Fire Ice nf-3

by Clive Cussler

  "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.

  Tucking the laptop under his arm, Murphy led the way to the conference room, where he set the laptop down on a table and connected it to a large-screen monitor. The computer's SeaSone software began to generate high-resolution sonar images in slow motion onto the screen, and the pictures of the seafloor as recorded by the UUV flowed down from the top of the monitor like twin waterfalls. Latitude, longitude and position were displayed to the right of the screen. Murphy adjusted the screen's color control to a yellow-brown that was easy on the eyes.

  The seafloor was largely unmarked. Occasionally, a boulder showed up or dark and light patches indicated differences in sediment. Halfway through its fourth track, the sonar caught two straight lines joined at an angle. All eyes were focused on the monitor as the vehicle finished the track, turned and came back. Murphy froze the picture.

  "Bingo!" he said. The unmistakable image of a ship stood out in sharp relief. With a click of the computer mouse, Murphy zoomed in the picture. The darks and lights became doors, hatches and portholes. The computer compiled the ship's measurements. "She's two hundred fifty feet long," Murphy said.

  Austin pointed to a shadow on the hull. "Can you zoom in on that section?"

  Murphy obliged with a click of the mouse, and the section Austin had noticed appeared as a small box to one side of the screen. The scientist played around with the resolution until the hole in the side of the hull near the waterline was clearly visible.

  He ran off a full-color copy of the survey area, showing the target hits, and sprea
d it out on a table. "She's at four hundred fifty feet," he said. "Here's where the three-hundred-foot bottom begins to fall away into a canyon. The ship is on the slope, just past the lip of the cut. We're lucky. A few hundred feet farther and the wreck would have been lost forever from metal deterioration."

  "Good job, Murphy," Captain Atwood said. Turning to the others, he said, "I've got a crew ready to launch an ROV from the moon pool." A robotic vehicle. They all moved to a small room that contained the control consoles for vehicles operating out of the moon pool. Gesturing toward a computer console, the captain said to Gunn, "Would you care to handle the controls, Commander?"

  Gunn's academic demeanor cloaked a personality that enjoyed action, and he had been charming in his role as a by-stander since boarding the ship. He was an experienced hand at running an ROV and needed no prodding. "I'd like that very much. Thank you, Captain."

  "Whenever you're ready."

  Gunn sat behind the control console and familiarized himself with the instruments and the feel of the joystick that controlled the ROV. Then he grinned and rubbed his hands together. "Drop 'er in."

  The captain unclipped a small radio from his belt and gave a command. A moment later, the screen flickered to life and projected a view of the cavernous moon pool through the video camera in the nose of the ROV. The camera seemed to flood as the ROV was lowered into the pool. A diver wearing a wet suit came into view as he uncoupled the line attached to the lifting crane. Then he was gone, replaced by a cloud of bubbles and the deepening blue of the sea, as the ROV sank slowly beneath the open bottom of the ship.

  A thousand-foot Kevlar-jacketed tether connected the Benthos Stingray ROV to the ship. The tether transmitted Gunn's commands to the operating system and relayed the video picture back to the screen. The Argo carried larger and more powerful ROVs, but after hearing the NR-1 story, the captain had thought they would need a smaller vehicle that could be maneuvered into tight spaces. The vehicle was the size and shape of a large suitcase. Although the ROV was relatively small, it carried video and digital cameras and a manipulator arm.

  Moving the joystick with a skilled hand, Gunn angled the ROV into a long dive. The vehicle used the navigational net established for the UUV to find its way directly to the target. Color faded from the water, as each descending fathom took the ROV farther from the dappled surface light. Gunn switched on the twin 150-watt quartz halogen lights, but even their powerful beams were swallowed by the thickening gloom.

  The ROV smoothly descended to three hundred feet, then leveled out a few yards above the ocean floor. The vehicle bucked a slight bottom current that kept its speed under a knot as it moved forward above the black mud. Then the bottom dropped away and the ROV soared over the lip of the undersea canyon so suddenly that everyone in the room felt a slight wave of queasiness. Gunn nosed the ROV downward, keeping the vehicle parallel to the sharp slope.

  The ROV's side-scan sonar painted the target on a separate monitor until it was close enough for visual inspection. Gunn goosed the vertical thrusters, and the vehicle rose slowly above the vessel.

  The ship lay at an angle on the sloping side of the canyon, the bottom section of hull embedded in mud. The ROV descended several yards and moved alongside the hulk at main-deck level, past a row of portholes, including some that were still open. Barnacles covered most of the ship and heightened its spectral aspect. Reddish patches of antifouling paint peeked out here and there. The wooden wheelhouse had disintegrated and the decks had rotted away. The lifeboat davits were empty, and wire shrouds hung with seaweed. A pile of rusty debris was all that remained of the collapsed funnel.

  The ship was a metal cadaver, useless except for the schools of fish that nosed through passageways where humans had once walked. To Austin, who watched the screen with an expression of fascination on his bronzed features, this sad and lifeless hunk of rusty metal was a living thing. Although there were no hands to close the hatches forced open by the pressure of escaping air, Austin could almost hear the creak of the booms and the throbbing engine as the ship plowed through the seas. In his mind's eye, he pictured the helmsman standing with feet braced on a wooden grating, hands on the wheel while crewmen went about their business on deck or fought the inevitable boredom of shipboard life.

  Austin asked Gunn to steer the ROV around to the stem. As Ensign Kreisman described it, the hull was covered with growth that hid the ship's markings. Gunn poked the vehicle into several nooks and crannies, hoping to come across a manufacturer's metal plate, but they found nothing.

  Austin turned to Gamay. "What's our resident nautical archaeologist have to say about this old gal?"

  Gamay pinched her chin in thought as she stared at the ghostly images on the glowing screen.

  "My specialty was Greek and Roman wooden ships, and if you asked me to ID a bireme or a trireme I might be of more help. I'll venture a few guesses, though." The camera was moving along the midships section, where the rusty steel plating had buckled and was clear of barnacles. "Those are riveted steel plates. By the 1940s, shipbuilders had switched to welding. The booms indicate that she's probably a cargo ship. She's an old-timer, judging from her lines, maybe built in the late eighteen-hundreds or around the turn of the century."

  Austin asked Gunn to move the ROV around to the damaged side. The ship leaned downhill, and from this angle it looked as if it could come crashing over at any second. Gunn brought the ROV straight in until the hole filled almost the entire screen. The lights probing the ship's innards picked out twisted pipes and steel columns.

  "Damage assessment, Rudi?" Austin said.

  "From the way those edges are curled, I'd say a projectile hit the engine room. Too high for a torpedo. Probably a shell from a big gun."

  "Who would sink a harmless old freighter?" Zavala asked.

  "Maybe someone who thought she wasn't so harmless," Austin said. "Let's check out the cabin section that Ensign Kreisman told us about."

  Gunn tweaked the controls, and the ROV rose abovedecks. It was clear from the grin on his face that Rudi was having a ball. He brought the vehicle around, taking care not to catch the tether in the foremast or booms. The ROV moved past the bridge, then stopped and hovered in front of a dark rectangular opening. Unlike the ragged cavity in the hull, the edges of the hole were relatively even from the cutting torch. Gunn brought the ROV to within a few feet of the opening. The lights picked out the framework of a bunk and the remnants of a metal chair and desk that lay in a tumbled heap.

  "Can we go inside?" Austin asked.

  "I'm getting a side current that could make things tricky, but I'll see what I can do." Gunn maneuvered the vehicle left and right, then when it was directly centered, he put it through the hole as easily as a seamstress threading a needIe. The ROV was capable of turning within its own radius, and Gunn executed a three-hundred-sixty-degree turn. The camera captured slimy gray piles of debris. Gunn probed a corner with the ROV's manipulator, stirring up a powdery cloud of rust. Then the ROV got tangled and wouldn't, move. Gunn waited for the dust to settle and wriggled the ROV until it broke free of the overhead wire that had snagged a projection of its protective shielding.

  "What do you think?" Gunn said, turning to Austin.

  "I think anything of value has been removed. We'll have to piece together the story from the ship itself, not what's in it." He pointed to a wall shelf. "What's that?"

  Austin's sharp eye had caught a dark, squarish object. Gunn used the manipulator to clear away a pile of amorphous grayish-brown trash and made several fruitless attempts to grab the object. It kept slipping away like a prize in a penny-arcade game. Gunn set his jaw in determination and pushed the object into a corner where he could get a firm grasp on it, then he backed the ROV out of the cabin and moved the manipulator to put the prize directly in front of the lights. The claw clutched a small, flat box.

  "I'm bringing her up," he said. He reversed the ROV's direction and sent the vehicle scuttling back to the Argo. Minutes later, the light
s of the moon pool appeared on the screen. The captain ordered the ROV's handlers to stabilize the artifact in seawater and send it to the vehicle control room. Soon a technician arrived, carrying a white plastic bucket. Gamay, whose background in nautical archaeology made her the most experienced conservator on board, asked for a soft brush. She removed the box from the bucket and gently placed it on the floor. Then, with soft strokes, she brushed a thumbnail patch of the black patina to reveal the gleam of metal.

  "It's made of silver," she said, and continued to work until fifty percent of the top was cleaned. The metal was embossed with a double-headed eagle. Gamay examined the clasp. "I might be able to get this open, but I don't dare because I could destroy what's inside when it hits air. It may need intense conservation." She glanced at the captain.

  "The Argo is primarily set up for biological and geological survey," Atwood said. "There's another NUMA ship called the Sea Hunter doing archaeological work not far from here. They might be able to help."

  "I'm sure they can. I did some research on the Sea Hunter a couple of years ago," Austin said. "She's the sister ship of the Argo, isn't she?"

  "That's right. The two vessels are almost identical."

  "We should get this box there soon," Gamay said. "I'll stabilize it in seawater as best I can." She glanced with longing at the box. "Damn! Now I'm really curious about the contents."

  "How about running it through the X-ray machine in the infirmary?" Austin suggested. "That might partially satisfy your curiosity."

  Gamay carefully replaced the box in the bucket, and the technician carried it off. "You're brilliant," she said.

  "You may not think so after you hear my next idea," Austin replied. He outlined his plan.

  "Worth a try," Atwood said, and clicked on his hand radio. Before long the screen flickered into life and the moon pool appeared again. The ROV was being put back into the water. The dive was a repeat of the first, with the diver, bubbling foam and dark water.