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Satisfied, Pitt turned his attention to himself. All the joints swiveled properly, the muscles functioned, nothing seemed distorted. Yet he didn't escape unscathed. A purplish lump was rising on his forehead, and he noticed a strange stiffening sensation in his neck. Pitt canceled out the discomfort with the consolation that no one appeared to be bleeding. One hairline brush with death was enough for one day, he mused. The last thing they needed now was a shark attack.
Pitt focused on the next problem, getting out of the control car. The door was jammed, small wonder after the beating it had taken. He sat on his buttocks, grasped both hands on the bent frame, and lashed out with his feet. Lashed out was an exaggeration. The water pressure impeded the thrust of his legs. He felt as though he was trying to kick out the bottom of a huge jar of glue. On the sixth attempt, when the balls and heels of his feet could take no more, the metal seal gave and the door swung outward in slow motion.
Giordino emerged first, his head swathed by a surge of bubbles from his breathing regulator. He reached back inside, dug his feet into the sand, braced himself for the chest pain that was sure to come, and gave a mighty heave. With Pitt and Gunn shoving from the inside, a large, unwieldy bundle slowly squeezed through the door and dropped to the sand. Then eight steel tanks containing 104 cubic feet of air were passed out to the waiting hands of Giordino.
Inside the mangled control car Jessie fought to equalize her ears with the water pressure. The blood roared and a stabbing pain burst in her head, blanking out the trauma of the crash. She pinched her nose and snorted furiously. On the fifth try her ears finally popped, and the relief was so marvelous that tears came to her eyes. She clamped her teeth on the regulator's mouthpiece and sucked in a lungful of air.
How beautiful it would be to wake up in her own bed, she thought. Something touched her hand. It was another hand, firm and rough-skinned. She looked up to see Pitt's eyes staring at her through his mask, they seemed crinkled in a smile. He nodded for her to follow him.
He led her outside into the vast liquid void. She gazed up, watching her air bubbles hiss and swirl toward the restless surface. Despite the turbulence above, visibility on the bottom was nearly two hundred feet and she could clearly see the entire length of the airship's main carcass lying a short distance from the control car. Gunn and Giordino were nowhere in sight.
Pitt gestured for her to wait by the air tanks and the strange bundle. He checked the compass on his left wrist and swam off into the blue haze. Jessie drifted, weightless, her head feeling light from a touch of nitrogen narcosis. An overwhelming sense of loneliness closed over her, but quickly evaporated when she saw Pitt retuning. He made a sign for her to follow, and then he turned and slowly paddled away.
Pounding her feet against the water resistance, she quickly caught up with him.
The white sandy bottom gave way to clumps of coral inhabited by a variety of oddly shaped fish. Their natural bright colors were deadened to a soft gray by the scattering and absorption of the water particles that filtered out the reds, oranges, and yellows, leaving only dull greens and blues. They pedaled their fins, moving only an arm's length above the weird and exotically molded underwater jungle, observed queerly by a crowd of small angelfish, pufferfish, and trumpetfish. The amusing scene reminded Pitt of children watching the huge ballooned cartoon characters that float down Broadway in Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
Suddenly Jessie dug her fingers into Pitt's leg and pointed above and behind. There, swimming in lazy apathy, only twenty feet away, was a school of barracuda. There must have been two hundred of them, none measuring less than four feet in length. They turned as one and began circling the divers while displaying a beady-eyed curiosity. Then, deciding that Pitt and Jessie were not worth lingering over, they flashed away in the wink of an eye and were lost to view.
When Pitt turned back he saw Rudi Gunn materializing out of the smoky blue curtain. Gunn came to a stop and beckoned for them to hurry in his direction. Then he made the V sign of success.
The meaning was clear. Gunn vigorously kicked with one fin, rapidly rising at an angle until he was about thirty feet above the coral landscape, Pitt and Jessie trailing immediately in his wake.
They had traveled nearly a hundred yards when Gunn abruptly slowed and curved his body into a vertical position, one whitened hand held out, slightly bent finger pointing like the grim reaper.
Like a haunted castle looming from the mists of a Yorkshire moor, the phantom shape of the Cyclops rose up through the watery gloom, evil and sinister, as though some unspeakable force lurked within her bowels.
Pitt had dived on many shipwrecks and he was the first man to view the Titanic, but staring at the lost ghost ship of legend left him numb with an almost superstitious awe. The knowledge that she was the tomb for over three hundred men only deepened her malignant aura.
The sunken ship was lying on her port side with a list of about twenty-five degrees, her bow set toward the north. She did not have the look of anything that was supposed to rest on the sea floor, and mother nature had gone to work laying a veil of sediment and marine organisms over the steel intruder.
The entire hull and superstructure were encrusted with sea growth of every imaginable description--
sponges, barnacles, flowery anemones, feathery sea ferns, and slender weeds that gracefully swayed with the current like the arms of dancers. Except for the distorted bow and three fallen derricks, the ship was suprisingly intact.
They found Giordino busily scraping the growth from a small section below the stern railing. He turned at their approach and showed off his handiwork. He had exposed the raised letters that spelled out Cyclops.
Pitt glanced at his orange-faced Doxa diver's watch. It seemed an eternity since the blimp crashed, but only nine minutes had passed from the moment they swam out of the control car. It was imperative that they conserve their air. They still had to search the wreck and have enough left in the spare tanks for decompression. The safety margin would be cut dangerously thin.
He checked Jessie's air gauge and studied her eyes. They looked clear and bright. She was breathing slowly in a comfortable rhythm. She gave him a thumbs-up sign and then threw him a coquettish wink.
Her brush with death in the Prosperteer was forgotten for the moment.
Pitt winked back. She's actually enjoying this, he thought.
Using hand signals for communication, the four of them fanned out in a line above the fantail and began prowling her length. The doors of the aft deckhouse had rotted away and the teak deck was heavily worm-eaten. Any flat surface was coated by sediment that gave the appearance of a dusty shroud.
The jackstaff stood bare, the United States ensign having rotted away long ago. The two stern guns pointed aft, mute and deserted. The twin smokestacks stood like sentries over the decaying wreckage of ventilators, bollards and railings, rotting coils of wire and cable still hugging rusting winches. Like a shantytown, each piece of debris offered a nesting place for spiny urchins, arrow crabs, and other creatures of the sea.
Pitt knew from studying a diagram of the Cyclops' interior that searching the stern section was a waste of time. The smokestacks stood over the engine room and its crew quarters. If they were to find the La Dorada statue it would most likely be in the general cargo compartment beneath the bridge and forecastle. He motioned the others to continue their probe toward the bow.
They swam slowly, carefully along the catwalk that stretched over the sprawling coal hatches, skirting around the great clamshell loading buckets and under the corroded derricks that reached forlornly toward the refracted rays from above. It became apparent to them that the Cyclops had died a quick and violent death. The rotting remains of the lifeboats were forever frozen in their davits and much of the superstructure looked as if it had been crushed by a monstrous fist.
The odd boxlike form of the bridge slowly took form out of the blue-green dusk. The two support legs on the starboard side had buckled, but the hull's tilt to port had compensated for the angle. Peculiarly out of kilter with the rest of the ship, the bridge stood on a perfect horizontal plane.
The dark on the other side of the wheelhouse door looked ominous. Pitt switched on his dive light and drifted slowly inside, taking care not to stir up the silt on the deck with his fins. Dim light filtered through the slime-coated portholes on the forward bulkhead. He brushed away the muck from the glass covering the ship's clock. The tarnished hands were frozen at 12:21. He also examined the big upright compass stand. The interior was still watertight and the needle floated free in kerosene, pointing faithfully toward magnetic north. Pitt noted that the ship's heading was 340 degrees.
