'The briefing papers said she's under the ice cap, far from here.' The assessment supplied before Challenger left Cape Verde said that Deutschland was sneaking toward Canada, for a raid against Halifax or the St. Lawrence Seaway.
'There could still be German subs somewhere above us, XO, playing hide-and-seek around the mountaintops. Waiting for us to make just one mistake.'
'Agree, sir,' Bell said. 'Texas is perfect bait, for them to use against us.' Jeffrey looked Bell in the eyes. 'A disadvantage of our hugging the seafloor is, one Axis nuclear fish in seamount nine-sixty's chin, six thousand feet above our heads, and we're buried alive down here.'
Jeffrey took a deep breath. He glanced around the CACC.
'All right, people, we don't have all day…. Chief of the Watch, bring the probe to the final way-point.'
'Probe holding at way-point,' COB said, 'depth two thousand feet. Inertial nav agrees with dead reckoning plot for probe. Position checks complete.'
'Very well,' Jeffrey said.
Bell recommended testing the probe's sensor functions, and Jeffrey agreed. Jeffrey configured his console to show the scanning sonar data from the torpedo-shaped LMRS probe. He watched his screens. A computer image slowly sketched the near side of Mount 458. The slope was extremely steep, almost vertical. COB shifted the probe. More seamount features appeared, including a jagged protrusion.
'Don't snag the tether,' Jeffrey said. The probe's sonars were functioning properly. Then COB turned on its passive imaging cameras. The picture was featureless, inky black.
'Changing to image intensification factor ten thousand.' Now Jeffrey saw a dull glow in the window on his screen, the barest trace of bright predawn moonlight, penetrating from high above, the photons picked up and. multiplied by the cameras' CCDs. There was faint blue bioluminescence, too, as the LMRS stirred up microbes in the water.
COB brought the probe closer to the wall of the sea-mount. Deep-sea fish began to react to the movement. There were flashes in yellow and green, and flickers of sheet lightning, ghostly white.
'Image intensification fifty thousand,' COB said.
The picture grew brighter, more detailed, though still fuzzy and murky. Jeffrey saw a swarm of small creatures dash by.
'Pelagic shrimp,' Ilse said from her console. She was obviously watching, too.
'Confirmed,' Kathy said. 'Biologics. We're hearing the shrimp click and pop.' A huge jellyfish drifted past, translucent and gelatinous. Ilse said something in Latin. Out of curiosity, Jeffrey selected Challenger's own lowlight- level TV camera mounted on the sail. He saw something black and ugly, with needle-sharp teeth, and a bright green lure dangling near its mouth.
'Demonfish,' Ilse said.
Next COB tested the probe's active laser line-scan cameras. Now Jeffrey could see a small swatch of the seamount's slope, in crisp black and white. The texture of the bare rock was very rough.
'COB, it's time to break cover. Proceed to the peak of four-fifty-eight.' COB worked his joystick. 'Bringing the LMRS up to fifteen hundred feet, sir.' Jeffrey saw Bell eye a chronometer. 'LMRS battery level check,' Bell said.
'Sixty-two percent,' COB said.
'Very well,' Bell said.
'Probe is at the summit.'
'Sonar,' Jeffrey said, 'anything new?'
'Negative, sir. Not even any distant nuclear blasts in some while now.'
'Quiet today,' Bell said.
'Both sides are licking their wounds,' Jeffrey said.
'Very well, Sonar…. COB, begin the expanding snake search down the spur. Until we find Texas.'
'Understood, sir.'
'Use forward-and side-looking sonars in passive mode, to listen for transients and threats. Use passive-only imagery as a piloting aid…. I don't want the probe damaged, by an outcropping or uncharted wreck, or by Texas herself for that matter.'
'Understood. LMRS has begun descent down the slope. Depth now fifteen hundred fifty feet.'
Jeffrey saw a big boulder go by, lit by the living flashes and glows — or rather, the LMRS went by the boulder. The boulder's edges were softened by muck.
Jeffrey saw a starfish, waving an arm.
'There's silting on this spur,' Ilse said.
'That would be organic waste, right?' Jeffrey kept his voice very even as he spoke with her. At least, he hoped he did. 'Dead diatoms and plankton?'
'The bottom current transports nutrients,' Ilse said. 'The seamount makes it upwell, feeding an ecosystem over the summit. That's why the water turbidity's higher now.' Ilse was right. The image from the LMRS was murkier. For a while the only sense of motion came from floating specks and particles. They appeared out of the darkness, diverged to the edge of the picture, and were lost from view.
'If there's no erosion underwater,' Jeffrey said, 'how come the summit's so flat?' He hated to admit it, but talking shop with Ilse really turned him on. Since their little encounter yesterday, she'd been cool and professional. Good for her, but the widening gulf between them only made Ilse seem sexier to him.
'The top used to be a volcanic crater,' she said. 'The probe's in the bowl.'
'Oh… But where's the rest of it? This spur is just a fragment.' The downhill side of the spur ended abruptly in a sheer drop of almost two miles. There was no crater rim at the edge of the drop.
'Blew up, looks like,' Ilse said. 'Think of an undersea Mount St. Helens.'
'Yikes,' COB said. 'That must have hit the Azores with one heck of a tsunami.'
'Concur,' Ilse said. 'But that was millions of years ago.' Jeffrey chided himself on his one-track mind now of all times. He ordered his brain, the one in his head, to take back control of his thought processes.
COB continued to work the probe downhill, carefully searching.
'XO,' Jeffrey said, 'stand by with today's acoustic recognition signal and countersign.'
'Recognition codes ready,' Bell said.
'If anyone's still alive on Texas, this way they'll know we're here, and we're friendly.'
'LMRS depth now sixteen hundred feet. Still no sign of Texas.'
'How far past official crush depth do you think they could go?' Bell said.
'With the hull stressed by an atomic near miss?' Jeffrey said. 'Lord, there's no way of knowing.'
Jeffrey eyed the gravimeter. Past the end of the spur, at the bottom of the sheer drop, at a depth of over nine thousand feet, lay a huge field of boulders and lava extrusions.
'Probe depth now sixteen hundred fifty feet,' COB said. 'Still searching spur, now one thousand yards from the edge. No sign of Texas.'
'What worries me,' Jeffrey said, 'is that after their second buoy got off, the ship may have slid down the slope. All the way down the slope.'
'I saw something!' Ilse shouted.
'Keep your voice down,' Jeffrey said. 'Give me a proper report.'
'Urn, sediment on slope appeared disturbed to the left. Striations, as if from a large moving object.'
'Got it,' COB said. 'Good eyes, Miss Reebeck. Shifting LMRS to the left.'
'Sonar, anything?' Jeffrey said.
'Nothing, sir,' Kathy said. 'No indications of enemy presence.'
'Any signs of life at all?'
Kathy spoke to her people. 'Negative, Captain. No Virginia-class tonals on sonar feed from LMRS, or other tonals for that matter. No broadband either, except for current flow noise.'
'They must be conserving the battery,' Bell said. 'Or they're dead,' Jeffrey murmured. Jeffrey watched the image-intensified picture from the probe. There was indeed a groove on the slope, gouged gradually deeper, running west. It went on and on.
'Debris now,' COB said. 'Stripped-off anechoic tiles. Something big, lying on its side. Yes, looks like the lower rudder.'
'Careful,' Jeffrey said. 'Don't break the tether.'
