Zak was watching one such manic display to his right when he noticed a separate and distinct radiance some distance off. Exactly how far off he couldn’t tell. At first it looked like a small sphere of light. Not blue but white, with a diffuse halo around it.

Zak stared for a long five seconds, puzzled. The light grew in size, its corona and inner circle quickly resolving into a single disk of brightness. It appeared to be coming closer and was moving at a rapid clip.

“Does everyone see what I see?” he said.

There was no answer from above.

“Murph? Rawl? Do you two copy?”

He waited. Then waited some more, frowning behind his mask.

There was still no answer.

The dive-control van was a modular unit in the center of the four-hundred-fifty-foot Stalwart’s main deck. Situated near the moon pool—the well through which the diving bell was lowered into the water—it was nothing fancy on the outside. Not too big, not too small, a single door, a couple of windows. The sort of corrugated aluminum trailer where the foreman might slug down his morning joe at an ordinary construction site.

The interior of the DCV was another thing. There were two side-by-side stations, one with specialized video-monitoring and communications panels, the other with the gauges, dials and switches used to regulate the life-sustaining gas mixture inhaled by the underwater team. A third console, on a separate wall, controlled the scrubbing and filtering of gases exhaled by the divers, removing carbon dioxide, moisture and biological contaminants, then mixing the leftover oxygen with helium for recycling to the bell. The Gasmizer made for an efficient, closed system that ensured the supply of heliox would be without interruption.

All three technicians in the van were dead. Grigor Malkira had shot the men at the side-by-side stations as he entered, using a single subsonic bullet for each. They never knew what hit them. The third tech, seated with her back to the door at the Gasmizer console, lived long enough to register his presence, swiveling toward the door. Grigor put one round in her heart and one in the middle of her forehead. She had sprawled backward over the console, her blond hair spilling over its controls and readouts in a bloody fan.

Now Grigor stood behind the dead man at the dive-control station, holding his sound-suppressed FN Five-seveN against his thigh. Eight seconds ago, he had cut all communications between the surface and the bell and between the bell and diver. His next matter of business was at the saturation-control station beside it.

It proved fortunate that the window was between them. Grigor was sidling past it when he glimpsed a man outside on deck, approaching the DCV in the shadow of the crane. He immediately recognized him as Friedman, the project manager.