“What do you mean?” said Tommy. His longish hair was still wet and he looked like a front man who’d just come offstage from a performance.
“We’re beyond the territorial limits of any states,” said Dex. “I was telling Don — we need to put in a salvage claim under maritime law.”
“And then we’re okay?” said Andy, who seemed to be as intrigued by the possibility of gold as even Don or Tommy.
“Okay as we’ll ever be.” said Dex.
“And then we can split it up?” said Tommy.
Dex paused, looked at all of them slowly. He paused to look each guy in the eye. He could feel them all worrying about what Tommy might have seen, and some of them were already dreaming of the ways they were going to spend the money.
“Okay, listen,” Dex said finally. “We all have to cool it a little bit here, okay?”
“What do you mean?” said Don.
“A couple things you should realize. One, nobody much cares about sunken U-boats anymore, so when we notify the Coast Guard, we can pretty much rely on regular admiralty law to protect us. Two, there’s a good chance Tommy saw something through that hatch, but there’s no way to tell if it’s gold or anything similar until we can get a closer look at it. And three, if it is gold, we might be in for an interesting couple of years.”
“Yeah? Like how?” said Tommy.
“Any of you guys ever hear of the S. S. Central America?”
“Is that the one in the book?” said Mike. “Bestseller a good ways back? I didn’t read it, but I remember seeing a bunch of reviews about it.”
“Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea,” said Dex. “That’s the one.”
“I remember that one,” said Kevin. “They did it on The History Channel, I think too. About the guy who invented all this stuff to get to the wreck, right?”
“Yeah, that’s part of the story,” said Dex. “The Central America was full of gold from the California gold rush. It went down in a hurricane off the Carolina coast. When the salvage team brought up all the gold, they had to face claims by insurance companies that had paid out money on the losses almost a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“What?” said Andy, his usually loud voice booming even louder with incredulity.
“That’s bullshit!” said Tommy.
“Some of the companies were still in business, and had a right to recover their losses,” said Dex. “Or so they claimed.”
“Let me guess,” said Doc. “Tied up in court. A lot of lawyers making money. Nobody else.”
Dex smiled. “Now you’ve got it.”
“Welcome to the modern world,” said Kevin.
“So what do we do?” said Don.
“We all go home, spend a nice night with our families, and plan to get some answers tomorrow.”
Nobody said anything. They knew he was right… so Dex figured he’d put a little finer point on what had happened.
“One more thing,” he said. “We keep our cakeholes shut about this, okay?”
Everybody grunted in the positive.
“At least until we get things sorted out. We don’t need any salvage vultures stirring things up yet.”
Dex started gathering up his gear and stowing it in the storage bins. He was done talking about this, and he hoped they all got the message.
Everybody apparently did — they all started putting up their own stuff, and Don headed back up to the bridge to get the Sea Dog headed back to Annapolis. Mike went up to join their skipper. Andy and Doc walked aft to hang on the rail and watch the boat’s progress back to the harbor. They would probably be rehashing the conversation and what they’d seen today. Kevin leaned back on the bench, closed his eyes as if meditating. It was part of a ritual he always did to relax after a dive. He’d been distracted this time, but habits and superstitions died hard.
Tommy slowly peeled out of his drysuit, taking his sweet-assed time.
“Man,” he said. “Why’s everything have to be so complicated?”
“Because the world would get very boring if it wasn’t,” said Dex. “But listen, if you wanna know the truth, I don’t feel much like talking to you right now.”
“Man… okay, I hear you.”
“Let’s deal with it tomorrow, okay?”
Tommy nodded, hung up his suit in the salon locker, pulled on a sweatshirt. The sun westered across the bay, and the temperatures were dropping pretty fast. Belowdecks, the big Detroit diesels kicked in, and Don leaned on the forward levers as the big crew boat surged through the bay water chop.
“Hey, c’mon, Dex,” said Tommy. “I deserved what I got from you. No hard feelings, okay?”
“There better not be… you acted like a complete and total jackass.” Dex reached for a thick turtleneck sweater, pulled it down over his head.
“Yeah, I gotta agree with him on that one,” said Kevin, not bothering to open his eyes or look up. He said it with a wry grin, which was his usual demeanor, no matter what he was talking about.
“Okay, okay. Gang up on me, why don’t yas.”
“Just remember it, okay?” said Dex. “Nobody has any idea how easy it is to die down there. Till it happens.”
Nobody had anything to add, and to be honest, the silence was just fine with Dex. He needed the break to get himself calmed down. There was a moment back there, if Tommy had pushed him, when it could’ve gotten ugly. He watched the kid break a Bud out of the cooler and go back to the stern rail to drink it by himself.
Then it was just him and Kevin sitting there.
“This is the first time he’s ever been on a real wreck dive, right?” said Kevin. “Not the ones that’ve been staked out and marked on maps”
“Yeah, so what? He’s been on plenty of training dives. He oughta know by now.”
“I mean, he’s never done the whole drill, with teams and all that. He’s a rook in that regard.”
“No excuse for his antics,” said Dex. “I’m not sure he should be part of the group after that stunt. “He’s a wildcard.”
“Okay, just checking…”
Dex nodded, then changed the subject. He nudged him with his elbow. “I saw a number down there — on the inside of the hatch. 5-0-0-1. You think it might be the designator?”
“You mean the name? As in U-5001?” Kevin continued to lean back, looking straight ahead as if studying the horizon.
“Yeah.”
Kevin sighed. “I don’t know. When Don and I did a quick look on the internet, we didn’t see any numbers that high. Could be a new class or something, right?”
“Well, it’s obvious it’s different from anything else the Germans ever had.”
Kevin nodded. “Yeah, that’s true. How about I run it through the network at the lab and I check with some Navy people in DC?”
“Yeah, definitely. Call me if you get wind of anything on U-5001.”
“You got it. I’ll check Monday morning.”
As Kevin moved off to get a beer from the cooler, Dex looked past him to where Tommy was leaning against the rail by himself. Kevin walked right by him, saying nothing.
It was times like this when Dex could see why people didn’t warm up to Tommy Chipiarelli, why so many people thought he was a loose cannon.
Which made Dex wonder why he put up with the kid himself. Well, it was no secret Dex saw a lot of himself in Tommy. Certain guys had a streak of weirdness in them that most people could never understand. Weird because it made you look for a challenge, if not trouble, at every turn in the road. Guys like that ended up doing a lot of the jobs nobody else wanted to do — cops, firemen, boomers, and soldiers. Stuff like that. Most of them Dex had known over the years liked their women plenty, but never enough to marry any of them, and they had a knack for doing something that sooner or later kept them from enjoying a nice, restful retirement and reflective, elderly years.