Clive Cussler - Cyclops

Pitt smiled distantly. "We'll know as soon as Al and I dive down and run a search pattern."

As if on cue they all became quiet and gazed over the side into the water, oil-slicked and ash-coated, dark and secretive. Somewhere in the sinister green depths La Dorada beckoned.

<<80>>

Pitt stood in full dive gear and watched the bubbles rising from the deep and bursting on the surface. He glanced at his watch, marking the time. Giordino had been down nearly fifty minutes at a depth of forty feet. He went on watching the bubbles and saw them gradually travel in a circle. He knew that Giordino had enough air left for one more 360-degree sweep around the descent line tied to a buoy about thirty yards from the boat.

The small crew of Cubans Sandecker had recruited were very quiet. Pitt looked along the deck and saw them lined up at the rail beside the admiral, staring as though hypnotized at the glitter from the bubbles.

Pitt turned to Jessie, who was standing beside him. She hadn't said a word or moved in the last five minutes, her face tense with deep concentration, her eyes shining with excitement. She was swept up in the anticipation of seeing a legend. Then suddenly she called out. "Look!

A dark form rose from the depths amid a cloud of bubbles, and Giordino's head broke the water near the buoy. He rolled over on his back and paddled easily with his fins until he reached the ladder. He handed up his weight belt and twin air cylinder before climbing to the deck. He pulled off his face mask and spit over the side.

"How did it go?" asked Pitt.

"Okay," Giordino answered. "Here's the situation. I made eight sweeps around the base point where the buoy's descent line is anchored. Visibility is less than three feet. We may have a little luck. The bottom is a mixture of sand and mud, so it's not real soft. The statue may not have sunk over her head."

"Current?"

"About a knot. You can live with it."

"Any obstructions?"

"A few bits and pieces of rusted wreckage protrude from the bottom, so be careful not to snag your distance line."

Sandecker came up behind Pitt and made a final check of his gear. Pitt stepped through an opening in the rail and set the air regulator's mouthpiece between his teeth.

Jessie gave his arm a gentle squeeze through the protective dry suit. "Luck," she said.

He winked at her through the face mask and then took a long step forward. The bright sunlight was diffused by a sudden burst of bubbles as he was engulfed by the green void. He swam out to the buoy and started down the descent line. The yellow nylon braid faded and vanished a few feet below in the opaque murk.

Pitt followed the line cautiously, taking his time. He paused once to clear his ears. Less than a minute later the bottom abruptly seemed to lift up toward him and meet his outstretched hand. He again paused to adjust his buoyancy compensator vest and check his watch for the time, compass for direction, and air pressure gauge. Then he took the distance line Giordino had attached to the descent line by a clip and moved out along the radius.

After swimming about twenty-four feet his hand came in contact with a knot in the line Giordino had tied to measure the outer perimeter of his last sweep. After a short distance, Pitt spied an orange stake standing in the muck that marked the starting point for his circular search pattern. Then he moved out another six-foot increment, held the line taut, and began his sweep, his eyes taking in the three-foot visibility on both sides.

The water was desolate and lifeless and smelled of chemicals. He passed over colonies of dead sea life, crushed by the concussion from the bursting oil tanker, their bodies rolling across the bottom with the tide like leaves under a gentle breeze. He had sweated inside his dry suit under the sun on the boat, and he was sweating inside it now forty feet below the surface. He could hear the sounds of the rescue boats racing back and forth across the harbor, the roar of their exhaust and cavitation of their propellers magnified by the density of the water.

Yard by yard he scanned the barren harbor until he completed a full circle. He moved the marker out and started another sweep in the opposite direction.

Divers often experience great loneliness when swimming over an underwater desert with nothing to see beyond a hand's reach. The real world with people, less than fifty feet away on the surface, ceases to exist. They experience a careless abandon and an indifference toward the unknown. Their perception becomes distorted and they began to fantasize.

Pitt felt none of those things, except maybe a touch of a fantasy. He was drunk with the hunt and so absorbed in seeing the treasured statue in his mind, gleaming gold and brilliant green, that he almost missed a vague form looming up through the mist on his right.

Rapidly kicking his fins, he swam toward it. The object was round and indistinct and partly buried. The two feet that protruded from the silt were coated with slime and strands of sea growth that waved with the current.

A hundred times Pitt had wondered how he'd feel, how he would react when he confronted the golden woman. What he really felt was fear, fear that it was only a false alarm and the search might never end.

Slowly, apprehensively, he wiped away the slimy growth with his gloved hands. Tiny particles of vegetation and silt billowed in a brown swirl, obscuring the thing. He waited under an eerie silence until the cloud melted into the watery gloom.

He moved closer, floating just above the bottom, until his face was only a few inches away from the mysterious object. He stared through his face mask, his mouth suddenly going dry, his heart pounding like a calypso drum.

With a look of timeless melancholy, a pair of emerald-green eyes stared back at him.

Pitt had found La Dorada.

January 4, 1990

Washington, D.C.

<<81>>

The President's announcement of the Jersey Colony and the exploits of Eli Steinmetz and his moon team electrified the nation and caused a worldwide sensation.

Every evening for a week television viewers were treated to spectacular scenes of the lunar landscape never viewed during the brief Apollo landings. The struggle of the men to survive while constructing a livable habitat was also shown in dramatic detail.

Steinmetz and the others became the heroes of the hour. They were feted across the country, interviewed on countless television talk shows, and given the traditional ticker tape parade in New York.

The cheers for the moon colonists' triumph had the ring of old-fashioned patriotism, but the impact went deeper, broader. Now there was something tangible beyond the short, showy flights above the earth's atmosphere, a permanence in space, solid proof that man could live a life far from his home planet.

The President looked buoyant at a private dinner party he hosted in honor of the "inner core" and the colonists. His mood was far different from the first time he had confronted the men who conceived and launched the moon base. He held out a glass of champagne to Hudson, who was staring absently through the roomful of people as though it were silent and empty.

"Your mind lost in space, Leo?"

Hudson's eyes fixed on the President for a moment, and then he nodded. "My apologies. A nasty habit of mine, tuning out at parties."

"I'll bet you're hatching plans for a new settlement on the moon."

Hudson smiled wryly. "Actually, I was thinking of Mars."

"So the Jersey Colony is not the end."

"There will never be an end, only the beginning of another beginning."

"Congress will ride with the mood of the country and vote funding to expand the colony. But an outpost on Mars-- you're talking heavy money."

"If we don't do it now, the next generation will."