“It wouldn’t be the first time someone accused me of being one beer short of a six-pack. You get used to it when you’re doing pure research.” Kane removed his sunglasses, revealing eyes of Kris Kringle blue. “And please call me Doc.”

Austin gestured toward the orange globe. “Don’t pay any attention to my earlier comment, Doc. I’m nursing a serious case of sour grapes. I’d make the dive in a heartbeat if the bathysphere came in a bigger size. Joe is the best deep-sea guy in the business. He’s made the diving bell as safe as any NUMA submersible.”

Zavala cast an appraising eye on the sphere. “I used technology that wasn’t available back in the thirties, but otherwise it’s the original Beebe-Barton design that set the record by diving 3,028 feet in 1934. The bathysphere was beautiful in its simplicity.”

“The sphere design seems so obvious to us now,” Kane said. “At first, William Beebe thought that a cylinder-shaped bell might work. He was chatting with his friend Teddy Roosevelt years before the actual dive and sketched his idea out on a napkin. Roosevelt disagreed and drew a circle instead, representing his preference for a globe-shaped bell. Later, when Beebe saw the Otis Barton design based on a sphere, he realized that was the only way to deal with the pressure at great depth.”

Zavala had heard the story before. “Beebe saw that the cylinder’s flat ends would cave in,” he picked up the story, “but a sphere would distribute the pressure more evenly around its entire surface.” He squatted next to the globe and ran his hand over the thick skids that the legs rested upon. “I’ve added emergency flotation bags in the runners. There’s more than a little self-preservation involved, Doc. I’ll be making the dive with you.”

Kane rubbed his palms together like a hungry man savoring a juicy steak. “This is a dream come true,” he said. “I pulled every string I could to get on the dive list. William Beebe is responsible for my career in marine microbiology. When I was a kid, I read about the glowing, deep-ocean fish that he found. I wanted to share Beebe’s adventures.”

“My biggest adventure has been trying to stuff myself through that fourteen-inch door,” Austin said. “Try it on for size, Doc.”

Kane, who was about five foot eight, hung his jacket on the bathysphere’s frame, then poured himself headfirst into the sphere, doubled his body with the skill of a contortionist, and poked his head out the circular opening.

“It’s roomier in here than it appears from the outside.”

“The original bathysphere was four feet nine inches in diameter, and had walls one and a half inches thick made of fine-grade, open-hearth steel,” Zavala said. “The divers shared their space with oxygen tanks, filter trays, a searchlight, and telephone wires. We’ve cheated a little. The portholes are polymer instead of fused quartz. The tether is Kevlar rather than steel, and we’ve replaced the copper communications link with photo-optic fiber. We miniaturized the bulkier instruments. I would have preferred a titanium sphere, but the costs were higher.”

Kane easily exited the sphere and stared at it with near reverence. “You’ve done an amazing job, Joe. Beebe and Barton were aware they were risking their lives, but their boyish enthusiasm overcame their fears.”

“That enthusiasm must have rubbed off on you to come all this distance,” Austin said. “I understand you were in the Pacific Ocean.”

“Yeah. Contract work for Uncle Sam. Pretty routine stuff. We’re about to wrap it up, which is fortunate because there was no way I would have missed this opportunity.”

The third mate was making her way across the deck toward the bathysphere accompanied by two men and a woman carrying video cameras, lights, and sound equipment.

“That’s the NUMA film crew,” Austin said to Kane. “They’ll want to interview the intrepid divers on camera.”

A look of horror came over Max Kane’s face. “I must look like crap. Smell like it too. Can they wait until I hop into the shower and trim the porcupine quills on my chin?”

“Joe will fill them in while you clean up. I’ll see you in the bridge after you’re done with the interview,” Austin said. “We’ll go over the plans for tomorrow.”

As he headed for the bridge, Austin reflected on how Beebe’s books had stirred his own imagination when he was a boy growing up in Seattle. He recalled one story in particular. Beebe described standing at the edge of an underwater precipice at the limit of his surface air supply, looking down with yearning into the deep water beyond his reach. The scene crystallized Austin’s own tendency to push to his limits.

Born and raised in Seattle, Austin had followed his boyhood dreams, studying systems management at the University of Washington. He also attended a prestigious deepwater diving school, specializing in salvage. He worked a few years on North Sea oil rigs and put in a stint with his father’s ocean-salvage company, but his spirit of adventure needed freer rein. He joined a clandestine underwater-surveillance unit of the CIA that he led until it was disbanded at the end of the Cold War. His father hoped he would return to ocean salvage, but Austin moved over to NUMA to head up a unique team that included Zavala and Paul and Gamay Trout. Admiral Sandecker had seen the need to create the Special Assignments Team to investigate out-of-the-ordinary events above and below the world’s oceans.

After completing the team’s last assignment, the search for a long-lost Phoenician statue known as the Navigator, Austin had heard that the National Geographic Society and the New York Zoological Society were sponsoring a docudrama on Beebe’s historic half-mile bathysphere dive of 1934. Actors would play Beebe and Barton, using a prop bathysphere, with much of the action simulated.

Austin persuaded the NUMA brass to let Zavala design a state-of-the-art bathysphere. The diving bell would be launched from the agency’s research vessel, William Beebe, in conjunction with the docudrama. Like all government agencies, NUMA had to fight for its share of the federal funding pie, and favorable publicity never hurt.

Dirk Pitt had taken over from Sandecker as NUMA’s director after Sandecker became the Vice President of the United States, and Pitt was equally interested in creating favorable public awareness of the agency’s work. The bathysphere’s pressure sphere would be recycled after the expedition as the heart of a new deep-sea submersible. The diving bell was nicknamed the B3 because it was the third pressure hull using the Beebe-Barton design.

Trailed by a cameraman and sound technician, Zavala and a freshly scrubbed Kane climbed to the bridge after being interviewed in front of the bathysphere. Austin introduced Kane to the captain, an experienced NUMA hand named Mike Gannon, who spread a chart out on a table and pointed to Nonsuch Island off the northeast tip of Bermuda.

“We’ll anchor as close as possible to Beebe’s original position,” the captain said. “We’ll be about eight miles from land with just over a half mile of water under the ship’s keel.”

“We decided on a shallower location than the original so we could film the sea bottom,” Austin said. “How’s the weather looking?”

“There’s a gale expected tonight, but it should blow out before morning,” Gannon said.

Austin turned to Kane. “We’ve been doing all the talking, Doc. What do you hope to get out of this expedition?”

Kane gave the question a moment’s thought.

“Miracles,” he said with a mysterious smile.

“How so?”

“When Beebe reported hauling phosphorescent fish in his trawl nets, his fellow scientists didn’t believe him. Beebe hoped the bathysphere would vindicate his research. He compared it to a paleontologist who could annihilate time and see his fossils alive. Like Beebe, my hope is to dramatize the miracles that lie beneath the surface of the ocean.”