4.

December 5, 2011, 04:00 EST.
Onboard the Proteus, 11 nautical miles off Long Island.

Kathy was bewildered. She'd tracked the jet engine to a Boeing 737, which had been bought from the airline by the airline's own boss. For his own use.
Yes, the owner of the 737 was none other than Arnold Budmera himself.
And after that, the trail went cold. Until today.
Of course the trail had gone cold! The plane's right here! One hundred feet down!
Suddenly filled with fury, Kathy jumped up and made her way to the bridge. As she walked in, she could see Arnold Budmera's massive frame facing the captain. Haisselbak looked cowed.
Budmera turned towards Kathy and quickly registered how angry she was. He was a clever man with years of experience behind him – and he'd seen right through her immediately. She knew it.
The captain stepped away – he could see that something important had happened.
"You must be Kathy Linbaum," intoned Budmera in his rich baritone voice. "I've already heard talk of your exploits."
She opened her mouth to speak but he held up his hand to say no. There was a tiredness about the old man's eyes, and yet they still commanded authority.
"Come, we have to talk."

They were in the small room just off the bridge. Just her and Budmera.
"Please take a seat."
Kathy wanted to say no, but surprised herself by sitting down anyway. Budmera put his hand to his dappled scalp with its white hair.
"You know everything, don't you?"
She nodded, slowly, like a small girl caught doing something naughty.
"Except why," she added after a moment.
He raised his eyebrows.
"Except why," he repeated.
He stared at her, his pupils almost trembling.
"I'll get straight to the point. Look at me, Miss Linbaum. I'm an old man. I lived through almost all of the twentieth century. And what have I got to show for it? I have no children, no wife. I made my fortune at the age of thirty, with my first airline. But you know what's funny? I didn't even particularly want to be rich, I just happened to like planes. I just wanted a few of my own. I bought up other companies, got richer… but I never stopped doing it all for the love of aircraft. Do you know how I've spent my free time over all these years?"
Kathy shyly shook her head.
"In airplanes."
A wide smile lit up his face.
"I've spent my life flying, and watching others fly," he added.
He turned towards the porthole and stared out for a moment at the storm that was building up around them.
"Soon I'll be gone. I'll leave my empire to others… but what's under us right now, that's my gift to the children of tomorrow…."
Kathy frowned.
"You probably take me for one of those billionaire cranks, Miss Linbaum, and in a way you're right. Nonetheless, what I'm doing with the planes in the ocean is creating a reserve for the future – a memory for the centuries to come. What will the world be like in 200 or even 500 years? And what would it be like today if past civilizations had hidden and preserved their greatest discoveries? Aviation has been my life, it's all I know about, and it's want I want to leave for the future – the trail of these silver birds we've created."
He turned away from the porthole and back to Kathy.
"You think I'm senile?"
She stammered out something unintelligible. What could she say?
"I've thought of everything, you know. Each aircraft is covered in a special type of canvas, completely waterproof and ultra-resistant. It's made of Neosata, an alloy of various proteins which originally come from spider silk. It's a revolutionary process that one of my companies developed for the military, although it hasn't been marketed yet.
"My experts sought out the perfect site to preserve these planes, with little sand, very little current – a calm basin where the ocean won't damage the planes – a granite surface if I remember correctly. It's the perfect place to preserve these machines for a very long time. No one will find them, no one will know. In each aircraft, I've placed an extremely powerful radio transmitter, at the cutting edge of today's technology. Their batteries are designed to last at least two or three hundred years, maybe even much longer. The day one of the batteries reaches the end of its life, they will all be triggered. They'll emit a signal for decades, and our distant descendants will hear this call of the deep… what an archeological discovery it will be for them… because who knows what will remain of our civilization?"

The ship started to roll wildly, and Kathy wondered for a second whether it wasn't part of the show, put on for her benefit. Because this whole story was… surreal. Four planes at the bottom of the ocean, because of the obsession – or passion – of an eccentric old man? But despite of everything, she didn't really know what to think of him. It was certainly one truly bizarre dream. But it was the dream of a lonely man, a bashful lover offering this fragment of eternity to the one love of his life. Did she have the right to judge?
"There are three other aircraft I'll be placing here soon. I hope to "land" over a dozen before I leave this earth…. All this will cost me a fortune; you can imagine how complex it is to transport by ship an aircraft as heavy as a 737, not to mention putting it on the ocean floor."
It amused him to have the last word.
"That said, money is no object. That's why I decided to come this evening. I've just told Captain Haisselbak that his mission has been cut short, that he's to return to port. Bell-Trans belongs to me, but that doesn't mean I know everything that goes on. I was appalled to hear a few hours ago that the boat had been stopped in its tracks by a bizarre discovery. I had no idea of the Proteus's route. My dream was almost ended by one of my own companies! I don't care about the extra costs, I'm ordering Bell-Trans to reroute this cable.
Kathy suddenly felt herself sharing the old man's sense of joy.
The door opened. Haisselbak looked from one to the other before announcing: "We've got something strange on the radar. There's… some kind of signal, incredibly powerful, that's coming from one of the aircraft underwater. We've only just picked it up."
"The beacons," murmured Kathy.
Arnold Budmera raised his hands to the sky.
"No, it's impossible," he replied. "The beacons can't be triggered like that. There's a security system which disables them for the first two hundred years."
"Nonetheless, I have five beacons transmitting from forty-two meters under."
"Five?" cried Kathy.
"Yep, I've checked twice. We've got five signals."
Kathy shivered.
This time, things were getting out of hand.

***