“You might be surprised,” she mysteriously replied. “I’m going for the galley; you coming?”
David watched her saunter away, again somewhat mesmerized by her beauty. He looked about after a moment to see if anyone noticed him noticing her as she disappeared below decks. He rushed after, trying to convince himself he was hungry so as to have a reason to chase after this woman.
If David expected an intimate moment at breakfast with the lovely Dr. Irvin, he was immediately disappointed when she opened the galley entryway. There they found some dozen or so members of the crew, a few other divers, a number of the scientists, and a cook, a ship’s dog that looked a mix of lab and shepherd, and a galley boy who looked from his day’s old beard to be perhaps eighteen. Rather than doing introductions at this time, everyone just cheered in a group welcoming of the two newcomers.
That is, all but one fellow had cheered.
At the far end of the tight galley room, a sullen fellow kept his own counsel, eyes on his food, fork pushing scrambled eggs around on his plate. A big man with huge hands, this fellow had looked up at David and Kelly for the briefest moment, averting his eyes, which to David appeared silver grey with the intensity of lightning. He recalled Jacob Mendenhall from the earlier meeting, another member of the dive squad.
While he seemed cold, Mendenhall might simply be taking to heart the planned protocol to have as little contact as possible with fellow members of the dive assigned to. It would explain his seeming rudeness. David noticed that Kelly also seemed disturbed by the silver-eyed fellow the other end of the table.
“Sit, eat!” said the cook like a captain giving orders.
“Sit where?” asked Kelly, shrugging when two of men in the room rushed to their feet, saying they’d finished, and rushed off topside with their dishes still half full.
David and Kelly sat side by side in the noisy atmosphere unconsciously pulling in their shoulders to make room for themselves. They were soon eating and listening to the talk. Someone had brought up how few funds went into ocean exploration and the safety of aquanauts as opposed to space and astronauts. David quickly agreed, punctuating with his fork to say, “Take the mid-ocean ridge, a 40,000 mile long seam that goes around the globe like a baseball seam—biggest geological feature on earth—the oceans—and it’s ignored while people need to be made aware of it—just how big it is and how little exploration’s been done.”
“Exactly what I’ve been saying for years. People don’t know for instance there’re more volcanoes under the sea than on land—active volcanoes.” This fellow introduced himself as Steve Jens—one of the other aquanauts.
“It’s sad how little we know about the ocean,” agreed Will Bowman, who was paired with David as a roommate but not for the upcoming dive to and through Titanic.
Kelly piped in, adding, “I’ve read where the volume of water our oceans are made up of has, over the last eight million years, seeped down into the Earth’s crust and returned through hydrothermal vents—and that, gentlemen, is a lot of water.”
“Yeah, and what about all those new life forms Robert Ballard discovered at the East Pacific Rise—life forms that exist on sulfides instead of sunshine and chlorophyll?” asked Bowman. “All that life needs to be studied.”
“That kind of life form… damn alien to us,” added Steve Jens, his baritone voice filling the room. “Could, you know… could be out there in space on another planet for all we know.”
“Who knows,” said David, smiling. “Maybe our little mission to Titanic will revive interest in oceanic exploration—get up some funds and fans.”
“Fans? You mean groupies? I hope you’re not in this for glory, Ingles,” said Will Bowman, eyeing his dive partner and leaving more unsaid than said.
“Fans of oceanography, Will; that’s all I meant.”
“Eat, eat!” shouted the head cook, a fellow everyone called Cookie. Then before Kelly knew it, the men were talking first about how the Air Coast Guard plied the North Atlantic to safeguard ships from icebergs since Titanic’s demise. But soon their talk turned to guns that might or might not be found on Titanic, and what sort of weapon would Will Murdoch have used to mercy kill a passenger and then shoot himself in the head?
“In 1912 semi-automatics were rare as hell,” David replied to someone who suggested such a thing. “The Browning Colt 1911 .45 automatic was only manufactured the year before—1911.”
Mendenhall added, “Ingles is right. I mean, a handful of the original prototypes were available in 1911, but not to the public—and surely they weren’t likely to be available to the Titanic crew in 1912.”
“No, the British would’ve been using a Webley MKIV break top revolver in .455 Webley caliber,” added David and displaying with his fingers in pinch-fashion the size of the bullet, he added, “Big chunk of lead throwing 6 shooter—that mother.”
A crewman named Ford got into the fray, saying, “They would have had a lot of weapons being transported from one side of the pond to the other in her cargo holds—no telling what prizes are still down there.”
“Packed alongside ammo and caps, no doubt—I mean for the breach loaders like the Sharps rifles.”
“According to the cargo manifest no, but sometimes in those days they had a code for weaponry onboard,” put in Alandale. “Calling it crates of wine instead, and according to the manifest, there was a boatload of crated up wine going to New York.”
Kelly had too much on her mind to listen to this. She wanted another cup of coffee though and Cookie had promised more eggs, so she suffered through.
FOUR
The Harland & Wolff Shipyards, Belfast, April 3, 1912
Veteran shipyard watchman, Anton Fiore had, seconds before, seen what appeared to be a drunken sod in miner’s apparel mucking about below. Anton had just stepped out of his small office atop a scaffolding some twenty-five feet from the ground, not even close to Titanic’s second level. Anton had stepped outside in hopes of having a quiet smoke on his pipe and a gander at the stars overhead. As always, he didn’t look forward to a slow night going by in painful boredom with little more to do than play chess with himself.
Anton once had a second man on duty but those in charge had unreasonably deemed a second man suddenly to be an unnecessary extravagance. The poor fellow, George Pines, was unceremoniously let go—fired. So now Anton played the game alone until his replacement at daybreak should relieve him. Pines had, been an awful opponent anyway… still the place was lonely without him.
Now Anton’s star gazing was interrupted by the sight of the stumbling miner or derelict far below. The man was extremely near the new ship the builders were talking up as an ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner, its hull made of the finest ore to be double-plated, its compartments built so as to cut off any flooding from one another. The thing was mammoth—gargantuan in fact to the point it could not be exaggerated. To be sure it was beyond anything Anton Fiore had ever seen in the shipyards; in fact, it had humbled him on the one hand and made him proud of mankind at the same time.
He hoped the figure he’d seen at the base of the ship stumbling about was just a derelict, but suppose he was one of those madmen with an incendiary device—an anarchist who lived to terrorize god-fearing people, a fellow who lived to disrupt normal society and progress. What a headline it would make to blow up Titanic before she even got out of dry dock.
Anton rushed to catch up to the man and to apprehend him if need be. He had a club, and he knew how to use it. They did not give him a firearm. After all, he was no Pinkerton agent. He had read something in the papers about the shipyard hiring private security in the form of Pinkertons; their reputation had spread far and wide since the days of their having broken up so many strikes across the globe, and having been the model for the US Secret Service since Lincoln’s presidency. Every Irishman afoot was proud that Alan Pinkerton was one Irishman who’d made something of himself and his now famous two sons as well. They’d made something of a dynasty of their agency with the motto: We Never Sleep. All due to an Irish trait—an innate sense of intuition and tracking.