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“I don’t care who gave you authorization. Until my office is satisfied that this site is secure, no one is going down there. Your toy boat’ll just have to wait.” The speaker was a man wearing a hard hat and a safety orange vest over a Carhartt coat. Pitt noticed that he was from OSHA, the government watchdog for workplace safety.
Facing off against him were a man and a woman dressed in civilian attire, although they wore proper boots. Pitt correctly guessed that these two were the archeologists, who were doubtless concerned that the submersible needed to be conserved as soon as possible.
It was the woman who spoke for them. “It will only take a few hours. We’ve excavated the ash and tar from the pit. All that’s left is bracing up the hull and rigging the crane.”
“Lady, I don’t care,” the OSHA inspector fired back. From his tone, Pitt could tell that he loved throwing his weight around.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Hi. I’m Dirk Pitt. Are you Dr. Lawrence?”
The female academic turned to him. “Susan Lawrence. Yes. I’m sorry, who are you?”
“Dirk Pitt. I spoke to someone in your office about coming today to see the Turtle. I’m the Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency.”
She nodded sharply. “Yes, I recall now. I am sorry to say, but it seems you wasted a trip from Washington because our site just got shut down by OSHA.”
Pitt didn’t mention he was playing hooky on the last day of a UN conference to be here. He turned his attention to the OSHA supervisor. The safety inspector nodded to one of his guys, who, in turn, grabbed two hard hats off a table and handed them to Pitt and Gwynn. “What seems to be the problem?”
“The problem is, the contractor was supposed to leave twenty feet’s worth of earth in place next to the seawall, with a sixty percent grade down to the bottom of the pit. As you can see—as you all can see,” he said with special emphasis, “there’s barely ten feet of ground remaining, and its face is perfectly vertical. There isn’t enough fill to backstop the seawall and it’s in danger of breaching. It looks like they’re attempting to shore it up with steel plating, but until I see and go over the engineering specs on that plan, I’m declaring this site too dangerous.”
“You must understand,” the male archeologist pled, “the Turtle’s entire hull is exposed to the air, and every moment we delay could cause irreparable damage.” He then remembered another detail and he went ashen. “By God, we left the hatch open. You must let us at least reseal the hatch.”
The OSHA inspector said, “Look, I’m not an idiot. I know how these things work. I’ve been to a lot of sites around the city where you guys are called in, but I can’t let you down there until I’m satisfied that it’s safe.”
Another of the group chimed in. He was dressed like the construction guys but neater, as if he’d never faced the mud and slop found at a typical work zone. He looked like someone from the front office. “Come’n, John. Our engineers sent the changes in the specs to the city three weeks ago. Someone there gave us temporary approval.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to change anything until a final review. Besides, you dug out the remaining material before you had your steel protection up over the existing seawall.”
“Well, okay, that was a screwup,” the man admitted. “The contractor dug much faster than we . . .”
Pitt was tuning out the conversation. He knew how this would ultimately end. The jobsite was going to be shut down for the foreseeable future. The Turtle would undoubtedly suffer some degradation, but ultimately he didn’t think the world’s earliest example of an
attack submarine would be damaged too severely. And who knew? Depending on the schedule, maybe he could still sneak up to see it hoisted from its two-hundred-fifty-year-old cocoon.
He watched the men working the steel out on the seawall. He would have assumed that the OSHA inspector would have ordered them off the structure, but he had to be enough of a pragmatist to know that placing the heavy metal caps over the existing wall could be done much faster than in-filling the massive excavation to the original design specifications.
The steel structural members were about fifty feet long and L-shaped. The two leaves of metal were each at least an inch thick. The shorter leg would rest atop the seawall, and likely be bolted directly into the cement. The longer section would dangle nearly thirty feet down along its face and well into the riverbank’s muck and ooze. Pitt’s gut told him, and likely the OSHA guy would agree, that this was an acceptable alternative to leaving twice as much contaminated soil in the work zone to buttress the old seawall.
The crane was swinging one of the huge steel pieces across the site and over the wall as Pitt watched. Two men in hard hats were on the wall ready to guide the piece into place with ropes hanging from each end. This was a bread-and-butter-type maneuver for ironworkers, something these guys had probably done thousands of times on high-rises and bridges all over the city.
One worker patiently waited for the hundred-foot rope to gently be lowered so he could reach it. His partner might have done the same, had a gust of wind not suddenly hit the plate, twisting his rope so that it started floating away out over the East River.
Pitt never knew why the guy leapt for it. The wind would have died down and the line would have eventually come back to him. He would later come to realize that the workmen had been told to get the job done before the contractor incurred more delays and penalties.
The steelworker managed to grab the rope just before it looped out of reach, but his two hundred pounds was no match for the thirty tons of dangling steel and he was quickly yanked off his feet. The delicately balanced rigging connecting the plate to the crane’s forged-steel hook wouldn’t have registered such a tiny imbalance had the machine’s operator not overreacted. Fearing for the man’s safety, that he could fall to the swift current below, the operator snapped back on a lever to reverse the boom’s swing. The sudden change in momentum caused the massive steel plate to dip enough to upset its center of gravity. In seconds, what had once been a routine maneuver had spiraled out of control.
The plate twisted and corkscrewed in the air like a bird of prey caught by one foot. The second rigger fled his post, not knowing what was going to happen next. The man clutching the rope was tossed and whipped about like a rag doll and was about to be flung either far out into the river, where his heavy clothes and boots would surely drown him, or, equally deadly, be hurled into the pit, where most of his bones would break upon impact.
The crane operator moved more levers in rapid succession, the jolt of adrenaline making his hands tremble. He timed his action so when the plate dropped from the sky, the iron rigger flopped onto the seawall at the full extension of his rope. He was well clear when the mass of steel slammed into the old concrete like the chisel of a jackhammer.
The crumbly masonry came apart as though it had been hit by an explosive. The clang of the impact echoed painfully across the site as though the Roman god Vulcan had struck his mighty hammer against the anvil of the earth.
Pitt was in motion even before the full effects of the disaster became clear. He turned to Thom Gwynn and said, “Call 911. Make sure they send divers.”
Pitt legged over the metal rail that acted as a barrier for the platform overlooking the construction site. The drop to the roof of a container down in the excavation was about ten feet, but Pitt’s perception, since he was a tall man, added another five and a half. He didn’t hesitate. The wind rushed past his ears and his hard hat was blown from his head. He landed well, letting the big muscles of his legs absorb some of the impact before he dipped a shoulder to collapse his body in order to absorb the rest. He let momentum carry him back up to his feet, and he ran to the edge of the container. He paused to look across the workings to the steel plate that had been rammed into the retaining wall.
Cracks had appeared directly below the impact, and they ran from the top of the wall to where it was buttressed by the dirt left in place. Already, water was burbling through these cracks, frothing and angry and eager to exploit the seams as though it resented being penned up behind such an artificial barrier. In seconds, water was snaking across the dirt berm and cascading down its face. As it fell into the pit the water remained clear for just a moment before its erosive forces started chewing through the ground and it turned a muddy brown. All this was taking place a good hundred yards from the square stone sump that had been the Turtle’s home for two and a half centuries.
Pitt had spent his entire career above and below the waters of the world, and few men alive today better understood its undeniable power. He knew what was coming. What he didn’t know, what he was betting his life on, was if he had time enough to accomplish what he’d set out to do. He’d done many rash things over the years, putting his life on the line more times than he could count, and while he’d never second-guessed a decision he’d made, he did wonder for a fleeting moment if what he was about to attempt was worth dying for. Realizing the history that was about to be lost, he tore his gaze from the inevitable destruction that was about to be unleashed and focused instead on the ground below the container.
