"Dates?" Pitt interrupted.
Flores looked questioningly at Pitt for a moment and then he averted his gaze. "The Captain did not give them."
"An oversight that will be corrected," said Rojas sternly, immediately picking up on Pitts thoughts.
"If it isn't already too late," Flores came back uneasily. "You must admit, Colonel, the debris appears to be trash, not ship's wreckage."
"Could you plot the coordinates of the ships as they're shown on the satellite photo?" asked Pitt.
Hores nodded and began plotting the positions on to a nautical chart.
"Another brandy, gentlemen?" Rojas offered.
"It's quite vibrant," said Gunn, holding out his glass to the lieutenant. "I detect a very slight coffee flavor."
Rojas smiled. "I can see you're a connoisseur, Mr. Gunn. Quite right.
My uncle distills it on his coffee plantation."
"Too sweet," said Giordino. "Reminds me of licorice .
"It also contains anisette." Rojas turned to Pitt. "And you Mr. Pitt.
How do you taste it?"
Pitt held up the glass and studied it under the light. "I'd say about two hundred proof."
North Americans never ceased to amaze Rojas. All business one moment, complete jesters the next. He often wondered how they built such a superpower.
Then Pitt laughed his infectious laugh. "Only kidding. Tell your uncle if he ever exports it to the U.S., I'll be the first in line to distribute it."
Flores threw down his dividers and tapped a penciled box on the chart.
"They were here at 03:10 yesterday morning."
Everyone moved back to the table and hovered over the chart.
"All three were on converging courses all right," observed Gunn. He took a small calculator from his pocket and began punching its buttons.
"If I make a rough estimate of speeds, say about thirty knots for the Lady Flamborough, eighteen for the Cabo Gallegos, and twenty-two for the General Bravo . . ." his voice trailed off as he made notations on the edge of the chart. After several moments he stood back and tapped the figures with a pencil. "Not surprising the Chilean coal carrier didn't make visual contact. She would have crossed the cruise liner's bow a good sixty-four kilometers to the east."
Pitt stared thoughtfully at the lines across the chart. "The Mexican container ship, on the other hand, looks as if she missed the Lady Flamborough by no more than three or four kilometers."
"Not surprising," said Rojas, "when you consider the cruise liner was running without lights."
Pitt looked at Flores. "Do you'recall the phase of the moon, Captain?"
"Yes, between new moon and first quarter, a crescent."
Giordino shook his head. "Not bright enough if the bridge watch wasn't looking in the right direction."
"I assume you launched the search from this point," said Pitt.
Flores nodded. "Yes, the aircraft flew grids two hundred miles to the east, north and south."
"And found no sign of her."
"Only the container ship and the ore carrier."
"She might have doubled back and then cut north or south," suggested Gunn.
"We thought of that, too," said Flores. "The aircraft cleared all western approaches toward land when they returned for fuel and went out again."
"Considering the facts," said Gunn ominously, "I fear the only place the Lady Flamborough could have gone is down."
"Take her last position, Rudi, and figure how far she might have sailed before the search planes arrived."
Rojas stared at Pitt with interest. "May I ask what you intend to do?
Further search would be useless. The entire surface where she vanished has been swept."
Pitt seemed to stare through Rojas as though the Colonel were transparent. "Like the man just said, 'The only place she could have gone is down." And that's precisely where we're going to look."
"How can I be of service?"
"The Sounder, a NUMA deep-water research ship, should arrive in the general search area sometime this evening. We'd be grateful if you could spare a helicopter to shuttle us out to her. "
Rojas nodded. "I will arrange to have one standing by."
Then he added, "You realize you n-light as well be hunting one particular fish in ten thousand square kilometers of sea. It could take you a lifetime."
"No," said Pitt confidently. "Twenty hours on the outside."
Rojas was a pragmatic man. Wishful thinking was foreign to him. He looked at Giordino and Gunn, expecting to see skepticism mirrored in their eyes. Instead, he saw only complete agreement.
"Surely, you can't believe such a fanciful time schedule?" he asked.
Giordino held up a hand and casually studied his fingernails. "If experience is any judge," he replied placidly, "Dirk has overestimated."
Exactly fourteen hours and forty-two minutes after the Uruguayan army helicopter set them on the landing pad of the Sounder, they found a shipwreck matching the Lady Flamborough's dimensions in 1,020 meters of water.
On the discovery pass the target showed up as a tiny dark speck on a flat plain below the continental slope. As the Sounder moved in closer, the sonar operator decreased the recording range until the shadowy image of a ship became a discernible shape.
The Sounder did not carry the five-million-dollar viewing system Pitt and Giordino had enjoyed on the Polar Explorer. No color video cameras were mounted on the trailing sonar sensor. The mission of her oceanographic scientists was purely to map large sections of the sea bottom. Her electronic gear was designed for distance and not closeup detail of manmade sunken objects.
"Same configuration all right," said Gunn. "Pretty vague. Could be my imagination but she appears to have a sweptback funnel on her stern superstructure. Her sides look high and straight. She's sitting upright, no more than a ten-degree list."
Giordino held back. "We'll have to get cameras on her to make a positive ID."
Pitt said nothing. He kept watching the sonar recording long after the target slipped behind the Sounder's stern. any hope of finding his father alive was draining away. He felt as though he was staring at a coffin as dirt was being thrown on the lid.
"Nice going, pal," Giordino said to him. "You laid us right on the dime."
"How did you know where to look?" asked Frank Stewart, skipper of the Sounder.
"I gambled the Lady Flamborough didn't change her heading after crossing the inside path of the General Bravo," Pitt explained. "And since she wasn't spotted by search aircraft beyond the outside course of the Cabo Gallegos, I decided the best place to concentrate our search was on a track extending east from her last-known heading as shown by the Landsat."
"In short, a narrow corridor running between the General Bravo and the Cabo Gallegos, " said Giordino.
"that about sums it up," Pitt acknowledged.
Gunn looked at him. "I'm sorry it's not an occasion to celebrate. "
"Do you want to send down an ROV?"* asked Stewart.
"We can save time," answered Pitt, "by skipping a remote camera survey and going direct to a manned probe. Also, the submersible's manipulator arms may be useful if we need to lift anything from the wreck."
"The crew can have the Deep Rover ready to descend in half an hour,"
said Stewart. "You going to act as operator?"
Pitt nodded. "I'll take her down."
"At a thousand meters, you'll be right at the edge of its depth rating."
"Not to worry," said Rudi Gunn. "The Deep Rover has a four-to-one safety factor at that depth."
"I'd sooner go over Niagara Falls in a Volkswagen," said the Captain,
"than go down a thousand meters in a plastic bubble."
Stewart, narrow-shouldered, with slicked-down burnt-toast-brown hair, looked like a small-town feed-store merchant and scoutmaster. A seasoned seaman, he could swim but was leery of the deep and refused to learn to dive. He catered to the scientists' requests and whims concerning their oceanographic projects as in any business/client relation 'Remote Operated Vehicle; tetherrd, underwater viewing system.