Steve didn’t answer. Shaking his head, Jerry fed in the tape, put on the headphones, and hit Play. He hadn’t thought he’d hear Scottish pipers skirling away, and he didn’t. He heard next to nothing, only a faint, rhythmic sound like a faraway washing-machine agitator, barely above the limit of what his ears could pick up. He knew what that was: the noise from a submarine’s prop in the distance. He’d run into it before, on recordings mostly involved with whale songs.

No whale songs here. The noise went on, pretty much unchanged, for five or six minutes. Then, without warning, it sounded as if someone were frying the world’s biggest pan of bacon right in his ears. After that, he heard what could only be the K-129 going down and collapsing in on itself as relentless water pressure crushed the boat’s hull. Silence followed.

Jerry yanked off the headphones. What else could you do when you’d just listened to dozens of men dying? “Jesus!” he said. “What happened?”

Instead of answering directly, Steve stopped the tape and removed it from the player. He went back to the safe with it. “We never leave it out, even inside this container,” he said, working the combination again. “Never. The same goes double for what I’m going to show you.” The door to the safe opened. In went the tape. Out came a full manila envelope of the kind that had traveled in Fred’s briefcase. Steve handed it to Jerry.

He opened the clasp. The first photograph inside was numbered 1. He went straight to the last. Sure as hell, the number in the upper right corner there was 78. Only then did he actually look at the pictures themselves. He went through them slowly. When he got done, he looked through them again.

At last, he said, “These can’t be what I think they are.”

“What do you think they are?” Steve’s voice was gentle, as if he were trying to calm a spooked horse. Jerry was spooked, all right.

“They look like…” He had to stop and try again: “They look like pictures of a, a spaceship on the bottom of the ocean.”

“That’s what they look like to everybody who’s seen them, which isn’t very many people,” Steve said, still in that gentle voice. “The camera trailing from the Halibut took them when it was searching for the K-129. This … thing is only about three hundred yards from the wreck of the Russian sub.”

“It looks like it’s all in one piece. Not a wreck itself, I mean,” Jerry said.

The older man nodded. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“Did it sink the K-129?”

“We don’t know for sure. We don’t know anything for sure. But that’s the assumption we’re making at this point in time.”