and died in another era, men who left a mystery for later generations to unravel.
What kind of men walked the decks of sixteenth-century ships, he wondered. Besides the lure of adventure and the remote prospect of riches, what possessed them to sail on voyages sometimes lasting three or more years on ships not much larger than a modest suburban, two-story house? Out of sight of land for months at a time, their teeth falling out from the ravages of scurvy, the crews were decimated by malnutrition and disease. Many were the voyages completed by only ship's officers, who had survived on more abundant rations than the common seamen. Of the eighty-eight men on board the Golden Hind when Drake battled through the Strait of Magellan into the Pacific, only fifty-six were left when he entered Plymouth Harbor.
Pitt turned his attention to the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion. Perlmutter had included illustrations and cutaway plans of atypical Spanish treasure galleon that sailed the seas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pitt's primary interest was in the amount of iron that was on board for the magnetometer to detect. Perlmutter was certain the two cannon she reportedly carried were bronze and would not register on an instrument that measures the intensity of the magnetic field produced by an iron mass.
The galleon carried four anchors. Their shanks, arms, and flukes were cast from iron, but their stocks were wood and they were secured to hemp lines, not chains. If she had been riding on two anchors, the force of the wave, suddenly striking the ship and hurling it ashore, would have probably snapped the lines. That left a small chance her two spare anchors might have survived intact and still be somewhere in the wreckage.
He totaled up the rest of the iron that might have been on board. The fittings, ship's hardware, the big gudgeons and pintles that held the rudder and allowed it to turn. The trusses (iron brackets that helped support the yards or spars), any shackles or grappling irons. The cook's kettle, carpenter's tools, maybe a keg of nails, small firearms, swords, and pikes. Shot for the cannon.
It was an exercise in the dark. Pitt was hardly an authority on sixteenth-century sailing ships. He could only rely on Perlmutter's best guess as to the total iron mass on board the Concepcion. The best estimate ran between one and three tons. Enough, Pitt fervently hoped, for the magnetometer to detect the galleon's anomaly from 50 to 75 meters in the air.
Anything less, and they'd stand about as much chance of locating the galleon as they would of finding a floating bottle with a message in the middle of the South Pacific.
It was about five in the morning, with a light blue sky turning orange over the mountains to the east, as Pitt swung the McDonnell Douglas Explorer helicopter over the waters of the Bay of Caraquez. Fishing boats were leaving the bay and heading out to sea for the day's catch. The crewmen paused as they readied their nets, looked up at the low-flying aircraft and waved. Pitt waved back as the shadow of the Explorer flickered over the little fishing fleet and darted toward the coastline. The dark, radiant blue of deep water soon altered to a turquoise green streaked by long lines of breaking surf that materialized as the seafloor rose to meet the sandy beach.
The long arms of the bay circled and stopped short of each other at the entrance to the Chone River. Giordino, who was sitting in the copilot's seat, pointed down to the right at a small town with tiny streets and colorfully painted boats drawn up on the beach. The town was surrounded by numerous farms no larger than three or four acres, with little whitewashed adobe houses next to corrals holding goats and a few cows. Pitt followed the river upstream for two kilometers where it foamed white with rapids. Then suddenly the dense rain forest rose like an impenetrable wall and stretched eastward as far as they could see. Except for the river, no opening beneath the trees could be seen.
'We're approaching the lower half of our grid,' Pitt said over his shoulder to Gunn, who was hunched over the proton magnetometer.
'Circle around for a couple of minutes while I set up the system,' Gunn replied. 'Al, can you drop the tow bird for me?'
'As you wish.' Giordino nodded, moving from his seat to the rear of the cabin.
Pitt said, 'I'll head toward the starting point for our first run and hang around until you're ready.'
Giordino lifted the sensor. It was shaped like an air-to-air missile. He lowered it through a floor hatch of the helicopter. Then he unreeled the sensor on its umbilical cable. 'Tow bird out about thirty meters,' he announced.
'I'm picking up interference from the helicopter,' said Gunn. 'Give me another twenty meters.'
Giordino complied. 'How's that?'
'Good. Now hold on while I set the digital and analog recorders.'
'What about the camera and data acquisition systems?'
'Them too.'
'No need to hurry,' said Pitt. 'I'm still programming my grid lane data into the satellite navigation computer.'
'First time with a Geometrics G-8136?' Giordino asked Gunn.
Gunn nodded. 'I've used the model G-801 for marine and ocean survey, but this is my introduction to the aerial unit.'
'Dirk and I used a G-8136 to locate a Chinese airliner that crashed off Japan last year. Worked like a woman of virtue-sensitive, reliable, never drifted, and required no calibration adjustments. Obviously, my ideal for a mate.'
Gunn looked at him strangely. 'You have odd taste when it comes to women.'
'He has this thing for robots,' Pitt joked.
'Say no more,' Giordino said pretentiously. 'Say no more.'
'I'm told this model is good for accurate data on small anomalies,' said Gunn, suddenly serious. 'If she won't lead us to the Concepcion, nothing will.'
Giordino returned to the copilot's seat, settled in and stared down at the unbroken carpet of green no more than 200 meters (656 feet) below. There wasn't a piece of ground showing anywhere. 'I don't think I'd like to spend my holidays here.'
'Not many people do,' said Pitt. 'According to Julien Perlmutter, a check of local historical archives came up with the rumor that the local farmers shun the area. Julien said Cuttill's journal mentioned that mummies of long dead Inca were torn from graveyards by the tidal wave before being swept into the jungle. The natives are highly superstitious, and they believe the spirits of their ancestors still drift through the jungle in search of their original graves.'
'You can run your first lane,' declared Gunn. 'All systems are up and tuned.'
'How far from the coast are we going to start mowing the lawn?' Giordino asked, referring to the seventy-five meter wide grid lanes they planned to cover.
'We'll begin at the three-kilometer mark and run parallel to the shore,' answered Pitt, 'running lanes north and south as we work inland.'
'Length of lanes?' inquired Gunn, peering at the stylus marking the graph paper and the numbers blinking on his digital readout window.
'Two kilometers at a speed of twenty knots.'
'We can run much faster,' said Gunn. 'The mag system has a very fast cycle rate. It can easily read an anomaly at a hundred knots.'
'We'll take it nice and slow,' Pitt said firmly. 'If we don't fly directly over the target, any magnetic field we hope to find won't make much of an impression on your gamma readings.'
'And if we don't pick up an anomaly, we increase the perimeters of the grid.'
'Right. We'll conduct a textbook search. We've done it more times than I care to count.' Then Pitt glanced over at Giordino. 'Al, you mind our altitude while I concentrate on our lane coordinates.'
Giordino nodded. 'I'll keep the tow bird as low as I can without losing it in the branches of a tree.'
The sun was up now and the sky was clear of all but a few small, wispy clouds. Pitt took a final look at the instruments and then nodded. 'Okay, guys, let's find ourselves a shipwreck.'
Back and forth over the thick jungle they flew, the air-conditioning system keeping the hot, humid atmosphere outside the aircraft's aluminum skin. The day wore on and by noon they had achieved nothing. The magnetometer failed to register so much as a tick. To someone who had never searched for an unseen object, it might have seemed discouraging, but Pitt, Giordino, and Gunn took it in stride. They had all known shipwreck or lost aircraft hunts that had lasted as long as six weeks without the slightest sign of success.
Pitt was also a stickler for the game plan. He knew from experience that impatience and deviation from the
