“Got that right,” he replied. “Twenty-two wrecks checked and twenty-two consecutive goose eggs.”
“So what are we looking at?” Max asked as he crossed the room with a plate of food in his hand. He set it next to Cabrillo’s elbow. “Fish tacos, by the way. Fresh pico de gallo, but the chef hid a ghost chili in there, so watch yourself.”
“Thanks. I’m starved.” Cabrillo ate half of a taco in a single bite, managing to not ruin his shirt when the shell inevitably collapsed. “What we are seeing, if my five days of experience has taught me anything, is a Boston long-liner that sank in 1960 or so.”
“Not our target?”
“Not even close. Do you know how many wrecks there are off the East Coast?”
“About thirty-five hundred,” Max replied. “And most of them are clustered between Richmond, Virginia, and Cape Cod. Less than a quarter of them are identified. Which leaves us searching a lot of haystacks for a single needle.”
“You are the paragon of the understatement.”
In the days since Cabrillo’s return to the ship after his ill-fated meeting with Wesley Tennyson, the Oregon had been scouring the seafloor with side-scan sonar looking for the mysterious mine tender that the professor said had been modified by Nikola Tesla. Murph and Stone had worked out the search parameters and overlaid it with a grid of shipwrecks in the region. There was good news. Since these waters were so heavily fished, all bottom obstructions, like boulders, outcroppings, and sunken ships, were clearly marked, though rarely identified by name.
That left them with forty possible candidates to explore with their remotely operated vehicle, named Little Geek after a similar-looking ROV from the movie The Abyss. They could safely ignore wooden-hulled ships and natural rock formations by first verifying each target with a magnetometer to detect the presence of metal. Once they did have a steel-hulled wreck, it was a laborious process of lowering the suitcase-sized robot through the moon pool to the bottom and visually inspecting each wreck. Identification was more difficult because many of the vessels were festooned with nets torn off fishing trawlers as they plied the seas. Nets that not only obscured the wrecks but made it easy for an ROV to get trapped.
Juan hit a button on the arm of his command chair. “Cabrillo to Moon Pool. This one’s a bust, Eric. Reel in Little Geek, and we’ll check out target twenty-three.”
“Roger that, Chairman.”
“Helm, as soon as the ROV’s aboard, steer one eight-five at twenty knots.” That was far below the ship’s best speed, but with the waters so busy, it wouldn’t do to show off the Oregon’s true potential. In fact, twenty knots seemed out of reach for a rust-streaked old tramp like her, but that was all part of her elaborate deception. “Next potential target is twenty miles away.”
Juan rubbed his eyes. “I can’t believe Dirk Pitt did this kind of stuff for a living. Talk about boring.”
“Different strokes,” Max replied. “And you and I both know there isn’t a whole lot of boring on that man’s résumé.
“By the way, how is it that the Emir isn’t screaming his head off that we’re not there to protect him?”
“We lucked out. He’s rafting with a Saudi prince and some Mexican telecommunications billionaire, if you can call three mega-yachts lashed together rafting. Linda tells me they’re trying to outdo each other on hosting lavish dinners. She says each of them has had chefs and food flown into Hamilton and choppered out to them. She Googled one of the wines and saw it sold at auction four years ago for ten grand.”
“Per case?”
“Bottle. And the three of them and their nubile guests went through eight of them at dinner.”
Max cocked an eyebrow. “‘Nubile’?”
“My adjective. Linda’s description of them was less kind. I thi
nk she even used the word ‘floozy.’”
Hanley chuckled. “There aren’t too many women who can make her jealous in the looks department.”
“Well, six of them are with her now and she’s not too happy about it. She says we have two more days before they break up their little party and the Emir heads to Bermuda. If we don’t find the wreck by this time tomorrow, we’ll call off the search, nursemaid our esteemed friend on one of the safest islands in the world for two weeks, and then head back here to keep looking.”
“What do you think we’ll find?”
“I have no idea, but if Pytor Kenin is interested, it can’t be good.”
Eric Stone’s voice came over the speakers built into the ceiling. “Little Geek’s back aboard, and the keel doors are closed.”
“Helm,” Cabrillo prompted.
“On it, Chairman.”
Juan flipped the main view screen to the bridge cameras and expanded it so he had an almost panoramic view of the ocean. The seas were choppy and leaden under a gray sky, and in the distance there were dark curtains of rainsqualls. He could see the silhouettes of two ships along the horizon, one heading north and the other south. As the Oregon picked up speed, her ride stabilized, and the constant rolling she’d endured while hovering over the old sunken trawler faded away.
He wolfed down the second taco and gave a sudden gasp. His face reddened, and he began panting.