But the "A" and "B" teams have been sitting on their hands for weeks with nothing to do but oil and service the enormous mechanism floating in the moon pool at the heart of the ship, then twiddle their thumbs nervously for eighty hours as the drill lowers it into the crushing darkness.

And now that Clementine is nearly on target, there's a storm coming.

"Fucking weather," complains Milgram.

"Language." Duke is a tight-ass. "How bad can it get"

Milgram brandishes his paper, the latest chart to come out of the weather office on C deck where Stan and Gilmer hunch over their green-glowing radar displays and the telex from San Diego. "Force nine predicted within forty-eight hours, probability sixty percent and rising. We can't take that, Duke. We go over force six, the impellers can't keep us on station. We'll lose the string."

The kid, Steve, crowds close. "Anyone told Spook City yet?" The guys from Langley hang out in a trailer on E deck with a locked vault-type door. Everyone calls it Spook City.

"Nah." Duke doesn't sound too concerned. "Firstly, it hasn't happened yet. Secondly, we're only forty fathoms up from zero." He snaps his fingers at the curious heads that have turned in his direction from their camera stations: "Look to it, guys! We've got a job to do!"

Clementine — the vast, submersible grab at the end of the drill string — weighs around 3,000 tons and is more than 200 feet long. It's a huge steel derrick, painted gray to resist the corrosive effects of miles of seawater. At a distance it resembles a skeletal lobster, because of the five steel legs protruding from either flank. Or maybe It's more like a giant mantrap, lowered into the icy stillness of Davy Jones's locker to grab whatever it can from the sea floor.