"I think we might have to head back earlier than planned today. We seem to have not one, but two rather nasty weather fronts, both of them heading our way and fast." The monsignor looked at Reilly uncertainly, then arched an eyebrow. "Sound familiar?"
Reilly had already made the association before De Angelis had mentioned it. It was uncomfortably close to what Aimard had described in his letter. He noticed that Plunkett, who was out smoking a cigarette on deck, was eyeing the gathering storm with some concern. Turning to the cockpit, he saw that the two officers he'd been watching were now intent on a batch of dials and monitors. This and their frequent glances toward the converging banks of dark clouds told Reilly that the storms were making both men uneasy. Just then, the radar operator called out to the skipper and uttered something in Turkish. Karakas stepped over to the console, as did De Angelis. Reilly tore his eyes away from the storm front and joined them.
According to the skipper's clipped translation, the radar operator was walking them through a chart onto which he had plotted the movements of some vessels he had been tracking. He was particularly interested in one of the ships, which had a curious navigation pattern. It had spent a noticeable time sailing up and down a narrow corridor of sea. This, in itself, wasn't unusual. It could easily be a fishing boat trawling an area favored by its captain. Several other blips behaved in the exact same way. But the radar operator noted that, whereas over the last couple of days a contact, which he believed could well be the same ship, would spend a couple of hours navigating up and down this particular patch of sea before heading off and trawling elsewhere, the vessel he was now watching had been stationary for the last two hours. Furthermore, of the four vessels in the area, three were now moving out, presumably because they'd spotted die approaching storms. The fourth—the contact in question— wasn't budging.
Reilly leaned in for a closer look. He could see that the three other contacts on the screen had indeed altered course. Two of them were heading for the Turkish mainland, the third toward the Greek island of Rhodes.
De Angelis's brow furrowed as he absorbed the information. "It's them," he said with chilling assurance as Plunkett came indoors. "And if they're not moving, it's because they've found what they're looking for." He turned to Karakas, his eyes hardening. "How far are they?
Karakas scanned the screen with expert eyes. "About forty nautical miles. In this sea, I'd say two—two and a half hours away, maybe. But it's going to get worse. We might have to turn back before we get to them. The barometer readings are falling very quickly, I've never seen anything like it."
De Angelis didn't miss a beat. "I don't care. Send in a chopper to have a closer look and get us over there as fast as you can."
Chapter 74
The camera glided through the forbidding darkness, past streaming galaxies of plankton that lit up the screen before quickly sailing out of the glare of its spotlight.
The images from the ROV unfurled before a breathless audience in the control room of the Savanna, a cramped space situated behind the vessel's bridge. Vance and Tess were standing, leaning over the shoulders of Rassoulis and two technicians who were seated before a small bank of monitors. To the left of the monitor showing the images from Don's camera, a smaller GPS positioning monitor displayed the current location of the ship as it circled and doubled back on its course, trying to hold its position against a surprisingly strong current. A smaller screen on the right showed a computerized representation of the sonar scan, a big circle with concentric bands of blue, green, and yellow; another, a pixeled compass, showed their heading as just off due south. But no one was giving those monitors more than a fleeting, occasional glance. Their eyes were all riveted onto the central monitor, the one showing the images from the ROV's camera. They watched in rapt silence as the bottom came rushing up, the pixeled reading in the corner of the screen quickly closing in on the 173 meters that the depth sounder of the mother ship was showing.
At 168 meters, the starry flecks grew thicker. At 171 meters, a couple of jerking crayfish scurried out of the light, and then, at 173 meters, the screen was suddenly flooded by a silent burst of yellow light. The ROV had landed.
Dorr's highly protective guardian, a Corsican engineer by the name of Pierre Attal, was locked in concentration as he used a joystick and a small keyboard to manipulate his robotic ward. He reached for a small trackball at the edge of the keyboard and, responding to his fingers' orders, the camera rotated on itself, panning across the seabed. Like the images from a Mars probe, the pictures showed an eerie, inviolate world. All around the robotic visitor was nothing but a flat expanse of sand that disappeared into a stygian darkness.
Tess's skin was tingling with guarded anticipation. She couldn't help but feel excited, although she knew they weren't necessarily there yet, not by any means. The low-frequency, side-scan sonar only provided the rough position of any promising target; the ROV then had to be deployed, its high-frequency sonar allowing the eventual pinpointing and examination of those sites. She knew the ocean floor underneath the Savarona dropped as deep as 250 meters in places and was covered with scattered coral reefs, many the size they'd expect the Falcon Temple to be. The sonar scans weren't enough to distinguish the wreck from these natural mounds, which was where the magnetometers came into play. Their readings would help detect the wreck's residual iron, and, although they were carefully calibrated—Rassoulis and his team had calculated that after seven hundred years of saltwater corrosion, there would be, at most, a thousand pounds of iron left in the Falcon Temple's remains—they still carried the risk of triggering false alarms due to natural pockets of geomagnetism or, more commonly, from more recent wrecks.
She watched as the procedure she had witnessed twice in recent days unfurled again. Using the most minute of tugs on the joystick, Attal con-fidentiy guided the ROV across the seafloor. Every minute or so, he would set it down in another cloudburst of sand. He would then hit a button that would cause its pinger to initiate a 360-degree sweep of its immediate surroundings. The team would carefully study the resulting scan before Attal would be back at the controls, firing the small robot's hydraulic thrusters and propelling it forward on its silent quest.
Attal had repeated the exercise over half a dozen times before an inchoate patch appeared in the corner of the screen. Guiding the ROV to the spot, he initiated another sonar scan. The screen took a couple of seconds to record the results before Tess saw the patch coalesce into an oblong pinkish shape, beckoning to her from its blue surroundings.
Tess glanced at Vance, who met her eyes calmly.
Without looking up at them, Rassoulis said to Attal, "Let's get a closer look."
The ROV was on the move again, skimming the bottom of the seafloor like an undersea hovercraft as Attal guided it expertly to its target. At the next ping, the pink shape grew more distinct along its edges.
"What do you think?" Vance asked.
Rassouhs glanced up at Vance and at Tess. "The magnetometer reading's a bit high, but ..." He pointed a finger at the image on the scan. "You see how it's squared off at this end and pinched in over here at the other end?" He raised a hopeful eyebrow. "It doesn't look like a rock to me."
The room fell silent as the ROV moved in. Tess's eyes were locked on the screen as the camera floated over a cloud of sea plants that swayed almost imperceptibly in the desolate waters. As it dropped back down and hugged the sand again, Tess felt her pulse quicken. At the edge of the ROV's beam, something was coming into view. Its edges were too angular, its curves too regular. It looked man-made.