Clive Cussler - The Navigator

“Congratulations on finding the Jefferson file,” Austin said with a friendly grin that put her at ease.

“Thank you,” Angela said. “It was dumb luck, really.”

“Angela has had more dumb luck,” Gamay said. “Please tell Kurt and Joe what else you’ve found.”

“We think that Meriwether Lewis was murdered to stop him from bringing some vital information to Thomas Jefferson.”

“I’d be interested in how you reached that conclusion,” Austin said.

Angela pulled a file folder out of a battered leather briefcase.

“I dug into the files looking for information on Lewis’s slave, a young man named Zeb. The records show that he arrived at Monticello several weeks after Lewis died. It’s possible he had gone along with a man called Neelly, who traveled to Monticello with news of Lewis’s death. Neelly would have needed help with Lewis’s belongings and brought along the slave. I wondered what became of Zeb after that.”

“In those days the slave would have been considered part of Lewis’s estate,” Austin said.

“That’s what I thought. He would have been delivered with other property to Lewis’s family. On a hunch, I went through Monticello’s slave population. I found something quite fascinating.”

She handed Austin a sheet of paper with the names of slaves, their sex, age, and job. Austin perused the roster and passed it along to the table without comment.

Gamay said, “Zeb is listed as a freeman. He was assigned to the house.”

“How did he become free at age eighteen?” Austin said.

“I think it was a reward,” Angela suggested.

“That makes sense,” Austin said. “It was Jefferson’s way of thanking the young man for a service he had performed.”

“The Lewis material,” Gamay said. “I’ll bet he delivered the goods to Jefferson.”

“Do you know what happened to him?” Austin asked Angela.

“He stayed at Monticello, working in a prize position inside the house. He vanished from the roster years later, but that’s not the end of the story.”

She produced a copy of an old newspaper clipping.

Gamay read the clipping. “Our freeman?”

“It says he worked for President Jefferson,” Angela said.

Gamay passed the clipping to Paul. “This is dynamite. He’s in his nineties, and was interviewed shortly before he died. On his deathbed, he says flat out that Meriwether Lewis was murdered.”

“What are the chances he told Jefferson the same thing?” Austin said.

Paul said, “We think Jefferson knew it was murder all the time but pushed the suicide story, even though it diminished the reputation of his old friend.”

“Jefferson was not above chicanery, but he must have had a good reason,” Austin said.

Paul picked up the ship rendering. “We think he didn’t want to call attention to the fact that he knew about this. ”

“I think our next step is clear,” Gamay said. “A trip to Monticello to see if we can learn more about young Zeb.”

Austin was about to say he agreed with the suggestion when he excused himself to answer a phone call. It was Wilmut.

“I’ve got it,” Wilmut’s excited voice said.

“You’ve found the ship’s position?”

“Even better, Kurt. I’ve found the ship. ”

Chapter 36

AUSTIN STOOD ON THE DECK of his catboat and gazed out at Chesapeake Bay. The bay was familiar territory to Austin. He had gunkholed nearly every cove and inlet on both shores in the twenty-four-foot-long shallow-draft sailboat he had restored. Despite its wide beam, the catboat was surprisingly fast and maneuverable, living up to its reputation to come about as “quick as a cat.” Austin had a penchant for speed, and liked nothing better than sailing tight to the wind with the big gaff-rigged sail close-hauled in a brisk breeze.

But not today. Austin climbed out of the sailboat and walked back to the parking lot. He helped Zavala unload their bags from the Jeep. After the meeting at NUMA, they had picked up some gear and drove to the boatyard south of Annapolis. Austin had called ahead to arrange with the boatyard manager for the loan of a twenty-foot fiberglass powerboat.

Zavala carried the duffel bags that held their scuba gear. Austin took charge of two plastic cases. They hauled the equipment out onto the slip dock and stowed their gear on board the powerboat. Then they cast off the lines and headed south into the bay. Zavala manned the wheel. Austin consulted the chart and handheld GPS.

Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States, stretching two hundred miles long from Havre de Grace, Maryland, where the Susquehanna River empties into the bay, to Norfolk, Virginia. The bay ranges in width from about thirty-five miles wide near the mouth of the Potomac River to less than four miles near Aberdeen in Maryland.

Zavala scanned the wide expanse of sun-sparkled water. “What’s the wreck tally on the bottom of the Chesapeake?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the buzz of the motor.

Austin looked up from the chart. “About eighteen hundred at last count. They range from a sixteenth-century wreck of TangierIsland to the Cuyahoga, a Coast Guard cutter that went down after a collision. But the historian at NUMA was clueless about the target the satellite picked up.”

“What kind of depth are we talking about?”

“The Chesapeake’s pretty shallow, for the most part,” Austin replied. “Averages about twenty-one feet, although it’s laced with troughs that reach nearly two hundred feet.” He tapped the chart with his finger. “From the looks of it, our target sank into one of these deep holes.”

The powerboat continued south, skimming over the tops of two-foot seas past oyster boats and sailing craft. There was a steady stream of traffic in both directions along the Intercoastal Waterway, which ran down the middle of the Chesapeake.

Less than an hour after leaving the boatyard, Austin again glanced at the GPS and signaled to Zavala, who backed off the throttle and steered the boat to follow Austin’s pointing finger. When they were on-site Austin pointed down toward the water and yelled:

“Here.”

The boat plowed to a stop and Zavala killed the motor. Austin set the GPS aside and threw the anchor over the side. The boat rocked in the waves a few hundred yards from a small island. The boat’s depth finder indicated that the water under their hull was forty-six feet. He and Zavala pored over the satellite photo Wilmut had provided. The faint outline of a ship was clear. It should be right under their hull.

Austin opened a plastic case and lifted out a SeaBotix Remote-Operated Vehicle that was about the size and shape of a canister vacuum cleaner. NUMA had ROVs that were as big as a car, and Austin could have drawn upon an array of the sophisticated remote sensing devices, but he wanted to move fast. He had decided against a time-consuming magnetometer or side-scan sonar survey in favor of a shallow-water vehicle that was portable and easily transported.

At one end of the bright red plastic housing was a high-resolution color camera and halogen lights. At the other end was a pair of powerful thrusters. The ROV had a lateral thruster that could shift it sideways and a vertical thruster for up and down. Metal frameworks on each side of the vehicle served a dual purpose as runners and housing protection.

Zavala snapped open the lid on the other case, which contained the ROV’s eight-inch television monitor and controls. He was a skilled pilot, and the single-stick control would be easy to use. He and Austin connected the three-hundred-foot-long low-drag umbilical to the vehicle and control box. Austin lifted the ROV by the handle in the top of the housing and dropped it into the water. Zavala put the vehicle through a few tricky maneuvers to get a feel for the controls. Then he pointed the ROV toward the bottom in a shallow dive and powered the thrusters.