Chapter 4:

Chuck's impromptu scuba lesson was cut short barely half an hour later, when Jack shouted from the wheelhouse to announce their arrival at the coordinates Chuck had given him earlier.

"We made better time than I thought," Jack said, once Chuck and Sarah joined him at the wheelhouse. "You mind helping my darling daughter get the ROV in the water? Then we can get cracking."

Chuck shrugged. "No problem," he said and turned back toward the stern, where they'd set up the ROV by the aft railing. Sarah shook her head and grinned at him as he stooped to check the connections. Chuck frowned up at her. "What's wrong?"

She gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Nothing," she said. "Usually, when we take people out, they just end up fishing the whole time or staring at my butt until Dad throws them overboard."

Chuck's eyes widened. "Did he really..."

Sarah punched him in the arm. "C'mon," she said. "Of course not, and besides, you're mostly safe anyway."

"W-what? Why mostly?"

"You've been very circumspect. No staring at all, just the occasional sidelong glance when you think I'm not paying attention. I don't think Dad's even noticed. Close your mouth before you catch flies, and help me get this thing in the water."

Chuck struggled not to get flustered and bent to lift the submersible. Then he arched an eyebrow. Sarah seemed to be... watching him with a vague hint of... The struggle not to become flustered was suddenly a losing battle. "Are you..."

"What?" Sarah grinned with a raised eyebrow. "If it's good for the gander..." She rolled her eyes and lowered her voice. "That's at least a B+ on the glutes, Chuck. You work out?"
"I..." Chuck started, but then stopped, unable to come up with anything to say to that before Sarah grabbed up the other side of the ROV and helped Chuck swing the awkwardly bulky vehicle over the railing. They lowered it carefully into the water, and Sarah took the trailing cable and played it out over to the card-table where they had set up the monitors earlier.

Chuck stood at the rail for a few seconds, until Jack came aft and slapped him on the back. "You alright there, Chuck?"

"Yeah..." he finally managed. "Just... rebooting."

"Looked a lot like staring slack-jawed into space."

"Yeah," Chuck said. "Well."

"I think I broke his brain," Sarah chortled while running the initialization protocols for the ROV.

Jack rolled his eyes. "I warned you to stop doing that to people."

Sarah gave that same one-armed shrug again. "But he's so easy," she grinned. "Chuck, you'll want to come watch this, the cameras are booting up. I promise no more breaking of brains. For a while at least."

Chuck grumbled under his breath and joined her at the monitors.

The image wasn't great, there was a fair amount of dust or something in the water. "Why's it all murky?" Chuck wondered. "It's not that far down yet, is it?"

"Nah," Sarah said and waved absently back toward land. "Water's kind of churned up from our wake, that's all. Should clear up once we get down past thirty feet or so, see look."

The picture cleared even as she spoke, and the ROV's cameras sent back a minimally grainy image of the bottom of the South China Sea. It was surprisingly clear, once the ROV was out of the turbulence of the boat's wake. Chuck let out a low whistle. "How far down is the bottom?"

"Not sure," Sarah said absently. "Dad? What's the depth here?"

"'Bout thirty fathoms."

"People still use 'fathoms'?" Chuck asked.

"We do around landlubbers," Jack said. "Also around schnooks."

Chuck sighed. "Aw, I thought we were past the whole schnook thing."

Sarah laughed. "You're a man, and roughly the same age as his darling daughter. You're never past the schnook thing. Dad are you sure we're at the right coordinates?"

"What do you mean," Chuck said. "GPS is seldom wrong."

"Yeah, kiddo," Jack said. "These are the coordinates schnook gave me. Why?"

"There's no plane," Sarah said.

"How can you tell?" Chuck protested.

"The ROV is down about half-way. I can see the bottom, and the skin of the plane should be reflecting back off the halogen lamps; it's too far down for sunlight I think. I'll make a loop around to be sure we're not just a few hundred yards off in either direction, but so far.. no plane."

"What about that?" Chuck pointed at a tiny glint showing up on the bottom nearby.

"That's not..." Sarah started. "Huh."

"What d'ya got kiddo?" Jack asked.

"Hang on," she fiddled with the controls and leaned in closer to the monitor. "It's too small to be the plane, but it's definitely metal. Another thirty seconds and we'll be able to tell for sure."

Chuck and Jack crowded around the monitor, and Jack shaded the small TV with his hand. "Well, congratulations darlin'. You found a door."

"Hang on," Chuck said. "That must be the door off the plane. But where's the rest of the wreck?"

Jack rubbed his chin. "Chuck, you still got the report your boss gave you?"

"Yeah, just a second," Chuck said, fumbling the thick sheaf of paper out. "Okay, what am I looking for."

"It say in there what the plane's airspeed was when it hit?"

Chuck frowned and leafed through the report. "Uh... I'm looking. Why?"

"If it was in a straight on-dive. It'd be on the bottom pretty close to its last known coordinates. Like if the plane was completely out of control. But if, say, the pilot put her down relatively gently..."

"Oh!" Sarah said. "Crap, you're right."

Chuck raised his hand. "Late to the party here? Somebody want to explain for the slow kid?"

"Water is pretty much the same as air, from a fluid dynamics perspective. They can use wind-tunnels to test boat hulls, and water tanks to test airplane hulls. It's why submarines have got those little wings on 'em," Jack went on. "Your plane may have flown through the water for a couple of miles before it hit bottom. That's if it stayed in one piece when it hit, of course. At a couple hundred knots it's like hitting concrete."

"Oh," Chuck said. "Why'd you say 'crap,' Sarah?"

"Because we've got to do math now," she explained.

Chuck grinned. "Well, it's a good thing you've got me, then. Isn't it?"

However, reconstructing the plane's flight-path data and estimating it's glide-slope as it fell to the bottom of the ocean was more complicated than Chuck envisioned at first, and Sarah and Jack had retrieved the ROV before he had even figured out what kind of calculus it was even going to involve. It turned out to be ordinary differential equations, thankfully, and not the horribly tricky partial variety, but still, Chuck's diff-eq skills had atrophied some since Stanford. His job at Roark Instruments had largely been on the software end of things, and not the hardware side, so he didn't have as much day to day use for the more convoluted stuff he'd had drilled into his head.

"So..." Sarah said eventually, watching Chuck with his paper and pencil. "You need a calculator or something?"

Chuck sighed. "No, the arithmetic is fairly straightforward, once I build the equation right. If I get it wrong, I'll have us looking in the wrong place again," he shrugged. "And we won't know if I'm wrong until we get over there and take a look. This could be a longer search than we thought. But, I think I've got it."

Chuck did a little more scratch work and nodded, reading off a new set of coordinates. "Somebody want to double check me?"

Sarah got out a solar powered desktop calculator and they put their heads together.

Jack grunted and headed for the fridge. They had given over the fold-down table to Chuck's seemingly endless scratch-paper, so he waited until he caught Chuck's eye to toss him a beer.

Chuck glanced at the familiar-brand aluminum can, and back to Mr. Walker. "You earned it. He mess up the math?" Sarah shook her head, and Jack grinned, tore off the bottom part of the paper with the new location and headed topside.

"So how far does the math say the plane glided?"

"About twenty six hundred meters," Chuck said. "Sorry. One point six miles give or take a couple significant digits."
"How significant?" Sarah said.

"No, I... never mind," he said. "Nerd speak. The GPS coordinates should be about right."

"Good," Sarah said. "I'd better go get my wetsuit then."

Chuck blinked in surprise and followed her out of the galley, leaving his beer unopened and heading aft toward the stairs. "I thought you'd just use the ROV again."

"Oh we will," Sarah said. She ducked into her cabin and came out with her wetsuit under her arm. "But the little grabber arm thing is busted, and I don't think it'd be up to pulling out a laptop. Much easier all around if somebody goes down there and pokes around the wreck."

"Right," Chuck said going up the ladder. "I hadn't thought that one all the way through yet." Sarah stopped and sat in the hatch opening, tugging her wetsuit up her legs, and then shrugging the sleeves up over her shoulders. It reminded Chuck of a snake shedding its skin, but in reverse. Also, there was a little bit of jiggling happening that he tried to ignore.

Sarah rolled her eyes. Apparently his attempt was a failure. She bobbed up to her feet and hauled the zipper up. Her wetsuit was two-toned black and blue, and she was fiddling with something else. Chuck frowned. "Why do you need a knife?" he asked while she strapped a bright orange scabbard to her calf.

"Standard gear, Chuck," Sarah explained. "In case I have to go hand-to-hand with an octopus or something."

"You're kidding... right?"

"Well," Sarah said. "About the octopus thing? Yeah. But you never know what you'll get tangled up with, and it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, am I right?"

"Be prepared. You'd have done the Boy Scouts proud, Sarah Walker."

She rolled her eyes. "Ugh, don't remind me. My dad made me join the Girl Scouts one summer. What a disaster."

"I don't know," Chuck said. "I can imagine you doing pretty well selling those cookies."

Sarah smiled, but there was a hint of sadness in it when she responded. "You have no idea."

Chuck frowned. "What? What is it?"

"Forget I said anything, okay? Long story, and we don't have time for it. Come on," she said. "Let's put the ROV back in the water."

Jack came back from the wheelhouse a few minutes later, once he'd set both anchors. "So, Chuck," Jack said. He had the Roark Instruments report on the crash in his hand. "I figured we'd be doing a body recovery or two on this one. A little business jet like that crashes; I mean usually they don't have parachutes, but this thing says the pilot and copilot all got off before the plane went in. Seems unlikely."

"How so?" Chuck said. "I read that thing cover to cover on the trip over. The plane had engine failure, he put on the auto-pilot and then they jumped when they were a couple dozen yards over the water."

Jack shrugged. "I don't know, schnook, I've read a lot of these reports. There's something hinky going on here."

"I got this straight from Mr. Roark. Well, his secretary, but still," Chuck said. "You're saying he rigged up a false report?"

Sarah let out a curse and shouted for them. "Hey, guys? You might want to come take a look at this!"

Chuck and Sarah's father trotted over and glanced at the monitor. Chuck blanched and Jack grimaced. Though the halogen lamps on the ROV threw up a glare off the single pane of the front windscreen that was left intact, Chuck could still see a figure in the cockpit, his hair waving slightly in the current. The pilot, dead in his chair, his four-point seatbelt still fastened.

"Oh my god," he said. "What the hell is going on?"

"Great," Sarah said. "That's reassuring. I was about to ask you the same thing."

"Looks like somebody's pulling a con on you, schnook," Jack said.

Chuck shook his head. "I don't get it," he complained. "Why would he falsify the report? It doesn't... none of this makes sense."

"Kiddo?" Jack said.

"Yeah," Sarah said. "I'm on it."

"What? On what?" Chuck said.
Sarah rose from a nearby storage chest and held up a camcorder set up for underwater filming. "We need to document everything. When a client is lying to us and it's his word against ours, videotape is our best friend. You wouldn't believe how many times we haven't gone to court because of this thing." She rapped her knuckles on the plexiglass casing.

Chuck was still having trouble wrapping his mind around the sudden turn of events. They had found the plane, but... he hadn't been prepared for the sight. From what the report said there shouldn't be any dead bodies, but the monitor didn't lie. He fought off the urge to curl up into a little ball, and then Jack hit him in the back.

Chuck coughed and straightened. "First dead body?"

"Yes!" he said. "God, isn't this freaking anybody else out? How are you just okay with there being a dead guy down there."

Sarah shrugged. "We salvaged a wrecked World War II PT boat a couple years ago; it went down with all hands back in like forty-something. Full of skeletons and a couple mummified corpses. Seeing it in the ROV monitor is a lot less stressful than having one fall out of a ruptured bulkhead onto your back in a hundred feet of water."

Chuck's stared at her, unable to reconcile her easygoing banter with someone who'd had a skeleton appear out of nowhere and land on her back. He'd have expected her to be scarred for life, but maybe that was the lesson. Fear didn't leave physical scars, and once the initial shock wore off, maybe the emotional ones weren't as bad as others. Like those left by betrayal, he thought darkly, and shook himself out of those morbid thoughts. "I can see how that would be... yeah, stressful you said?" he managed a halfhearted laugh. "I mean, wow, you've got to be a front-runner for the understatement of the year award."

"If you don't want to watch the monitors for this next part, Chuck, that's okay," Jack said. "Wrecks are always a little spooky, even without bodies in them."

Chuck shook his head. "I'll be fine," he said. "I'm not going to get scared and scream like a little girl if I see a dead body. I'm just... I wasn't expecting it, okay? That's more what's got me a little wound up; it's the shock of it all."

"Okay," Sarah said. "Then help me put on my air tanks, okay? It'll be good for you to see how it's done."

It didn't really seem like Sarah needed all that much help, and Chuck suspected the continuation of his scuba lesson was really just to get his mind of dead bodies down there in the darkness at the bottom of the sea. Sarah's scuba-camcorder had a cord just like the ROV's which she tossed to Jack before Chuck started hauling the heavy air tank up into position.

Sarah shrugged her shoulders and took the added weight easily, turning and sitting on the railing to put on her flippers. With a decided lack of ceremony, she dumped the camcorder over the side.

Chuck handed her a pair of goggles, and Sarah grinned. "Thanks," she said. "And Chuck?"
"Yeah," he said.
"Don't freak out," she said. "We'll figure this thing out, alright? Together." She barely let him finish nodding before she tipped herself backward over the rail and disappeared into the depths.

TO BE CONTINUED...