Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt 4)

"I am not," Giordino declared pontifically, "cut out to be a hero."

"Neither am I, pal," Woodson added. "But you've got to admit it beats hell out of selling life insurance."

"The drama of it all escapes him," Gunn said. "Think of the stories you can tell your girl friends. Think of the enraptured looks on their pretty faces when you tell them how you unerringly piloted the greatest undersea probe of the century."

"Unerringly?" Giordino said. "Then suppose you tell me why I'm running this scientific marvel around in circles five hundred miles off our scheduled course?"

Gunn shrugged. "Orders."

Giordino stared at him. "We're supposed to be under the Labrador Sea. Instead, Admiral Sandecker changes our course at the last minute and makes us chase all over the abyssal plains below the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. It doesn't make sense."

Gunn smiled a sphinx-like smile. For several moments none of the men spoke, but Gunn didn't require a concentrated dose of ESP to know the questions that were running through their minds. They were, he was certain, thinking what he was thinking. Like himself, they were three months back in time and two thousand miles in distance at the headquarters of the National Underwater and Marine Agency in Washington, D.C., where Admiral James Sandecker, chief director of the agency, was describing the most incredible undersea operation of the decade.

"God damn," Admiral Sandecker had thundered. "I'd give up a year's salary if I could join you men."

A figure of speech, Giordino reflected. Next to Sandecker, Ebenezer Scrooge spent money like a drunken sailor. Giordino relaxed in a deep leather sofa and tuned into the admiral's briefing, while idly blowing smoke rings between puffs on a giant cigar, lifted from a box on Sandecker's immense desk when everyone's attention was focused on a wall map of the Atlantic Ocean.

"Well, there she is." Sandecker rapped the pointer loudly on the map for the second time. "The Lorelei Current. She's born off the western tip of Africa, follows the mid-Atlantic ridge north, then curves easterly between Baffin Island and Greenland, and then dies in the Labrador Sea."

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Giordino said "I don't hold a degree in oceanography, Admiral, but it would seem that the Lorelei converges with the Gulf Stream."

"Not hardly. The Gulf Stream is surface water. The Lorelei is the coldest, heaviest water in the world's oceans, averaging fourteen thousand feet in depth."

"Then the Lorelei crosses under the Gulf Stream," Spencer said softly. It was the first time in the briefing he had spoken.

"That seems reasonable." Sandecker paused, smiled benevolently, then continued "The ocean is basically made up of two layers-a surface or upper layer, heated by the sun and thoroughly churned by winds, and a cold, very dense layer consisting of intermediate, deep and bottom water. And the two never mix."

"Sounds very dull and forbidding," Munk said. "The mere fact that some character with a black sense of humor named the current after a Rhine nymph who lured sailors onto the rocks makes it the last place I'd want to visit."

A grim smile crawled slowly over Sandecker's griffin face. "Get used to the name, gentlemen, because deep in the Lorelei's gut is where we're going to spend fifty days. Where you're going to spend fifty days."

"Doing what?" Woodson asked defiantly.

"The Lorelei Current Drift Expedition is exactly what it sounds like. You men will descend in a deepwater submersible five hundred miles northwest of the coast of Dakar and begin a submerged cruise in the current. Your main job will be to monitor and test the sub and its equipment. If there are no malfunctions that would necessitate cutting short the mission, you should surface around the middle of September in the approximate center of the Labrador Sea."

Merker cleared his throat softly. "No submersible has stayed that long that deep."

"You want to back out, Sam?"

"Well . . . no."

"This is a volunteer expedition. Nobody is twisting your arm to go."

"Why us, Admiral?" Ben Drummer uncoiled his lean frame from the floor where he had been comfortably stretched. "Ah'm a marine engineer. Spencer here is an equipment engineer. And Merker is a systems expert. Ah can't see where we fit in."

"You're all professionals in your respective capacities. Woodson is also a photographer. The Sappho I will be carrying a number of photographic systems. Munk is the best instrument-component man in the agency. And, you'll all be under the command of Rudi Gunn, who has captained, at one time or another, every research ship in NUMA.

"That leaves me," Giordino said.

Sandecker glared at the cigar jutting from Giordino's mouth, recognized it as one from his private brand, and gave him a withering look that was completely ignored. "As assistant projects director for the agency, you'll be in overall charge of the mission. You can also make yourself useful by piloting the craft."

Giordino smiled devilishly and stared back. "My pilot's license authorizes me to fly airplanes not submarines."

The admiral stiffened ever so slightly. "You'll just have to trust my judgment, won't you?" Sandecker said coldly. "Besides, what matters most is that you're the best crew I've got on hand at the moment. You all worked together on the Beaufort Sea Expedition. You are men with heavy experience and records of ability and ingenuity. You can operate every instrument, every piece of oceanographic equipment yet invented-we'll let the scientists analyze the data you bring back-and, as I mentioned, naturally you're all volunteers."

"Naturally," Giordino echoed, his face deadpan.