The captain led the way to the midship’s search-and-rescue center, just off the main deck. A dozen men and women, sitting in front of computer monitors, were processing information that was streaming in from the ships and planes involved in the search.

“How close are we to the actual lab site?” Zavala asked.

Dixon pointed down to the deck at his feet.

“It’s approximately three hundred feet directly under the ship’s hull. We had been on standby patrol for the lab, acting as backup for the support ship, Proud Mary. When we heard the Mayday, we got to the site within hours.”

“Where is the support ship now?” Zavala asked.

“A Navy salvage vessel is towing what’s left of her to a ship-yard, where the forensics folks can take a closer look at her. We were busy taking care of the survivors, so it took some time before we got around to checking on the status of the lab. When we couldn’t raise it on the radio, we erroneously assumed at first that the communications buoy got shot out. We carry an ROV for hull inspections, and we got it down.” He stepped over to a computer screen. “Those circular depressions you see in the ocean bottom match the feet of the legs supporting the Locker.”

“There are no drag marks,” Zavala observed. “That indicates the lab was lifted off the site, which would have been possible with the Locker’s neutral buoyancy. Can you show me the site on the satellite map?”

Dixon asked a technician to bring up a map-and-satellite-image hybrid of the waters being searched.

“We’ve been using orbiting spy satellites that can zero in on an area as small as a square yard to look for infrared emissions,” Dixon said. “Davy Jones’s Locker was west of Pohnpei, between Nukuoro Island on the north and Oroluk Island to the south. We’ve drawn lines from all three islands and dubbed our main search area the Pohnpei Triangle.”

“Those red squares must be the areas that have been searched,” Zavala said.

“That’s right. The squares designate the territory that’s been scoured with sonar. The ships transmit their sonar data to our computer network. We map out a grid of the ocean in squares, the ships move over each square parallel to one another in a line that stretches several miles across, and then they move on to the next square. We can cover a lot of ocean that way in a very short time. We’ve also got fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters making visual checks.”

“These would be the islands circled in red,” Zavala said.