The Sea Witch II dived to a depth of 60 feet. Sam stopped the water intake and leveled her into neutral buoyancy. In a heads-up display across the front of the dome, a GPS screen overlapped the bathymetric map of the seafloor. He then started the forward propellers, located at each end of the twin hulls. They whirred quietly as they moved the sub towards the strange mound of sand.
Sam brought the submarine down right in front of the large mound of sand. The clear water and ample sun from the surface penetrated to give a clear vision of the strange formation. It looked like the remnants of a forty-foot sandcastle, with its features weathered away into a crude mound by the first wave of the incoming tide.
The sandcastle was already starting to deteriorate under the sea’s constant movement. Large chunks, the size of a medium sized car, had broken off and fallen to the ground. On the seabed, bizarre grooves were marked into the ground.
“What do you think those are?” Sam asked.
Tom studied the seabed for a moment. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say those grooves almost look like a giant hand raked its way through the sand.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty much what I thought, too.”
“What if it wasn’t just a thought?”
Sam’s lips curled into an incredulous grin. “You think some giant built this sandcastle?”
Tom shook his head. “No, but what about a giant sinkhole?”
San ran his eyes over the strange grooves in the seabed again. They formed almost perfectly straight lines, etched deep into the sand. It would take a lot of energy to do that.
“It’s a possibility.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I’m not convinced, but I don’t have anything else right now.”
“What do you want to do about it?”
Sam positioned the Sea Witch II directly over the mound of sand. “Take the controls, and keep us as close as you can to the sand.”
“Sure. What are you going to do?”
Sam gripped the twin joysticks in his hands that controlled the manipulator arms, which protruded from each of the submarine’s pontoons. Each arm had a reach of twelve feet forward of the bubble. “Let’s see how solid this thing is.”
“Don’t dig too far,” Tom cautioned. “No need to bring the whole thing down on us. I’m a cave-diver, not a doodlebug.”
Sam did a double-take and stared at Tom. “A what?”
“You know, one of those bugs that digs a hole in the sand… never mind. Just be careful.”
Sam sighed heavily. Relaxed his shoulder and gently took control of the twin manipulator arms. He slowly drove the robotic arms into the crest of the mound. He felt no resistance in them whatsoever. The fine white sand known as glacial silt parted like powder.
He watched as the crest was replaced with a thick dust cloud of the fine sand. “What the hell?”
Tom moved the submarine backward — the last thing they wanted was the murky cloud to be sucked into their impellers. “Whatever that is, it wasn’t here a few days ago. That’s for sure. This is glacial silt. It will disappear in a few days.”
“Agreed. Take us around to the base. I want to try the ground penetrating radar.”
Tom positioned the submarine about twenty feet back from the base and Sam adjusted the transducer until it lit up a clear image of the mound of sand. There was no doubt about it. The entire thing was soft sand. There was no steel from the bridge tower of a cargo ship or any other sign of a manmade structure.
Sam shook his head. “I’ll be damned, but I’d say the ground just opened up and swallowed the Gordoye Dostizheniye whole!”
Tom said, “What do you want to do about it?”
“There’s nothing we can do. We’ll need to wait until we can bring in a large-scale dredging vessel. But where the hell we’re going to find one of those this far north, I have no idea.”
Chapter Six
Brody Frost would have never, if someone had told him years ago, that his work buddy on a Colorado ranch would be a white guy from New York. Whoever heard of a cowboy from New York? Except the kind from that old movie, Rhinestone Cowboy. What a joke. But Malcom Corbin was okay, even if he was a greenhorn. Easy company. Didn’t talk much.
Today, he and Malcom were riding one of the mesas on the Cloud Ranch, looking for strays and unbranded calves. The weather was typical for July in southwestern Colorado — sunny, hot, no clouds in the sky. The strong breeze that often blows at the top of the mesa on such a day was not present. It would have been welcome, though. The damp bandana Brody wore around his neck would have cooled him better with a bit of wind.
Malcom, riding several yards away, gave a short whistle, catching Brody’s attention. When he looked over, Malcom lifted a lazy arm and pointed toward the mesa’s edge. There a young calf was resting in the shade of a bush.
“Where’s his mama?” Brody called.
“Yonder,” Malcom said.
“Yonder?” Brody had to laugh when Malcom tried to sound Western. “Seriously?”
He looked where Malcom was pointing. Sure enough, a cow stood listlessly. Not much feed or water up here. If they didn’t get her down to better pasturage, she’d die, and her calf with her. He nudged his horse with his knee, and the gelding obediently turned in the direction of the cow, while Malcom dismounted and cautiously approached the calf. Neither wanted to spook the animals that could easily panic and run over the edge, where a 500-foot or more, sheer drop would kill them quicker than any lack of water.
Concentrating on the cow and his slow approach, lasso ready in case she bolted, Brody edged closer. He was focused so much that he didn’t notice at first when the wind picked up. He managed to flank her and began to crowd her back toward her calf, when he heard Malcom swear.
Brody asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Dust in my eye. Where’d this wind come from?”
For the first time, Brody noticed the stirring in the sagebrush at his horse’s feet. As he watched, it became strong enough to swirl and eddy around the gelding’s legs. But a few yards away, where Malcom stood calming the calf, it was moving fast enough to give Malcom some trouble.
Malcom looked up. “I’ll be damned, where’d that come from?”
“No telling,” Brody answered. “Sometimes it just starts blowing. This looks strange, though. Look how it’s like a river in this one spot.”
The two men stared in wonder as the sand and dust coalesced into what did indeed look like a current of fast-flowing red-brown water, nearly a mile wide, with calmer air on either side of it.
“What the hell? You ever see anything like that before?” Malcom asked. He leaned down to get a closer look at the debris flowing past him. Suddenly, a stray gust took his hat, and despite his swipe at it, the hat joined the wind current and flew toward the edge of the mesa. “Shit! I just bought that Stetson,” he swore.
Brody shook his head, and dismounted, careful to stay out of the midst of the red-brown current. Malcom also dismounted again, and both laid their reins over a stunted juniper tree, signaling their mounts to stay put. Brody secured his own hat to his saddle horn.
The two walked toward the edge of the mesa, skirting the side of the strange wind current, which was now as tall as Malcom, at about six feet. In contrast, Brody himself was more than a few inches shorter, at five-foot-six.
Brody got down on his hands and knees and then stretched out full-length on the ground before belly-crawling to the edge. He’d never liked heights, and this one was no different. Below, the glint of water in a year-round spring-fed trickle caught his eye. He didn’t see Malcom’s hat.