My own obstinate father, a man who had never finished grammar school, had labeled me weak, his incessant badgering (I need tae make ye a man, Zachary) fostering a negative self-image. Yet here was my great-uncle Alfred, a brilliant man of science, telling me that if my physique made me vulnerable, then another attribute could be trained to compensate.

That attribute would be my intellect.

My appetite for academics and the sciences became voracious. Within months I established myself as the top student in my class, by the end of the school year, I was offered the chance to skip the next grade. Mr. Tkalec continued feeding me information, while his roommate, a retired semipro football player named Troy, taught me to hone my body into something more formidable to my growing list of oppressors.

For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of pride. At Troy's urging, I tried out for freshman football. Aided by my tutor's coaching and a talent for alluding defenders (acquired, no doubt, on the pitch back in Drumnadrochit) I rose quickly through the ranks, and by the end of my sophomore year, I found myself the starting tailback for our varsity football team.

Born under the shadow of a Neanderthal, I had evolved into Homo sapiens, and I refused to look back.

Mr. Tkalec remained my mentor until I graduated, helping me secure an academic scholarship at Princeton. Respecting my privacy, he seldom broached subjects concerning my father, though he once told me that Angus's dragon story was simply a metaphor for the challenges that each of us must face in life. "Let your anger go, Zack, you're not hurting anyone but yourself."

Gradually I did release my contempt for Angus, but unbeknownst to both Mr. Tkalec and myself, there was still a part of my childhood that remained buried in the shadows of my soul, something my subconscious mind refused to acknowledge.

Angus had labeled it a dragon.

If so, the Sargasso was about to set it free.

* * *

The afternoon haze seemed endless, the air lifeless, the Sargasso as calm as the Dead Sea. It was my third day aboard the Manhattanville, a 162-foot research vessel designed for deep-sea diving operations. The forward half of the boat, four decks high, held working laboratories and accommodations for a dozen crew members, six technicians, and twenty-four scientists. The aft deck, flat and open, was equipped with a twenty-one-ton A-frame PVS crane system, capable of launching and retrieving the boat's small fleet of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and its primary piece of exploration equipment, the Massett-6, a vessel designed specifically for bathymetric and bottom profiling.

It was aboard the Massett-6 in this dreadful sea that I hoped to set my own reputation beside that of my great Uncle Alfred.