"She's beautiful, isn't she?" Conner parked the van on the dock and leaned back in his seat with a sigh of contentment. "She looks like a panther. Sleek, graceful, and magnificently lethal."

"My God, you're waxing poetic." Hannah chuckled and shook her head as she jumped out of the van. "It's a machine, Conner. A submarine. And she's beautiful only in the way a finely constructed machine is beautiful. It was designed and built by man. It's not as if it's alive."

"You have no soul." Conner got out of the van and moved eagerly toward the edge of the pier. "Do you think Michelangelo's David has no beauty because it was carved from stone? This is the same thing."

"You always say that." She followed her brother to the edge of the pier and gazed appraisingly at the black submarine. But she could see why Conner was bubbling with enthusiasm. There was something sleek and elegant about all submarines and this Oscar II was no exception although the hull showed every one of its twentytwo years. Officially named Kulyenchikov, the twin-reactor nuclear sub was dubbed Silent Thunder by its builders in the Severodvinsk shipyard, and the workers' name stuck. An appropriate moniker, Hannah thought. The Silent Thunder's dark, massive hull seemed to devour all light around it. At more than five hundred feet in length, it was one of the largest submarines in the world.

She glanced back at Conner. "You even thought that submersible I designed for the Titanic expedition was beautiful, and it looked like a goggle-eyed frog."

"Frogs can be beautiful." He made a face. "Well, they can be interesting-looking. Did I really say it was beautiful?"

She nodded. "But you were drunk at the time. It was the night we had the party at that bar in Halifax when the expedition was over. You were going home to Cathy and the kids, and you thought everything was beautiful."