“Oh man!” Tom shouted. “Have a look at this!”
Sam’s eyes darted toward the LIDAR display monitor. An unmistakable shape of a pyramid stood atop the hull of a large ship. The image could have been of anything, but Sam was as certain he’d found the CSS Mississippi than as he would be if the LIDAR screen had located its nameplate.
A grin reached his lips. “Well done, everyone. We’re about to get to the bottom of a hundred and sixty-year-old mystery.”
Tom dropped an electronic pin on the map readout from the scanner, and checked the GPS reading on his watch to verify the coordinates — writing them down. The four occupants of the plane eagerly craned out the port side window of the tiny aircraft. Each tried to visualize what the wing-mounted sensor had picked up, but all they could see was the verdant green foliage of the thick woods below.
“Got it marked?” Sam asked, his face beaming with delight at his friend.
Tom matched his grin. “You bet.”
Sam searched the map, locating a level meadow about three miles to the west. “I’m going to try to put us down in a relatively flat field to the west of here. Who’s ready to go for a hike?”
Chapter Fifty-Two
The only available landing site turned out to be closer to a five-mile trek from the suspected shipwreck. Sam studied his hand-held GPS and plotted a course. There was no vehicle access anywhere nearby, and it turned out to be roughly a two-hour hike to reach.
Sam, Tom, Virginia and David made the trip on foot, slogging down thickly wooded, low hills, which they followed to a large flatland with densely forested marshes. The trio’s desert boots sunk into the swampy ground, and the foliage became nearly impenetrable the closer they got to the final resting place of the ship. They were pushing through virgin scrub with no sign of mankind anywhere to be seen.
Insects bit them and buzzed in their ears. It was midsummer, and they were feeling every degree of the hot and humid wetlands. Their progress was reduced by trying to slog over the soft, uneven terrain. The stilled air was thick with birdcalls of ducks and water-fowl.
Sam wished they’d come closer and eat all the bugs that were attacking him.
“I still can’t believe Elise was finally wrong about something!” Tom said as he held up a branch for the rest of them to clamber under.
“Well, she wasn’t off by much” Sam replied. “She probably couldn’t find any accurate estimates of what the prairie potholes did that year.”
“Prairie potholes?” Tom asked.
“What we’re in. They’re the areas of low lying land across the northern states cut by glaciers ten thousand years ago. The glaciers scarred the land and left potholes known as kettles that hold water in the springtime each year. They support most of the agriculture up here — in some places farmers rely entirely on them. The thing is though, between winter snowmelts, river estuaries and annual rainfall differences, who can say where water collected from year to year?”
It took nearly two hours before they reached the base of a small ravine. The climb up the canyon was a hundred feet of loose rocks and soft, earth-sliding hell.
Reaching the crest first, Virginia turned around and shouted, “Didn’t you say the CSS Mississippi was an ironclad?”
Sam felt doubt rise like bile in his throat. “Yeah, why?”
“I hate to say this, but I think we’ve found the wrong shipwreck.”
“What are you talking about?” Sam asked.
He immediately picked up his pace to the peak, until he could clearly see down into the gorge below. Sam kicked an innocent bush, cursing in a low, muffled voice. Right there below him, was a dilapidating paddle steamer from 150 years ago…
Chapter Fifty-Three
Sam ran his eyes across the old paddle steamer. To the right of him, Tom shook his head with a combination of amusement, disappointment, and astonishment. “Well, would you look at that?” Tom’s booming laughter filled the air.
“Yeah, I’m looking.” Sam growled.
A paddle steamer? Really?
The damned thing looked like it belonged popped right out of an old western movie. Sam half expected the sound of an antique player piano to start playing honkytonk, envisioning a few cowboys sitting around a table with a deck of cards, reeking of tobacco and strong whiskey. The ship had three decks layered like a birthday cake. In ascending order from water leveclass="underline" he noted what constituted the main deck, the boiler deck, and the hurricane.
A series of old boxes lined the main deck where freight had once been stored. The boiler deck looked like it contained the cabins. The pilothouse jutted from the hurricane deck, in what Sam recalled the old-timers refer to as the Texas.
Twin smoke stacks rose amidships; once they carried sparks away from the ship’s powerful boilers. Like other steamboats of its era, it had been painted white, with a red stern paddle wheel. The paint had faded, and in most places, had been stripped by the sun. Otherwise, it looked like it belonged in a museum of a bygone period of the far west Missouri River.
A small forest of Hybrid Polar, American Elm, and Flowering Dogwood trees surrounded the vessel as though by purpose, creating a canopy through which the paddle steamer had been hidden for probably some 150 or more years. A few Eastern Redbud’s, still in full blossom, were growing from within the ship.
David stumbled to the top, bent over to catch his breath. “What’s the problem?” he asked.
“We found the wrong shipwreck.”
“Shit.”
“That’s what I said.” Virginia turned toward Sam. “Now what?”
Just down in this gorge lay the unexplored remains of a ship. Good humor abruptly restored, Sam and Tom glanced at each other, excitement in their eyes. Together, they both replied, “Let’s go check it out!”
“Have you two forgotten that we’re on the clock here? If we don’t find that gold, a lot of good people are going to die.” David turned to Virginia. “You told me that we’ve got four days to find the Confederate treasury if you want your dad back alive.”
“I know,” Sam said. “But it won’t take long to reach the paddle steamer and find out how it got here. Maybe the captain’s left his pilot logbook.”
“What difference is that going to make?” David asked.
“Look around you. The Missouri River is miles and miles away. There are no tributaries anywhere near here.”
“So?”
“If the steamboat managed to be blown here, where it’s remained all this time, there’s a good chance the ironclad might be nearby, too.”
David nodded, as though he were mentally considering the logic of that. Then, reluctantly, he replied, “All right. But let’s make it quick. If we’re not in the right place, I want to get back to the aircraft. There might be still time to refuel and make another run before nightfall.”
“Agreed.”
Sam led the group down the shallow ravine into the flat field. The sky darkened beneath the canopy of thick vegetation. The ground was soft, a silty mixture of sand and gravel. He made his way through the forest toward the portside of the ship. Surrounding the hull was a six-foot skirt of dilapidated iron, slanted outward at thirty degrees.
He grasped the side of it to see if he could climb up, but the rusty metal broke free, crumbling away in his hand. With a bit of time they could probably hammer through a chunk to climb up, but the thicker main section was unrelenting.
“What is this stuff?” Virginia asked.
“No idea,” Sam replied, breaking another section off in an attempt to climb. “Maybe they used it as a defensive barrier to protect the ship from various rocky shoals along the sections of rapids spread throughout the unmapped river?”