Dirk helped her undo the heavy, riveted waterproof zippers on her Viking dry suit. First removing the gloves and pulling the inner hood down behind her head, he began peeling the suit from her torso, arms and then legs and feet, until she could step out of it. Her hair fell in a cascade of copper red. Underneath, Summer wore a skintight polypropylene nylon body suit that nicely displayed her curvaceous body.
"Did you enter the crud?" asked Dirk with concern in his tone.
She nodded. "I brought back samples."
"You certain there was no leakage inside your suit?"
Holding her arms over her head, she did a pirouette. "See for yourself. Not a drop of toxic slime to be seen."
Pitt put a hand on her shoulder. "Words to remember: 'Don't ever dive alone again.' Certainly not without me if I'm in the neighborhood."
"Yes, brother," she said with a condescending smile.
"Let's get your samples in a sealed case. Captain Barnum can take them back to the ship's lab for analysis."
"The captain is coming to the habitat?" she asked in mild surprise.
"He invited himself for lunch," Pitt answered. "He insisted on delivering our food supplies himself. Said it will give him a break from playing ship's commander."
"Tell him he can't come if he doesn't bring a bottle of wine."
"Let us hope he got the message by osmosis," Dirk said with a grin.
A cadaverously built man, Captain Paul T. Barnum might have been taken for a brother to the legendary Jacques Cousteau, except that his head was almost desolate of hair. He wore a shorty wet suit and left it on after entering the main lock. Dirk helped him lift a metal box containing two days of food onto the galley counter where Summer began stowing the various supplies in a little cupboard and refrigerator.
"I brought you a present," Barnum announced, holding up a bottle of Jamaican wine. "Not only that, the ship's cook made you lobster thermidor with creamed spinach for dinner."
"That explains your presence," Pitt said, slapping the captain on the back.
"Spirits on a NUMA project," Summer murmured mockingly. "What would our esteemed leader, Admiral Sandecker, have to say about breaking his golden rule of no booze during working hours?"
"Your father was a bad influence on me," said Barnum. "He never came aboard ship without a case of vintage wine while his buddy Al Giordino always showed up with a humidor filled with the admiral's private stock of cigars."
"It seems everybody but the admiral knows that Al secretly buys the cigars from the same source," said Dirk, smiling.
"What's for a side dish?" asked Barnum.
"Fresh fish chowder and crab salad."
"Who's doing the honors?"
"Me," muttered Dirk. "The only seafood Summer can prepare is a tuna sandwich."
"That's not so," she pouted. "I'm a good cook."
Dirk gazed at her cynically. "Then why does your coffee taste like battery acid?"
Panfried in butter, the lobster and creamed spinach were washed down with the bottle of Jamaican wine, accompanied by tales of Barnum's seafaring adventures. Summer made a nasty face at her brother as she presented them with a lemon meringue pie she had baked in the microwave. Dirk was the first to admit she had performed a gourmet wonder, since baking and microwave ovens were not suited to one another.
Barnum stood to take his leave, when Summer touched his arm. "I have an enigma for you."
Barnum's eyes narrowed. "What kind of enigma?"
She handed him the object she'd found in the cavern.
"What is it?"
"I think it's some kind of pot or urn. We won't know until we clean off the encrustation. I was hoping you'd take it back to the ship and have someone in the lab give it a good scrubbing."
"I'm sure someone will volunteer for the job." He hoisted it in both hands as if weighing it. "Feels too heavy for terra-cotta."
Dirk pointed to the base of the object. "There's an open space free of growth where you can see that it's formed out of metal."
"Strange, there doesn't appear to be any rust."
"Don't hold me to it, but my guess is it's bronze."
"The configuration is too graceful for native manufacture," added Summer. "Though it's badly encrusted, it appears to have figures molded around the middle."
Barnum peered at the urn. "You have more imagination than I do. Maybe an archaeologist can solve the riddle after we return to port, if they don't go into hysterics because you removed it from the site."
"You won't have to wait that long," said Dirk. "Why not transmit photos of it to Hiram Yaeger in NUMA's computer headquarters in Washington? He should be able to come up with a date and where it was produced. Chances are it fell off a passing ship or came from a shipwreck."
"The Vandalialies nearby," offered Summer.
"There's your probable source," said Barnum.
"But how did it get inside a cavern a hundred yards away?" Summer asked no one in particular.
Her brother smiled foxlike and murmured, "Magic, lovely lady, voodoo island magic."
Darkness had settled over the sea when Barnum finally bid good night.
As he slipped through the entry lock door, Pitt asked, "How does the weather look?"
"Pretty calm for the next couple of days," replied Barnum. "But a hurricane is building up off the Azores. The ship's meteorologist will keep a sharp eye on it. If it looks like it's heading this way, I'll evacuate the two of you and we'll make full speed out of its path."
"Let's hope it misses us," said Summer.
Barnum placed the urn in a net bag and took the pouch of water samples Summer had collected before he dropped out of the entry lock into the night-blackened water. Dirk switched on the outside lights, revealing schools of vivid green parrot fish swimming in circles, seemingly indifferent to the humans living in their midst.
Without bothering to don air tanks, Barnum took a deep breath, beamed a dive light ahead of him and stroked to the surface in a free ascent fifty feet away, exhaling as he rose. His little aluminum rigid-hull inflatable boat bobbed on its anchor that he'd dropped earlier a safe distance from the habitat. He swam over, climbed in and pulled up the anchor. Then he turned the ignition and started the two one-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower Mercury outboard motors and skimmed across the water toward his ship, whose superstructure was brightly illuminated with an array of floodlights embellished with red and green navigation lamps.
Most oceangoing vessels were usually painted white with red, black or blue trim. A few cargo ships sported an orange color scheme. Not the Sea Sprite.As with all the other ships in the National Underwater and Marine Agency fleet, she was painted a bright turquoise from stem to stern. It was the hue the agency's feisty director, Admiral James Sandecker, had chosen to set his ships apart from the other vessels that roamed the seas. There were few mariners who didn't recognize a NUMA vessel when they passed one at sea or in port.
Sea Spritewas large, as her type of vessel went. She measured 308 feet in length with a 65-foot beam. State of the art in every detail, she had started life as an icebreaker tug and spent her first ten years stationed in and around the north polar seas, battling frigid storms while towing damaged ships out of ice floes and around icebergs. She could bulldoze her way through six-foot-thick ice and tow an aircraft carrier through rough seas and do it with motion stability.
Still in her prime when purchased by Sandecker for NUMA, he ordered her refitted into an ultra-multipurpose ocean research and dive support vessel. Nothing was spared in the major refurbishment. Her electronics were designed by NUMA engineers as were her automated computerized systems and communications. She also possessed high-quality laboratories, adequate work space and low vibration. Her computer networks could monitor, collect and pass processed data to the NUMA laboratories in Washington for immediate investigation that turned the results into vital ocean knowledge.