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"Damned shame we can't get out and walk around," Gu
"Same thing you'd find in the middle of the Mojave Desert," Giordino grunted. "Absolutely zilch." He reached up and tapped a gauge. "Colder temperature though. I read a rousing thirty-four-point-eight degrees Fahrenheit."
"A great place to visit," Woodson said, "but you wouldn't want to spend your golden years there."
"Anything show on sonar?" Gu
Giordino nodded at a large green screen in the middle of the panel. The reflected pattern of the terrain was flat. "Nothing ahead or to the sides. The profile hasn't wavered for several hours."
Gu
Giordino nodded. "Mother is hanging in there."
He needed only to glance at the fluctuating needle on the transducer instrument to know that the mother ship, a surface support tender, was continuously tracking the Sappho I on sonar.
"Make contact," Gu
"I've almost forgotten what a sunset looks like," Woodson murmured. "It's off to the beach to recapture a suntan and ogle all those gorgeous bikini-clad honeys for Papa Woodson. No more of these deep-sea fu
"Thank God, the end is in sight," Giordino said. "Another week cooped up in this overgrown wiener and I'll start talking to the potted plants."
Woodson looked at him. "We don't have any potted plants."
"You get the picture."
Gu
Giordino turned to Gu
"I don't get your meaning," Gu
"A poorly cast drama is what I mean. Take a good look at your crew." He gestured to the four men working in the aft section of the submersible-Ben Drummer, a lanky Southerner with a deep Alabama drawl; Rick Spencer, a short, blond-haired Californian who whistled constantly through clenched teeth; Sam Merker, as cosmopolitan and citified as a Wall Street broker; and Henry Munk, a quiet, droopy-eyed wit who clearly wished he were anywhere but on the Sappho I "Those clowns aft, you, Woodson, and myself; we're all engineers, nuts-and-bolts mechanics. There isn't a Ph.D. in the lot."
"The first men on the moon weren't intellectuals, either," Gu
"I am not," Giordino declared pontifically, "cut out to be a hero."
"Neither am I, pal," Woodson added. "But you've got to admit it beats hell out of selling life insurance."
"The drama of it all escapes him," Gu
"Unerringly?" Giordino said. "Then suppose you tell me why I'm ru
Gu
Giordino stared at him. "We're supposed to be under the Labrador Sea. Instead, Admiral Sandecker changes our course at the last minute and makes us chase all over the abyssal plains below the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. It doesn't make sense."
Gu
"God damn," Admiral Sandecker had thundered. "I'd give up a year's salary if I could join you men."
A figure of speech, Giordino reflected. Next to Sandecker, Ebenezer Scrooge spent money like a drunken sailor. Giordino relaxed in a deep leather sofa and tuned into the admiral's briefing, while idly blowing smoke rings between puffs on a giant cigar, lifted from a box on Sandecker's immense desk when everyone's attention was focused on a wall map of the Atlantic Ocean.
"Well, there she is." Sandecker rapped the pointer loudly on the map for the second time. "The Lorelei Current. She's born off the western tip of Africa, follows the mid-Atlantic ridge north, then curves easterly between Baffin Island and Greenland, and then dies in the Labrador Sea."
Giordino said "I don't hold a degree in oceanography, Admiral, but it would seem that the Lorelei converges with the Gulf Stream."
"Not hardly. The Gulf Stream is surface water. The Lorelei is the coldest, heaviest water in the world's oceans, averaging fourteen thousand feet in depth."
"Then the Lorelei crosses under the Gulf Stream," Spencer said softly. It was the first time in the briefing he had spoken.
"That seems reasonable." Sandecker paused, smiled benevolently, then continued "The ocean is basically made up of two layers-a surface or upper layer, heated by the sun and thoroughly churned by winds, and a cold, very dense layer consisting of intermediate, deep and bottom water. And the two never mix."
"Sounds very dull and forbidding," Munk said. "The mere fact that some character with a black sense of humor named the current after a Rhine nymph who lured sailors onto the rocks makes it the last place I'd want to visit."
A grim smile crawled slowly over Sandecker's griffin face. "Get used to the name, gentlemen, because deep in the Lorelei's gut is where we're going to spend fifty days. Where you're going to spend fifty days."
"Doing what?" Woodson asked defiantly.
"The Lorelei Current Drift Expedition is exactly what it sounds like. You men will descend in a deepwater submersible five hundred miles northwest of the coast of Dakar and begin a submerged cruise in the current. Your main job will be to monitor and test the sub and its equipment. If there are no malfunctions that would necessitate cutting short the mission, you should surface around the middle of September in the approximate center of the Labrador Sea."
Merker cleared his throat softly. "No submersible has stayed that long that deep."
"You want to back out, Sam?"
"Well . . . no."
"This is a volunteer expedition. Nobody is twisting your arm to go."
"Why us, Admiral?" Ben Drummer uncoiled his lean frame from the floor where he had been comfortably stretched. "Ah'm a marine engineer. Spencer here is an equipment engineer. And Merker is a systems expert. Ah can't see where we fit in."