LC 04 - Skeleton Crew (13 page)

Lindsay looked over at him and laughed. The lights on the
barge reflected in Lewis's dark eyes as he spoke about himself.

"I admit that I like to be the brightest star, but it's no good being
one if there aren't other bright stars in your constellation."

"I'm not going to call you Cisco."

When Lewis smiled, she fully expected to see the lights of the
dam twinkle off his teeth.

"No, I don't expect you would," he said and left to join the discussion about whether Kennewick Man was Indian or Caucasoid.

Lindsay turned toward the ocean and looked out at the water.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of John West standing against the wall watching her. She walked over to him.

"Care to dance?" she asked.

"I don't dance," he said.

"I can teach you." She held out her arms and he came forward.
"Put your arm around my waist like this."

He did and pulled her close. "Like this?"

"That's it."

"I can do this part well. It's the movement where I have
trouble."

"Then let me lead." Lindsay led a few steps and West followed.
"See, that wasn't so bad."

"It would be much better just to stand here like this."

"No, I think once you get used to the movement, you'll like it
better."

"You may be right."

They danced several more steps until the music stopped.

"There's still some shrimp left. Have you eaten?" she asked.

"I'm not hungry. I'd rather just relax here with you."

The argument in the corner of who should be the rightful
receiver of the ancient bones, the Native Americans or the archaeologists, grew louder. John and Lindsay looked over at them. She
thought she heard Steven Nemo's voice saying something like,
"That was nine thousand years ago. How do you know he
wouldn't have been offended by their ceremonies as much as our
analysis?" The response was lost to the sound of a wave.

"Maybe we should go to the other end of the boat?" West said.

I think that would be a good idea."

They walked along the port side of the barge to the aft where
the noise of the party became an indistinct mixture of sounds. The
cofferdam stood beside them like an island, only nine feet above
the water. The barge was anchored close so that a gangplank
stretched across to the dock of the dam. They were so close that
Lindsay could hear the pumps running.

"Do the pumps always run?"

The breeze from the land was chilly and Lindsay shivered.

"Yes." From behind, John wrapped his arms around her.

"What would happen if they stopped?"

"The dam would fill back up with water. The ocean is very persistent. We have to maintain a constant expenditure of energy to
keep it at bay. Don't worry. The dam is constantly guarded, and I
have backup pumps."

Lindsay shivered again, but this time from her thoughts.

"The ocean wouldn't come gushing in, would it?"

She felt his chest vibrate with a laugh.

"No, even if the pumps stopped, it would fill very slowly. The
only way the ocean would rush in is if there was a serious breach
in both the inner and outer bulkheads, and we would discover any
problem long before it got to that point. You have to trust the
physics."

"The whole thing is really quite magnificent. You should be
very proud of it."

"I am. The success of this dam is my future."

John's body was a welcome warmth in the cool night air and
she felt content just to let the moment last. She knew that something good was happening between her and John. She made a conscious effort not to think about how it would all end if they had a
confrontation about Indian burials. That issue was a gulf between
them that both of them ignored-but how long could that last,
considering what she did for a living?

It was two o'clock in the morning and most of the party had
broken up when Lindsay made her way down the hallway to her
cabin. Somewhere she had made a wrong turn, for when she
opened the door to what she thought was her room and flipped
the light switch, the glow illuminated a room filled with computer
equipment, wallpapered with maps, and cluttered with data-filled
notebooks. She turned to go and met Nate coming through the
door.

"Well, this is a nice surprise."

"I appear to be lost," she said.

"Well, damn. I thought maybe you came to change my bandage."

"This looks like a command center." She gestured to the trappings.

"My dissertation. Want a Cook's tour?" He grinned like a kid.

"Sure."

Nate stepped in and turned on his computer. "I'm developing
a computer simulation of ocean wind and currents. Look." He
pointed to a map. "This is a map of the major ocean currents and
wind directions-the blue lines are the currents, the red is wind."
The map had several others hanging behind it, which he flipped
through. "There are seasonal differences and drifts over decades."
He turned his head as if to see if she was paying attention. "We've collected oceanographic data for the past hundred years. The
Spanish archives have quite a bit of data from the past and I've
recorded those as well."

"What are you doing with it?"

"Right now, developing a model to predict where to find shipwrecks. Watch." He sat down at the computer and punched keys
on his computer and started putting in data. "Say it was reported
that a ship went down in 1770 off the coast of Georgia, and we find
some artifacts but not the ship. Knowing what the ocean conditions were at that time and what they are now, I can come up with
several possibilities of where to find her. Or"-he raised a hand
before she spoke-"if we have some idea where she sank, I can use
the same variables to figure where she may have drifted to."

"That's an awful lot of variables," said Lindsay.

"Yes, that's what makes it so difficult. And I don't have complete data. I received a lot from the archives of seafaring countries,
a bunch more from sea floor core drilling that's really good."

Lindsay picked up an open notebook filled with what looked
like map data points. "And you put all those numbers into the
computer?"

"Yes, and a lot of other data about the relative energy of a particular spot on the ocean floor."

"I'm not good with computers, but doesn't that take a lot of
memory?"

"You bet it does. It's another reason that the biology people are
pissed at us. You know Easterall, the biologist?"

"Sure do. The would-be Nobel Prize winner whom UGA got by
building him a new research facility and buying a state-of-the-art
supercomputer."

Nate grinned wickedly. "Don't you just love celebrity faculty?
The supercomputer was supposed to be for all research faculty to
use, of course," he said.

"Yeah, sure," said Lindsay. "If you can get time on it."

"Precisely. Easterall hogged all the time, filling it up with his
rain forest data-which I have to admit, is a worthwhile project."

True, thought Lindsay, but in the meantime, all the other faculty
who had massive amounts of data to analyze had to take a back
seat. Lindsay knew part of Easterall's work was here on St.
Magdalena, but she really didn't know what his people did here.

"What did you do to make him mad?" Lindsay asked.

"Not me"-Nate looked at her innocently-"Cisco. Here have
a seat." He pulled out a chair.

Lindsay sat down, a hint of a smile playing around her lips.
Having been indefinitely put on hold herself for only a few hours
of computer time she had requested a couple of years ago, she was
interested to hear what Lewis had been up to since he arrived at
UGA.

"Cisco," continued Nate, "turns out to be a better politician. He
really is good. Have you ever seen him work?"

Lindsay shook her head.

"He gets everything done before he even meets formally with
the university bigwigs. He starts with politicians, businessmen,
and alumni. He shows them numbers-how many people he's
going to put to work, and how he can make it pay, and how we are
doing something no other state but Texas has done. When he has
their support, he meets with university officials. By then, it's
almost a done deal." Nate's grin broadened. "All he needs is some
initial financial support to go along with the private money he's
already raised, and a whole lot of computer time. The upshot of it
is, I get to plug my data into the supercomputer and Easterall has
to wait."

Lindsay laughed out loud. "I'll bet he hated that."

"He's still fuming. He's got those guys over at St. Magdalena
spying for him. The fax machine gets so much use, I'm surprised it
hasn't gone up in smoke. We kind of like to feed them rumors to
keep 'em going."

"I see. That's where the story came from that Lewis is going to
make St. Magdalena a theme park."

"You got it. That was my idea. Carolyn had a friend slip the
idea to one of the graduate students in Botany, and she faxed it to
Tessa."

Lindsay closed her eyes and shook her head. At least they
weren't putting whipped cream in one another's shoes. "You
know, you might make the poor woman stroke out."

"No, we're just aiming for them to look like fools."

"Is there that much animosity?"

Nate sobered for a moment and nodded his head. "What do
you think? We needed a lot of space and had to build the warehouse for the ship timbers. Cisco arranged to have the biology people moved into less than half the building space they had before we came, and shack up at the ranger station so Harper and some
of the other crew could have their apartments. He especially
wanted Harper to work at the site, so he arranged to get the largest
suite for her."

"I can see why Tessa was so upset by the thought that I might
be moving in." Lindsay stood up and yawned. "I need to find my
way back. This has been an interesting conversation. Your work is
fascinating. I'll look forward to reading your dissertation."

"I'm pretty excited about it. There's a lot of applications it can
be put to besides archaeology." He got up, closed the door and
pointed to a schematic of the ship. "That's the barge. We are here."
He pointed to a room. "You are here, with Bobbie, right?" Lindsay
nodded. "Always become familiar with a ship you're in, especially
if you plan to do any wreck diving. Always know how the wreck
is oriented. You'll find one of these maps behind your door as
well."

Lindsay didn't plan to do any wreck diving, but she thanked
him for the advice. As she walked down the narrow hallways, she
realized that the silver galleon was the wreck Nate was going to
find with his program. All he needed was the sea floor location of
some artifacts from the galleon or some idea where she sank. And
that's why Lewis got so much support for the project. You show
anyone credible evidence that you can find a billion dollars' worth
of treasure and you have their attention. What's the rain forest or
the Nobel Prize compared to that? For the first time ever, Lindsay
felt sympathy for Easterall and his students. They had reason to be
angry. Further, there's no way a secret can be kept about a sunken
galleon loaded with that much gold, silver, and jewels. Someone
had to have told Eva Jones. Lindsay knew it.

Bobbie was already asleep when Lindsay climbed in her bunk
and pulled the covers over her. She drifted off to sleep, then
abruptly awoke and sat up. She realized that Hardy Denton purposefully bid too low because he wanted to be sure to win. He was
to have been Jones's spy at the dig, to keep her informed about
what the archaeologists found and what they knew. No wonder he
was so angry. Lindsay lay back down with an uneasy feeling in the
pit of her stomach.

THE FINAL RESTING place of the Estrella de Espana was under five
feet of sand and silt, deep in the middle of a vast sandy desert on
the ocean floor in part of the featureless plain that makes up most
of the sea bottom along the coast of Georgia. Rising out of the
floor of this ocean desert is a seventeen-square-mile limestone
oasis known as Gray's Reef. The flat troughs and rugged overhangs carved in the rock of the reef are home to a lush and colorful sea life, including sea fans, yellow colonial anemone, red
sponges, loggerhead turtles, sharks, whales, and an amazing variety of fish.

But twelve thousand years ago, when glaciers tied up significantly more water than today, the coastline extended almost sixty
miles farther out to sea from where it is now, and Gray's Reef was
dry land. Instead of the ocean forest, this place was a terrestrial
home to Paleo-Indians, the Indians who fashioned chert Clovis
points for their spears and hunted megafauna.

So far in the excavation of the sea bottom around the ship, none
of the seventeen bone fragments and fossils found could be linked
directly back to Paleo-Indians. The fragments were small, but
sometimes small remains tell big stories.

Gray's Reef would be Lindsay's deepest dive-seventy feet,
nothing to an experienced diver, but a deep dive for her. She went
off the boat backward into the water. It was cool and refreshing,
but not cold. She liked the water, but she was a surface swimmer.
Diving still made her heart race. Once in the water, she oriented
herself facing Trey, Harper, and John West. Lindsay was pleased
that John had talked Bobbie and Gina into staying with the boat
and letting him be Lindsay's buddy for the dive.

They set a reference on their compass so they could find their way back to the boat and zeroed their timers and gauges. Trey set
his global position indicator. Lindsay changed the snorkel for her
regulator and moved her jaw back and forth to pressurize her ears.
Trey pointed to her buoyancy compensator deflator valve, and she
took it in her hand. Everyone was ready.

Trey signaled the descent. Lindsay exhaled and vented her vest.
She and the others started down, feetfirst, every few feet equalizing the pressure in their ears. The descent was Lindsay's least
favorite part of a dive. In a way, it was like falling in slow motion,
but not quite falling. Here buoyancy was a stronger force than
gravity. It was hard to get down and stay down without help. It
was like being in a place with new physical laws to cope with.
After all, people were not made for the water. They cannot breathe
it. They cannot withstand the pressure. They cannot stay submerged without help. It seemed forever before Trey gave the signal to level off just above the bottom.