As he stepped through the door into the warmth of the mess hall, the mouth-watering bouquet of coffee, fried eggs and bacon provided an antidote for his morbid mood, and his spirits improved. Except for the blue sea visible through the windows, the ship's dining area could have been a smaII-town breakfast hangout where the locals have coffee mugs with their names on them. Sleepy-eyed crew members coming off the night watch occupied a few tables.

Austin grabbed a coffee to go. On his way to the bridge, he encountered the Trouts, who had come down for break- fast earlier and taken a tour of the ship. Together they climbed up to the wheelhouse, where the wraparound windows gave a wide view of the bow and deck.

Rudi Gunn, an early riser going back to his navy days, stood near a bank of instruments and monitors, talking to Captain Atwood. He smiled broadly when he saw his colleagues. “Good morning, everyone. I was about to go looking for you. The captain was going over his plans for the wreck site.”

“Looking forward to hearing them,” Austin said. “How soon will we be on-site?”

Atwood pointed to a circular gray screen with white concentric circles etched into the glass. Specks of gray indicated the GPS readings from an antenna that picked up information from the network of twenty-four satellites orbiting the earth at a height of eleven thousand miles. A digital readout next to the screen displayed current latitude and longitude. The system could place the ship within thirty to forty-five feet of its target.

“We should be on-site in about fifteen minutes if the navigational coordinates from the sub sailor's Dick Tracy wrist-watch are on the mark.”

“You weren't joking when you said we'd be there first thing this morning,” Austin said.

“The Argo may look like a workhorse, but she's got racing genes in her blood.”

“What are your plans for the initial survey?”

“We'll map out the general area with side-scan sonar using our new UUV, then take a closer look. The crew is down on the deck getting things ready.” The Unmanned Untethered Vehicle, or UUV, was one of the hottest developments in undersea exploration.

Paul asked to see a chart. The captain pushed aside a blue curtain that divided the wheelhouse from the smaller chart room. A map of the Black Sea was spread out on the table. “We're here,” Atwood said, putting his finger on a spot off the western shore of the Black Sea.

Trout's tall form bent over the chart. “We're over the edge of a shallow underwater shelf that wraps around the shoreline past Romania and the Danube delta, the Bosporus and around to Crimea in the north.” He turned to his wife. “Gamay can fill us in on the biological and archaeological angles.”