“Don’t blame you there, Cal. Abby is pretty special.”
“Well?” Calvin drawled the word out into two syllables. Way-all. “What’s going on with you and the lady?”
“We haven’t talked to each other in months, so you can assume not much is going on.”
Calvin grinned. “I’ve known you both too long to fall for that line.”
“Dang. Shoulda known you’d be onto me. But like Abby said, it’s complicated. Maybe I should write Ann Landers for advice.”
“She’d probably tell you that you’re both worrying too much about getting burned again.”
Hawkins felt the boat slowing under his feet and was glad to change the subject. “Looks like we’re coming up on the site, Cal. Let’s get Minnie prepped for the dive.”
The storm that had swept in after the first dive had left clear weather in its wake. Low seas, cloudless skies, a light breeze.
Hawkins and Cal went to the stern deck where Miguel stood next to a heavy-duty plastic container, roughly the size of a large shipping carton that sat under a crane used to haul in fishnets. Hawkins unlatched the box and pushed the cover back on its hinges. Nestled in a contoured foam bed was a remote-operated vehicle around four feet long and almost as wide, with runners like those found on an old sled.
Hawkins had named the vehicle Minnie, after Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend. It was a wordplay on the ROV’s compact size, but also because the twin spotlights on top of the vehicle looked like mouse ears. Turbines on both sides of the battery housing powered the vehicle.
It was not unusual in ROV design to have one or more mechanical arms called manipulators. Hawkins had wanted this model to be a workhorse. Instead of jointed manipulators, he built it with two sturdy arms that could extend from the main body and lift heavy loads into a basket under the camera.
Following his conversation with Cal, he had called Howard Snow back in Woods Hole, checked on his dog and asked Snowy to put the ROV on a truck to Boston. Calvin picked Minnie up at Logan Airport during a stop-off on his trip to Spain.
They connected it to a 500-foot-long fiber-optic emergency cable coiled onto a drum. Next they set up the control console. Hawkins linked the units and placed the control and thirteen-inch TV monitor on a wooden workbench under the shade of a canvas canopy.
Hawkins asked Miguel to be the ROV tender. His job would be to stand on deck, watch the ROV and signal his father when to move the boat. The job normally required experience, but Miguel seemed quick-witted and eager, and he had good rapport with his father. He and the captain ran the boat with hardly a word exchanged between them. Hawkins attached the winch cable’s quick-release hook to an eye-bolt on the top of the ROV frame and gave a thumb’s up to Miguel who stood at the winch controls.
The winch motor growled, the cable went taut and the vehicle lifted out of its container trailing the tether as it unwound from the drum. The crane swung out until the vehicle was hanging over the water. The boat lurched to one side. The ROV was a light load compared to a net full of fish and the vessel took the weight easily. Hawkins crooked his thumb and forefinger in an OK sign and pointed downward with his other hand.
Minnie swayed at the end of the cable as Miguel lowered the vehicle under the waves. When the ROV had reached the depth of a few feet, Hawkins asked Miguel to stop the winch. He tested the video camera and controls. Then he instructed Miguel to release the cable hook from the eye-bolt. The ROV had neutral buoyancy, meaning it would neither sink, nor bob back to the surface.
The trick to operating an ROV is for the operator to act like a miniature pilot actually riding in the vehicle. Hawkins moved the joystick to point the front of the vehicle down and increased power to the turbines. Minnie’s lights cut through the deepening darkness. The monitor displayed depth and speed. Hawkins tracked the vehicle until the image of grayish-brown sand filled the screen. He called for the vehicle to hover several feet above the bottom. There was no sign of the wreck.
“We’ll mow the lawn,” Hawkins said, using the term for a common search technique.
The vehicle began to move back and forth in a series of parallel underwater rows that covered a large rectangular area. The first pass failed to uncover any sign of the shipwreck. After a few minutes, the camera picked up a dark shape on the bottom.
“It’s Captain Santiago’s boat,” Hawkins said.
The Sancho Panza lay at a forty-five degree angle. A big chunk of the pilot house was missing. Hawkins maneuvered Minnie until the vehicle was at right angles to the elevated side. As the ROV hovered, its lights picked out a ragged hole in the metal hull.
Calvin let out a low whistle.
“Nasty,” he said. “Spike was designed to penetrate plate armor. Missile would have gone through regular ship-building steel like it was cardboard.”
Hawkins pivoted the vehicle and sent it along the hull a few feet, where it stopped like a pointer dog in front of a hole that was an exact twin of the first.
Calvin squinted at the screen. “Run that attack sequence by me again, Hawk.”
“There was one explosion, then a pause followed by two in rapid succession.”
“Based on your recollection, I’d say the first missile was intended to disable the pilot house. After the pause, two more missiles were launched at the hull to sink the boat. Let’s work our way backwards.”
Hawkins elevated the ROV above the angled hull, then sent it over the stern deck.
“The captain said this was where Rodriguez, the bogus government observer, was standing when he was hit. The missile would have passed through his body into the sea, thus the lack of an audible explosion from the second Spike. That would have been the pause that I noticed.”
“Like I said, that was no accident,” Calvin said.
“Maybe a wave lifted the shooter’s boat as he was taking a bead on the hull.”
“Can’t say for sure because I wasn’t there, but he had time to correct his shot. With Spike missiles you hit what you aim for.”
“Then the only conclusion is that the shooter must have been aiming for that poor bastard.”
“That’s my take on it. Don’t know why he’d waste a shot if the goal was to sink the boat. Missiles like those don’t come cheap.”
“Maybe it tells us something about the shooter,” Hawkins mused. “Sending the Sancho Panza and everyone on it to the bottom wasn’t enough for him. He likes to kill people.”
Hawkins pulled the ROV back and moved it around the ship in an ever-increasing spiral. The camera picked up Falstaff sitting on the bottom around fifty feet from the salvage boat. Abby had been standing behind Hawkins watching the monitor. She gave his shoulder a hard squeeze when the submersible appeared.
“You and your friend were damned lucky to get out of that thing. And please don’t tell me it was no big deal.”
Hawkins felt a dryness in his throat as he imagined being trapped with Kalliste in the water-filled sphere. “Okay, Abby. This was a very big deal. Falstaff is in bad shape, but may be salvageable.”
Calvin returned from talking to the captain. “We’ve got two blips on radar, both beyond the effective range of a Spike,” he reported. “No aggressive movement from either one. The captain hailed them on the radio. Both are fishing boats that he knows. I’m going back to the pilot house and keep watch in case someone starts moving in on our perimeter. How long will it take if we have to get the ROV on board in a big hurry?”
“Around five minutes if nothing goes wrong.”
“That might work if I’m right about the shooter using a Spike. We’ll see him moving in on us.”
“And if you’re not right?” Abby said. “What if they used something with greater range than a Spike?”