After a time Miyuki spoke, “What do you really hope to find out there?”

“Answers.” Karen leaned on the rail. “You read Professor Masaaki’s thesis.”

Miyuki nodded. “That once these islands were part of some lost continent, now sunk under the waves. Pretty wild conjecture.”

“Not necessarily. During the Holocene era, some ten thousand years ago, the ocean levels were three hundred feet shallower.” Karen waved an arm. “If so, many of these separate islands would have been joined.”

“Still, you know from your own research that the islands of the South Pacific were populated only a couple thousand years ago. Not ten thousand.”

“I know. I’m not saying you’re wrong, Miyuki. I just want to see these pyramids for myself.” Karen gripped the ship’s rail tighter. “But what if I can find proof to support Professor Masaaki’s claim? Could you imagine what this revelation would mean? It would change the entire historical paradigm for this region. It would unite so many disparate theories—” She hesitated, then continued. “—even explain the mystery of the lost continent of Mu.”

Miyuki crinkled her nose. “Mu?”

Karen nodded. “Back in the early 1900s Colonel James Churchward claimed he had stumbled upon a set of Mayan tablets that spoke of a lost continent, similar to Atlantis, but in the central Pacific. He named this sunken continent Mu. He wrote a whole series of books and essays about the place…until he was discredited.”

“Discredited?”

Karen shrugged. “No one believed my great-grandfather.”

Miyuki’s brows rose, her voice shocked. “Your great-grandfather!”

Karen felt a blush blooming. She had never explained this to anyone. She spoke softly, embarrassed. “Colonel Churchward was my great-grandfather on my mother’s side. When I was a child, my mother used to tell me stories of our infamous ancestor…even read sections from his diaries to me at bedtime. His stories first drew me to the South Pacific.”

“And you think the Dragons might prove your relative’s wild claim?”

Karen shrugged. “Who knows?”

“I still say this is all a wild goose chase.”

Karen shrugged. Wild goose chases? They ran in her family, she thought sourly. Twenty years ago her father had left his wife and baby girls to chase the dream of oil and wealth in Alaska, never to be heard from again — except for a sheaf of divorce papers arriving in the mail a year later. After his disappearance, hardships drained the life from the remaining household. Her mother, abandoned with her two young daughters, had no more time for dreams and worked herself into a dull job at a secretarial pool and an even duller second marriage. Karen’s older sister, Emily, had moved to the small town of Moose Jaw after graduating from high school, her belly full of twin boys.

Karen, however, had inherited too much of her father’s wanderlust to settle down. Between tips as a waitress at the Flying Trout Grill and a few small scholarships, she was able to put herself through an undergraduate program at the University of Toronto, followed by graduate work in British Columbia. So it was no particular surprise to those who knew her that Karen Grace had ended up on the far side of the Pacific. Still, she had learned from her father’s abandonment — each month she mailed a chunk of her paycheck back home to her mother. Though she may have inherited her father’s blood, she didn’t have to accept his cold heart.

A call from the wheelhouse drew her attention. “Yonaguni!” the captain yelled above the motor’s roar. He pointed off the port side to a large island. The fishing boat made a wide turn around the isle’s southern coast.

“This is the place,” Karen said, shading her eyes with a hand. “The island of Yonaguni.”

“I don’t see anything. Are you—”

Then from around the high cliffs of the island, they appeared, no more than a hundred meters off the coastline, shrouded in morning sea mists: two pyramids, towering above the waves, their terraced sides damp with algae. As the boat drew closer, details emerged. Among the pyramids’ steps, white cranes clambered, picking stranded urchins and crabs from the debris.

“They’re real,” Karen said.

“That’s not all,” Miyuki said, her voice full of awe.

As the small boat continued to circle around the island, the deeper mists parted and the view opened wider. Past the pyramids, rows of coral-encrusted columns and roofless buildings rode above the waves. In the distance a basalt statue of a robed woman stood waist-deep in the sea, draped in seaweed, a stone arm raised as if calling for their aid. Farther yet, piles of tumbled bricks and cracked stone obelisks marched deep into the Pacific.

“My God,” Karen exclaimed in shock.

Along with the Dragons, an entire ancient city had risen from the sea.

On the bridge of the Deep Fathom, Jack lounged in the pilot’s chair, sprawled out, his bare feet propped up on a neighboring seat. He wore a white cotton robe over a pair of red Nike swim trunks. The morning had started warm and had only grown warmer. Though the pilothouse was equipped with air-conditioning, Jack hadn’t bothered. He enjoyed the moist heat.

As he sat, one hand rested on the wheel of the ship. The Fathom had been on autopilot since it left the site of the sunken Kochi Maru yesterday, but Jack felt a certain comfort with his hand on the wheel. A twinge of mistrust for automated equipment. He liked to keep things in his immediate control.

As he sat, he chewed on the end of the cigar hanging from his lips. A Cuban El Presidente. The smoke trailed in a lazy circle toward the open window nearby. Behind him, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major wafted gently from a Sony CD player. This was all he wanted: the open sea and a handsome ship to travel her.

But that was not to be. Not today.

Jack glanced at the reading from the Northstar 800 GPS. At their current cruising speed they should arrive at their destination in another three hours.

Exhaling out a stream of smoke, he stared out the windows across the upper deck of his salvage ship. He understood why his ship had been summoned to aid the search for the wreckage of Air Force One. The Fathom was the closest salvager with a deep-sea submersible on hand, and they were contractually obligated to lend the sub’s services during an emergency.

Still, though he knew his duty, he did not have to like it. He spit out his cigar and ground its fiery end into the ash tray. This was his ship.

Twelve years ago, using money from his settlement against General Dynamics after the shuttle accident, Jack had purchased the Deep Fathom from a shipyard auction house. The eighty-foot Fathom had originally been built as a research ship for the Woods Hole Institute back in 1973. In addition to the purchase price, he had been forced to take out a large loan to convert the aged research vessel into a modern salvage ship: adding a hydraulic cargo crane, upgrading to a five-ton capacity A-frame, and overhauling the Caterpillar marine diesel engine. He had also updated the navigation equipment and outfitted it so the Fathom could operate without outside assistance for weeks at a time. He added Naiad stabilizers, a Bauer diving compressor, and Village Marine water makers.

It had cost him his entire savings, but eventually the Fathom had become his home, his world. Over the years, he had gathered a team of scientists and fellow treasure hunters to his side. They became his new family.

Now, after twelve years, he was being called back to the world he had left behind.

The door to the pilothouse squeaked open behind him and a fresh cross-breeze blew in. “Jack, what are you still doing here?” It was Lisa. The doctor from UCLA scowled at him as she entered. In shorts and a bikini top, she did not look the part of an experienced medical researcher. Her limbs were deeply tanned, and her long blond hair had been bleached white by the months under the sun. She looked like she belonged on a beach, hanging on the arm of a muscled surfer. But Jack knew better. There was no sharper doctor on the high seas.