Juan had been thinking about where in the fjordlike cove the Chinese ship would have been sunk. He assumed they would have been as close to shore as possible, and in the satellite pictures he had spotted what he believed to be the best area. There was a beach of sorts, or at least an area where the towering mountains and glaciers were much lower.

He steered the submersible into the mouth of the bay and plotted a course to the spot. He kept one eye on their side-scan sonar. As he had predicted, the bottom was rising at better than a sixty percent gradient. It remained featureless rock without so much as an outcropping. Had the incline below them been above water, it would have been nearly impossible to scale.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Tamara said for the third or fourth time. “Just a few days ago, I was half certain Admiral Tsai Song and the Silent Sea were just legends, and now I’m about to see her for myself.”

“If we’re lucky,” Juan cautioned. “A lot could have happened in the past five hundred years. She could have been ground into toothpicks by the ice.”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. Do you think that happened?”

“Not really. Eric and Mark, you met them on the bridge—”

“The two who don’t look old enough to shave?”

“That’s them. They’re crackerjack researchers. They looked into archives from the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, the last time anyone took measurements of this area. The mountains around the bay were never named, but a survey team checked the glaciers and found them to be about the slowest moving on the continent. If the ship is in deep enough water, she wouldn’t have been affected even when the surface froze over.”

Cabrillo rubbed his hands together to restore some circulation. He checked their battery level and determined they had more than enough but left the heat control untouched. He would rather spend more time surveying the bottom on this trip than have to go through it all over again tomorrow.

They saw their first sign of life when a leopard seal swooped in close to the acrylic view port. It pirouetted in front of them, its body trailing a wreath of bubbles, and then it vanished as suddenly as it appeared.

“Cute little fellow,” Linda remarked.

“Not if you’re a penguin.”

Juan eyed the bottom profiler. The slope they had been traveling over was leveling out as it neared the shore, which was still about three miles away.

“Whoa,” Linda called.

“What do you have?”

“I just got a strong hit off the magnetometer to starboard.”

Cabrillo eased over the aircraft-style yoke, and the submersible swung right, not as elegantly as the seal, but she responded much better than their big Nomad. “Check out the sonar,” he said.