The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  Day eight of the search, 30 January, started like all the preceding days. Fifteen minutes before midnight, I stepped up into the twenty-foot shipping container we had converted into our search operations command office and listened to Bill Lawson’s summary of the previous twelve hours of operations while my shift relieved his. The news from Bill was that there was no news: no probable targets, no possible targets, not even the hint of a target. His shift had endured another tedious and uneventful twelve hours. I knew exactly how he felt as he trudged off to bed. Just an hour earlier, they had completed line 7 and were starting the turn for line 5, which would be the last within Wagner’s high-probability area. If the wreck wasn’t found on line 5, the prospect that we were either looking in the wrong place or had somehow missed the wreck would suddenly become very real. I had another five hours before the sonar towfish was back on line and searching again to come up with a plan B in case it was needed.

  On the wall of our office I had pinned up a large plot of the search area with all the estimated sinking positions, search track-lines and zones of varying probability, from the highest to lowest. To keep people engaged, and for a bit of fun, I had created a pool at the start of the search, with everyone on board putting in $10 to pick the zone where they thought the wreck would be found, though I had had second thoughts about this when its existence had leaked out to the tabloid press in Austria. The last thing I wanted was for our harmless game to send the wrong message to the public. I could just imagine how the pool could be used to unfairly attack our professionalism, especially if the search ended in failure. As I studied this plot to work out where I would add new lines to fill in the blind spots or around the problematic rock ridges as part of a plan B, I noticed that the zone I had picked was about to come up on line 5.

  The sonar towfish reached the start of line 5 at 5.01 a.m., but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. For the next forty-five minutes we struggled with manoeuvring the ship to keep it on line. A southerly current was running, which meant that more speed and rudder was needed to maintain the correct track as the ship crabbed down the line. The weather and sea conditions thus far had been ideal, and I dreaded to think that this was about to end. The sonar was well into the flat, rock-free area of the search box when suddenly, and without warning, targets started to appear on our screens. These targets were unlike the few small, insignificant and thus easily discounted ones we had seen to date. They were hard, large objects grouped in a tight cluster, which told me we had either stumbled on a completely out-of-place field of rock boulders or we had just found the Lucona. In about twenty minutes’ time I had my answer: the Lucona was lost no longer.

  Although finding what we believed to be the wreck of the Lucona took the immediate pressure off the team, a new pressure quickly took its place. Whereas Judge Leiningen-Westerburg had been somewhat detached during the search operations, leaving Dr Strasser to monitor things whilst he mostly sunbathed on the upper deck of the ship, he was suddenly very anxious to view the wreck as soon as possible and terminate the operation. I didn’t know what was driving this new sense of urgency, but it was clear to me that he had no idea or appreciation of what lay ahead of us when the ROV reached the seabed.

  A second line over the wreck with the Ocean Explorer sonar in high-resolution mode revealed that the wreckage was more extensive and spread much further than we had originally thought. The magnified sonar image showed a single large target, which I interpreted to be the stern and bridge/superstructure of Lucona, with dozens of smaller targets scattered in every direction. Whatever had caused the ship to shatter this way, it had been impressively effective, and deadly, leaving us marvelling that anyone had survived such a violent sinking. Making sense of the wreckage, especially for a criminal trial where the defendant’s freedom swung in the balance, was going to take a lot more time than the couple of days the judge appeared to have in mind.

  To begin with, the Magellan still needed to be completed and tested. Although the basic vehicle was in pretty good shape, a number of important subsystems, like the scanning sonar, depth sensor and navigation transponder, were still not working. So much was riding on this next phase of the project, it was nerve-racking to think everything rested on a vehicle that had yet to pass even a basic wet test. My only comfort was that we had been in exactly the same situation with the Ocean Explorer sonar and had been amazed by its reliability to complete the entire search in a single dive lasting eight and a half days. I knew not to expect the same good fortune with the ROV, but getting the judge and experts to understand this wasn’t going to be easy, as they were all primed for action and results.

  There was plenty of action over the next four days but none of the results the judge expected or needed. The ROV was being worked on nonstop and even made one dive that resulted in ninety minutes of bottom time on the seabed. Frustratingly, we were unable to get either the scanning sonar or acoustic navigation system to work, making it impossible to navigate around the wreckage. This left us with only a standard colour video camera and a pair of lights to see, at best, six metres ahead of the vehicle as it was flown by the pilots. With the wreckage field measuring over 800 metres across, this meant it was like searching eight football pitches in complete darkness whilst armed with only a couple of flashlights. The two small pieces of twisted steel we found during the short dive provided no firm clue as to the identity of the wreckage and served only to tease the judge with what lay beyond the loom of our lights.

  Even though it was strictly against best practice and potentially dangerous to dive in a wreckage field without a sonar or some form of subsea navigation, there wasn’t any question in our minds about whether we were going to make another dive. The stakes for everyone involved were too high for us to back off now. Having come so far, to within touching distance of the court’s objective, we were as keen as the judge to get the ROV back in the water and on the seabed. As Magellan touched down later that same day, it became frighteningly clear how difficult it was going to be to safely manoeuvre the vehicle in and around the dense field of wreckage, where any piece of exposed steel could sever our umbilical cable or damage the ROV irreparably. Without a working sonar to scan for objects beyond the short distance our lights could shine, we had no way of knowing what lay ahead of us. One moment there would be nothing ahead except emptiness; then within an instant a huge piece of wreckage would suddenly appear out of nowhere. Our ROV pilots, Greg Gibson and Ron Schmidt, did exceptionally well not to be totally unnerved by the situation we found ourselves in.

  Despite these dangerous conditions, the second dive started promisingly, and by its end, a remarkable nineteen hours later, we had answered most of the court’s questions. Within twelve minutes of reaching bottom, at a depth of 4,192 metres, we found a section of derrick sticking vertically out of the seabed, confirming that the wreckage was indeed from a ship. A few hours later we came across a shipping container lying on its side with an identification code matching one listed on Zapata’s manifest. The container’s canvas top had been ripped away to reveal its true contents as scrap metal. The next significant object was a piece of coal-mining equipment that bore the German manufacturer’s name in raised letters and the fresh coat of paint that Proksch had instructed a gang of Italian labourers to apply to the cargo while it was in storage before being loaded on Lucona.

  To give his shipment an air of greater authenticity, Proksch had also had the labourers paint stencilled labels and code numbers on individual pieces of his cargo. These identification marks – B1, B10, XB19, the name ZAPATA SA and a four-digit manifest number – also appeared on numerous company documents discovered by the journalist Pretterebner, and were thus virtual fingerprints that tied Proksch and Zapata to the cargo. Each time one of the marks was found on a piece of wreckage, the judge and Strasser, looking on over the shoulders of our pilots, would excitedly ask them to stop and zoom in with the ROV’s video camera. As the pieces of cargo found with the unique Zapata marking began to mount up, any doubts that we w
ere looking at the exploded remains of Lucona faded away.

  Twisted and torn pieces of hull structure littered the seabed like so many scraps of crumpled paper. The utter destruction of Lucona’s solidly built steel hull into so many relatively small and unrecognizable pieces shocked all of us, but none more than the explosives experts, Wieser and Hemmer, who began revising upwards the amount of explosives they believed Proksch had used. Based on the confession of an army explosives expert, Major Johann Edlemaier, who’d admitted giving Proksch a large amount of TNT, dynamite and plastic explosives in 1976 in exchange for making an army training video, they originally believed that 100 kg of explosives had been used, but now they felt the amount was closer to 150 kg and possibly as much as 200 kg. From what we could tell, the bomb must have been hidden in the forward cargo hold, as the one piece of destroyed hull structure we could still identify, based on visible draft marks, was the bow, while according to the sonar imagery the stern was intact, although we had yet to find it amongst the wreckage.

  Finding Lucona’s stern became the new priority to answer the final and most critical question about how the ship came to grief. In the brief time filming the wreckage we had proved that it was from Lucona based on the cargo markings; that the cargo was mining equipment, scrap metal and other worthless items as opposed to the uranium processing plant expensively insured by Proksch; and that Lucona was sunk by a devastating explosion, as the damage we were documenting simply couldn’t have occurred by any other means. However, Proksch’s lawyers argued that if an explosion was the root cause of Lucona sinking, it could easily have originated outside the hull and not from a bomb hidden in the cargo hold. To give this idea some credence, they further suggested the ship might have been sunk by a Russian submarine ordered to torpedo the Lucona to prevent delivery of the uranium processing equipment to a possible Far Eastern enemy.

  In the face of all the evidence stacked up against Proksch, this seemed an outrageous and desperate attempt by his defence team to make it more difficult for the prosecution to prove their client’s guilt. The problem it posed for the judge and for us was that we had to find the seat of the explosion, which meant finding the stern and bridge/superstructure and whatever remains of the cargo holds were still attached to the hull. This was the only way we’d be able to determine whether the explosion originated from a bomb inside the ship, or from a torpedo detonating outside. It was the last piece of forensic evidence the judge needed, but it was proving the most difficult to obtain.

  Three more dives to the wreck ended mostly in frustration before we had to admit defeat, at least temporarily, and head into port for reprovisioning. By systematically moving the Valiant Service to some forty different positions, we did eventually get the ROV on to Lucona’s stern, but only for a brief period before poor visibility and strong surface currents made us pull off the wreck without ever reaching the forward break. We desperately needed to get a replacement sonar shipped in to us and fitted to the ROV to have any chance of relocating the stern. After hours of phone consultations with the defence and prosecuting lawyers and the Austrian Ministry of Justice, the judge told me that he and his technical assistants wanted to come back out and complete the video documentation of the wreck now that it had been located. Colombo was the nearest major port, so we got under way and began planning the necessary improvements for the Magellan ROV. We had been at sea for a month and were so low on food that the only thing to eat during the two-day transit was cornflakes, tinned corned beef hash and, appropriately, Vienna sausage hotdogs. It wasn’t exactly the celebration meal we were hoping for, but our spirits were high as we looked forward to the break in port.

  I was aiming for a quick turnaround in Colombo, with just enough time to take on food and fuel and install a replacement sonar on the ROV, and for the judge to fly to Vienna for a mandatory court hearing to present the evidence we had collected to date. My plans were immediately thrown into turmoil, however, when I learned that because of shortages due to the Gulf War, the government fuel agency were limiting ships our size to 50 tons of fuel maximum, well short of the 166 tons we needed. The only way around the predicament was to get special authorization from the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who for the next two days had me jumping through various bureaucratic hoops. He requested I get a letter from the Austrian consulate explaining our situation, but when I produced the letter the next day, he demanded additional confirmation direct from the Austrian government in Vienna. I was furious by his U-turn and worried that America’s impending ground invasion to liberate Kuwait would make the fuel situation even worse.

  Outside in the streets there was a slightly menacing anti-American feeling, with groups of Muslims staging demonstrations against the war and at one point even threatening to storm the US embassy. To make matters worse, Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war with the Tamil Tigers had flared up and the word in Colombo was that eighty people had been killed in fighting up north. Although I found Colombo fascinating and the people bright and extraordinarily helpful, I didn’t want to be stranded here. It took another day of urgent phone calls and faxes between the embassy in New Delhi and the foreign ministry in Vienna before the correct letters were dispatched to Colombo and the full 166 tons of fuel was approved for delivery the following day.

  With the fuel drama behind us and the judge back on board in the nick of time, we left Colombo just before midnight and headed back out to the wreck site, hoping for one last perfect dive. Bill Lawson had successfully installed and tested the replacement sonar while we were in port, so there could be no excuses now about not being able to find the stern. The type of sonar we were using operated exactly like a radar, with the head rotating through a wide angle as it scanned for wreckage ahead of the ROV. Within minutes of the Magellan reaching bottom, the sonar was switched on, triggering sighs of relief all around as it immediately displayed a field of bright coloured targets ahead.

  We picked out the largest target and started moving in that direction. The first small object we came to, however, was a white hard hat, reminding us of the human tragedy that resulted when Lucona sank. The next target was even more thought-provoking. It was the empty canister for one of the ship’s inflatable life rafts. Whether this canister had held the raft used to save Lucona’s six survivors, or whether it was the one that sadly went unused, we could only guess. The ROV was now very close to the largest target. Although it wasn’t visible yet, whatever it was filled the entire sonar display. The ROV pressed ahead another few metres and from the gloom the faint outline of Lucona’s port side finally came into view. I heard someone say quietly, ‘Thank God for that’; otherwise the ROV hut was silent. We had been searching for only twenty-seven minutes.

  Plummeting through over 4,000 metres of water at high speed, Lucona’s wreck had hit the seabed with such enormous force that it had driven the hull deep into the soft mud, obscuring the name on its transom. The violence of the impact had also badly buckled the stern and bent railings and platforms. It was tricky manoeuvring the ROV around the wreck, but ultimately Greg Gibson was able to make it forward of the bridge/superstructure, which was the main area of interest for the judge and the experts. What we saw next left no one in any doubt about what happened to the Lucona fourteen years ago.

  While the ship’s aft cargo hold was mostly intact, the forward hold, where the prosecutors suspected the bomb had been hidden in a large spherical container, was almost completely gone. The ship had been literally severed in half, with hardly anything left of the forward section. The break was roughly at the position of the middlemast and winch platform, situated between the two cargo holds. All that remained at the break were the double bottom tanks and remnants of the side shell plates still connected to the hull. Crucially, both the starboard and port side shell plates nearest to the break were very clearly splayed outwards.

  Seeing this extraordinary level of destruction, we had absolutely no doubt that a massive explosion, originating from inside the forward cargo hold, had r
ipped the Lucona apart. The idea that a torpedo had caused the damage we documented was simply not believable. If a picture is worth a thousand words, we could only imagine the story the video we had collected of Lucona would tell when it was shown in court.

  On 11 March 1991, less than three weeks after the conclusion of our investigation of Lucona’s wreck, Udo Proksch was found guilty of all charges against him, including the murder of six innocent people, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. When the sentence was read out, he shouted, ‘Heil Hitler!’ to a stunned courtroom before being led away in handcuffs. Thankfully the video evidence we had produced spoke volumes by itself, and there was no call for me to testify during the trial as an expert witness.

  Relying mostly on the protection of his political friends, Proksch had been able to remain a free man for some fourteen years after he conspired with Hans-Peter Daimler to commit their crimes in the coldest and most calculating way. During the trial it came out that Proksch personally gave Captain Puister one of Deme’s famous chocolate tortes before the Lucona left port. In his summary of Proksch’s motivations, the state’s prosecutor maintained that ‘The cake was not a travel provision but an executioner’s meal.’ The trial lasted thirteen months, and because of the costs connected with the expedition to find and film the wreck, it earned the distinction of being the most expensive criminal trial in Austrian history.