Trojan Odyssey

hand in its mouth.

A shadow crossed above a sandy gap in the coral and she looked up, half expecting to see the same shark returning for a closer look, but it was a flight of five spotted eagle rays. One peeled off the formation like an aircraft and cruised around Summer, staring curiously before swooping upward and rejoining the others.

After traveling another forty yards she slipped over a formation of horny gorgonian coral and came within view of a shipwreck. A huge five-foot barracuda hovered over the debris, staring out of cold, black beady eyes at all that took place in its domain.

The steamship Vandalia was driven onto Navidad Bank in 1876 during a fierce hurricane. Of her one hundred and eighty passengers and thirty crewmen, none survived. Listed by Lloyd's of London as lost without a trace, her fate remained a mystery until sport divers discovered her coral-encrusted remains in 1982. There was little left to distinguish Vandalia as a shipwreck. A hundred and thirty years on, the bank had covered her with anywhere from one to three feet of sea life and coral. The only obvious signs of what was once a proud ship were the boilers and engines that still protruded from the twisted carcass and exposed ribs. Most of the wood was gone, long rotted away by the salt water or eaten by critters of the sea that consumed anything organic.

Built for the West Indies Packet Company in 1864, Vandalia was 320 feet from the tip of her bow to the jack staff on her stern, with a 42-foot beam and accommodations for 250 passengers and three holds for a large amount of cargo. She sailed between Liverpool and Panama, where she unloaded her passengers and cargo for the rail trip to the Pacific side of the isthmus where they boarded steamers for the rest of the journey to California.

Very few divers had salvaged artifacts from Vandalia. She was difficult to find in her camouflaged position amid the coral. Little was left of the ship after being crushed that horrible night by the mountainous waves of the hurricane that caught her in the open sea before she could reach the safety of the Dominican Republic or nearby Virgin Islands.

Summer roamed over the old wreck, carried by a mild current, looking down and trying to picture the people who had once trod her decks. She sensed a spiritual sensation. It was as if she was flying over a haunted graveyard whose inhabitants were speaking to her from the past.

She kept a wary eye on the great barracuda that hung motionless in the water. Food was no problem for the ferocious-looking fish. There was enough sea life living in and around the old Vandalia to fill an encyclopedia on marine ichthyology.

Forcing her mind from visions of the tragedy, she swam warily around the barracuda that never took a beady eye off her. A safe distance away, she paused to check the air left in her tanks on the pressure gauge, mark her position on a Global Positioning System satellite minicomputer, eye the compass needle in relationship to the underwater habitat where she and her brother were living while studying the reef and note the reading on her bottom timer. She felt slightly buoyant and neutralized by venting a bit of air from her back-mounted buoyancy compensator.

Swimming another hundred yards, she saw the bright colors fading and the coral turning colorless. The farther she swam the more the sponges became glazed and diseased, until they died and ceased to exist. The visibility of the water also dropped drastically, until she could see no farther than the extended tip of her hand and fingers.

She felt as if she had entered a dense fog. It was a phenomenon, known as the mysterious 'brown crud,' that had appeared throughout the Caribbean. The water near the surface was an eerie brown mass that fishermen described as looking like sewage. Until now, no one knew exactly what caused the crud or what triggered it. Ocean scientists thought it was associated with a type of algae, but had yet to prove it.

Strangely, the crud did not appear to kill the fish, like its notorious cousin, the red tide. They avoided contact with the worst of the toxic effects, but soon began to starve after losing their feeding grounds and shelter in the process. Summer noticed that the usually brilliant sea anemone, with their arms extended to feed in the current, also seemed hard hit by the weird invader to their realm. Her immediate project was simply to take a few preliminary samples. Recording the dead zone on Navidad Bank with cameras and chemical analysis instruments to detect and measure its composition would come later, in the hope of eventually finding countermeasures to eradicate it.

The first dive of the project was purely one of exploration, to see firsthand the effects of the crud so she and her fellow marine scientists on board the nearby research ship could evaluate the full scale of the problem and create a precise pattern for future study of the cause.

The first brown crud invasion warning had been sounded by a commercial diver working off Jamaica in 2002. The baffling crud had left a path of underwater destruction unseen and mostly unreported from the surface as it drifted out of the Gulf of Mexico and around the Florida Keys. That outbreak was, Summer was beginning to discover, much different than here. The crud on Navidad Bank was far more toxic. She began to find dead starfish, and shellfish such as shrimp and lobster. She also noted that the fish swimming through the strange discolored water seemed lethargic, almost comatose.

She removed several small glass bottles from a pouch strapped to one thigh and began taking water specimen samples. She also collected dead star- and shellfish and dropped them in a netted bag attached to her weight belt. When the jars were sealed and securely resting in the pouch, she checked her air again. She had over twenty minutes of dive time left. She rechecked her compass readings and began swimming in the direction from which she had come, soon reaching clean and clear water again.

Casually observing the bottom that had turned to a small river of sand, she sighted the opening to a small cavern in the coral, one she hadn't noticed before. At first glance it looked like any one of twenty others she'd passed in the last forty-five minutes. But there was something different about this one. The entrance had a square-cornered, carved look about it. Her imagination visualized a pair of coral-encased columns.

A ribbon of sand led inside. Curious, and with an ample supply of air in reserve, she swam over to the entrance of the cavern and peered into the gloom.

A few feet inside the chamber the indigo of the walls flickered under the shimmering light from the sun's rays above. Summer slowly swam along the sandy bottom as the blue turned dark and became brown after several yards. She nervously turned and looked over her shoulder, reassuring herself at seeing brightness surrounding the opening. Without a dive light there was nothing to see and it didn't take great imagination to picture danger in the inky interior. She nimbly turned and stroked toward the entrance.

Suddenly one of her fins brushed against something half buried in the sand. She was about to simply dismiss it as a lump of coral, but the coral-encrusted object had a seemingly man-made symmetrical contour. She dug into the sand until the thing came free. Moving toward the light, Summer held it aloft and lightly swirled it in the water, cleaning away the sand. It looked to be about the size of an old-fashioned lady's hatbox except that it felt quite heavy, even underwater. Two handles protruded from the upper area, while the bottom gave the impression under the encrustation of having a pedestal base. As near as she could tell, the interior looked hollow, another sign that it wasn't created by nature.

Through the mask, Summer's gray eyes mirrored skeptical interest. She decided to carry it back to the habitat, where she could carefully clean and determine what was to be seen under the accumulated coral sea growth.

The extra weight of the mysterious object and the dead sea life she had collected on the bottom had affected her buoyancy, so she compensated by adding air to her BC. Tightly gripping the object under her arm, she languidly swam toward the habitat oblivious of her air bubbles trailing behind her.

The habitat that she and her brother would call home for the next ten days appeared through the shimmering blue water a short distance ahead.

Pisces was often called an 'inner space station,' but she was an underwater laboratory designed and dedicated to ocean research. She was a sixty-five-ton rectangular chamber rounded off on the ends, thirty-eight feet long by ten feet wide by eight feet high. The habitat sat on legs attached to a heavy weighted base plate that provided a stable platform on the seafloor fifty feet below the surface. The entry air lock served as a storage unit and a place to don and remove diving equipment. The main lock that maintained a differential pressure between the two compartments contained a small lab working area, a galley, a confined dining area, four bunk beds, and a computer and communications console connected to an outside antenna for contact with the world above the surface.