Valhalla Rising (17 page)

Friends since childhood, Pitt and Giordino had played on the same football teams in high school and at the Air Force Academy. Wherever one went, the other was sure to follow. Giordino didn’t think twice about joining Pitt at the National Underwater and Marine Agency. Their adventures together above and under the sea had become legend. Unlike Pitt and his aircraft hangar full of antique cars, Giordino lived in a condo with decor that would incite an interior decorator to suicide. For transportation, he drove an old Corvette. Besides his work, Al’s passion was women. He saw nothing wrong with playing the role of a gigolo.

“Ahoy the ship!” he shouted. He waited before shouting again, as a figure walked out onto the bridge from the pilothouse and a familiar face stared down at him.

“Can you restrain yourself?” Pitt said in mock seriousness. “We don’t take kindly to barbarians coming aboard an elegant vessel.”

“In that case, you’re in luck,” said Giordino, flashing a vast smile. “You could use a vulgar rowdy to liven up the place.”

“Stay put,” Pitt said. “I’ll come down.”

In a minute, they were unashamedly embracing like the old friends they were. Though Giordino was three times stronger, Pitt always delighted in lifting the shorter man off the ground.

“What kept you? Sandecker said to expect you yesterday morning.”

“You know the admiral. He was too cheap to let me borrow a NUMA jet, so I came commercial. As was expected, all flights were late and I missed my connection in San Francisco.”

Pitt slapped his friend on the back. “Good to see you, pal. I thought you were on the Atlantis Project in the Antarctic.” Then he stood back and stared at Giordino with a questioning look. “The last I heard, you were engaged to be married?”

Giordino held up his hands in a helpless gesture. “Sandecker took me off the project, and my lover took off without me.”

“What happened?”

“Neither one of us was about to quit our job and move to a house in the suburbs. And, she was offered a job to decipher ancient writings in China, which would have taken two years. She didn’t want to turn down the opportunity, so she flew off in the first plane to Beijing.”

“I’m happy to see you can cope with rejection.”

“Oh well, it beats being beaten with a whip, having your tongue nailed to a tree and thrown in the trunk of a 1951 Nash Rambler.”

Pitt picked up the satchel, but made no effort to hoist the steamer trunk. “Come along, I’ll show you to your suite.”

“Suite? The last time I was aboard the
Encounter,
the cabins were the size of broom closets.”

“Only the sheets have been changed to protect the innocent.”

“The boat looks like a tomb,” Giordino said, motioning around the deserted ship. “Where is everyone?”

“Only Chief Engineer House and I are aboard. The rest are staying in the finest hotel in the city, pampered and glamorized, giving interviews and accepting awards.”

“From what I heard, you’re the man of the hour.”

Pitt gave a modest shrug. “Not my style.”

Giordino gave him a look of genuine respect and admiration. “It figures. You always play Humble Herbert. That’s what I like about you. You’re the only guy I know who doesn’t collect photos of himself standing next to celebrities and who hangs all his trophies and awards in his bathroom.”

“Who’d see them? I rarely throw parties. Besides, who cares?”

Giordino gave a slight shake of his head. Pitt never changes, he thought. If the president of the United States wanted to present him with the nation’s highest award, Pitt would send his regrets and claim he’d developed a case of typhoid.

A
fter Giordino had unpacked and settled in, he entered Pitt’s cabin, to find his friend seated at a small desk studying deck plans of the
Emerald Dolphin.
He set a wooden box down on top of the plans.

“Here, I brought you a present.”

“Is it Christmas already?” Pitt said, laughing. He opened the box and sighed. “You’re a good man, Albert. A bottle of Don Julio Reserve blue agave anejo tequila.”

Giordino held up two sterling-silver cups. “Shall we test it and make sure it meets our qualifications?”

“What would the admiral say? Are you dismissing his tenth commandment about no alcohol on board a NUMA vessel?”

“If I don’t get medicinal spirits in my system soon, I may well expire.”

Pitt pulled off the cork top and poured the light brown liquid into the silver cups. As they held them up and clicked the metal edges, Pitt toasted, “To a successful dive on the carcass of the
Emerald Dolphin.
”

“And a successful return to the sunlight.” After savoring a swallow of the tequila, Giordino asked, “Where exactly did she go down?”

“On the west slope of the Tonga Trench.”

Giordino’s eyebrows lifted. “That’s pretty deep.”

“My best guess is that she lies in about nineteen thousand feet.”

Giordino’s eyes followed his brows. “What sub do you plan on using?”

“The
Abyss Navigator.
She’s built for the job.”

Giordino paused, and his face took on a dour expression. “You know, of course, that her specified depth is nineteen-five, and she has yet to be tested that deep.”

“There’s no better opportunity to see if her designers knew their stuff,” said Pitt offhandedly.

Giordino passed his empty cup to Pitt. “I think you’d better pour me another drink. On second thought, I’d better have ten or twelve, or I won’t sleep between here and the Tonga Trench while having nightmares about imploding submersibles.”

They sat there in Pitt’s cabin until midnight, sipping the reserve tequila, telling old war stories and reliving their adventures together throughout the years. Pitt told of finding the
Emerald Dolphin
on fire and the rescue, the timely arrival of the
Earl of Wattlesfield,
the report of the sinking by the captain of the
Audacious,
his rescue of Kelly and the killing of the assassin.

When he finished, Giordino rose to return to his cabin. “You’ve been a busy boy.”

“I wouldn’t want to go through it again.”

“When does the shipyard expect to have the hull repaired?” he asked.

“Captain Burch and I hope to get under way the day after tomorrow and be on site four days later.”

“Time enough for me to regain the tan I lost in the Antarctic.” He noticed the leather bag sitting in the corner of the cabin. “Is that the case you mentioned that belonged to Dr. Egan?”

“The same.”

“You say that after all that, it was empty?”

“As a bank vault after Butch Cassidy rode out of town.”

Giordino picked it up and ran his fingers over the leather. “Fine grain. Quite old. German made. Egan had good taste.”

“You want it? You can have it.”

Giordino sat back down again and set the leather case on his lap. “I have a thing about old luggage.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

Giordino unlatched the catches and lifted open the lid—and nearly two quarts of oil flowed out into his lap and onto the carpet covering the deck. He sat there in mute surprise as it soaked his pants legs and pooled on the carpet. After the shock faded, he gave Pitt a very acidic look indeed.

“I never knew you had a thing for practical jokes.”

Pitt’s face reflected pure astonishment. “I don’t.” He jumped to his feet, rushed across the cabin and peered into the case. “Trust me. I had nothing to do with this. This case was empty when I checked it yesterday. No one but Chief Engineer House and I have been on board for the past twenty-four hours. I don’t understand why somebody would bother to sneak in here and fill it with oil. What’s the point?”

“Then where did it come from? It obviously didn’t just materialize.”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” said Pitt. There was a strange look in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. “But I’m betting we’ll find out before the voyage is over.”

T
he mystery of who put the oil in Egan’s leather case was set aside as Pitt and Giordino began checking and testing the equipment and electronic systems of the
Sea Sleuth,
the survey vessel’s autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). During the voyage to the grave of the
Emerald Dolphin,
they discussed the wreck probe procedure with Captain Burch and the ocean engineers on board. All agreed that for reasons of safety the autonomous vehicle should be sent down first rather than the manned submersible,
Abyss Navigator.

There was nothing sleek or streamlined about the design of the
Sea Sleuth.
She was the extreme of functional design. Utilitarian and expedient, she made a Mars lander look artistic. Seven feet high by six feet wide by seven feet in length, she weighed in at slightly less than seven thousand pounds. Her skin was a thick layer of titanium, and from a distance she looked like a huge elongated egg open on the sides, standing on sled runners. A circular protrusion on top housed her two variable-buoyancy tanks. Support tubes laced her inner construction beneath the variable-buoyancy tanks.

Mounted inside, almost as if they had been placed there by a child with his Lego set, were high-resolution video and still cameras, a computer housing and sensors that recorded salinity, water temperature and oxygen content. A pressure-balanced, direct-drive DC motor provided her propulsion and was energized by a powerful manganese-alkaline battery system. Highly sophisticated transducers transported signals and imagery through the watery depths to the mother ship far above on the surface, and it sent control signals in return. Her path was illuminated by an array of ten external lights.

Like some mechanical monster out of a science-fiction movie, a complicated robotic arm, or manipulator, as it was called, extended from one side of the vehicle. It had the muscle to lift a four-hundred-pound anchor and the sensitivity to pick up a teacup.

Unlike earlier robotic vehicles,
Sea Sleuth
was untethered and had no umbilical cord connected to controls in the pilothouse. She was completely autonomous; her propulsion and video cameras were operated from the command room of the
Deep Encounter
thousands of feet above.

A crewman came up to Pitt as he was helping Giordino adjust the robotic arm. “Captain Burch said to let you know that we’re three miles from the target.”

“Thank you,” said Pitt. “Please tell the skipper that Al and I will join him shortly.”

Giordino threw a pair of screwdrivers into a toolbox, stood up and stretched his back. “She’s ready as she’ll ever be.”

“Let’s head up to the bridge and see how the
Dolphin
looks on the side scan sonar.”

Burch and several other NUMA engineers and scientists were in the command center compartment just aft of the pilothouse. Everyone’s faces and hands were reflected in a weird purplish cast from the overhead lighting. Recent experiments had determined that instrumentation was easier to read for long elements of time under a red-blue wave band of light.

They were massed around the computer-enhanced screen on the Klein System 5000 recorder, watching the seabed twenty thousand feet below unreel as if on a scroll. The colored image showed a fairly smooth bottom that sloped off into the deep abyss. Burch turned as Pitt and Giordino entered and pointed at the Global Positioning System digital readout that showed the distance remaining to the target.

“She should be coming up in another mile,” he commented.

“Is this the GPS position given by the tug?” asked Giordino.

Burch nodded. “Where the liner went down when the tow rope broke.”

Every eye in the compartment in the command center focused on the Klein imagery screen. The seabed deep below the sensor that trailed far behind the
Deep Encounter
on a cable showed the flat, desertlike surface covered with dingy, gray-brown silt. No jagged rocks or hills were visible. No wasteland came close to being so desolate. Still, the image was mesmerizing because everyone was waiting expectantly for an object to materialize and creep across the screen.

“Five hundred yards,” Burch announced.

The crew and the men and women of the scientific team went silent. The command center became as quiet as a crypt. To most, the wait would have been agonizing, but not to the men and women who searched the seas. These were patient people. They were used to spending weeks at a time staring at instruments, waiting for an interesting object, a sunken ship or an unusual geological formation to reveal itself, but usually seeing nothing other than a seemingly endless and sterile seabed.

“Something’s coming,” announced Burch, who had the best view of the screen.

Slowly, the recorder showed a hard image that took on a man-constructed shape. The outline looked jagged and uneven. It looked too small, not at all the immense image of the cruise liner they were expecting.

“That’s her,” stated Pitt firmly.

Burch grinned like a happy bridegroom. “Got her on the first pass.”

“The tug’s position was right on the money.”

“It’s not the right size for the
Emerald Dolphin,
” Giordino observed in a monotone.