"That's right. That gorge he talked about is probably an extended riverbed. The continental shelf is smooth and gradually dips seaward, pretty much like the ensign's description. The decay from all those organisms has formed pockets of methane gas. Presumably, a diver could be insulated from that type of thing, but there might still be some danger in diving in a poisonous environment."
Gunn had been absorbing the discussion. He rose from his seat and borrowed the laser pointer.
"Let's see what we've got. The NR-1 was hijacked here." He ran the red dot from the Aegean through the Bosporus. "This is where they heard sounds of ship traffic." He moved the pointer along the edge of the continental shelf. "Here's our mystery ship, according to the GPS."
Using his cursor, Paul drew an X at the location Gunn indicated.
"Someone went to a great deal of trouble to salvage that ship," Austin said. "Maybe it holds the key to unraveling this whole mess."
Gunn turned to the captain. "How soon can we haul anchor and get moving?"
Atwood had kept silent throughout the ensign's presentation and the NUMA team's discussion. He smiled and said, "You people have been so engrossed in the Black Sea, you didn't notice me calling the bridge. We're on our way. Should be on-site in the morning."
The faint vibration of the engines came through the deck under their feet. Gunn got up. "I'm going to hit the sack. Tomorrow could be a long day." Austin got directions to his cabin, then told Joe that he'd catch up with him later. When Austin was alone, he sat at the table and stared at the lines and squiggles of the Black Sea map projected on the screen as if they were letters of an unknown language whose secret could be unlocked by a Rosetta Stone. His eye fastened on the X that marked the position of the mystery ship.
He sorted through the events that had brought him to this place on a NUMA vessel in pursuit of what? He felt like someone making his way through a snake pit, trying to pick out the nonpoisonous snakes from the vipers. He snapped off the lights and left the conference room. As he made his way to his cabin, he had a depressing thought. Maybe they were all poisonous.
-20- THE GRAY DAWN light streaming through the cabin porthole woke Austin up. He glanced over at Zavala, who was in the next bunk, no doubt lost in a dreamworld of red Corvettes and beautiful blond statisticians. He envied his partner's ability to drop off to sleep, snooze soundly through the night and wake up fresh and ready for action. Austin's own slumber had been fitful, disturbed by churning thoughts, as if his brain were searching for answers hidden in the maze of his subconscious.
Levering himself out of bed, Austin went over to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. He dressed quickly, pulling on jeans, a heavy sweatshirt and a windbreaker, and stepped out of the cabin. A cool morning breeze from off the water smacked him in the face and blew away the lingering shreds of sleep. The sun's eyebrow was starting to peek over the eastern horizon, its soft rays bathing the clouds in a reddish gold light.
With the Argo steaming at fifteen knots, Austin hung over the railing and stared out at the opaque surface of the sea, listening to the soothing hiss of the waves against the hull. Seabirds skimmed the foam like windblown confetti. It was hard to believe that a few hundred feet below was the most lifeless place on the planet. The Black Sea was a big puddle of dead water, but Austin knew that an abyss with far more reason to be feared was the remorseless evil that lurked in the depths of the human mind. Austin shivered, not entirely from the cold, and headed back into the ship.
As he stepped through the door into the warmth of the mess hall, the mouth-watering bouquet of coffee, fried eggs and bacon provided an antidote for his morbid mood, and his spirits improved. Except for the blue sea visible through the windows, the ship's dining area could have been a smaII-town breakfast hangout where the locals have coffee mugs with their names on them. Sleepy-eyed crew members coming off the night watch occupied a few tables.
Austin grabbed a coffee to go. On his way to the bridge, he encountered the Trouts, who had come down for break- fast earlier and taken a tour of the ship. Together they climbed up to the wheelhouse, where the wraparound windows gave a wide view of the bow and deck.
Rudi Gunn, an early riser going back to his navy days, stood near a bank of instruments and monitors, talking to Captain Atwood. He smiled broadly when he saw his colleagues. "Good morning, everyone. I was about to go looking for you. The captain was going over his plans for the wreck site."
"Looking forward to hearing them," Austin said. "How soon will we be on-site?"
Atwood pointed to a circular gray screen with white concentric circles etched into the glass. Specks of gray indicated the GPS readings from an antenna that picked up information from the network of twenty-four satellites orbiting the earth at a height of eleven thousand miles. A digital readout next to the screen displayed current latitude and longitude. The system could place the ship within thirty to forty-five feet of its target.
"We should be on-site in about fifteen minutes if the navigational coordinates from the sub sailor's Dick Tracy wrist-watch are on the mark."
"You weren't joking when you said we'd be there first thing this morning," Austin said.
"The Argo may look like a workhorse, but she's got racing genes in her blood."
"What are your plans for the initial survey?"
"We'll map out the general area with side-scan sonar using our new UUV, then take a closer look. The crew is down on the deck getting things ready." The Unmanned Untethered Vehicle, or UUV, was one of the hottest developments in undersea exploration.
Paul asked to see a chart. The captain pushed aside a blue curtain that divided the wheelhouse from the smaller chart room. A map of the Black Sea was spread out on the table. "We're here," Atwood said, putting his finger on a spot off the western shore of the Black Sea.
Trout's tall form bent over the chart. "We're over the edge of a shallow underwater shelf that wraps around the shoreline past Romania and the Danube delta, the Bosporus and around to Crimea in the north." He turned to his wife. "Gamay can fill us in on the biological and archaeological angles."
Gamay took over. "The shelf Paul talked about is an incredibly productive fishery. It's home to salmon, beluga sturgeon, turbot. You'll find dolphins here and bonito, although the stocks are down. Some say the Turks have over- fished the sea, but they say it's European Union pollution coming from the Danube. What's not in dispute is the fact that below a fluctuating depth of around four hundred fifty feet, there is no life. Ninety percent of the sea is sterile. With the fish population down, huge red tides and jellyfish infestations have come in. People are concerned enough to actually start doing something."
"That's how NUMA came to be involved," Captain Atwood said. "We were collecting information for a joint Russian-Turkish project."
"I was wondering why you didn't have representatives from either country aboard," Paul said.
"On earlier trips the government observers spent most of their time telling the ships where they couldn't conduct surveys. Admiral Sandecker insisted on carte blanche when NUMA was asked to lend a hand. Which meant no observers on this preliminary survey. Between his prestige and their desperation, he was able to hold his own."
"These countries have a good reason to be desperate," Gamay said. "The pollution is creating the conditions for a 'turnover.' If the dead water rises to the top, everything in the sea and around the rim could be wiped out."
"There's nothing like the threat of extinction to get people off their butts," Gunn remarked.
"That would do it for me," Austin said. Trout drew his finger along the map. "The bottom here will be covered with black mud over clay that marks the change of the ancient lake to a sea. When you get beyond the edge of the shelf, we find deep submarine canyons carved into the steep shelf slope. Ten thousand years ago, the sea level was a thousand feet lower than it is now. The flood theory suggests that sixty thousand square miles were inundated by the waters of the Mediterranean."
"Which made anyone with a boat very popular," Austin said.
Gamay said, "This deals directly with our situation. As Paul explained last night, ship worms can't survive in the deep water, so wooden wrecks will be perfectly preserved for thousands of years. And steel ships will disintegrate."
A crewman called the captain into the wheelhouse. Atwood excused himself. A minute later, he returned, his face wreathed in a wide grin.
"We're on target. Our mystery ship should be right below our radio antenna."
Gunn said, "Remind me to send a bouquet of flowers to the young woman who gave her sailor boy a GPS watch."
Austin looked out at the sea stretching to the horizon and thought of the wasted time that could have been spent in a fruitless search for the ship. "I've got a better idea," Austin said. "Let's send her a whole greenhouse."
Zavala arrived and they went down to the starboard deck, where sunlight gleamed off the metal skin of a small torpedo that rested in an aluminum rack. The tall man disconnecting a computer modem attached to the device was Mark Murphy, the Argo's expert in remote-operated undersea vehicles.
Murphy was a nonconformist who scorned the NUMA work coveralls for his own uniform: faded jean cutoffs, chamois shirt worn over a T-shirt, scuffed work boots and a short-billed baseball cap. Both his cap and T-shirt had the word Argonaut printed on them. He was in his early fifties, and a thick salt-and-pepper beard covered his chin, but his ruddy sunburned face glowed with boyish enthusiasm.
He saw Zavala gazing at the torpedo and said, "Be my guest."
"Thanks." Zavala ran his fingertips lightly over the wide stripes of green, yellow and black painted on the metal skin. "Sexy," he said with a low whistle. "Very sexy."
"You'll have to excuse my friend," Austin said. "He hasn't had shore leave for at least twenty-four hours."
"I understand perfectly," Murphy replied. "This baby is hot. Wait'll you see the way she performs."
Austin was amused but not surprised to hear the two men fawn over the device. Zavala was a brilliant marine engineer who had designed or directed construction of many underwater vehicles. Murphy was the Argo's expert in their use. To them, the clean lines of the compact object cradled in its aluminum rack were as sensual as the curves of the female body.
Austin could understand their passion. The UUV was only 62 inches long, 7.5 inches in diameter and weighed a mere eighty pounds. But the bantam-sized device represented the cutting edge of undersea exploration, a vehicle that could operate almost independently of its shipboard controllers. This model was developed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which had dubbed it SAHRV, for Semi-Autonomous Hydrographic Reconnaissance Vehicle.
"We're about ready to launch," Murphy said. "We've dropped two separate transducers over the side, one at each comer of the survey area. That sets up the navigational net. The vehicle talks constantly with the transducers that tell it where it is at all times. The data she picks up will be recorded on a hard drive and downloaded later."
"Why not telemeter the information directly back to the ship?" Austin asked.
"We could, but the data would take too long to make it through the water. I've told the vehicle to survey ten one-hundred-foot lanes at high resolution for a start. She'll run at five point five knots around ninety feet off the bottom. The collision avoidance sonar will make sure she goes over or around any big obstacles."
Murphy reached over and pressed a magnetic switch on the side of the vehicle. The battery-powered stainless steel propeller whirred softly. With the help of another crewman, Murphy gently lowered the rack into the water.
The Argo bristled with an amazing array of winches and cranes to handle the variety of electronic eyes and ears and hands, manned and unmanned submersibles the scientists on board dropped into the ocean. One crane, so powerful it could lift a house, also had weak links that would deliberately break under undue stress - that was to prevent them from sinking in case the ship hooked onto an undersea mountain.
Most of the heavy equipment was lowered through the moon pool, a center section of the Argo's hull that opened to the sea through huge sliding doors. With the UUV, however, it was only a matter of lowering it over the side. The propeller grabbed water and the vehicle took off like a fish released from a hook. It headed away from the ship and arced into a preprograrnmed thirty-foot circle when it hit open sea.
"She'll go around four times to calibrate the compass," Murphy explained. "The vehicle is talking to the navigational net now, getting its bearings through triangulation." As they watched, the vehicle made a small circle and disappeared below the surface. "She's heading off to do her first lane."
"What do we do now?" Austin said.
Murphy gave them his big-toothed grin. "We go have some coffee and doughnuts."
-21- THE UNDERSEA VEHICLE moved back and forth above the ocean floor in a lawn-mowing pattern, its path on the ocean floor displayed on the computer screen. When its task was finished, the UUV homed in on a third transducer like a puppy who'd heard the word bone. The vehicle nosed up to the side of the ship, where it was snagged in a special pickup rack and lifted back on deck. Murphy hooked up a modem and transferred all the data from the dripping vehicle to his laptop computer. Then he disconnected the computer.
