Polar Shift (NUMA Files 6)

Gamay gave him a quick glance, even smiling briefly at the unusual display of emotion, before she, too, joined in the cheering.

The smooth water behind the ship boiled as if someone had turned the burner on high. The engines were doing their work. The propellers biting into the slanting sides of the funnel, the ship inched its way painfully toward the rim again, settled back, shot upward at an angle, was buried by the foam, then gave a mighty surge that carried it over the lip.

This time, the ship disappeared for good. The Trouts cheered, but their celebration was tempered by their own sense of loneliness and impotence against an unstoppable force of nature.

"Any ideas about how we get out of here?" Gamay shouted.

"Maybe the whirlpool will end on its own."

Gamay glanced down. In the few minutes they had watched the ship struggle, the boat had dropped at least another twenty feet.

"I don't think so."

The water had lost its India ink cast, and the slick black sides had picked up a brownish tinge from the mud being scooped up from the bottom. Hundreds of dead or dying fish whirled in a great circle like confetti caught in a windstorm. The damp air was thick with the smell of brine, fish and bottom muck.

"Look at the debris," Paul said. "It's rising from the bottom."

Wreckage was being churned up from the floor of the sea in the same way a tornado picks up objects and lifts them in the air. There were splintered wooden cartons, plywood, hatch covers, scraps of ventilators, even a damaged lifeboat. Much of the material sank back into the vortex, where it was regurgitated and destroyed with the same effect as if it were at the bottom of Niagara Falls.

Gamay noticed that some pieces, mostly small, were heading up toward the rim. "What if we jump into the water?" she said. "Maybe we'd be light enough to rise to the top like that stuff."

"No guarantee we'd ascend. More likely, we'd get sucked farther into the whirlpool, to be ground up like hamburger. Remember that the first rule of the sea is to stick with your boat-if possible."

"Maybe that's not such a great idea. We've dropped lower."

It was true. The boat had slipped farther into the whirlpool.

A cylindrical object was working its way up the side of the whirlpool. Then several more followed.

"What's that?" Trout said.

Gamay wiped away the moisture from her eyes and looked again, at a point twenty feet ahead and slightly below the Zodiac. Before becoming a marine biologist, she had been a nautical archaeologist, and immediately recognized the tapered ceramic forms with their greenish gray painted surfaces.

"They're amphorae," she said. "And they're moving upward."

Trout read his wife's mind. "We'll only have one chance to go for it."

"Our weight may change the dynamics, and there will only be one chance to go for it.

"Do we have a choice?"

The three ancient wine vessels were maddeningly close. Trout pulled himself up to the steering console and pressed the starter button. The engine caught. The boat moved ahead at its crazy angle, and he had to compensate with its tendency to fishtail by creative handling of the wheel. He wanted to get above the amphorae to block their way.

The first amphora in the group started to drift across the bow. In another second, it would be out of reach. Trout gunned the motor, and the boat passed just above the moving object.

"Get ready," Trout yelled. The leap would have to be perfectly timed. "It will be slippery, and it's going to roll. Make sure you grab on to the handles and wrap your arms and legs around it."

Gamay nodded and climbed onto the bow. "What about you?" she said.

"I'll catch a ride on the next one."

"It's going to be hard to keep the boat steady." She knew that without someone to keep the boat under control, Trout's leap would be even more hazardous.

"I'll figure it out."

"Like hell, you will. I'm not going."

Damned stubborn woman. "This is your only chance. Someone's got to finish that damned wallpapering. Please."