Splashdown

by David Wood

  Dane nodded. He’d always been fascinated by the space race and the Apollo moon missions in particular.

  “But the unofficial agenda of that mission is why you’re here today. As I said, the U.S. was looking to use the fourth Mercury mission as a message to the world, and in particular the Soviets, that America was the preeminent space power. But beyond that, the Kennedy Administration had something up their sleeve.”

  Dane looked away from the photo of Grissom and the capsule on screen to gauge the faces of the other men. All of them appeared dead-serious, almost grimly determined. Dane saw the Admiral eye the General and lift a hand in his direction from where it had been resting on the table. Stop.

  The Admiral took over. “Liberty Bell 7 carried a as part of her payload a small nuclear bomb.”

  Dane gave a low whistle. For a few seconds the only sound was the rumble of the jet’s engines as they cut through the evening sky.

  The Admiral spoke up again. “We can't tell you why that device was on board, so don't ask.”

  The General nodded and then resumed his talk by clicking to the next slide.

  “This shot was taken from a U.S. Navy air craft carrier, and shows Gus Grissom treading water while the Liberty capsule is flooding. Poor ol’ Gus was blamed for the rest of his career and even afterwards for accidentally blowing the explosive hatch bolts prematurely.”

  Dane could almost hear Bones’ gears churning to put out a dirty joke, but the loquacious Indian seemed to realize he’d pushed right up to the edge with his earlier question, and he remained silent along with the rest of the room.

  “But the truth is, he did it on purpose. He did it to sink that capsule because of what it contained on board: an unexploded nuclear bomb that no one was supposed to know about,” the General interjected once again, reading the questions apparent on the SEALs’ faces. “The reason the bomb was never detonated, and that no one has ever heard of a nuclear weapon aboard a U.S. spacecraft, was because of Gus Grissom. Once he was in space, apparently he got cold feet and refused to carry out his orders. He got scared or something. The psychologists still aren’t exactly sure—but the upshot of it was that he absolutely would not cooperate to carry out the flight objective, making the working atmosphere non-conducive to completing the mission.”

  “So instead,” the Admiral resumed, “it was arranged that NASA would announce they had successfully completed a short sub-orbital hop that just happened to have a little glitch on splashdown. They carried a few ordinary science experiments aboard, nothing special.”

  Sardowski made his voice heard for the first time since the briefing began. “The end result of all this is that the A-bomb is still resting inside the capsule on the ocean floor,” he stated. “And until now that hasn’t posed much of a problem. Back in 1961, deliberately sinking that capsule was a good move if you didn't want it to be found. Undersea salvage capabilities were far behind what’s needed to raise the capsule. But in recent years that began to change, and very recently…” The CIA man paused to hit a key on his laptop, advancing the slide to one that showed the logo of a popular cable television network.

  “…the TV network, The Science Channel mounted a privately funded expedition to locate the spacecraft on the ocean floor. Interestingly enough, for a while it looked like they would be unsuccessful, although they did find a wreck of another sort— one that historians agree is most likely a sixteenth-century Spanish treasure ship.”

  “And that find has a lot of unwanted attention converging on the area,” the General chimed in.

  “Yes,” the Admiral said, “but since then the TV expedition succeeded in locating the capsule and have made a series of preliminary unmanned dives to it with a remotely operated vehicle. CIA intelligence shows that they are now on site preparing to make a serious attempt at raising Liberty Bell 7. They, of course, have no idea that a nuclear bomb rests inside that capsule.”

  The analyst clicked off the overhead monitor, casting the room a shade darker. The admiral spoke next, leveling a steely gaze at Dane and Bones.

  “And we have direct orders from the President of the United States to make certain it stays that way. We need you two to ensure that the network’s effort to raise the capsule is not successful. We need you to do this as quietly as possible. The optimal outcome would be for you to extract the nuclear payload from the capsule before anyone knows about it and bring it to us. Failing that, either destroy the bomb on the seafloor—without getting yourselves killed. Or, as a last resort…”

  The admiral trailed off, eyeing the CIA agent, who finished his sentence for him.

  “…make sure that the television expedition meets with an accident.”

  Chapter 3

  Atlantic Ocean, 288 miles off Cape Canaveral

  The fishing trawler F/V Atlantic Pride wasn’t much to look at. Steaming east at a leisurely cruising speed, the streaks of rust on her hull and the plume of black exhaust from her chugging diesel told a casual observer that this was a tired, aging workhorse of a boat, perhaps a couple of seasons away from the end of her useful life. This image was carefully chosen, however, in order to provide a rustic veneer over what was in fact a state-of-the-art special warfare platform for the U.S. Navy.

  Dane stood at the helm of the nondescript vessel while beside him in the wheelhouse Bones monitored the radar, sonar and chartplotters. Upon landing in Cape Canaveral, they’d been driven to Port Canaveral where they boarded the Atlantic Pride in the wee hours of the morning. They were then given a full tour of its layout, functionality and covert features by Captain Epson, who wished them “Godspeed” and left Dane and Bones on the vessel. The SEAL duo had the boat underway shortly after that, still under cover of darkness.

  Now early afternoon, they’d motored all day to reach this remote area of the Atlantic. After initially inspecting the boat’s engine compartment, Dane had expressed concern to Epson that it would take far too long to get three hundred miles offshore, but Epson had smiled and bent down to a concealed hatch cover overlain with a carefully placed application of grime. Lifting the cover, Epson had beamed while he pointed out a gleaming set of twin Volvo diesels. “Less than fifty hours on these things,” he’d said, explaining, “To get you out there fast, there’s a concealed switch on the instrument panel, underneath the weather fax. Flip that and you shut off the original engine and switch to the new twins. Just remember to switch back to the old when you approach the site, because you want to look like an old, slow fishing trawler, not something that can do forty knots all day long.”

  Both had appreciated the features of the old scow, including the redundancy of the three engines, as well as the other special features Epson had pointed out.

  Now, approaching the capsule salvage area, Bones lifted a pair of marine binoculars and scanned the waters ahead. He had reached the end of his arc when the glint of sunlight off metal arrested his gaze. “Got something.” He steadied himself with one arm on the instrument console.

  “There she is! R/V Ocean Explorer,” Bones said, giving the name they were told in the latter portion of their briefing was that of the Science Channel’s research vessel. “Pretty big boat. A ship, I’d call it.”

  “Let me have a look.” Bones handed Dane the binoculars and he scoped out the television expedition’s vessel. “Yeah, geez. Got to be almost a hundred and fifty feet. Converted mega-yacht, looks like. They don’t look like they’re under power right now.”

  Dane handed the glasses back to Bones and flipped the switch that would activate the old engine. The deceptive trawler slowed, but kept heading toward the salvage site.

  “Hey Maddock,” Bones said from underneath the binoculars. “I see some activity on the stern deck. Looks like a camera crew.”

  Dane gave a quick laugh. “Out of all the targets a SEAL could be asked to engage with, I’ll take a camera crew aboard a modified luxury yacht any day.”

  “I hear you,” Bones said, setting aside the binoculars and turning to his associate. “
It seems a hell of a lot easier than extracting some diplomat from a Liberian oil tanker off the coast of Somalia, you remember that?”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “I know. But at the same time…” Bones trailed off.

  “At the same time what?” Dane wanted Bones to clear whatever it was that seemed to be weighing on him off his chest before they got any closer to the site.

  “I don’t know if I…” Bones stalled again.

  “You don’t know if you could kill civilians to protect the secrets of our mission?”

  “Yeah. I mean, those are our orders, right? ‘Make sure they have an accident.’ That sucks.”

  “That’s a last resort,” Dane reminded him. “We’ll do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t come to that.”

  “But if it does come to that…”

  A flash of light on the water caught their attention. “Hold on, did you see that?” Dane asked.

  “White flash?”

  “Yeah. Gotta be a good nautical mile from the TV ship, too.”

  Bones saw a second blip light up on their radar circle and grabbed for the binoculars. “It’s another boat, just flipping on their deck lights for the evening, looks like.”

  “Part of the TV expedition?”

  Bones examined the ship again. After a while he said, “It looks like they’re towing something. Let’s move in for a closer look.”

  Dane glanced over at the Ocean Explorer, then back to the mystery ship before throttling up and heading toward the latter. He looked down on the work deck once and then back to Bones, as if thinking about something.

  “Before we get too close we should get out on deck and do some fishing. It’s part of our cover,” he said. He opened a storage locker and grabbed a couple of rod-and-reel combos. “We can just fish and watch them from the deck, try to see what they’re up to.”

  Bones indicated his agreement and Dane set the boat to a trolling speed, engaging the auto-pilot so that it would hold its course and then the two of them went out to the work deck.

  “I’ve done a lot of trout fishing in North Carolina, but not much ocean fishing,” Bones said. “You know what you’re doing?”

  Dane looked up from the lure he was tying onto his line. “I lived most of my life in Florida. I know my way around a deep sea fishing rig. Way out here we’ll probably catch something pretty quick.”

  “Won’t it look funny for a commercial boat to be using rod and reels, though?”

  “No, just heading from one spot to the next the commercial guys sometimes fish for fun. I think it’s best to have some kind of activity on deck when we first approach. I can almost feel the binoculars on us now.” Dane and Bones gazed at the two ships in the distance.

  “Let’s give it a try.” Dane set up Bones’ rig and then the two of them cast their lines into the boat’s wake. While they waited for a strike, Bones monitored the mystery ship, focusing with his binoculars on its tow rig.

  “What do you think? Magnetometer?” he asked, referring to a kind of high-tech metal detector used in deep water shipwreck searches. He passed the binoculars to Dane, who directed them at the ship.

  “Definitely a magnetometer. They’re coming back around now, too, to start another leg of their grid pattern. They’re searching for something made of metal down there. The Spanish ship itself was made of wood, of course, but its treasure, if it carried gold and silver, would register.”

  “If the show made it known where they found the treasure wreck, why do they have to search for it?”

  “It’s not unusual for portions of a wreck to be scattered over a large area, even miles. Especially one that sank in water this deep, probably in a storm. You can picture it breaking into pieces on the way down and then those pieces settle on the seafloor in a long debris trail.”

  “So the Science Channel people could have found only part of the wreck, and now these guys are looking around to see what else they might have missed?”

  “That’d be my guess.” Dane handed the binoculars to Bones.

  “But why wouldn’t the Science Channel also be interested in the Spanish wreck, keeping that discovery to themselves? Why announce it?”

  “Probably because the TV expedition is not really focused on the shipwreck. They want the capsule. They may even be renting equipment that they only have a set number of days to use, and it’s going to take all their concentration and resources to be able to pull that spacecraft salvage off. After all, if they’re successful, it’d be the deepest commercial salvage operation ever done. So they decided to stir the publicity pot a little by announcing the treasure ship. It could…”

  Suddenly the fishing rods—first Dane’s and then Bones’—bent sharply at the tips and they heard a rapid clicking noise as line spooled from the reels.

  “Fish on!” Dane said, yanking his rod out of the holder. He let the fish run until it soared from the water, glistening in the light.

  “What is it?” Bones picked up his rod and almost lost it over the side before he realized how much strength he needed.

  “Yellowfin tuna!” Dane said. “We’ll be eating good tonight.” He briefly coached Bones on how to fight the gamefish and then went back to reeling in his own.

  Bracing the butt of the pole against his midsection, Dane pulled up on it, feeling his biceps burn with the effort. Pull up, reel down, repeat. It was a familiar set of actions to him, and for a little while he almost forgot that he was a highly trained naval operative on a dangerous undercover assignment. The faint smell of diesel in his nostrils, the salt spray flicking from the spooling line peppering his face... it took him back to the days of his youth, fishing Florida waters. He squinted his eyes against the sun-dappled ocean where the majestic fish thrashed and pulled for its life.

  Soon the sound of splashing yanked Dane out of his reverie and he was staring at a fish whipping the water behind the boat into a frenzy. He reached over the side with a gaff and hooked his tuna behind a gill, hauling it aboard where it slapped hard against the deck.

  Bones almost had his tuna to the boat by sheer brute force, and Dane told him to pull up on it while he readied the gaff again. In one smooth motion he hooked the second fish and tossed it over the rail.

  “Not bad, right?” Dane said to Bones, who was grinning ear to ear while looking at the pair of tuna on deck. In addition to the cover, Dane had also hoped that the fishing would help him bond with his partner. They got along well enough most of the time after a rocky start in BUDS school, but the relationship was still being forged and for this mission above all others, they would need to respect one another. Dane knew that the wily Cherokee felt he was too by-the-book at times, too safe.

  He removed the titanium dive knife he wore clipped to his belt and proceeded to filet his fish on the deck, throwing the scraps over the side.

  “You’re as good at that as I am at skinning a deer,” Bones noted.

  “Spent every summer fishing while I was growing up. At least, the years we lived in Florida. Caught tons of yellowfins just like these.”

  “This is my first one,” Bones said with a hint of pride.

  “No way! Well then you’ve got to do the ritual.”

  Bones gave him a skeptical look.

  “Seriously.” Dane bent to the big fish with his knife and made a few deep cuts. After a minute he withdrew his bloodied hand from the animal and held out a small globule of dark red meat for Bones’ inspection. It quivered slightly in his palm.

  “The heart.”

  Dane popped the morsel into his mouth and swallowed, enjoying the look of surprise on Bone’s face as he chased it with a swig from a bottle of water. “The ultimate sushi,” he said, wiping his mouth. “It’s good luck to eat the heart from your first tuna. Try it with yours.”

  Dane knew he was appealing to Bones’ native American instincts. In short order he had extracted the powerful muscle from the tuna Bones had boated. The hefty Indian took the piece of meat and held it up for closer inspection.
“When I killed my first deer, my uncle spread its blood over my face. I guess this is the fish version.” He glanced over the boat’s rail toward the ships they were monitoring. “I guess I could use all the luck I can get, too.” He tipped his head back and dropped the heart into his mouth. Like Dane, he swallowed it whole and chased it with water.

  “How is it?”

  “Tastes like chicken.” Bones grinned.

  The two SEALs looked one another in the eye. They were in this together now, in a way that went beyond the non-disclosure agreements they’d signed aboard the Learjet.

  Then they heard the radio, rigged such that it was broadcast over a loudspeaker system to be heard when not in the wheelhouse, crackle to life.

  “Calling fishing trawler, this is research vessel Ocean Explorer, please reply!”

  Chapter 4

  Dane and Bones ran to the trawler’s pilothouse where Dane picked up the radio and keyed the transmitter.

  “Attention R/V Ocean Explorer, this is fishing trawler Atlantic Pride acknowledging your transmission.” Dane repeated his message one more time before they received a reply.

  “Atlantic Pride, you are advised to fish away from this area, which is now the site of a deep water salvage operation. Fishing gear in the water may interfere with salvage operations. Do you copy?”

  Bones glanced through his binoculars at the salvage ship in the distance. “They worried we might snag their ROV cables with our lines from a mile away?”

  Dane held the transmitter at the ready without keying it while he weighed the question. “More than likely they just don’t want anyone around. But let’s have a little fun.” He spoke into the microphone.

  “We copy. We’ll stay clear.” He kept his tone casual. “Mind if we ask what you’re salvaging?”

  Bones raised his eyebrows. Would they be truthful? But the reply was easygoing.

  “Space capsule on the bottom. We’re filming for a Science Channel cable special.”

  Dane grinned at Bones as he replied. “Cool! I wouldn’t mind getting a look at that. When do you plan to bring it up?”