Zavala pulled himself back up to a sitting position. “Getting bounced around down here, Kurt. Sea picking up again?” he inquired.

“It’s like a mirror. Wind’s died down and the swells have flattened out.”

“Joe,” Kane shouted, “there it is again . . . the monster fish!” He jabbed his index finger at the window.

A shadow passed near the edge of the searchlight beam and turned toward the bathysphere.

As Zavala pressed his face against a porthole, every hair on his scalp stood up and saluted. He was looking into three glowing eyes, one of them over the other two.

He had little time to analyze his impressions. The sphere jerked again.

“We’re seeing cable oscillations near the surface,” Kurt’s voice came over the speaker. “What’s going on?”

There was another jerking movement.

“There’s something out there,” Zavala said.

“What are you talking about?” Austin asked.

Zavala wasn’t sure himself, so he simply said, “Haul us up.”

“Hang tight,” Austin said. “We’re starting the winch.”

The bathysphere seemed to stabilize. The numbers on the fathometer blinked, showing that the sphere was moving up toward the surface. Kane broke into a relieved grin, but the expression on his face froze as the bathysphere jerked once more. A second later, the men in the B3 were levitating as if plunging on a runaway elevator.

The bathysphere had gone into free fall.

AUSTIN LEANED AGAINST THE SHIP’S RAILING AND SAW THE B3’s tether cable oscillating like a plucked violin string. He spoke into the headset microphone that connected him with the bathysphere. “What’s going on, Joe? The cable is going crazy.”

Austin heard garbled voices, the words inaudible against a background of metallic clanging. Then the cable abruptly stopped its wild gyrations, and the line went dead.

Austin strained his ears. Nothing. Not even a whisper of static. He removed the headset and examined the connections. Everything was in place. He unclipped his belt radio and called the captain in the ship’s bridge.

“I’ve lost voice communication with the B3. Is the video transmission coming through?”

“Not since it was cut off,” the captain reported.

“Have you checked the redundant systems?” Austin asked.

Unlike the original bathysphere, which was connected to the surface with a single telephone line, the B3’s hauling cable incorporated several different communications routes in case one went out in the hostile deep-sea environment.

“Ditto, Kurt, nothing. All systems are out.”

A frown crossed Austin’s tanned face. It made no sense. If one system failed, another system should have taken over. Zavala had bragged that the instrumentation he’d designed for the B3 equaled that of a jetliner.

Austin instructed the crane operator to reel the cable in. As it slithered out of the water and around the drum, the operator’s voice came over Austin’s headset.

“Hey, Kurt, something’s wrong. There’s no weight resistance at the other end. The cable’s coming up too fast and easy. It’s like cranking a spinning reel after you’ve lost your fish.”

Austin asked the crane man to speed up the retrieval of the bathysphere, and the cable slinked from the sea at an even faster rate. The launch crew was pressed against the railing, silently watching the streaming cable. The NUMA film crew, sensing the tension in the air, had stopped filming.

“Almost at the surface,” the crane operator warned. “Heads up!”

The operator slowed the winch, but still the cable snapped like a bullwhip when it came out of the water, the bathysphere no longer attached. He swung the dangling cable over the ship and put the winch in reverse, letting several yards of the cable coil on the deck. Austin went over to the coil and picked up the end of the cable.

A cameraman standing nearby saw Austin holding the free end of the cable. “Damned thing snapped!” he said.

Austin knew that the cable could hold ten times the weight of the B3. He examined it closely. The strands were as even edged as the bristles of a paintbrush. He turned to the NUMA oceanographer who had chosen the dive site.

“Is there any feature down there, a coral ridge or overhang, that could have snagged the cable?” he asked.

“The bottom is as flat as an ironing board,” the oceanographer said, almost insulted at the question. “There’s a carpet of marine growth, but that’s it. Nothing but mud. That’s why we selected this spot. We did intensive bottom profiling before we made our recommendation.”

Watching from the bridge, Captain Gannon had seen Austin examining the cable. He hustled down to the deck, and he swore lustily when Austin showed him the sheared-off end. “What the hell happened?”

Austin shook his head. “I wish I knew.”

“The press boats have been calling in,” the captain said. “They want to know what happened to the video transmission.”

Austin scanned the cordon of encircling boats being kept away from the area by a Coast Guard patrol. “Tell them that there was a problem with the fiber-optic cable. We need time to figure this thing out.”

The captain called the bridge, relayed Austin’s suggestion, and snapped the radio back onto his belt.

“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it, Kurt?” Gannon asked with worry in his eyes. “The B3’s flotation bags will bring them to the surface, right?”

Austin squinted against the glare coming off the surface of the water. “The bathysphere is a long way down; let’s give it a while. But we should ready an ROV in case we need to take a look.”

Despite his apparent serenity, Austin knew that each passing minute diminished the possibility of a flotation-bag ascent. The bathysphere could rely on battery power for light, but its air would eventually peter out. He waited a few more minutes, then called the captain and recommended that they launch the ROV.

The remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, has become the workhorse of undersea exploration. Controlled by means of a tether, an ROV can dive deep, maneuver into the tightest spaces, and transmit television images, allowing the operator to travel to the depths without leaving the dry comfort of the ship.

The captain had chosen a medium-sized vehicle, about the size and shape of an old steamer trunk, that could operate at a depth of six thousand feet. Six thrusters positioned the vehicle with pinpoint accuracy; it was equipped with two manipulators for collecting samples, and several cameras, including high-resolution color video.

A telescoping starboard boom swung the ROV off its cradle and lowered it into the sea. Austin watched it sink under a mound of pale green bubbles, trailing its tether behind it, then stepped into the remote-sensing control center located in a cargo container on the main deck.

The video feed through the ROV’s tether was connected to a console from which the remote’s movement was controlled by a pilot with a joystick. Images from the feed were transmitted to a big screen above the console. The ROV’s heading and speed were displayed in combination letters and numbers at the top of the screen, along with elapsed time.

Moving in a descending spiral, the ROV traveled in minutes the same distance it had taken the bathysphere hours. The remote blasted through schools of fish, scattering them like leaves, as it corkscrewed into the sea.

“Leveling out,” the pilot said.

She put the remote into a shallow-angled dive like an airplane preparing to land. Its twin searchlights picked out brownish green bottom vegetation that looked like leaves of spinach undulating in the current. There was no sign of the Bathysphere 3.

Austin said, “Start searching, in parallel passes, a hundred feet long.”

The ROV cruised about twenty feet over the vegetation. It finished its first hundred-foot pass, then traveled back with fifteen feet separating it from the first pass. The speed indicator showed the ROV was doing five knots.