It was now April 2012—precisely one hundred years—the Centenary of Titanic’s launching and her demise when she struck an iceberg at 22 knots.
David Ingles took notice of the birds—thankful the seagulls weren’t a flock of albatrosses. He gave a flash thought to his reading of The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, imagining he would undoubtedly run into an ancient sailor on board Scorpio this trip—old timers with short fuses and little patience for the young and foolish who got men killed at sea as quickly as scratching an itch. If the old timers aboard Scorpio knew his history, or his latest failed mission, they’d surely be wary of him the entire way out and back.
Ingles came aboard without fanfare and no one to greet him. Everyone on the pier and on board busily work at their jobs. It was obvious orders were to ship out within the hour.
At the center of Scorpio, Ingles found the ‘oil well’ over which the largest derrick supported a myriad of equipment strung with cable as thick as hemp on a Cutty Schooner. But this ship was far from a schooner, and while faster, hardly as romantic or beautiful. Essentially a high-tech outfitted drill ship, Scorpio’s primary drilling derrick stood amidships. But rather than use a traditional drill pipe, Scorpio’s gleaming derricks supported her enormous cables—hundred pound Cryo-Cable to be exact. Her cable could withstand the most frigid conditions on Earth—or rather below the seas—including the bottom of the North Atlantic exactly two and a half miles below the surface.
Ingles, carrying his gear, now ran a strong hand along the huge steel derrick. With her electronically controlled pulleys, Scorpio could hoist anything imaginable, even a Titanic-sized bulkhead if need be. If the Titanic were in one piece and not the ripped apart, pancaked-in-on-itself ship that it’d become, David had no doubt that the mighty little Scorpio could “Raise the Titanic.” She was that strong.
However, their mission was not to raise Titanic so much as to raid and plunder her. Some news accounts used the term ‘rape’ her, but Ingles didn’t see it that way. Not in the least. It was well documented in the literature that Titanic took down many treasures with her—far more than dishware—and the belief held that even the sealed hold that carried a treasure-trove of vintage automobiles would be perfectly preserved at the depths where Titanic resided. Even a sandwich at such depths would be perfectly preserved and edible unless found in a Stover’s lunchbox—which would be permeated then with corrosive salts and more toxic than sea water. So what of the stash of mailbags crossing the Atlantic in 1912? They resided in a sealed section of the ship. A wealth of letters, documents, and bank notes alone. So what of all the jewelry stowed in the safes aboard yet to be discovered? Not to mention brass and gold fixtures and shipboard items within the ship? The treasures that had survived all these years—museum pieces for world showcases, and each item itself worth a fortune!
It was just a matter of using modern means to salvage the treasures awaiting them from what remained inside the various safes aboard, the staterooms, the varied first, second, and third-class dishes and silverware, the mailbags, the secret cargo in the holds—like the rumored crates of Vickers automatic machine guns destined for the US Army, and a stash of now quite antique automobiles. Not to mention an Egyptian mummy on its way to New York.
Yes it was all extremely controversial, and Ingles’d had to walk through a sizeable crowd of protestors noisier than the seagulls to get aboard, but history would eventually prove the mission the right thing to do—of this he was certain. Otherwise the enormous sacrifice of all those 1600 souls aboard the night Titanic went to its watery grave would have been in vain. At least that was the sound byte put out for the media and the public.
The other side argued that Titanic was a cemetery, sacred ground; they championed Dr. Robert Ballard, who had consecrated that solemn peace of the death ship at the bottom of the Atlantic. Ingles recalled Robert Ballard in a Red Sox ball cap when the discoverer of the Titanic in its grave had last left Titanic’s ruins decades ago. He had certainly put his stamp on the discovery and had every good intention to proclaim it a last resting place, a sanctified ground, a place not to be disturbed, a place nothing should be removed from.
Author Rod Serling’s brother Robert’s worst novel—Ghosts of the Titanic—prevailed in the minds of many, but for Ingles and other scientists such concerns amounted to superstitious claptrap—Twilight Zone nonsense.
“Make no mistake about it,” said a white-bearded stout fellow confronting Ingles, jabbing at the derrick with his pipe. “This monster can hoist up an entire Sherman tank from below if you give the order, Dr. Ingles. If need be, we can bring up that blasted ship piece by piece, compartment by compartment.”
“Capable of a quarter million pounds of lift,” David replied, smiling. “May sound like science fiction but there you have it. Please, call me David.”
“Indeed, young man… indeed.” They shook hands.
“Your voice sounds somewhat familiar. You’re Dr. Dimitri Alandale, aren’t you, sir? We’ve spoken. You called my iPhone.”
“Aye—first mate, science officer, and you look like your photo, yes? Sometimes a good thing!”
“You’ve got me!” Ingles joked, and they both looked out to sea.
“Ahhh, yes! I called you from my Droid—lot of interference. Cell phones don’t always work out at sea. Well, son, our captain’ll see you soon ’nough. Busy with that bloody press conference.” He pointed to the pier with his pipe.
“Good to meet you, sir.”
“Sorry there’s no one to welcome you aboard other than me.” A tall, gaunt man perhaps in his early to mid-sixties, Dr. Dimitri Alandale was half Greek, half Scotsman. He looked the picture of a graying oceanographer and seaman, and Ingles took an instant liking to the man whose laugh came so easily.
The two seamen, young and old, stood in silent admiration of the machinery before them. They understood its enormous power, that its express purpose was to lower and lift a massive platform on which thousands of tons of sensing devices, search and salvage equipment, as well as recovered artifacts would rest. This equipment would be made available two miles below the surface to the diving teams, men and women whose experiences uniquely qualified them to participate in this historic dive into the very bowels of Titanic.
Ingles would be among the divers using the new underwater breathing apparatus that allowed divers to explore the vast interiors of the sleeping giant below the North Atlantic.
He would be among two other divers set to dive the bow section of the shipwreck while another team of three divers were planning to explore the aft section of the wreck. Swigart would pilot the sub carrying all the divers below, while an eighth man, Kyle Fiske, almost Swigart’s age, would help monitor the dive teams from the control room aboard Scorpio along with Dr. Entebbe and Captain Forbes. In essence, two teams of three divers, two additional diver-ready backup men in the form of Fiske and Swigart manning controls—eight in all. Overall Commander of Divers and making all the decisions at this point was Lou Swigart. Fiske was considered the man to take over for Lou in the event something happened to Swigart. Fiske could also step in for any one of the others in the event he was needed.
All of them had passed extensive tests utilizing the new technology that amounted to breathing oxygenated liquid into their lungs. Essentially, they were going through an act of ‘de-evolution’—returning to a fish-like existence in that their lungs would be filled with liquid, but liquid from which they could sustain life.