The vessel was at the edge of the gyre, its stern protruding into thin air from the ridge of foam. The ship disappeared after a moment. Seconds later, it returned to view, only to disappear again.
The Trouts forgot about their own misfortune. From the ship's peekaboo performance, it was apparent that the Franklinhad been caught in the swirling currents generated by the vortex and was being drawn into the funnel.
The ship oscillated back and forth in a deadly game of tug-of-war as the propellers came out of the water and the vessel lost way. The ship would tilt, the propellers would catch and the vessel would rise up and over again in a bucksaw motion that went on for several minutes. Then the entire length of the vessel was drawn over the lip and into the cauldron. The ship's bow was higher than the stern. It hung there as if stuck by glue.
"Go, baby, go … !" Trout yelled.
Gamay gave him a quick glance, even smiling briefly at the unusual display of emotion, before she, too, joined in the cheering.
The smooth water behind the ship boiled as if someone had turned the burner on high. The engines were doing their work. The propellers biting into the slanting sides of the funnel, the ship inched its way painfully toward the rim again, settled back, shot upward at an angle, was buried by the foam, then gave a mighty surge that carried it over the lip.
This time, the ship disappeared for good. The Trouts cheered, but their celebration was tempered by their own sense of loneliness and impotence against an unstoppable force of nature.
"Any ideas about how weget out of here?" Gamay shouted.
"Maybe the whirlpool will end on its own."
Gamay glanced down. In the few minutes they had watched the ship struggle, the boat had dropped at least another twenty feet.
"I don't think so."
The water had lost its India ink cast, and the slick black sides had picked up a brownish tinge from the mud being scooped up from the bottom. Hundreds of dead or dying fish whirled in a great circle like confetti caught in a windstorm. The damp air was thick with the smell of brine, fish and bottom muck.
"Look at the debris," Paul said. "It's rising from the bottom."
Wreckage was being churned up from the floor of the sea in the same way a tornado picks up objects and lifts them in the air. There were splintered wooden cartons, plywood, hatch covers, scraps of ventilators, even a damaged lifeboat. Much of the material sank back into the vortex, where it was regurgitated and destroyed with the same effect as if it were at the bottom of Niagara Falls.
Gamay noticed that some pieces, mostly small, were heading up toward the rim. "What if we jump into the water?" she said. "Maybe we'd be light enough to rise to the top like that stuff."
"No guarantee we'd ascend. More likely, we'd get sucked farther into the whirlpool, to be ground up like hamburger. Remember that the first rule of the sea is to stick with your boat-if possible."
"Maybe that's not such a great idea. We've dropped lower."
It was true. The boat had slipped farther into the whirlpool.
A cylindrical object was working its way up the side of the whirlpool. Then several more followed.
"What's that?" Trout said.
Gamay wiped away the moisture from her eyes and looked again, at a point twenty feet ahead and slightly below the Zodiac. Before becoming a marine biologist, she had been a nautical archaeologist, and immediately recognized the tapered ceramic forms with their greenish gray painted surfaces.
"They're amphorae," she said. "And they're moving upward."
Trout read his wife's mind. "We'll only have one chance to go for it."
"Our weight may change the dynamics, and there will only be one chance to go for it.
"Do we have a choice?"
The three ancient wine vessels were maddeningly close. Trout pulled himself up to the steering console and pressed the starter button. The engine caught. The boat moved ahead at its crazy angle, and he had to compensate with its tendency to fishtail by creative handling of the wheel. He wanted to get above the amphorae to block their way.
The first amphora in the group started to drift across the bow. In another second, it would be out of reach. Trout gunned the motor, and the boat passed just above the moving object.
"Get ready," Trout yelled. The leap would have to be perfectly timed. "It will be slippery, and it's going to roll. Make sure you grab on to the handles and wrap your arms and legs around it."
Gamay nodded and climbed onto the bow. "What about you?" she said.
"I'll catch a ride on the next one."
"It's going to be hard to keep the boat steady." She knew that without someone to keep the boat under control, Trout's leap would be even more hazardous.
"I'll figure it out."
"Like hell, you will. I'm not going."
Damned stubborn woman. "This is your only chance. Someone's got to finish that damned wallpapering. Please."
Gamay gave him a hard stare, then shook her head and crawled farther out onto the bow. She bunched her legs under her and was preparing to make the leap.
"Stop!" Trout shouted.
She turned and glared at him. "Make up your mind."
Trout had seen what Gamay hadn't. The whirlpool's glassy sides above them were clear of debris. The wreckage that had been kicked up by the churning seemed to have reached an invisible barrier beyond which it failed to rise. The debris was moving back down into the funnel as quickly as it had risen.
"Look," he yelled. "That sea trash is being pulled down again."
It took Gamay only a few seconds to see that he was right. The amphorae were as high as they were going to go. Trout stretched his hand out and pulled her back into the boat. They held on to the safety lines, unable to do anything more than watch helplessly as their boat descended farther into the abyss.
9
The spherical figure on the computer screen reminded Austin of the membrane, cytoplasm and nucleus of a malignant cell.
He turned to Adler. "What exactly are we dealing with here, Professor?"
The scientist scratched his shaggy head. "Hell, Kurt, you got me. This disturbance is growing by the second, and it's moving in a circle at thirty knots. I've never seen anything like it, in size or speed."
"Neither have I," Austin said. "I've run into rough swirling currents that gave me sweaty palms. They were comparatively small and short-lived. This seems more like something out of Edgar Allan Poe or Jules Verne."
"The vortex in Descent into the Maelstromand Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seaare largely literary inventions. Poe and Verne were inspired by the Moskstraumen maelstrom off Norway's Lofoten Islands. The Greek historian Pytheas described it more than two thousand years ago as swallowing ships and throwing them up again. The Swedish bishop Olaus Magnus wrote in the 1500s that it was stronger than Charybdis from The Odysseyand that the maelstrom smashed ships against the bottom of the sea and sucked in screaming whales."
"That's the stuff of fiction. What about reality?"
"Far less frightening. The Norwegian whirlpool has been scientifically measured, and it isn't even close to the violent cauldron described in literature. Three other significant whirlpools, Corryvreckan, Scotland, Saltstraumen, also off Norway, and Naruto, near Japan, are far less powerful." He shook his head. "Odd to see any whirlpool action on the open sea."