Valhalla Rising (18 page)

Burch aimed a finger at the screen. “Al’s right. We’re only seeing part of her. Here comes another piece.”

Pitt studied the images on the screen thoughtfully. “She broke up, either on the way down or on impact when she struck bottom.”

A large section of what Burch identified as the stern crept across the screen. A vast debris field between the fragments of the wreck revealed hundreds of unidentifiable objects large and small, scattered as if hurled by a passing tornado.

Giordino made a quick sketch of the images on a notepad. “It appears to be broken in three pieces.”

Pitt studied Giordino’s sketches and compared them with images on the sonar screen. “They rest about a quarter of a mile from one another.”

Burch said, “Because of the ship’s weakened internal structure from the fire damage, she probably disintegrated on the way down.”

“Not unheard of,” said one of the scientific team. “The
Titanic
broke in half as she sank.”

“But she pitched downward at an extreme angle,” Burch clarified. “I talked to the tugboat captain who had the
Dolphin
under tow when she sank. He claimed that she plunged under rapidly on a very shallow angle of not more than fifteen degrees. The
Titanic
dove at a forty-five-degree angle.”

Giordino stared through the forward window at the sea ahead. “The most logical scenario is that she sank intact and shattered when she struck bottom. Her speed was probably somewhere between thirty and forty miles an hour.”

Pitt shook his head. “If that were the case, the wreckage would be more concentrated. As we can see, she’s spread all over the landscape.”

“Then what caused her to break up on the way down?” Burch asked no one in particular.

“With luck,” Pitt said slowly, “we’ll find the answers when and if
Sea Sleuth
lives up to her name.”

A
dazzling orange sun rose across the flat blue horizon in the east as the
Sea Sleuth
hung under a new crane that had replaced the one dumped overboard during the rescue. It had been installed at the shipyard, and the crew had finished connecting the winch and its cable only hours earlier. Anticipation reigned as the oblong AUV was swung over the stern. The sea was fairly smooth, with waves running no more than three feet.

The ship’s second officer directed the launch, and signaled to the crewman operating the winch when the vehicle was free of the stern. Then he waved an all-clear, and
Sea Sleuth
was lowered until just above the surface. One final check of her electronic systems, and then she was slowly dropped into the blue Pacific. As soon as she was afloat, a switch was activated, the electronic snap released and the lifting cable came free.

Inside the command center, Giordino sat in front of a console with a series of knobs and switches mounted around a joystick. He would pilot the
Sea Sleuth
during its journey into the abyss. As one of the team who’d written the probe’s computer software, he was also the chief engineer in charge of its production. Few men knew more about the eccentricities of piloting an AUV four and half miles deep under the ocean than Giordino. As he glanced at the monitor that showed the AUV floating free of the ship in the water, he activated the valves of the buoyancy tank and watched as she descended beneath the waves and disappeared.

Next to him, Pitt sat at the keyboard, entering a series of commands into the computer on board the AUV. While Giordino controlled the vehicle’s propulsion and attitude systems, Pitt operated the cameras and lighting systems. In back of them and to their side, Misty Graham sat at a table studying a copy of the
Emerald Dolphin’s
construction plans that had been flown in from the architects. All other eyes were locked on the array of monitors that would relay images of what
Sea Sleuth
recorded in the depths.

Misty was a petite woman, full of fire and vinegar. Her black hair cropped short for easy maintenance on board ship, she might have looked boyish if she didn’t have well-defined construction. With light brown eyes under a pert little nose and soft lips, Misty had never been married. A dedicated scientist and one of the best marine biologists with NUMA, she spent far more time at sea than she did in her condominium in Washington and seldom had time to date.

She looked up from the chart and spoke to Burch. “If she’s caved in on herself,
Sea Sleuth
won’t have an easy time finding anything of interest.”

“We won’t know till we get there,” he said slowly.

As with other underwater search projects, conversation filled the compartment. Now that the probe was under way, the three and a half hours it would take for the AUV to reach the bottom were simply a dreary routine. There was little to see unless one of the strange species of fish that lived in the deep oceans happened to pass in front of a camera lens.

It is generally thought by the public that underwater searches are exciting. The truth is, they are downright dull. Many hours are spent waiting for something to happen, or what is known in the trade as “an event.” Yet everyone remains in optimistic anticipation for an anomaly to reveal itself on the sonar or camera monitors.

All too often the searchers fail to find anything. Still, the vision returned from the deep had a hypnotic effect, and the crew and scientists could never tear their eyes from the monitors. Fortunately, in this case, the whereabouts of the shipwreck, after its four-mile fall to the bottom as recorded by the tugboat’s Global Positioning System, was accurately targeted within an area the size of a football stadium.

The progress of the
Sea Sleuth
was displayed on the guidance monitor with digital readings of direction and altitude on the bottom of the screen. Once the vehicle reached the bottom, Giordino had only to send her directly to the wreckage without the bother of a time-consuming search operation.

He read out the digital numbers relayed by the probe’s altimeter. “Two thousand, five hundred feet.”

He reported the depth readings every ten minutes as the
Sleuth
descended into the black void far beneath the keel of the survey ship. Finally, after two and a half hours, the sensors began to transmit a rapidly narrowing gap with the bottom.

“The bottom is at five hundred feet and rising.”

“Turning on lower lights,” Pitt responded.

Giordino slowed the descent rate of the
Sleuth
to two feet every second in the event she came down directly on top of the wreck. The last thing they needed was for it to become trapped in the twisted debris, and lost. Soon the drab silt of the sea floor came into view on the monitors. Giordino stopped the probe’s descent, hovering it at 100 feet.

“What’s the depth?” asked Burch.

“Nineteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty,” Giordino answered. “Visibility is extremely good. Almost two hundred feet.”

Now Giordino took over actual control of the
Sea Sleuth,
staring at the monitors and operating the knobs and joystick as if he were flying an aircraft in a flight simulator computer game. The bottom passed beneath in what seemed like agonizing slowness. Because of the extreme water pressure, the
Sleuth’s
thrusters could only move her forward at slightly better than one knot.

Pitt pecked away at the keyboard of his computer, sending commands down to the computer on board
Sea Sleuth
to adjust and focus the cameras mounted on the bow and keel for viewing ahead and directly below. To his left, Burch sat at his guidance console, checking the AUV’s position and keeping the
Deep Encounter
positioned directly above the wreck.

“Which way?” Giordino asked Burch.

“Move on a heading of eighteen degrees. You should run into her hull in another four hundred feet.”

Giordino set the
Sleuth
on the course indicated. Ten minutes later, a phantom shape loomed ahead. The dark mass spread and rose beyond view of the monitors. “Target dead ahead,” he called out.

Gradually, features of the wreck became distinguishable. They came on slightly off the starboard bow near the anchor. Unlike earlier passenger ships, the modern cruise ship’s anchors were nestled farther back from the bow and not as far above the waterline.

Pitt switched on the powerful forward lights that cut through the gloom and illuminated most of the bow section. “Cameras in motion, and rolling tape.”

Unlike other shipwreck discoveries, this one was not greeted with cheers and laughter. Everyone was as silent as if they were looking down at a coffin in a grave. Then, as though drawn and tightened by a giant rubber band, they moved closely around the monitors. They could see now that the
Emerald Dolphin
was not sitting entirely upright. She rested in the silt on a twenty-five-degree angle, exposing her lower hull almost to the keel.

Giordino eased the
Sea Sleuth
along the hull, watching for any obstructions the vehicle might encounter that could cause her to become caught and trapped. His calculated cautiousness paid off. He stopped the AUV ten feet away from a massive opening in the hull, the plates contoured into jagged unrecognizable shapes.

“Zoom in for a closer look,” he said to Pitt.

The command was entered and the camera lenses aimed at the shattered hole from different perspectives. Meanwhile, Giordino maneuvered the probe so that its bow faced the mangled destruction head-on.

“Hold station,” Pitt instructed him. “This looks interesting.”

“That wasn’t caused by the fire,” said one of the ship’s crew.

“The wreckage is blown from the inside out,” observed Pitt.

Burch rubbed his eyes and gazed at the monitors. “A fuel tank explosion maybe?”

Pitt shook his head. “The magnetohydrodynamic engines did not run on flammable fossil fuel.” He turned to Giordino. “Al, take us along the hull until we reach where it broke off from the amidships section.”

Giordino did as he was instructed and jockeyed the joystick, moving the
Sea Sleuth
on a parallel path with the hull. In another two hundred feet, they came on a second, even larger, hole. This one also indicated an interior blast that had ripped the hull plates outward.

“The section inside the hole is where the air-conditioning equipment was housed,” Misty informed them. She examined the deck plans closely. “I see nothing here that would cause such damage.”

“Nor I,” Pitt agreed.

Giordino steered
Sea Sleuth
upward slightly until the boat deck came into view. Several of the burned lifeboats had been torn out of their davits during the plunge to the bottom. The rest that remained with the ship were burned and melted beyond description. It didn’t seem possible that the most technically advanced ship on the seas could have had all her boats rendered useless in so short a time.

The AUV then passed around the devastated part of the hull that had broken away from the rest of the ship. Pipes, twisted beams, shattered deck plating spread from the aft end like the remains of a burned-out oil refinery. It looked as though the
Emerald Dolphin
had been wrenched apart by some gargantuan force.

The amidships section was totally unrecognizable as part of a ship. It was nothing but a huge pile of blackened, twisted rubble. The abhorrent sight was left behind as the AUV passed over the bleak ocean landscape again.

“What course to the stern section?” Giordino asked Burch.

The captain examined the digital numbers on the bottom of his guidance monitor. “You should find it three hundred yards on a ninety-degree course west.”

“Turning ninety degrees west,” Giordino echoed.

Here, the bottom was littered with all kinds of debris, most of it burned beyond recognition. Only scattered heaps of ceramic seemed to have survived. Dishes, bowls and cups, many still in stacks unfolded in the silt like a deck of cards spread across a gray felt table. To the observers in the command center, it seemed macabre that objects so fragile had endured the terrible fire and a drop of almost twenty thousand feet into the abyss without being shattered into thousands of shards.

“Stern coming up,” Giordino alerted them, as the debris field was left in the wake of the thrusters, and the final section of the sunken ship began to materialize under the AUV’s penetrating lights. Now the horrible nightmare truly came home, as the men and women who had worked so courageously to rescue the passengers and crew from the burning wreck found themselves staring once again at the stern decks where survivors had abandoned the ship down the ropes or jumped into the sea before they were taken aboard the
Deep Encounter.

“I never thought I’d have to look at that again,” murmured one of the women.

“It’s not something easily forgotten,” said Pitt. “Come around to the forward section where it separated from amidships.”

“Coming around.”

“Descend down to five feet above the silt. I want to get a look at her keel.”

The
Sea Sleuth
followed Giordino’s commands and crawled around the bottom of the stern that sat nearly upright. Very cautiously, inching over and around debris, Giordino stopped the vehicle and hovered it at a point where the ship’s stern section was ripped open. The massive steel keel was free of the silt. They could all plainly see that it was warped and curled downward where it had been torn in half.

“Only explosives could have done that,” Pitt commented.

“It’s beginning to look like her bottom was blasted out,” said Giordino. “Her internal structure, weakened by the fire and the blast, broke apart from the increasing water pressure during her fall to the bottom.”

“That would explain her abrupt sinking,” added Burch. “According to the tugboat captain, she went down so fast she almost took his boat with it.”

“Which leads to the conclusion that someone had a motive for setting the ship afire and then sinking her in the deepest part of the ocean so her wreckage couldn’t be examined.”

“A sound theory,” said Jim Jakubek, the team’s hydrographer. “But where is the hard evidence? How can it be proven in court?”