Think the crew was rescued? Lugones asked.
Espinoza shook his head. No idea. I'm wondering why the ship didn't sink. For a captain to abandon his vessel, he should be damned sure of his reason. I want to check the engineering spaces.
It took several minutes and more than a few wrong turns to find a stairwell that led down into the guts of the ship. As soon as Jimenez pulled the door open, a six-inch surge of icy water washed over their boots. Lugones trained his light into the stairwell. It was completely flooded. The water was thick with oil and flashed rainbow spectrums at them.
That answers that, the Sergeant said. She's flooded, all right.
I wonder what she was carrying. Jimenez mused. If I remember my salvage law, whoever finds her gets to keep not only the ship but her cargo.
And when did you study salvage law? Espinoza asked sarcastically.
Okay. I saw something on TV about it.
Tuck your larcenous hands back in your pockets. We're soldiers, not scrap dealers. More than likely, this heap will drift off again at the next high tide or when another storm brews up.
Think we should pop some more holes in her to make sure she sinks for real this time?
Espinoza considered Lugones's question. You know what? No. Let her keep wandering. If she's survived this long, more power to her.
A DECK BELOW WHERE the three men stood, Juan Cabrillo relaxed back into his chair. He hadn't thought the Argentine Major, whose face he was beginning to see in his dreams, had a romantic side. That had been his one main concern that they would use the Oregon for target practice. These soldiers were once boys who probably liked to blow stuff up. The only difference is, now they had plastique explosives rather than firecrackers. The crew had defeated the thermal imaging by cutting the heat to the public parts of the ship, lowering the temperature in the rest, and letting the flooded ballast tanks shield them from the scan. The trick with the flooded staircase had been accomplished by simply closing the bottom hatch and pumping in some bilgewater.
Cabrillo looked over at Max Hanley, who was shaking his head. What? he said. I told you I could hide the ship right on their doorstep.
This doesn't count, Max groused.
The more outrageous the lie, the more easily it's accepted. By rights, they should be suspicious as hell, and look at them. They called off the search after ten minutes, and our good Major is practically in tears.
I'll give you this, Juan. You are one crafty SOB. So now what? You got us here. What's your plan?
To be honest, I hadn't thought much past this point. You did notice the piece of cargo under the tarp on the second boat? The outside cameras had been watching the soldiers since the first group arrived at sunup.
Seems about the right size and shape for a side-scan sonar probe.
Means they're going to be looking for the Chinese wreck.
I assume we're going to beat them to it?
See, the plan reveals itself, Cabrillo said with the self-satisfied grin of a kid pulling one over on his parent. He really hadn't thought much beyond getting the Oregon into position.
Max nodded toward the image of the soldiers milling around near the bow. We'll need to wait until that lot sods off before we can empty enough ballast to open the moon-pool doors.
Juan nodded. I suspect they'll start searching today, so as soon as they pass by in the workboat, we'll do our thing. When Tamara wakes up, ask if she'd like to join us. The least we can do is show her the fabled Treasure Ship before we destroy it.
That was the first Hanley had heard about that, and he stared at the Chairman for a moment before seeing the logic. It'll be a shame, but you're right. It can't be helped.
I know. We can't afford to give the Chinese even the slimmest chance of staking a claim down here.
An hour later, Juan released the clamps holding the thirty-two-foot Discovery 1000. The three-person submersible didn't have an escape trunk like her big sister, but no one had any real desire to swim in water that was just a fraction of a degree above freezing.
Cabrillo sat in the reclined pilot's seat with Tamara on his right. Linda Ross had drawn the lucky number to accompany them, although with the temperature chilly enough for them to see their breaths in the cockpit she wasn't sure how lucky she felt.
Can't we crank the heat a tad? she asked, blowing on frozen fingertips.
Sorry, but the bay we identified off the satellite pictures is at our maximum range. We need the endurance more than the comfort.
Won't the Chinese already be there? Tamara asked. She was bundled in an arctic parka, with another draped over her long legs.
Nope. They went the wrong way. There are two similarly shaped bays around here. One to the north and one south. Because of the body Linda and her team found at Wilson/George, we know the wreck has to be in that direction. Those guys are going to spend the next week or so surveying fifty miles from where they should.
For the next three hours, they cruised at twenty feet. Because of the weak polar sun, it was nearly black even this shallow. Juan relied on the sub's sonar and lidar systems to navigate. At least the seas were calm. Had the weather been foul, running so close to the surface would have been like taking a ride inside a clothes dryer.
Linda and Juan kept Tamara entertained with some of the crazier stunts the Corporation had pulled off, making certain each story painted Max in the best light. If she suspected they were putting on the hard sell for their friend, she didn't let on. They drank sweetened tea and ate gourmet sandwiches prepared in the Oregon's world- class galley.
The nav computer says we're coming up on the bay, Cabrillo informed his passengers. The depth here is five thousand feet, but the bottom will come up sharply.
Juan had been thinking about where in the fjordlike cove the Chinese ship would have been sunk. He assumed they would have been as close to shore as possible, and in the satellite pictures he had spotted what he believed to be the best area. There was a beach of sorts, or at least an area where the towering mountains and glaciers were much lower.
He steered the submersible into the mouth of the bay and plotted a course to the spot. He kept one eye on their side-scan sonar. As he had predicted, the bottom was rising at better than a sixty percent gradient. It remained featureless rock without so much as an outcropping. Had the incline below them been above water, it would have been nearly impossible to scale.
I can't believe we're doing this, Tamara said for the third or fourth time. Just a few days ago, I was half certain Admiral Tsai Song and the Silent Sea were just legends, and now I'm about to see her for myself.
If we're lucky, Juan cautioned. A lot could have happened in the past five hundred years. She could have been ground into toothpicks by the ice.
Oh. I hadn't thought of that. Do you think that happened?
Not really. Eric and Mark, you met them on the bridge
The two who don't look old enough to shave?
That's them. They're crackerjack researchers. They looked into archives from the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, the last time anyone took measurements of this area. The mountains around the bay were never named, but a survey team checked the glaciers and found them to be about the slowest moving on the continent. If the ship is in deep enough water, she wouldn't have been affected even when the surface froze over.
Cabrillo rubbed his hands together to restore some circulation. He checked their battery level and determined they had more than enough but left the heat control untouched. He would rather spend more time surveying the bottom on this trip than have to go through it all over again tomorrow.
They saw their first sign of life when a leopard seal swooped in close to the acrylic view port. It pirouetted in front of them, its body trailing a wreath of bubbles, and then it vanished as suddenly as it appeared.
Cute little fellow, Linda remarked.
Not if you're a penguin.
Juan eyed the bottom profiler. The slope they had been traveling over was leveling out as it neared the shore, which was still about three miles away.
Whoa, Linda called.
What do you have?
