Mar 23, 2009 3:08 PM

Cowboys of the deep

**It's almost midnight in the North Pacific and, 230 miles south of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, a heavy fog blankets the seas.

There's nothing but the wind spinning eddies through the mist.**

Out of the darkness, a rumble grows. The water begins to vibrate. Suddenly, the prow of a massive ship splits the fog. Its steel hull rises seven storeys above the water and stretches two football pitches back into the night. A 15,683-horsepower engine roars through the holds, pushing 50,192 tonnes of steel. Crisp white capital letters - COUGAR ACE - spell out the ship's name. A deep-sea car transporter, its 14 decks are packed with 4,703 new Mazdas bound for North America. Estimated cargo value: £55 million.

On the bridge and below decks, the captain and crew begin the intricate process of releasing water from the ship's ballast tanks in preparation for entry into US territorial waters. They took on the water in Japan to keep the ship steady, but US rules require that it be dumped here to avoid contaminating American marine environments. It's a tricky procedure. To maintain stability and equilibrium, the ballast tanks need to be drained of foreign water and simultaneously refilled with local water. The bridge gives the go-ahead to commence the operation and a ship engineer uses a hydraulic-powered system to open the starboard tank valves. Water gushes out of one side of the ship and pours into the ocean. It's July 23, 2006.

In the crew's quarters below the bridge, Saw "Lucky" Kyin, the ship's 41-year-old Burmese steward, rinses off in the common shower. The ship rolls underneath his feet. He's been at sea for long stretches of the past six years. In his experience, when a ship rolls to one side, it generally rolls right back the other way.

This time it doesn't. Instead, the tilt increases. For some reason, the starboard ballast tanks have failed to refill properly and the ship has abruptly lost its balance. At the worst possible moment, a large swell hits the Cougar Ace and rolls the ship even farther to port. Objects begin to slide across the deck. They pick up momentum and crash against the port-side walls as the ship dips farther. Wedged naked in the shower stall, Kyin is confronted by an undeniable fact: the Cougar Ace is capsizing.

He lunges for a towel and staggers into the hallway as the ship's windmill-sized propeller spins out of the water. Throughout the ship, the other 22 crew members begin to lose their footing as the decks rear up. There are shouts and screams. Kyin escapes through a door into the damp night air. He's barefoot and dripping wet and the deck is now a slick metal ramp.

In an instant, he's skidding down the slope toward the Pacific. He slams into the railings and his left leg snaps, bone puncturing skin. He's now draped naked and bleeding on the railing, which has dipped to within feet of the frigid ocean. The deck towers 105 feet above him like a giant wave about to break. Kyin starts to pray.

It's 4am in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and a phone is ringing.

Rich Habib opens his eyes and blinks in the darkness. He reaches for the phone, disturbing a pair of dogs cuddled around him. He was going to take them to the river for a swim today. Now the sound of his phone means that somewhere, somehow, a ship is going down, and he's going to have to get out of bed and go save it.

Ship captains spend their careers trying to avoid a collision or grounding like this. But for Habib, nearly every month brings a welcome disaster. While people are shouting "Abandon ship!", Habib is scrambling aboard. He's been at sea since he was 18, and now, at 51, his tanned face, square jaw and don't-even-try-bullshitting-me stare convey a world-weary air of command. He holds an unlimited master's licence, which means he's one of the select few who are qualified to pilot ships of any size, anywhere in the world. He spent his early years captaining hulking vessels that lifted other ships on board and hauled them across oceans. He helped the US Navy transport a nuclear refuelling facility from California to Hawaii.

Now he's the senior salvage master - the guy who runs the show at sea - for Titan Salvage, a highly specialised outfit of men who race around the world saving ships.

Muscle cars and magic

The Titan crew is a motley mix: American, British, Swedish, Panamanian. Each has a speciality - deep-sea diving, computer modelling, underwater welding, big-engine repair. And then there's Habib, the guy who regularly helicopters on to the deck of a sinking ship, greets whatever crew is left and takes command of the stricken vessel.

Salvage work has long been viewed as a form of legal piracy. The insurers of a disabled ship with valuable cargo will offer from 10 to 70 per cent of the value of the ship and its cargo to anyone who can save it. If the salvage effort fails, they don't pay a penny.

But, when it works, the rewards can be huge. Titan now has staging grounds in Florida, the UK and Singapore and pays the salaries of 45 employees who drive Lotuses, BMWs and muscle cars tricked out with loud DynoMax exhaust systems. There's also a wall at headquarters with a row of photos of the men who have died on the job. Three have been killed in the past three years.

Titan's biggest competitors are Dutch firms, which have dominated the business for at least a century, due in part to the pumping expertise they developed to keep their low-lying lands dry. But, 20 years ago, a couple of yacht brokers in southern Florida - David Parrot and Dick Fairbanks - got fed up dealing with crazy, rich clients and decided that saving sinking ships would be more fun.

They didn't really know much about the salvage business but thought that the Dutch companies had come to rely too much on tugs and heavy-lift cranes.

Fairbanks envisioned a different kind of salvage company - one with no heavy machinery of its own. Instead, its business plan hinged on the idea that ships could be saved by human ingenuity, not horsepower. In 1992, a freighter sank alongside a dock in Dunkirk, France. Titan won the contract by proposing a novel approach: it hired a naval architect to create a 3D computer model of the ship. The model indicated that the vessel would float again if water was pumped out of the holds in a specific sequence. Titan put the plan into action and the ship bobbed to the surface as if by magic. Since then, a naval architect capable of building digital models has been a key member of the Titan team.

Jolted awake in Wyoming, Habib pushes himself out of bed. His dogs cluster around him. Clearly they want to go along, but he'll need a little more help than they can give. It's time to mobilise the Titan A-Team.

In Seattle, it's warm and breezy as Marty Johnson zips through the traffic in his black BMW Z3 convertible. He's wearing shades and, although he just turned 40, he has a boyish look that suits the car. Since graduating first in his class from New York's Webb Institute, a pre-eminent undergraduate naval architecture school, he has travelled the world with his laptop, building 3D models and helping refloat sunken things. He oversaw a system to lift a submerged F-14 from 70 metres of water near San Diego in 2004. And, in his free time, he wins boat races in which the skippers build their vessels from scratch in six hours or less.

The Cougar Ace is Johnson's lucky break. Habib's usual 3D modeller, Phil Reed, is visiting his in-laws in Chicago and his wife won't let him go to Alaska. Reed recommends Johnson, who has worked with Habib once before.

The job is daunting: board the Cougar Ace and build an on-the-fly digital replica of the ship. The car carrier has 33 tanks containing fuel, fresh water and ballast. The amount of fluid in each tank affects the way the ship moves at sea, as does the placement of the cargo. It's a complex system when the ship is upright and undamaged. When the holds take on water or the ship rolls off-centre the vessel becomes an intricate, floating puzzle.

Johnson will have to unravel the complexity. He'll rely on ship diagrams and his own onboard measurements to recreate the vessel using maritime modelling software known as GHS - General HydroStatics. The model will allow him to simulate what will happen as water is transferred from tank to tank in an effort to roll the ship upright. If the model isn't accurate, the operation could end up sinking the ship.

So when he gets the message inviting him to join the team headed to the Cougar Ace, his only question is: "When do we leave?"

Within hours of the Cougar Ace rolling, Habib's team arrives in Dutch Harbor, a small fishing town 800 miles west of Anchorage. As well as Habib and Johnson, there are Colin Trepte, a hard-edged, London-born diver who has spent most of his life in salvage, and Titan mechanic Hank Bergman, a Scandinavian cowboy obsessed with Hank Williams, who took a job as a ship's engineer to get out of smalltown Sweden.

They gather up their kit and head out to sea at top speed aboard the Makushin Bay, a 40-metre ship readied for salvage work. It's stacked with generators, steel-cutting equipment, machining tools and salvage pumps. Johnson's laptop is loaded with GHS and he begins building a rough model of the ship based on photographs and diagrams emailed from the owners.

After more than a day of full-speed motoring through the North Pacific, the Titan team spies the Cougar Ace. At first, it's only a sharp rise on the horizon. But as the Makushin Bay approaches, the scale of the ship dwarfs the salvage vessel. It's as if the men have gone through some kind of black hole and emerged as miniatures in a new and damaged world. The Cougar Ace lies on its side, its enormous red belly exposed to the smaller boats around it. The propeller floats eerily out of the water, the rudder flopped hard to port in the air.

"Holy fuck," Trepte mutters.

Six hours later, an HH-65 Coast Guard helicopter flies the team to the ship and lowers the guys one by one on to the tilted deck in a steel basket. Dan Magone, the owner of the Makushin Bay, comes with them. He's a local salvage master himself and an expert on the region's currents, tides, weather and shoals. He has spent more than 27 years saving fishing boats in the area.

The ship is rocking but the sea is calm and Habib thinks it's holding steady at a list of about 60°. Titan's first mission is to hunt for water on board. Johnson needs to know exactly how much water is sloshing around the cargo holds so he can put the data into the digital model he's constructing.

The guys click their LED headlamps on. The generators have gone dead and it will be pitch-dark below. The ship's thick steel sidewalls block radio reception, so once the men are below they won't be able to communicate with the outside world. All they'll have is each other.

Deep within the ship, the men dangle on ropes inside an angled staircase and peer through a doorway into cargo deck number nine.

Their lights partially illuminate hundreds of cars tilted on their side, sloping down into the darkness. Each is fastened to the deck by four white nylon straps. Periodically a large swell rolls the ship, straining the straps, and a chorus of creaks echoes through the hold. Then, as the ship rolls back, the hold falls silent. It's a cold, claustrophobic nightmare slicked with trickling engine oil and transmission fluid. Trepte lowers a rope and eases into the darkness. The others follow and, like rock climbers rappelling in slow motion, they back down the steep deck.

As they come to the middle, they reach a ramp built into the side of the hull, used for driving cars on and off the ship. A good deal of the ramp's exterior is about 10 metres underwater and, although it has a thick rubber seal, it wasn't designed to take the pressure of submersion. Habib thinks it might be leaking.

Sure enough, as they descend further, Trepte sees green water with a sheen of oil. The water is about two metres deep and runs the length of the compartment - dozens of new Mazdas can be seen beneath the murky surface like drowning victims. What that means is that the seal is leaking slowly and could fail completely at any moment. And, if that happened, seawater would fill the deck in a matter of minutes and drown them all. But having lasted this long, Habib figures, it's probably OK for now. Probably.

Trepte measures the dimensions of the wedge of water in the hold using a metal weight and string and shouts out the numbers. While Johnson does some trigonometry on a small pad of paper, Habib accidentally steps on one of the straps securing a car and the Mazda lurches downward with a screech. Trepte looks up with a start and realises that he's at the bottom of a suspended automotive avalanche. Dozens of cars hang over his head and, if one broke its straps, it would trigger a domino effect, sending a pile of Mazdas down on top of him.

"Oi, mate, try not to kill me down here, wontcha?" he shouts up to Habib.

Johnson finishes his calculations - the wedge of water weighs 930 tonnes, part of the ballast keeping the ship pinned on its side.

They will have to pump this water overboard and then fill the tanks on the high side of the ship to add enough ballast to bring it back to an even keel. According to Johnson's preliminary computer simulations, pumping 145.9 tonnes into the starboard tanks will do the trick.

But the situation is more precarious than Habib had thought. If they overfill the high-side starboard tanks, the Cougar Ace will roll back to normal - but then keep going, potentially in a matter of seconds. Everybody on board would be catapulted from one side of the ship to the other and the car straps could snap. If the cars were to pile up on one side, the added weight would create even more momentum, causing the ship to roll upside down and sink.

It's getting dark by the time they emerge from inside the ship - they were down for more than three hours - and Habib decides not to ask the Coast Guard to pull them off by helicopter. It would be risky in the twilight. Given the calm sea, he figures they can make their way to the back deck of the ship and jump from the low port side on to the Makushin Bay.

But when they reach the back and take stock of the situation, it doesn't seem that simple. If the deck were flat, they could walk straight across. But now it's a 32-metre metallic cliff dotted with keg-sized steel bollards. If one of the guys were to slip when not clipped in to a rope, no amount of clawing on the hard surface would arrest his slide. He would rocket down the 60° incline with only the blunt steel of the bollards to break his fall.

What's worse, the automated fire-prevention system vents on to the deck. Since the generators have been down for days, the system's chilled liquid carbon dioxide is warming and expanding. Every few minutes, the oxygen-snuffing chemical explodes out of the vent in a raging -73°C cloud.

'Is he breathing?'

Magone is anxious to get off the ship before nightfall makes it too difficult to jump on to the Makushin Bay. He begins to back down the deck, followed by Trepte and Bergman. The carbon dioxide explodes out of the vent, raining down slivers of dry ice. They pause to shield their faces and then keep descending.

Johnson's nervousness mounts and he stays put. He tells Habib that his backpack is bothering him. Habib offers to climb back up to the helicopter drop zone - there's extra rope there that he can use to lower the backpack. While Johnson twists his way out of the pack, Habib heads back up toward the drop zone.

Then it happens. Magone looks up and suddenly Johnson is hurtling down. He blurs past Bergman, screaming. Johnson is falling and he isn't clipped in to anything. His body ricochets off a steel post, sending him into an uncontrollable spin. He plunges past Trepte, upside-down. Nobody has time to react - in little more than a second, he has fallen 25 metres and his head smashes into a winch, with a sickening thud. His face smacks the metal, ripping a deep laceration in his forehead. Water sloshes just below him. Blood drips into it.

Habib hurls the rope down and races back the length of the ship.

He climbs as fast as he can down the looped line through the carbon dioxide blast zone. Magone has swung over to the winch in the centre of the deck and is struggling to stay in position over Johnson.

"Is he breathing?" Habib shouts.

Magone can't tell. Johnson is face down, and Magone is afraid to move him by himself. Habib swings over on a rope, and together they roll Johnson face up. His eyes are open, staring straight through Habib. No blinking. No movement. There's blood everywhere and he doesn't seem to be breathing, but he has a pulse. He's alive.

Habib's heart is racing. There's a chance. He starts mouth-to-mouth just as a boat crashes into the Cougar Ace only feet from Habib and Magone. It's the Emma Foss, a 30-metre tug whose crew has come to help.

But the collision rips off a piece of the railing that's supporting Habib. He splashes into the cold water beneath the winch. In an instant, he muscles himself back up beside Johnson.

"Let's get him off," Habib shouts. He's thinking, "He can make it.

He's got a pulse."

A stretcher is passed over from the Emma Foss and Johnson is hauled aboard to be transferred to a Coast Guard cutter and the care of its medics. Habib and his team jump on to the Makushin Bay and wait nervously for news of their friend. At 11 o'clock, the captain of the cutter calls Habib.

Marty Johnson is dead.

Through an overcast sky, the sun finally dawns faintly. It has been a long night and Habib has to rebuild his team. Choking back tears, he makes a call to headquarters in Florida.

A Coast Guard ship takes Johnson's body back to Adak, a rugged Aleutian island with an airstrip. Soon a twin-propeller plane floats down from the sky and stops at the end of the runway. The plane's ramp flips open and guys lugging cold-weather gear hustle down the Tarmac. They glance at the body bag and keep moving. The reinforcements have arrived.

Phil Reed - Titan's chief naval architect - has got the go-ahead from his wife. In the early 90s, Reed was one of the first to repurpose naval-architecture software for use on salvage jobs. Now 48, he's Titan's most senior 3D modeller - a sort of geek-in-residence. Two deep-sea divers - Yuri Mayani and Billy Stender - follow Reed. They look like a rough-and-tumble version of Laurel and Hardy. Mayani is a foulmouthed, hot-tempered 5'2" Panamanian with rippling muscles. Stender is a laconic 6'2"

Michigan native who spends as much time as he can living in a trailer in the woods near the Canadian border. Somehow, these two have become friends. "We understand each others," is how Mayani puts it. Stender refers to his friend as "the Panamaniac".

Into the hold

As Reed boards the Makushin Bay, Habib grimly hands him Johnson's computer. Reed agrees with Johnson's assessment: to decrease that risk of the ship flipping, the team needs to make sure that the largest ballast tank on the ship's lower side is filled. The crew had reported that they left it half full. This will be the team's first important task: a journey to the deepest part of the ship to drill a hole in the tank and fill it all the way. To get there, they will have to descend like potholers.

Habib orders his men on to the Redeemer, a 132ft tug that has joined the operation, for some impromptu rappelling practice, while the other tugs haul the Cougar Ace into the calm waters of the Bering Sea. And then it's time to begin the operation for real.

Reed serves as the navigator through the intricacies of the vessel's holds - he has spent the past 24 hours memorising the Cougar Ace's complex design. But it's one thing to picture the orderly lines of a blueprint, quite another to traverse the dark confines of a capsized ship. As a result, he is not always sure where they are and the darkness fills with Mayani's elaborate curses. Nobody wants to get lost inside this thing.

It takes them almost three hours of rappelling and climbing to descend to the thirteenth deck and, when they get there, no one is that excited to have arrived. This far down, they are well below the waterline. The sea presses in on the steel hull. They feel like they're inside an abandoned submarine.

Reed and Habib crawl along the tilted deck, periodically consulting a drawing of the ship's internal compartments. They rap their knuckles on a piece of steel - this is the top of the low-side ballast tank. Trepte pulls out a drill and bores down.

Suddenly, water erupts. The tank is already full and pressurised - water must be flowing in through a broken vent on the underwater side of the ship. It sprays furiously. They have unwittingly caused the worst thing possible: the deepest cargo hold is flooding.

In an instant, Trepte covers the hole with the tip of a finger and presses hard. The sound of gushing water stops abruptly and the shouts and curses of the moment before echo through the hold. Salt water drips off Mazdas and the panic the men all felt transforms into a contagious laugh. Trepte is keeping the ship afloat with one finger.

"Well, I guess the tank is already full," Reed chuckles.

"Very funny," Trepte says. "Now why don't some of you smart chaps go figure out how to fix this bloody mess?"

While Habib races to the Makushin Bay to find a solution, Mayani plugs the hole with his finger to give Trepte a break. They go back and forth for an hour-and-a-half before Habib returns with a tapered metal bolt to jam into the hole. Their fingers took a beating, but now they know that the tank is full. Reed enters the data into his computer model, runs the numbers, and tells Habib how much water he needs to pump into the high-side tanks. It's time to roll the ship.

The plan is to position large pumps throughout the ship and begin moving liquid in a sort of orchestrated water ballet. Reed has already choreographed the dance in his GHS model but still hasn't been able to find a solution that guarantees the ship won't flip.

When he runs the simulation, GHS sometimes shows the ship righting itself, but sometimes it just keeps rolling until it's belly up.

Then it sinks.

Habib decides not to worry about that right now and tells Mayani and Stender to position pumps near the water that has flooded into deck nine. Though they are both highly trained deep-sea divers, they play many roles on a salvage job. They can operate cranes, drive bulldozers and slice through metal with plasma torches;

Stender can even fly a helicopter. Right now, their role is to lug the 45kg pumps into place. Since there are no functioning winches on board, the two men haul the pumps by hand, using, as Mayani likes to say, a combination of "man-draulics and the man-crane".

Mayani is assigned to play pump monkey. Stender ties one rope around his buddy, a second rope around a pump, and then, using a rock-climbing belay device, lowers both down the face of deck nine.

Mayani hugs the pump so that it doesn't get banged up on the way down. What happens to Mayani is another matter.

"I'm no fucking pinball, motherfucker!" Mayani shouts as he slams against walls and cars. Stender likes the pinball reference and starts calling himself the pinball wizard.

Once the pumps are set up, Stender and Mayani explore the ship.

Mayani is on the hunt for some binoculars - he likes to collect mementos from jobs. He took a bright yellow plastic radio beacon from the last ship he helped save and displays it proudly next to the flat-screen TV in his Florida condo. Sometimes the ship's crew objects, calling the guys pirates.

"What the fuck you think we are?" Mayani likes to say. "We look like yuppies?" Luckily, the Cougar Ace is a ghost ship - there's no one to get in their way. Stender and Mayani make their way to the bridge. There are no ropes up here, so they're not clipped in to anything. They find a door on the high side of the bridge, but when Mayani jostles it, it flies open, throwing him off balance. Stender lunges for him, but Mayani falls inside and slides down the steeply inclined bridge. As he accelerates, he grasps for anything and manages to wrap an arm around the captain's chair 12 metres down, arresting his fall. Amazingly, he sees a pair of binoculars dangling from the chair.

"Are you OK?" Stender shouts, on the verge of panic.

"I found the motherfucking binoculars," Mayani responds, momentarily forgetting that he's hanging off the chair as though it were a tree sprouting off a cliff.

"Good job," Stender shouts back. "You did that real nice. Now how the hell you plan to get out of there?"

Mayani doesn't have a good answer. Stender looks around and sees a fire hose. He grabs the nozzle, lowers it down and Mayani climbs up the hose. He took the type of fall that killed Johnson, but Mayani doesn't seem too bothered. Instead, he scrutinises the binocs. One of the lenses is cracked.

"Shit," he says and throws them back down into the bridge.

"OK everyone," Habib says into his mic. Radios crackle across the Cougar Ace. Trepte, Bergman, Mayani and Stender are ready to drop down into the holds and fire up the pumps. An additional four Titan guys have arrived to assist. "Let's get this ship straightened up,"

Habib says. The pumps roar into life. Reed's model doesn't indicate how fast the ship will roll upright. If it's anything like the time the ship first rolled, it will be fast. It could be a dangerous roller-coaster ride.

Since the radios aren't powerful enough to reach the lower holds, Habib acts as both salvage master and radio relay, climbing halfway down into the ship so that his radio is close enough to pick up the signal of the guys up top and lower down. He follows Reed's plan and shouts orders: "Pump the wedge of water on deck nine overboard.

Begin filling the fifth starboard ballast tank now." He's like the conductor of an unusual, waterlogged symphony.

Reed's calculations show that the fifth starboard ballast tank has to be about 20 per cent full to bring the Cougar Ace all the way up, and as water begins to pour into the tank the ship starts to come off its 60° list.

"We're rolling her," Habib radios calmly. Everyone aboard waits anxiously for the ship to flip in an instant, but the vessel rises slowly, like a stunned boxer after a heavy blow. Water cascades down its sides. It makes no sudden movements - it's as if the ship itself has been trying to figure out whether it can do this, whether it can really return to the land of the living.

As the Titan team coaxes the Cougar Ace upright, Habib ties a water bottle to one end of a rope and affixes the other end to a pipe, forming an improvised plumb line. He uses it to calculate their progress: 56.5°... 51°... 40°. The Cougar Ace is coming up. Every hour it looks more and more like a normal ship.

Stender and Mayani stay on board, sleeping on cars, smoking cigarettes and tending the pumps. For lunch, they toss a rope to the Makushin Bay, 15 metres below, and its crew ties their food to the line. Habib checks his pendulum again and sees that it's still moving: 34°, then 28°, and counting.

By the end of the second day of pumping, the Cougar Ace is upright. A few days later, the owners come aboard to reclaim the ship. The operation has been a success. What initially seemed like a lost cause is now floating freely. It did not sink. Ninety nine per cent of its cargo is intact. There was no environmental disaster.

Soon, a payment of more than $10 million is wired to Titan's account.

For more than a year, the 4,703 Cougar Ace Mazdas sit in a huge parking lot in Portland, Oregon. Then, in February 2008, the cars are loaded one by one on to a 2.5-metre-wide conveyor belt. It lifts them 10 metres and drops them inside a Texas Shredder, a 15-metre-tall, hulking blue and yellow machine that sits on a one-hectare concrete pad. Inside the machine, 26 hammers - weighing 500kg each - smash each car into fist-sized pieces in two seconds.

Though most of the cars appeared to be unharmed, they had spent two weeks at 60°. Mazda can't be sure that something isn't wrong with them. Will the air bags function properly? Will the engines work flawlessly throughout the warranty period? Rather than risk lawsuits down the line, Mazda has decided to scrap the entire shipment.

Habib and the guys don't really give a damn. In the 16 months since they saved the Cougar Ace, the team has done laps around the globe. They pulled a stranded oil derrick off the world's most remote island, 2,750km west of South Africa. Then they wrangled a 300-metre container ship off a sandbar in Mexico and rescued a loaded propane tanker in the middle of a Caribbean storm. But none of the men will forget the Cougar Ace. When Mayani does shots of Bacardi at clubs in Miami Beach, he sometimes thinks back to the first time he saw the car carrier floating sideways on the sea. It gives him a chill until the rum takes hold. For Stender, it's the same. Trepte is the only one who doesn't seem affected.

"Listen, mate, all I do is crazy shit," he says, on a mobile from his bungalow on Trinidad. "You get used to it."

But Habib doesn't get used to it - Marty Johnson's death on the Cougar Ace still weighs on him. When Titan asks him to attend a first aid refresher course, he arrives solemnly in the hotel conference room near the Fort Lauderdale airport. The instructor lays out a few plastic life-sized dolls on the carpeted floor and asks Habib to demonstrate his technique. A couple of other Titan employees in attendance joke that the emaciated mannequins resemble some prostitutes they met while on a job in Russia. Habib doesn't smile. He doesn't join in with the laughter. He kneels down beside one of the pale forms, breathes into its mouth, and tries to bring it back to life.

This feature has been optioned as a movie by Steven Spielberg's studio DreamWorks. Joshua Davis is a contributing editor to Wired.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK