Treasure (Dirk Pitt 9)

Rojas nodded. "I will arrange to have one standing by."

Then he added, "You realize you n-light as well be hunting one particular fish in ten thousand square kilometers of sea. It could take you a lifetime."

"No," said Pitt confidently. "Twenty hours on the outside."

Rojas was a pragmatic man. Wishful thinking was foreign to him. He looked at Giordino and Gunn, expecting to see skepticism mirrored in their eyes. Instead, he saw only complete agreement.

"Surely, you can't believe such a fanciful time schedule?" he asked.

Giordino held up a hand and casually studied his fingernails. "If experience is any judge," he replied placidly, "Dirk has overestimated."

Exactly fourteen hours and forty-two minutes after the Uruguayan army helicopter set them on the landing pad of the Sounder, they found a shipwreck matching the Lady Flamborough's dimensions in 1,020 meters of water.

On the discovery pass the target showed up as a tiny dark speck on a flat plain below the continental slope. As the Sounder moved in closer, the sonar operator decreased the recording range until the shadowy image of a ship became a discernible shape.

The Sounder did not carry the five-million-dollar viewing system Pitt and Giordino had enjoyed on the Polar Explorer. No color video cameras were mounted on the trailing sonar sensor. The mission of her oceanographic scientists was purely to map large sections of the sea bottom. Her electronic gear was designed for distance and not closeup detail of manmade sunken objects.

"Same configuration all right," said Gunn. "Pretty vague. Could be my imagination but she appears to have a sweptback funnel on her stern superstructure. Her sides look high and straight. She's sitting upright, no more than a ten-degree list."

Giordino held back. "We'll have to get cameras on her to make a positive ID."

Pitt said nothing. He kept watching the sonar recording long after the target slipped behind the Sounder's stern. any hope of finding his father alive was draining away. He felt as though he was staring at a coffin as dirt was being thrown on the lid.

"Nice going, pal," Giordino said to him. "You laid us right on the dime."

"How did you know where to look?" asked Frank Stewart, skipper of the Sounder.

"I gambled the Lady Flamborough didn't change her heading after crossing the inside path of the General Bravo," Pitt explained. "And since she wasn't spotted by search aircraft beyond the outside course of the Cabo Gallegos, I decided the best place to concentrate our search was on a track extending east from her last-known heading as shown by the Landsat."

"In short, a narrow corridor running between the General Bravo and the Cabo Gallegos, " said Giordino.

"that about sums it up," Pitt acknowledged.

Gunn looked at him. "I'm sorry it's not an occasion to celebrate. "

"Do you want to send down an ROV?"* asked Stewart.

"We can save time," answered Pitt, "by skipping a remote camera survey and going direct to a manned probe. Also, the submersible's manipulator arms may be useful if we need to lift anything from the wreck."

"The crew can have the Deep Rover ready to descend in half an hour,"

said Stewart. "You going to act as operator?"

Pitt nodded. "I'll take her down."

"At a thousand meters, you'll be right at the edge of its depth rating."

"Not to worry," said Rudi Gunn. "The Deep Rover has a four-to-one safety factor at that depth."

"I'd sooner go over Niagara Falls in a Volkswagen," said the Captain,

"than go down a thousand meters in a plastic bubble."

Stewart, narrow-shouldered, with slicked-down burnt-toast-brown hair, looked like a small-town feed-store merchant and scoutmaster. A seasoned seaman, he could swim but was leery of the deep and refused to learn to dive. He catered to the scientists' requests and whims concerning their oceanographic projects as in any business/client relation 'Remote Operated Vehicle; tetherrd, underwater viewing system.

ship. But the ship operation was his domain, and any aca demic type who played Long John Silver with his crew was cut off at the knees in short order.

"That plastic bubble," said Pitt, "is an acrylic sphere over twelve centimeters thick."