The ama sat on the lifeboats and frolicked without much tension, despite the extreme danger of the work.

Sato, the secretary of a chaebol from Tokyo, appeared at the village office with a cheque book, and it was undoubtedly good luck for these girls, because the diplomatic confrontation between the United States and Japan caused the pearl salvage industry, which was mainly for export, to plummet. It's about to be a bad winter, but the God of Wealth has arrived. Sato's daily wage is staggering. Even some women who have been out of the profession for several years are beginning to take the leap.

However, Eisaku Sato has set very high requirements, more than 20 years old, and those who have a history of childbirth do not want. Those who fail to meet the eye test standards cannot ask for it. In the end, 35 people were lucky enough to be selected, and they signed a two-month contract, each of which will be paid 300 yen.

The description of the work in the contract was not clear, and for the time being, they only knew that they were going to find a wreck, and about the ship, the contract was accompanied by a drawing of the shape of the ship. They were told that the ship was disconnected from the middle.

The shape of Kasugamaru was drawn by Makino, who expected that the name of the ship might not be clear when viewed from more than 100 meters to the pitch-black seabed, and the name of the ship was not mentioned for reasons of secrecy, but the characteristics of Kasuga Maru were drawn in great detail, and several sets of cranes on both sides of the ship, as well as the circular satellite dish on the top, were very obvious signs.

Despite the signing of a confidentiality agreement prohibiting the discussion of work, the girls privately argued about who had paid a lot of money to find a shipwreck, and finally they unanimously decided that it was a ship carrying gold or something valuable, and it sank there.

The ama stand on the lifeboats, doing some of the necessary preparations before entering the water, as well as taking a few deep breaths. They can stay in deep water for a few minutes without the aid of anything (sometimes a stone is needed to speed up the dive).

According to the square area demarcated by Makino, 2 boats and 6 ama were assigned to each square kilometer, and the search was carried out for several hours when the sun was close to direct at noon. The location of the wreck that he could determine was about 15 x 15 kilometers, and according to calculations, it would take a month to cover all these areas.

The hydrological data in the Dragon Delta area is very pale, but there have been many records of shipwrecks, which will inevitably make it more difficult to identify, but Makino is prepared to search hastily first, and then narrow down the area by excluding some areas.

Like all children growing up on the seashore, the ama had good eyesight, and they waved to their companions on the boat in the distance and jumped down.

They use a 90° vertical approach, sinking rapidly downward, and rarely use their feet to draw water to avoid unnecessary oxygen consumption. Of course, because oxygen cylinders are not used, the possibility of various decompression sickness is also reduced.

Eisaku Sato sat on the 900-ton sentry boat and watched the girls get to work.

The Sentinel was converted from an old Fir-class destroyer and originally belonged to the Naval Reserve. The ship's naval personnel were very unimpressed with the new mission, because the original planned salvage site was 250 kilometers to the north (they also did not know that Izumo was sinking), and suddenly changed the area at sea. The only thing that made them stop complaining was that there were suddenly a lot of young women on board who were very little dressed, which was unthinkable in a well-disciplined navy.

After a week of searching for nothing, a ama disappeared on the 7th day. It could have been swallowed by a shark, or it could have been some other accident.

In general, very few were found, only a few wooden sailing boats and small iron-hulled fishing boats of apparently wrong tonnage, which could be ruled out almost immediately.

Sato, who had received an important mission, finally couldn't sit still, he was worried that he would not be able to save the Konoe regime in time if he continued to search aimlessly, and the radio station on the broken ship could not accept ordinary broadcasts, so he didn't know anything about what was going on in the outside world, and he didn't know how the diving tank at the Sakurajima shipyard was being processed.

By the tenth day, the area of the search area was exactly half of the plan. If statistically, if your method is feasible and your luck is okay, you should find it before this boundary. He inevitably felt a little desperate and suspicious, feeling that it might be futile to look any further. He asked some ama what it felt to look down when they reached the deepest point, and the answer was: it was pitch black.

The limits of the human body dictate that these girls can only dive for a maximum of 50 to 60 meters, and they are still far from sinking, so they may not be able to see a ship lying on the bottom of the sea. Although the navy came out of the ship for this operation, the cost of recruiting ama was all paid by the Sato family, and it was also a lot of expenses.

He couldn't help but want to send a telegram to his brother in Tokyo, hoping to end the search earlier, maybe when the pressurized chamber was built, he could send naval divers directly to the bottom of the sea, so that there would be a better chance. After much hesitation, he prepared to send a telegram after noon.

At noon that day, the ama Maejima Tomoko, as usual, put on diving goggles and carried a stone to the side of the boat. She looked at the calm sea, took a deep breath, and slid into the water.

The trick to diving in the water for long periods of time is not to think about anything, so she didn't expect to find anything at all. Just with her eyes closed, straight down, without any equipment to indicate the depth of the water, her eardrum is the best bathymetry.

Tomoko's brain remained blank and plunged headlong into the bottomless abyss, and for every ten meters of descent, the water pressure would exert an extra 1 atmosphere of pressure on her body, which made her feel a tingle.

She felt the cold and pain all around her, so she threw away the stone and opened her eyes. The 6-meter shark was swimming around her, and she was unmoved, a curious hammerhead shark that doesn't usually attack humans. If you move, it might come and try to take a bite.

In the chaos below, there seemed to be something. It's like a ship.

She knew that she didn't have much time left for observation, and she had to reserve at least 50 seconds to float, which was almost a breath-holding time for ordinary people.

It was a strange ship, and it looked bigger than the Imperial warships that sailed around the seashore and showed off their might. It can be seen that the sinking time is not long; Three days earlier, she had just found an iron-hulled fishing boat that had sunk at 60 meters of the seabed, covered in coral and shells, but there was nothing like that on board, not even rust.

As described in the contract, it is disconnected from the middle, and a clear gap can be seen. The boat lay diagonally on a hillside beside a bottomless ravine. There were several sets of lifters on the front class of the ship with strange round objects on the mast. Observing too closely, it took her more than ten seconds, and she even saw the name of the ship clearly.

The light from the sea had dimmed, and perhaps there was a dark cloud in the sky obscuring the sun, and she realized that she had to go up immediately.

Even though she was accustomed to being at the bottom of the sea and avoiding too much movement of her mind, when she confirmed that the wreck was the ship described on the drawings, she remembered the bonus number written on the contract, which exacerbated the oxygen consumption and made her feel depressed in advance. She swung her legs at a constant speed to increase the speed of her ascent, but it might be too late. Her thinness gives her an edge when diving, but her ascent is slower, and they usually only work at depths of no more than 20 metres. Expeditions of this depth are always dangerous.

Tomoko looked at the sea that was getting brighter and brighter, but the feeling of suffocation was stronger than a moment, and she could clearly feel that she would be suffocated to death in the next second, and the urge to breathe was always testing her nerves. She subconsciously intensified the frequency of her legs swinging and made a last-ditch effort.

The ama rushed out of the sea and began to gasp for breath, like a fish in a dry pond with its head tilted. Her companions in the boat stared blankly at her, she was a full minute later than the usual time to enter the water, and everyone thought that she had met some misfortune and would never come up again.

"I found ...... I found ......"

Sato was drafting a telegram in the telegraph room of the sentinel ship, and he knew that once this telegram was sent, he was destined to be scolded by his own brother, but he was ready to let go, and he had to tell Kishi Nobusuke that Makino's method would not work, that the ama could not see through the water more than a hundred meters deep, and that someone had already died because of this stupid idea, which meant that the original budget would be greatly overspent due to a compensation. If it continues, perhaps more girls will die.

He pondered the wording, scribbled and revised the telegram several times, and was about to hand it over to the sender, when he heard someone shouting outside, so he went out to look. In the distance, a signal flare was falling from the sky, which was a sign that the wreck had been found.

"Isn't it going to be some shipwreck from the Edo period?"

He began to be suspicious, after all, there had been a few oolongs before. But first, he shoved the draft telegram into his pocket.

According to Makino's plan, the small boat that found the suspicious target did not approach the big ship to avoid deviating from its position, but waited for the big ship to approach.

Tomoko climbed up the rope ladder to the dilapidated old destroyer, and Eisaku Sato had been waiting at the bow for a long time.

"You found it?"

"yes, I think I found it."

"It can't be another Dutch shipwreck from the Edo period, right?"

"No, I'm sure it's the one pictured, the ship is very new, disconnected from the middle, and it has the word Kasugamaru written on its side."

Sato never revealed the three words Kasugamaru to the ama, mainly for the sake of secrecy, so when Tomoko said these three words, he knew he had found it.

Sato immediately sent a telegram to Tokyo, and at the same time, using radio lateral equipment, determined the approximate location, which, of course, was not enough.

The big ship dropped a 200-kilogram iron ball into the sea where the Kasuga Maru was found. A 250-metre-long chain is attached to the ball, measuring three-quarters of an inch in diameter and 2 cm pitch, and the weight of this large bundle of chains is 450 kilograms (excluding buoyancy). It has an iron ball at one end and a huge hollow pontoon at the other, which can provide 600 kg of buoyancy.

In the short term, the pontoons floating on the surface of the sea will be used as a marker to determine the location, so that the next time you can find the position accurately and quickly. The women on the ship began to celebrate, and according to the contract, they would find it in advance, and they would also get the rest of their wages, and Sato was even more ambitious, and he couldn't wait to go down and fish for something bigger than Asano's dentures to prove that Makino and the others were right.