"Good God above!" he blurted. "We've found her, really found her?"
"Hiding in the seascape," said Pitt, pointing to the monitor while handing Knight the photo. "The perfect image of one Alfa-class Soviet submarine."
Knight stared, fascinated, at both sonar images. "The Russians probed all around this section of the sea. Incredible they didn't find her."
"She's easy to miss," said Pitt. "The ice pack was heavier when they conducted their search. They couldn't maintain a straight track.
Probably skirted the opposite side of the upslope, and their sonar beams only showed a shadow where the sub was lying. Also, the unusually heavy concentration of iron under the crater would have thrown off their magnetic profile."
"Our intelligence people will dance on the ceiling when they see this."
"Not if the Reds get wise," said Giordino. "They'll hardly stand idle and watch us repeat our 'Seventy-five snatch of their 'Golf' class sub with the Glomar Explorer."
"You suggesting they haven't swallowed our story about conducting a geological survey of the seafloor?" Pitt asked with deep sarcasm.
Giordino gave Pitt a sour look indeed. "Intelligence is a weird business," he said. "The crew on the other side of these bulkheads has no idea of what we're up to, yet Soviet agents in Washington smelled out our mission weeks ago. The only reason they haven't interfered is because our undersea technology is better and they want us to lead the way to their sub."
"Won't be easy to deceive them," agreed Knight. "Two of their trawlers have been shadowing our every move since we left port."
"So have their surveillance satellites," added Giordino.
Pitt said, "All reasons why I asked the bridge to run out our last track before coming about for a closer look."
"Good try, but the Russians will pick up our track rerun."
"No doubt, except once we pass over the sub we go on and Turn onto the next lane, continuing as before. Then I'll radio our engineers in Washington to complain of equipment problems and ask for maintenance instructions. Every couple of miles we'll rerun a lane to reinforce the ruse."
Giordino looked at Knight. "They might buy it. It's believable enough."
Knight considered that. "Okay, we won't hang around. This will be our last look at the target. Then we continue on, acting as if we've found nothing."
"And after we've finished this grid," Pitt said, "we can start a new one thirty miles away and fake a discovery."
"A nice added touch," Giordino said approvingly. "Drop a red herring across our trail."
Knight smiled wryly. "Sounds like a good script. Let's go for it."
The ship rolled and the deck canted slightly to starboard as the helmsman brought her around on a reverse course. Far behind the stern, like an obstinate dog on a long leash, a robot submersible called Sherlock automatically refocused its two movie cameras and one still camera while continuing to send out probing sonar waves. Presumedly named by its designer after the fictional detective, Sherlock revealed detailed features of the seafloor previously unseen by man.
Minutes ticked by with the slowness of hours until at last the crest of the crater began slipping across the sidescan. The Polar Explorer's course towed Sherlock along the plunging slope of the crater's interior.
Three pairs of eyes locked on the sidescan recorder.
"Here she comes," Giordino said with the barest tremor of excitement.
The Soviet submarine nearly filled the port side of the sonograph. She was lying on a steep angle with her stern toward the center of the crater, her bow pointing at the rim. The hull was upright and she was in one piece, unlike the U.S. submarines Thresher and Scorpion, which had imploded into hundreds of pieces when they sank in the 1960s. The slight list to her starboard side was no more than two or three degrees.
Ten months had passed since she went missing, but her outer works were free of growth and rust in the frigid Arctic waters.
"No doubt of her being an 'Alfa' class," said Knight. "Nuclear-powered, titanium hull, nonmagnetic and noncorrosive in salt water, latest silent-propellor technology, the deepestdiving and fastest submarines in both the Soviet and U.S.
navies."
The lag between the sonar recording and the video view was around thirty seconds. As if watching a tennis match, their heads turned in unison from the sonar as they stared intently at the TV monitors.
The sub's smooth lines slid into view under the camera's lights and were revealed in a ghostly bluish-gray hue. The Americans found it hard to believe the Russian vessel was a graveyard with over a hundred and fifty men resting inside. It looked like a child's toy sitting on the bottom of a wading pool.
"any indication of unusual radioactivity?" asked Knight.
"Very slight rise," answered Giordino. "Probably from the sub's reactor."
"She didn't suffer a meltdown," Pitt surmised.
"Not according to the readings."
Knight stared at the monitors and made a cursory damage report. "Some damage to the bow. Port diving plane torn away. A long gouge in her port bottom, running for about twenty meters."
"A deep one by the looks of it," observed Pitt. "Penetrated her ballast tanks into the inner pressure hull. She must have struck the opposite rim of the crater, tearing the guts out of her. Easy to imagine the crew struggling to raise her to the surface as she kept running across the center of the crater. But she took in more water than she could blow off and lost depth, finally impacting about halfway up the slope on this side."
The compartment fell into a momentary silence as the submarine dropped astern of the Sherlock and slowly faded from view of the cameras. They continued to gaze at the monitors as the broken contour of the sea bottom glided past, their minds visualizing the horrible death that stalked men who sailed the hostile depths beneath the sea.
for nearly half a minute no one spoke, they hardly breathed. Then slowly each shook off the nightmare and turned away from the monitors.
The ice was broken. They began to relax and laugh with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of saloon patrons celebrating a winning touchdown by the home team.
Pitt and Giordino could sit back and take it easy for the rest of the voyage. Their part in the search project was over. They had found a needle in a haystack. Then slowly Pitts expression turned serious and he stared off into space.
Giordino knew the symptoms from long experience. Once a project was successfully completed, Pitt suffered a letdown. The challenge was gone, and his restless mind quickly turned to the next one.
"Damn fine job, Dirk, and you too, Al," Knight said warmly. "You NUMA people know your search techniques. This has to be the most remarkable intelligence coup in twenty years. "
"Don't get carried away," said Pitt. "The tough part is yet to come.
Recovering the sub under Russian noses will be a delicate operation. No Glomar Explorer this time. No salvage from highly visible surface ships. The entire operation will have to be carried out underwater-"
"What the hell is that?" Giordino's eyes had returned to the monitor.
"Looks like a fat jug."
"More like an urn," Knight confirmed.
Pitt stared into the monitor for a long moment, his face thoughtful, his eyes tired, red and suddenly intense. The object was standing straight up. Two handles protruded from opposite sides of a narrow neck, flaring sharply into a broad, oval body that in Turn tapered toward the base buried in the silt.
"A terra-cotta amphora," Pitt announced finally.
"I believe you're right," said Knight. "The Greeks and Romans used them to transport wine and olive oil. They've been recovered all over the bottom of the Mediterranean."
"What's one doing in the Greenland Sea?" Giordino asked no one in particular. "There, to the left of the picture, we've picked up a second."
Then a cluster of three drifted under the cameras, followed by five more running in a ragged line from southeast to northwest.