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Adam turned to Monk. “Now what?”
He shrugged. “We wait. When it comes to hunting, patience is as important as stealth or firepower.”
They all settled in. Every five minutes one of the DriX units would fire its echosounder, casting an expanding wave of sound toward the seabed. On their respective screens, colorful 3D images appeared, showing the water column in gradients of depths and a crisp image of the seabed.
The trench appeared in flashes, revealing its high cliffs and the dark shadow of its bottom. The detail was clear enough to discern the scar across the coral canopy below. Even the smooth contour of the Chinese submarine showed up, crumpled at one end.
But Monk concentrated higher up the water column.
An hour went by, and the seas remained empty.
“Maybe we’re wrong,” Adam finally offered with a jaw-breaking yawn.
Phoebe cocked her head, narrowing one eye. “That can’t be good.”
“What?” Monk asked.
Phoebe leaned closer, while blindly tapping the keyboard. She flipped between the image recorded by thefirstping and thelatestone. She switched back and forth, like an optometrist testing one’s vision.
“What are you seeing?” Adam asked, clearly failing the eye exam like Monk.
“Hang on. Let me adjust the opacity.”
Phoebe tapped a few more times, and the two images now overlapped each other, translucent enough to see both. The trench walls aligned perfectly on both images, as did most of the seabed—but not at its center. The current image showed the coral canopy and the submarine it cradled had dropped tens of meters lower.
“What’s happening?” Adam asked.
“It’s all sinking.” Phoebe frowned. “Maybe the radiation weakened the coral forest under it, enough to make it crumble beneath the sub’s weight.”
“Is that possible?” Monk asked. “The sub’s been leaking radiation for more than two weeks. Why would the coral be breaking down now?”
“Could it be secondary to the quake?” Adam asked.
“Maybe.”
Another of the DriX pinged its sonar scanner. Phoebe quickly placed the new image on top of the other two.
“It’s still subsiding,” she reported. “Another eight meters.”
As they watched the images over the next half hour, the sinking appeared to be accelerating, which made no sense.
Phoebe frowned at the oddity. “If the sub was merely settling atop a crumbling expanse of forest, its descent should be slowing as the debris piled beneath it, braking its fall. But that’s not happening. I think I know what’s—”
They all gasped with the next sonar firing.
Phoebe leaned closer, studying the seabed.
The wreck of the submarine was gone.
6:30A.M.
Phoebe ignored the chatter from the two men. They had kept secrets long enough, so she felt little need to answer their press of questions.
Instead, she brought up the sub-bottom profiler on one of the DriX units and ran a real-time scan of the black hole in the coral. She studied the cross-sectional image as it cut down into the darkness, searching for its bottom.
She didn’t find it.
With a growl of frustration, she sat back.
