“A shipwreck, huh?”

Annja explained about how the hurricane had pulled the CSS Mariettaoff the riverbank and sent it several miles downstream. She told him they had a general sense of where it might have ended up and that they needed him to run several passes up and down the river towing a magnetometer to help them pinpoint the actual location. At that point Annja and Garin would dive to the wreck and do what they could to confirm its identity.

“Sounds easy enough,” Mitchell said. “Rentals in twenty-four-hour increments, but you’ll have to pay the fuel charge, as well.”

They dickered for a bit on price, but finally came to an agreement both parties could live with. Jimmy gave them the address of the wharf where his boat was docked and Annja relayed that to Doug, who informed them that the equipment could be delivered later that afternoon.

“About that price,” Garin said to Annja as they made their way back to the car. “Just so you know, it’s all coming off the top when we recover the treasure, anyway.”

Ifwe recover the treasure, Annja thought. She bit her tongue to keep from saying it aloud even as she reminded herself to have some confidence.

It’s out there; you just have to get to it first, she told herself.

She had every intention of doing just that.

Unable to do anything more until the equipment arrived, the two of them decided to stay out of sight for the rest of the afternoon. The fact that the Order had not only tracked them to Washington but had also managed to get hold of Annja’s cell phone number showed they had plenty of resources at their disposal, so Annja didn’t want to take a chance of being exposed any more than necessary. They found a new hotel near the wharf where they would be meeting Mitchell in the morning and settled in, having both lunch and dinner delivered to them so they wouldn’t have to go out.

Annja used the time to learn everything she could about the CSS Marietta,researching it on the internet and even speaking to one of the curators at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. By the time she finished several hours later, she thought she was reasonably well prepared for the difficult task ahead of them.

If they could find the boat, and if it was still intact, Annja was confident that she could locate what she was looking for.

That’s a lot of ifs…

Early that evening she took another call from Doug.

“I received word that the equipment has been delivered as promised,” he told her. “I’m going to be sending Richie down to meet you in the morning, to get all this on film for the episode.”

“No!” Annja said sharply. There was no way she was going to put someone else in danger. “There’s limited room on the boat, so I’ll just use my handheld and capture the footage myself. We’ll have enough to use. I promise.”

Doug was a bit hesitant, but she finally convinced him that it was a bad idea and he reluctantly let it go.

“Just be sure that you get some decent footage. I don’t know how we’re going to use it in a show about reanimated Civil War soldiers in the Paris catacombs, but better safe than sorry.”

“For the last time, Doug, it is not a show about reanimated—”

“Gotta go, Annja. Talk to you tomorrow.”

And, with that, the son of a gun hung up.

25

The next day dawned cool and clear. Annja and Garin were up with the sunrise and waiting on the wharf when Jimmy Mitchell pulled up in a dilapidated Ford pickup truck.

He greeted them with enthusiasm and then led the way to the dockmaster’s office where the equipment was delivered the night before. It took about two hours to sort through the boxes, unpack the equipment and confirm that it was all in good working order. One of the scuba tanks turned out to have a bad regulator so Annja switched that out for one of the spares she’d ordered. When they were finished, they loaded it all on a pair of dollies and moved it down to the wharf so they could load it onto the boat.

Their first look at the Kelly Maywasn’t encouraging.

She was a fiberglass fishing trawler with a small wheelhouse set two-thirds of the way back from the bow. A boom mast covered in flaking paint rose up behind the wheelhouse. Normally used to drag fishing nets, it would be used on this voyage to drag the magnetometer. The hull was faded, the name on the side of the boat barely legible, but Jimmy Mitchell stood there gazing at her proudly.

“Forty-two feet in length and fourteen feet abreast, with a six-foot draft. She’ll do twelve knots while carrying fifteen tons of cargo,” he said with a smile.

Yeah, but does it float? Annja felt like asking.

Garin seemed to have the same hesitation she had.

When Mitchell fired up the engines a few minutes later to warm them for the day’s activity, much of Annja and Garin’s anxiety was relieved. She might not look like much, but even a nongearhead like Annja could tell that engines were masterfully maintained. They purred with a throaty hum that spoke of power just waiting to be used.

That was good, as she intended to make use of every bit of it.

It took them another hour to load all the equipment and finish filling the tanks with fuel, but by nine that morning they were headed out onto the river to start their search.

Annja gathered her two companions together over the chart table in the wheelhouse and went through the plan she’d put together to find what they were looking for. Satisfied they all knew their assignments after twenty minutes of discussion, they sat back to enjoy the short trip downstream to the target area.

After they had arrived in the general location where the university team had recorded their earlier finding, it was time to get the search under way in earnest.

The magnetometer looked like a miniature rocket, with a blunt nose, long tube-shaped body and a set of fins in the rear. It was four feet long and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve pounds. After assembling it, Garin launched the magnetometer over the side while Annja played out the line until it was being towed roughly fifty feet behind the boat at a depth of about one hundred and fifty feet. The device was designed to pick up variations in the earth’s natural magnetic field. Large quantities of iron, like that used in the construction of the CSS Marietta,would alter that field and show up on the device’s screen. The accompanying GPS would allow them to note the exact coordinates and reveal the width and length of the debris field, as well.

As they began the long, slow process of trawling up and down the river, searching for an anomaly with the magnetometer, Jimmy spoke up.

“So tell me about this boat we’re looking for.”

Annja glanced up at him and then back down to the dials on the magnetometer’s control box. “The CSS Marietta.She’s an old Confederate ironclad built back in 1862.”

“Cool,” Mitchell said, and then, completely unselfconsciously, asked in the same breath, “What’s an ironclad?”

Annja laughed good-naturedly. “Basically, it’s a steam-propelled wooden warship that’s fitted with iron plates for protection.”

Mitchell thought about that for a minute. “So they took a steamboat and stuck it in a suit of armor?”

It wasn’t exactly the way Annja would have explained it, but it worked just the same. “Yes,” she told him, “that’s pretty much it.”

She went on. “There were several different types built during the Civil War, but the most common was the casemate ironclad. Think of it as an armored box, with slanting sides, built to protect the guns and crew from enemy shot. They often had a reinforced bow that was used to ram enemy vessels, as well. The Marietta,the ship we’re looking for, was a casemate ironclad.”