There must be better ways, Jason Bradley kept telling himself, of celebrating one's twenty-first birthday than attending a mass funeral; but at least he had no emotional involvement. He wondered if Operation JENNIFER's director, or his CIA sidekicks, even knew the names of the sixty-three Russian sailors they were now consigning to the deep.

The whole ceremony seemed utterly unreal, and the presence of the camera crew added yet another dimension of fantasy. Jason felt that he was an extra in a Hollywood movie, and that someone would shout "Action!" as the shrouded corpses slid into the sea. After all, it was quite possible -- even likely -- that Howard Hughes himself had been in the plane that had circled overhead a few hours before. If it was not the Old Man, it must have been some other top brass of the Summa Corporation; no one else knew what was happening in this lonely stretch of the Pacific, a thousand kilometers northwest of Hawaii.

For that matter, not even Glomar Explorer's operations team -- carefully insulated from the rest of the ship's crew -- knew anything about the mission until they were already at sea. That they were attempting an unprecedented salvage job was obvious, and the smart money favored a lost reconnaissance satellite. No one dreamed that they were going to lift an entire Russian submarine from water two thousand fathoms deep -- with its nuclear warheads, its codebooks, and its cryptographic equipment. And, of course, its crew....

Until this morning -- yes, it had been quite a birthday! -- Jason had never seen Death. Perhaps it was morbid curiosity that had prompted him to volunteer, when the medics had asked for help to bring the bodies up from the morgue. (The planners in Langley had thought of everything; they had provided refrigeration for exactly one hundred cadavers.) He had been astonished -- and relieved -- to find how well preserved most of the corpses were, after six years on the bed of the Pacific. The sailors who had been trapped in sealed compartments, where no predators could reach them, looked as if they were sleeping. Jason felt that, if he had known the Russian for "Wake up!" he would have had an irresistible urge to shout it.

There was certainly someone aboard who knew Russian, and spoke it beautifully, for the entire funeral service had been in that language; only now, at the very end, was English used as Explorer's chaplain came on line with the closing words for burial at sea.

There was a long silence after the last "Amen," followed by a brief command to the Honor Guard. And then, as one by one the lost sailors slid gently over the side, came the music that would haunt Jason Bradley for the rest of his life.

It was sad, yet not like any funeral music that he had ever heard; in its slow, relentless beat was all the power and mystery of the sea. Jason was not a very imaginative young man, but he felt that he was listening to the sound of waves marching forever against some rocky shore. It would be many years before he learned how well this music had been chosen.

The bodies were heavily weighted, so that they entered the water feet first, with only the briefest of splashes. Then they vanished instantly; they would reach their final resting place intact, before the circling sharks could mutilate them.

Jason wondered if the rumor was true, and that in due course the film of this ceremony would be sent to Moscow. It would have been a civilized gesture -- but a somewhat ambiguous one. And he doubted that Security would approve, however skillfully the editing was done.

As the list of the sailors returned to the sea, the haunting music ebbed into silence. The sense of doom that had hung over Explorer for so many days seemed to disperse, like a fog-bank blown away by the wind. There was a long moment of complete silence; then the single word "Dismiss" came from the PA system -- not in the usual brusque manner, but so quietly that it was some time before the files of men standing at attention broke up and began to drift away.

And now, thought Jason, I can have a proper birthday party. He never dreamed that one day he would walk this deck again -- in another sea, and another century.