The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

Gwynn leaned over the rear bench to recover the bag and handed it to Pitt. Pitt had already slipped off his leather shoes. He held one up so both driver and passenger could see it. “My wife got me these as an expensive practical joke, thinking I would never wear Italian loafers, but they’re more comfortable than sneakers.”

From the dive bag he removed a pair of shin-high rubber boots and an insulated high-vis windbreaker. He jammed his feet into the galoshes and contorted his way into the jacket while penned in by the Suburban’s confines.

“Here’s a story for you,” Pitt said when he clicked on his seat belt once again. “Following the battles of Lexington and Concord during our Revolutionary War against the British, an inventor living near New Haven named David Bushnell proposed building a submersible craft that could be used to affix mines to the underside of the English ships blockading New York Harbor. None other than George Washington himself liked the proposal and agreed to fund it.

“All that summer, and into the fall, Bushnell and several dedicated woodworkers, metalsmiths, and self-taught engineers built the submarine. About ten feet tall and barrel-shaped—or, as once described, resembling two turtle shells that had been fused together—it was made of iron-banded wood like the staves of a barrel and powered by a pair of hand-cranked screws. It also had an auger that was designed to bore into a ship’s hull so an explosive charge could be affixed. It had a foot-pedal bilge pump and windows in a metal . . . Well, I guess conning tower is the best way to describe it. All in all, it was ungainly, awkward, and utterly brilliant.

“And also, a total failure,” Pitt added. “In the summer of 1776, after a lot of sea trials and testing, one Sergeant Ezra Lee was selected to be the Turtle’s pilot. Finally, in September of that year, Lee launched the Turtle at the British flagship HMS Eagle, which was at anchor below Governors Island at the mouth of New York Harbor. It took Lee two hours to maneuver the submersible, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the upward-facing drill to bite deep enough into the Eagle’s hull to set the explosives. In retrospect, it’s pretty easy to see that maintaining the Turtle’s stability while drilling in that exact location was practically impossible given the tides and currents.”

“Not to mention the poor guy must have been exhausted,” Blankenship said.

Pitt nodded. “The Turtle was thought to have only enough air for a half hour. He could replenish his supply by surfacing as he crossed the harbor, but by the end of his attempt at boring into the Eagle he would have been delirious from too much carbon dioxide.

“They tried attacking a different ship a month later with the same result. Not long afterward, the British sank the Turtle’s support ship on the Jersey side of the harbor. Bushnell claims he salvaged the little sub, but its fate was lost to history.”

“Until now?” Thomas Gwynn hazarded.

“Exactly. Interesting, it wouldn’t be until almost a hundred years later that a submarine was successful at sinking an enemy warship. That was the Confederate sub Hunley, which rammed a torpedo into the USS Housatonic during the Civil War.”

They were approaching a large construction zone in a commercial section of the city. The ground was mostly broken-up asphalt. The nearby buildings were brick or metal and windowless. Several old smokestacks were silhouetted against the skyline. Dumpsters and rusted equipment littered the alleys between buildings, and most vertical surfaces were desecrated with multiple layers of graffiti, none of which could be considered art. The fine mist that had hung in the air all day became heavier. Not yet a rain, it was a perfect gloomy pall for the forlorn district.

Just ahead, a long corrugated metal fence blocked further access to the neighborhood. A temporary guardho

use had been set up next to an open gate. The metal shack’s bank of fluorescent ceiling lights looked especially bright in the gathering murk. Hidden by the fence was a large crane. Its spindly boom was visible as it reached for the sky.

Blankenship braked at the gate. The guard begrudgingly left the warm confines of his little metal hut and stepped out and over to the idling SUV.

The Secret Service agent jerked a thumb toward his passenger. “That’s Dirk Pitt, the head of NUMA. He’s expected.”

“Sec,” the guard said. He returned to the guardhouse and consulted a clipboard that he probably should have carried with him but hadn’t bothered to. He looked up, caught Blankenship’s eye, and nodded.

The worksite was vast, at least ten acres. Much of what had stood here before had been dismantled and carried away, and a huge amount of polluted fill had been hauled out for decontamination. A massive stone and brick seawall held back the waters of the East River, which were flowing by on both the meltwater channeled from the Hudson via the Harlem River at the very top of Manhattan Island and an ebbing king tide that was escaping through the river from Long Island Sound.

Vic Blankenship looked around. “When I was a kid, this was all warehouses and old manufacturing plants. Smelled awful even on a good day.”

“The state archeologist told me,” Pitt said, “that from the time of the Civil War until about 1913, there was a plant here to convert coal into gas. The ground was saturated with contaminants that were never removed. The next generation of industry simply capped the old sludge and built anew.”

Gwynn asked, rather unnecessarily, “And here’s where they found the Turtle?”

“As I understand it, an excavator was removing overburden when the bucket hit stone. Not unusual, since all the old foundations were left behind when newer buildings were put up. The operator cleared an area around the granite blocks. It turns out it was a sump below the foundation of a building that had been here around the time of the Revolutionary War. The cavity had a stone lid that the machine slid aside. The inside was filled with fly ash and oil that was still somewhat liquid, and sticking out of it was this brass dome. He managed to open it and peer inside. He didn’t know exactly what he’d found, but he told a supervisor, who eventually found someone who recognized the Turtle from a replica he’d seen at a museum in Connecticut. Archeologists from the state and city level were brought in.”

“And NUMA?” Thomas asked.

“Not really. We heard about the find, naturally. I’m here because, as a lover of archeology, I’m curious. I’m just using my NUMA credentials to get access to what’s otherwise a closed site.”

“Is anything going to be happening today?”

“Absolutely. Today they’re going to attempt to pull the Turtle out of the hole it’s been resting in for nearly two hundred and fifty years.”

They parked the Suburban next to several other cars, mostly sedans and pickup trucks. The trucks belonged to the workmen, the cars, no doubt, to the archeologists and techs overseeing the discovery of the nation’s first submarine.

The site that had been dug out was easily two football fields long and a hundred feet wide. Some material had been left in place along the old seawall to buttress it against the gray river just beyond. At the bottom of the twenty-foot-deep excavation were large earthmovers, dump trucks, shipping containers for other gear, and dozens of portable pumps with hoses snaking up and out to a separate containment pond that had been purposely dug to store contaminated seepage for later cleanup.

It didn’t appear that anyone was working. The site felt abandoned except for the big crane that was maneuvering a large section of steel closer to the seawall. A couple of hard-hatted workers were atop the wall waiting to guide the steel into place. There was a raised platform at the edge of the construction zone. They couldn’t see where the Turtle lay buried because blue plastic tarps had been erected over the dig to protect the craft from the elements. The tarps rippled in the chilling wind.

The precipitation ratcheted up a notch and now fell as a light rain. The ground at the lip of the site was a muddy morass. Blankenship declined to join Pitt in his trek across to a raised platform holding a half dozen people, but young Gwynn joined him.

As they neared the gathering, Pitt could hear voices rising and tension mounting.