Raise the Titanic! (2 page)

APRIL 1912

The man on
Deck A, Stateroom 33, tossed and turned in his narrow berth, the mind behind his sweating face lost in the depths of a nightmare. He was small, no more than two inches over five feet, with thinning white hair and a bland face, whose only imposing feature was a pair of dark, bushy eyebrows. His hands lay entwined on his chest, his fingers twitching in a nervous rhythm. He looked to be in his fifties. His skin had the color and texture of a concrete sidewalk, and the lines under his eyes were deeply etched. Yet he was only ten days shy of his thirty-fourth birthday.

The physical grind and the mental torment of the last five months had exhausted him to the ragged edge of madness. During his waking hours, he found his mind wandering down vacant channels, losing all track of time and reality. He had to remind himself continually where he was and what day it was. He was going mad, slowly but irrevocably mad, and the worst part of it was that he knew he was going mad.

His eyes fluttered open and he focused them on the silent fan that hung from the ceiling of his stateroom. His hands traveled over his face and felt the two-week growth of beard. He didn't have to look at his clothes; he knew they were soiled and rumpled and stained with nervous sweat. He should have bathed and changed after he'd boarded the ship, but, instead, he'd taken to his berth and slept a fearful, obsessed sleep off and on for nearly three days.

It was late into Sunday evening, and the ship wasn't due to dock in New York until early Wednesday morning, slightly more than fifty hours hence.

He tried to tell himself he was safe now, but his mind refused to accept it, in spite of the fact that the prize that had cost so many lives was absolutely secure. For the hundredth time he felt the lump in his vest pocket. Satisfied that the key was still there, he rubbed a hand over his glistening forehead and closed his eyes once more.

He wasn't sure how long he'd dozed. Something had jolted him awake. Not a loud sound or a violent movement, it was more like a trembling motion from his mattress and a strange grinding noise somewhere far below his starboard stateroom. He rose stiffly to a sitting position and swung his feet to the floor. A few minutes passed and he sensed an unusual, vibrationless quiet. Then his befogged mind grasped the reason. The engines had stopped. He sat there listening, but the only sounds came from the soft joking of the stewards in the passageway and the muffled talk from the adjoining cabins.

An icy tentacle of uneasiness wrapped around him. Another passenger might have simply ignored the interruption and quickly gone back to sleep, but he was within an inch of a mental breakdown, and his five senses were working overtime at magnifying every impression. Three days locked in his cabin, neither eating nor drinking, reliving the horrors of the past five months, served only to stoke the fires of insanity behind his rapidly degenerating mind.

He unlocked the door and walked unsteadily down the passageway to the grand staircase. People were laughing and chattering on their way from the lounge to their staterooms. He looked at the ornate bronze clock, which was flanked by two figures in bas-relief above the middle landing of the stairs. The gilded hands read 11:51.

A steward, standing alongside an opulent lamp standard at the bottom of the staircase, stared disdainfully up at him, obviously annoyed at seeing so shabby a passenger wandering the first-class accommodations, while all the others strolled the rich Oriental carpets in elegant evening dress.

“The engines…they've stopped,” he said thickly.

“Probably for a minor adjustment, sir,” the steward replied. “A new ship on her maiden voyage and all. There's bound to be a few bugs to iron out. Nothing to worry about. She's unsinkable, you know.”

“If she's made out of steel, she can sink.” He massaged his bloodshot eyes. “I think I'll take a look outside.”

The steward shook his head. “I don't recommend it, sir. It's frightfully cold out there.”

The passenger in the wrinkled suit shrugged. He was used to the cold. He turned, climbed one flight of stairs and stepped through a door that led to the starboard side of the boat deck. He gasped as though he'd been stabbed by a thousand needles. After lying for three days in the warm womb of his stateroom, he was rudely shocked by the thirty-one-degree temperature. There was not the slightest hint of a breeze, only a biting, motionless cold that hung from the cloudless sky like a shroud.

He walked to the rail and turned up the collar of his coat. He leaned over but saw only the black sea, calm as a garden pond. Then he looked fore and aft. The Boat Deck from the raised roof over the first-class smoking room to the wheel-house forward of the officers' quarters was totally deserted. Only the smoke drifting lazily from the forward three of the four huge yellow and black funnels and the lights shining through the windows of the lounge and reading room revealed any involvement with human life.

The white froth along the hull diminished and turned black as the massive vessel slowly lost her headway and drifted silently beneath the endless blanket of stars. The ship's purser came out of the officers' mess and peered over the side.

“Why did we stop?”

“We've struck something,” the purser replied without turning.

“Is it serious?”

“Not likely, sir. If there's any leakage, the pumps should handle it.”

Abruptly, an ear-shattering roar that sounded like a hundred Denver and Rio Grande locomotives thundering through a tunnel at the same time erupted from the eight exterior exhaust ducts. Even as he put his hands to his ears, the passenger recognized the cause. He had been around machinery long enough to know that the excess steam from the ship's idle reciprocating engines was blowing off through the bypass valves. The terrific blare made further speech with the purser impossible. He turned away and watched as other crew members appeared on the Boat Deck. A terrible dread spread through his stomach as he saw them begin stripping off the lifeboat covers and clearing away the lines to the davits.

He stood there for nearly an hour while the din from the exhaust ducts died slowly in the night. Clutching the handrail, oblivious to the cold, he barely noticed the small groups of passengers who had begun to wander the Boat Deck in a strange, quiet kind of confusion.

One of the ship's junior officers came past. He was young, in his early twenties, and his face had the typically British milky-white complexion and the typically British bored-with-it-all expression. He approached the man at the railing and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Beg your pardon, sir. But you must get your life jacket on.”

The man slowly turned and stared. “We're going to sink, aren't we?” he asked hoarsely.

The officer hesitated a moment, then nodded. “She's taking sea faster than the pumps can keep up.”

“How long do we have?”

“Hard to say. Maybe another hour if the water stays clear of the boilers.”

“What happened? There was no other ship nearby. What did we collide with?”

“Iceberg. Slashed our hull. Damnable bit of bloody luck.”

He grasped the officer's arm so hard the young man winced. “I must get into the cargo hold.”

“Little chance of that, sir. The mailroom on F Deck is flooding and the luggage is already floating down in the hold.”

“You must guide me there.”

The officer tried to shake his arm loose, but it was held like a vise. “Impossible! My orders are to see to the starboard lifeboats.”

“Some other officer can man the boats,” the passenger said tonelessly. “You're going to show me the way to the cargo hold.”

It was then that the officer noticed two discomforting things. First, the twisted, insane look on the passenger's face, and, second, the muzzle of the gun that was pressing against his genitals.

“Do as I ask,” the man snarled, “if you wish to see grandchildren.”

The officer stared dumbly at the gun and then looked up. Something inside him was suddenly sick. There was no thought of argument or resistance. The reddened eyes that burned into his burned from within the depths of insanity.

“I can only try.”

“Then try!” the passenger snarled. “And no tricks. I'll be at your back all the way. One stupid mistake and I'll shoot your spine in two at the base.”

Discreetly, he shoved the gun into a coat pocket, keeping the barrel nudged against the officer's back. They made their way without difficulty through the milling throng of people who now cluttered the Boat Deck. It was a different ship now. No laughter or gaiety, no class distinction; the wealthy and the poor were joined by the common bond of fear. The stewards were the only ones smiling and making small talk as they handed out ghost-white life preservers.

The distress rockets soared into the air, looking small and vain under the smothering blackness, their burst of white sparkles seen by no one except those aboard the doomed ship. It provided an unearthly backdrop for the heartrending good-byes, the forced expressions of hope in the men's eyes as they tenderly lifted their women and children into the lifeboats. The terrible unreality of the scene was heightened as the ship's eight-piece band assembled on the Boat Deck, incongruous with their instruments and pale life jackets. They began to play Irving Berlin's “Alexander's Ragtime Band.”

The ship's officer, prodded by the gun, struggled down the main stairway against the wave of passengers who were surging up toward the lifeboats. The low angle of the bow was becoming more pronounced. Going down the steps, their stride was off-balance. At B Deck they commandeered an elevator and rode it down to D Deck.

The young officer turned and studied the man whose strange whim had inexorably bound him tighter in the grip of certain death. The lips were drawn back tightly over the teeth, the eyes glassy with a faraway look. The passenger glanced up and saw the officer staring at him. For a long moment their eyes locked.

“Don't worry…”

“Bigalow, sir.”

“Don't worry, Bigalow. You'll make it before she goes.”

“What section of the cargo hold do you want?”

“The ship's vault in number one cargo hold, G Deck.”

“G Deck must surely be under water by now.”

“We'll only know when we get there, won't we?” The passenger motioned with the gun in his coat pocket as the elevator doors opened. They moved out and pushed their way through the crowd.

Bigalow tore off his life belt and ran around the staircase leading to E Deck. There he stopped and looked down and saw the water crawling upward, inching its relentless path up the steps. Some of the lights still burned under the cold green water, giving off a haunting, distorted glow.

“It's no use. You can see for yourself.”

“Is there another way?”

“The watertight doors were closed right after the collision. We might make it down one of the escape ladders.”

“Then keep going.”

The journey along the circuitous alleyways went rapidly through the unending steel labyrinth of passages and ladder tunnels. Bigalow halted and lifted a round hatch cover and peered into the narrow opening. Surprisingly, the water on the cargo deck beneath was only two feet deep.

“No hope,” he lied. “It's flooded.”

The passenger roughly shoved the officer to one side and looked for himself.

“It's dry enough for my purpose,” he said slowly. He waved the gun at the hatch. “Keep going.”

The overhead electric lights were still burning in the hold as the two men sloshed their way toward the ship's strong room. The dim rays glinted off the brass of a giant Renault town car blocked to the deck.

Both of them stumbled and fell in the icy water several times, numbing their bodies with the cold. Staggering like drunken men, they reached the vault at last. It was a cube in the middle of the cargo compartment. It measured eight feet by eight feet; its sturdy walls were constructed of twelve-inch-thick Belfast steel.

The passenger produced a key from his vest pocket and inserted it in the slot. The lock was new and stiff, but finally the tumblers gave with an audible click. He pushed the heavy door open and stepped into the vault. Then he turned and smiled for the first time. “Thanks for your help, Bigalow. You'd better head topside. There's still time for you.”

Bigalow looked puzzled. “You're staying?”

“Yes, I'm staying. I've murdered eight good and true men. I can't live with that.” It was said flatly. The tone final. “It's over and done with. Everything.”

Bigalow tried to speak, but the words would not come.

The passenger nodded in understanding and began pulling the door closed behind him.

“Thank God for Southby,” he said.

And then he was gone, swallowed up in the black interior of the vault.

 

Bigalow survived.

He won his race with the rising water and managed to reach the Boat Deck and throw himself over the side only seconds before the ship took her plunge.