Valhalla Rising (Dirk Pitt 16)

"Looking good on this end," replied Burch. "Ready anytime you are."

"Flooding tanks now," said Giordino.

The Abyss Navigator descended by filling her upper ballast tank with water. Once on the bottom, the extreme pressure was too much for pumps to expel, so weights on the vehicle's bottom were dropped, allowing it to float to the surface.

A four-man submersible, the Abyss Navigator's nerve center was a round titanium alloy ball that housed the pilot and the technician who controlled the life-support systems, external lights, cameras and the two manipulator arms. The latter were mounted under the round hull and protruded like the special-effects arms of a robot in a science-fiction movie. A metal basket sat under the mechanical fingers to retrieve any artifacts picked off the bottom. Connected to the tubular framework around the manned ball were the pressure housings for the electronics, batteries and communications equipment. Though they served similar purposes and basically carried the same equipment, the Navigator and the Sleuth looked as much alike as a Saint Bernard and a mule. One carried a cask of brandy, the other one or more humans.

This trip the Navigator was carrying three people. Misty Graham had joined Dirk and Al for two reasons. One, whatever project Misty tackled, she threw herself into it with every ounce of her soul. After spending every free minute studying the deck plans of the Emerald Dolphin, she knew more about specific compartment locations than anyone on the survey ship. And, two, this was an opportunity for her to study the marine organisms of the deep.

Once Pitt had loaded the cameras and checked them out, he monitored the life-support system before positioning a small reclining seat for his lanky frame. He settled in for the long, boring trip to the seabed by working a crossword puzzle. He occasionally looked up and peered out one of the view ports as the light from the surface above began to lose reds, greens and yellows before turning a dark blue and finally pitch-black. He switched on one of the exterior lights, but there was nothing to see. No curious sea life bothered investigating the strange intruder falling into their liquid domain.

They entered the black, three-dimensional universe of the ocean's midzone, an eternal region extending from about five hundred feet beneath the surface to five hundred feet above the seabed. Here, they received their first visitor.

Pit laid down the puzzle and gazed through the port-side view port and found himself face-to-face with an anglerfish that was keeping up with the descent of the Navigator. There were few fish as ugly and grotesque as an anglerfish. With beady eyes the color of gray pearls, it bore a shaft that stuck up vertically from a hole in its nose. A little luminous light beaconed at its tip, a lure that attracted the anglerfish's dinner in the infinite blackness.

Scaleless, unlike its distant cousins nearer the surface, it was sheathed in wrinkly brown skin that looked like rotting parchment. A huge mouth, accommodating hundreds of tiny needlelike teeth, stretched across its lower head like a yawning cavern. Though equal in size-a few inches in length-a piranha encountering an angler-fish in a dark underwater alley would have turned tail and fled.

Pitt smiled. "A perfect example of the old cliche, a face only a mother could love."

"Compared to other denizens of the deep," said Misty, "the an-glerfish is downright gorgeous."

The homely little carnivore's curiosity soon waned, and it swam out of the light back into the darkness.

Beyond two thousand feet, they encountered the world of bizarre sea life known as siphonophore, gelatinous predators that come in all shapes and sizes, some less than an inch long, others that stretch to more than 120 feet. They live in a realm that covers 95 percent of the Earth's waters, and yet they are a mystery to ocean scientists, seldom seen and rarely if ever captured.

Misty was in her element as she stared entranced at the remarkably beautiful, deep-water siphonophore. Like their jellyfish cousins that inhabit surface waters, they are delicately transparent and come in spectacularly luminescent colors, with different characteristic light displays. Their bodies are modular with multiple internal organs, sometimes with more than a hundred stomachs, usually visible through their diaphanous interior. Many varieties have long, ethereal tentacles that stream over one hundred feet. The tentacles of others are more feathery, while some are similar to a dust mop. Like a spider's web, the

ir tentacles are deployed like nets to catch fish.

The heads of most siphonophore are called bells. They are devoid of eyes or mouths but function as a means of propulsion. In an incredibly efficient system, water is drawn in through a series of valves. Then it is expelled by muscular contractions, propelling the glutinous beast in whatever direction it decides to travel, depending on which valves in the bells are compressed.

"Siphonophore shy away from bright light," Misty said to Pitt. "Can you fade the lamps?"

Pitt complied and reduced the Navigator's beams to a dim glow that also allowed the animals to show off their bioluminescent rainbows.

"An apolemia," Misty whispered reverently, as she watched the creature glide past, uncoiling its ninety-foot tentacles in a deadly net.

For the next several thousand feet, the show continued while Misty furiously recorded her observations in a notebook as Pitt recorded on the video and still cameras. As the number of creatures diminished, those that remained became much smaller. They existed in the depths under thousands of pounds of pressure because the interior of their bodies equaled the force from outside.

Pitt was so absorbed by the drama outside his view port that he never went back to his crossword puzzle. He turned from the port only when Giordino nudged him.

"Bottom coming up."

Outside, the water was becoming filled with falling marine snow, tiny light gray particles, consisting of dead organisms and waste produced by the sea creatures above. The men inside the submersible felt as though they were driving through a light blizzard. Pitt wondered what underwater phenomena caused the snow to look heavier now than it had under the lights and cameras of Sea Sleuth the day before.

He switched on all lights and stared down through the view port mounted on the floor of the Navigator. As if it were land materializing through a fog, the bottom took shape beneath the sled runners as the submersible's shadow appeared under the bottom lights on the silt.

"We have the bottom," he alerted Giordino.

Giordino slowed the ascent by dropping a pair of weights, neutralizing the buoyancy until their downward motion slowed to a crawl, and stopped only twenty feet above the bottom. Like an aircraft making a picture-perfect landing, Giordino had maneuvered the sub to a halt right on the mark with great skill.

"Well done," Pitt complimented him.

"Just another of my many accomplishments," Giordino replied grandiosely.

"We're on the bottom and need a direction," Pitt called Burch in the command center four miles upward.

"You'll find her two hundred yards southeast," the captain's voice came back through the depths. "Follow a course of one hundred forty degrees and you should come up on the aft end of the forward section where it tore away."