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 spread 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
