Twenty Minute Wars: CBG Seven
by Michael G. Crawford
Here, off Northern Africa's Ivory Coast, she had sunk with all hands, carrying her cargo of riches to the bottom. In this case her riches were more precious than any gold or jewels.
The Pegasus had carried the most volatile and costly of cargos in her day, a cargo of human beings. A slaver of unknown registry, only her name and the general location of her sinking had survived the passage of time.
But Adam and his teammates were not here for the purpose of finding treasure. Despite that the sparse history predicted a few gold bars used for bartering might be on board, Adam and his colleagues were embarked on a more mundane purpose.
As underwater archaeologists they performed the painstaking and humorless job of digging up ancient graves, playing detective with human remains sometimes centuries old.
Adam's specialty was on the societies of the less "recent" past, at least as archaeologists might term it. He would have been more at home exploring Egyptian ship wrecks, but those were damn few in the twentieth century. One had to go where the action was, and if that was the newly discovered wreck of a comparatively recent society as the slave traders, then c`est la guerre, such is life.
The fact that one of his ancestors could have just as easily died on the ship instead of making it to Virginia really hadn't impressed him until he had seen the first skeleton. It was funny that without his expertise arming him, he would not have seen the subtle differences between the slaves and the crew of the ill-fated ship. Only the longer leg and arm bones, the flattened feet and the Mongoloid facial bone structures pointed an unerring finger at the origin of the skeletons. Deep in the bowels of the ship, kept like cattle, the cargo had died a horrible death while nearly all of the white crew had abandoned ship.
With the hold of the ship on his mind, Adam's eyes stared at the spot on the ocean floor where it would have been if the ship were uncovered. Here they would use their vacuum pump to suck the water and sand off the old wreck, and hopefully find more evidence of the old ship's trade-craft, conclusive evidence of its unwilling passengers. As with most archaeologists, Adam hated to disturb his find, but the logical and scientific part of his mind had won out in the end.
He forced himself back to the present as he watched his companions preparing to take their preface camera shots. These were to preserve the state of the wreck before the team began to really work in earnest upon the ship's secrets.
Adam swam down slowly, letting his now patterned reflexes relax the pain in his ears. A normal irritant to a scuba diver, the pain occurred as the diver moved deeper into the water. The slight pain was caused by the unequal pressure between the inside and the outside of body. The remedy was simply to equalize the two pressures, and most divers usually grabbed their nose and forced a little air into their Eustachian tubes, thus relieving the pain in their ears.
In his case though, he hardly noticed the transition to the deep, as he un-consciously flexed his jaw muscles. This action forced the slight movement of the sinuses required to accomplish the equalization.
As he stopped his downward travel and began to help his teammates, he was struck by the incongruity of the men surveying this travesty of man's injustice upon his neighbors. One Black, a Chinese, and a French Caucasian. It was ironic that this mix of races should be working together to uncover an artifact which held up man's racism for all to see.
The enormity of it still amazed him. Even in the "modern" societies today, he and his friends still noticed as people stared at their obvious and open display of friendship. He reveled in their ability to set the example. It was his pride, and his own personal badge of courage.
The best of his friends was Terry Sustance, the tall Frenchman. Terry was very much at home in the water, and Adam was always amazed to see how his friend could move so effortlessly and breathe so naturally. When Adam and his Oriental friend Chu surfaced with almost empty tanks, Terry still had another twenty-five to thirty minutes of air left.
Terry was a fairly quiet, yet competitive man, who always spoke with an air of authority. Adam didn't know much about his past, only that he had been with the Navy and then after retiring, the State Department for awhile. He had gone back for his doctorate on the G.I. bill, building on a Masters in Military Science from Annapolis.
Their friendship over the last year had grown even closer, Terry sometimes surprising Adam with his sensitivity and caring while at the same time, Adam knew the man to be a certain hawk politically.
Once Terry had explained his thoughts on what he called, "the soldier, the human". He had said, "A soldier must also be a human. He or she must have compassion for the innocent, an almost insane drive for justice, and a conscience which allows them to make up their own mind on actions their superiors ask them to do."
He had gone on to explain that even though the soldiers job was to obey his superior, doing whatever he was ordered to do without question, there always came a time when he must stop and ask why. Terry had explained how that decision point had come to many a soldier he knew, and how it had changed their lives.
"If you can't justify your existence as a soldier to yourself anymore, than it's time to quit. No leader of worth would deny a man's right to question his own involvement in things military. In fact, if the leader is the least bit human, he has already asked the question of himself, perhaps several times."
Terry had said his reasons for continuing his education in archaeology had come from a desire to understand man's conflicts through the ultimate lesson giver, the past. It was this combination of sensitivity and a soldier's resolve that made Terry such an interesting companion for Adam.
Then, almost as if he had purposely chosen a friend to offset the hawk in Terry Sustance, Adam had also befriended Chu Chang. This man was thought by others to be quiet and peaceful. In actuality, Chu wasn't particularly shy or introverted as many thought. Adam considered that the tendency was to assume Chu's personality was a match to the Chinese stereotype, introspective, philosophical, and full of awe and respect for tradition and his ancestors.
But although his friend did have some of these qualities, he was by no means a person you could pigeonhole into any stereotype. One moment he would be deep in thought, in the next he would spring from his chair, bubbling with enthusiasm for his latest brainstorm. The people surrounding him would find themselves suddenly anxious to begin work, or finish a long dreaded task. The man was nefariously epidemic in his ability to motivate people into new levels of creativity or animation.
Chu was also an amazingly agile and strong swimmer for a man of 58 years. He was in excellent health, probably the most fit of the three, and only a slight bit slower in reflexes.
Adam had heard people call Chu an eccentric. But to his mind, Chu was simply able to involve himself in incredible levels of concentration.
And it was Chu's intellect which had spurred on the process which led to his leaving his country of birth. Not that he had wanted to leave, nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact was, Chu had realized that despite the love he felt for his country, there was little chance of his pursuing his chosen vocation there. But his friend had never given up on his desire to return, and as recent as last week Chu had mused on the date of his return. Often he had told Adam that one of his life's desires was to return and find the origins of his ancestors.
Another thing that provided Adam with a certainty to Chu's humanism and love for life, was his wife Le Suu. She had followed him from China, at her own expense and against the wishes of her family. She had found Chu at his Harvard graduation, and then wouldn't leave his side. Chu liked to joke that he had to marry her just to keep the rumors from getting too bad. But Adam had seen that Chu loved Le Suu deeply, and probably had loved her since their first meeting.
He broke from this second reverie, as his team began their final positioning of the camera, trying to get just the right angle. It was difficult sometimes, since they wanted a clear shot for their notes on the find. They would take a shot, decide there was a better one, and maneuver the camera to a new spot and start all over again. Finally, just as they had found a spot where their bright underwater lights were adding just the right amount of "fill" to the minimal glare coming from the surface, they began to hear a low thrum. It was a deep sound, pulsing, nearly painful to the ears with its low frequency sound. Then as they looked at each other without understanding this new phenomenon, a shadow fell over the entire scene.
Adam shivered at the enormous size of the shadow and the hair on his back threatened to stick straight out the back of the light wetsuit jacket. The shiver running up his back was real enough, yet like in a nightmare, he found it hard to turn his head and look up at the object casting the huge underwater shadow. But he did it, and unlike a nightmare, he got to see the whole damn thing, no mystery or unsolved cycle in this vision.
The black shape smoothly crossed slightly behind them at their depth, riding at 90 feet below the surface. The topmost portion of the shape missed the bottom of their dive boat by a slim twenty feet. The bottom...well it missed them, but not by much. Its sleek shape was forming a shock wave in the water as it ever so slowly cruised by, feeling its way along the coastline.
Adam noted the absence from blemish on the animal like surface as it passed. Even as the wake shoved him away and down from the subs bottom, the only fear registering was for his precious ship on the bottom. What if this gargantuan intruder were to nose down too close to the wreck. Would it stir up the sand, shift the water enough to relocate their precious artifact, spreading it all over the sand?
He never stopped his worries over their find, not even long enough to consider his chances on surviving the passing of the black shape. It just never occurred to him that he should worry. All that registered at this point was that he felt a kind of electric charge as it hissed by him. Then suddenly he saw a flash, a glint of surface light reflecting forward from the rear of the black shape, reflecting off a curiously unwavering mass that trailed behind. Then as the black shadow began to finish its pass over his teammates and himself, he understood why it had confused him.
At such a close distance, the shadowy shape was not discernible, not something he could recognize. It's true form had escaped him so far, only a part of his mind noting that the sides of the shape were a painted surface, the material a cold, hard steel. Then as if he were watching himself flailing in the water, his mind finally formed a picture. He could see himself swimming next to an unbelievable underwater artifact, a submarine. The screws of the sub, mercifully, weren't turning. It seemed to be coasting, its deadly twelve blade, twin screws stopped in motion. Even so it was gliding by them at only three or four knots, the low pulsing "thrumm" keening through the water. It couldn't really be heard, it was more like it was felt; right in the chest cavity, and in the ears.
He realized suddenly that even at that slow speed, the screws were dangerous, as their forward motion would still carry a horrible impact underwater. Or least he assumed as much, and he was determined not to test his theory by empirical methods. He snapped out of his mesmirized vision of himself next to the sub. He hooted a breath out the regulator in his mouth, to wake his teammates from the same stupor that he had found himself in. Then he back-pedaled away from the sub as hard as he could. He realized at last the beneficial effects of the adrenaline which was a by-product of that same fear which had produced the sensation of spine chilling shivers.
Miraculously, he watched as the screws approached, and felt the tug of the subs passage, as a new fear shot through him. The unexpected pull of the sub's passing had surprised him as it suctioned him back toward the deadly brass sickles. He was very lucky he had fled when he had, for his motion back toward the sub stopped 10 or more yards from the screws despite his continued back-pedaling. Terry moved in a likewise motion as he, the two of them quite equal in the water as usual.
But Chu Chang hadn't been quite as fast in reacting as his friends. Adam watched in horror as the older man was suddenly yanked in the opposite direction, being sucked uncontrollably into the back side of the blades. A sickening, metallic crunch made its delayed acknowledgement through the water.
Chu's body was now motionless, just hanging in the water as the sub drew away from them. His two friends swam frantically to him, hoping to help. But it became a matter of certain knowledge that he was beyond help. A cloud of darkness was spreading in a gory blossom from around his face mask.
As Adam neared him first, he grabbed his friends arm, and began the long climb to the surface. Taking just a moment to peer into the cracked faceplate of Chu's mask, hoping to check the damage, he retched. The reaction forced him to spit his mouthpiece out, along with the short breath he had taken in the involuntary gasp.
Chu's face was quite flat, the glass of the facemask embedded in large slivers in his eyes and generally spread all over his face. It was like a porcupine back in many respects. The ugly part was the grey matter oozing from the eye sockets, nose and mouth. The impact of the head against unresisting brass of the screws had simply crushed the skull front to back, and like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it had leaked its contents at every opening.
Terry Sustance shoved his own regulator into Adam's mouth, and then yanked his spare regulator from its perch at his side. Pounding Adam on the chest he questioned with his eyes and a gesture, his thumbs up flashing directly in front of his friend's facemask.
Nodding, Adam motioned toward the surface in agreement, taking only a second to stare at the receding shape of the submarine's stern. As the black shape moved away, he looked in awe at the strange structure of the conning tower. It looked like an exagerated letter T, rather than the thin column he would have expected.
Then, struggling with his inflator, he began the task of giving himself some positive buoyancy to aid them both in hauling the dead body of their friend to the surface.