“Get to the point. What’s this got to do with organized crime and trapping us inside this ninety-year-old shipwreck?”
“The Habana-New York distillery was opened in New York to produce Bacardi Rum in 1916, but it had to shut down production by 1919 prior to prohibition coming into effect.”
“Meaning?”
Tom laughed. “So, you’re not much of a drinker. It doesn’t matter. The fact is, a bottle of Habana-New York Bacardi Rum could fetch upward of fifty thousand dollars depending on its condition and guess what? Look around you. The ice-cold waters of Lake Superior are a natural preserver, capable of maintaining everything in pristine conditions.”
“So why have they been diving here every night for nearly three weeks?”
“Maybe there’s a particular bottle they’re searching for. A shipment that’s so rare, it’s worth spending a fortune to steal.”
“Of course. The J.F. Johnson would be registered as a National Historic Place and as such, would prohibit the removal of any items found within. If they got caught, it would be a criminal offence, but more importantly, they’d lose out on potentially millions of dollars’ worth of rare prohibition era rum bottles.”
“Exactly.”
“All right. So now we know what they were doing down here, how are we going to find our way out?”
Tom scanned his gas supply numbers. They still had nearly three hours. It would be plenty of time to wait until the diver unlocked the hatchway — that was, assuming that’s how he reached the surface again.
“Come on, let’s see where this thing leads.”
He swam along the bilge, toward the bow. The J.F. Johnson was a 251-foot steel Tramp-Steamer. It would take some time to reach the opposite end of the hull. Tom squeezed the twin accelerator triggers on the sea scooter and started heading toward the bow.
He trained the light toward the port side up ahead.
What he saw made him take an involuntary breath. Where the bottom of the hull should have been, a giant gash now tore through at least thirty feet of the iron hull. Tom would have expected the steel hull to be bent inward, but instead the jagged edges were curved outward — meaning the J.F. Johnson hadn’t run into a reef or collided with another vessel, but the damage had been caused by an explosion from the inside. Most of that gash had been buried by the seabed of Lake Superior, but two thirds of the way along, someone had gone to the effort of digging through it.
He fixed his flashlight at the opening. “There’s our way out.”
There was relief in Sam’s voice. “Great. What are you waiting for. Let’s get out of this damned shipwreck.”
Tom swam through the manmade opening within the buried ruptured hull. The tunnel continued for approximately twenty feet before expanding into what he guessed would be the open seabed of Lake Superior.
Before he swam out the end of the tunnel he switched off his flashlight.
Behind him, Sam asked, “Can you see the other diver?”
Tom’s eyes went wide. “Yeah, but you’re not going to believe what else I can see!”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Sam reached Tom’s side an instant later, expecting to now be in the open, 205 feet below the surface of Lake Superior. He watched the diver’s light diminish in size, over a hundred feet away.
“Think he’s far enough away not to notice us if I shed some light on our new environment?”
“Not to notice our lights?” Tom asked. “Yeah, should be all right.”
Sam switched on his flashlight.
He shined the beam upward, expecting the light to be absorbed and disappear in the darkness of the deep water that reached toward the night’s sky. Instead it showed the ceiling of a large limestone cavern that extended due west in a gradually upward slant. Strewn throughout were potentially more than a thousand wooden barrels.
Sam turned to meet Tom’s wide eyes. “I guess it might take our friends more than a few dives to locate the contents of a specific barrel.”
“Yeah, no wonder they’ve been so devious about diving here. It could take months to search their massive stockpile. The first time they were to get caught removing anything from the J F Johnson and their dreams of gold would be lost.”
“The question still remains. Where did it all come from?”
Tom watched the last of the mysterious diver’s light dissipate into the distant cavern. “I don’t know, but I’m betting our diving friend over there has some idea.”
Sam focused his flashlight into the cavern. “If nothing else, I’d feel better knowing we can reach the surface.”
He depressed the sea scooter’s accelerators and the machine whirred, as though eager to get going again. The cavern continued in a gradual upward slope for approximately two miles. Their course was perfect because it graduated their ascent in such a way that they progressively decompressed in the process, removing the need for prolonged decompression stops.
About twenty minutes into their journey, the cavern changed direction, angling in a near vertical section that appeared more like a sinkhole than a subterranean cavern. Up ahead, Sam spotted the diver’s light and guessed the man was performing a dedicated decompression stop.
Sam switched his flashlight off. “Guess we’re in the right place. It looks like he’s preparing to surface.”
“Looks like it.” Tom followed suit and switched his light off, too.
Soon the diver’s light diminished in size as the diver ascended far above them. Sam waited in the dark, maintaining neutral buoyancy and their closed-circuit rebreathers concealed their very breath, he ensured nothing had given away their presence to the diver they stalked.
The icy waters of the lake were crystal clear and devoid of sea-life and the detritus which would otherwise obscure them, so extra care needed to be taken. They had followed the man North along a subterranean tunnel for what seemed like miles before the roof opened up above them to where they could see sunlight beyond the surface.
Confident the diver had left the area, they increased their depth to thirty feet and stopped to make a mandatory safety decompression.
Once it was complete, Sam and Tom silently ascended to the surface.
Sam broke the surface first. He allowed no more than his facemask to show. He carefully turned 360 degrees in search of the other diver, or danger. Unable to spot either, he allowed himself to fully surface above the water.
“Clear,” he confirmed.
Tom said, “Copy. Coming up.”
He swept the area with his eyes. They were still underground. Blue-green bioluminescent lights of firefly larvae adorned the ceiling of the grotto eight or so feet above, reflecting like stars on the slow moving shallow stream that led toward the mouth of the cavern. A lightly worn path followed the edge of the water, leading over several boulders.
Sam listened to the silence.
On the edge of the path was a Canadian National Parks wooden placard which read: This creek is of cultural significance to the Meskwaki First People who once inhabited the region.
Sam glanced at the sign. “Check that out, Tom. The Meskwaki Gold Spring was never about gold. It was a secret spring that led between Canada and the U.S. waters on Lake Superior.”
Tom grinned. “You’re right. Only there was never a spring, either.”
“There wasn’t?”
“No. A river that flows from the surface to underground is called a siphon.”
Sam’s lips curled in an amused smile. “Thanks for the vocabulary lesson.”
“Just saying…”
Sam smiled. “What do you think happened here, back in the twenties?”
Tom looked around the grotto from the entrance at the mouth of the cavern, back to where the water disappeared underground. “My guess is someone must have known about this spot and realized that barrels of rum or other contraband could be dropped into this creek, where they would be pulled underground by the flow of water and the slightly warmer waters of the siphon would disperse at the bottom of Lake Superior.”