Fire Ice (NUMA Files 3)

Paul asked to see a chart. The captain pushed aside a blue curtain that divided the wheelhouse from the smaller chart room. A map of the Black Sea was spread out on the table. "We're here," Atwood said, putting his finger on a spot off the western shore of the Black Sea.

Trout's tall form bent over the chart. "We're over the edge of a shallow underwater shelf that wraps around the shoreline past Romania and the Danube delta, the Bosporus and around to Crimea in the north." He turned to his wife. "Gamay can fill us in on the biological and archaeological angles."

Gamay took over. "The shelf Paul talked about is an incredibly productive fishery. It's home to salmon, beluga sturgeon, turbot. You'll find dolphins here and bonito, although the stocks are down. Some say the Turks have over- fished the sea, but they say it's European Union pollution coming from the Danube. What's not in dispute is the fact that below a fluctuating depth of around four hundred fifty feet, there is no life. Ninety percent of the sea is sterile. With the fish population down, huge red tides and jellyfish infestations have come in. People are concerned enough to actually start doing something."

"That's how NUMA came to be involved," Captain Atwood said. "We were collecting information for a joint Russian-Turkish project."

"I was wondering why you didn't have representatives from either country aboard," Paul said.

"On earlier trips the government observers spent most of their time telling the ships where they couldn't conduct surveys. Admiral Sandecker insisted on carte blanche when NUMA was asked to lend a hand. Which meant no observers on this preliminary survey. Between his prestige and their desperation, he was able to hold his own."

"These countries have a good reason to be desperate," Gamay said. "The pollution is creating the conditions for a 'turnover.' If the dead water rises to the top, everything in the sea and around the rim could be wiped out."

"There's nothing like the threat of extinction to get people off their butts," Gunn remarked.

"That would do it for me," Austin said. Trout drew his finger along the map. "The bottom here will be covered with black mud over clay that marks the change of the ancient lake to a sea. When you get beyond the edge of the shelf, we find deep submarine canyons carved into the steep shelf slope. Ten thousand years ago, the sea level was a thousand feet lower than it is now. The flood theory suggests that sixty thousand square miles were inundated by the waters of the Mediterranean."

"Which made anyone with a boat very popular," Austin said.

Gamay said, "This deals directly with our situation. As Paul explained last night, ship worms can't survive in the deep water, so wooden wrecks will be perfectly preserved for thousands of years. And steel ships will disintegrate."

A crewman called the captain into the wheelhouse. Atwood excused himself. A minute later, he returned, his face wreathed in a wide grin.

"We're on target. Our mystery ship should be right below our radio antenna."

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."