With the excellent visibility the sub had been running without lights. At a depth of one hundred twenty feel. Zavala flattened their trajectory, slowed the minisub's spe
ed to a crawl, and switched on the craft's belly light. The ship lay on its side. The large circle of illumination transformed a section of the hull below them from black to a cadaverish grayish green broken here and there with leprous splotches of yellow and rust stains like dried blood. The patina of marine growth, made up of millions of sea anemones, stretched off into the dimness beyond the reach of the light.
Austin found it difficult to imagine that this huge dead leviathan was once one of the fastest and most beautiful ships afloat. It is possible to stand before a building as tall as the Doria was long and not be awed by its size. But if that same seven-hundred-foot tower is tuned horizontally and placed by itself on a flat empty plain, its immensity becomes breathtaking.
Lying on its starboard or right side, hiding the fatal gash from the Stockholm's sharp beak, the Doria looked like a monstrous sea creature that had simply lain down to rest, had fallen asleep, and was now being reclaimed by the sea. The mini. sub switched on its video camera and glided toward the stern, staying a short distance above the rows of portholes. Dwarfed by the massive hull, the craft resembled a little bug-eyed crustacean checking out a whale. Near the sixteen-ton portside propeller
Zavala made a sharp turn and passed over the sharply etched black rectangles that once served as windows to the promenade deck. When open water appeared he dropped the sub down to a depth of two hundred feet and pointed the craft back toward the bow on a path parallel to their earlier course: The multi-tiered decks were a ninety-foot-high vertical wall off to their left. They moved past the three swimming pools that had once cooled passengers according to class on their transatlantic passage, scudding along the lifeboat deck whose davits didn't work any better now than they did in 1956.
Dozens of fishing nets had become snagged on the hook-like davits. The nets veiled the decks like great shrouds draped over an immense bier. The mesh was coated with a hoary cloak of marine growth. Some nets, held aloft from the wreck by their buoys, were still snaring fish from the schools of large pollock and cod that darted dangerously close. Noting the rotting bones caught in the mesh, Zavala wisely kept the mini-sub at a respectful distance from the still dangerous nets.
The ship's great red-and-white smokestack had fallen off, leaving an immense square shaft down to the engine room. Other openings marked uncovered staircase wells. The superstructure had slipped off and lay in a jumble of disintegrating debris on the sea bottom. With its distinctive stack and superstructure gone the Andrea Doria looked more like a barge than a ship. Only when they glided by the remnants of the wheelhouse and saw the massive booms, winch heads, and bollards intact on the foredeck did they began to get the sense that this was a huge passenger liner. It was hard to believe a vessel this big could ever sink, but that's what they said about the Titanic, Austin reminded himself.
They had been as reverent as mourners at a funeral, but now Austin broke the silence. "That's what thirty million dollars looks like after a few decades at the bottom of the sea."
"Hell of a lot of money to pay for an oversized fish, catcher," Zavala said.
"That's just for the hull. I didn't count the millions in furnishings and artwork and four hundred tons of freight. The pride of the Italian navy."
"I can't figure it," Zavala said. "I know all about the thick fog, but both these ships had radar and lookouts. How in all of those millions of square miles of ocean did they happen to occupy the same space at the same time?"
"Plain lucky. I guess."
"They couldn't have done better if they planned out a collision course in advance."
"Fifty two people dead. A twenty-nine-thousand-ton ocean liner on the bottom. The Stockholm heavily damaged. Millions in cargo lost That's some planning."
"I think you're telling me it's one of those unsolved mysteries of the sea.'
"Do you have a better answer?"
"Not one that makes any sense," he replied with a sigh that was audible over the mike. "Where to now?"
"Let's go up to Gimbel's Hole for a looksee," Austin said.
The minisub banked around as gracefully as a manta ray and headed back toward the bow, then cruised evenly about halfway down the length of the port side until it came to a jagged four-sided opening.
Gimbel's Hole.
The eight-by-twenty-foot hole was the legacy of Peter Gimbel. Less than twentyeight hours after the Doria went under, Gunbel and another photographer named Joseph Fox dove on the liner and spent thirteen minutes exploring the wreck. It was the start of Gimbel's fascination with the ship. In 1981 he led an expedition that used a diving bell and saturation diving techniques. The divers cut away the entrance doors into the First Class Foyer Lounge to get at a safe reported to hold a million dollars in valuables. Amid great hoopla the safe was opened on TV, but it yielded only a few hundred dollars.
"Looks like a barn door," Zavala quipped.
"This barn door took two weeks to open with magnesium rods," Austin said. "We don't have that long."
"Might be easier to raise the whole thing. If NUMA could raise the Titanic, the Doria should be a cinch."
"You're not the first one to suggest that. There have been a pile of schemes to bring her up. Compressed air. Helium-filled balloons. A coffer dam. Plastic bubbles. Even Ping-Pong balls."
"The Ping-Pong guy must have had some cojones." Zavala whistled.
Austin groaned at the Spanish double entendre. Aside from that astute observation, from what you've seen, what do you think?"
"I think we've got our work cut out for us:"
"I agree. Let's go topside and see what the others say"
Zavala gave him a thumbs up, tweaked the motor, and lifted the nose of the sub. As they quickly ascended with the power from four thrusters, Austin glanced at the gray ghost receding in the gloom. Somewhere in that huge hull was the key to the bizarre series of murders. He put his grim thoughts aside as Zavala broke into a Spanish chorus of "Octopus's Garden." Austin thanked his lucky stars that the trip was short.