Splashdown

Prologue

Juan Diego de Guerrero emerged from his cabin onto the stern deck of the Nuestra Señora de la San Pedro and narrowed his eyes against the driving rain. It was not the precipitation that concerned him, however, but the wind that drove it and the sea’s response to that steadily increasing force. He frowned, wiping cold salt spray from his weathered face as he gazed out on the marching waves, a single terrifying word dominating his mind: Huracán.

I should have known.

Upon waking with the sunrise he’d been pleased to see that they were beyond sight of land, well underway across the great Atlantic to his Spanish homeland. But even then he’d noticed the unusual conditions — the decreasing interval between swells, the electric tang in the air. Now these were undeniably magnified. It was like the hand of God pulling him back from his goal. Had he done something wrong?

“Captain, I was just coming to find you.” Luis López de Olivares, Guerrero’s first mate, skidded to a halt on the damp decking. His deeply tanned face was pale, and his calloused fingers worked with nervous energy. “The weather is turning against us.” He gave Guerrero a meaningful look, knowing he did not need to finish the thought.

Somewhat of a maverick, Guerrero had been warned about being caught in this part of the world during the summer months. But he had not planned things this way. It had taken him longer than he had anticipated to find what he was looking for and to load it into his ship’s hold. Not satisfied with the usual bounty of gold, silver and jade figurines making their way to Europe in a steady stream from the New World, he had meandered much farther south than his contemporaries, in search of ever more exotic treasures and curiosities with which to impress King Charles. Eventually he had come to a southern land known to him only as Río de la Plata, where there were rumored to be entire river valleys lined with silver, complete mountain ranges made of the same.

“We will make it.” Guerrero stilled his voice to a calm that he did not feel. “We always do.”

Olivares turned to look out at the sea. “We shouldn’t have traveled so far south. The silver wasn’t worth it.” The words came out in a low murmur, clearly not intended for Guerrero’s ears, but the captain heard.

“It will be all right.”

A pang of guilt caused Guerrero to wince. It wasn’t prodigious amounts of silver that had drawn Guerrero months’ worth of treacherous sailing out of his way. Early reports from his notable predecessors, including Amerigo Vespucci, had spawned provocative talk that Guerrero, then a child dockside laborer, had routinely eavesdropped on in the shadows of Spanish seaports. The explorers’ gossip told of a wealth of strange and interesting minerals in addition to silver and gold, some of which had never before been witnessed in all of Europe. At the age of sixteen he would join the King’s navy and for a time he forgot about the particulars of the tales of his youth, but still they drove his desire to remain at sea, to explore the world and locate its riches for Spain.

And so it was that decades later, after many false starts, tribulations and general hardships, he came to command the King’s vessel, the treasure frigate San Pedro. It was also how he’d come to try the patience of his weary crew. Following an arduous coastal voyage, Guerrero’s ship had landed at Rio del Plata. Guerrero himself spoke to the indigenous tribes who met them on the beach about the minerals he had heard of, and he was introduced in short order to a shaman who claimed that the stones had very special powers, perhaps to a dangerous degree.

The indigenous priest agreed to allow Guerrero’s landing party to traverse their territory accompanied by local guides to a distant, rugged site where the natural resources might be excavated, but only under the condition that he first be allowed to bless the entire expedition in an elaborate ritual. To Guerrero, who reflected the widely held sentiment of Europe as a whole, these people were little more than savage heathens prone to the most base superstitions and animal urges, not yet having found the truth of Catholicism.

Olivares turned to face him, straightened his lanky frame, and clenched his fists. “Captain. What are those stones?”

Only by sheer force of will did Guerrero maintain his calm. He wondered the same thing, though he was not about to admit it.

He had heard tales of these strange rocks for many years, though, and he thirsted for the chance to finally bring some back to Spain. At the same time, Guerrero knew that the time required for the overland trek would likely put him beyond his safe weather window for the return trip across the Atlantic, but he was on the voyage of a lifetime and it was a chance he was willing to take.

To Guerrero’s men, however, the raw ore they painstakingly recovered and transported to the ship’s cargo hold proved most unremarkable indeed. From whispered rumors of Guerrero’s descriptions, the crew had been expecting some kind of lesser known gemstones — something that looked like rubies, garnets, maybe emeralds. But the rocks were plain-looking by comparison to those usually of value. Nothing they could easily trade in the ports of call for the favors of women and barkeeps. For these drab rocks they had trekked many miles through dank, insect-infested jungles and snake-filled swamps, scrabbled up and down the side of a bleak never-ending mountain of loose shale in order to extract examples of these rarest of New World specimens. A few of the men expressed dissatisfaction at going to such extremes to retrieve minerals not precisely known or valued rather than accepting more of the golden gifts readily offered by the coastal natives.

Guerrero had silenced the most vocal of these dissenters upon return to the ship by having them tied to the mast and whipped until dead while the rest of the crew was rewarded with a wine drenched feast. “Blood shall flow like wine for those who dare speak against his orders,” he had shouted over the tortured cries of the condemned. For Guerrero, only absolute authority could command and control such a motley assortment of common men enduring long months at sea. His seafaring career had been long and varied, met overall with mixed success, and he was determined that this was the voyage with which he would finally make a lasting impression on the King.

But now, a sudden and vicious storm stood between him and that opportunity.

Guerrero ignored the question, took a deep breath, and looked down the decks of his hundred-foot-long ship. He was not surprised to see his crew already taking appropriate actions: reefing canvas, securing the cannons and various loose objects on deck, the helmsman adjusting course at the wheel to head them into the waves while barking orders to crew in the rigging.

“Was there something you needed from me, or did you think the middle of a storm was an appropriate time to debate my choice of cargo?”

Duly chastened, Olivares shook his head.

“In that case, resume your duties at once.”

Olivares threw up a ragged salute, turned on his heel, and stalked away.

Guerrero clenched his fists. The mate was not wrong. I should have headed north sooner! Or perhaps if I had made the crossing to Africa and then headed north to Europe from there instead of travelling north into the heart of the New World…

But as a wave crashed over the stern deck, the highest on the ship, and he watched a man fall to his death from the crow’s nest, he knew that his second-guessing could no longer make a difference. It was a matter of mere hours at most before his ship would be ingested by a hurricane, and with God’s blessing they would withstand the storm and be able to limp home. Without it, they would succumb to its fury.

With a last hurried glance at the wind-whipped whitecaps threatening his vessel, Guerrero retreated belowdecks and ran to the cargo hold. His feet sloshed through rank bilge water. He could have assigned crew to do this, but he wanted to personally supervise the securing of his most distinctive gifts. Reaching the wooden crates piled high with ore, he double-secured the ropes lashing the crates to the deck, then added more. He did not wish them to spill over and rip a hole in the hull. Satisfied, he was about to turn on a heel and head back topside when he paused.

Reaching into the nearest crate, he tossed chunks of ore aside until he found a flatter one and removed it. He used the tip of his machete to carve his initials into the rock, slicing a finger once when the rocking of the ship caused the blade to slip, and then thrust it into a pocket of his pantalones.

Were his dead body ever to be brought back to Spain, he desired proof that Juan Diego de Guerrero, the boy who had labored for his entire childhood as a petty dockworker fetching items for sailors, had now retrieved something that would one day light the world on fire.

NASA space capsule Liberty Bell 7 dangled from its drogue parachute at an altitude of 1,200 feet. Returning from a successful suborbital flight in a demonstration of emerging United States space power, it was now about to land back on Earth as planned, by splashing down into in the Atlantic Ocean. A small flotilla of support ships and helicopters waited below to retrieve the capsule as soon as it hit the water. Inside the spacecraft, Gus Grissom, among the first wave of a new breed of fliers known as “astronauts,” spoke into his radio, his gravelly voice exuding a calm professionalism.

“Atlantic ship Capcom, this is Liberty Bell 7, do you read me, over?”

The reply was near instant. “Bell 7, this is Atlantic ship Capcom. I read you loud and clear, over.”

“Roger that, Capcom. My rate of descent is twenty-nine feet per second, fuel has been dumped for impact, over.”

“Copy that, Bell 7. We are tracking your descent. Everything looks A-okay, over.”

For the next few seconds, all eyes on the support ships and aircraft were focused on the falling space capsule. Then the radio channel crackled again.

“Capcom reporting: Splashdown! We have splashdown! Bell 7, a helicopter will reach you in about thirty seconds, over.”

The space capsule, shaped roughly like the American iconic symbol for which it was named, complete with a “crack” painted down its side, was about as seaworthy as a cork. It bobbed helplessly in the water, capable of nothing more than drifting until it could be picked up by a helicopter. A tense couple of seconds passed while those listening to the radio frequency waited to see if the astronaut inside the capsule had been knocked around too badly upon hitting the water to reply.

But then Grissom said, “Roger that, ‘chute has been jettisoned. I’ll be going over my post-flight checklist. As soon as that’s done I’ll be ready for evac, over.”

Broadcast radio commentators intended for audiences listening around the world remarked how thorough and professional Gus Grissom was, that he would rather complete his checklists before leaving the capsule for the comforts of the helicopter and ships even after all he’d endured. The big Huey hovered overhead until they heard Grissom’s voice over the communications line once again.

“Liberty Bell 7 to Capcom. Now prepared for evac, over.”

The Huey moved into position over the floating capsule. A cable was lowered from the helicopter.

Suddenly the hatch cover of the spacecraft was seen popping off the craft.

Fitted with explosive bolts for emergency evacuation from the inside, under normal circumstances it was meant to be opened not by the astronaut but by rescue personnel once the capsule had been secured back aboard its transport ship. That ship was aircraft carrier USS Randolph, and from its bridge a mission recovery team coordinator frowned beneath a pair of binoculars.

“Grissom’s out of the capsule, he’s in the water!” he told the radioman, who promptly relayed that message to the pilot of the helicopter, who was told in no uncertain terms to pursue the capsule. Grissom’s spacesuit was designed to provide him with flotation, but they had no way of knowing now whether it really worked. What they did know was that without the hatch cover in place, America’s space race investment was rapidly flooding with water and would soon be lost to the depths if not secured.

A helicopter crewman descended from the aircraft and connected a cable to the spacecraft. While Grissom floated nearby, buffeted by rotor wash that whipped up the sea surface into a frothy foam, the rescue crew member was winched back into the chopper. The Huey’s pilot then managed to lift the capsule a few feet out of the water, but could gain no further altitude, the entire rig slanting dangerously toward the sea.

“Capsule’s full of water, we can’t lift it!” came the frantic radio transmission to mission support personnel. One more attempt at airlifting the swamped spaceship was made, but to no avail. The laws of physics, to whose mastery the entire mission owed its success to this point, could not be broken. The helicopter could simply not provide enough lift, and the rescue craft itself started to wobble precariously scant feet above the waves.

“Cut the cable, cut the cable!” came the command from Capcom, but the quickness with which the task was carried out made it likely that the helicopter crew hadn’t been waiting for orders.

The cable was severed. The capsule dropped back into the sea.

The chopper’s pilot, now free of his weighty burden, quickly regained control of the aircraft and maneuvered to pick up the floating astronaut.

Gus Grissom was hauled aboard without further incident, while below them all, Liberty Bell 7 continued its mission alone to the distant seafloor.