Doctor Victor Corvo placed three gloved fingertips against the cold vibration of the two-inch-thick Pyrex inspection dome.
Inside the bronze housing of the Starboard Sea-Chest Strainer, the churning seawater clouded with plumes of milky white slurry and dark venous blood.
Wedged tight against the heavy steel intake bars was a brass Kirby Morgan SuperLite-17 diving helmet.
Its thick umbilical bundle of breathing gas hoses, hot-water lines, and communications wire had been severed clean through, trailing down into the intake pipe like a dead eel.
“Look at the ragged ends of those severed lines,” Lin Mei whispered, shining her headlamp through the glass. “They weren’t cut with a diver’s knife.”
“No,” Mac Cole growled, leaning close to the flange. “Those were crushed by thirty-thousand-pound hydraulic jaws. The same industrial shears the Syndicate uses to scrap derelict hulls.”
Through a small bronze acoustic diaphragm welded to the strainer casing, the screams continued.
The voice was shrill, nasal, and rapid, vibrating at a piercing fundamental frequency of one thousand one hundred hertz.
