Vixen 03 (Dirk Pitt 5)

His primary enemy was the water temperature. The icy pressure would drastically affect his concentration and performance. His body heat would soon be drained by the cold, pushing his endurance beyond its borders and into the realm of excessive fatigue.

Visibility was no more than eight feet, but that factor did not hinder him. The marker buoy had missed the sunken plane by mere inches and he had but to extend a hand and touch the metal surface. Pitt had wondered what sensations would course through him.

He was certain fear and apprehension would raise their tentacles. But they did not appear. Instead, he felt a strange sense of accomplishment. It was as though he'd come to the end of a long and exhausting journey.

He swam over the engines, the blades of their propellers gracefully bent backward, like the curled petals of an iris, the finned cylinder heads never to feel the heat of combustion again. He swam past the windows of the cockpit. The glass was still intact but coated with slime, cutting off any view of the interior.

Pitt noted that he had used up nearly two minutes of his bottom time. He quickly kicked around to the shattered opening of the main fuselage, squeezed through, and switched on his dive light.

The first things his eyes distinguished in the somber gloom were large silver canisters. Their tie-down straps had broken in the 16

crash and they lay jumbled about the cargo-cabin floor. Carefully he snaked in and around them and glided through the open door to the control cabin.

There were four skeletons sitting in their assigned seats, held in their grotesque positions by nylon seat belts. The navigator's bony fingers were still clenched; the one at the engineer's panel leaned backward, its skull cocked to one side.

Pitt moved forward, more than a touch of fear and revulsion in his chest. The bubbles from his air regulator cascaded upward and mingled in one corner of the cockpit's ceiling. What made the scene all the more unearthly was the fact that although the flesh of the bodies was gone, the clothes remai

ned. The icy-cold water had held back the rotting process over the decades, and the crew sat as properly uniformed as at the instant they had all died.

The copilot sat stiffly upright, his jaws open in what Pitt imagined to be a ghostly scream. The pilot drooped forward, his head almost touching the instrument panel. A small metal plate protruded from his breast pocket, and Pitt gently retrieved it, pushing the small rectangle up one of the sleeves of his wet suit. A vinyl folder hung from a pocket next to the pilot's seat, and Pitt took that also.

A glance at his watch told him his time was up. He didn't need an engraved invitation to head for the surface and the friendly rays of the sun. The cold was beginning to seep into his blood and mist his mind. He could have sworn the skeletons had all turned and were staring at him through the empty sockets of their skulls.

He hurriedly backed out of the cockpit and turned around when space permitted in the cargo cabin. It was then he spied a skeletal foot behind one of the canisters. The body that belonged to the foot was secured by straps to several of the cargo tie-down rings.

Unlike the remains of the crew forward, this one still had remnants of flesh adhering to its bones.

Pitt fought the bile rising in his throat and studied more closely what was once a living, breathing man. The uniform was not Air Force blue but rather a khaki similar to the old Army issue. He went through the pockets, but they were bare.

An alarm began to go off in his head. His arms and legs were losing all feeling and turning stiff from the relentless cold, and his movements came as though he were immersed in syrup. If he did not get some warmth to his body soon, the ancient aircraft would claim another victim. His mind was fogged and for a brief moment he felt the sharp knife of panic as he became confused and lost his sense of direction. Then he spotted his air bubbles, trailing from the cargo cabin and ascending toward the surface.

With great relief he turned from the skeleton and followed the bubbles into open water. Ten feet from the surface he could see the bottom of the boat as it wavered in the refracted light like an object in a surrealistic film. He could even make out Giordino's seemingly disembodied head peering over one side.

He barely had the strength to reach out and grasp an oar. The combined muscles of Giordino and Steiger then hoisted him into the boat as effortlessly as if he were a small child.

"Help me get this wet suit off him," Giordino ordered.

"My God, he's turned blue."

"Another five minutes down there and he would have entered hypothermia."

"Hypothermia?" asked Steiger, stripping off Pitt's jacket.

"Profound body-heat loss," explained Giordino. "I've known divers who died from it."

"I am not . . . repeat . . . am not ready for a coroner's slab," Pitt managed between shivers.

The wet suit was peeled off and they rubbed Pitt vigorously with towels and wrapped him in heavy wool blankets. The feeling slowly came back to his limbs and the warm sun added to his sensual comfort by penetrating his skin. He sipped hot coffee from a Thermos jug, knowing its rejuvenating benefits were more psychological than physiological.

"You were a fool," Giordino said, more out of concern than anger. "You damned near killed yourself by staying down too long.

The water must be near freezing at that depth."

"What did you find down there?" Steiger asked anxiously.

Pitt sat up, pushing the last of the fog from his head. "A folder. I had a folder."

Giordino held it up. "You still do. It was clutched in your left hand like a vise."