Sam reduced the engine to an idle, before powering off. The engine coughed and the propeller stopped spinning. Unclipping his belt, he opened the door, and climbed down the ladder. Holding onto the wing support, he reached down and picked up his hat that was floating on the surface of the water.
Sam shook the excess water off his cap, jauntily placed it back on his head. Stunned, surprised, and a little awed, Virginia, standing at the door to the plane, laughed out loud. Tom muttered, “Show off,” under his breath, but he chuckled, too.
“All right,” Sam said, beaming a crooked, boyish grin. “Let’s go find Holman’s sunken aircraft.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Sam idled the DHC-3 Otter to the edge of the silty, sandy basin. Once there, he and Virginia used a set of ropes to secure the aircraft, tying it between the base of two conifer trees. Tom opened the luggage hatch at the back of the aircraft, and nudged the container for the self-inflating twelve-foot Zodiac out the door into the water.
On landing onto water, the sensors in the casing fired the carbon-dioxide and nitrogen canisters. This inflated the boat in a matter of seconds. The three climbed in, and Tom started the two horsepower Suzuki outboard. He lowered the propeller, and headed out into the deep water of the basin.
Once they were about fifty feet out, and the water was deep enough that Sam could be confident that they wouldn’t snag anything on the shallow reeds, he dropped the sonar transducer buoy and commenced towing it in a large grid formation.
Closing in on the third grid, less than twenty minutes into their search, Sam spotted the outline of a metal object beneath the water. The sonar started to ping, indicating something man-made had been located. Sam increased the frequency of the sonar’s soundwaves, which improved the quality of the image. It was good, but nothing like the bathymetric equipment used on board Sam’s salvage vessel, the Maria Helena.
“Our luck is in.” Sam grinned. “That’s never happened before!”
“What?” Virginia asked.
“Luck… we’ve never found something on the first run,” Tom answered.
Sam shook his head. “He’s right. That honestly never happens. After all these years of silence, who would have thought old Yago was telling the truth?”
Chapter Forty-Six
It took nearly forty minutes to set up their closed-circuit rebreathers and diving paraphernalia. They carried additional oxygen tanks and dropped spare oxygen tanks at multiple pre-arranged safety decompression stops from a dive line attached to a large orange buoy.
There was a reason Yago never tried to reach his father’s plane, and it wasn’t just the depth of the wreck. Altitude diving was dangerous — even for a trained diver. Diving a hundred feet at altitude was much different than being submerged to a hundred feet at sea level.
Few dive charts existed to correctly identify the rate in which compressed nitrogen dissipated from one’s blood stream. The charts that did, such as those produced by the U.S. Navy, showed decompression sickness rates with a base line of sea level. None give depths at altitude.
Jack Holman’s plane was buried under 350 feet of water, but also 1083 above sea level. Thus, the rate of decompression sickness would be in the realm of an educated guess.
Sam and Tom had no desire to push the limits, so they decided to make a bounce-dive. Racing to the bottom, searching the wreck and getting the hell out of there. It would then take nearly four hours to complete the decompression stops and reach the surface. Sam just hoped the batteries for his undergarment infrared heating system lasted that long.
He finished checking his equipment and turned to Tom. “Are you good to go?”
“Good to go,” Tom confirmed.
Virginia said, “I’ll have a fire going and some soup heated by the time you get back. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Sam said, noticing her anxious expression. “We’re going to find this thing and then we’re going to get your father back.”
“I know,” she said. “Just don’t get yourself killed in the process.”
“We’ll do our best.”
Sam rolled backwards into the water, letting himself fall free from the Zodiac. He checked his gauges, searched for Tom, and confirmed that all was ready to go. A moment later, he deflated his buoyancy wing and began the long journey to the bottom of the lake.
It took nearly twenty-five minutes to reach the bottom of the lake. At a depth of 350 feet the pressure exerted on their bodies was the equivalent of a little more than ten atmospheres, which meant their time at this depth needed to be short. The dive line deposited them just about right on top of Jack Holman’s wrecked aircraft.
Sam fixed his flashlight on the seaplane.
The visibility was excellent — surprisingly better at this depth than on the surface. The icy cold water made the perfect environment for preserving the aircraft. Sam recalled how the float plane had never crashed, but as Yago had told him, Stanford had intentionally sunk it after murdering Holman. Now, the sunken seaplane looked like a museum grade display of a 1920s aircraft lying in a bed of marine life to make the focus point of a manmade reef.
On the lakebed beside the open hatchway, a small pile of equipment, books, and personal belongings could be seen strewn across the ground. Despite their disordered clutter, as though a kid had simply thrown them out of the aircraft, they appeared amazingly well preserved.
He kicked his fins and headed toward the still open hatchway midway down the fuselage. Shining his beam across the aircraft, he noticed there was a fine layer of silt which had built up over the metal structure over the decades. It was to be expected, no matter how cold the environment. He stopped at the opening and spotted something that wasn’t supposed to be there.
A single hand-print in the soft silt, indicated someone else had tried to open the door recently.
Sam’s eyes raked the internal edge of the fuselage and the hatchway. There were another three handprints there. Tom’s beam flicked across the hatch and then stopped.
Sam entered the aircraft. The inside of the entire fuselage, aft cargo bay, and cockpit were all stripped bare. Anything that wasn’t bolted down had been removed. He swam up to the cockpit. Maps and maintenance books, which would have ordinarily been stored in the open console between the two pilot seats, were all missing. He flicked his flashlight around the cockpit. There was nothing else to see.
He turned around in the narrow compartment and headed back out through the opening.
Tom met him at the hatchway. “Let me guess… we weren’t the first to reach the wreck?”
“It looks like it.”
Tom turned his focus to the pile of junk that lay next to the languishing float plane. “It looks like someone else was looking for Holman’s journal, too.”
Sam sighed. “Yes, and it looks like someone else beat us to it.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
It took nearly four hours to reach the surface.
They weren’t taking any chances with decompression stops, given their altitude. It was a long, slow, and cold process. Sam felt hypothermia start to encapsulate him by the time they reached the surface and Virginia met them with the Zodiac.
Tom climbed on board first and then helped pull his friend up.
Sam removed his facemask.
Virginia met his eye. “You didn’t find it, did you?”
“No. Someone else beat us to it. Must have been recent. Maybe even in the last few days.”
Her face became instantly etched in pain and fear. “It’s all right. We’ll work something out.”
“Yeah. I’ll have Elise track down the rest of my crew from the Maria Helena. They were owed some hard-earned vacation time and are currently scattered throughout the globe. They’re an eclectic bunch, each professional to their core. Holiday or not, my crew will come running if I tell them I need help. Together, we’ll come up with a plan to find your dad.”