I figured this was the perfect time to steal off into the night and head to the nearest saloon for a tequila on the rocks.

For the next safari through the. tick-infested Harrisburg bush country, I called on the services of Connie Young, the noted psychic from Enid, Oklahoma. Along with Craig Dirgo, on his first expedition with NUMA, we drove through Harrisburg while Connie worked her magic. She sensed a pair of hot spots between the Southern Pacific railroad tracks and Bray’s Bayou. We then continued to Galveston, where Wayne Gronquist and a group of volunteers were searching for the Republic of Texas warship Invincible. Connie thought there was a possibility that Invincible might be under the sand on the beach, since the shoreline had worked out nearly half a mile after the long rock jetties were built around the turn of the century. A Texas rancher, who had volunteered his services, drove up and down the beach in his SUV while I dragged a gradiometer out the rear end. Connie, Craig, and a Boy Scout came along for the ride.

We were passing time waiting for a target to make itself known on the recorders, when I turned to Connie and said, “Time sure flies when you’re having fun.”

The words were barely out of my mouth when the rancher drove over a ditch in the beach without slowing. Craig and I both tumbled from where we were sitting on the tailgate. He rolled on the sand and back to his feet. I went straight up into the air and down onto my head. The blow crushed two of the discs in my spine. Anguish and torment can’t describe the pain. I could only gasp, unable to utter a word. Everyone stood around in a daze, thinking I had broken my back, until Craig walked over, picking sand from his ear, then looked down at me on the ground.

“You don’t look so good,” he said, tilting his head to allow the sand to run from his ear.

Over time Dirgo has proved to be a master of the obvious.

“Move your leg for me,” he said.

I did, though in much pain. He reached down to help me to my feet.

“I think you’ll live to write another day,” he said, as I slowly rose to my feet, “but we might want to take a side trip to the hospital.”

A trip to the hospital and an X ray told the story. I’ve lost half an inch in height due to age and another inch and a half to a pair of mashed discs. I had compressed from six feet three to six feet one in two seconds and was no longer as tall as Dirk Pitt, the hero in my books. A year and six months would pass before the pain slowly receded.

I think Craig said it best that day after we left the hospital and were driving back to the motel in the rental car. “I thought we killed the goose that laid the golden egg.”

“I’ll make it,” I said through gritted teeth.

Craig steered along the road running down Galveston’s sea-wall. “You know the good thing about motels?”

“What’s that,” I asked.

“Ice machines.”

Craig, who over the years has proven to be a more than an adequate scrounger, continued. “I’m going to get a trash bag and fill it with ice,” he said, “then I’ll take some duct tape and wrap it around your body to hold it in place.”

It worked, but I looked like a hunchback.

Unable to go out on the search boat the following day, I instructed Gronquist to begin running search lanes at the outer edge of the grid and work in while hunting for Invincible with the gradiometer. Not wishing to sit around, I thought I could take my mind off the pain with a side expedition. So Connie, Craig, and I took a little handheld magnetometer and drove the short distance to Harrisburg and looked for the Twin Sisters.

Craig ran the mag over the area while Connie experienced vibes. There was a low reading, perhaps suggesting a buried target. Craig then drove into town and rented a backhoe and operator. I was still in the throes of anguish when Connie, bless her heart, bought me a lawn chair to sit on and relax my aching back during the dig.

As soon as the operator with the backhoe arrived, it began to rain. We sat there under newspapers, teeth clenched, as Craig, crammed into the scoop, went down in the trench every few feet, and swept the mag around the bottom, which was now rapidly filling with water. The mag target petered out as we went deeper.

I paid off the patient backhoe operator, and we drove back to the motel where we stay in Galveston, Gaidos Motor Lodge. No sooner did we walk in, Connie drenched, Craig looking like a snowman built from mud, and me sloped over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, than we find Gronquist and crew packing and almost ready to depart.

I said, “What’s going on? We have another four days scheduled for the project.”

Gronquist snapped his bag shut and began walking out the door. “We overturned the boat in the surf, and the gradiometer was immersed and shorted out in the salt water. So we’re calling it quits and going home.”

I was somewhere between enraged and infuriated. “But you finished the search grid.”

“Nope,” muttered Gronquist. “We were running the first lane when a wave spilled over the side.”

“I told you to begin out where it’s calm before working toward the surf.”

Gronquist merely shrugged. “I though it best to start in close where I thought the ship might be.”

I thought it was a pity it wasn’t Sunday and Gronquist could have stayed in bed.

Craig wiped some mud from under his eye and looked at me. “I might be able to fix the mag,” he said, “but do you mind if I take a shower first?”

Later that night, he repaired the damage with a hair dryer borrowed from the front desk, along with some WD-40, solder, and a soldering gun from the hardware store. By that time the volunteers had already given up, but Connie, Craig, and I managed to spend the remaining days in a fruitless search for the cannon.

So ended the great calamity of 1989.

I should have scratched the Twin Sisters off my list of things to do, but I was swept away in an orgy of obstinacy. We’d be back.

The next few rounds of battle were fought by Craig and me, along with my son Dirk. When Craig was running the NUMA office, he would drive up to my house on Lookout Mountain outside Denver a couple of times a week to report on what was happening, and we’d spend hours talking. One of the topics was the Twin Sisters. He didn’t want to give up and neither did I, so we would occasionally reread the tale and format strategies. Our flights of fancy could become quite elaborate and detailed.

My personal favorite was the time we waited until dark and then set off into the woods near my home with a pedometer. After walking four hundred yards in a random direction, we marked several trees with dabs of spray paint and returned by a different route. We then waited a week and set out to find them. We never did. Not only that, when we later checked the distance once again with the pedometer, we found that the area where we had searched for the marked trees was more like two hundred or two hundred and fifty yards from my house. That showed that, without accurate aids, estimating distances in a forest at night is at best a hit-or-miss proposition.

Next we tried carrying a bag of Portland cement, which weighs a lot less than a heavy iron cannon, a distance into the woods. I think I can now tell you that if they were carrying the guns, they didn’t go four hundred yards. More like a hundred and forty yards.

In 1989 and 1994, Craig stopped in Harrisburg for a day here and a day there while going to or returning from other searches, but to no avail. In 1995, when NUMA returned to search for the Texas Navy ship Invincible, Craig and I had a go at it again. I still laugh about this. My son Dirk was due to arrive from Phoenix to lend a hand that afternoon, and since Harrisburg is close to Hobby Airport, where Dirk was arriving, Craig and I figured we could search almost right up until his plane was due to arrive and then rush over and pick him up.