Success, Darryl thought, as he bent down to inhale the first fumes of this vintage wine…and immediately recoiled.
If he’d been wondering if the wine would still be even remotely drinkable, he would wonder no more. The odor was vile. He gave it a few seconds to dissipate, then, pricked by curiosity, put his nose to the bottle again. It wasn’t just a bad aroma—and it wasn’t just wine that had long ago turned to vinegar. The scent was something else, and it was something that, to a biologist, was disturbingly familiar. His brow furrowed, and he opened a counter drawer to remove and prepare a clean slide.
“All right, mates,” Calloway was saying in his manufactured Aussie accent, “I want you to listen carefully to what I’m about to say and do exactly what I tell you.”
Suited up once more in the suffocating dive suit, and with Bill Lawson dressed just the same, Michael was not about to argue with anything. He just wanted to get into the water as quickly as possible.
“You’ve got dual tanks today, but that still gives you a max—max, I say—of ninety minutes. And given the exertion of sawing through submarine ice, probably a fair bit less than that. Any difficulty with the saw, and you come up, pronto! Got that?”
Michael and Lawson nodded.
“That means, any tear in your suit, no matter how small, and you come straight up. Any tear in your skin—anything that leaks blood—and you come up even faster. We’ve seen leopard seals around the dive hut today, and you know they’re not your friends.”
Michael did know—the Weddels were frisky but harmless; their close cousins, distinguishable by their large reptilian heads, were not. A Weddell would play with you, but a leopard, with its immense curving mouth, would bite.
“If you have to, defend yourselves with the ice saws.”
Each of them had been equipped with a fifty-two-inch-long Nils Master ice saw; it wasn’t necessarily the most precise ice-cutting instrument, but with its wing-nut design and razor-sharp teeth, angled inward like a shark’s, nothing could cut through underwater ice faster.
“Michael, you know where you’re going, right? So you’ll go down first and lead the way. Bill, you take the net and salvage line and follow.”
Michael was nodding the whole time while he inched in his fins toward the beckoning ice hole. A cool bloom seemed to rise up off it and into the overheated dive hut, and he noted that its diameter had been enlarged.
“That’s it then, mates,” Calloway said, slapping Michael on the shoulder to indicate it was time to go. “Masks on, feet in the deep freeze.”
Michael sat at the edge of the hole, then slipped down the icy funnel and into the sea. He didn’t have to go in search of the sunken chest; an earlier dive team had already gone down and retrieved it, and he’d seen a team of huskies dragging it back on a sledge toward the base camp. A big guy named Danzig was mushing them, and as he passed Michael, he raised one hand in salute. Word had quickly spread around the compound that Michael had made a pretty unusual find, and even if the ice princess didn’t turn up, his stock had definitely risen.
Michael knew that she was going to turn up.
After orienting himself in the water, and waiting for Lawson to take the plunge, Michael turned away from the dive and safety holes and swam off toward the glacier wall that appeared in the distance. Much as he regretted it, he did not have his camera with him; Murphy had forbidden it. “I don’t want you mucking around with photography down there,” he’d said. “You have limited time, and if you’re right about what you saw”—he still hadn’t been willing entirely to concede the point—“you’re going to have your hands full helping Bill to cut through all that ice.” With his saw in one hand and a flashlight in the other, Michael propelled himself through the water like a seal, undulating his body and working his fins for all they were worth. Still, it was harder work, and more time-consuming than he thought, just to reach the glacier. It was difficult to gauge distances underwater, and especially so there, where the ice cap cast a pall over everything. Once in a while, a break in the ice might let some direct rays of sunlight penetrate the depths, creating a shaft of gold aimed straight at the black and benthic regions below, but otherwise the ocean water was a very pale and clear blue, like an early-morning sky in summer.