5

THE GRASP II WAS THE BEST CIVILIAN DEEP-SEA EXPLORATION AND SALVAGE ship on the West Coast—and her crew would argue that she was the best in the world. A twenty-ton crane towered over her deck midship. A smaller crane near the stern supported a complicated device called an ROV (short for “remotely operated vehicle”) that explored the deep and guided the crane.

Today, however, the Grasp II was not exploring but waiting at her home dock in the Port of Oakland. “The wife and kids weren’t too happy to hear there’d be no Hawaii trip again this year,” commented Mitch Daniels, the Grasp II ’s ROV pilot, as he helped stow extra cable for the ROV winch.

“Take ’em to Yosemite. It’s closer and cheaper.” Ed Granger eyed Mitch’s work critically. “Hey, don’t put that cable there. Too close to the spare cameras. Don’t want to bust one of those.”

Mitch thought the cable was fine where it was, but he didn’t protest. Ed’s official job title was simply “ROV Chief Pilot,” but he was in fact master of all things related to the ROV, and he knew it better than he knew his children. He had even given it a name: “Eileen,” after his ex-wife’s divorce lawyer. Both of them were expensive, ugly, and very good at poking around in the muck.

“Tried Yosemite,” Mitch grunted as he moved the massive spool of metal cable where Ed wanted it. “Wife didn’t go for it. She said she’d promised the kids dolphins and volcanoes and what was I going to do about it? So I said, ‘What am I supposed to do, miss the ship and get left behind? I’ll lose my job.’ And she gets all mad and says, ‘You can’t just make me break promises to the kids!’ So I tell her to go—” he broke off in a curse as the cable got stuck on a crate. After he got it loose, he continued, “So anyway we had a pretty good fight about it.”

“You guys fight a lot,” Ed observed.

Mitch shrugged and grinned.

Ed grinned back. “You like the way she fights, huh?”

Mitch laughed. “I guess you could say that.”

“Sign of a good marriage. Well, this trip should be worth the fight.”

Mitch stopped working and looked up. “Why’s that? You know something?”

Ed looked around and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “They had me put some new sensors on Eileen. Metal detecting stuff.”

He patted Eileen gently. To the untutored eye, the ROV was a chaotic seven-foot mass of cables, pipes, propellers, and cameras. To a marine engineer, however, the Grasp II’s ROV was a masterpiece—a cutting-edge array of depth-resistant sensors and cameras, a Swiss-army-knife array of tools and manipulators that could probe deep into ocean floor mud or perform delicate surgery on oil rig parts, and half a dozen powerful thrusters that could hold it virtually motionless above the bottom of the sea even when buffeted by deep water currents.

Mitch noticed the new bank of sensors on Eileen’s tool sled. “So you think we’re looking for a shipwreck?”

Ed nodded. “But not just any shipwreck. There’s already a magnetometer on Eileen and we’ve got side-scan sonar. The new metal detector looks for nonferrous heavy metals.”

Mitch stared at him blankly.

Ed rolled his eyes. “Metals like gold, Mitch.”