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cargo. She sailed between Liverpool and Panama, where she unloaded her passengers and cargo 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 from Vandalia. She was difficult to find in her camouflaged position amid the coral. Little was left of the ship after being crushed that horrible night by the mountainous waves of the hurricane that caught her in the open sea before she could reach the safety of the Dominican Republic or nearby Virgin Islands.
    Summer roamed over the old wreck, carried by a mild current, looking 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 problem for the ferocious-looking fish. There was enough sea life living in and around the old Vandalia to fill an encyclopedia on marine ichthyology.
    Forcing her mind from visions of the tragedy, she swam warily around the barracuda that never took a beady eye off her. A safe distance away, she paused to check the air left in her tanks on the pressure gauge, mark her position on a Global Positioning System satellite minicomputer, eye the compass needle in relationship to the underwater habitat where she and her brother were living while studying the reef and note the reading on her bottom timer. She felt slightly buoyant and neutralized by venting a bit of air from her back-mounted buoyancy compensator.
    Swimming another hundred yards, she saw the bright colors fading and the coral turning colorless. The farther she swam the more the sponges became glazed and diseased, until they died and ceased to exist. The visibility of the water also dropped drastically, until she could see no farther than the extended tip of her hand and fingers.
    She felt as if she had entered a dense fog. It was a phenomenon, known as the mysterious “brown crud,” that had appeared throughout the Caribbean. The water near the surface was an eerie brown mass that fishermen described as looking like sewage. Until now, no one knew exactly what caused the crud or what triggered it. Ocean scientists thought it was associated with a type of algae, but had yet to prove it.
    Strangely, the crud did not appear to kill the fish, like its notorious cousin, the red tide. They avoided contact with the worst of the toxic effects, but soon began to starve after losing their feeding grounds and shelter in the process. Summer noticed that the usually brilliant sea anemone, with their arms extended to feed in the current, also seemed hard hit by the weird invader to their realm. Her immediate project was simply to take a few preliminary samples. Recording the dead zone on Navidad Bank with cameras and chemical analysis instruments to detect and measure its composition would come later, in the hope of eventually finding countermeasures to eradicate it.
    The first dive of the project was purely one of exploration, to see firsthand the effects of the crud so she and her fellow marine scientists on board the nearby research ship could evaluate the full scale of the problem and create a precise pattern for future study of the cause.
    The first brown crud invasion warning had been sounded by a commercial diver working off Jamaica in 2002. The baffling crud had left a path of underwater destruction unseen and mostly unreported from the surface as it drifted out of the Gulf of Mexico and around the Florida Keys. That outbreak was, Summer was beginning to discover, much different than here. The crud on Navidad Bank was far more toxic. She began to find dead starfish, and shellfish such as shrimp and lobster. She also noted that the fish swimming through the strange discolored water seemed lethargic, almost comatose.
    She removed several small glass