sea bottom along the coast of Georgia. Rising out of the floor of this ocean desert is a seventeen-square-mile limestone oasis known as Gray's Reef. The flat troughs and rugged overhangs carved in the rock of the reef are home to a lush and colorful sea life, including sea fans, yellow colonial anemone, red sponges, loggerhead turtles, sharks, whales, and an amazing variety of fish.

  But twelve thousand years ago, when glaciers tied up significantly more water than today, the coastline extended almost sixty miles farther out to sea from where it is now, and Gray's Reef was dry land. Instead of the ocean forest, this place was a terrestrial home to Paleo-Indians, the Indians who fashioned chert Clovis points for their spears and hunted megafauna.

  So far in the excavation of the sea bottom around the ship, none of the seventeen bone fragments and fossils found could be linked directly back to Paleo-Indians. The fragments were small, but sometimes small remains tell big stories.

  Gray's Reef would be Lindsay's deepest dive-seventy feet, nothing to an experienced diver, but a deep dive for her. She went off the boat backward into the water. It was cool and refreshing, but not cold. She liked the water, but she was a surface swimmer. Diving still made her heart race. Once in the water, she oriented herself facing Trey, Harper, and John West. Lindsay was pleased that John had talked Bobbie and Gina into staying with the boat and letting him be Lindsay's buddy for the dive.

  They set a reference on their compass so they could find their way back to the boat and zeroed their timers and gauges. Trey set his global position indicator. Lindsay changed the snorkel for her regulator and moved her jaw back and forth to pressurize her ears. Trey pointed to her buoyancy compensator deflator valve, and she took it in her hand. Everyone was ready.

  Trey signaled the descent. Lindsay exhaled and vented her vest. She and the others started down, feetfirst, every few feet equalizing the pressure in their ears. The descent was Lindsay's least favorite part of a dive. In a way, it was like falling in slow motion, but not quite falling. Here buoyancy was a stronger force than gravity. It was hard to get down and stay down without help. It was like being in a place with new physical laws to cope with. After all, people were not made for the water. They cannot breathe it. Th
ey cannot withstand the pressure. They cannot stay submerged without help. It seemed forever before Trey gave the signal to level off just above the bottom.

  It was another world, a fantasy. This was the payoff for the long descent. Lindsay was a strong swimmer, and during her diving lessons she had discovered a talent for maneuvering underwater with fins. Here, balanced with the weights on her belt and the vestlike buoyancy compensator, she was suspended, free of gravity, free of drifting upward. Must be like flying, she thought.

  Lindsay swam through a school of fish that looked like shiny silver coins. An angelfish darted behind a vase sponge. Ahead, Trey pointed to a loggerhead sea turtle. Lindsay dived to take a closer look, wondering how old the huge reptile was. She and John hovered over its back. She touched the shell with the tips of her fingers, awed that any of its kind survived the ordeal of hatching in the sandy beach, running a gauntlet of birds to the water, and avoiding predator fish for the years it took to grow big enough to stop being prey.

  They investigated nooks and crannies, pointing out anything beautiful or interesting. Harper was startled by an eel languishing in a deep recess. A tiger fish brushed Lindsay's arm. She would have liked to see a whale, but they came to these waters only in the winter.

  She checked her watch. They had been down fifteen minutes already. The time went so fast. They came upon an expanse of sand, like a valley carved in the limestone. Lindsay signaled to John that she was going to look inside an overhang. He nodded and motioned that he was going to swim overhead and look at the top of the overhang. Lindsay examined the sandy floor, brushed it with her fingers, letting loose a fog of sediment. She swam to the other side, resolving to look and not muddy the waters.

  Ahead of her, she thought she saw something-a curve in the pattern of rocky sediment. She swam to it, brushed away the sand, clouding the water again. She reached and found the object but was unable to see it in the sediment-filled water. She slipped it into a zippered pocket, then glanced up and realized she couldn't see in any direction through the clouded water that had enveloped her, and didn't know which way to swim. She panicked and grabbed at her belt for her flashlight. Unable to see or to think clearly what she was doing, she mistakenly tugged at the buckle, loosening the belt, and her weights slipped from her waist, into the murky water. Suddenly and quickly, as if having pushed a button in an elevator, she was moving upward.