"Ready to go," Trout said. He read the surface of the sea with an experienced eye. "Wind's freshening. Could get choppy. We'll have to stay sharp." He pronounced it "shaap," betraying his New England roots.

Gamay glanced at the whitecaps starting to dot the grayish blue water. "We might not be able to go out again for days if we wait."

"My thoughts exactly." He handed her the Van Dorn sampler. "I'll meet you at the Zodiac davit."

Gamay delivered the sampler to the wet lab. The water sample would be analyzed for trace metals and organisms. She went to her cabin, pulled a hooded, foul-weather suit on over her jeans, Icelandic wool sweater and chamois shirt, and tucked her long, dark red hair under a multicolored "Friends of the Hunley" baseball cap. Slipping into her personal flotation device, she went out to the stern deck.

Trout was waiting next to the davits that held the twenty-three-foot-long, rigid inflatable boat. He was dressed impeccably as usual. Under a full suit of yellow commercial-grade, foul-weather gear, he wore designer jeans specially tailored to fit his six-foot-eight frame and a navy sweater made of cashmere wool. One of the colorful bow ties to which Trout was addicted adorned the button-down collar of his Brooks Brothers oxford-weave blue shirt. As a counterpoint to his casual elegance, he wore scuffed work boots, a holdover from his days at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where functional footwear was de rigueur. He wore a navy wool cap to protect his head.

The Trouts climbed aboard the rigid inflatable boat and the Zodiac was lowered into the sea. Paul started the Volvo Penta diesel inboard/outboard engine as Gamay cast off the tether line. They stood side by side at the steering console with legs braced in a charioteer's pose, knees bent to absorb the shock of the flat-bottomed hull slapping the waves.

The rugged inflatable craft planed over the seas like a playful dolphin. Trout steered toward a Day-Glo orange sphere that was bobbing in the water about a quarter mile from the ship. They had set the buoy earlier in the day to provide a reference point for the phytoplankton survey.

It was not the most hospitable work environment. Glowering clouds were moving in from the east, and the horizon line was barely visible where gray sea met gray water. The easterly wind had come up a few knots. The thick cloud layer blocking the sunlight was starting to spit light rain.

But as they prepared for the survey, Paul and Gamay wore that particular expression of bliss people born to the sea have when they are in their natural element. Paul had climbed aboard a fishing boat with his fisherman father as soon as he could walk. He had fished commercially out of the Cape Cod village of Woods Hole until he went off to college.

Gamay was unfazed by the gloomy weather, although her background was somewhat different from Trout's. Born in Racine, Wisconsin, she had spent many of her younger years sailing the sometimes cantankerous waters of the Great Lakes with her father, a successful developer and yachtsman.

"You must admit this is a lot more fun than wallpapering," Paul said as he maneuvered the boat closer to the buoy.

Gamay was readying the survey gear. "This is more fun than almost anything I can think of," she said, ignoring the cold spray that splashed her face.

"Glad you qualified your statement with 'almost,' " Paul said with a leer.

Gamay gave him a sour look that didn't match the amusement in her eyes. "Pay attention to what you're doing or you'll fall overboard."

The Trouts hadn't expected to be back to sea so soon. After wrapping up their last mission with the Special Assignments Team, they had planned to catch some R amp; R. Trout had once observed that Camay's relaxation technique must have been learned from a French Foreign Legion drillmaster. A fitness and exercise nut, she was only home a few hours before embarking on an Olympic-level running, hiking and biking schedule.

Even that wasn't enough. Gamay had a habit of making a top priority of whatever happened to come into her mind at a given moment. Trout knew he was in trouble when, after a day together cruising through the Virginia countryside in their Humvee, she eye-balled the living-room wallpaper of the Georgetown town house they were constantly remodeling. He had nodded with learned patience as Gamay ticked off the remodeling projects she had piled on their plate.

The remodeling frenzy lasted only a day. Gamay was slapping wallpaper on a wall with typical ferocity when Hank Aubrey, a colleague from Scripps Institute of Oceanography, called and asked if she and Paul would like to take part in an ocean eddy survey off the mid-Atlantic coast aboard the Benjamin Franklin.

Aubrey didn't have to twist their arms. Working with Austin and the Special Assignments Team was a dream job that took them on adventures to exotic parts of the world. But sometimes they yearned for the pure research of their college years.

"Ocean eddies?" Trout had said after they accepted the invitation. "I've read about them in the oceanographic science journals. Big, slow-moving swirls of cold or warm water that are sometimes hundreds of miles across."

Gamay nodded. "According to Hank, there's a lot of new interest in the phenomenon. The whorls can hamper offshore drilling operations and affect weather. On the good side, they can churn up marine microorganisms from the ocean floor to the surface and cause an explosion up the food chain. I'll be studying the flow of nutrients and the impact on commercial fishing and whale populations. You can look into the geological components."

Noting the growing excitement in his wife's voice, Paul said, "I love it when you talk dirty."

Gamay puffed away a strand of hair that had fallen over her face. "We scientist types are a bit odd when it comes to the things that turn us on."

"What about the wallpapering?" Paul teased.

"We'll hire someone to finish it."

Paul tossed the wallpaper brush into a bucket. "Finestkind, cap," he said, using a phrase from his fishing days.

The Trouts worked together with the precision of a fine Swiss watch. Their teamwork was a quality former NUMA director James Sandecker recognized when he hired them for the Special Assignments Team. Both were now in their mid-thirties. From outward appearances, they were an unlikely couple.

Paul was the more serious of the two. He seemed constantly in deep thought, an impression that was heightened by his habit of speaking with his head lowered, eyes peering up as if over glasses.

He seemed to reach deep inside himself before saying anything of importance. His seriousness was tempered by a sly sense of humor. Gamay was more open and vivacious than her husband. A tall, slender woman who moved with the grace of a fashion model, she had a flashing smile with a slight gap between her upper front teeth, and, while not gorgeous or overly sexy, was appealing to most men. They had met at Scripps, where he was studying for his doctorate in deep-ocean geology, and Gamay was switching her field of interest from nautical archaeology to marine biology.

A few hours after receiving the call, they were packed and boarding the Benjamin Franklin. The Franklin had a highly trained crew of twenty, plus ten scientists from various universities and government agencies. Its primary mission was to conduct a hydrographic survey along the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

On a typical trip, the ship made thousands of precise depth measurements to create a picture of the ocean bottom and any wrecks or other obstructions that happened to be present. The information was used to update nautical maps for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.