Cradle of Solitude

by Alex Archer

  “Just checking.”

  Annja opened her mouth to answer him when the phone in her hand rang again. Without thinking she stabbed the connect button and said, “You listen to me, you son of a—”

  “Annja?”

  It was Doug Morrell.

  She blew the air out of her lungs in one hard push, trying to get her temper under control, and then said into the phone, “Sorry, Doug. I thought you were someone else.”

  “Glad I’m not him, that’s all I can say. I’ve got what you need.”

  “Already?”

  She was surprised; it hadn’t taken him long at all.

  “Turns out the archaeology department at the University of Atlanta was all too happy to help out the infamous Annja Creed. Especially when I told them you’d be happy to show up for the Chasing History’s Monsters marathon weekend they’re planning next month.”

  “You did what? No, never mind. Whatever they want, I’ll do it. Tell me about the equipment.”

  Doug walked her through the entire list, confirming that he’d gotten it all, from the towed magnetometer to the scuba gear. “All I need to know is where to deliver it,” he said.

  Annja told him she’d call him back with that information once they’d had a chance to talk with their riverboat captain and then hung up.

  They drove in silence for a while, until Garin said, “You’re not really intending to give him the treasure, are you?”

  “Not if I can help it,” she replied.

  And she’d do everything in her power to keep from having to. Provided she could keep Bernard safe in the process.

  The trouble was, she was starting to doubt that she could.

  Garin, however, seemed satisfied with her answer and let the matter drop.

  Twenty-five minutes later they found themselves pulling into the driveway of a beat-up-looking house on the far side of a small town. A tall chain-link fence enclosed the entire property and the front yard was filled with various bits of equipment that partially obscured the single-level ranch behind it all.

  A large dog, a rottweiler by the looks of it, barked at them from behind the fence.

  As they got out of the car, Garin said, “It will be a miracle if the guy’s boat actually floats.”

  “Quiet,” Annja told him as the front door opened and a man dressed in grease-stained coveralls stepped out onto the porch. He was an inch or two shorter than Annja, but what he missed in height he made up for in the width of his brawny shoulders.

  He seemed friendly enough.

  “You folks lost?” he asked.

  Annja smiled. “Depends. Are you Jimmy Mitchell?”

  “Depends,” came the quick reply, gently mocking her at the same time. “You with the IRS or the Salvation Army?”

  The Salvation Army? She wondered why he would say that.

  “Nope. Neither. We’re looking to hire us a riverboat captain.”

  “Preferably one with an actual boat,” Garin added.

  Mitchell squinted at him, then turned to look at Annja. “Does he think he’s funny?” he asked, indicating Garin with a wave of his thumb.

  “He does. We all have our crosses to bear.”

  Mitchell laughed. “Ain’t that the truth, missy, ain’t that the truth.”

  He came down off the porch and approached the fence, shooing the dog as he did. He unlatched the gate and invited them in.

  “Jimmy Mitchell,” he said, extending his hand to Annja.

  “Annja Creed,” she replied. “And the funny guy behind me is Garin Braden.”

  “What do you need the boat for?” he asked as he led them across the yard and up to the porch, where he indicated with a wave of his hand that they should grab one of several folding chairs stacked there and have a seat.

  “We’re trying to locate the wreck of a ship.”

  Mitchell squinted at them and Annja had the sense that he was trying to figure out if the city folk were pulling his leg.

  “A shipwreck, huh?”

  Annja explained about how the hurricane had pulled the CSS Marietta off the riverbank and sent it several miles downstream. She told him they had a general sense of where it might have ended up and that they needed him to run several passes up and down the river towing a magnetometer to help them pinpoint the actual location. At that point Annja and Garin would dive to the wreck and do what they could to confirm its identity.

  “Sounds easy enough,” Mitchell said. “Rentals in twenty-four-hour increments, but you’ll have to pay the fuel charge, as well.”

  They dickered for a bit on price, but finally came to an agreement both parties could live with. Jimmy gave them the address of the wharf where his boat was docked and Annja relayed that to Doug, who informed them that the equipment could be delivered later that afternoon.

  “About that price,” Garin said to Annja as they made their way back to the car. “Just so you know, it’s all coming off the top when we recover the treasure, anyway.”

  If we recover the treasure, Annja thought. She bit her tongue to keep from saying it aloud even as she reminded herself to have some confidence.

  It’s out there; you just have to get to it first, she told herself.

  She had every intention of doing just that.

  Unable to do anything more until the equipment arrived, the two of them decided to stay out of sight for the rest of the afternoon. The fact that the Order had not only tracked them to Washington but had also managed to get hold of Annja’s cell phone number showed they had plenty of resources at their disposal, so Annja didn’t want to take a chance of being exposed any more than necessary. They found a new hotel near the wharf where they would be meeting Mitchell in the morning and settled in, having both lunch and dinner delivered to them so they wouldn’t have to go out.

  Annja used the time to learn everything she could about the CSS Marietta, researching it on the internet and even speaking to one of the curators at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. By the time she finished several hours later, she thought she was reasonably well prepared for the difficult task ahead of them.

  If they could find the boat, and if it was still intact, Annja was confident that she could locate what she was looking for.

  That’s a lot of ifs…

  Early that evening she took another call from Doug.

  “I received word that the equipment has been delivered as promised,” he told her. “I’m going to be sending Richie down to meet you in the morning, to get all this on film for the episode.”

  “No!” Annja said sharply. There was no way she was going to put someone else in danger. “There’s limited room on the boat, so I’ll just use my handheld and capture the footage myself. We’ll have enough to use. I promise.”

  Doug was a bit hesitant, but she finally convinced him that it was a bad idea and he reluctantly let it go.

  “Just be sure that you get some decent footage. I don’t know how we’re going to use it in a show about reanimated Civil War soldiers in the Paris catacombs, but better safe than sorry.”

  “For the last time, Doug, it is not a show about reanimated—”

  “Gotta go, Annja. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  And, with that, the son of a gun hung up.

  25

  The next day dawned cool and clear. Annja and Garin were up with the sunrise and waiting on the wharf when Jimmy Mitchell pulled up in a dilapidated Ford pickup truck.

  He greeted them with enthusiasm and then led the way to the dockmaster’s office where the equipment was delivered the night before. It took about two hours to sort through the boxes, unpack the equipment and confirm that it was all in good working order. One of the scuba tanks turned out to have a bad regulator so Annja switched that out for one of the spares she’d ordered. When they were finished, they loaded it all on a pair of dollies and moved it down to the wharf so they could load it onto the boat.

  Their first look at the Kelly May wasn’t encouraging.

  She was a fiberglas
s fishing trawler with a small wheelhouse set two-thirds of the way back from the bow. A boom mast covered in flaking paint rose up behind the wheelhouse. Normally used to drag fishing nets, it would be used on this voyage to drag the magnetometer. The hull was faded, the name on the side of the boat barely legible, but Jimmy Mitchell stood there gazing at her proudly.

  “Forty-two feet in length and fourteen feet abreast, with a six-foot draft. She’ll do twelve knots while carrying fifteen tons of cargo,” he said with a smile.

  Yeah, but does it float? Annja felt like asking.

  Garin seemed to have the same hesitation she had.

  When Mitchell fired up the engines a few minutes later to warm them for the day’s activity, much of Annja and Garin’s anxiety was relieved. She might not look like much, but even a nongearhead like Annja could tell that engines were masterfully maintained. They purred with a throaty hum that spoke of power just waiting to be used.

  That was good, as she intended to make use of every bit of it.

  It took them another hour to load all the equipment and finish filling the tanks with fuel, but by nine that morning they were headed out onto the river to start their search.

  Annja gathered her two companions together over the chart table in the wheelhouse and went through the plan she’d put together to find what they were looking for. Satisfied they all knew their assignments after twenty minutes of discussion, they sat back to enjoy the short trip downstream to the target area.

  After they had arrived in the general location where the university team had recorded their earlier finding, it was time to get the search under way in earnest.

  The magnetometer looked like a miniature rocket, with a blunt nose, long tube-shaped body and a set of fins in the rear. It was four feet long and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve pounds. After assembling it, Garin launched the magnetometer over the side while Annja played out the line until it was being towed roughly fifty feet behind the boat at a depth of about one hundred and fifty feet. The device was designed to pick up variations in the earth’s natural magnetic field. Large quantities of iron, like that used in the construction of the CSS Marietta, would alter that field and show up on the device’s screen. The accompanying GPS would allow them to note the exact coordinates and reveal the width and length of the debris field, as well.

  As they began the long, slow process of trawling up and down the river, searching for an anomaly with the magnetometer, Jimmy spoke up.

  “So tell me about this boat we’re looking for.”

  Annja glanced up at him and then back down to the dials on the magnetometer’s control box. “The CSS Marietta. She’s an old Confederate ironclad built back in 1862.”

  “Cool,” Mitchell said, and then, completely unselfconsciously, asked in the same breath, “What’s an ironclad?”

  Annja laughed good-naturedly. “Basically, it’s a steam-propelled wooden warship that’s fitted with iron plates for protection.”

  Mitchell thought about that for a minute. “So they took a steamboat and stuck it in a suit of armor?”

  It wasn’t exactly the way Annja would have explained it, but it worked just the same. “Yes,” she told him, “that’s pretty much it.”

  She went on. “There were several different types built during the Civil War, but the most common was the casemate ironclad. Think of it as an armored box, with slanting sides, built to protect the guns and crew from enemy shot. They often had a reinforced bow that was used to ram enemy vessels, as well. The Marietta, the ship we’re looking for, was a casemate ironclad.”

  “That means it should light up the magnetometer like a Christmas tree,” Garin put in.

  Annja nodded. “That’s the hope, anyway.”

  As if on cue the magnetometer began beeping and a section of the screen suddenly bloomed with color. Hearing it, Mitchell slowed the boat to a crawl, letting the magnetometer get a good long look.

  The men turned expectant gazes in her direction, but after studying the readings for a moment, Annja had to shake her head. The object, while certainly iron, was too small to be the Marietta.

  More like somebody’s old hot-water heater, she thought to herself, and quelled the sense of disappointment that threatened. She guessed there had been plenty of junk dumped into the river over the years and they were likely to get a lot of false positives before they found the real target.

  To try and limit that as much as possible, Annja moved the gamma setting from three to nine, ensuring that they would only pick up larger concentrations of iron, and signaled to Mitchell to get the boat moving again.

  By midafternoon they’d stopped four more times. Each time Annja had suited up in wetsuit and scuba gear and, with the help of a diving sled outfitted with high-powered spotlights, had gone down into the murky water to take a look. Each time she’d been filled with anticipation, her heart pounding as her diving fins pushed her through the dark toward the unknown. Each time she’d been disappointed. So far she discovered an abandoned station wagon, an industrial-size boiler, a pile of cast-iron sinks and, much to her surprise, a steam locomotive. The train had just been sitting there on the river bottom, the round bulb of its front light looking like an eye gazing back at her out of the gloom. Seeing it sent her imagination into overdrive and she found herself wondering what train it was from and how it had come to be here, at the bottom of the Savannah River. When she surfaced, she made a note on the charts, indicating the find, and made a mental note as well to return to the spot one day to learn more.

  For now, though, they still had an ironclad to find.

  They were on the very edge of the target area, just finishing off their complete pass, when the magnetometer’s alarm went off for the fifth time that day. The display showed a good-size target, so Annja zipped up her wetsuit and prepared to dive again.

  “Want me to take it this time?” Garin asked.

  Annja was tempted but, after a moment’s consideration, shook her head. She wanted to be the first to see the Marietta’s final resting place; call her selfish, she didn’t care.

  “Thanks, but I’ve got it,” she told him.

  “Suit yourself. Remember to use one of the strobes if you get into trouble—white for marking the wreck and red for an emergency.”

  “Right. Wish me luck,” she said as she put her mouthpiece between her teeth and went over the side for the fifth time that day. When she surfaced, Garin handed the light sled down to her, waited until she’d turned it on to check how much battery power was left and then played out her dive rope behind her as she sunk beneath the surface.

  The weights on her belt helped her resist the river’s current and took her to the bottom fairly quickly. They’d loaded the exact location into the GPS unit she wore on her wrist, so it was a simple matter of following the signal to the site.

  Except there was nothing there.

  Or rather, nothing that looked to her like the wreckage of a Civil War ironclad.

  She began swimming in a wide circle, moving through the target area methodically. At this point in the river a wide ridge rose up about ten feet along the bottom, just large enough that she couldn’t see over it and long enough that she couldn’t see past it in the gloom. She kept it close on her left, keeping it as a reference point so she wouldn’t get confused in the murky water.

  Damn, it’s dark down here, she thought.

  She’d almost reached the end of the ridgeline when she saw something sticking out of the muck at the point where the ridge rose up from the river bottom.

  Something that looked far too symmetrical and round to be natural.

  Annja shone the light directly at it.

  The open mouth of a Civil War–era cannon gaped at her.

  With a grunt of surprise, she understood what had been eluding her for the past several minutes.

  The hurricane must have pushed the wreckage deep into the silt of the river bottom, where it had become lodged against the current. Over time, spring floods and the oc
casional high-water storm had deposited more and more debris atop the wreck, until it was essentially entombed in the earth, forming the underwater ridge she’d been swimming beside.

  Better yet, based on the size and shape of the ridge, it appeared that the Marietta might have remained reasonably intact, despite the force of the water.

  Annja felt her excitement grow at the realization.

  If the ship was intact and she could find a way inside, they might still be able to recover Ewell’s Rifle and continue the search for the treasure!

  She gave a powerful kick and began swimming along the length of the ridge, looking for some way inside the hull she knew was hidden beneath.

  It didn’t take long.

  A shelf jutted out from the rounded side of the ridge and a school of fish shot out from beneath when her light washed across it. When she moved in for a closer look, pointing her light like a beacon into the darkness, she found herself staring at the algae-encrusted edges of a wide hole that led farther into darkness.

  At some point in the distant past, a hole had been gouged through the casemate armor that surrounded the hull. Annja didn’t know if it happened when the ship ran aground or prior to that, during the battle itself that had forced the CSS Marietta to heave to or risk sinking with all hands on board, but it didn’t really matter. The hole provided a way inside the vessel and that’s what she needed to allow her to search inside the ship for what they come here for.

  But first, she had to tell the others….

  She pulled one of the white emergency flare lights off her belt and clipped it to the edge of the hull. She gave the top a twist, activating the strobe inside it, and then pushed off for the surface, rising through water suddenly lit up with the pulsing white light of the flare.

  26

  The wide smile on her face must have given her news away, for her two companions took one look at her and began whooping and hollering like a couple of two-year-olds. Annja swam over to the boat, passed the light sled up to Mitchell and then accepted Garin’s hand to help pull her aboard.