“Yeah. Contract work for Uncle Sam. Pretty routine stuff. We’re about to wrap it up, which is fortunate because there was no way I would have missed this opportunity.”

The third mate was making her way across the deck toward the bathysphere accompanied by two men and a woman carrying video cameras, lights, and sound equipment.

“That’s the NUMA film crew,” Austin said to Kane. “They’ll want to interview the intrepid divers on camera.”

A look of horror came over Max Kane’s face. “I must look like crap. Smell like it too. Can they wait until I hop into the shower and trim the porcupine quills on my chin?”

“Joe will fill them in while you clean up. I’ll see you in the bridge after you’re done with the interview,” Austin said. “We’ll go over the plans for tomorrow.”

As he headed for the bridge, Austin reflected on how Beebe’s books had stirred his own imagination when he was a boy growing up in Seattle. He recalled one story in particular. Beebe described standing at the edge of an underwater precipice at the limit of his surface air supply, looking down with yearning into the deep water beyond his reach. The scene crystallized Austin’s own tendency to push to his limits.

Born and raised in Seattle, Austin had followed his boyhood dreams, studying systems management at the University of Washington. He also attended a prestigious deepwater diving school, specializing in salvage. He worked a few years on North Sea oil rigs and put in a stint with his father’s ocean-salvage company, but his spirit of adventure needed freer rein. He joined a clandestine underwater-surveillance unit of the CIA that he led until it was disbanded at the end of the Cold War. His father hoped he would return to ocean salvage, but Austin moved over to NUMA to head up a unique team that included Zavala and Paul and Gamay Trout. Admiral Sandecker had seen the need to create the Special Assignments Team to investigate out-of-the-ordinary events above and below the world’s oceans.

After completing the team’s last assignment, the search for a long-lost Phoenician statue known as the Navigator, Austin had heard that the National Geographic Society and the New York Zoological Society were sponsoring a docudrama on Beebe’s historic half-mile bathysphere dive of 1934. Actors would play Beebe and Barton, using a prop bathysphere, with much of the action simulated.

Austin persuaded the NUMA brass to let Zavala design a state-of-the-art bathysphere. The diving bell would be launched from the agency’s research vessel, William Beebe, in conjunction with the docudrama. Like all government agencies, NUMA had to fight for its share of the federal funding pie, and favorable publicity never hurt.