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“Topside, Diver Two, entering the sub.”

The dive master continued to calmly issue orders, sending the remaining UUVs to the Los Angeles and getting rescue divers into the water.

The image on Clarence’s screens s.h.i.+fted from static to the entrance hole and then the torpedo room, the view of Diver Two’s camera nearly an exact replay of what Diver One had seen just minutes earlier.

Suddenly, the image shook violently, filled with bubbles and bits of falling metal. The diver slewed right, making the view tilt.

“Topside! Large explosion in the nose cone! Wreck is unstable!”

“Diver Two, exit immediately. Repeat, exit immediately.”

Clarence heard the diver scream, saw a flash of something coming down from above. The image slewed the other way, the horizontal now vertical and the vertical horizontal as the diver fell to her side. He heard a crunching sound, painfully loud in the speakers.

“Diver Two, get out of there,” the dive master said, his voice at last carrying a shred of urgency, a hint of emotion. “Exit immediately.”

“Topside … I’m stuck … oh my G.o.d, my visor is cracked, water is coming in, get me help, get someone down here—”

Another crunch far louder than the first, then, no sound at all.

The sideways view didn’t waver. The diver had been crushed, but her helmet camera remained on, continued to send signals up the umbilical to the Brashear far above.

Clarence sagged back in his chair. He felt cold, distant, as if it were all happening somewhere else. Two divers dead. Both ADSs destroyed.

And, worst of all, the artifact was still down there.

DAY FOUR

FOREIGN POWERS

Murray hated the Situation Room, but at least that felt comfortable, felt familiar. The president’s private sitting room didn’t feel familiar at all. He’d been here twice before, both times to deliver bad news to former presidents; the kind of news that couldn’t wait until morning.

The room could have been in any house, really, any house of someone with money and status. Murray and Admiral Porter sat on a comfortable couch. Murray knew he looked wrinkled, disheveled — he’d been napping on a cot when the news had come in. His staff had brought him fresh clothes, but he’d done little more than throw them on. Porter, of course, looked neat and pressed, not a wrinkle on his uniform.

The sitting room was right next to the president’s bedroom. Blackmon seemed sleepy, which was no surprise — she’d been woken up only fifteen minutes earlier.