glacier arms curling and grinding toward the sea.  Then he looked down.

The water in the dive hole looked jade, ominous and cold.

Commander Knight approached and put his hand on Pitts shoulder.  All he

could see was a pair of intense green eyes through the glass of the

mask.  He spoke loudly so Pitt could hear.

"One hour, twenty-three minutes left.  I thought you ought to know."

Pitt gave him a steel-edged stare but did not reply.  He made a "thumbs

up" sign and slipped through the narrow hole into the forbidding water.

He slowly settled past the encircling white walls.  He felt as if he

were diving down a well.  Once clear, he was dazzled by the glistening

kaleidoscope of color from the sun's rays that penetrated the ice.  The

underside of the sheet was jagged and uneven and specked with small

hanging stalactites formed by brine from the rapidly freezing fresh

water carried into the fjord by glaciers.

Underwater visibility was almost eighty meters on a horizontal range. He

glanced down and saw a small kelp community grasping the rocky mass

carpeting the bottom.  Thousands of small shrimplike crustaceans

suspended in the still water swirled past his sight.

A huge, three-meter bearded seal eyed him curiously at a distance, tufts

of coarse bristles sprouting from its muzzle.  Pitt waved his arms, and

the big seal shot him a wary look and swam away.

Pitt touched the bottom and paused to equalize his ears. There was a

danger in diving with a buoyancy-compensatortype life-jacket under ice

and he did not wear one.  He was slightly heavy, so he adjusted by

removing and dropping a lead weight from his belt.  The air that flowed

from the compressor through a filter and then an accumulator into his

mask tasted bland but pure.

He gazed upward and oriented himself from the eerie glow of the ice hole

and checked his compass.  He hadn't bothered to carry a depth gauge.  He

wouldn't be working in water over four meters deep.

"Talk to me," the voice of Al Giordino came through the mask's

earphones.

"I'm on the bottom," replied Pitt.  "All systems up to par."

Pitt spun and stared through the green void.  "She lies about ten meters

north of me.  I'm going to move toward her.  Give me some slack in the

lines."

He swain slowly, taking care his lines didn't foul on the rock

outcroppings.  The intense cold of the frigid water began to seep into

his body.  He was thankful Giordino had had the foresight to see that

his air supply was warm and dry The stern of the wreck slowly unveiled

before his eyes.  The sides were covered with a mat of algae.  He

brushed away a small area with his gloved hand, stirn'ng up a green

cloud.  He waited a minute for the cloud to dissipate and then peered at

the result.

"Inform Lily and Doc I'm looking at a wooden hull without a stern