Titanic

{Chapter One}

.  .  .  .  .

1997

Blackness. Then two faint lights appeared, close together and growing brighter. They resolved into two submersibles, free-falling like express elevators. One was ahead of the other, looking like a spacecraft blazing with lights, bristling with insectile manipulators. It descended away into the limitless blackness below. Soon they were fireflies, then stars, then gone.

Inside the first falling submersible, Mir One, was a cramped, seven-foot sphere, crammed with equipment. Anatoly Mikhailovich, the submersible's pilot, sat hunched over his controls, singing softly in Russian.

Next to him on one side was Brock Lovett. He was in his late thirties, deeply tanned, and liked to wear his Nomex suit unzipped to show off the gold from famous shipwrecks past, covering his chest hair. He was a wily, fast-talking treasure hunter. A salvage superstar who was part historian, part adventurer, and part vacuum cleaner salesman. At that moment, he was propped against the CO2 scrubber, fast asleep and snoring.

On the other side, crammed into the remaining space, was a bearded, wide-body named Lewis Bodine, who was also asleep. Lewis was a Remotely Operated Vehicle pilot and the resident Titanic expert.

Anatoly glanced at the bottom sonar and made a ballast adjustment.  

The bottom of the sea was a pale, dead-flat, lunar landscape. It got brighter, lit from above, as Mir One dropped to the sea floor in a down blast from its thrusters. It hit the bottom after its two-hour free-fall with a loud, bonk!

Lovett and Bodine jerked awake at the landing.

Anatoly spoke in his heavy, Russian accent. "We are here."

Minutes later, the two submersibles were skimming over the seafloor to the sound of the side scan sonar and the thrum of big thrusters.

The featureless, gray clay of the bottom unrolled in the lights of the submersibles. Bodine was watching the side scan sonar display, where the outline of a huge, pointed object was visible. Anatoly lay prone, driving the submersible, his face pressed to the center port.

Bodine tried to direct him. "Come left a little. She's right in front of us. Eighteen meters. Fifteen. Thirteen...you should see it."

Anatoly was growing tired of Bodine's attitude. "Do you see it? I don't see it...there!"

Out of the darkness, like a ghostly apparition, the bow of the ship appeared. Its knife-edge prow was coming straight at them, seeming to plow the bottom sediment like ocean waves. It towered above the sea floor...standing just as it had landed eighty-four years before.

The Titanic. Or what was left of her. Mir One went up and over the bow railing, which was still intact, except for an overgrowth of rusticles draping it like a mutated, Spanish moss.

Brock Lovett's face filled the black and white frame of a video camcorder. "It still gets me every time."

He turned the camera to the front viewport, looking over Anatoly's shoulder, to the bow railing in the lights beyond. Anatoly turned. "It's just your guilt because of stealing from the dead."

Brock turned the camera so that it pointed at his own face. "Thanks, Tolya. Work with me, here."

Brock resumed his serious, pensive gaze out of the front port, with the camera aimed at him from arm's length. "It still gets me every time...to see the sad ruin of the great ship, sitting here, where she landed at 2:30 in the morning of April 15, 1912...after her long fall...from the world above," he said dramatically.