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He willked back at her.
He turned and walked through the entryway of the shelter into the cold outside, trailed by two Navy men who tended his lines.
Giordino began to follow when Lily clutched his arm. "Will we be able to hear him?" she asked anxiously.
"Yes, I've connected him into a speaker. You and Dr. Gronquist can stay here where it's warm and listen in. If you have a message for Pitt, simply come and tell me, and I'll pass it on."
Pitt walked stiffly to the edge of the ice hole and sat down. The air temperature had dropped to zero. It was a crystalline November day with a biting edge, courtesy of a ten-mile-an-hour wind.
As he slipped on his fins he looked up at the sheer sides of the mountains that soared above the inlet. The tons of snow and ice clinging to the steep palisades seemed as if they could fall at any moment. He turned to the upper end of the fjord where he could see glacier arms curling and grinding toward the sea. Then he looked down.
The water in the dive hole looked jade, ominous and cold.
Commander Knight approached and put his hand on Pitts shoulder. All he could see was a pair of intense green eyes through the glass of the mask. He spoke loudly so Pitt could hear.
"One hour, twenty-three minutes left. I thought you ought to know."
Pitt gave him a steel-edged stare but did not reply. He made a "thumbs up" sign and slipped through the narrow hole into the forbidding water.
He slowly settled past the encircling white walls. He felt as if he were diving down a well. Once clear, he was dazzled by the glistening kaleidoscope of color from the sun's rays that penetrated the ice. The underside of the sheet was jagged and uneven and specked with small hanging stalactites formed by brine from the rapidly freezing fresh water carried into the fjord by glaciers.
Underwater visibility was almost eighty meters on a horizontal range. He glanced down and saw a small kelp community grasping the rocky mass carpeting the bottom. Thousands of small shrimplike crustaceans suspended in the still water swirled past his sight.
A huge, three-meter bearded seal eyed him curiously at a distance, tufts of coarse bristles sprouting from its muzzle. Pitt waved his arms, and the big seal shot him a wary look and swam away.
Pitt touched the bottom and paused to equalize his ears. There was a danger in diving with a buoyancy-compensatortype life-jacket under ice and he did not wear one. He was slightly heavy, so he adjusted by removing and dropping a lead weight from his belt. The air that flowed from the compressor through a filter and then an accumulator into his mask tasted bland but pure.
He gazed upward and oriented himself from the eerie glow of the ice hole and checked his compass. He hadn't bothered to carry a depth gauge. He wouldn't be working in water over four meters deep.
"Talk to me," the voice of Al Giordino came through the mask's earphones.
"I'm on the bottom," replied Pitt. "All systems up to par."
Pitt spun and stared through the green void. "She lies about ten meters north of me. I'm going to move toward her. Give me some slack in the lines."
He swain slowly, taking care his lines didn't foul on the rock outcroppings. The intense cold of the frigid water began to seep into his body. He was thankful Giordino had had the foresight to see that his air supply was warm and dry The stern of the wreck slowly unveiled before his eyes. The sides were covered with a mat of algae. He brushed away a small area with his gloved hand, stirn'ng up a green cloud. He waited a minute for the cloud to dissipate and then peered at the result.
"Inform Lily and Doc I'm looking at a wooden hull without a stern rudder, but no sign of steering oars."
"Acknowledged," said Giordino.
Pitt pulled a knife from a sheath strapped to one leg and pried at the underside of the hull near the keel. The point revealed soft metal.
"We have a lead-sheathed bottom," he announced.
"Looking good," replied Giordino. "Doc Gronquist wants to know if there is any sign of carving on the sternpost."
"Hold on."
Pitt carefully wiped off the growth over a flat section of the sternpost just before it disappeared upward into the ice, waiting patiently for the resulting algae cloud to drift away.
"There's some kind of a hardwood plaque imbedded into the sternpost. I can make out lettering and a face."
"A face?"
"With a curly head of hair and heavy beard."
"What does it read?"
