Splashdown

Chapter 9

“You really think we can trust that dude?” Bones asked. Earlier they had released Roland Streib, who had boarded his inflatable boat and rode it back to his ship, tail between his legs. Then they had motored their own vessel farther from Streib’s Ocean Explorer. They did not want to suggest any kind of collaboration between themselves and the television ship. They now floated near the Spanish wreck site, not far from the treasure hunter vessel they had sighted there before.

“A space conspiracy nut with a gun? What’s not to trust?” Dane made a face. “He wants those dimes. If it’s in his power to do what we asked, I think we can count on him.”

“I wish there was a way we could verify what he was telling us. I don’t know much about the early space program.”

“You don’t know much about any space program, do you?” Dane ribbed.

“Got me there.”

Dane reached across the cockpit and pulled down the encrypted satellite phone given to them by Captain Epson.

“Epson said not to even bother using that thing unless we had the nuke in our possession,” Bones recalled.

“He said not to call him, unless we had it. He didn’t say we couldn’t call anyone else,” Dane said, lighting up the handheld device.

“We sure as hell can’t tell anyone about…”

Dane held the phone up, its digital display ready to dial. “Of course not. But like you said, we just want to know a little more about the space program. We can call someone who might be able to tell us about it at face value, without even mentioning we’re on a mission.”

“Like who?” Bones asked.

“Know any space buffs?”

“Nope.”

Dane grimaced. “Me neither. Nor do I know any NASA guys.”

“Who do we know that’s just a smart guy, not in the military?” Bones asked, scratching his head.

The pair of SEALs thought about this in silence for a moment, until Dane pumped his fist in a gesture of triumph.

“Okay, he's ex-military, but what about Jimmy Letson?”

“Oh yeah, the guy who helped us out in Boston that time?”

Bones grinned at the memory of an adventurous search for a historical lantern.

“Right, the Boston Globe reporter, who’s good with computers. He might know something, or at least be able to look it up.” Dane pulled out his wallet and rifled through it, coming up with a folded sheet of paper full of phone numbers.

“The Maddock rolodex,” Bones said. “Any single ladies on that list, or just dudes with computer fetishes?”

“Here it is.” He hit the speaker phone button and punched in Jimmy’s number.

“Pretty late,” Bones said, glancing at a clock in the cockpit. “Hopefully he’s a workaholic.”

“He's probably up playing Dungeons and Dragons or hacking some network for kicks.” They heard a high, nasal voice emanate from the sat-phone speaker. “Jimmy here.”

Dane pictured the tall, wiry man with his curly brown hair, thin mustache and round spectacles. “Hey Jimmy, it’s Maddock. Sorry for the late call.”

“Maddock. Let me guess, you need a favor and you need it fast?”

Dane grinned at Bones. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

“You in Boston? Bottle of Scotch again?”

“No, actually Bones and I are travelling right now, through Florida.”

Jimmy sighed. “That’s too bad. Some friends and I are just starting a game of D&D. You’ve never tried out that dwarf warrior I rolled up for you.”

Bones guffawed and mouthed “geek” while Dane’s face reddened.

“Yeah,” he said, “anyway, we need to know some info on the Mercury era NASA space program.” He explained that they heard there might be some dimes that were brought aboard the Liberty Bell 7 capsule.

“Yep,” Letson replied. “It was common practice, and still is, for astronauts to bring small, light, personal effects aboard so that they would have something that’s been to space afterward. You didn’t know that? I thought you were supposed to be intelligent, at least by swabbie standards.”

Dane ignored the jibe. “But I have also heard that there were some strange symbols carved into the dimes. Any idea what those are about?”

There was a slight pause on the other end of the connection. “Strange symbols, you say? What’s so strange about them?”

Dane looked at Bones, who was looking at one of the dimes closely. He showed it Dane, who leaned in to look at it while he spoke on the phone. “Not sure, really, but maybe shapes, like triangles.”

“Are they cast into the coins or were they carved later?”

“Definitely carved in later. Directly over the head side.”

“Hmm. So one of the astronauts did it. In that case, obverse or reverse, I doubt the side means anything. You’re reading too much into it, would be my semi-informed opinion.”

“How so?”

“Put yourself in the shoes of a 1960’s astronaut or mission support specialist. Space was very new. To be able to have a space-flown object of any kind was quite a bragging right, and potentially even valuable. So what they did was, everyone put in their dime to give to the capsule astronaut, Gus Grissom, on this particular mission if I’m not mistaken, and to make sure they’d get back their exact dime and not one that was substituted, they would carve their initials, maybe. Or if they feared being reprimanded for bringing a dime on without permission — space contraband, you know— and didn’t want to be identified, they would simply carve a symbol on it, so later on they could say, ‘Hey that one’s mine, the one with the triangle.’”

Bones shook his head and laughed quietly, muttering something about Streib.

“What made you think it was something more than that?”

Dane felt a tinge of embarrassment. “We spoke to a guy who said they might have some meaning, something about proving that the mission was a lie and a fake and how they never really went into space at all.”

“Ah, so you’ve had a run-in with a space conspiracy theorist!”

“Well, this person seemed like they could be knowledgeable…”

“Right up until the part about the dime symbols constituting a coded message?”

“I guess so. This individual also seemed to think that the Russians somehow could have been interested in the dimes, if they did carry a message, which I guess they don't.”

Letson's voice seemed to perk up. “Well, now actually there might be something to that aspect of it. That’s the thing about these conspiracy theorists. They tend to take two different issues and conflate them to create meaning that isn’t there.”

Dane frowned. “So you mean the Russians would be interested in the dimes?”

“What I mean is that the Russians would be interested in anything that proves the mission was faked in some way, or was somehow misrepresented, since it marked a pivotal moment in the early Cold War space race. But forget about the coins. There was a living, breathing person more than willing to talk. He was a backup astronaut for the Mercury-Redstone 4 mission who trained right alongside Grissom leading up to the launch. I forget the man’s name. But he later became an outspoken opponent of NASA and was sued at one point, I believe, for violating confidentiality clauses related to the Mercury program.”

Dane and Bones traded glances, recalling the documents they had signed.

Letson went on. “My point being that for anyone really interested, there’s no need to puzzle over some scratched up dimes, if you could even locate them all — the capsule sank in the deep ocean, I believe — when you have, or at least had for many years, one of the astronauts more than willing to tell his side of the story. In fact…” They heard Letson tapping on a computer keyboard. “Hold on, here it is…Yes. I saw a news piece a year or so ago about how this Mercury astronaut said he was taking a trip to Star City, Russia to meet with Soviet space officials there.”

“And what happened in that meeting?” Dane wanted to know.

“Nothing. The meeting never occurred. The guy was killed in a freak accident. It says here he was hit by a train, just a few days before he was to leave for Russia.”

“Who the hell gets hit by a train?” Bones said. “My cousin Elijah did, but he was drunk on really cheap moonshine…”

Dane waved him into silence. The gears of his mind were spinning fast. He recalled aloud how Streib told them that Grissom had been killed in a fire.

“That's also true,” Letson said. “But again, it doesn't mean it wasn't an accident. Fires and rocket launches unfortunately go hand in hand. But there is something else that is a bit unusual about this particular period of the NASA space program.”

“I'm all ears.”

Dane heard Letson clacking away on a keyboard before his voice returned. “There are some back page reports of a Mercury-era plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon.”

Dane was stunned for a moment but recovered quickly. “What's the point of bombing the little green men?”

“You got me. But the thinking at the time was that it would intimidate the Russians as some kind of display of space weapons power. But keep in mind that this operation is pretty much just hearsay and was probably never run.”

“Weird.” Dane ran a hand through his hair, mulling over this new information. “Well, I guess I’d better let you get back to your friends.”

“Are you kidding? I lied. I’m playing by myself. Besides, this is more fun. I might keep digging just for the heck of it.”

“In that case, I’ll let you get on with it. You can call me at this number if you learn anything interesting. Thanks for your help.”

“You can thank me with drinks and a good meal next time you’re in town.” In typical Jimmy fashion, he ended the call without saying goodbye.

Dane looked at Bones, who was flipping one of the dimes again and again.

“This,” Dane began, “is turning out to be one weird mission.”

Dane climbed back into the cockpit of Deep Black and ran through some diagnostic checks on the sub in preparation for another dive on Liberty Bell 7.

“What if Streib was lying about giving us a window to work alone down there, and he attacks us with ROVs?” Bones asked from his position at the moon pool crane.

In answer, Dane’s arm reached across the instrument console and the externally mounted missile pod swiveled in Bones’ direction.

“Five left,” Bones said, referencing the missile they used on Streib. He went to the same manipulator arm he’d grabbed the nuke with and fully examined it. Satisfied it was undamaged, he gave Dane a thumbs up and went to the crane.

“One way or another, we need to go back down there and grab that Cold War artifact,” Dane said, looking up from the cockpit. “Space Boy said his team plans to attempt to raise the capsule later this afternoon, so we need to use this window to snatch the thing.”

“Nothing else to do out here in the middle of the night,” Bones said. He lowered the sub to the water with the crane and climbed into the co-pilot seat.

“So the plan is to drop down on the wreck site and then cover the quarter mile to the capsule on the seafloor. If we do that, according to Streib, we’ll come up on the capsule shortly after their ROVs are called back to the ship for maintenance.”

“And if anyone from the expedition has figured out that we have a sub, they’ll think we’re just diving for the treasure ship,” Bones said.

Dane nodded in agreement. “Then we grab Little Fat Girl or whatever cutesy name somebody probably thought up for that A-bomb, and head for the hills.”

He pulled the hatch over them and Bones latched it in place.

Four hours later, as dawn approached three miles above, Dane and Bones reached the seafloor once again.

“This looks sort of familiar, “Dane said, staring out at the featureless mud flat. “Having some real de ja vu, here, how about you?”

“I would be, if it weren’t for this sonar reading I’m getting.” He tapped a small screen with some squiggly yellow lines on it.

“How far out?”

“Maybe a hundred yards, dead ahead.”

Dane locked their course into the sub’s navigation system and they scooted across the deep sea plains toward the reading. A few minutes later a structure appeared out of the gloom.

“Spanish frigate,” Dane observed, hovering the submersible a safe distance away and above.

The two operatives marveled at the pristine condition of the aged sailing ship.

“Thing is in outstanding shape,” Bones commented, his eyes tracing the distinctive outline of the bow.

“Low oxygen content in the water down here preserves the wood.”

“That means the crew…” Bones trailed off as he gazed at a ship more than a half millennia old.

“In there, maybe even with skin still on their bones,” Dane said.

A soft beeping emanated from Bones’ side of the cockpit, and the Cherokee focused his attention on one of the instruments in his charge.

“This is funny. I’m getting a reading on the Geiger counter.”

Dane brought the sub in a smooth arc around the ship’s broken forecastle, coasting over a debris trail that seemed to spill from the wreck. As he did, the frequency of beeps from the Geiger counter increased.

“What’s so funny about that?” Dane said. Was it possible the Admiral and the General had not told them the complete truth regarding the role of nuclear weapons on the Mercury mission? They were, after all, only SEALs — tools of force used by the powers that be to carry out their directives. Dane was under no illusion that they were told nothing more than the bare minimum of what they needed to know in order to complete their objectives.

“We’re way too far from the capsule to be getting a reading from its nuke,” Bones stated matter-of-factly.

“Right, so does that mean there are more nukes that were dumped down here they didn’t tell us about?”

Bones fiddled some more with the radioactivity meter’s settings, alternately looking down on the debris trail and back to the Geiger counter’s screen.

“Do me a favor and drop down a little closer to that field of rocks over there.”

Dane eyed the rubble field and eased the sub closer to it. Bones’ eyes were locked to his device display. “I think it’s coming from those rocks.”

Dane eyeballed the dull-looking stones skeptically. “You sure it’s not from inside the wreck?”

Bones shook his head. “Readings get weaker closer to the shipwreck, stronger toward this trail of rocks.”

“Maybe there’s a device hidden under them?” Dane piloted the sub around the perimeter of the rocky pile.

“I think it’s just the stones, dude. Readings are pretty equal all the way over this mound. But I’ve got an idea.”

“You’ve got an idea that doesn’t involve either women or dive bars?”

Bones snorted. “Yeah, I guess I do. I say we take a sample of these rocks, check ‘em out later back on board the boat.”

“What for? We need to get over to…”

“Chill. It’ll only take a couple of minutes. And look, these things look like they spilled out of the ship. A Spanish frigate was pretty much always a treasure ship, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know. They don’t look like gold or silver or anything valuable, really.”

“Such a pessimist, Maddock. After five hundred years, they could be all encrusted over, couldn’t they?”

Dane frowned. “But what’s with the radioactivity? I guess we could collect some and show them to the wreck divers up there, but they’d probably just get into a territorial pissing contest with us.”

“Enough with the thinking ahead. Let’s just get us some and we’ll figure out what to do with them later.”

Dane dropped the submersible to within a couple of feet of the mound of rocks. Bones used the long grab arm to transfer a pile of the geological specimens into a collection box stored outside the sub.

“Happy?” Dane asked. He pressed a button and they heard the soft hiss of compressed air venting into the sub’s buoyancy tubes. “These things are weighing us down. Let’s head to the capsule.”

“Always with the negatives.”

Dane checked the compass and set off in the direction of the space wreck. They coasted across the bare seafloor, Bones occasionally spotlighting a strange denizen of the deep.

“Freaky down here, man. I hope we can grab that nuke this time so we can get back to base tomorrow. I got this chick’s number and I was supposed to call her last night.”

“I’ll put you on the capsule, Bones. You just grab that thing.”

“Slow out this time, too.”

“You got it. No ROV is going to scare me this time, if we see it, I’ll…”

“Whoa!” Bones interrupted him to point at his sonar display.

Dane turned his head sharply to look. He saw only an empty readout and Bones’ confused face.

“What is it?”

“It’s…gone.”

Something in Bones’ voice set Dane on edge. “What’s gone?”

“I don’t know. It was there for a second, I swear. A large signature, then it squiggled off the field.”

Dane knew that as a sonar specialist, Bones had received specialized training in recognizing undersea sonar signatures. “Well, what was it?”

“It was big. Sort of looked like a…well never mind.”

“No really, what did it look like?”

“Like a warfare-class submarine.”