The Sea Hunters Part 28

They pried open every cabinet, probed every suitcase, every box and container, large and small. They went through the engine room with dental mirrors, searching behind every pipe and manifold. The heads, the galley, the staterooms, nothing went unprobed. I half expected a demand for a strip search. They questioned the purpose of the side scan sonar, the magnetometer and video equipment, wanting to know every detail of their operation.

Finally, after they were satisfied we were not carrying a nuclear bomb, the head honcho, who looked like a cross between Inspector Clouseau and Ace Venture with a mustache, asked me the purpose of our visit to France. With nothing to hide, I guilelessly told him we were hunting for the wreck of the Confederate raider Alabama.

I was then informed in no uncertain terms that we could not search in French waters without permission. Permission from whom, I asked.

The commander of the local French naval district, Clouseau answered as if he were conversing with a fungus.

My blood ran cold, my nerve endings turned to ice. Oh, dear G.o.d, not the French Navy. I hate dealing with the navy, any navy. For them to grant permission to a civilian for anything more than a pet.i.tion to go to the bathroom is nearly impossible. Subordinates who universally enjoy saying no before pa.s.sing the request up the chain of command to some nebulous officer in the throne room are as common as bacteria.

Deploying our forces, we counterattacked. Wayne Gronquist donned his cowboy boots and custom-made cowboy hat, settled his watch and chain in the pockets of his vest, and a.s.saulted the offices of the admiral commanding the Cherbourg naval district. You have to see and know Wayne to know that he is the kind of guy who won't take no for an answer. He is soft-spoken, with limpid blue eyes, a great prospector's beard, and a body thoroughly established by yoga. He looks amazingly like old photographs of Jeb Stuart, the famous Confederate cavalryman.

The first order of the day was to hire a translator, since our combined vocabulary consisted of such phrases as "Where is the bank?"

and "Can I honk your horn?" While standing on the dock, a fellow came up to me and launched a conversation in French. I raised my eyebrows, puckered my lips, and replied, "No parlez vous franqais." I thought I was saying, "I don't understand French." What I really said was, "You don't speak French." No wonder he looked at me like all the nuts had spun off my screws.

After sizing up Gronquist in his Texas attorney attire, the French admiral politely suggested that the Texan and his friends take the next stagecoach out of Cherbourg. Instead, Wayne boarded a train for Paris and camped out at the United States Emba.s.sy. Acting like Ben Franklin during the Revolutionary War, he cut quite a swath in diplomatic circles. In the meantime, I was swept up in an orgy of dramatic grandeur by holding press conferences and calling every bigwig I knew in Washington.

Unless they've finally decided to join the rest of the world, at that time you could not make a long-distance phone call in France with a credit card on a public phone. They refused to accept my AT&T card.

In England, it often takes a while to get an operator, but the call goes through without problem. In Denmark, I simply put a silver krone in the slot, dialed the two-digit number for the international code, and gave the operator, who always replied in English, my card number and the number I was calling. Presto, I was talking to my wife as if she were in the booth beside me. Not France. You either have to use a private-residence phone or check into a hotel and call from your room.

And since no Frenchman was about to allow a crazy American in his house to make overseas calls on his private phone, I was forced to check into the local inn and be hosed by the management.

Now the hara.s.sment began on all flanks. Odd as it sounds, we rather enjoyed it.

While Arvor III was moored to the dock in the yacht basin, helicopters flew over the boat while cameramen leaned out and shot overhead pictures of us sunbathing on the deck. We also took great delight in sneaking up on the people sitting in cars or crouching behind seawalls observing the boat and crew through binoculars. An American yachtsman and his wife, whose ketch was tied up across the dock from Arvor III, told us two Frenchmen in army uniforms came aboard one evening when we were all having dinner at a nearby dockside restaurant. He said it appeared to him as if they'd bugged our boat.

I asked how he could know that. He replied that he was a retired investigator from the Chicago Police Department and knew about such things.

We tried to find any listening devices but failed. So we all began talking in bizarre accents and unintelligible languages and discussing economic doctrines as related to Antarctica. Back into the stereo player went my Dixieland jazz tapes. Jimmy and the Scots made comments about the Froggies, as they called them, never having won a war, which I'm sure did not win us any points with their navy.

One evening after dinner, Jimmy Flett and I were sitting on the deck enjoying brandy and cigars when he noticed bubbles in the water illuminated by the lights along the quay. Walking inside the cabin, we alerted Bill, who turned on the video equipment. We then carefully lowered the underwater video camera over the side. In great antic.i.p.ation the entire crew stared at the video monitor as Bill popped on the lights attached to the camera. Suddenly, the startled faces of two French navy frogmen, their eyes bugging through the lenses of their underwater face masks, burst on the screen. An instant later they stroked into blackness and were gone.

What in h.e.l.l was going on? we all wondered. Why were we being treated like spies?

In Washington, NUMA's chief director, Admiral Bill Thompson, former Naval Chief of Public Information, hit on every officer he knew in the French Navy, rallied the Pentagon, and pestered the White House.

Things became so confused that the French Emba.s.sy sent a message to our State Department saying, "We apologize for this incident."

The State Department, in total ignorance of our predicament, replied, "We apologize too."

According to my literary agent in Paris, I became the darling of the French press with my ranting and raving. I was especially irritated because Jacques Cousteau was flitting all over the waters of Chesapeake Bay as if he owned it without an American official mentioning anything so mundane as a permit. French naval officials were particularly embarra.s.sed. They thought they were dealing with a scurvy crew of treasure hunters, and had no idea their nemesis was a high mucketymuck author, who made the best-seller lists in France. The firestorm of publicity was hardly what they expected.

Some pretty high officials in the French government regretted our situation, but said there was nothing they could do. Who was this local-yokel admiral? I inquired. And why did he carry so much weight.

I thought sure that if he realized that our presence represented nothing more than an innocent search expedition without artifacts being s.n.a.t.c.hed, he would allow us to begin the hunt. How could the crew of Arvor III threaten French national security?

During this c.o.c.kamamie absurdity, our crew took time to do some sightseeing. My son, Dirk, joined the expedition. He took time off from his job at Motorola in Phoenix, Arizona, flew to Paris, and arrived by train at Cherbourg. Together, we all walked the famed beaches of Normandy, Omaha and Utah, and the British invasion sites at Gold, Juno, and Sword. The sandy sh.o.r.es of Normandy, though deadly to those who landed in June of 1944, are the most spectacular beaches in the world. Their vast golden sand stretches for miles. But for the lack of tropical weather and temperate water, they would put anything the Caribbean or the Pacific has to offer to shame.

We strolled through the immaculately kept American cemetery on the bluffs above Omaha beach and read the names inscribed behind the columns of the great amphitheater, noting several of those who had died and gone missing on the Leopoldville.

On the light side, Bill made a lasting impression on the good citizens of Cherbourg. He walked to the town laundromat, piled his clothes into a machine, and inserted French coins. So far so good.

Then he poured in half a box of concentrated laundry detergent.

Rather than sit around and wait, he met up with Dirk and me for lunch at a nice little bistro.

Forty-five minutes later as we walked back to the laundromat together, we rounded the street corner and walked into a giant wall of soap bubbles. We all stared dumbstruck like the first guy in a sciencefiction movie to see the alien creature. The overabundance of concentrated detergent created the greatest display of soapsuds the city of Cherbourg had seen since the fat-rendering factory blew up in Bill dashed into the advancing blob of bubbles and disappeared.

Somehow groping his way inside the laundromat, he s.n.a.t.c.hed his clothes from the machine and beat a hasty retreat back to the boat. He spent the next day and a half rinsing thickened goo out of clothes with a hose and nozzle beside the dock.

Wayne added to the gaiety after Dirk came back from a toy store in town and produced a pirate costume. Wayne waved the Jolly Roger flag, donned a pirate hat, eyepatch, and a hook. Then he would sneak up on the French security people spying on us, threaten them with his plastic hook, and shout, " Haarr-rh! " I would have given my left foot to read the reports that were written by French security on our activities.

After two weeks of futile combat, I struck our flag. I felt there was nothing more to be accomplished. The French admiral refused to capitulate. He played his cards with great a.n.a.l retentiveness. I still don't recall his name. I turned over my records, charts, and projections to the French schoolteacher who acted as our translator rather than carry them back to Colorado with me on the airplane. He agreed to keep them safe until my return. I was sure we would get the mess ironed out during the coming months and come back with a permit in hand the following summer.

Short of mooning the customs officials as we departed Cherbourg Harbor, I could not stop myself from firing the last shot. Since a side scan search for Alabama involved a fairly extensive grid, I could not risk that attempt, knowing the French Navy would be all over us before lunch. But I figured that finding a ship the size of Leopoldville within a short time was far from impossible. Paying our dock fees and casting off, we set sail for her grave early one morning before the sun came up.

Playing cat and mouse with government officials in a foreign country is not a game for amateurs, and I was about as green as a farm boy staring up at tall buildings in Fargo, North Dakota. The trick was to find Leopoldville, identify it, then beat it out of French waters to Britain.

Though no helicopters flew over the dock, and we did not spot any binoculars aimed in our direction, I still a.s.sumed we were being observed every inch of the way. If Arvor III was followed, then all bets were off, and we would continue over the horizon for Britain.

Our one advantage was that Wayne and I had requested permission to search only for Alabama. We never mentioned Leopoldville. Since Arvor III was heading away from the Confederate raider's final resting place, with our course set west toward Weymouth, England, I hoped it appeared to the French officials that we had given up and were leaving Cherbourg for good.

Strangely, Leopoldville is mismarked on nautical charts of the Cherbourg area. There is a large wreck marked about a mile to the north, but its position is not where we found the ill-fated troopship.

I decided to take the Admiralty position as gospel and work from there.

I was leery of dropping the side scan over the side. Should we spot a helicopter or fast boat heading in our direction, it would take us too long to pull in the sensor and shut down the equipment before they saw what we were up to. We would literally be caught in the act.

Because we were hunting for an object nearly 500 feet in length and 62 feet wide, I gambled on using only our boat's built-in echo sounder.

This meant we had to go almost directly over Leopoldville in order to record its hulk. Again, I deviated from my normal routine of mowing the lawn within either a square or rectangular search grid. I asked Jimmy to throw out a small buoy over the Admiralty's position and then circle around it, working outward and widening each spiral circ.u.mference. The seabed was flat with a depth of 160 feet.

An hour and twenty minutes into the chase, the echo sounder recorded an anomaly rising 60 feet off the bottom. It was a lucky hit.

Two more pa.s.ses confirmed a huge, long object pointed toward Cherbourg, but on a slight angle, no doubt caused by currents swinging Leopoldville on her anchor before she sank. She lies just 300 meters northwest of the recorded position. Our navigation readings put her at 49 44 40 by 01 36 40.

I regretted that we had no wreath to drop over the side, or a ceremony prepared. Though the sun was shining brightly, it didn't take great imagination to picture that night of horror. We slowly circled the wreck, watching its ma.s.s rise from the bottom on the echo sounder.

It was a heartrending moment, but we knew the French Navy would not allow us to hang around. We all kept one eye aimed on the entrance to Cherbourg Harbor.

"Throw out the side scan," demanded Dirk.

"Be nice to see more of her," said Jimmy.

"No peeky, no findy," added Bill.

I'm easy. Over went the sensor, on went the power to the side scan.

Clickety-clack, went the recorder. "Will the boat five miles north of Cherbourg please return to port immediately," came a voice in perfect English over the radio.

"My G.o.d!" I muttered. "How did the French catch on so quickly?"

"We're in their submarine testing ground," said Jimmy. "They probably have sensors stationed on the bottom that pick up sonar signals."

"Now you tell me." I groaned and turned to Bill. "Did we get a reading on our first and only pa.s.s?"

"Not the best. She casts an immense shadow on the recorder.

Looks intact and fairly well preserved. She's not spread around the bottom like some we've found. I'd guess that she's lying on her starboard side."

"Will the boat five miles north of Cherbourg please return to port immediately," came the disembodied voice again.

"I wonder if he does children's parties," Bill mused to no one in particular.

"At least he said 'please," " Dirk reminded me.

I looked at Jimmy. "How far to British waters?"

"About eighteen miles."

"What do you think, skipper?"

Before he could answer, our party p.o.o.per was back. "Will the boat-"

Jimmy Flett is a man among men. He smiled slyly, reached up, and turned off the radio.

I nodded. "All right, that concludes the entertainment part of the program. Let's get the h.e.l.l out of here."

With Jimmy grimly gripping the spokes of the wheel, his eyes set toward England, the rest of us stood on the stern and watched for French patrol boats or helicopters to come chasing after us. With our trusty boat pounding along at all of nine knots, it was like robbing a bank and then making our getaway in a bulldozer.

I was certainly in no position to endanger lives on board Arvor III by putting up any resistance. Except for a grappling hook and a couple of Swiss Army knives, our only other a.r.s.enal of weapons was Colin's incredible bounty of small boiling potatoes. Not exactly a morale builder, but a well-aimed volley might stop a patrol boat for all of about ten seconds.

Down deep, I didn't think even the French Navy would attack a British boat flying the Royal Yacht Club ensign with four virtuous Americans on board. We had caused enough problems in the news media to make them wary about inciting an international incident.

Besides, such an affair would only enhance the sale of my books, a n.o.ble endeavor to which they had no wish to contribute.

There comes a time in the affairs of men when fortune shines down through the clouds. Trumpets can be heard along with a drum roll and the lilting sound of harps. Vengeance is mine, quoth Mickey Spillane.

The time came for the meek to inherit the sea. As Arvor III was entering the harbor of Weymouth, we pa.s.sed a French Navy missile frigate coming out that was partic.i.p.ating in NATO exercises.

"How close can you shave him, Jimmy?" I asked.

"Thirty feet be okay?"

"Thirty feet will do just fine."

To the French sailors roaming the decks of the missile frigate, Arvor III simply looked like another fishing boat coming into port.

They hardly gave a second look as Bill, Dirk, Wayne, and I lined up on the stern deck. The stunned expression on their faces was like a narcotic to me as our barrage of boiling potatoes struck, burst, and sprayed over men and ship alike. They never knew what hit them. They didn't know why. And I guess they never will.

We were in friendly waters now and all they could do was shake their fists and shout awful things at us in French.

Revenge is sweet indeed.

Jimmy and John escorted us to the train station for the journey to London. I found it hard to say goodbye to our Scots crew. We had all gone through wild times together in the past six weeks and become quite close. Bill was especially touched at the parting, treasuring a photo he took of Jimmy and John waving as the train pulled from the station.

As shipwreck expeditions go, this one possessed the fondest memories.

Much had been accomplished. Our only failure was not being allowed to hunt for Alabama. It was never my intention to set off a wave of controversy. But we scored well overall and had a boatload of fun while we were at it.

I laid over in New York and held a news conference on board the aircraft carrier Intrepid to announce our finds. I especially wanted to tell the tragic story of the Leopoldville and its sinking on Christmas Eve of 1944. It seemed strange that so few people were aware of the disaster and staggering loss of life. Every government that was remotely involved ignored the tragedy and treated it like an insignificant event not worth dwelling on. The United States Army and Navy acted as though it never happened. The British Admiralty scarcely gave it mention, while the Belgians played down the cowardly actions of the crew.

We gave it our best shot and put Leopoldville on the six o'clock TV news shows and in every major newspaper in the country. Suddenly, families who had simply received telegrams soon after the sinking saying only that their loved ones were killed in action, now began to ask questions. It warmed our hearts to be instrumental in steering a number of wives, brothers, sisters, and survivors to the Panther Veteran Organization, made up of men who had served with the 66th Division.

Bob Hesse, president and one of the founders of the Panther Veteran Organization, showed up at the news conference, and I introduced him as a survivor. He was accompanied by Alex Yarmosh, Ed Riley, and d.i.c.k Dutka, three of the men who had jumped onto the deck of the H.M.S.

Brilliant that terrible night. There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Never dreaming that any Leopoldville survivors would surface, I was deeply touched. Over the years, Bob and I, along with many of the Panther Vets, became good friends. I spoke at one of their reunions and was privileged to be named as an honorary member.

In a book I wrote ent.i.tled Cyclops, I made the following dedication.

To the eight hundred American men who were lost with the Leopoldville, Christmas Eve, 1944, near Cherbourg, France.

Forgotten by many, remembered by few.

The final act of the Cherbourg incident, however, was far from over.

The French were full of surprises, however inappropriate.

Shortly after I returned to my home in Colorado, I read of the dastardly slap in the face given me by the French Navy. One of their salvage ships had launched a search two weeks after we made our great escape from Cherbourg. And guess what? They found Alabama. They claimed to have searched for twenty years, discovering the wreck site only after new research material was brought to their attention.

Mine!

I was surprised at the timing. Then a member of the U.S. Emba.s.sy in Paris wrote and informed me that the captain of the salvage vessel was given doc.u.ments showing the general location. Coincidentally, the cousin of the I salvage-ship commander happened to be the schoolteacher with whom I left all my research material and my estimated position for Alabama. The schmoes- Not only were they proud of it, they were smug about it.

I underwent a total personality change and was suddenly taken sober.

I looked and felt like a ba.s.set hound who forgot where he buried his bone. I was sorely tempted to walk into a fancy French restaurant and ask for their hot cereal of the day. It sprang into my head like a Hallmark pop-up greeting card. The French Navy held a grudge against NUMA for pelting its missile cruiser with potatoes? Could discovering the remains of Alabama have been their way of getting even?

The French went one step farther when American archaeologists began creating proposals for survey and artifact recovery. In a letter to the U.S. State Department, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated in no uncertain terms that since the wreck lies within their territorial waters it belongs to France. It did not matter whether or not our government considered Alabama to be the property of the United States. Their Minister of Culture and the Higher Council on Archaeological Research lost no time in funding and putting together an extensive recovery project, with the choice artifacts going to a new conservation facility and museum in Cherbourg.

Sometime later, Kevin Foster, who is with the National Park Service, was invited to dive on the Alabama site with French archaeologists.

Acting as though their archives were a national treasure, they reluctantly allowed him to study their doc.u.mentation on the shipwreck.

While going through nautical charts, he discovered a chart with my name on it.