Curses, Foiled Again
July 1984 mes it is hard to separate reality from comic relieL Despite the best-laid plans of mice and Cussler, the second phase of the '84 North Sea Expedition developed and ended like a comic opera produced and staged by inmates from a mental institution. If I'd known the fiasco the NUMA crew of Arvor III was about to encounter in Cherbourg, I'd have ordered Jimmy Fiett to keep right on going and steer a course for the harbor at Monte Carlo.
After finding and surveying U-21, we reached Bridlington, England, on a level sea under a bright blue sky-one of the few times I'd seen Bridlington without a cloud in sight. On my earlier visits during the Bonhomme Richard search projects, it rained incessantly. A workingclass resort town, filled with gaudy casinos and amusement centers, Bridlington is clean, the people friendly. The homes along the side streets in the old section of town exude a rustic Edwardian charm.
I've seen entire families strolling along the beach promenade through a torrential downpour, with matching rain slickers on mum and dad as well as the children, including babies in strollers and the family dog.
They were going to enjoy their vacation, by God, come rain, sleet, or fog. Considering England's too frequently dismal weather, I've always been amazed by the humorous disposition of the Brits. Unlike residents of Seattle, who sit under bright lights during ninety straight days of gray skies to keep from falling into fits of depression, the English, Scots, and Welsh endure with a grin and remain incredibly cheery.
Arvor III probed her bow into the small man-made harbor at Bridlington and settled her wide beam against the south quay. Bill Shea, several pounds lighter, rose from the dead and stared through the door at the serene harbor and fishing boats moored to the docks.
"I knew it, I knew it," he said, shading his eyes from the sun.
"I've died and been sentenced to spend eternity in Bridlington for my sins."
"At least it isn't raining," I replied.
"Give it another five minutes." Bill looked at me with a you poor fool look. "Don't you know that at the instant of death you always pass through a tunnel into a bright light?"
What could I say? Bill's theory was flushed down the drain after we experienced clear skies for the next four days.
We took advantage of the good weather and calniseas by spending a couple of days searching a grid area marked by a pair of psychics for the remains of the Bonhomme Richard. The record of our magic department remained unbroken. Five straight strikeouts. Nothing of interest was seen. The seabed was as clean as a toilet bowl at grandmother's house.
Bill and I welcomed an invitation by Manny and Margaret Thompson of Bridlington, our good friends and supporters during the Bonney Dick search projects. Splendid people with a pair of broad-shouldered sons, Manny and Margaret own and operate amusement centers that are popular in Britain. After three weeks aboard Arvor III, we thought their lovely home looked to us like a five-star hotel, solidly planted in the ground with no inclination to pitch and roll. We had to clutch our bed headboards the first night while our internal workings acclimated to a stable position.
I called home and wished my wife, Barbara, a happy birthday. I do believe it was the only time in forty-one years I missed being with her for the occasion.
Margaret Thompson is one of the loveliest women in the whole of Yorkshire. She stands out among the other ladies of the coastal towns, and Manny is as generous and helpful as a saint. Well, maybe he's not quite ready to be canonized, but he's still one hell of a great guy.
During the earlier Bonhomme Richard expeditions, our crew made jokes about the local girls, especially those over the age of twenty-five, who they swore took ugly pills. In all fairness, the women married early, usually fishermen, and went downhill. They were attractive in their teens but seemed to lose any interest in appearance once they bore children. The running joke was that Yorkshire held a beauty contest and nobody came. The crew then held their own contest.
A bottle of fine scotch to the man who found and had his picture taken with the prettiest lady in all the Yorkshire counties over the age of twenty-five. Margaret was eliminated because she was born and raised outside the area before Manny married her.
I won the contest. mile returning to Arvor III one morning after buying a nautical chart of the coast, I was stopped on the pier by a photographer who was taking photos of people passing by with girls dressed up like Miss Piggy- I promptly paid him for the privilege, and as soon as the pictures were developed, I claimed the scotch.
Surprisingly, none of the other guys protested.
A friend of the Thompsons gave Bill and me a tour through a Russian automobile distributorship. The cars were basically Fiats, manufactured just outside Moscow. I built better soap-box derby racers when I was a kid. Next to these heaps, Yugos looked like Bentleys.
None of the paint matched on the doors, the upholstery was patched together like a quilt, and the engine looked like a power unit out of a scrapped snowblower.
I do believe Ronald Reagan studied one of these cars and came up with his scheme to break the Soviet Union by bluffing them into a technology race.
On the day we were to depart for Cherbourg and begin the search for Alabama and Leopoldville, Wayne Gronquist, who was supposed to arrive from Austin, Texas, failed to show up at the dock. We waited nearly an hour and still no Wayne. The tide, which rose and fell as much as ten feet and often left Arvor III lying in the mud, was dropping rapidly. Jimmy informed me that if we didn't leave within the next few minutes we would become a fixture at the quay for the next twelve hours.
Demonstrating my talent for command decisions, I said to Jimmy, "You're the skipper. When you say we go, we go."
Jimmy clanged the engine-room bell and started the diesels as Colin and Bill cast off the mooring lines. Just as in the movies, here comes Wayne running madly across the quay. Jimmy shifted the engines into drive and never looked back. Bill and I were cheering and urging Wayne to run faster. He made amazingly good time considering he was carrying a huge tote bag.
I do believe Wayne set some sort of broad-jump record that day.
He sprang off the quay, tote bag and all, barely landing on the deck of Arvor III in the arms of Bill and me. "Why in hell were you late?" I demanded. "You knew we had to beat the tide or lose another day."
"Sorry," Wayne answered like a chastened collie. "I was buying a camera."
"You could have done that before you left Texas."
"I thought I could buy one cheaper here."
Bill stared at the camera slung around Wayne's shoulder. "You figured you could buy a Japanese camera cheaper in England than in Texas?"
"Don't they sell for less out of the country?" asked Wayne innocently.
"Nothing sells for less in England," Bill explained, "especially in Bridlington."
"Gosh, I thought I got a pretty good deal."
You could plumb the depths of Wayne's M#ld, but you'll never fathom his powers of reason. He shot almost fifty rolls of film in the next three weeks. After a while he became wise and never left his camera sitting around by itself At first he wondered why he only took five pictures, set the camera down to do something or other, and when he returned the roll was finished. Only when he developed the film after going home to Austin, Texas, did he find twenty shots of his breakfast eggs, twenty shots of his sneakers, twenty shots of a dead fish prone on the dock, etc.
As we left the North Sea and passed through the Straits of Dover into the English Channel, Bill was in seventh heaven. The sea was a pond.
No waves rocked Arvor III. The trip was smooth and delightful.
Jimmy watched in detached amusement as Wayne performed his yoga on the foredeck. Thereafter, the Scots called Wayne Yogi Bear.
The cliffs above Cherbourg came into view and we slipped into the harbor past the breakwater, the old fort, and monstrous oil rigs on their way to the North Sea. Jimmy had radioed ahead for a berth in the yacht basin and we tied up not far from a nice hotel with a gourmet dining room.
During innocent conversation with the dockmaster, we mentioned that we had come to Cherbourg to search for the Confederate raider Alabama. Inquiring as to when we were to launch the search, he was told the next day.
When the time came to make the effort, we never left the dock.
Six uniformed customs agents, red pillbox hats perched on their greasy heads, came aboard first thing in the morning and proceeded to tear the boat apart while asking a multitude of foolish questions. We all bit our tongues, dug our nails into our palms, and cooperated, wondering why we were singled out for such nasty treatment. Was this any way to welcome foreign visitors?
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 God, 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 petition to go to the bathroom is nearly impossible. Subordinates who universally enjoy saying no before passing 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 assaulted 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 Embassy. 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 harassment 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 anticipation 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 hell 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 Embassy 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 embarrassed. 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 snatched, he would allow us to begin the hunt. How could the crew of Arvor III threaten French national security?
During this cockamamie 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 shores 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 wate
r, 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.