David Golemon - Legend

"What are you thinking, short stuff?" he asked.

She laid her fork in her plate and sighed. "It's Danielle, her showing up at the dig in Okinawa. If she was so intent on tracking her ex-husband down, why use us? I mean, surely she has other resources at her disposal, so much so that we should have been irrelevant."

"Well, you heard her explanation. She didn't really want to bring in her own people for personal reasons," Virginia said.

"I'm not buying it," Sarah insisted.

Jack gave her a look she knew all too well.

"Knock it off, it's not just that I don't like her, or because her former name was Farbeaux. It's the way her agency has so conveniently become cooperative right now. Besides, so soon after Lisa's death, I think she's a bad influence on Carl."

"Oh, that's it — you don't think Carl's man enough to avoid an entanglement. Or is it that you're jealous for Lisa?" Jack asked.

"Listen, Jack," she said, then caught her mistake a split second after it was out of her mouth. "I mean Major, leave that crap out of it… it's just that maybe Lieutenant Ryan would have been better off working with her, instead of Carl," she said, picking up her fork to indicate she was ending her part in this awkward conversation.

"Where is Jason, anyway? He's usually attached to you and Carl like a pet," Virginia commented.

"I assigned him another project," Jack quickly replied. "And Ryan is the last man you want around a Frenchwoman anyway," he joked, hoping to steer the conversation away from the lieutenant's whereabouts.

"Chief Jenks, Major, come to the bridge please," Carl said over the intercom. "We're coming up on the area where our Spaniard said the Black River starts."

Jenks and Jack passed Danielle in the companion way that joined the navigation area with the cockpit. She smiled and nodded a greeting. The master chief stopped and tilted his head to admire her from behind, then entered the cockpit to relieve Carl at the controls.

"Had Frenchie keepin' you company, Toad?" Jenks asked as he squeezed into the command chair.

"Nah, all by my lonesome up here," Carl answered.

Jack caught an inflection in his answer and, instead of going into the cockpit, turned and looked around the navigation compartment. He went to the map table. The computer rendering of Padilla's map was up. Jack remembered shutting it down earlier, and surmised that Carl must have turned it on when he took over for Jenks. He ducked his head into the cockpit and saw that the map was also up on the monitor between the two seats. Everett must have used the map table first and then routed the program to the cockpit.

"We have a branch coming up. We have about fifteen feet of water under our keel, so no problem there, yet," Jenks said.

"I was thinking," Jack asked, "what would have made Captain Padilla take this particular tributary route instead of keeping with the main river?"

"What do you mean?" Carl asked from the copilot's seat.

"It makes no sense, there had to have been something his scouts had seen that made Padilla choose this route over the Amazon, a peculiarity in the river perhaps, or a man-made object. I just don't see him arbitrarily leaving the main river."

"I see what you mean and I don't have a clue. If that's the case, others in the five hundred years since would have seen the same thing and ventured down the tributary," Carl said. "So whatever it was that drew him to it—"

"Isn't there anymore," Jack finished for him.

"Well, this is going to be one short-ass trip, boys. Look," Jenks said as he throttled back on the engines.

"What the hell, we must have taken the wrong route," Carl exclaimed.

Up ahead, Teacher was dwarfed by sheer rock walls in front of her. A waterfall splashed down and created a beautiful scene in front, but that was it. The tributary ended after only ten miles. Jenks looked down at the sonar picture.

"She's deep. We've gone from fifteen feet under the keel to thirty-five," he reported. He reached down and pinged the bottom with a blast of sound, getting a clearer picture of the bottom landscape when the sound waves bounced back.

"Lot of boulders and shit on the bottom, some pretty large schools of fish, but that's about it. Wait a minute, look at this," he said, tapping at the still shot of the computer-generated sonar picture. He used a cursor and backtracked a little. "That's a weird-shaped rock."

"Damned near looks like a head, doesn't it?" Carl ventured.

Jack leaned in and nodded his agreement. The boulder, if that's what it was, looked as if it were a head, with ears, nose, and everything.

"Ah, sonar plays tricks on you sometimes, just a weird-shaped rock, that's all."

"Chief, those fifteen fancy remote probes you have from TRW, I think its worth one to see what that is, I'm betting it's something," Jack said, still looking at the frozen sonar picture.

"You're betting about five thousand bucks, Major," Jenks responded as he stuck a fresh cigar in his mouth. "I have only five that are programmed and operational; there were priorities in the work assigned the last two days."

Jack just looked at him.

"You're the boss, I'm only a galley slave," Jenks acquiesced. "Toad, on your console, hit the button that says UDWTR Bay 3, will ya? It's time to see if I trained you right the last few hours on the operation of our Snoop Dog."

Carl found the button and pushed it. Somewhere below they heard a short whine coming from somewhere. Then a small console popped up on the thick armrest of Everett's chair. It was equipped with a small joystick. Jenks reached out and switched the main monitor between them to another channel, which was filled with static.

"Now, raise the small plastic cover there," he said.

Carl saw the switch cover by the joystick and raised it. Underneath was a red push button that illuminated when the switch cover was raised.

"Push it, Toad," Jenks ordered.

Carl pushed down until it clicked. They heard a gush of air and saw bubbles rise to the surface ahead of them.

"Hey, hey, watch it, you'll run her into the bank. Swing her around, swing her around!" Jenks called out loudly.

"Shit!" Carl said as he saw on the monitor the little torpedo-shaped probe was heading for shallow water. He took the small joystick and twisted it to the left. The angle on the monitor changed and the compass located in digital form at the bottom of the screen swung from east to north to south.

"Okay, Toad, now you're headed right for us; twist the top of the joystick, that's your speed control. Toad? Slow down, goddammit!"

The picture angled right at Teacher , the tri-shaped hull clearly visible, the probe slowed.

"Damn, kid, keep the speed down, will ya? Now, push down on the joystick. That controls your dive on the probe, push down for down, and pull up for—"

"Up?" Carl said smartly.

"I knew they made you an officer for a fuckin' reason, Toad."

Carl turned the probe again until it started heading away and then threw the four-foot-long radio-controlled unit, dubbed "Snoopy," which TRW had developed for the navy, into a spiral headed down, trailing her near-invisible fiber-optic power and control cable behind it.

"You catch on fast, now try not to run it into the mud. We can still recover her and use her again. Major, ask that kid Mendenhall to get to the fantail and make ready to bring the probe aboard, and tell that army fella not to fall overboard, it's heavy."

Jack did so using the intercom.

On the monitor the picture grew darker. A light just under Snoopy's nose came on with the use of an installed rheostat sensor that automatically lit up in darkness. The probe edged deeper with every turn it made, the small fins on the zero buoyancy craft keeping the device in a tight spiral. Jenks looked at the depth and called it out.