No compass, no landmarks to give them a direction. Hala Kamil and her U.N. bedfellows will vanish in the cold waters of the Arctic sea."
"Is there no hope for survival?" asked Ismad. "None," said Ammar firmly.
"Absolutely none."
Dirk Pitt relaxed and slouched in a swivel chair, stretching out his legs until his six-foot-three-inch body was on a near horizontal plane.
Then he yawned and ran his hands through a thick mat of wavy black hair.
Pitt was a lean, firm-muscled man in prime physical shape for someone who didn't run ten miles every day or look upon the exertion and sweat of bodybuilding as a celestial tonic against old age. His face wore the tanned, weathered skin of an outdoorsman who preferred the sun to the fluorescent lighting of an office. His deep green, opaque eyes radiated a strange combination of warmth and cruelty while his lips seemed eternally locked in a friendly grin.
He was a smooth article who moved easily among the rich and powerful, but preferred the company of men and women who drank their liquor straight up and liked to get their hands dirty.
A product of the Air Force Academy, he was listed on active status with the rank of Major, although he had been on loan to the National Underwater & Marine Agency (NUMA) for nearly six years as their Special Projects Director, Along with Al Giordino, his closest friend since childhood, he had lived and adventured in every sea, on the surface and in the depths, encountering in half a decade more wild experiences than most men would see in ten lifetimes. He had found the vanished Manhattan Limited express train after swimming through an underground cavern in New York, salvaged a few passengers before being sent to the bottom of the Saint Lawrence River with a thousand souls. He had hunted down the lost nuclear submarine Starbuck in the middle of the Pacific and tracked the ghost ship Cyclops to her grave under the Caribbean. And he raised the Titanic.
He was, Giordino often mused, a man driven to rediscover the past, born eighty years too late.
"You might want to see this," Giordino said suddenly from the other side of the room.
Pitt turned from a color video monitor that displayed a view of the seascape one hundred meters beneath the hull of the icebreaker survey ship Polar Explorer. She was a sturdy new vessel especially built for sailing through ice-covered waters. The massive boxlike superstructure towering above the hull resembled a five-story office building, and her great bow, pushed by 80,000-horsepower engines, could pound a path through ice up to one-and-a-half meters thick.
Pitt placed one foot against a counter, flexed his knee and pushed. The motion was honed through weeks of practice and with the gentle roll of the ship for momentum. He twisted 180 degrees in his swivel chair as its castors carried him some meters across the slanting deck of the electronics compartment.
"Looks like a crater coming up."
Al Giordino sat at a console studying an image on the Klein sidescan sonar recorder. Short, standing a little over 162 centimeters in stockinged size-eleven feet, broadened with beefy shoulders in the shape of a wedge, he looked as if he were assembled out of spare bulldozer parts. His hair was dark and curly, an inheritance from Italian ancestry, and if he had worn a bandanna and an earring he could have moonlighted as an organ-grinder. Dry-humored, steadfast and reliable as the tides, Giordino was Pitts insurance policy against Murphy's Law.
His concentration never flickered while Pitt, feet extended as bumpers, came to an abrupt stop against the console beside him.
Pitt watched the computer-enhanced sonograph as the ridge of a crater slowly rose to a crest and then made a steep descent into the interior void.
"She's dropping fast," said Giordino.
Pitt glanced at the echo sounder. "Down from 140 to 180 meters. "
"Hardly any slope to the outer rim."
"Two hundred and still falling."
"Weird formation for a volcano," said Giordino. "No sign of lava rock."
A tall, florid-faced man with thick graying brown hair that struggled to escape from a baseball cap tilted toward the back of his head, opened the door and leaned in the compartment.
"You night owls in the mood for food or drink?"
"Peanut-butter sandwich and a cup of black coffee sounds good," Pitt replied without turning. "Leveling out at 220 meters. "
"A couple of doughnuts with milk," Giordino answered.
Navy Commander Byron Knight, skipper of the survey vessel, nodded.
Besides Pitt and Giordino, he was the only man with access to the electronics compartment. It was off limits to the rest of the officers and crew.
"I'll have your orders rustled up from the galley."
"You're a wonderful human being, Byron," Pitt said with a sarcastic smile. "I don't care what the rest of the navy says about you."
"You ever try Peanut butter with arsenic?" Knight threw at him over his shoulder.
Giordino watched intently as the arc of the formation spread and widened. "Diameter almost two kilometers."
"Interior is smooth sediment," said Pitt. "No breakup of the floor."
"Must have been one gigantic volcano."
"Not a volcano."
Giordino faced Pitt, a curious look in his eyes. "You have another name for a submerged pockmark?"
"How about meteor impact?"
Giordino looked skeptical. "A meteor crater this deep on the sea bottom?"
"Probably struck thousands, maybe millions of years ago, at a time when the sea level was lower."
"What led you up that street?"
"Three clues," Pitt explained. "First, we have a well defined rim without a prominent outer upsiope. Second, the subbottom profiler indicates a bowl-shaped cross section. And third" he paused, pointing at a stylus that was making furious sweeps across a roll of graph paper.
"The magnetometer is having a spasm. There's enough iron down there to build a fleet of battleships."
Suddenly Giordino stiffened. "We have a target!"
"Where?"
"Two hundred meters to starboard, lying perpendicular on the crater's slope. Pretty vague reading. The object is partly obscured by the geology."
Pitt snatched the phone and rang the bridge. "We've had a malfunction in the equipment. Continue our heading to the end of the run. If we can make the repair in time, come around and repeat the track."
"Will do, sir," replied the watch officer.
"You should have sold snake oil," said Giordino, smiling.
"No telling the size of Soviet ears."
"Anything from the video cameras?"
Pitt glanced at the monitors. "Just out of range. They should pick it up on the next pass."
The initial sonar image that appeared on the recording paper looked like a brown smudge against the lighter geology of the crater's wall. Then it slipped past the sidescan's viewing window and disappeared into a computer that enhanced the detail. The finished picture came out on a special large high-resolution color video monitor. The smudge had become a well defined shape.
Using a joystick, Pitt moved a pair of crosshairs to the center of the image and clicked the button to expand the image.
The computer churned away for a few seconds, and then a new, larger, even more detailed image appeared on the screen. A rectangle automatically appeared around the target and showed the dimensions. At the same time another machine reproduced the color image on a sheet of glossy paper.
commander Knight came rushing back into the compartment. After days of tedium, cruising back and forth as though mowing a vast lawn, staring for hours on end at the video display and sidescan readings, he was galvanized, anticipation written in every line of his face.
"I was given your message about a malfunction. You have a target?"
Neither Pitt nor Giordino answered. They smiled like prospectors who have hit the mother lode. Knight, staring at them, suddenly knew.