Treasure (Dirk Pitt 9)

"Mind you don't smack the bottom," Gunn warned him.

"We'll keep an eye peeled. Neither of us is keen on making a one-way trip."

"Never hurts to have a worrywart on your side. How's your oxygen?"

"On the money."

"You should be getting close."

Pitt slowed the Deep Rover's descent with a light touch of the sliding armrest. Giordino peered downward, his eyes watchful for a sign of rocks. Pitt could have sworn his friend never blinked in the next eight minutes it took for the seabed to gradually materialize below.

"We're down," Giordino announced. "Depth one,thousand fifteen meters."

Pitt applied extra power to the vertical sters, bringing the submersible to a hovering stop three meters above the gray silt. Due to the water pressure, the weight of the craft had increased during the descent. Pitt turned one of the ballast tank valves, keeping an eye on the pressure gauge, and filled it with just enough air to achieve neutral buoyancy.

"Making our sweep," he notified Gunn.

"The wreck should bear approximately one one zero degrees," Gunn's voice crackled back.

"Affirmative, I read you," said Pitt. "We have a sonar target two hundred twenty meters, bearing one one two degrees."

"I copy, Deep Rover."

Pitt turned to Giordino. "Well, let us see what we shall see.

He increased the power on the horizontal thrusters and executed a sweeping bank, studying the barren seascape ahead as Giordino kept him on track by reading off the compass heading.

"Come left a couple of points. Too much. Okay, you've got it. Keep her straight."

There was not a flicker of emotion in Pitts eyes. His face was strangely still. He wondered with a growing fear what he might find.

He recalled the haunting story of a diver salvaging a ferry that had sunk after a collision. The diver was working the wreck at one-hundred meters when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He swung around and was confronted by the body of a beautiful girl who was staring at him through sightless eyes, one arm extended and touching him as if asking to take her hand. The diver had nightmares for years afterward.

Pitt had seen bodies before, frozen as the crew of the Serapis; bloated and grotesque as the crew of the Presidential yacht Eagle; decayed and half-dissolved in sunken airplanes off Iceland and a lake in the Colorado rockies. He could still close his eyes and visualize them all.

He hoped to God he wouldn't see his father as a floating corpse. He shut his eyes for a few moments and almost ran the Deep Rover into the bottom. Pitt wanted to remember the Senator as alive and vibrant-not as a ghostly thing in the sea or a ridiculously made up stiff in a casket.

"Object in the silt to the right," Giordino said, jolting Pitt from his morbid thoughts.

Pitt leaned forward. "A two-hundred-liter drum. Three more off to the left."

"They're all over the place," said Giordino. "Looks like a junkyard down here."

"See any markings?"

"Only some stenciled lettering in Spanish. Probably weight and volume information."

"I'll move closer to the one dead ahead. A trace of whatever was in them is still rising to the surface."

Pitt edged the Deep Rover's sphere to within a few inches of the sunken drum. The lights showed a dark substance curling from the drain hole.

"Oil?" said Giordino.

Pitt shook his head. "The color is more nistlike. No, wait, it's red.

By God, it's an oil-base red paint."

&nbs