Pitt gave her a knowing wink. “Quite simple, actually. We just need to use an old trick that once worked for Hannibal.”
58
The Nevena, formerly the Besso, lay anchored in the Turkish harbor of Kabatepe. An offshore current pulled at the vessel until she floated perpendicular to land. A short distance away, the town’s central dock was filled with small, sun-beaten fishing boats. A delivery truck emblazoned with IRMAK PRODUCE motored to the end of the dock and stopped with a squeal of its brakes. Valentin Mankedo hopped out of the cab and opened the rear of the truck, releasing three crewmen who had been wedged between crates of tomatoes.
Mankedo returned to the cab, pulled out a thousand euros from his wallet, and handed the bills to the driver. “Be gone, Irmak. And remember, you didn’t bring us here.”
“Of course, of course, Valentin,” the driver said with a smile. “Good luck with your treasure hunt.”
As the truck drove away, a small launch was released from the Nevena. The boat sped quickly to shore and collected Mankedo and his men.
Returning to the ship, Mankedo climbed up to the bridge, where Dimitov and the ship’s pilot welcomed him.
“Any issues passing the Bosphorus?” Mankedo asked.
“None,” the pilot said. “We registered as the Nevena and passed without question.”
“Good.” He turned to Dimitov. “Now, where are we with the Pelikan?”
“Some positive developments. As you know, available Russian war records only indicate she was lost in the Aegean. Turkish naval records have no information. But I did find a reprimand in March 1917, issued to the commander of a shore battery in the Dardanelles for allowing an enemy submarine to slip past the nets at the southern end of the Sea of Marmara.”
“That doesn’t sound encouraging. If the Turks sank her but have no record of it, that doesn’t leave us much to go on.”
“Actually, they didn’t sink her,” Dimitov said. “It was the Germans. While they had no real surface fleet in the Mediterranean, they did have an active submarine fleet. One of their U-boats, the UB-42, reported attacking and sinking a suspected Allied submarine in February 1917. It can only have been the Pelikan.”
“Do we know where?”
“Navy records indicate the engagement took place twenty kilometers off the northwest coast of Chios, within sight of Epanohoron Cape.”
“That narrows things down a bit.”
“But wartime records are notoriously inaccurate. We might have a weeks-long search on our hands.”
“No matter. Let’s get under way and out of Turkish waters.”
The Nevena raised anchor and sailed south, drawing within sight of Chios eight hours later. One of the larger Greek islands, Chios lay in the central Aegean, just four miles from the Turkish mainland. They approached the northern tip of the island and angled to a point twenty kilometers offshore. A towed side-scan sonar array was lowered off the stern, and the ship began sweeping across a search grid of three-mile-long lanes.
They quickly disproved the conventional wisdom of underwater explorers that lost shipwrecks are never where they’re supposed to be. On only its second survey lane, the Nevena located a prime target. Barely six hours into the search, a lowered ROV confirmed that they had found the Pelikan.
59
“Hannibal?” Giordino said. “I don’t see any elephants. This old car doesn’t even have a trunk.”
“If you’d stayed awake in history class,” Pitt said, “you might remember how Hannibal solved a problem in moving his elephants, and the rest of his army, across the Alps.”
In 218 B.C., Hannibal Barca had led the one-hundred-thousand-man Carthaginian Army in a surprise attack against the Roman Empire, launching what would later be called the Second Punic War. History remembers his epic trek across the Alps from Gaul in the company of thirty-eight war elephants to make a bold strike from the north. But while his army descended the rugged slopes into Italy, its path was blocked by a massive landslide.
Bottled up in the mountains, Hannibal turned his army into laborers, clearing away the loose rock. But several enormous boulders still blocked their way. So the Carthaginian leader turned to an old mining technique that dated to the ancient Egyptians. He set fires beneath the boulders, then doused them with vinegar, which caused them to fracture into smaller pieces that could be hauled aside. With their way now clear, his army proceeded to attack and defeat t
he Roman forces protecting Milan. Though ultimately repelled by the Romans, Hannibal’s march over the Alps remains a classic case study in military strategy.
Pitt knew the fire-setting technique could still work without vinegar. With Giordino’s assistance, he hauled several of the support timbers to the base of one of the boulders that sealed the cavern. He then turned to the Isotta Fraschini for a way to ignite the wood. Prying and pounding the crankcase drain plug with rocks until it spun free, he collected the engine’s syrupy oil in an empty gravel bucket. He punctured the car’s fuel tank with a tire iron, adding some stale gasoline to the mix, and applied it to the boulder and timbers.
“Everybody stay back,” he told the NUMA crew. Using the lantern’s flame, he ignited the formula. At first the oil and gas mixture burned with a low, smoky flame, but the dry timbers eventually produced a roaring fire.
As the flames danced up the face of the boulder, Pitt stood aside with Ana and Giordino.
“I’m a little worried about the fumes,” Pitt said, pointing at the small opening above their heads. “Ventilation is on the weak side.”