While we're about it, where the hell's Pete got to?
To tell this story properly, I'd first have to tell you about winning a folio of assorted manuscripts in a late-night game of Cachito, but that would involve first telling you a long and uninteresting story involving a Mosin-Nagant with Finnish stampings, a drunk Moldovan, and Rich Johnson's (now deceased) Buick LeSabre. So we'll start with the part where I figured out that at least two of the manuscripts in the folio weren't forgeries, and that one of them was a map of the Upper Chesapeake dating to 1608, when, ostensibly, the bay hadn't been surveyed yet. Moreover, the map seemed to show two Spanish forts, and what appeared to be a shipwreck.
The other one was a slightly pornographic illumination of the Song of Solomon, but I digress.
I wish Alex had been there. He has a knack for sweet-talking his way past guards everywhere. He smiles in that friendly, slightly sheepish way, and people are always lighting his cigarettes and letting him through on the flimsiest of excuses. They always remember he was a funny guy. Instead I had to improvise, using the old trick of khaki work pants and a blue Oxford shirt and a roll of construction drawings. The MP at the gate of the Proving Ground was bored and obstinate, and that didn't help. It took me twenty minutes to get through, a combination of inspired guessing and appearing too harmless for my own good.
Four hundred years ago, the land here had been different, the bay wider and cleaner, and a galleon might easily have sailed up this far, only to be wrecked in an unseasonable storm. And the place where I was standing now might have been on the waterfront. I unpacked the ground radar from the truck and began dragging it over the ground. This itself is always an exciting prospect at APG. Underground I saw dud shells, exploded shells, bits of shrapnel, harmless tin cans, a giant metallic anomaly that might have been a tank at one point, but deep enough I could make out the packed ground that might,
might, once have been the earthen walls of a Spanish outpost. Then I called in a UXB, and slipped out in the confusion. It turned out I found a fifty-nine year old canister of something inexpressibly horrible; they closed the base for two days while they extracted and burned the nasty, polysyllabic toxin.
The next two weeks I spent in a mix of ancient and new maps, of conjectured waterlines and silting patterns, of computer models of tidal action and statistical sedimentary drift. I went to Gencon, yes, but while I was in Indianapolis the computers whirred and plotted, making educated guesses about where that galleon might lie.
I came home, and spent every waking hour chasing bureaucracy for a dredging permit, only to be challenged at every turn. That was when I found out that I hadn't been subtle enough. I think the Institute, my inveterate foes, had sussed out enough of what I was doing to make some very educated guesses. They broke into my house one night, but only made off with some red herrings. The big break came last week, when a barge grounded about fifty yards from the best-estimate point of the shipwreck, and my firm was the only company big enough to handle the recovery. We used the incident as cover to slip out and do the preliminary dredging, spending late nights under the glare of portable generator lights and the hammer of air compressors. But that work paid off.
Fellows, I can tell you now, she's there under fifty feed of mud - a shipwreck to make the
Atocha look like pocket change. And on board her, I know, is
la Calavera Negra de la Luna.
03 December 2007, 09:16:13 AM