The view from the bow of the Discovery, one of three Fugro vessels leading the search for MH370 in the Roaring Forties, one of the most dangerous and remote oceans in the world. (Abis Chris Beerens, Ran)

The view from the bow of the Discovery, one of three Fugro vessels leading the search for MH370 in the Roaring Forties, one of the most dangerous and remote oceans in the world. (Abis Chris Beerens, Ran)

THE ROARING FORTIES

The sea offers this white slab to the tongue of the beach like the Holy Eucharist. This is my body. For sixteen months, the Boeing 777 wing flap sailed the Indian Ocean Gyre, meandering and eddying, speeding up and slowing unpredictably, before making landfall on Réunion Island off the east coast of Africa in July. If you were to beat back against the current, following the flap as it nudged along for more than five hundred days—reverse drift modeling, admittedly an inexact science—you would intersect with a tiny flotilla of ships twenty-five hundred miles away, each piloting a precisely programmed path.

Over the past year and a half, the search for Malaysia Air 370 has devolved from a massive international military effort—Malaysian, Chinese, American, and Australian planes and ships scouring the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the west Indian Ocean—into something quite small and focused, just a handful of technical experts and seasoned mariners fifteen hundred miles off the west coast of Australia. These men, this team, on these ships, in the wind-tormented wilderness of the Roaring Forties, one of the most treacherous and isolated stretches of ocean on the planet, a place where five-story waves rise out of sudden cyclones and the nearest land is a weeklong boat ride away.

Zoom in. Zoom out. Use all your devices with all appropriate apps. Say you are here. You want to go there. You cannot go there.

Begin, then, by imagining outer space. Beware the thousands of near-earth-orbit satellites weaving a basketry of reconnaissance around our blue planet. Little shutterbugs, little spies. Soar higher, to twenty-two thousand miles above earth, to that sweet spot where escape velocity meshes with gravity. Here's our hovering guardian angel, a south Indian Ocean satellite, shooting a spot beam—a two-way data conduit hired at a high price—down to a ship. Follow the beam until you see the vessel's wake, making a beeline from its port south of Perth in Western Australia. Meet the Fugro Equator.

The Equator has made a quick turnaround in port—enough time to refuel, resupply, sign out an exhausted crew and take on a fresh one—and now the early days at sea are a chance to catch up, tell stories, be reabsorbed into the shipboard tribe. If they're efficient, they can knock out their setup and kick it a bit. Store up sleep as a miser hoards gold. Where the Equator is headed,

bad weather is a near certainty, with the likelihood of something really awful.



The vessel can take it. It's nearly brand-new (2012), a two-hundred-foot steel-hulled purpose-built survey ship, incredibly robust and extraordinarily smart—a floating computer center with the lines of a superyacht. Fugro, a Netherlands-based company, is the world's largest marine survey firm. Its ships are the best its clients can afford, and since clients are typically multinational oil and gas companies, that means the best ships money can buy. For this mission, though, when all the bureaucratic acronyms are parsed and linked—from Perth to Canberra to Kuala Lumpur, to China and Europe, the U. S. and the U. N.—Fugro's client is humankind. A poor relation, you might say. But money has been no object so far.

At the end of March 2014, Australia took the lead in the south Indian Ocean search, declaring the waters to be its responsibility. In the words of treasurer Joe Hockey, "We're not a country that begs others for money to do our job," and true to its pledge, the government set aside $65 million to finance what was becoming the most expensive search in aviation history. In August, Fugro landed a contract for $44 million to spearhead the underwater search. Fugro project director Paul Kennedy and managing director Steve Duffield, both based in Perth, had carte blanche to scour the planet for the most effective technology—"all the best kit," as the Australians say. They paid a million for each EdgeTech sonar device. Another million for each Dynacon winch. They consulted with experts from all over the world and set up an elaborate data stream to maximize the number of brilliant scientific eyes scrutinizing pixels.

Kennedy, who has thirty years of offshore experience, calls the south Indian Ocean a miserable place to be. And though the crews work twelve-hour shifts, he knows most will work much longer hours. Out of dedication, yes, but also because sleep is nearly impossible on a violently tossing ship. You can brace yourself while you work; it's when you try to relax that you compound effort with futility. It's tough, he says, really tough. The crews of the three Fugro ships engaged in the search for MH370—the Equator, the Discovery, and the Supporter—are battling fatigue under the most challenging conditions: executing the deepest and most detailed ocean survey ever attempted.

But this is much more than a survey; it's an active murder inquiry. Somewhere down there, perhaps more than three miles down, perhaps partially intact or shattered into a thousand pieces and tangled in a rat's nest of wires, is what's left of MH370. And possibly the victims, too. Two hundred and thirty-nine souls. Mothers, fathers, lovers. Calligraphy artists and technical wizards. A two-year-old boy. Predominantly Chinese, they also include citizens of fourteen nations. They are connected by heartstrings to thousands, by lesser bonds of profession and acquaintance perhaps to millions. They await the only rescue left to them: the return to their loved ones, and the world of the known.

One of the million-dollar Abis Chris Beerens, Ran





NETS

Every ancient culture conceived a net, a multidimensional grid with a place for everything and everyone, living or dead. The Greeks ran their earthly course between Olympus and Hades under the surveillance of the Fates, clothiers of mortality who spun out destinies, measured their lengths, and cut them short. Indra's Net, the Hindu weave, is a more static, more placid grid. It extends ad infinitum in all directions. At each interstice is a jewel reflecting all the other jewels, a hall of mirrors extending endlessly outward and endlessly inward simultaneously, the most colossal of colossi coexisting with the minutest of the minuscule—which also seems to be true of this enigmatic planet here and now. Or so we dream, and perhaps subliminally remember.

But this I take to be fact: The beginning of technology was the knot—E pluribus unum—and the knot begat the net. And off we went, with that inborn mythological compulsion to guide us on our journey of joinery until we actually built the fucker on a global scale. Yet the twenty-first-century net we have built—nets within nets within nets—only exists where necessity demands it or profit supports it. At every crossroads is a meter ticking. And still it comforts us, even as it harries us. Our connecting screens, like the jewels of Indra's Net, contain colossi of information borne on invisible waves, the unseen resolving into pixels, pixels into image and text, the world at our fingertips. We capture every moment as it drifts into the past, and the data piles up behind us in a monolithic information cloud so big that even when we think we're out from under it, we are not quite free. Some part of us still links to it, like electric sparks jumping across a Tesla coil.

As it taxied down the runway a little after midnight on March 8, 2014, the Boeing 777 of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the red-eye from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, was enmeshed within nets of communication and navigation systems and the Internet of Things—machines autonomously signaling to machines. The weather was clear; the pilot, fifty-three-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was experienced and well-respected; the six-and-a-half-hour flight should've been a routine matter of climbing to cruising altitude, switching to autopilot, and following a programmed course. Less than an hour after takeoff, airborne at thirty-five thousand feet over the South China Sea, the cockpit signed off with Kuala Lumpur air traffic control: "All right. Good night, Malaysia Three Seven Zero."

But Three Seven Zero never made the expected contact with Vietnamese air traffic control at Ho Chi Minh City. Instead, it made a hard left turn and flew back over Malaysia. Erratic, incomprehensible, a swooping, panicky journey of wrong turns, bad choices (or no choices), a night torturously prolonged and indeed never quite terminated—that was the flight of MH370. Then it disappeared.

In the aftermath of the 2009 Air France crash and other sea crashes, aircraft debris littered the ocean, leaving a trace easily seen from the air. But here, no wreckage was found.

And then, a week later, with the trail gone cold, Inmarsat, the U. K.-based satellite company, asserted that for an astonishing and confounding six additional hours after the last radar contact, machine communicated with machine, the airliner sending "pings" to the Indian Ocean region geostationary satellite twenty-two thousand miles above, in space.

These "pings," also called "handshakes" or "heartbeats," contain very little real information. They are simply the aircraft telling the satellite, "I'm still here" (but not where); it means "We're still in business, so don't give away my slot." Someone in the cockpit must have disabled the plane's ACARS (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System), which can be done with the flip of a switch. But the ACARS is a layered system, and to disable the autonomous system below, a saboteur would have had to root around in the sub-cabin-floor electronics. Most pilots don't even know this backup system exists, according to avionics experts. So whether the primary ACARS was intentionally or catastrophically disabled, the aircraft and the satellite—Inmarsat-3 F1—kept up their conversation through six hourly handshakes and a final, partial seventh handshake. Out of sequence, the seventh ping foretold imminent disaster.

It was a "Log-on Request," which means that even the autonomous layer of the ACARS had broken contact with the satellite after what must have been a total electrical failure due to fuel exhaustion. MH370 was trying to sign on anew with the satellite, make a fresh start with a new power source.

A Boeing 777 has a last-ditch device, deployed from the belly of the plane behind the wing: the ram air turbine, or RAT. The RAT is a little power plant, a small windmill that can generate enough juice to turn on vital systems, like the satellite transponder. Out of gas but still gliding, the aircraft reached out to the electronic grid one last time, one final brief burst of information—MH370's true last words—and then it really disappeared.

There wasn't much data to crunch: only about six hundred bytes total, equivalent to a few text messages. From plane to satellite, from satellite to ground station in Perth—here were electronic beams like the two arms of a compass, good for drawing a circle but not a net to catch the plane. Inmarsat experts, working in conjunction with a formidable global brain trust, deduced from the seventh ping a Seventh Arc—a 2,485-mile-long curve, the most probable piece of the circle. By considering possible plane speeds, flight range, reported winds, parameters of aircraft performance, frequency variations in the satellite data, even the minute temperature effect on the satellite as it passed through a brief lunar eclipse, the investigative team homed in on the section of the arc that was most likely the crash site. By the best calculations of the best minds, the plane should have fallen somewhere along the southern end of the Seventh Arc, in the south Indian Ocean.

Until that wing flap washed up on Réunion Island off the east coast of Africa, there was no more information. No surveillance photos of contrails. Here, even near-earth satellites blink as they pass by. These empty latitudes are their recharge zone, their scheduled downtime. They look where they have business, and since there's nobody here, nothing to see, they sail by blindly.

Now it's up to the

Equator to look, through a miles-deep veil, as it battles the sea in the loneliest place on earth.

A FISH NAMED HOPE

Maybe you have to be Australian to get it, with a continent of empty waste at your back, and spend some years in Western Australia especially, looking across the Indian Ocean toward Africa, but Paul Kennedy isn't at all amazed that something as large as a Boeing 777 could disappear without a trace. No, not at all, he says. Things go missing.

Go out to Rottnest Island, just nine miles offshore, he says, and there's no cell-phone reception. Go out another thirty miles and there's no TV, no radio. It's very quiet. The silence is almost deafening. Kennedy considers the vastness of the Indian Ocean, the satellite blackout—before Fugro paid up to turn on a beam—and he considers the speck that is a plane, even a 777, and he says: No. No, it's not surprising. But in this case, it is unacceptable.

Trim, tan, as bald as Captain Picard with a similarly deep, resonant voice, the fifty-year-old Kennedy radiates confidence. He has "command presence"; you think of someone in the mold of Shackleton, at which he would surely laugh. But PK, as all the crews call him, is on top of every aspect of the search. Stump anybody on the ships and they'll say, "Ask PK. PK'll know." The crews carry that confidence with them to the Seventh Arc.

On illustrative maps, the Seventh Arc appears as a curved rectilinear box divided into a grid of numbered squares comprising about forty-six thousand square miles, a little larger than a sunken Pennsylvania. Navigating with a network of GPS satellites that can accurately determine its location to within two to four inches, the Equator reaches the spot on the grid where the previous team left off and can resume adding detail to the map in progress. Now the work can begin.

Everyone is at his station. The captain (or master, as he is called) is up on the bridge at the ship's controls. The surveyors are at their computers nearby, ready to direct him to keep the ship on the new line. The geophysicists are at their banks of computers down in the belly of the ship, running a checkup on their software. The data processors await the stream of information. The party chief, in charge of the sixteen-man survey crew—the scientists and technicians and engineers—is making his rounds, taking the pulse of morale and assessing the readiness of the gear. Worrying, that's what the party chief does.

Think of the Equator as a floating brain—a brain with a six-mile-long feeler. It's God's own USB connector, that marvel of a whisker, a one-inch-thick steel-armored cable at the heart of which is a fiber-optic filament finer than a human hair. The company that makes this cable also provides cables for NASA rockets and Nascar racers, machines that transmit data under the most extreme conditions man can tempt. The high-tech cord is coiled up on a giant reel, which is controlled by a massive traction winch powered by a truck engine. The apparatus at the steel whisker's tip, a coffin-sized box ingeniously crammed with electronics, is the "tow fish," or simply "the Fish."

The Fish is the ship's remote eyes, ears, and nose, and on this ship it's inscribed with a name, Spero: Hope. Because the Fish named Hope floats, it is tethered to a lead-filled "depressor" weighing half a ton—a nod to Iron Age tech. Now men in hard hats and fluorescent jumpsuits, wearing harnesses and tension lines securing them to the swaying ship, steady the Fish as it's hoisted aloft. Then Fish and sinker ride out over the stern rail, swaying beneath the extendable hydraulic A-frame (just the thing for just that job). As the cable pays out, the Fish smacks the surface and then, following the tug of the depressor, begins its descent.

Project director Paul Kennedy (left) and managing director Steve Duffield lead the search for MH370 from Fugro's headquarters in Perth, on the west coast of Australia. Andrew Cowen





THE GREAT COMPUTER GAME

The surface of the sea is a skin; we hardly think of the fruit, the heavy heaving jelly, its gigantic volume and incredible weight, its perpetual darkness. So when Fugro signed on to find the plane, it was essentially working blind. The only chart of the south Indian Ocean seafloor was a "gravity" map, a soft-focus estimate of depth shot from a satellite (that and Captain Cook's soundings from 1792). Job one for the Equator was a general bathymetric map—an underwater topological survey—of fifty-seven thousand square miles straddling the line of the Seventh Arc. You have to build the foundation before you can build the house, managing director Steve Duffield explains. Along with a Chinese ship, the Zhu Kezhen, the Equator "mowed the lawn," shooting sound waves from the ship's multibeam sonar. The monthslong survey produced an excellent map of depths, and seafloor hardness, and specific seabed features—just not good enough to find an airplane.

But what a sunken world that map reveals! The Seventh Arc transits undersea mountains comparable to the Alps, in terrain that plunges from ten thousand feet below to fifteen thousand. A section of the Equator's new deepwater bailiwick includes Broken Ridge, part of the rift where Australia ripped away from Antarctica, the violent topography harking back to Gondwana. The Broken Ridge's near-vertical walls drop down into a canyon grander than the Grand—a crack in the crust of the earth where the aliens live, as Duffield sometimes jokes at barbecues. The rift is a geological hot zone, with "black smokers" spouting boiling chemical brews, the adjacent abyssal plain studded with volcanoes. It's a true Lost World, like somewhere out of an H. Rider Haggard novel. It's often said we know less about the bottom of the sea than the surface of Mars. Yes, indeed, because it costs more to look. If time is money, then time in the abyss is money squared.

Without that map, the Equator would surely have towed the Fish into a mountainside. Now, as the traction winch grinds and the cable pays out, the Fish slowly descends into terrain that's supremely challenging but at least somewhat known. And descends, and descends. The blue of the bathyal zone bleeds into the black of the abyssal, the light winks out to perfect pitch, and the dark goes on and on, for eight monotonous hours. At last the tow supervisor hears from the Fish, which tells him that it's within optimal viewing range—about five hundred feet above the bottom. Now the Fish deploys its sonar arrays and begins absorbing and transmitting megabytes of the most rarefied knowledge.

But let us pause for a moment to appreciate this feat of engineering as art. How the cable extends two yards in length for every yard of depth until the weight of the cable and the depressor matches the velocity of the ship to form a perfect parabolic arc. Eight thousand yards of cable, four thousand yards of depth, say, constantly recalibrated via the winch, or by the speed of the ship, or both at once, to fly the Fish at its optimal altitude 24/7 over rugged terrain. The Fish, the long swooping cable, the proportionately tiny ship, the improbably distant satellite, its beams touching Perth and more distant stations—that's the true array of this plane-catching net, a performance that's never been attempted before and may never be repeated,

not with this technology.



Imagine towing a trailer five miles behind your car, survey party chief Scott Miller says. In the dark. On mountain roads. As party chief, Miller has to stay on top of all the technical problems that may arise, as well as the psychological quirks of the survey crew. A thirtyish father of three young daughters, with a soul patch and a West Australian drawl, Miller boasts talents that include absorbing stress and projecting, with wry humor, an easygoing confidence.

Now, with the Fish at depth and the Equator nodding into the seas at a jogging pace, Miller and his survey crew commence one of the greatest computer games ever played. Electrical impulses generated within the Fish are converted to pulses of sound that, fanning out from the side-scan transducers, make contact with a thousand yards of seabed on either side of the unit and echo back as information. A multibeam array on the bottom of the Fish does the same, filling in the "nadir gap" directly below.

Almost instantaneously, a detailed profile of the seafloor travels to the ship via the fiber-optic cable. The surveyors up on the bridge view the Fish data in real time, and by comparing the new information with the bathymetric map and current GPS info, they direct the master to steer the ship—and thus the Fish—in a perfectly straight line. In the same way, the tow operators control the up and down, the Fish's altitude. With mountain peaks looming ahead, this becomes a game of anticipation. Reel in too fast to make the Fish rise and the data is blurred; rise too high above the seabed (nine hundred feet is the upper limit) and the data is also compromised. Reaching the daily goal of sixty square miles requires maintaining optimal speed. Flying the Fish around the clock within these narrow parameters, on a rough sea, with fatigue increasing with

every bad night's sleep, becomes a white-knuckle exercise.



And, of course, everyone viewing the data is looking for any trace of MH370. This may register as a measure of hardness. Anything metallic is suspicious. Anything angular, any straight line sets off alarms. The data is compressed and beamed up to a satellite that relays the sonar data files to Fugro's office in Perth for further inspection by expert eyes, and to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) in Canberra for still more analysis. The data also travels via satellite to a U. S.-based quality-control expert, Andrew Sherrell, who advised on the search for Air France 447. The scrutiny is exhaustive, even obsessive. It's highly unlikely the Fish will fly over the plane, or any piece of it, and all these eyes will fail to see it.

There's another possibility, though—a sobering one. The search zone is the creation of the ATSB, and is perforce somewhat arbitrary. Its limits are determined as much by time and money as by probability. If Inmarsat and the rest, working with so many variables and unknowns, are a little more off than the box allows, the plane will not be found.

STORM

Brad Cooper, a young data processor working deep in the belly of the Equator, hails from

Invercargill, New Zealand, which at a latitude of 43 degrees is one of the southernmost cities in the world. And though his hometown is notorious for its wind and horizontal rain, and the local museum features a permanent exhibit on the Roaring Forties, he says he never really gave much thought to what that meant. He didn't plan to become a mariner. Didn't reckon he'd learn about the Roaring Forties firsthand, on a ship, staring at a computer when you're going like this and the screen's going like that. If you try to stay fit, you have to time your push-ups just right or you get body-slammed. Same thing with chin-ups. And most of the time, forget about the treadmill. It's three hundred steps from the data room to the bridge (everyone wears a pedometer, part of a corporate fitness challenge), where you can watch the seas that've been knocking you about. Now Brad Cooper knows something true about the Roaring Forties. Yes indeed. It's a zone best avoided—not an option for the Fugro ships. They are slow-moving targets as they haul the Fish. There's always tension, the expectation of a bad-weather beat-down.

February 2, 2015. The satellite forecast warned of a perfect shitstorm. Tropical Cyclone Diamondra was wallowing to the east, about to converge with Tropical Cyclone Eunice, and the Equator was right in the crosshairs. The ship brought in the Fish and secured it on the aft deck, and then the master, Andreas Ryanto Molyo, made a general announcement: "Prepare for a severe roll." The ship executed a hard turn, listing to 35 degrees and then righting itself to confront the rising seas. All the tech on board—consoles, laptops, phones, etc.—was securely mounted, bolted, or glued, personal items lashed or stashed for foul weather. The coffee machine was the only casualty, but that was a painful loss.

At the height of the storm, party chief Scott Miller recalls watching from the bridge, where all he could see was a wall of white foam five stories high bearing down on the Equator. The ship climbed and climbed and punched through, spray firehosing the bridge windows. Then it fell into the trough, the prow nearly submarining, and began to rise again. The motion, jolting and arrhythmical, went on and on, as erratically violent as the chaotic seas. Miller notes that Molyo, a deeply experienced Indonesian mariner, remained stoically cool, steering the ship into the waves, which were stacked up to the horizon in a grim gray file. Except for Miller and the medic, who continued making their rounds—and the master, of course—the crew members hunkered down in their cabins, trying to stay in their bunks.

There was nowhere to run. To head for Perth would mean a six-day retreat followed by another six-day chug back, an unacceptable loss of time and money. And that wasn't the plan anyway. The plan was to sit it out in the survey area, the weather be damned. At such times it's clear that the crew—the wetware—is the weak link in the technology, the part that suffers. In a storm, the world is reduced to the interior of the ship, a maze of stairways and gleaming white hallways, all spick-and-span, leading up from the twin diesel electric engines and the lower-level data-processing room, to other empty office rooms with arrays of computers and screens, to the unoccupied gymnasium and rec room and mess hall. The crew is at liberty to pinball off the wall up to the high bridge for a view of the seas—which established a Fugro record of 57.7 feet during that blow—but most stick to their private cabins, enduring in solitude.

They hold on, riding out the storm hour after sleepless hour. Scott Miller compares the experience to a roller-coaster ride that can last for days: "You have to learn to live—sleep, eat, drink, and go to the bathroom—while on the ride." John Boudreaux, an American AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) tech who endured a cyclone on the Supporter, says it's like "being drunk without being drunk." Boudreaux is a Cajun who loves to eat but found holding his plate where he could get at it with his fork to be nearly impossible.

Everything is moving. And everything that can make a noise is making the noise it can make. There's a prank some of the younger crew members like to play on trainees. They'll be coming off the ship after their six weeks on and they'll plant little noise booby traps for the next guy in the cabin—maybe little BBs that'll dribble from one side of the room to the other once the ship starts to roll. One time it was a crumpled Coke can stashed up behind the ceiling tiles. But those things get found out in the early days. Deeper into the voyage, when the weather turns sour and nerves are wearing thin, ordinary sounds become magnified. The pillow stuffing crinkles right in your ear; cabinet doors creak. One sleepless night, Miller took a small piece of paper, folded it four times to make a shim, and then crammed it into a crack above his closet door. Who knows how many sleepless hours, how many other cracks he tried before he found the source of the creak and silenced the bugger?

Eventually every storm blows itself out. The crew members creep out of their cabins, chastened, relieved, curious to see what the outside world looks like. And they'll see something only a handful of people have ever seen: fifty-foot waves in the open sea, blue and foam-flecked but smooth, glassing off, still majestic. The cooks put out a big feed, and the conversation in the mess rises to a roar. Everybody has a story, the same story: Look at us! We have come through!

Soon it's time to start back for the mark, get ready to redeploy the Fish. Get back to the routine of work. But the bond is strengthened between members of the crew and between the crew and the larger community it represents. They all feel it. At this time, in this place, the Fugro Equator can say to the world, to the families of the victims of MH370: We are still here. We have not given up.

The search area is fifteen hundred miles west of Perth, Australia, and twenty-five hundred miles east from where the Boeing 777 wing flap washed up on Réunion Island. Australian Transportation Safety Board





MAPS

In the boardroom of Fugro's Perth office, the bathymetric map sprawls across a very long polished table and hangs over at both ends. This map must be thirty feet long and six feet wide. It's a beautiful color-coded artifact depicting the mountains and trenches of the deep-sea terrain. An immense miniature, it brings home the scope of the search operation. The search for anything has a peculiar tautological logic. "If I knew when we'd find the plane," Paul Kennedy says, "I would know where to look." The deep-tow operation has been ongoing for seven months of twenty-four-hour workdays and could go on for another year. Three factors will remain the same: the remoteness of the site, the rigors of the weather, and the isolation of the crews. Every moment will be challenging, every new moment as important as the last.

To keep the guys keen, Kennedy and Duffield made a conscious decision from the start to remind them at every turn that they are involved in something historic, to give them a bit of the rock-star treatment. Something to look forward to when they get up in the morning or the middle of the night. These can be little things like a bottomless candy bowl. M&M's, Skittles, Mars bars, whatever. Cooks who are ex-cruise-ship chefs and can really lay out a spread. For Christmas at sea, they served suckling pig and carved vegetables. A doctor offering better health care than they'd get at home, if only because weekly checkups are encouraged on the ship. Thanks to the satellite, they have high-speed Internet.

The crews have responded, both to the humanitarian appeal—they keep wanting to go back, which has surprised and touched Paul Kennedy—and to the technical challenges. And the system is working. The ceaseless river of data streaming from the Fish is painstakingly categorized as 3) of no interest; 2) of potential interest but unlikely to be MH370; and 1) It's the freaking plane, call the ATSB in Canberra! When Category 2's arise, it's time to bring in the Fugro Supporter, with its AUV. If the Fish is a lawn mower, think of the AUV as a Weedwacker, as AUV project manager Nick Bardsley puts it. It gets to the tight spots, does the close-up work.

May 13, 2015. The Fish flew over a small debris field, twelve nautical miles east of the Seventh Arc center line. A classic Category 2. The ATSB's operational search team decided to dispatch the Supporter. Its AUV, "Hugin" (named for a Norse god's companion raven), has a sonar array similar to the Fish's, as well as a high-definition camera, and can safely nose in to within forty yards of a target—twenty if it's worth the risk. A beautiful fifteen-foot orange torpedo, Hugin can be programmed for a fully autonomous mission or flown like a radio-operated plane via its underwater acoustic modem, sending up data in real time, then returning to the surface near the ship, compliant as Flipper.

On this mission, Hugin shot a series of close-ups of stark clarity,

like nighttime crime scenes. The straight line that set off the alarm bells turned out to be the shaft of an anchor. Multiple bright reflections on the tow's sonar data were identified as rivets and lumps of coal. The search team had discovered a previously uncharted shipwreck, at a depth of 12,800 feet, probably dating from the nineteenth century. This was both exciting and a bit of a letdown. Indeed, every gap in the tow data—every volcano crater, every trench or steep mountainside—will call for a follow-up with the AUV. When you look at all the contour lines established by the Fish, with an overlay of all the previous AUV missions, the map of the survey takes on the complexity of a computer circuit board. What used to be one of the least known places on the planet—a "blank space," as Joseph Conrad said of the Congo at the end of the nineteenth century—is becoming the most, and the only, thoroughly mapped and examined portion of the abyssal zone.

CLOSING THE LOOP

When Paul Kennedy talks about his confidence in the satellite data, in the calculations derived by Inmarsat and the independent brain trust that corroborates them, you feel confident, too. Yeah, they gotta be right. The wing flap that washed up on Réunion Island is further confirmation, in Kennedy's words, that their original analysis was spot-on. The story of the debris has occasioned new excitement from the world press and the Internet blogosphere, a surge of surety that has spread to the Fugro crews, whose morale, Kennedy says, is "fantastic." But all the news stories—which begin with the provocative question "Could this be the big break?"—conclude that, well, no, not likely. Nor should it be ignored that in an overlooked and otherwise-unintelligible-to-nonmathematicians paper published by Inmarsat, the writers conclude "it is stressed that . . . there remains significant uncertainty in the final location."

And here's another possibility, one also not lost on the blogosphere. When the search for MH370's black box in the waters due west of Australia failed, there was no next move. Yet it was impossible to do nothing. Necessity demanded a new strategy, and Inmarsat offered one. A guesstimate. Maybe a wild-goose chase, but something. One blogging satellite expert said Inmarsat's published diagrams "look like cartoons." Maybe the deep-sea search is at bottom an elaborate ritual, something between mad King Xerxes flogging the sea and a ceremonial covering of the grieving body politic with the ashes of information.

Even if Inmarsat is right and the plane lies within the Seventh Arc, chance could be the deciding factor. If the aircraft fell into a volcano, it may be missed. If the debris is scattered along a sheer cliff, the Fish may not detect it. If it lies at the bottom of a trench below sixteen thousand feet, it will be out of the AUV's range. And if the ships miss the plane, that's it—they won't be going back. On the other hand, a Boeing 777 is not insubstantial, and the technology employed by the ships is impressive. Based on other incidents, the debris field will be about seven hundred yards long, impossible to miss unless somehow concealed. The ships' sonar screens should light up like Vegas slots.

So Kennedy's confidence in the ships and the crews remains unflappable. He believes that with every square mile searched, finding the plane becomes more likely, not less. Expectations are actually increasing, not decreasing. Resolve is high on all the vessels and in the office. But along with confidence, what Kennedy feels mostly is the burden of responsibility. When the plane is found, there will be no celebration in the Perth office, just relief.

Already the ATSB is making plans with Malaysia and China for the aircraft's recovery. A large ship will be required for the plane itself, with refrigeration for the expected human remains. If MH370 struck the sea at a near-level glide, the bodies of the dead will have been preserved by the darkness and the extreme anaerobic cold, persisting in a gelid state, like waxworks. A heave-compensated crane, computer-controlled to negate the roll of the ship, will bring the bodies up carefully, in special mesh body bags—like tea bags—to best protect them as the pressure decreases

and the seawater drains. The remains will be returned to their families, and the pieces of the plane taken to shore for analysis. The hope is that the black box, or the wreckage itself, will tell the tale, and the mystery will be solved.

This is far from a sure thing. In the near year and a half since MH370 disappeared, the proposed search zone has had a protoplasmic life of its own. It swelled to an intimidating three million square miles when the Malaysian military radar report was first released. Then it contracted to twenty-three thousand square miles when faith in the Inmarsat satellite data analysis hit its zenith. In April 2015, it doubled to forty-six thousand square miles. These numbers are also measures of political will and money. Malaysia pledged to match the $65 million Australia put aside for the search but has so far not ponied up all of the cash. China, home to the vast majority of the passengers, continues to sit on the sidelines. Still, these sums, while adding up to the most expensive search in aviation history, are less than half the cost of a single Boeing 777. By that light, the search has been a lowball effort.

Yet there is growing pressure from the Australian public to stop the cash drain. How much will the country pay to know? Australia's prime minister, Tony Abbott, has said that we owe it to the twenty-three million Australians who fly in these planes, to the hundreds of millions around the world whose safety is at risk. But he has also recently begun to judiciously back away, saying to Parliament, "I can't promise the search will go on at this intensity forever." A search consortium has quantified the issue by stating that without some new information, "there will be no further expansion of the search area."

Lost!? A 777-200ER? This has been a blow to human pride, to human competence. The world looms large again. We are like gnats buzzing about in our little tin flying machines. How much would it cost the human spirit—the confidence of the flying public—to just let it go?

In the Fugro office in Perth, they know they're in a race, approaching a crossroads. Things could go Greek—Time and Necessity ruling. Either they'll call Canberra with the good word or one day Canberra will call them and say, "Well, good try, but that's it."

Paul Kennedy feels strongly that this would cost too much. It would be unforgivable if we gave up too soon and something like this happened again, he says. We need to close the loop.

If MH370 remains lost, it will become myth. We can't be having that, Kennedy says. There's nothing natural about aircraft safety. It isn't natural for these great airplanes to stay in the air. It takes diligence and hard work. That's what's driving this. One morning we'll wake up and there'll be a phone call from the ships. That's it. Resolution for the families. It's all about closing the loop for them. And closing the loop so it doesn't happen again.

After MH370, whether found or lost forever, our net will tighten, the loops will contract. Next year, if a recommendation becomes law, aircraft will say where they are every fifteen minutes instead of every half hour. A movement is afoot for constant awareness of all locations of all planes in the sky. This is necessary, and it will cost. This is the dream of Indra's Net, everything reflecting everything, everything in touch. The technology already exists, for a price. There's also a movement to limit passenger or pilot malfeasance by expanding the autonomy of the machines. Here one loop tightens and another expands. The onus shifts to the technicians and maintenance crews to never make a mistake. The cloud of data grows in real time, always threatening to spiral out of control. Like the Indian Ocean Gyre. Like the Roaring Forties. Like life.

Let us pray. Open your books to any page. Yes, that greasy, dog-eared document in the seat flap in front of you. Admire that infinity pool above the Mediterranean blue. Consider yurt-to-yurt trekking in Mongolia. Take a moment to circle the names of the gods diagonally on the puzzle page, on the way to regarding the hubs, those many-fingered rosettes of pure possibility.

Use all your devices with all appropriate apps. Say you are here. You want to go there. Go there.

For Esquire's 1,000th issue, October 2015 (on sale now), we look back on the history of the magazine and launch a digital archive of everything we've ever published, Esquire Classic.

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