The Last Templar

Chapter 74

The camera glided through the forbidding darkness, past streaming galaxies of plankton that lit up the screen before quickly sailing out of the glare of its spotlight.

The images from the ROV unfurled before a breathless audience in the control room of the Savanna, a cramped space situated behind the vessel's bridge. Vance and Tess were standing, leaning over the shoulders of Rassoulis and two technicians who were seated before a small bank of monitors. To the left of the monitor showing the images from Don's camera, a smaller GPS positioning monitor displayed the current location of the ship as it circled and doubled back on its course, trying to hold its position against a surprisingly strong current. A smaller screen on the right showed a computerized representation of the sonar scan, a big circle with concentric bands of blue, green, and yellow; another, a pixeled compass, showed their heading as just off due south. But no one was giving those monitors more than a fleeting, occasional glance. Their eyes were all riveted onto the central monitor, the one showing the images from the ROV's camera. They watched in rapt silence as the bottom came rushing up, the pixeled reading in the corner of the screen quickly closing in on the 173 meters that the depth sounder of the mother ship was showing.

At 168 meters, the starry flecks grew thicker. At 171 meters, a couple of jerking crayfish scurried out of the light, and then, at 173 meters, the screen was suddenly flooded by a silent burst of yellow light. The ROV had landed.

Dorr's highly protective guardian, a Corsican engineer by the name of Pierre Attal, was locked in concentration as he used a joystick and a small keyboard to manipulate his robotic ward. He reached for a small trackball at the edge of the keyboard and, responding to his fingers' orders, the camera rotated on itself, panning across the seabed. Like the images from a Mars probe, the pictures showed an eerie, inviolate world. All around the robotic visitor was nothing but a flat expanse of sand that disappeared into a stygian darkness.

Tess's skin was tingling with guarded anticipation. She couldn't help but feel excited, although she knew they weren't necessarily there yet, not by any means. The low-frequency, side-scan sonar only provided the rough position of any promising target; the ROV then had to be deployed, its high-frequency sonar allowing the eventual pinpointing and examination of those sites. She knew the ocean floor underneath the Savarona dropped as deep as 250 meters in places and was covered with scattered coral reefs, many the size they'd expect the Falcon Temple to be. The sonar scans weren't enough to distinguish the wreck from these natural mounds, which was where the magnetometers came into play. Their readings would help detect the wreck's residual iron, and, although they were carefully calibrated—Rassoulis and his team had calculated that after seven hundred years of saltwater corrosion, there would be, at most, a thousand pounds of iron left in the Falcon Temple's remains—they still carried the risk of triggering false alarms due to natural pockets of geomagnetism or, more commonly, from more recent wrecks.

She watched as the procedure she had witnessed twice in recent days unfurled again. Using the most minute of tugs on the joystick, Attal con-fidentiy guided the ROV across the seafloor. Every minute or so, he would set it down in another cloudburst of sand. He would then hit a button that would cause its pinger to initiate a 360-degree sweep of its immediate surroundings. The team would carefully study the resulting scan before Attal would be back at the controls, firing the small robot's hydraulic thrusters and propelling it forward on its silent quest.

Attal had repeated the exercise over half a dozen times before an inchoate patch appeared in the corner of the screen. Guiding the ROV to the spot, he initiated another sonar scan. The screen took a couple of seconds to record the results before Tess saw the patch coalesce into an oblong pinkish shape, beckoning to her from its blue surroundings.

Tess glanced at Vance, who met her eyes calmly.

Without looking up at them, Rassoulis said to Attal, "Let's get a closer look."

The ROV was on the move again, skimming the bottom of the seafloor like an undersea hovercraft as Attal guided it expertly to its target. At the next ping, the pink shape grew more distinct along its edges.

"What do you think?" Vance asked.

Rassouhs glanced up at Vance and at Tess. "The magnetometer reading's a bit high, but ..." He pointed a finger at the image on the scan. "You see how it's squared off at this end and pinched in over here at the other end?" He raised a hopeful eyebrow. "It doesn't look like a rock to me."

The room fell silent as the ROV moved in. Tess's eyes were locked on the screen as the camera floated over a cloud of sea plants that swayed almost imperceptibly in the desolate waters. As it dropped back down and hugged the sand again, Tess felt her pulse quicken. At the edge of the ROV's beam, something was coming into view. Its edges were too angular, its curves too regular. It looked man-made.

Within seconds, the unmistakable remains of a ship became discernible. The robot banked over the site, revealing the skeleton of a ship, its wooden ribs hollowed out by teredo worms.

Tess thought she spotted something. She pointed excitedly at the corner of the screen. "What's that?

Can you get a tighter shot of that?"

Attal guided his robot as directed. Tess leaned in for a better look. In the bright glow of its spotlights, she could make out something rounded, barrel-like. It looked like it was made of rusted metal. It was hard to tell the relative scale of die objects on the screen, and, for a moment, she wondered if what she was seeing was a cannon. The thought triggered a sudden ripple of concern inside her—she knew a ship from the late Crusades wouldn't have been carrying one. But as die ROV swung closer, the curved metallic shape appeared different. It looked flatter and wider. From the corner of her eye, Tess saw an unhappy grimace break across Rassoulis's face.

"That's steel plating," he said, shrugging. She knew what he meant before he said it. "It's not the Falcon.'' '

The ROV banked around it, showing it from another angle. Attal nodded in grim confirmation. "And look, over here. That's paint." He looked up at Tess and shook his head with dismay. As the robot nosed around the sunken vessel's hull, it was pretty clear that what they had found were the remains of a far more recent ship.

"Mid-nineteenth century," Rassoulis confirmed. "Sorry." He shot a glance out the window. The sea 176

was getting increasingly restless, and dark-bellied clouds were rolling in from two fronts with alarming speed. "We'd better get out of here and head back anyway. This doesn't look good." He turned to Attal. "Bring Dori up. We're done here."

Tess nodded slowly, heaving a dejected sigh. She was about to turn and leave the room when something at the edge of the screen caught her eye. She felt a sudden shiver of excitement and stared at it, wide-eyed, before jabbing a finger at the monitor's left side. "What's this? Right here?

You see that?"

Rassoulis craned his neck in, staring intently at the screen while Attal maneuvered the robot toward the spot Tess had pointed out. Peering between the two men, Tess studied the screen intently. At the edge of the ROV's frail light, a protrusion was coming into view. It looked like a leaning tree stump, rising out of a small mound. As the robot edged nearer, she could see that the mound was composed of what appeared to be spars, some of them trailing strands of seaweed, but which her imagination hoped were actually remnants of rigging. Some of the pieces were curved, like the ribs of an ancient carcass. Centuries of marine growth covered the ghostly remains.

Her heart was racing. It had to be a ship. Another one, an older one, partially obscured by the more recent wreck lying on top of it.

The ROV moved in closer, gliding over the disintegrating, coral-encrusted wreckage, its lights bathing the protrusion in their whitish glow.

Tess suddenly felt the air being sucked out of the room around her.

There, basking in the otherworldly glare of the spotlight and jutting out of the ocean floor in fierce defiance, stood the falcon figurehead.