Treasure

  He was a smooth article who moved easily among the rich and powerful, but preferred the company of men and women who drank their liquor straight up and liked to get their hands dirty.

  A product of the Air Force Academy, he was listed on active status with the rank of Major, although he had been on loan to the National Underwater & Marine Agency (NUMA) for nearly six years as their Special Projects Director, Along with Al Giordino, his closest friend since childhood, he had lived and adventured in every sea, on the surface and in the depths, encountering in half a decade more wild experiences than most men would see in ten lifetimes. He had found the vanished Manhattan Limited express train after swimming through an underground cavern in New York, salvaged a few passengers before being sent to the bottom of the Saint Lawrence River with a thousand souls. He had hunted down the lost nuclear submarine Starbuck in the middle of the Pacific and tracked the ghost ship Cyclops to her grave under the Caribbean. And he raised the Titanic.

  He was, Giordino often mused, a man driven to rediscover the past, born eighty years too late.

  "You might want to see this," Giordino said suddenly from the other side of the room.

  Pitt turned from a color video monitor that displayed a view of the seascape one hundred meters beneath the hull of the icebreaker survey ship Polar Explorer. She was a sturdy new vessel especially built for sailing through ice-covered waters. The massive boxlike superstructure towering above the hull resembled a five-story office building, and her great bow, pushed by 80,000-horsepower engines, could pound a path through ice up to one-and-a-half meters thick.

  Pitt placed one foot against a counter, flexed his knee and pushed. The motion was honed through weeks of practice and with the gentle roll of the ship for momentum. He twisted 180 degrees in his swivel chair as its castors carried him some meters across the slanting deck of the electronics compartment.

  "Looks like a crater coming up."

  Al Giordino sat at a console studying an image on the Klein sidescan sonar recorder. Short, standing a little over 162 centimeters in stockinged size-eleven feet, broadened with beefy shoulders in the shape of a wedge, he looked as if he were assembled out of spare bulldozer parts. His hair was dark and curly, an inheritance from Italian ancestry, and if he had worn a bandanna and an earring he could have moonlighted as an organ-grinder. Dry-humored, steadfast and reliable as the tides, Giordino was Pitts insurance policy against Murphy's Law.

  His concentration never flickered while Pitt, feet extended as bumpers, came to an abrupt stop against the console beside him.

  Pitt watched the computer-enhanced sonograph as the ridge of a crater slowly rose to a crest and then made a steep descent into the interior void.

  "She's dropping fast," said Giordino.

  Pitt glanced at the echo sounder. "Down from 140 to 180 meters. "

  "Hardly any slope to the outer rim."

  "Two hundred and still falling."

  "Weird formation for a volcano," said Giordino. "No sign of lava rock."

  A tall, florid-faced man with thick graying brown hair that struggled to escape from a baseball cap tilted toward the back of his head, opened the door and leaned in the compartment.

  "You night owls in the mood for food or drink?"

  "Peanut-butter sandwich and a cup of black coffee sounds good," Pitt replied without turning. "Leveling out at 220 meters. "

  "A couple of doughnuts with milk," Giordino answered.

  Navy Commander Byron Knight, skipper of the survey vessel, nodded.

  Besides Pitt and Giordino, he was the only man with access to the electronics compartment. It was off limits to the rest of the officers and crew.

  "I'll have your orders rustled up from the galley."

  "You're a wonderful human being, Byron," Pitt said with a sarcastic smile. "I don't care what the rest of the navy says about you."

  "You ever try Peanut butter with arsenic?" Knight threw at him over his shoulder.

  Giordino watched intently as the arc of the formation spread and widened. "Diameter almost two kilometers."

  "Interior is smooth sediment," said Pitt. "No breakup of the floor."

  "Must have been one gigantic volcano."

  "Not a volcano."

  Giordino faced Pitt, a curious look in his eyes. "You have another name for a submerged pockmark?"

  "How about meteor impact?"

  Giordino looked skeptical. "A meteor crater this deep on the sea bottom?"

  "Probably struck thousands, maybe millions of years ago, at a time when the sea level was lower."

  "What led you up that street?"

  "Three clues," Pitt explained. "First, we have a well defined rim without a prominent outer upsiope. Second, the subbottom profiler indicates a bowl-shaped cross section. And third" he paused, pointing at a stylus that was making furious sweeps across a roll of graph paper.

  "The magnetometer is having a spasm. There's enough iron down there to build a fleet of battleships."

  Suddenly Giordino stiffened. "We have a target!"

  "Where?"

  "Two hundred meters to starboard, lying perpendicular on the crater's slope. Pretty vague reading. The object is partly obscured by the geology."

  Pitt snatched the phone and rang the bridge. "We've had a malfunction in the equipment. Continue our heading to the end of the run. If we can make the repair in time, come around and repeat the track."

  "Will do, sir," replied the watch officer.

  "You should have sold snake oil," said Giordino, smiling.

  "No telling the size of Soviet ears."

  "Anything from the video cameras?"

  Pitt glanced at the monitors. "Just out of range. They should pick it up on the next pass."

  The initial sonar image that appeared on the recording paper looked like a brown smudge against the lighter geology of the crater's wall. Then it slipped past the sidescan's viewing window and disappeared into a computer that enhanced the detail. The finished picture came out on a special large high-resolution color video monitor. The smudge had become a well defined shape.

  Using a joystick, Pitt moved a pair of crosshairs to the center of the image and clicked the button to expand the image.

  The computer churned away for a few seconds, and then a new, larger, even more detailed image appeared on the screen. A rectangle automatically appeared around the target and showed the dimensions. At the same time another machine reproduced the color image on a sheet of glossy paper.

  commander Knight came rushing back into the compartment. After days of tedium, cruising back and forth as though mowing a vast lawn, staring for hours on end at the video display and sidescan readings, he was galvanized, anticipation written in every line of his face.

  "I was given your message about a malfunction. You have a target?"

  Neither Pitt nor Giordino answered. They smiled like prospectors who have hit the mother lode. Knight, staring at them, suddenly knew.

  "Good God above!" he blurted. "We've found her, really found her?"

  "Hiding in the seascape," said Pitt, pointing to the monitor while handing Knight the photo. "The perfect image of one Alfa-class Soviet submarine."

  Knight stared, fascinated, at both sonar images. "The Russians probed all around this section of the sea. Incredible they didn't find her."

  "She's easy to miss," said Pitt. "The ice pack was heavier when they conducted their search. They couldn't maintain a straight track.

  Probably skirted the opposite side of the upslope, and their sonar beams only showed a shadow where the sub was lying. Also, the unusually heavy concentration of iron under the crater would have thrown off their magnetic profile."

  "Our intelligence people will dance on the ceiling when they see this."

  "Not if the Reds get wise," said Giordino. "They'll hardly stand idle and watch us repeat our 'Seventy-five snatch of their 'Golf' class sub with the Glomar Explorer."

  "You suggesting they haven't swallowed our story about conducting a geological s
urvey of the seafloor?" Pitt asked with deep sarcasm.

  Giordino gave Pitt a sour look indeed. "Intelligence is a weird business," he said. "The crew on the other side of these bulkheads has no idea of what we're up to, yet Soviet agents in Washington smelled out our mission weeks ago. The only reason they haven't interfered is because our undersea technology is better and they want us to lead the way to their sub."

  "Won't be easy to deceive them," agreed Knight. "Two of their trawlers have been shadowing our every move since we left port."

  "So have their surveillance satellites," added Giordino.

  Pitt said, "All reasons why I asked the bridge to run out our last track before coming about for a closer look."

  "Good try, but the Russians will pick up our track rerun."

  "No doubt, except once we pass over the sub we go on and Turn onto the next lane, continuing as before. Then I'll radio our engineers in Washington to complain of equipment problems and ask for maintenance instructions. Every couple of miles we'll rerun a lane to reinforce the ruse."

  Giordino looked at Knight. "They might buy it. It's believable enough."

  Knight considered that. "Okay, we won't hang around. This will be our last look at the target. Then we continue on, acting as if we've found nothing."

  "And after we've finished this grid," Pitt said, "we can start a new one thirty miles away and fake a discovery."

  "A nice added touch," Giordino said approvingly. "Drop a red herring across our trail."

  Knight smiled wryly. "Sounds like a good script. Let's go for it."

  The ship rolled and the deck canted slightly to starboard as the helmsman brought her around on a reverse course. Far behind the stern, like an obstinate dog on a long leash, a robot submersible called Sherlock automatically refocused its two movie cameras and one still camera while continuing to send out probing sonar waves. Presumedly named by its designer after the fictional detective, Sherlock revealed detailed features of the seafloor previously unseen by man.

  Minutes ticked by with the slowness of hours until at last the crest of the crater began slipping across the sidescan. The Polar Explorer's course towed Sherlock along the plunging slope of the crater's interior.

  Three pairs of eyes locked on the sidescan recorder.

  "Here she comes," Giordino said with the barest tremor of excitement.

  The Soviet submarine nearly filled the port side of the sonograph. She was lying on a steep angle with her stern toward the center of the crater, her bow pointing at the rim. The hull was upright and she was in one piece, unlike the U.S. submarines Thresher and Scorpion, which had imploded into hundreds of pieces when they sank in the 1960s. The slight list to her starboard side was no more than two or three degrees.

  Ten months had passed since she went missing, but her outer works were free of growth and rust in the frigid Arctic waters.

  "No doubt of her being an 'Alfa' class," said Knight. "Nuclear-powered, titanium hull, nonmagnetic and noncorrosive in salt water, latest silent-propellor technology, the deepestdiving and fastest submarines in both the Soviet and U.S.

  navies."

  The lag between the sonar recording and the video view was around thirty seconds. As if watching a tennis match, their heads turned in unison from the sonar as they stared intently at the TV monitors.

  The sub's smooth lines slid into view under the camera's lights and were revealed in a ghostly bluish-gray hue. The Americans found it hard to believe the Russian vessel was a graveyard with over a hundred and fifty men resting inside. It looked like a child's toy sitting on the bottom of a wading pool.

  "any indication of unusual radioactivity?" asked Knight.

  "Very slight rise," answered Giordino. "Probably from the sub's reactor."

  "She didn't suffer a meltdown," Pitt surmised.

  "Not according to the readings."

  Knight stared at the monitors and made a cursory damage report. "Some damage to the bow. Port diving plane torn away. A long gouge in her port bottom, running for about twenty meters."

  "A deep one by the looks of it," observed Pitt. "Penetrated her ballast tanks into the inner pressure hull. She must have struck the opposite rim of the crater, tearing the guts out of her. Easy to imagine the crew struggling to raise her to the surface as she kept running across the center of the crater. But she took in more water than she could blow off and lost depth, finally impacting about halfway up the slope on this side."

  The compartment fell into a momentary silence as the submarine dropped astern of the Sherlock and slowly faded from view of the cameras. They continued to gaze at the monitors as the broken contour of the sea bottom glided past, their minds visualizing the horrible death that stalked men who sailed the hostile depths beneath the sea.

  for nearly half a minute no one spoke, they hardly breathed. Then slowly each shook off the nightmare and turned away from the monitors.

  The ice was broken. They began to relax and laugh with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of saloon patrons celebrating a winning touchdown by the home team.

  Pitt and Giordino could sit back and take it easy for the rest of the voyage. Their part in the search project was over. They had found a needle in a haystack. Then slowly Pitts expression turned serious and he stared off into space.

  Giordino knew the symptoms from long experience. Once a project was successfully completed, Pitt suffered a letdown. The challenge was gone, and his restless mind quickly turned to the next one.

  "Damn fine job, Dirk, and you too, Al," Knight said warmly. "You NUMA people know your search techniques. This has to be the most remarkable intelligence coup in twenty years. "

  "Don't get carried away," said Pitt. "The tough part is yet to come.

  Recovering the sub under Russian noses will be a delicate operation. No Glomar Explorer this time. No salvage from highly visible surface ships. The entire operation will have to be carried out underwater-"

  "What the hell is that?" Giordino's eyes had returned to the monitor.

  "Looks like a fat jug."

  "More like an urn," Knight confirmed.

  Pitt stared into the monitor for a long moment, his face thoughtful, his eyes tired, red and suddenly intense. The object was standing straight up. Two handles protruded from opposite sides of a narrow neck, flaring sharply into a broad, oval body that in Turn tapered toward the base buried in the silt.

  "A terra-cotta amphora," Pitt announced finally.

  "I believe you're right," said Knight. "The Greeks and Romans used them to transport wine and olive oil. They've been recovered all over the bottom of the Mediterranean."

  "What's one doing in the Greenland Sea?" Giordino asked no one in particular. "There, to the left of the picture, we've picked up a second."

  Then a cluster of three drifted under the cameras, followed by five more running in a ragged line from southeast to northwest.

  Knight turned to Pitt, "You're the shipwreck expert. How do you'read it?"

  A good ten seconds passed before Pitt replied. Then at last he did, his voice was distant, as though it came from someone in the next compartment.

  "My guess is they lead toward an ancient shipwreck the history books say isn't supposed to be here."

  Rubin would have traded his soul to abandon the impossible task, remove hands slick with sweat from the control rolumn, close tired eyes and accept death, but his sense of responsibility to the flight crew and passengers drove him on.

  Never in his wildest nightmares did he see himself in such a crazy predicament. One wrong physical movement, a slight error in judgment and fifty people would find a deep, unknown grave in the sea. Not fair, he cried in his mind over and over. Not fair.

  None of the navigation instruments was fullctioning. All communications equipment was dead. Not one of the passengers had ever flown an aircraft, even a light plane. He was totally disoriented and hopelessly lost. Inexplicably the needles on the fuel gauges wavered on "Empty."

  His mind strained at the confusion of it al
l.

  Where was the pilot? What caused the flight officers' deaths? Who was behind this insane madness?

  The questions swarmed in his mind, but the answers remained wrapped in frustration.

  Rubin's only consolation was that he was not alone. Another man shared the cockpit.

  Eduardo Ybarra, a member of the Mexican delegation, had once served as a mechanic in his country's air force. Thirty years had passed since he wielded a wrench on propellerdriven aircraft, but bits and pieces of the old knowledge had returned to him as he sat in the copilot's seat-reading the instruments for Rubin and taking command of the throttles.

  Ybarra's face was round and brown, the hair thick and black with traces of gray, the brown eyes widely spaced and expressionless. In his three-piece suit, he seemed out of place in the cockpit. Oddly there was no beaded perspiration on his forehead, and he had not loosened his tie or removed his coat.

  He motioned upward at the sky through the windshield. "Judging from the stars, I'd say we're on a heading toward the North Pole."

  "Probably flying east over Russia for all I know," Rubin said grimly. "I haven't a vague idea of our direction."

  "That was an island we left behind us."

  "Think it was Greenland?"

  Ybarra shook his head. "We've had water under us for the last few hours. We'd still be over the icecap if it was Greenland. My guess is we crossed Iceland."

  "My God, how long have we been heading north?"

  "No telling when the pilot turned off his London-to-New York course."

  Another fear added to Rubin's aching confusion. Calamity was piling on calamity. The one-in-a-thousand chance of coming through alive had rapidly risen to one in a million. He had to make a desperate decision, the only decision.