As he watched the underwater video recorded by the AUV, he hardly expected to see anything that did not belong on the lake's bottom. His primary interest was the area in and around the dock and the yacht moored beside it. He sat patiently as the submersible swept back and forth over the shallower slopes before passing over the deep hole in the middle of the lake during its roundabout voyage toward Shang's dock. The first few minutes revealed only an occasional fish that darted away from the mechanical intruder, weeds growing out of the silt, gnarled logs that had been washed down the feeding streams. He smiled to himself when he observed several children's toys and bicycles just off a beach, as well as a pre-World War II automobile in deeper water. Then, suddenly, odd patches of white appeared through the blue-green void.

Pitt stiffened and stared in horrified fascination as the patches of white materialized into human faces on heads attached to bodies heaped together or lying alone in the silt. The lake bed was littered with what must have been hundreds of them, some piled three and four deep, perhaps more, many more. They rested on the slope of the lake in forty feet of water and spread out of sight into the deepest part of the lake. To Pitt it was like staring from a stage at a vast audience through an opaque curtain. Those in the front seats were clear and distinct, but me mass of people seated further to the rear faded and were lost in the dark. He couldn't begin to estimate the numbers. The appalling thought that came to him was that the bodies scattered in the shallower waters were but a small portion of those that lay out of the AUV's camera range in the unseen deep of the lake.

The chilling fingers of revulsion touched the back of Pitt's neck as he saw a number of women and several children scattered among the sunken field of dead. Many of them were elderly. The icy, fresh water running down from the glaciers had maintained the bodies in a state of near-perfect preservation. They appeared to be lying peacefully, as if asleep, slightly indented in soft silt. On some the facial expressions were tranquil, on others the eyes bulged and mouths were thrust open in what was their final scream. They lay undisturbed, unaffected by the frigid water temperature and the daily sequences of light and dark. There was no sign of decay.

As the submersible passed directly within one meter of what looked like an entire family, he could see by the folds of the eyes and features of the faces that they were Oriental. He could also see that their hands were tied behind them, their mouths taped and their feet roped to iron weights.