Here is the next entry in the Sea Hunters Writing Competition. This entry was submitted by "
Foss Gly" (not to be confused with "fossgly", the winner of the competition.) This entry came extremely close to winning and is an outstandingly well written story.
The Sea Hunters III Part One: Star ArielJanuary 17, 1949
“Well, it looks like I won’t be getting that quick round of golf in after all,” John Clutha McPhee muttered to his co-pilot Dauncey as the two went over the last of the pre-flight checks aboard the British South American Airways airliner Star Ariel.
“Too bad,” Dauncey replied, peering out the Tudor IV’s window at the sun peering between the buildings on the easterly side of the landing strip. “Looks like it would have been prime weather, for January. Already it’s up to fifty degrees, and it’s not even eight thirty yet. Giving nice weather all day. Possibly sixty degrees or more.”
McPhee scowled. “Don’t remind me. It’s not like I’ll get the chance once we return to jolly ‘ol England in a few days.” He glanced down at his wrist chronometer, and adjusted it back an hour. “Might as well set your watch back,” he said. We’ll be hitting the timeline about an hour and a half up.” Dauncey nodded, and adjusted his watch accordingly. “Better do it now, I’ll likely forget when we’re in the air. I’ll be wondering why I’m getting tossed out of the local pub in Kingston an hour earlier than I’d have expected.”
McPhee chuckled as he completed the last of the checks, filling out information on the clipboard behind him. The Tudor IV was in prime condition, and fit for flight. The sturdy aircraft was powered by four Rolls Royce engines; the chrome-silver plane was painted in the standard livery of the BSAA line, red stripes with a Union Jack painted on the aircraft’s tail rudder. The craft was reliable, and its comfort as a passenger vehicle was becoming more and more well known throughout aviation circles. Hermetically sealed, the craft was capable of flying at much higher altitudes than previous airliners, and as McPhee looked up at the vividly blue skies, he mentally planned to keep a higher than normal altitude to cut down on both fuel and flight time. The craft had enough fuel for over ten hours of flight, though John expected the flight to only take five and a half, since a favorable tailwind was in the weather forecast.
The pretty stewardess that McPhee only knew as Moxon momentarily stuck her pretty head into the cockpit. “Everyone is seated and prepared for takeoff, Captain,” she said sweetly, and just as quickly vanished.
“What do you think, old boy?” McPhee asked Dauncey, “ready to fly?”
Dauncey grinned behind his thick graying walrus moustache. “I think I can handle that,” he replied jovially, releasing the brakes that had held the landing gear securely in place on the runway.
Under the skillful, steady hands of McPhee on the yoke, within three minutes the Star Ariel was airborne, leaving the Hamilton, runway a half-mile below. To McPhee’s left, the sun cast a vivid yellow glow on the Atlantic Ocean, the reflective glare already making McPhee squint if he looked down at the water.
In the passenger section, the passengers, all thirteen of them, were getting themselves settled in for the long flight after the smooth liftoff. Moxon, the pretty stewardess and K. Coleman, the young steward assigned to the flight, began preparing a light breakfast snack of light fruit and coffee or tea. Most of the passengers had at least the beverage of choice, but only two had fruit. It was likely the other passengers had eaten while waiting for their connecting flight.
They had all been passengers aboard the Star Ariel’s sister plane in the BSAAC air fleet, the Star Lion, which had lost the function of one of her engines while on final approach to the Hamilton airfield, the biggest strip in Bermuda. While the craft had landed safely, it was pretty quickly determined that the Star Lion was in no condition to carry on though to Jamaica. The top brass at British South American Airways quickly pressed the idle Star Ariel into duty. The Star Ariel had been scheduled to return to England after a ten hour layover, instead, it was sent back to Jamaica to finish the Star Lion’s aborted flight. The crew didn’t mind, they were being paid double, and the passengers were equally pleased with the fact that their delay was minimal.
The passengers were an eclectic group; Moxon chuckled to herself as she refilled the coffee pot. There was no class distinction on this flight; as all of the passengers were treated as though they had paid for first-class airfare. But when one looked closely at the group it was obvious rather quickly that they came from a variety of walks of life.
The man closest to the galley where Moxon was standing was no doubt a physician, he had even carried an old-fashioned leather medical bag on board, instead of having it stowed with the rest of the passenger luggage. He was probably sixty or older, Moxon figured, and judging from the accent he had displayed thanking her for his tea, he was American, probably from the Southern states.
To his left sat a youngish couple, who obviously were enraptured with each other, unintentionally ignoring all else around them. Likely on their honeymoon, Moxon reflected, not without a twinge of jealousy. She herself had never married. Most of the eligible men around her had been heavily involved in the war, and those that weren’t were not interested in her high-flying, always-away lifestyle.
The couple huddled together, the husband was laughing softly at something his wife said, a twinkle in his eye. He clasped her hand in hers and squeezed tightly.
There were no children on this flight, a small blessing in Moxon’s eyes. While as a rule she loved children, on a flight they could oftentimes be troublesome. In fact, Moxon thought she might have been the youngest person on board, at twenty three. Only the radio operator, a new crewman by the name of Rettie, looked to be close in age to her.
Another interesting individual Moxon had taken immediate note of was the forty-something lady dressed in all black who looked dressed for a funeral instead of a trans-Atlantic flight. Wearing dark red lipstick and hiding behind deeply tinted eyeglasses, she was something of an enigma to the stewardess. She had declined food or drink when offered, and instead had stared intently out the window at the ocean—and now, some clouds—below. Moxon wondered what her story was...why the forlorn look, the drab clothes, yet the most vivid lipstick she had ever seen.
Every passenger had a story, she reflected as she began tidying. I should become a writer, she smiled to herself.
Little did she know she would only be alive for ten more minutes.
In the cockpit, Captain McPhee took a routine navigation reading and fired up his transceiver after a nod from his radio man, G. Rettie. He hailed Hamilton Field’s control tower, receiving the go-ahead to transmit a few moments later. There was no static in Bermuda’s response, indicating the weather had not changed since they had taken off just over an hour before. “I was over thirty degrees North at 8:37. I am now changing frequency to MRX.”
MRX was the radio frequency assigned to Kingston, Jamaica. Since the Star Ariel was just entering radio range of their destination, it was deemed by the Captain time to switch to their frequency. Bermuda radioed back a confirmation, and Rettie accordingly changed the radio’s channel.
The sky continued to remain sunshine-filled and clear, a blessing that allowed McPhee to relax a bit and allow Dauncey to take over the controls from his console. Dauncey was a talented pilot in his own right; McPhee had no reservations whatsoever handing over the controls at least once a flight. The two were becoming a well known team for British South American Airways. McPhee assumed they would be made a semi-permanent team upon their return to England. Dauncey, while somewhat quiet, seemed like a good chap, and he enjoyed flying with the younger man.
While all systems showed normal onboard the aircraft, outside of the vehicle it was a different matter altogether. A small crack had formed in the fuselage due to the differences between the outer hull and the pressurized interior.
It was later discovered that their fuselages were too weak to withstand the recently installed pressurization.
In a matter of moments, as soon as the delicate seal between the craft’s outer hull and the comfortable confines of the cabin was ruptured, the air seemed to be sucked from the aircraft’s interior almost instantly. The temperature dropped thirty degrees in mere seconds—to quick for anyone to react. The passengers passed out almost instantly, and the flight crew a scant few seconds later, without time to do anything, without time to even register something was wrong. The lack of oxygen was akin to falling asleep very quickly, far quicker than any of the Tudor’s occupants could have wanted.
Part Two: SearchJuly, 2006
My name is John Bullerwell, and I’m a part-time liaison to NUMA. the National Underwater & Marine Agency, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the discovery and preservation of historical shipwrecks and marine points of interest. I had participated in several of NUMA’s past expeditions after becoming a fan of author Clive Cussler’s fictional NUMA universe and then the real-life organization that he and several others had formed from his considerable book earnings. The Dirk Pitt series of novels were tremendously popular and had provided Clive the opportunity to fund expeditions to located marine points of interest that were sometimes the subjects of the same popular line of novels.
I had contacted Dr. Cussler in the hopes I could participate in a NUMA expedition that had been undertaken somewhat close to my home in Nova Scotia. While Clive was flattered that I wanted to lend a hand, he was cautiously wary of fan involvement. He did everything to dissuade me from helping, simply because it wasn’t as glamorous as one might think. Young and headstrong, I politely ignored his advice and found myself miserably seasick on small NUMA-chartered fishing vessel sonar scanning for a lost German U-Boat that we never did find. It was quite possibly the most sick I had ever been, but the thrill of the search had whetted my appetite for more.
I had always thought of myself as somewhat of an amateur marine historian, and had often found my interest leaning toward unexplainable maritime mysteries. The Bermuda Triangle, the Sargasso Sea and the like were my ‘bread and butter’, so to speak; I was an avid collector of mysterious maritime lore.
Dr. Cussler soon learned of this interest and seemed somewhat impressed by my knowledge, which was flattering in itself. I had asked why he had never used the Bermuda Triangle as a real plot point in the bestseller Cyclops, his Pitt novel that had delved into the vanishing of the Navy collier Cyclops back in 1918. Though I had never got a solid answer in that regard from the good Doc, he did take note of my fascination with the infamous Triangle.
A few months after the first expedition, Clive called me at home and asked what I knew of the Star Ariel, a Tudor aircraft that had vanished in the Triangle back in 1949. I rattled off what I knew, which wasn’t that much, really. Information was scarce on the plane’s disappearance. Clive chuckled on the other end of the line. I paused for a moment. “What’s this about, Clive?”
In his cheery voice, I could almost hear a smile. “Because, my friend, you’re gonna find that plane for us.”
At first I thought he was pulling my leg. Clive has always had an interesting sense of humor, but I soon found out it was no joke and I was flying to meet with him and a team of NUMA volunteers in Nassau, Bahamas. Not the worst place in the world to start an expedition, for sure, and considerably warmer than Nova Scotia.
We met up at a local bar, where Clive laid out his idea more succinctly. His idea was to find the lost flight, based on his theory that a lack of cabin pressure had brought the craft down. When asked where the idea had sprung up from, he confessed to watching too much cable news. The year before, an aircraft had crashed on a flight between Cyprus and Athens, and it had been attributed to lack of cabin pressure. And, he pointed out; similar circumstances had claimed the life of pro-golfer Payne Stewart in 1999. Clive’s thought was that similar circumstances most certainly could have brought down the Star Ariel in 1949. We had to admit, it seemed entirely plausible, and much more likely than the mysterious ‘Bermuda Triangle’ sucking the aircraft into a pocket of extra-dimensional space.
With a potential idea of ‘how’, it was then the goal to find out ‘where’. Not an easy task with the amount of ocean that would need to be covered. From the onset, I was skeptical that the plane would have survived in one piece had the crew died. But Clive had a surreal way of speaking, he had me convinced that the aerodynamic plane would have pretty much glided into the sea at a relatively flat angle after running out of fuel or lack of minute course augmentation. Whether or not he himself believed the tales he told me, he did fire up my imagination and determination to find the ship. Significant clues were left in the Star Ariel’s last transmission to Bermuda control, but we would need a math whiz to help coordinate the possible factors determining where the plane had ended up.
I wasn’t surprised that Clive had someone in mind. He told me of a retired mathematics professor that lived on the island, and within an hour, Dr. Davin McCain had joined us at the bar and had bought the table a round. An agreeable, jolly man, he made me think of Cussler’s Perlmutter character in his novels, a man who enjoyed life’s pleasures, sometimes to excess. McCain had a similar demeanor, if not girth, and was eager to lend his knowledge in an endeavor that might be proven completely fruitless.
After an eventful evening of conversation, conspiring and two too-many rum and cokes, I found myself looking forward to the search. My sleep was peaceful, visions of the aluminum plane in my dreams.
We spent the next three days researching the area, the currents (both air and sea), and brainstormed all possible fates of the missing plane. Finally convinced we had a general idea, Clive set about procuring a boat. It was no surprise that he found one without any trouble—if anything, Clive Cussler has connections. We had our boat—a sixty foot former seiner named Excelsior.
The chartered boat’s captain was a jolly older man who simply went by the name of Cap. I never did learn Cap’s real name, but I certainly did enjoy his tales of the local waters…and the local women. It seems Cap had had a most eventful career, and an even more eventful love life. And while most fishermen love to tell tall tales, something about Cap’s earnestness made me believe every word that came from his wrinkled lips.
Clive had a speaking engagement in California, so he wasn’t going to be joining us on this excursion. That was a disappointment to me, as I had never participated on an excursion with the good Doctor. He had all of the NUMA equipment for the search already loaded in the boat by the time we got there early Saturday morning, well before first light, so there was no delay in heading out to sea…which was good, considering we had a sixteen hour steam to our projected search area.
Our deductions had lead us to think the missing plane had remained relatively on a straight course, deviating only slightly east due to offset created by the wind patterns of that fateful day. But we also presumed that the craft hadn’t remained airborne for very long after the hypothetical loss of pressure. It was somewhat of a gamble, but we were going with the hopes that McPhee hadn’t been flying with the autopilot on. If he had, the plane would have likely passed over Jamaica with someone witnessing it, and since no one had reported any sign of the plane after its last radio transmission, we guessed that the autopilot had not been engaged.
Cap took the cruising time to tell us several more great stories from his past, each one more unbelievable than the last. I wish now I had written down some of them, they would have made a wonderful; basis for a book. Then again, I may have been beaten in that regard, as Dr. McCain made a similar comment. Don’t be surprised if your local bookseller ends up with an entertaining book about the adventures and misadventures of Cap on its shelves, by a certain Doctor Davin McCain.
The weather was warm and pleasant, with nary a breeze--perfect weather for us to begin our search. My seasickness even held off, something I was incredibly happy about. Years before, I had been offered a job as a lobster fisherman by my father, but couldn’t stand the seasickness enough to make a go of it.
We arrived at the leading edge of our projected search grid just after four pm. Daylight would be our friend for several more hours, and we would be able to work for as long into the night as we wanted due to our utilization of electronic equipment to search for any remnants of the plane.
Our most effective tool in our search arsenal would be our primary search device, our WESMAR side-scan sonar unit. Clive had personally financed a retrofit of this older unit to include a multibeam sonar unit, a more effective and promising technology that gave true three dimensional images of the ocean floor. The Excelsior’s bridge was jammed full of our portable computers to keep track of the data being passed back up to the boat from our trailing electronics package.
We also had brought along a magnetometer, but didn’t expect to get much use from it due to the fact that the Tudor was made up of mostly aluminum, and thus certainly wouldn’t provide much of a reading, even to its sensitive sensors. Still, you never know what else you’ll find while wandering over the endless ocean, so it could still come in handy for identifying other possible discoveries.
With the WESMAR unit at first trailing three hundred meters below us, we began our search. Because where we were searching was incredibly deep water, we began to let more and more of the line out, allowing the probe to sink lower and lower towards the seafloor. Even if we located the plane, the depth (sometimes over two miles, though usually less than one) meant that recovery of the aircraft would be impossible, as would diving to it for a positive identification. This was at first very disheartening, as we had hoped our initial research would plot the aircraft in shallower waters, where identification would be much easier and the possibility of diving the wreck might exist. Now, all of our hopes rested on finding its hulk and photographing it with the cameras mounted on the trailing sensor package.
As with nearly all search patterns used by those looking for underwater landmarks, we searched in a pattern known as “mowing the lawn”, covering huge swaths of sea in each pass. This allowed maximum ‘bang for our buck’.
We covered a lot of sea the first day, and found two very interesting targets. One we identified as a sunken fishing vessel not on any of our charts, but the second was unidentifiable. We could tell, however, that it obviously wasn’t our missing Tudor. Darius Young, one of our dedicated NUMA volunteers, hypothesized that due to its size and metallic readings, it might possibly be a German U-Boat, a kick in the pants to me personally considering one of my first NUMA excursions failed to find one. We marked the coordinates in our computers and GPS systems, and retired for the night.
Sleeping conditions on the Excelsior were not as bad as I expected them to be, in fact they were much better than I could have hoped for, and the swaying of the seiner on the waves lulled me into a relatively peaceful sleep. Once again, the missing Tudor aircraft haunted my dreams, taunting me…”Find me; I’m here waiting for you.”
Four hours later I was up again, pacing the afterdeck of the boat, and luckily I managed to catch the sunrise. Cap stepped out onto the deck a moment later, holding a mug of coffee out to me, which I gratefully accepted. We chatted about the expedition again for a while, watching the sun as it slowly ascended. The air was still cool, crisp with the smell of sea salt. Shortly thereafter the rest of the guys appeared on deck, and we got back to work.
Throughout the second day we again found two new targets, and again, both were eliminated from contention after we realized they were likely fishing boats. One, possibly a schooner, seemed in remarkably good shape for likely being wooden hulled. This was an enigma, as we would have guessed that the wood would have long ago been eaten away by the multitude of underwater organisms. Again, we plugged the coordinates into our portable computers and GPS equipment.
Finally, at the end of the third day, we still hadn’t located the plane and we were running short on time. Cap, while very enthusiastic about the expedition, had been chartered by a local hotel for a tourist fishing trip the following day, and thus, we had no choice but to get underway. We were all disappointed, as one might imagine. But as Dr. McCain pointed out, we now knew, for next time, where the Star Ariel wasn’t.
Our last, desperate ploy was to trail the WESMAR unit behind us as we left the search grid. We plotted a course out that would take us though unexplored sea and let the side-scan do its work.
That did not find anything.
It was a letdown, to be sure. Any NUMA expedition that failed to locate their target was a letdown, both financially and emotionally. The most disparaging fact was that another expedition would likely never happen. The depths that our search was taking place at, the sheer logistical problems involved in finding a plane that could very well no longer even exist—all combined to prove this would be our only attempt. I was depressed beyond words.
Two nights later we sat gathered together in the same local bar, lamenting over our failed expedition. Even old Cap had joined us, once again regaling us with assorted tales of debauchery. Over cold drinks we went over every scenario that we had before the expedition to see if there was anything we may have overlooked, any reason why the downed Star Ariel might not be where we hoped it could be. Cap summed it up pretty well. “The ocean’s a big place, lads. She tells a different story each time you listen to her, and her secrets are the best kept in the universe.
That night, standing on the seaside balcony of my modest hotel room I stared at the sea and smelled the salt air. Different from home, but familiar at the same time. I shook my head from side to side, cursing the waters. I turned back into the hotel room, turned off the small lamp, and dreamed about my next NUMA expedition.