Raise the Titanic! (29 page)

The day began
going badly for Pitt right after he wandered away from the salvage activity and made his way down to No. 1 cargo hold on G Deck.

The sight that met his eyes in the darkened compartment was one of utter devastation. The vault containing the byzanium was buried under the collapsed forward bulkhead.

He stood there for a long time, staring at the avalanche of broken and twisted steel that prevented any easy attempt to reach the precious element. It was then that he sensed someone standing behind him.

“It looks like we've been dealt a bum hand,” Sandecker said.

Pitt nodded. “At least for the moment.”

“Perhaps if we—”

“It would take weeks for our portable cutting equipment to clear a path through that jungle of steel.”

“There's no other way?”

“A giant Dopplemann crane could clear the debris in a few hours.”

“Then what you're saying is that we have no choice but to stand by and wait patiently until we reach the dry-dock facilities in New York.”

Pitt looked at him in the dim light and Sandecker could see the look of frustration that cracked his rugged features. There was no need for an answer.

“Removing the byzanium to the
Capricorn
would have been a break in our favor,” Pitt said. “It'd certainly have saved us a lot of grief.”

“Maybe we could fake a transfer.”

“Our friends who work for the Soviets would smell a hoax before the first crate went over the side.”

“Assuming they're both on board the
Titanic
, of course.”

“I'll know this time tomorrow.”

“I take it you have a line on who they are?”

“I've got one of them pegged, the one who killed Henry Munk. The other is purely an educated guess.”

“I'd be interested in knowing who you've ferreted out,” Sandecker said.

“My proof would never convince a federal prosecutor, much less a jury. Give me a few more hours, Admiral, and I'll lay them both, Silver and Gold, or whatever their stupid code names are, right in your lap.”

Sandecker stared at him, then said, “You're that close?”

“I'm that close.”

Sandecker passed a weary hand across his face and tightened his lips. He looked at the tons of steel covering the vault. “I leave it with you, Dirk. I'll back your play to the last hand. I don't really have much choice.”

 

Pitt had other worries, too. The two Navy tugs that Admiral Kemper promised to send were still hours away, and sometime during the late morning, for no apparent reason, the
Titanic
took it into her mind to increase her starboard list to seventeen degrees.

The ship rode far too low in the water; the crests of the swells lapped at the sealed portholes along E Deck just ten feet below the scuppers. And although Spencer and his pumping crew had managed to drop suction pipes down the loading hatches into the cargo holds, they had not been able to fight their way through the debris crowding the companionways to reach the engine and boiler rooms, where the greatest volume of water still lay—remote and inaccessible.

Drummer sat in the gymnasium, dirty and exhausted after working around the clock. He sipped at a mug of cocoa. “After almost eighty years of submersion and rot,” he said, “the wood paneling in the passageways has fallen and jammed them worse than a path in a Georgia junkyard.”

Pitt sat where he'd been all afternoon, bent over a drafting table next to the radio transmitter. He stared out of red-rimmed eyes at a transverse drawing of the
Titanic
's superstructure.

“Can't we thread our way down the main staircase or the elevator shafts?”

“The staircase is filled with tons of loose junk once you get down past D Deck,” Spencer declared.

“And there isn't a prayer of penetrating the elevator shafts,” Gunn added. “They're crammed with jumbled masses of corroded cables and wrecked machinery. If that wasn't bad enough, all the watertight double-cylinder doors in the lower compartments are frozen solid in the closed position.”

“They were shut automatically by the ship's first officer immediately after she struck the iceberg,” Pitt said.

At that moment, a short bull of a man covered from head to toe with oil and grime staggered into the gym. Pitt looked up and faintly smiled. “That you, Al?”

Giordino hauled himself over to a cot and collapsed like a sack of wet cement. “I'd appreciate it if none of you lit any matches around me,” he murmured. “I'm too young to die in a fiery blaze of glory.”

“Any luck?” asked Sandecker.

“I made it as far as the squash court on F Deck. God, it's blacker than sin down there…fell down a companionway. It was flooded with oil that had seeped up from the engine room. Stopped cold. There was no way down.”

“A snake might make it to the boiler rooms,” Drummer said, “but it's for sure a man ain't gonna. At least, not until he spends a week clearing a passage with dynamite and a wrecking crew.”

“There has to be a way,” Sandecker said. “Somewhere down there she's taking water. If we don't get ahead of it by this time tomorrow, she'll roll belly-up and head back to the bottom.”

The thought of losing the
Titanic
after she was sitting pretty and upright again on a smooth sea had never entered their minds, but now everyone in the gym began to feel a sickening ache deep in their stomachs. The ship had yet to be taken in tow and New York was twelve hundred sea miles away.

Pitt sat there staring at the ship's interior diagrams. They were woefully inadequate. No set of detailed blueprints of the
Titanic
and her sister ship, the
Olympic
, existed. They had been destroyed, along with files full of photographs and construction data, when the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding yards in Belfast were leveled by German bombers during World War II.

“If only she wasn't so damned big,” Drummer muttered. “The boiler rooms are damn near a hundred feet below the Boat Deck.”

“Might as well be a hundred miles,” Spencer said. He looked up as Woodson emerged from the grand stairway entrance. “Ah, the great stoneface is with us. What's the official photographer of the operation been up to?”

Woodson lifted a battery of cameras from around his neck and gently laid them on a makeshift worktable. “Just taking some pictures for posterity,” he said with his usual deadpan expression. “Never know, I just might write a book about all this someday, and naturally, I'll want credit for the illustrations.”

“Naturally,” Spencer said. “You didn't by chance find a clear companionway down to the boiler rooms?”

He shook his head. “I've been shooting in the first-class lounge. It's remarkably well preserved. Except for the obvious ravages of water on the carpeting and furniture, it could pass for a sitting room in the Palace of Versailles.” He began changing film cartridges. “How's chances of borrowing the helicopter? I'd like to get some bird's-eye shots of our prize before the tugs arrive.”

Giordino raised up on one elbow. “Better use up your film while you can. Our prize may be back on the bottom by morning.”

Woodson's brows pinched together. “She's sinking?”

“I think not.”

Every eye turned to the man who uttered those three words. Pitt was smiling. He smiled with the confidence of a man who just became chairman of the board of General Motors.

He said, “As Kit Carson used to say when he was surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by Indians, ‘We ain't done in yet, not by a damned sight.' In ten hours' time the engine and boiler rooms will be bone-dry.” He quickly fumbled through the diagrams on the table until he found the one he wanted. “Woodson said it, the bird's-eye view. It was right under our noses all the time. We should have been looking from overhead instead of from inside.”

“Big deal,” Giordino said. “What's so interesting from the air?”

“None of you get it?”

Drummer looked puzzled. “You missed me at the last fork in the road.”

“Spencer?”

Spencer shook his head.

Pitt grinned at him and said, “Assemble your men topside and tell them to bring their cutting gear.”

“If you say so,” Spencer said, but made no move for the door.

“Mr. Spencer is mentally measuring me for a strait-jacket,” Pitt said. “He can't figure why we should be cutting holes on the roof of the ship to penetrate a distance of a hundred feet through eight decks of scrap. Nothing to it, really. We have a built-in tunnel, free of any debris, that leads straight to the boiler rooms. In fact, we have four of them. The boiler casings where the funnels once sat, gentlemen. Torch away the Wetsteel seals over the openings and you have a clear shot directly down to the bilges. Do you see the light?”

Spencer saw the light all right. Everyone else saw it, too. They headed out the door as one, without giving Pitt the benefit of an answer.

Two hours later, the diesel pumps were knocking away in chorus and two thousand gallons of water a minute were being returned over the side to the mounting swells that were being pushed ahead of the approaching hurricane.

They had dubbed
her Hurricane Amanda, and by that same afternoon the great steamer tracks running across her projected path were devoid of most vessels. All freighters, tankers, and passenger liners that had put to sea between Savannah, Georgia, and Portland, Maine, had been ordered back to port after NUMA's Hurricane Center in Tampa sent out the first warnings. Nearly a hundred vessels along the eastern seaboard had postponed their sailing dates, while all ships bound from Europe that were already far at sea hove to, waiting for the hurricane to pass.

In Tampa, Dr. Prescott and his weather people swarmed around the wall chart, feeding new data into the computers and plotting any deviation of Hurricane Amanda's track. Prescott's original predicted track was holding up to within a hundred and seventy-five miles.

A weatherman came up and handed him a sheet of paper. “Here's a report from a Coast Guard reconnaissance plane that penetrated the hurricane's eye.”

Prescott took the report and read parts of it aloud. “‘Eye approximately twenty-two miles in diameter. Forward speed increased to forty knots. Wind strength one hundred and eighty plus…'” his voice trailed off.

His assistant looked at him, her eyes wide. “One-hundred-and-eighty-mile-an-hour winds?”

“And more,” Prescott murmured. “I pity the ship that gets caught in this one.”

A glaze suddenly passed across the weatherman's eyes and he swung back to study the wall chart. Then his face turned ashen. “Oh Jesus…the
Titanic
!”

Prescott looked at him. “The what?”

“The
Titanic
and her salvage fleet. They're sitting right in the middle of the projected path of the hurricane.”

“The hell you say!” Prescott snapped.

The weatherman moved up to the wall chart and hesitated for several moments. Finally, he reached up and drew an X just below the Newfoundland Grand Banks. “There, that's the position where she was raised from the bottom.”

“Where did you get this information?”

“It's been smeared all over the newspapers and television since yesterday. If you don't believe me, teletype NUMA headquarters in Washington and confirm.”

“Screw the teletype,” Prescott growled. He rushed across the room, snatched up a telephone, and shouted into the receiver: “Punch me on a direct line to our headquarters in Washington. I want to speak with someone's who's connected with the
Titanic
project.”

While he waited for his call to go through, he peered over his glasses at the X on the wall chart. “Here's hoping those poor bastards have a weatherman on board with uncanny foresight,” he muttered to himself, “or about this time tomorrow they'll forever learn the meaning of the fury of the sea.”

 

There was a vague expression on Farquar's face as he stared at the weather maps laid out before him on the table. His mind was so numb and woolly from lack of sleep that he had difficulty in defining the markings he had made only minutes before. The indications of temperature, wind velocity, barometric pressure, and the approaching stormfront all melted together into one indistinct blur.

He rubbed his eyes in a useless attempt to get them to focus. Then he shook his head to clear the cobwebs, trying to remember what it was that he had been about to conclude.

The hurricane. Yes, that was it. Farquar slowly came to the realization that he had made a serious miscalculation. The hurricane had not veered into Cape Hatteras as he'd predicted. Instead, a high-pressure area along the eastern coast held it over the ocean on a northerly course. And what was worse, it had begun to move faster after recurving and was now hurtling toward the
Titanic
's position with forward speed approaching forty-five knots.

He had watched the hurricane's birth on the satellite photos and had closely studied the warnings from the NUMA station in Tampa, but nothing in all his years of forecasting had prepared him for the violence and the speed that this monstrosity had achieved in such a short time.

A hurricane in May? It was unthinkable. Then his words to Pitt came back to haunt him. What was it he had said? “Only God can make a storm.” Farquar suddenly felt sick, his face beaded with sweat, hands clenching and unclenching.

“God help the
Titanic
this time,” he murmured under his breath. “He's the only one who can save her now.”