"We'll know for certain after we get the ROV down on her." He stared at Wilbanks. "Do you want to wait until tomorrow?"

"We're here, ain't we?" Wilbanks retorted with a smile. "Anybody have any objections against working at night?"

No one objected. Pitt and Hall quickly retrieved the sonar towfish and magnetometer sensor, and soon they had the Benthos MiniRover MK II robotic vehicle tethered up to the control handbox and a video monitor. At seventy-five pounds, it only took two of the men to lift it over the side and lower it into the water. The bright halogen underwater lights of the ROV slowly vanished in the deep as she began her journey downward into the dark void of Lake Michigan. She was attached to the Divercity and the control console by an umbilical cable. Wilbanks aimed an eye on the computer screen of the global positioning system and adroitly kept the Divercity floating motionless above the wreck.

The descent to four hundred feet took only a few minutes. All light from the setting sun vanished at 360 feet. Hall stopped the MiniRover when the bottom came into sight. It looked like a lumpy blanket of gray silt.

"The depth here is four hundred thirty feet," he said as he swung the ROV in a tight circle. Suddenly, the lights illuminated a large shaft that looked like a giant tentacle reaching out from a sea monster.

"What in hell is that?" muttered Wilbanks, turning from his computer positioning screen.

"Move toward it," Pitt ordered Hall. "I think we've come down on the forward cargo section of the hull, and we're looking at the overhead boom of a loading crane on the forward deck."

Working the controls of the MiniRover's handbox, Hall slowly sent the ROV along one side of the crane until the camera revealed a clear video image of a hull belonging to a large ship. He worked the ROV along the sides of the hull toward the bow, which still stood perfectly upright, as if the ship had refused to die and still dreamed of sailing the seas. Soon the outline of the ship's name became visible. It looked to have been painted crudely on the raised white gunwale atop the black bow slightly aft of the anchor, which still fit snug in its hawsehole. One by one the letters slid past the screen.

A doctor will tell you that if your heart stops, you're dead. But it seemed everyone's heart paused for several seconds as the name of the sunken ship passed under the MiniRover's cameras.

"Princess Yung Thi," Giordino shouted. "We got her!"

"The queen of the China Sea," Julia murmured as if she was in a trance. "She looks so cold and isolated. It's almost as if she was praying we'd come."

"I thought you wanted a ship called the Princess Dou Wan," said Wilbanks.