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Her physical contours and facial features were shrouded by the baggy dry suit and full head ray eyes gazing through the face mask lens and a wisp of red hair that showed on her forehead

Suh its void Every dive was a new adventure through an unknoorld She often ied by her raduated froraphy, where she had received her raphy At the saree in ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University

Soon after they returned to their ho mother that the father they never kneas the special projects director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency in Washington, DC Theiron her deathbed Only then did she describe their love and why she let him believe that she had died in an underwater earthquake twenty-three years before Badly injured and disfigured, she thought it best that he live his life unencuave birth to twins Inlove she had named Summer after herself, and Dirk after his father

After her funeral, Dirk and Suton to meet Pitt Sr for the first time Their sudden appearance ca a son and daughter who he had no idea existed, Dirk Pitt beca believed for ettable love of his life had long since died But then he was deeply saddened to learn she had lived all these years as an invalid without telling him and had died only the month previously

E the family he never knew he had, he iar where he lived with his huge classic car collection When he was told that their mother had insisted they follow in his path and become educated in the ocean sciences, he orchestrated their employment with NUMA

Now, after two years of working on ocean projects around the world, she and her brother had eather data on the strange toxic contaile sea life on Navidad Bank and other reefs throughout the Caribbean

Most parts of the reef systehtly hued snappers roupers while little iridescent yellow-and-purple tropical fish darted around tiny brown-and-red sea horses Moray eels looking fierce with their heads protruding out of holes in the coral, opened and closed their jawsto sink their needle teeth into aonly because that was their ills on the back of their necks They seldoonized To be bitten by a moray eel, one almost had to place a hand in its mouth

A shadow crossed above a sandy gap in the coral and she looked up, half expecting to see the saht of five spotted eagle rays One peeled off the for curiously before swooping upward and rejoining the others

After traveling another forty yards she slipped over a foronian coral and cae five-foot barracuda hovered over the debris, staring out of cold, black beady eyes at all that took place in its domain

The stea a fierce hurricane Of her one hundred and eighty passengers and thirty crewmen, none survived Listed by Lloyd's of London as lost without a trace, her fate remained a mystery until sport divers discovered her coral-encrusted reuish Vandalia as a shipwreck A hundred and thirty years on, the bank had covered her with anywhere from one to three feet of sea life and coral The only obvious signs of as once a proud ship were the boilers and engines that still protruded froone, long rotted away by the salt water or eaten by critters of the sea that consuanic

Built for the West Indies Packet Company in 1864, Vandalia was 320 feet from the tip of her bow to the jack staff on her stern, with a 42-foot beaers and three holds for a large ao She sailed between Liverpool and Panao for the rail trip to the Pacific side of the isthmus where they boarded steamers for the rest of the journey to California

Very few divers had salvaged artifacts froed position a crushed that horrible night by the ht her in the open sea before she could reach the safety of the Doin Islands

Summer roa down and trying to picture the people who had once trod her decks She sensed a spiritual sensation It was as if she was flying over a haunted graveyard whose inhabitants were speaking to her from the past

She kept a wary eye on the great barracuda that hung motionless in the water Food was no probleh sea life living in and ar

ound the old Vandalia to fill an encyclopedia on y