Raise the Titanic! (33 page)

The Russians came
aboard the
Titanic
during the storm's lull. Deep down in the bowels of the engine and boiler rooms, Spencer and his pumping crew had no chance, not the least opportunity for any resistance. Their total surprise acknowledged Prevlov's dedication to exact planning and detailed execution.

The fight that occurred topside—massacre would have been closer to the truth—was over almost before it began. Five Russian marines, half the boarding force, their faces all but hidden by seaman caps pulled low on top and with huge mufflers wrapped below, were in the gymnasium with automatic machine pistols ready and aimed before anyone could comprehend what was happening.

Woodson was the first to react. He swung from the radio, his eyes widened in a look of recognition, and an expression of pure anger swept over his normally passive face. “You bastard!” he blurted, and then hurled himself at the nearest intruder.

But a knife materialized in the man's hand and he deftly rammed it into Woodson's chest, tearing the photographer's heart nearly in two. Woodson clutched at his killer, then slowly slid downward to the booted feet, shock in his eyes, then disbelief, then pain, and finally the emptiness of death.

Dana sat up on her cot and screamed and screamed. It was that stimulus that finally stung the other members of the salvage crew into action. Drummer caught Woodson's murderer on the cheek with his fist and received the barrel of a machine pistol across his face for his effort. Sturgis launched his body in a flying tackle but his timing was late. A gun butt caught him just above the temple at the same instant he crashed into his intended victim and they both fell to the deck in a heap, the assailant quickly regaining his feet while Sturgis lay there as if dead.

Giordino was in the act of bringing a wrench down on another Russian's skull when there was an ear-splitting crack. A bullet passed through his upraised hand and sent the wrench clattering across the deck. The shot seemed to freeze all movement. Sandecker, Gunn, and Chief Bascom and his men halted in midaction as they abruptly realized that their unarmed defense of the ship was hopeless in the face of guns held by highly trained killers.

At that precise moment a man strode into the room, his intense gray eyes taking in every detail of the scene. He wasted no more than three seconds—three seconds and no more was all André Prevlov needed to survey any given situation. He stared down at the still-screaming Dana and smiled graciously. “Do you mind, my dear lady,” he said in fluent, idiomatic English. “I think female panic inflicts quite an unnecessary strain on the vocal chords.”

Her round eyes were stricken. Her mouth closed and she sat huddled in a ball on the cot, staring at the spreading pool of blood under Omar Woodson and shuddering uncontrollably.

“There now, that's much better.” Prevlov followed her eyes to Woodson, then to Drummer, who was sitting on the deck in the process of spitting out a tooth, and then to Giordino, who glared back holding his bleeding hand.

“Your resistance was foolish,” Prevlov said. “One dead and three injured, and for nothing.”

“Who are you?” Sandecker demanded. “By what right do you board this ship and murder my crew?”

“Ah! A pity we must meet under such remote and unpleasant circumstances,” Prevlov apologized. “You are, of course, Admiral James Sandecker, are you not?”

“My questions still stand,” Sandecker spat angrily.

“My name is of no consequence,” Prevlov replied. “The answer to your other question is obvious. I am taking over this ship in the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

“My government will never stand idly by and let you get away with it.”

“Correction,” Prevlov murmured. “Your government
will
stand idly by.”

“You underestimate us.”

Prevlov shook his head. “Not I, Admiral. I am fully aware of what your countrymen are capable of. I also know they will not start a war over the legitimate boarding of a derelict ship.”

“‘Legitimate boarding'?” Sandecker echoed. “The Civil Salvage Service laws define a derelict vessel as one whose crew has abandoned at sea without intent of returning or attempt at recovery. Since this ship still retains its crew, your presence, sir, constitutes a blatant act of high-seas piracy.”

“Spare me your interpretation of maritime legalities.” Prevlov held up a protesting hand. “You are quite right, of course, for the moment.”

The implication was clear. “You wouldn't dare cast us adrift in the middle of a hurricane.”

“Nothing so mundane, Admiral. Besides, I am well aware that the
Titanic
is taking on water. I need your salvage engineer, Spencer, I believe his name is, and his crew to keep the pumps operating until the storm abates. After that, you and your people will be provided with a life raft. Your departure will then guarantee our right to salvage.”

“We cannot be allowed to live to testify,” Sandecker said. “Your government would never permit that. You know it, and I know it.”

Prevlov looked at him, calm, unaffected. Then he turned casually, almost callously, dismissing Sandecker. He spoke in Russian to one of the marines. The man nodded and tipped over the radio, and pounded it with the stock of his machine pistol into mangled pieces of metal, glass, and wiring.

“There is no further use for your operations room.” Prevlov motioned around the gymnasium. “I have installed my communication facilities in the main dining room on D Deck. If you and the others will be so kind as to follow me, I will see to your comfort until the weather clears.”

“One more question,” Sandecker said without moving. “You owe me that.”

“Of course, Admiral, of course.”

“Where is Dirk Pitt?”

“I regret to inform you,” Prevlov said with ironic sympathy, “that Mr. Pitt was in your helicopter when it was swept over the side into the sea. His death must have come quickly.”

Admiral Kemper sat
opposite a grim-faced President and casually poured four teaspoons of sugar into his coffee cup.

“The aircraft carrier
Beecher's Island
is nearing the search area. Her planes will begin searching at first light.” Kemper forced a thin smile. “Don't worry, Mr. President. We'll have the
Titanic
back in tow by mid-afternoon. You have my word on it.”

The President looked up. “A helpless ship adrift and lost in the middle of the worst storm in fifty years? A ship that's rusted half through after lying on the bottom for seventy-six years? A ship the Soviet government is looking for any excuse to get their hands on? And you say not to worry. You're either a man of unshakable conviction, Admiral, or you're a hyperoptimist.”

“Hurricane Amanda.” Kemper sighed at the name. “We made allowances for every possible contingency, but nothing in our wildest imagination prepared us for a storm of such tremendous magnitude in the middle of May. It struck so fearfully hard, and on such short notice, that there was no time to reshuffle our priorities and time schedules.”

“Suppose the Russians took it into their heads to make their play and are on board the
Titanic
this minute?”

Kemper shook his head. “Boarding a ship under a-hundred-plus-mile-an-hour winds and seventy-foot seas? My years at sea tell me that's impossible.”

“A week ago, Hurricane Amanda would have been considered impossible, too.” The President looked up dully as Warren Nicholson sank in the opposite sofa.

“Any news?”

“Nothing from the
Titanic
,” Nicholson said. “They haven't reported since they entered the eye of the hurricane.”

“And the Navy tugs?”

“They still haven't sighted the
Titanic
—which isn't too surprising. With their radar inoperative, they're reduced to a visual search pattern. A hopeless chore, I'm afraid, in near-zero visibility.”

For long moments, there was a suffocating silence. It was finally broken by Gene Seagram. “We can't lose it now, not when we were so close,” he said, struggling to his feet. “The terrible price we've paid…I've paid…the byzanium, oh God, we can't let it be taken away from us again.” His shoulders drooped and he seemed to wither as Donner and Collins eased him back down on the sofa.

Kemper spoke in a whisper. “If the worst happens, Mr. President? What then?”

“We write off Sandecker, Pitt, and the others.”

“And the Sicilian Project?”

“The Sicilian Project,” the President murmured. “Yes, we write that off too.”

The heavy gray
wool slowly began to fade away, and Pitt became aware that he was lying in an upside-down position on something hard and in something wet. He hung there long minutes, his mind in the twilight zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, until gradually he was able to pry open his eyes, or at least one eye; the other was caked shut by coagulated blood. Like a man who had just struggled up from a deep dark tunnel into the daylight, he squinted his good eye from right to left, up and down. He was still in the helicopter, his feet and legs curled upward along the floor and his back and shoulders lay against the aft bulkhead.

That accounted for the hardness. The wetness was an understatement. Several inches of water sloshed back and forth around his body. He wondered vaguely how he had come to be contorted in this awkward position.

His head felt as if little men were running around inside it, jabbing pitchforks into his brain. He splashed some water over his face, ignoring the sting of the salt, until the blood diluted and ran off, allowing the eyelid to open. Now that he had regained his peripheral vision he turned his body so that he was sitting on the bulkhead and looking up at the floor. It was like staring at the crazy room of an amusement-park fun house.

There was to be no exiting through the cargo door; it had been jammed shut from the beating the fuselage had taken during its journey across the
Titanic
's decks. Left with no other choice but to get out through the control-cabin hatch, Pitt began climbing
up
the floor, using the cargo tie-down rings for handgrips.

One ring at a time, he pulled himself toward the forward bulkhead, or what now constituted the ceiling. His head ached and he had to stop every few feet, waiting for the cobwebs to clear. At last, he could reach up and touch the door latch. The door wouldn't budge. He pulled out the Colt and pounded at the latch. The force of the blow knocked the pistol out of his wet hand, and it clattered all the way to the rear bulkhead. The door remained stubbornly closed.

Pitt's breath was coming now in heaving gasps. He was on the verge of blacking out from exhaustion. He turned and looked down. The aft bulkhead seemed a long way away. He gripped a cargo tie-down ring with both hands, swung in a series of ever-widening arcs, and then lashed out with both feet, using all the muscle a man can use when he knows it is his last try.

The latch gave and the door sprang upward at an angle of thirty degrees before gravity took over and brought it slamming back down. But the brief opening was all Pitt needed to thrust a hand over the door frame, using his fingers as a jam. He gasped in agony as the door fell across his knuckles. He hung there, soaking up the pain, gathering the strength for the final hurdle. He took a deep breath and heaved his body through the opening as one would climb through a trapdoor in an attic without benefit of a ladder. Then he rested again, waiting for the dizziness to pass and his heart to slow down to a near-normal beat.

He wrapped his bleeding fingers in a sodden handkerchief and took stock of the control cabin. No problem escaping here. The cabin hatch had been torn off its hinges and the windshield glass knocked from its frames. Now that his escape was assured, he began to wonder how long he had been unconscious. Ten minutes? An hour? Half the night? He had no way of knowing as his watch was gone, probably wrenched from his wrist.

What had happened? He tried to analyze the possibilities. Had the helicopter been blown into the sea? Not likely. It would have been Pitt's coffin in the abyss by now. But where had the water in the cargo section come from? Maybe the aircraft had been ripped loose from its moorings and swept against one of the Boat Deck bulkheads of the derelict. That didn't work either. It couldn't explain why the helicopter was standing in a perfect perpendicular position. What he did know for certain was that every additional second spent sitting around in the middle of a hurricane and playing question-and-answer games moved him one second closer to more serious injury or even death. The answers were waiting outside, so he worked himself over the pilot's seat and stared through the shattered cockpit windows into the darkness beyond.

He was staring straight up the side of the
Titanic
. The gargantuan rusty plates of the hull stretched off into the dim light to the right and left. A quick downward look revealed the angry sea.

The waves were swirling about in massive confusion, often coming together in huge collisions that sounded like an artillery barrage. Visibility was better now; no heavy rain was falling and the wind had slackened to no more than ten or fifteen knots. At first Pitt thought that he must have slept through the hurricane, but then he figured out why the sea was leaping skyward without any sense of direction: the
Titanic
was drifting in the eye of the coil, and only a few more minutes would pass before the full fury of the storm's rear quadrant would fall upon the wallowing ship.

Pitt edged carefully through one of the broken windows over the nose of the helicopter and then dropped onto the deck of the
Titanic
. No sensuous or erotic interlude with the world's most beautiful woman could have come close to matching the thrill he felt at finding his feet on one side of the old liner's waterlogged decks again.

But which deck? Pitt leaned over the railing, twisted around, and looked up. There on the deck above was the bent and broken handrail still clutching a part of the helicopter. That meant he was standing on the B Deck Promenade. He looked down and saw the reason behind the aircraft's ignominious posture.

Its journey toward the boiling sea had been abruptly halted by the landing skids, which had caught and then wedged into the observation openings along the Promenade Deck, leaving the helicopter hanging in an upright stance like some monstrous bug on a wall. The great swells had then slammed against its fuselage, jamming it even tighter against the ship.

Pitt had no time to appreciate the miracle of his salvation. For, as he stood there, he felt the increasing pressure from the wind as the tail of the hurricane approached. He had trouble getting his footing and he realized that the
Titanic
's list had returned and she was leaning heavily to starboard again.

It was then that he noticed the running lights of another ship close by, no more than two hundred yards off the starboard beam. There was no way of telling what size she was; the sea and the sky began melting together as the driving rain returned, lashing his face with the cutting power of sandpaper. Could it be one of the tugs? he wondered. Or perhaps the
Juneau
had returned. But suddenly Pitt knew—the lights were from none of these. A shaft of lightning flashed and he saw the unmistakable dome that could only be the
Mikhail Kurkov
's radar antennae shield.

By the time he had climbed a stairway and staggered to the helicopter pad on the Boat Deck, he was still wet to the skin and panting from the exertion. He paused to kneel and pick up one of the mooring lines, studying the parted ends of the nylon fibers. Then he rose and leaned into the howling wind and vanished into the curtain of water that enshrouded the ship.