named by its designer after the fictional detective, Sherlock revealed

detailed features of the seafloor previously unseen by man.

Minutes ticked by with the slowness of hours until at last the crest of

the crater began slipping across the sidescan. The Polar Explorer's

course towed Sherlock along the plunging slope of the crater's interior.

Three pairs of eyes locked on the sidescan recorder.

"Here she comes," Giordino said with the barest tremor of excitement.

The Soviet submarine nearly filled the port side of the sonograph. She

was lying on a steep angle with her stern toward the center of the

crater, her bow pointing at the rim. The hull was upright and she was

in one piece, unlike the U.S. submarines Thresher and Scorpion, which

had imploded into hundreds of pieces when they sank in the 1960s. The

slight list to her starboard side was no more than two or three degrees.

Ten months had passed since she went missing, but her outer works were

free of growth and rust in the frigid Arctic waters.

"No doubt of her being an 'Alfa' class," said Knight. "Nuclear-powered,

titanium hull, nonmagnetic and noncorrosive in salt water, latest

silent-propellor technology, the deepestdiving and fastest submarines in

both the Soviet and U.S.

navies."

The lag between the sonar recording and the video view was around thirty

seconds. As if watching a tennis match, their heads turned in unison

from the sonar as they stared intently at the TV monitors.

The sub's smooth lines slid into view under the camera's lights and were

revealed in a ghostly bluish-gray hue. The Americans found it hard to

believe the Russian vessel was a graveyard with over a hundred and fifty

men resting inside. It looked like a child's toy sitting on the bottom

of a wading pool.

"any indication of unusual radioactivity?" asked Knight.

"Very slight rise," answered Giordino. "Probably from the sub's

reactor."

"She didn't suffer a meltdown," Pitt surmised.

"Not according to the readings."

Knight stared at the monitors and made a cursory damage report. "Some

damage to the bow. Port diving plane torn away. A long gouge in her

port bottom, running for about twenty meters."

"A deep one by the looks of it," observed Pitt. "Penetrated her ballast

tanks into the inner pressure hull. She must have struck the opposite

rim of the crater, tearing the guts out of her. Easy to imagine the

crew struggling to raise her to the surface as she kept running across

the center of the crater. But she took in more water than she could

blow off and lost depth, finally impacting about halfway up the slope on

this side."

The compartment fell into a momentary silence as the submarine dropped

astern of the Sherlock and slowly faded from view of the cameras. They

continued to gaze at the monitors as the broken contour of the sea

bottom glided past, their minds visualizing the horrible death that

stalked men who sailed the hostile depths beneath the sea.