bottom of the Saint Lawrence River with a thousand souls. He had hunted

down the lost nuclear submarine Starbuck in the middle of the Pacific

and tracked the ghost ship Cyclops to her grave under the Caribbean. And

he raised the Titanic.

He was, Giordino often mused, a man driven to rediscover the past, born

eighty years too late.

"You might want to see this," Giordino said suddenly from the other side

of the room.

Pitt turned from a color video monitor that displayed a view of the

seascape one hundred meters beneath the hull of the icebreaker survey

ship Polar Explorer. She was a sturdy new vessel especially built for

sailing through ice-covered waters. The massive boxlike superstructure

towering above the hull resembled a five-story office building, and her

great bow, pushed by 80,000-horsepower engines, could pound a path

through ice up to one-and-a-half meters thick.

Pitt placed one foot against a counter, flexed his knee and pushed. The

motion was honed through weeks of practice and with the gentle roll of

the ship for momentum. He twisted 180 degrees in his swivel chair as

its castors carried him some meters across the slanting deck of the

electronics compartment.

"Looks like a crater coming up."

Al Giordino sat at a console studying an image on the Klein sidescan

sonar recorder. Short, standing a little over 162 centimeters in

stockinged size-eleven feet, broadened with beefy shoulders in the shape

of a wedge, he looked as if he were assembled out of spare bulldozer

parts. His hair was dark and curly, an inheritance from Italian

ancestry, and if he had worn a bandanna and an earring he could have

moonlighted as an organ-grinder. Dry-humored, steadfast and reliable as

the tides, Giordino was Pitts insurance policy against Murphy's Law.

His concentration never flickered while Pitt, feet extended as bumpers,

came to an abrupt stop against the console beside him.

Pitt watched the computer-enhanced sonograph as the ridge of a crater

slowly rose to a crest and then made a steep descent into the interior

void.

"She's dropping fast," said Giordino.

Pitt glanced at the echo sounder. "Down from 140 to 180 meters. "

"Hardly any slope to the outer rim."

"Two hundred and still falling."

"Weird formation for a volcano," said Giordino. "No sign of lava rock."

A tall, florid-faced man with thick graying brown hair that struggled to

escape from a baseball cap tilted toward the back of his head, opened

the door and leaned in the compartment.

"You night owls in the mood for food or drink?"

"Peanut-butter sandwich and a cup of black coffee sounds good," Pitt

replied without turning. "Leveling out at 220 meters. "

"A couple of doughnuts with milk," Giordino answered.

Navy Commander Byron Knight, skipper of the survey vessel, nodded.

Besides Pitt and Giordino, he was the only man with access to the

electronics compartment. It was off limits to the rest of the officers

and crew.

"I'll have your orders rustled up from the galley."