Titanic 2012

Alandale, leaving him a mummified body than did the chief medical man on board. But David wasn’t foolish enough to believe the interest of the members of the crew were simply prurient—they wanted to see for themselves just how bad it was. They wished to decipher just how bad it could get for themselves. They were tough, callous seamen, and they’d at first laughed at those who described the condition of the body, ridiculing the frightened among the crew. That is until they saw Alandale first hand, ending such remarks as: “It’s a dead guy for the love’a God; ain’t’cha never seen a dead guy?” and “How bad can it be?” and “What’s a little death aboard a ship?”

All such talk had ceased now that they’d all seen the actual results of Dimitri Alandale’s demise. No one was cracking wise or finding even dark humor worthy of a laugh. Instead fear was fast taking hold—fear of disease, fear of a wasting away, a cancer like nothing that Entebbe had ever seen—worse than AIDS. Like nothing David had ever seen in his thirty six years on the planet outside of a museum of petrified mummies. An end described to a T in Declan Irvin’s journal, which David sat reading now. In fact, the journal had captured his imagination entirely and he was enraptured with one question that kept him turning pages—what happened next?

The ship came to a halt, the horns blasted, and everyone on the bridge was wildly cheering. The sounds filtered down to belowdecks, where the divers took up the cheer, knowing immediately what had happened. Their combined raised voices reached David’s ears where he sat mesmerized, reading Declan Irvin’s journal.

The continued cheers nagged at him, however, and finally pulled him from the journal. Then it dawned on David—they had arrived! Scorpio, cursed or not, now hovered two and a half miles above the most famous wreck of all the wrecks the world over—and a salvage diver’s wet dream to be sure.

David hid away the journal that he’d now gotten well over two-thirds of the way through. He needed a better hiding place for it; he mustn’t let it fall into the wrong hands. Recalling how Alandale’s body was recovered from behind that panel in his compartment, he spied an identical one here. He quickly pulled the panel away far enough to insert the precious journal. He’d come to believe entirely in its authenticity and in fact that Kelly had not lied to him regarding the origin of the narrative.

Once topside, David saw that some of the crew were still boisterous about their arrival while others only half-heartedly so. No doubt the death of Dimitri Alandale still weighed heavily; it certainly did for David. Many aboard, including some of the divers, had gone to the rails to look over the side and down at the surface of the water as if looking at the very spot where Titanic sank, they might feel a true connection, one that touched both imagination and the heartstrings.

With all movement at a standstill, all engines silent, he heard the sea anchor away, splashing and disappearing. Over the PA, the captain informed everyone, “Ladies, Gentlemen, we are perfectly situated halfway between the two halves of Titanic below, positioned to explore each section simultaneously.”

The official news gave even the most grizzled old sailor aboard goose bumps. They were, after all, here to seek contact with what awaited below Scorpio at this moment— Titanic. Forbes and his monitors and men behind the monitors up at the bridge, no doubt, already had Titanic on radar, and David imagined them all standing about the three- dimensional image of Titanic’s hologram as she now looked, detail for detail of massive destruction.

David leaned over the rail and watched now as the tethered Cryo-cable snaked down on its two and a half mile journey to the bottom, sending down a high-tech and highly sensitive camera eye alongside ambient light components that had already been lowered over the side. All this in an effort to ‘put eyes’ on Titanic—the living looking at the long dead—ship to ship.

Alongside everyone else, David had claimed a section of railing to watch the cable as it continued to disappear into the white caps. He now searched the enormous Atlantic for the ghosts of those who’d died here, imagining the horror of that night… imagining the cries rising up from those freezing to death in the shadow of the giant ship.

With dusk trailed by a blood orange sun dying on the horizon, and the mild whitecaps looking like debris in the water, a shape like a torn white shirt here, a napkin there, a table cloth in the distance, and the shadows beside each whitecap appeared as so many top hats, deck chairs, evening jackets, skirts, children’s dolls, door fixtures. None of which existed here except in David’s mind.

They had arrived and the divers were anxious to get below the surface, but it was rather late for a dive of such significance. Lou Swigart was saying so to anyone within the sound of his voice. Still, as any diver knew, neither surface weather nor time meant a thing two miles down.

David assumed Swigart and Forbes would be chomping at the bit to make initial contact with Titanic. Weather reports called for choppy seas only getting more so in the hours and days ahead. While topside conditions didn’t bother divers, it most certainly affected the ship and crew. It must be figured into the decision as to when to dive and when not to.

If tonight was to be it, they’d soon be preparing Mad Max—their state-of-the-art submersible—which meant the first dive team would be away within the hour. But no, given all that had happened on board it appeared the Commander of Divers wanted a halt to the excitement.

No doubt, Lou didn’t want his divers any more emotional than necessary once they were inside Titanic’s corridors, ballrooms, Turkish bathhouse, gymnasium, pilot house, her compartments, cargo holds, and staterooms.

On hearing Jacob Mendenhall, Will Bowman, Lena Gambio and others going toward the MHD submersible, David turned from his reverie at the rail. It would be up to Swigart to determine which of the two dive teams would be making first contact with Titanic—who among them, like astronauts stepping on the moon, would be standing on the foredeck, searching her interiors and compartments, snatching open closed hatches that had remained closed for a hundred years.

Steve Jens, too, was soon sliding down ladders to get to Max, calling out that they had Titanic on sonar and adding, “Forbes’ team has dropped a camera that’s traveling to Titanic as we speak, so we’ll have eyes on Titanic from inside Max here.” He slapped the submersible as if it were his favorite backyard grill, and thanks to Jens' rings, this sent up a resounding metal chorus.

“I want first dibs,” said Mendenhall in a voice louder than anyone had heard come out of him to date.

Bowman shouted, “Our team deserves first dive, Commander, sir!” Will pulled David into him. Kelly stood off to one side.

“Lou there’s room enough in Max for all eight of us,” Kelly suddenly shouted over them. “And given the time, and none of us have had any sleep since… since Alandale was found—well, why not one dive tonight with all parties, Commander Swigart, sir?”

“Nooooo way!” said Bowman. “Bad idea, Irvin.”

“Hold on,” said Swigart. “She’s got a point. One dive, one team; we get over who’s going to be first, people. Make for a helluva photograph to send back to shore, make Kane and CNN and all the rest happy—get ’em off our backs, give ’em a headline. We can set the sub on hover and automatic for the photo. Whataya say?” Suddenly Swigart seemed like a kid opening presents at Christmas.

Meanwhile the eyes on Titanic worked their way to the deep on the Cryo-cable snake-line, so that Forbes and those both on the surface and those inside Max, might see their way two miles below. All this as Scorpio would be hovering above given her steerable station-keeping thrusters—similar to the steerable thrusters of a tugboat. Meanwhile or soon rather, the MHD sub would be scouring the bottom like a UFO as it, like Scorpio, was tied to a computer and GPS for automatic station-keeping. MAX as the divers had come to call it, in fact operated, oddly enough, like a Chinook helicopter—hovering at times as well as this was possible without anchoring. It would be a piece of cake to have it hover over the coordinates of Titanic and monitored from the control room aboard Scorpio. The coordinates which Robert Ballard, decades before, had designated as the final home of the unsinkable ship were in use. Soon now the divers inside the MHD sub would be hovering over hallowed ground, a cemetery with not one but two giant mausoleums—the stern section and the bow section, separated by a good mile.

All this while Alandale’s body silently awaited autopsy, and crewman Houston Ford remained missing, and then there was that missing collapsible, which while equipped with an integrated EPIRB beacon, and a tough one at that, had surely been disabled. Why else could they not locate a signal? Had Alandale’s killer disabled the beacon?