Renata nodded at his logic, sighed and brushed a curl of dark hair from her face. “I suppose you’re right. But we can’t take them ourselves.”
“We might be able to use the element of surprise,” Kurt said.
“Hate to tell you, but I left our cloaking device back in Washington,” Joe said.
“I’m not suggesting we approach from the surface,” Kurt said.
“So we take the fight to the deep,” Joe said.
“Surprise will be on our side. And we might pick up some allies.”
“From where?”
“If these guys had divers of their own, they wouldn’t need to keep the men on deck at gunpoint. If the divers from the conservancy are working below to keep their friends from getting shot up top, they’d probably be ready to mutiny if the chance came along.”
“So we go in, make friends and start a rebellion,” Joe said.
&nbs
p; “Classic counterinsurgency,” Kurt said.
Twenty minutes later, Kurt and Joe were being lowered over the side in the powered dive suits along with an ROV named Turtle. They were still three miles from the wreck site, presumably far enough to keep the armed thugs from being suspicious. Just to make sure, Captain Reynolds turned the Sea Dragon away. If they were being watched on radar or with binoculars, it would look as if they were passing harmlessly to the south.
As the platform reached the water, Kurt, Joe and the Turtle were swept off it. They adjusted their buoyancy and disappeared beneath the surface, sinking slowly, grasping the frame of the ROV and pulling themselves into the curved sections behind its bulbous hydrodynamic nose. At a depth of fifty feet, Kurt gave a thumbs-up and the propellers on the Turtle began to spin.
The Turtle was normally piloted from the mother ship up above, but because it was designed to work in concert with divers on the bottom, the controls could be linked to the dive suits that Kurt and Joe were wearing. In this case, Joe was plugged in and driving.
“Take us down,” Kurt said. “Let’s hug the bottom.”
“Roger that,” Joe replied.
The waters east of Malta were relatively shallow, with an area known as the Malta Plateau spreading to the east and also north toward Sicily. The Sophie Celine had settled at a depth of ninety feet. It was deep enough to be a challenge, shallow enough for regular divers to work, but with a minimum of natural light reaching down from the surface.
“Bottom coming up,” Joe said.
In addition to the controls, Joe was plugged into the ROV’s telemetry. He could see their depth, heading and speed on a heads-up display inside his helmet.
The seafloor soon came into view, illuminated by the ROV’s forward-mounted lights. Joe leveled off, adjusted their course and punched the throttle.
“I’m going to kill the lights,” Joe said. “Don’t want anyone to see us coming.”
“Try not to run into anything,” Kurt said.
The lights went out and the ride became a trip through a dark tunnel until their eyes adjusted. “More light than I expected,” Joe said.
“Seas are calm,” Kurt said. “That always helps. Not a lot of sediment moving around down here.”
“I put the visibility at fifty feet.”
“Then make sure we stop at least a hundred and ten feet from the wreck.”
The Turtle was fast for an ROV. With a boost from the current, they were doing almost seven knots, but it still took nearly twenty minutes before they approached the wreck site, a dim glow in the distance.
“At least three or four diving lights,” Joe said.
Kurt acknowledged, then saw a fifth and sixth light appear, as someone came up from behind a mound of sediment.
Up ahead, the lights blurred as if hidden in a swirl of dust. Already Kurt could feel the strange throbbing sound of a submerged vacuum at work.