“’Fraid so,” Jerry said. SOSUS was the acronym for SOund SUrveillance System, the strings of hydrophones the Navy had laid on the ocean floor in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. They were there to listen for Soviet submarines and warn the brass if the Russians tried anything nasty.

They were there to listen for submarines, but they also picked up whale sounds. A lot of the material people like Hagop Krikorian and Jerry Stieglitz worked with came from SOSUS recordings … unofficially, but it did. In fact, SOSUS technicians had been the first people to detect low-frequency blue whale and fin whale vocalizations.

“Anyway, that gave us a pretty good location,” John said. “Then we sent out a sub of our own, one with cameras on the ends of long cables, and it gave us the exact position … and these.”

He took a big manila envelope out of Fred’s briefcase and gave it to Jerry. Jerry undid the metal clasp. He pulled out a stack of photos. Very detailed, they showed the wreckage of most of a submarine on its side at the bottom of the ocean. It looked cruder, more squared-off, than modern American boats. All the same, the sub seemed amazingly intact. In one picture, a skeleton still in seaboots lay near the hull.

Jerry noticed that the photos began with number 79 and continued through 180. “What’s on one through seventy-eight?” he asked.

“You don’t need to know that,” John said sharply.

“Yet,” Steve added. John sent him a red-hot dirty look. Steve just smiled. A quarter of an inch at a time, John subsided.

“Okay, you found the sub, the, uh, K-129,” Jerry said. “Now what, though? You said it’s three miles down. Not like you can bring it up from there.”

“That’s what the Russians think, too,” Fred said.

“You bet it is,” John agreed. “But they’re wrong. Or we hope they are. We built the Glomar Explorer to hook a giant lifting claw—Clementine, we call it—under that submarine and haul it back to the surface. Missiles to analyze, maybe codebooks to let us read Ivan’s mail … Who knows what kind of goodies we’ll find?”

“Wow. Oh, wow,” Jerry said. The first thing that came to him was You’re out of your fucking minds. But they obviously weren’t. The CIA wouldn’t have spent some large number of million dollars and cooked up this elaborate cover scheme if they didn’t think they had at least a decent chance of raising the lost Soviet sub. But … “Where do I fit into all of this?”

“We want you to come along,” Fred answered.

“This is supposed to be a research vessel,” John amplified. “While most of the crew will be learning how to bring up manganese nodules, you’ll be learning about whales out in the open ocean. You know, like what’s-his-name on the Beagle.”

“Darwin,” Jerry said faintly.