He had kept his helmet headlamps off for the descent, knowing that the beam from the thousand-lumen bulbs would cut through the gloom but also reflect off suspended particles in the water, potentially dazzling him. He wanted to accustom himself to the low light before reaching the wreck, and then only use the beam for close-up work. He checked his depth readout again: ninety meters. The gloom was enveloping him, but below it he began to sense something darker, the mottled shapes of rocky outcrops on the sea floor. Below him and just off to the right he saw the flashing red of a strobe. He felt a huge wave of relief course through him. It was a beacon, a waymarker. It showed that Costas had reached the seabed safely. Then he saw another light, a distant smudge perhaps twenty meters beyond the strobe, along the line of the drop-off where the continental shelf abruptly ended and the seabed angled into the abyss.
And then he saw the wreck. For a moment it took his breath away. The vast bulk of the ship loomed below him, its funnel gone and the superstructure a mass of twisted metal but still recognizable as a merchantman of its era. Beyond it he could see the inky blackness of the water above the drop-off, and on the other side the level plateau of the continental shelf at 120 meters’ depth. The ship had come to rest along the very rim of the shelf, upright but split in two places where the hull had impacted with ridges on the sea floor. The strobe light had been placed below the bow; the smudge of white came from one of the breaks further back in the hull. Jack sank down toward the strobe, passing the intact four-inch gun still in its mount on the forecastle, its ammunition box open and ready for use. Seconds later he came to a halt just above the flashing red beacon, seeing that Costas had jammed it into a crack in the rock in front of the 200-lb lead weight from Deep Explorer that anchored the shot line.
He kept hold of the line and let himself float with the current for a moment, taking stock of his situation. He was 124 meters deep, on the rim of the continental shelf. To his right he could see a jagged seascape of rocks extending east, a plateau that would eventually reach the African coast. To his left was the yawning chasm of the drop-off, no more than twenty meters away. The wreck was blocking the current, a south-trending flow that might exceed four or five knots in the open water beyond the drop-off, too strong to swim against. To stray out there might be to take a roller-coaster ride to oblivion, with the current sweeping down the side of the canyon and taking anyone with it to an abyssal depth before ejecting them far away, beyond the drop-off. He steeled himself, breathing rhythmically, focusing on the task at hand. He was going to have to be careful.
He switched on his headlamps and looked around. The world of gloom and shadows, a place where nothing seemed alive, had suddenly transformed into one of vivid colors and marine growth. It was too deep for most corals, but the rock was covered with living accretion and the water was filled with diaphanous organisms that reflected the light: plankton and diatoms and miniature nudibranchs. He blinked hard, adjusting to the particulate reflection, and then looked up, the two beams of his headlamp converging on the side of the hull above him. The iron was covered with rusticules, extrusions of ferrous material that seemed to drip off the hull like stalactites, with little trails of red streaming from them into the current as if the ship were bleeding. He could now see that the solidity of the wreck as it had first appeared in the gloom was an illusion — that after more than seventy years on the seabed, exposed to a powerful current, the hull plates were thin and friable, not far from crumbling entirely. The force of the current bearing on the hull meant that when the structure gave way, it was likely to be catastrophic, causing large parts to break away and be swept into the abyss. This was not a wreck that Jack would normally wish to penetrate, and the sooner they got out of here the better.
Then he saw the lettering below the port rail some ten meters above him, a few meters back from the gun mounting. It read: Clan Macpherson. It was what Jack had wanted to see, the proof that he needed. He checked his readout, making sure that the video camera on the front of his helmet was running. Those letters had probably been the only surviving remnant of her peacetime livery, as if in defiance of the gray uniformity that war had imposed on all ships. The sight of them, nearly clear of corrosion, gave him a strange sense of clairvoyance, allowing him to see for a moment the rusting hulk transformed into the ship as she originally had been. He thought of the men who had crewed her, of those who had gone down with the ship, who were still here now. More than ever he felt that the wreck was a place of sanctity, as deserving of respect as the thousands of other ships that had taken men down with them in the two world wars, whose remains were strewn across the ocean floor.
He angled his head so that his beam panned over the seabed. He could see a thin white line extending from the strobe along the port side of the wreck, the side in the lee of the current facing away from the drop-off. He reached down and gave it a tug. He guessed that it extended to where he had seen the smudge of light partway along the hull, somewhere in the green-black haze ahead.
Suddenly his intercom crackled. “Jack, are you there? Over.”
Jack felt another rush of relief. “I’m at the bow, over. The manifold glitch recurred and I had to wait on the surface for the computer to fix it. What’s the story with the comms?”
“A few moments ago I realized that the problem wasn’t with our intercom but with the diver-to-ship link. I shut that off, and hey presto.”
“So Deep Explorer can’t hear us.”
“Just you and me. Like it should be.”
“You were on your own. I was worried.”
“You won’t believe what I’ve found.”
“I saw the ship’s name.”
“It’s incredible,” Costas said. “The coordinates in the official report were dead on. Captain Gough fixed the position of the sinking with almost pinpoint accuracy, after having been torpedoed and from an open boat.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Jack said. “Back then they were still taught navigation in the same way as Nelson’s officers, using dead reckoning with a sextant and chronometer. The best captains had a sixth sense for it, and Gough was obviously one of those. So what have you found? And where the hell are you?”
“Jack, I need you to do something for me. I need you very carefully to look round the starboard side and see how much of the wreck is actually hanging over the edge.”
Jack looked to his left beyond the bow over the drop-off, seeing the particulate matter at the furthest extent of his beam rush by at an alarming speed, like a snowstorm caught in a car’s headlights. He finned a few strokes past the bow, feeling the edge of the current stream against his body, and peered over. In his experience, most drop-offs were not absolutely sheer, but this one was. The rock at the edge formed a jagged precipice over a darkness as forbidding as he had ever seen. To his right, Clan Macpherson’s bow rose high above him, and he could now see the starboard side of the hull hanging over the void. “Just out of curiosity, how stable is the geology?” he asked.
Costas’s reply crackled through. “The bedrock’s metamorphic, pretty friable. This cliff edge is like a snow cornice on the top of a mountain ridge. Not where I’d choose to park a ship carrying eight thousand tons of cargo.”
“You don’t want to see what I can see. From here, the hull looks as if it’s barely balanced on the edge.”