TEN
Ben Shepard stood and squinted into the wind on the fly bridge atop the police boat where he had met Mick Shay the day before. Shay stood alongside him, his legs adjusting effortlessly to the deck’s roll, which was gentled by the curved pier that separated Hyde Street Harbor from San Francisco Bay.
Ben clung with both hands to a chest-high grab bar and looked out across the water. Beyond the sea wall, whitecaps salted the bay. In the distance ferries large enough to swallow a half dozen of this boat, and freighters vast enough to swallow a half dozen of those ferries, cut smoothly through the waves. But, despite the clear sunshine, boats as small as this one were scarce, and the few that Ben saw bobbed on the waves like drifting corks.
Ben ran one hand over his life vest’s clasps. “Mick, is a police boat big enough to go out there today?”
Shay covered his moustache with one hand and coughed. “Police boat? Mr. Shepard, this is a Textron MLB 47 self-righting, self-baling motor lifeboat. The finest foul-weather rescue vessel God ever put on water, and the pride of the United States Coast Guard. A twenty-foot wave can capsize her and she’ll right herself and bale herself dry before a Coastie can pee his pants.”
“Oh.” Ben swallowed. Was there a less reassuring vessel in which to go to sea for the first time than one expected to capsize?
Shay winked and clapped Ben’s shoulder. “Mr. Shepard, you’ll live to tell this day’s tale, I promise. But if you don’t like the water, stay here. We can handle this.”
Shay knew as well as he did that Ben was just here for show. They both were. Ben could wave the DHS flag from dry land as visibly as he could wave it from the deck of this death trap. And Ben was connected with this underlying crime only by the accident of common service with the criminal. But it had stained Ben and every vet, and Ben had learned the hard way that the only way to deal with some irrational fears was to confront them.
Ben shook his head. “I’m going.”
The third person on the bridge stood by the helm, which consisted of an adjustable high-backed armchair set on the fly bridge’s right, starboard, side. In front of the chair were controls and instruments, and to its right were hand-operated throttles that controlled the boat’s two diesel engines. The principal control, of course, was a steering wheel. This boat’s wheel was the size of, and set at the flat angle of, the kind Ben was used to seeing on a city bus. The coxswain wore the same uniform as Shay and the other three members of the boat’s crew did, blue police utilities and an SFPD Marine Unit ball cap crested with oars crossed over a life ring.
She looked up, frowning, and asked Shay, “Mick, you wanna see how much longer your contractor needs to turn my beautiful boat into a damn tug?”
Ben followed Shay down a ladder to the bob-tailed boat’s afterdeck and asked, “The crew’s unhappy they’re pulling this duty?”
Mick shook his head as he jerked a thumb toward the coxswain on the fly bridge. “This ain’t the Army. Mr. Shepard, the best way to turn unhappy cops into happy cops is pay ’em overtime. Which we are. She just thinks towing sonar behind her MLB 47 is like using a racing catamaran to haul garbage. Which is a fuckin’ horselaugh since ninety percent of this boat’s operating hours are chuggin’ around McCovey Cove outside the ballpark during Giants games, tellin’ people to put on life jackets.”
“But is she right about this boat?”
Mick ran his fingers across the superstructure’s smooth white skin. “Marine 1’s a thoroughbred hooked to a beer wagon, for sure. She’s got newer electronics and engines than a Coastie MLB. But the alternatives to using her were using up hours on a workhorse boat that already gets too many, or requesting a hydrographic survey boat from NOAA. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration paper pushin’s slow as traffic. And the People’s Republic of San Francisco don’t invite Washington into its business unless hell cools to room temperature. Present company excepted, of course.”
On the afterdeck knelt a slender, curly-haired man in a logoed tan windbreaker and matching cap. He bent over a yellow, rear-finned torpedo decaled with the same logo as his cap. The sonar towfish was as long as the contractor’s representative was tall, and was as thick as the man’s arm.
A yellow, braided electrical cable was plugged into the torpedo’s midsection, then lay coiled on the deck and connected through a second device, a delta-winged yellow glider as wide as a man’s shoulders. From the glider the cable curled up and through a pulley that hung suspended from an A-frame hanger of tubular metal that the sonar contractor’s representative had affixed to the deck. The pulley hung out over the water beyond the boat’s stern. The cable snaked back from the pulley to a horizontal cable spool like a motorized and oversized fishing reel. The reel, too, was affixed to the boat’s afterdeck. The mechanism would allow the yellow fish to be towed through the depths like a fisherman’s lure.
The sonar contractor’s rep stood and stretched. “Towfish is good to go. If I run the predeployment tests while we’re underway, we might have time to find what you’re looking for yet today.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, Ben and Mick stood again on the fly bridge alongside the coxswain as she idled the rumbling police boat past the opening in the harbor pier.
The lifeboat cleared the pier and the coxswain pushed the throttles forward. The boat accelerated and its bow lifted as it sped toward the Golden Gate, orange and majestic in the morning sun.
The wind flushed Ben’s cheeks and he grinned at Shay. “Do they always ride up here outside when the weather’s good?”
Mick nodded. “Even more when it’s bad. Or when there’s serious business to do. Better visibility, and us old salts prefer the wheel to a joystick. Which is how you steer from the other control stations.”
Ben kept grinning. There was joy in this assignment all.
Ten minutes later, Ben’s grin had faded as the lifeboat rose, fell, and pounded through wave after wave at twenty-five teeth-rattling knots.
The coxswain leaned toward Ben. “Sir, you don’t look too good.”
“Don’t feel too good.”
“Sorry. MLBs are stable for their size, but they’re built for buoyancy, not comfort.”
An interesting fact. Not therapeutic, but interesting.
“The survivor’s compartment below is the most stable space aboard. And there’s Dramamine in the aid kit. If you can keep it down.”
A half hour later, Ben staggered out on deck from the compartment with the coffeemaker, leaned over the boat’s rail, and evacuated his complimentary hot breakfast, and probably the aid kit’s Dramamine, into the waters of San Francisco Bay.
Shay laid an arm across Ben’s shoulders. “I know, Mr. Shepard. But don’t jump. The swim to shore’s too far.”
Ben wiped tears from his eyes and drool onto his windbreaker sleeve. “When I die, it won’t be in the water.” He waved his hand at the hatch from which he had emerged. “Prefer to die indoors.” Whoever named it the survivors’ compartment had a keen sense of irony.
“Stay up here in the fresh air, sir. Keep your eyes fixed on the horizon. That helps. And maybe some of that Dramamine stuck.”
Ten minutes later, Shay proved a prophet, and Ben staggered, weak but relieved, forward.
* * *
Unlike a car, the MLB could be operated from multiple driver’s seats. The coxswain continued to drive from the fly bridge while Ben and Mick Shay stood below her, in the wide windowed, and currently underutilized, enclosed bridge. The curly-haired sonar operator sat in front of his laptop, set up on a stowable chart table, while they peered over his shoulder.
The sonar rep pointed at one of two rectangles displayed side-by-side on his laptop’s screen. “This one’s the GPS feed. Actually, I just plugged my phone in here, and the nav app’s not much different from what you use to find a coffee shop. In fact, it’s all Windows-based plug-and-play software.”
Shay looked at Ben and shrugged.
A ship outline crawled bottom-to-top of the GPS feed’s blue rectangle like a red beetle.
The rep shifted his finger. “This is the feed from the towfish.”
The other rectangle resembled a two-lane highway viewed from above that scrolled slowly from the screen’s top down.
Ben pointed. “The centerline’s—”
The rep nodded. “The axis the boat’s moving along. We’re towing the fish parallel to the bottom. To record in water this deep, we tow the fish behind the depressor wing you saw lying out on the afterdeck. It forces the fish deeper. The wing’s like the plane that tows an advertising banner above a ballpark. Side scan sonar’s transmitting sound energy from the fish at a specific frequency, in a pattern like a Chinese fan was hanging below the fish. When the energy encounters an object, the object bounces some of the energy back and the fish hears it.”
Ben said, “Ping?”
The sonar operator nodded. “Ping. Like in the movies, more or less.”
Ben asked, “What have you found so far?”
“So far I’ve been tuning up, not finding. The depressor wing keeps the fish down, but the currents in this channel make keeping the fish stable difficult. And we have to adjust for the velocity of sound through the temperature and composition of the water the fish is moving through. Then we correct for noise, adjust boat speed for the frequency the fish is set to transmit and receive. Then we’re ready to take pictures.”
“How sharp are the pictures?”
“Depends. If we ping at lower frequencies we can search wider areas with a single pass. But the resolution’s lower, too, so the imaging’s fuzzier. If we ID something of interest, we mark the location as a target then make another pass across it at higher frequency.”
Ben asked, “How fuzzy are we talking about?”
“Once we know what we want to look at, under the right conditions, 1600 Kilohertz can show you details less than a centimeter wide. Half the width of a dime.”
The rep spoke to the coxswain over the ship phone. “Good to go. Come about and let’s start working through the grid.”
Ben’s heart ticked up a beat and he leaned on the rep’s chair back and stared. The bottom of the Golden Gate Channel, pitch black and three hundred feet beneath and behind him, glowed on the screen like a yellow-brown desert, visible in every wrinkle and dune.
He pointed at the screen. “That curved, floating line?”
“An actual fish. At least its reflective parts. This thing’s really just a glorified fish finder.”
Ben had never caught a fish, much less tried to find one. He shook his head slowly as he whispered, “Amazing!”
He was here to cover Arthur Petrie’s ass and to bear witness. But now he was hunting buried treasure, and it bordered on fun.
An hour later, Ben straightened, stretched, and peered out the enclosed bridge’s tall windows at the Golden Gate’s red arch, and far beyond the bridge the needles and blocks of San Francisco’s skyline. Most of the time, this view out the window was more amazing than the view of the bottom of the sea, after all. The real fish turned out to be scarce, and he hadn’t seen a doubloon yet.
“Hmm.” The rep grunted.
Ben flicked his eyes down from the Golden Gate Bridge to the laptop’s screen. A squared off corner of something crawled into view at the edge of the yellow-brown road. They said the rarest thing in nature was a straight line.
Ben squeezed the rep’s shoulder. “What’s that?”
Mick had been napping in the enclosed bridge’s right-hand seat. At the sound of Ben’s voice he swung to his feet and stood behind the rep.
The sonar technician opened another screen window in which the object showed larger, and had been frozen. He moused a cross-shaped cursor over the corner of the image, dragged it to the opposite corner and clicked.
“Eight feet, six inches.” The rep turned to Mick and shrugged.
Mick shrugged back. “Yeah. Fuck it.”
Ben’s mouth hung open. “What? You can’t even see what it is.”
Mick said, “Standard intermodal shipping container’s a steel box eight feet by eight feet six inches in end dimension. Ten thousand of ’em fall off container ships every year.”
“But—”
“Full of doubloons?” Shay shook his head. “Cheap plastic crap from China, Mr. Shepard. And it sure ain’t your electric sports car.”
Shay settled back into his chair and tilted his cap’s bill over his eyes.
* * *
Twenty minutes after Shay’s dismissal of the shipping container, Ben stood, pouting, at Marine 1’s bow as he clung to the waist-high rail with one hand while he unzipped his fly with the other and relieved himself. Marine 1 was faced about toward the open ocean as it trolled the towfish, moving so slowly that the wind blowing off the land pressed against Ben’s back. One common denominator between Kansas and the Pacific Ocean was the folly of pissing into the wind, which Ben had concluded his current assignment here at the bow amounted to.
Shay came forward and stood beside him. “Spotted any grays yet, Mr. Shepard?”
Shay had sent Ben forward to watch for whales, and insisted it wasn’t the maritime equivalent of a snipe hunt. “It’s bullshit, isn’t it, Mick?”
Shay shook his head as he raised his palm. “God’s truth, Mr. Shepard. Night and day from November to March every year twenty thousand gray whales migrate past the Golden Gate south from the Arctic Circle to the lagoons off Baja California. The single girls are lookin’ to get lucky, the pregnant ones are lookin’ to drop their calves, and the cows who already have calves just want to dodge the orcas.”
At that moment, a hundred yards ahead, a pectoral fin larger than a car’s hood broke the water as casually as a swimmer’s arm, gray and crusted in white.
Ben pointed. “Ah!”
Then a grouping appeared where the flipper had been. A half dozen hillocks bulged the sea’s surface upward as they moved right to left, or as Ben corrected himself, starboard to port. Then the hillocks parted as the great, glistening gray snakes of six whales’ backs, large ones and small, rolled forward, then vanished.
Ben’s jaw hung slack.
“That’s what I thought you’d say. They’re a sight you never get tired of. They mostly hug the shoreline, but when they have to cross the open water of the mouth of a bay, like this one or down at Monterey, they pack into groups.”
“Why?”
“Orcas—killer whales—try to squeeze in between a cow and her calf and cut the little one away from the pod.”
At that moment Ben felt and heard the diesels’ pitch change and the boat’s progress toward the huge animals slowed abruptly.
Shay said, “The cox just throttled the engines back. Federal buffer’s three hundred feet, unless they swim up.”
Ben frowned. “You mean they swim at us?”
Shay laughed and shook his head. “Yes, Mr. Shepard. Moby Dick was based on a true story. But grays swim up to tourist boats all the time looking for a nose pat, not a fight. I think they’re more interested in us than we are in them. The buffer’s not to protect us from the whale. But a full-grown gray’s longer than this boat. If we did T-bone one, the fine and the misdemeanor would be the least of our worries.”
Ben and Mick stood at the bow, scanning the sea, then a gray breached ten yards off the starboard bow, water coursing off its vast black body as its great head rose ten feet above Ben’s eye level. The whale expelled its breath with a roar, crashed back into the water, then vanished again beneath the sea. A blink later the only evidence of the whale’s existence was the drifting mist cloud that settled onto their skin, their clothing, and onto the boat’s deck.
Shay whooped.
So far today, Ben had vomited over a boat rail, discovered a pirate’s treasure chest as big as a GI’s Containerized Housing Unit, but less valuable than a losing lottery ticket, and had been sneezed on by a whale. All things considered, in terms of seeing the world’s wonders, today beat the best day he ever had in Iraq.
* * *
Two hours later, Ben stood on SFPD Marine 1’s afterdeck and stared at a reddening sun dipping toward the western horizon. The taut towfish cable cut down into the waves behind the boat. Breaching whales and sunken treasure aside, he was beginning to wonder whether this voyage was just pissing into the wind.
The MLB’s coffeepot was empty, and the boat had just come about and begun to sweep another overlapped swath, as though the boat were mowing a vast lawn, but guided precisely along its path by its GPS. The boat continued through the water as slowly as a riding lawn mower, so the towfish could transmit and recover its pings. The litter the towfish had found on the channel bottom consisted of another shipping container, a half-buried truck chassis that Shay opined, based on the curve of its rotted hood, dated to World War II, and undecipherable bits of chain, cable, building materials, and miscellaneous machinery so numerous that Ben had stopped counting.
“Hey.” The pitch of the sonar man’s voice was elevated as it drifted out through the enclosed bridge’s open hatch.
By the time Ben reached the enclosed bridge, the sonar man had opened a window on his laptop’s screen that showed a “snapshot” of a target lying flat on the bottom.
It was a disc, perforated in a pinwheel pattern, and by the scale the size of an automobile wheel without a tire.
The sonar man called up an internet image of the Galvani prototype on a stage at the 2019 Detroit Auto Show. It showed the sleek, orange car in profile, and an equally sleek, short-skirted model caressed its low roofline.
The sonar rep enlarged the image, then maneuvered it until the prototype’s front wheel, an elaborately sculpted, unique alloy masterpiece, covered the fuzzy image of the object on the sea floor. Identical. The rep whispered, “Bingo!”
Shay stood alongside Ben and slapped his shoulder.
Ben’s heart pounded. “We found it!”
The sonar man removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Well, we found a wheel. Might have come loose when the car hit the water, then floated on the current until the tire went completely flat, got torn loose by wave action, then the wheel sank here. Or this wheel may have broken loose when the car hit bottom in one piece, and the whole wreck’s lying ten yards from it, in the next furrow we’re set to plow. Truth’s probably something in between. All I’m sure of is the cox says we’re headed for the barn after one more pass. And tomorrow the seas’ll be higher. When the boat moves up and down the towfish tries to move up and down. It won’t make things easier.”
Ben asked the sonar man, “What if the car is close?”
The rep cocked his curly-haired head. “If you’re a gambler in a hurry, we could run the last track at sixteen hundred K. The coverage’s narrow, so there’ll be more passes to make tomorrow, in rougher water. And even if I’m working free I don’t know whether this boat is. But that wheel didn’t sink out of sight, so the bottom silt’s not deep here. If we capture an image tonight, it’ll be a beaut’.”
The wonder had worn off for Ben. Except for the whale-watching prospects, another day of this in rougher water held little appeal. The quicker they found this body the quicker he could return to D.C.
If Petrie was actually thinking of running for president, absurd as the notion was, Ben could do more for veterans in D.C. than he could do floating around San Francisco Bay.
“Well, Mr. Shepard?” Shay winked. “I’ll leave it up to you. Are you a Beltway bean counter? Or a riverboat gambler?”