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.

for nearly half a minute no one spoke, they hardly breathed. Then slowly each shook off the nightmare and turned away from the monitors.

The ice was broken. They began to relax and laugh with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of saloon patrons celebrating a winning touchdown by the home team.

Pitt and Giordino could sit back and take it easy for the rest of the voyage. Their part in the search project was over. They had found a needle in a haystack. Then slowly Pitts expression turned serious and he stared off into space.

Giordino knew the symptoms from long experience. Once a project was successfully completed, Pitt suffered a letdown. The challenge was gone, and his restless mind quickly turned to the next one.

"Damn fine job, Dirk, and you too, Al," Knight said warmly. "You NUMA people know your search techniques. This has to be the most remarkable intelligence coup in twenty years. "

"Don't get carried away," said Pitt. "The tough part is yet to come.

Recovering the sub under Russian noses will be a delicate operation. No Glomar Explorer this time. No salvage from highly visible surface ships. The entire operation will have to be carried out underwater-"

"What the hell is that?" Giordino's eyes had returned to the monitor.

"Looks like a fat jug."

"More like an urn," Knight confirmed.

Pitt stared into the monitor for a long moment, his face thoughtful, his eyes tired, red and suddenly intense. The object was standing straight up. Two handles protruded from opposite sides of a narrow neck, flaring sharply into a broad, oval body that in Turn tapered toward the base buried in the silt.

"A terra-cotta amphora," Pitt announced finally.

"I believe you're right," said Knight. "The Greeks and Romans used them to transport wine and olive oil. They've been recovered all over the bottom of the Mediterranean."

"What's one doing in the Greenland Sea?" Giordino asked no one in particular. "There, to the left of the picture, we've picked up a second."

Then a cluster of three drifted under the cameras, followed by five more running in a ragged line from southeast to northwest.

Knight turned to Pitt, "You're the shipwreck expert. How do you'read it?"

A good ten seconds passed before Pitt replied. Then at last he did, his voice was distant, as though it came from someone in the next compartment.

"My guess is they lead toward an ancient shipwreck the history books say isn't supposed to be here."

Rubin would have traded his soul to abandon the impossible task, remove hands slick with sweat from the control rolumn, close tired eyes and accept death, but his sense of responsibility to the flight crew and passengers drove him on.

Never in his wildest nightmares did he see himself in such a crazy predicament. One wrong physical movement, a slight error in judgment and fifty people would find a deep, unknown grave in the sea. Not fair, he cried in his mind over and over. Not fair.

None of the navigation instruments was fullctioning. All communications equipment was dead. Not one of the passengers had ever flown an aircraft, even a light plane. He was totally disoriented and hopelessly lost. Inexplicably the needles on the fuel gauges wavered on "Empty."

His mind strained at the confusion of it all.

Where was the pilot? What caused the flight officers' deaths? Who was behind this insane madness?

The questions swarmed in his mind, but the answers remained wrapped in frustration.

Rubin's only consolation was that he was not alone. Another man shared the cockpit.

Eduardo Ybarra, a member of the Mexican delegation, had once served as a mechanic in his country's air force. Thirty years had passed since he wielded a wrench on propellerdriven aircraft, but bits and pieces of the old knowledge had returned to him as he sat in the copilot's seat-reading the instruments for Rubin and taking command of the throttles.

Ybarra's face was round and brown, the hair thick and black with traces of gray, the brown eyes widely spaced and expressionless. In his three-piece suit, he seemed out of place in the cockpit. Oddly there was no beaded perspiration on his forehead, and he had not loosened his tie or removed his coat.

He motioned upward at the sky through the windshield. "Judging from the stars, I'd say we're on a heading toward the North Pole."

"Probably flying east over Russia for all I know," Rubin said grimly. "I haven't a vague idea of our direction."

"That was an island we left behind us."

"Think it was Greenland?"

Ybarra shook his head. "We've had water under us for the last few hours. We'd still be over the icecap if it was Greenland. My guess is we crossed Iceland."