"Satisfied now?" asks Cooper, turning to grin at the Brit, who for his part looks as if he's waiting for something, staring at one screen intently.

"Well?"

"We've got a little time to go," says the hatchet-faced foreigner.

"A little ... "

"Until we learn whether or not you've gotten away with it."

"What are you smoking, man? Of course we've gotten away with it!" Murph has materialized from the upper decks like a Boston-Irish ghost, taking out his low-level resentment on the Brit (who is sufficiently public-school English to make a suitable whipping boy for Bloody Sunday, not to mention being a government employee to boot). "Look!

Submarine! Submersible grab! Coming up at six feet per minute! After the break, film at eleven!" His tone is scathing. "What do you think the commies are going to do to stop us, start World War Three? They don't even goddamn know what we're doing down here — they don't even know where their sub went down to within 200 miles!"

"It's not the commies I'm worried about," says the Brit.

He glances at Cooper. "How about you"

Cooper shakes his head reluctantly. "I still think we're going to make it. The sub's intact, undamaged, and we've got it — "

"Oh shit," says Steve.

He points the central camera in the grab's navigation cluster down at the sea floor, a vast gray-brown expanse stirred into slow whorls of foggy motion by the dropping of the ballast and the departure of the submarine. It should be slowly settling back into bland desert-dunes of mud by now. But something's moving down there, writhing against the current with unnatural speed.