It looked empty. The silt was all still. He swam to the end of the room and turned around. His light fixed on a small section of silt beneath the opening he’d just come through. The ground was a brown murky sea through which his gaze barely penetrated. There were two small streams where the debris and iron particles were slowly filtering downward.
Had he caused both of them?
A small eddy started to form. Murky water swirled for an instant. What the hell is that? Sam gripped his shark-stick.
He watched as the swirls gradually increased in diameter.
An instant later the nose of a sea scooter pierced the debris cloud. Its electric motor whirred. The propeller blade suddenly sped up its revolutions and the rider shot out, racing through the opening into the main passage.
Sam switched his sea scooter on and squeezed the dual triggers. “Tom. He’s heading back to the door!”
An inaudible crackle followed as the solid bulkhead of the J.F. Johnson disrupted their close proximity radio waves.
“Tom!” Sam shouted.
“What?”
Sam’s scooter raced out through the opening and turned left down the main passageway. In front of him he could see the glow of the diver disappear behind the door. “He’s heading for the locked door at the end of the passageway.”
Tom’s sea scooter whirred behind Sam. “I’m right behind you. Don’t let him close that door!”
“I won’t!” Sam hoped he was telling the truth.
He watched the diver open the door up ahead and race through. The door closed. Sam gritted his teeth and mentally begged his sea scooter to go faster.
Clang!
The nose slammed into the slight crease between the door and its iron frame.
For a moment the sea scooter became stuck — wedged between the door and the iron frame — until he adjusted the angle slightly and squeezed the twin throttle triggers. The machine whined as 350 watts of power were used to make its way through the door.
Behind the door, an open hatchway indicated a set of vertical ladders leading into the lowest levels of the ship. The slightest of glows illuminated from the opening. Sam drove his sea scooter downward into a room of large mechanical pieces. Sam stopped the sea scooter. He swept his new environment with the beam of his flashlight.
The engine room of the steamship was the largest single space inside the hull. It incorporated a room from the keel amidships — right up into the chimney at the top of the forecastle. There was room to swim down both sides of the mighty steam engine. Perfectly preserved in the icy water, the brass fittings and green casing of the engine shone in the diver's flashlight beams. It was a double action inverted triple-expansion vertical steam engine made by Joshua Hendy Ironworks in Sunnyvale, California. Three giant cylinders each larger than its predecessor allowed for re-cycling of the precious steam, producing economy of fuel. State of the art for its time. Machines like this were shrinking the globe before the jet airliner. The back of the engine was connected all the way to the stern by the propeller shaft.
Tom brought his sea scooter to a standstill beside Sam. “Any idea which way he went?”
“Not a clue. I followed his light into the engine room, but I have no idea where he traveled from here. He’s hiding somewhere in here. You take the left side and I’ll take the right.”
“Got it.”
Sam and Tom swam the length of the room on either side of the engine.
On the opposite end of the room, they met across the prop shaft. Splitting the engine bay in two, Sam and Tom swept the entire place. Every access door and hatch had been professionally sealed since the J.F. Johnson had sunk all those years ago. They circled the room in opposite directions, carefully checking each hatch. All were permanently welded shut.
Sam shrugged at Tom with palms upward. “I don’t get it. He can’t have just disappeared!”
Chapter Thirty-Six
An incredulous smile formed beneath Tom’s full-face dive mask.
He scanned the empty room. Why would the diver draw them into the old boiler-room? More to the point, why go to the effort of strengthening the place? He glanced at the heavy-duty, commercial grade underwater welding performed deep inside the hull. It was similar in quality to what could be found on an offshore oil drilling rig, where expert commercial divers lived in a pressurized habitat for weeks. So why would someone go to the effort with such craftmanship inside a ninety-year-old shipwreck?
“I’m all out of guesses what’s so important down here, let alone where he’s hidden,” Tom said. “You got any ideas, Sam?”
“Must be in hiding at the end of the propeller shaft?”
Tom raked the beam of his flashlight carefully down the length of the tunnel that housed the propeller-shaft. A flicker of light twinkled off the wall at the most distant point of the tunnel. As he approached it he ran his gloved hand across the bead of a fresh weld. The welding framed the outline of a hatchway which was more recently cut into the base of the hull just near the stern on the port side of the vessel, the side on which she listed.
Tom flashed his light toward the engine room to call Sam down to his position. Together, they turned the hatchway lock and opened the curved door outward. A current of warm water flooded over the two men from the bilge. It wasn’t hot, but compared to the near freezing water inside the J.F. Johnson the water felt like it had come straight from a hot bath.
Tom swam through the small hatchway into the bilge.
He shined his flashlight around the perimeter of the rounded hull, starting along the starboard side. Littered everywhere, were the remnants of more than a few hundred damaged wooden barrels. Most were cracked and empty, but some were still intact and others still, revealed dozens of bottles packed inside. At a guess, he figured the J.F. Johnson went down with a small fortune worth of prohibited rum.
The bilge ran the entire length of the ship, and by the looks of things, had been filled with contraband rum during prohibition.
Tom stopped and picked up a single bottle of rum.
He fixed the beam of his flashlight on the label. He ran his eyes across the bottle’s intricate craftmanship. The label was white with the words: Philadelphia 1876 set at the top — most likely a reference to the year Bacardi rum had earned a gold medal at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876. Below that were the words Ron Bacardi Superior and at the bottom of the label it read, Graduacion 44-5. The cork was intact, and had a foil seal with the Bacardi Bat embossed on top. Toward the lower half of the label were the words, Santiago de Cuba and below that, Habana — New York.
He handed the bottle to Sam. “I bet you this is part of what they were after.”
“Broken old bottles of Bacardi rum?” Sam asked, not bothering to hide his doubt. “Couldn’t they make it to their local liquor store?”
“Not the broken bottles, but I’m sure there would be some intact ones down here.” Tom smiled. “They could try, but I’m doubting their local store has one of these lying around.”
“It’s a rare bottle of rum?”
“You could say that.”
“How rare?”
“Rare,” Tom said. “In 1912, while Emilio Bacardi traveled to Egypt to purchase a mummy for the future promotion in Cuba, his brother Facundo M. Bacardi continued to meticulously supervise the training of the third generation of Family Master Blenders back in Santiago. Meanwhile, Henri Schueg, their brother in law, began to expand the company. He opened new bottling plants in Barcelona, Spain and New York City.”