"Slowpoke," muttered Giordino, still in the throes of exhaustion. "I beat you on board by a good two minutes."
"I'm lucky to be here," Pitt muttered back between gasps.
Now merely bystanders, they sagged to the deck under the gunwales and out of the water that blew over the deck, waiting for their heartbeats to slow and their breathing to come back to normal. They watched as Barnum gave the signal to Brown and the fifty-gallon drums that supported the mooring cables unseen below the surface began to spit out from beneath the hotel. The crane's winch turned, the thin Falcron line took up the slack and the drums began moving. The cable hanging under its steel floats was whipped by the current like a withering snake. Ten minutes later, the leading drums were bumping against the hull. The crane lifted them onto the stern deck along with the ends of both cables. The crew quickly moved in and shackled the ends together through the eyes spliced by Brown. Then, with the added muscle from Pitt and Giordino, who had recovered from their ordeal, they wrapped them around the big tow bit mounted in front of the crane.
"Ready for tow, Ocean Wanderer?" announced Barnum between heavy breaths.
"Ready as we'll ever be on this end," came back Brown.
Barnum hailed his chief engineer. "Ready in the engine room?"
"Aye, Captain," came back a heavily Scots-accented brogue.
Then to his first officer in the pilothouse, "Mr. Maverick, I will control from here."
"Acknowledged, Captain. She's all yours."
Barnum stood at a control console mounted forward of the big crane, legs spread apart, a set look on his face. He gripped the two chrome throttle levers and gently eased them ahead while he half turned and stared at the hotel that loomed over the seemingly midget research ship.
Pitt and Giordino stood on opposite sides of Barnum. Every member of the crew and scientific team was standing in the rain on the bridge wing above the waves now, staring at the Ocean Wanderer in hushed suspense laced with expectation. The two huge magnetohydrodynamic engines were not connected to shafts leading to propellers. They produced an energy force that pumped water through thrusters for propulsion. Instead of a churning mass of green water thrashing from under the stern, the surface was only stirred by twin rivers of water that roiled the water like horizontal tornadoes.
Sea Sprite's stern dug in and she shuddered under the strain from the tow, the blasting wind and the still-agonized sea. She began to fishtail, but Barnum quickly adjusted the angle of the thrusters and she straightened. For tortured minutes that seemed to last forever, nothing seemed to happen. The hotel appeared as if she was stubbornly continuing her journey toward a tumultuous death.
Below their feet on the stern deck, the engines did not throb and pound like diesels. The pumps that provided power for the thrusters whined like banshees. Barnum scanned the gauges and dials that registered the stress on the engines, not happy at what he saw.
Pitt came over and stood next to Barnum, whose hands bled white as he gripped the throttles and shoved them to their stops and beyond if it had been possible.
"I don't know how much more the engines can take," shouted Barnum above the noise from the wind and shriek from below in the engine room.
"Run the guts out of them," said Pitt, his tone cold and hard as glacial ice. "If they blow, I'll take responsibility."
There was no question of Barnum being the captain of his ship, but Pitt far outranked him in the NUMA hierarchy.
"That's easy for you to say," warned Barnum. "But if they blow, we end up on the rocks, too."
Pitt threw him a grin that was hard as granite. "We'll worry about that when the time comes."
To those on board Sea Sprite, the cause was becoming more hopeless with each passing second. It looked as if she was standing dead still in the water.
"Do it!" Pitt pleaded with Sprite. "You can do it!"
On board the hotel, deep anxiety was creeping over the passengers, followed by a growing panic as they stared in frozen fear at the surf crashing on the nearby rocks in a catastrophic display of raging water and exploding spray. Their mounting terror was accelerated by a sudden tremor as the bottom level of the hotel nudged into the rising seafloor. There was no insane rush to exits as in the event of a fire or an earthquake. There was no place to run. Jumping into the water was more than a simple act of suicide. It meant a horrible and painful death, either by drowning or being smashed to pieces on the jagged black lava rocks.
Morton tried to move about the hotel, calming and reassuring the passengers and his employees, but few paid any heed to him. He felt waves of frustration and defeat. One look out the windows was enough to turn the stoutest heart to paste. Children easily picked up on the fear written on their parents' faces and began crying. A few women screamed, some sobbed, others maintained a stony and blank exterior. The men for the most part were silent in their personal fear, holding their loved ones in their arms and trying to act brave.
The waves beating on the rocks below now came like thunder, but to many it was the toll of drums in a funeral procession.
IN the pilothouse, Maverick anxiously studied the digital speed indicator. The red numerals seemed frozen on zero. He saw the cables stretch out of the water with their fifty-gallon drums dangling like scales on a sea monster. He was not the only one mentally urging the ship to move. He turned his attention to the Global Positioning System readouts that recorded the exact position of the unit itself within a few feet. The numbers remained static. He glanced down through the rear windows at Barnum standing like a statue at the stern control console, then up at the Ocean Wanderer, still beset by the angry sea.
He glanced at the digital anemometer and noted the wind had dropped substantially in the last half hour. "That's a blessing," he muttered to himself.
Then, when he looked at the GPS again, the numbers had altered.
He rubbed his eyes, making sure he wasn't simply imagining a change. The numbers had slowly clicked over. Then he stared at the speed indicator. The digit on the far right was ticking back and forth between zero and one knot.
He stood numbed, wanting desperately to believe what he saw but not sure if it wasn't purely the harvest of an overly optimistic imagination. But the speed indicator didn't lie. There was forward movement, no matter how minuscule.
Maverick snatched up a bullhorn and ran out on the bridge wing. "She moved!" he shouted, half mad with excitement. "She's under way!"
Nobody cheered, not yet. Passage through the swirling waves was unreadable to the naked eye, so infinitesimal that they had no way of determining movement. They only had Maverick's word for it. Insufferable minutes passed as hope and excitement mounted as one. Then Maverick shouted again.
"One knot! We're moving at one knot!"
It was not illusory. With crawling awareness, it became apparent that the distance between Ocean Wanderer and the frenzied coastline was slowly but steadily widening.
There would be no death or disaster on these rocks this day.
13
Sea Sprite strained against the mooring cables, driving forward with her engines spinning wildly beyond limits never imagined by her designers. No one on the stern deck was looking at the murderous coastline or the endangered hotel. All eyes were locked on the capstan and the big mooring cables that creaked and groaned under extreme stress. If they snapped, the show was over. There would be no saving the Ocean Wanderer and all those within her glass walls.
But inconceivably in everyone's minds, the big cables remained in one piece just as Pitt had calculated.
Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, Sprite worked up to a speed of two knots, her bow bucking the great clouds of spray that swept the length of the ship. Only after the hotel had been towed nearly two miles off the cliffs did Barnum ease back on the throttles to relieve the overburdened engines. The danger diminished with each yard gained until the menacing rocks and the wild sea had been solidly cheated out of a major catastrophe.
The crew of Sea Sprite waved back at the joy
ous passengers of Ocean Wanderer, who were wildly waving and cheering behind the glass walls. With all fears of death lifted, pandemonium broke loose. Morton ordered the wine cellars opened and champagne was soon flowing in rivers throughout the hotel. To the passengers and his employees, he was the man of the hour. Hotel guests constantly surrounded and thanked him for his efforts in saving them from a horrible death, fully deserved or not.
Stealing away from the joyous bedlam, he returned to his office and sat at his desk in happy exhaustion. As waves of relief swept over him, his mind turned to his future. Though he hated to leave his position as manager of the Ocean Wanderer, he knew that any relationship with Specter was a thing of the past. He could never work again for the mysterious character who abandoned so many people who were fundamentally his responsibility.
Morton thought long and hard. There wasn't an international luxury hotel chain in the world that wouldn't hire him once his part in the drama became known. But becoming known and respected for his achievement was a problem.
It didn't take a Nostradamus to predict that once Specter realized the hotel had survived, he would order publicity and public relations people to grind out press releases, set up news conferences and arrange television interviews for the story of how he, Specter, had masterminded the rescue and was the savior of the famed hotel and everyone in it.
Morton decided to grasp his time advantage and leap first. With the hotel phones back in service without interference from the hurricane, he called an old college roommate who owned a public relations company in Washington, D.C., and gave him his rendition of the fabulous saga, graciously giving credit to NUMA and the men who engineered the tow, nor did he fail to mention the brave acts of Emlyn Brown and his maintenance crew. Morton's description of his direction of events during the excitement, however, was not exactly modest.
Forty-five minutes later, he set the receiver back in its cradle, placed his hands behind his head and smiled like the famed Cheshire Cat. Specter would counterpunch, to be sure. But once the lead story swept the media and the rescued passengers were interviewed, any follow-up would be diluted.
He downed another glass of champagne and promptly fell asleep.
"God, that was close," said Barnum quietly. "Nice work, Paul," said Pitt, slapping him on the back.
"I'm reading two knots," shouted Maverick from the pilothouse bridge wing to the gathering, cheering crowd below.
The rain had let up and the sea, whose surface was carpeted by a heavy chop embellished with a pattern of whitecaps, now lay down with waves of less than ten feet. Hurricane Lizzie, seemingly bored endangering and sinking ships at sea, was now taking out her rage on the town and cities of the Dominican Republic and its neighboring nation of Haiti. Trees were leveled in the Dominican Republic, but the vast majority of the people survived the gale winds in the interior that was still forested. The death toll was less than three hundred.
But the poorer Haitians, burdened with the worst poverty of any nation in the Western Hemisphere, had denuded their countryside of forested growth to make shacks and burn as firewood. Their buildings, run-down from neglect, offered them little protection, and nearly three thousand died before Hurricane Lizzie crossed the island and swept into open water again.
"Shame on you, Captain," Pitt said, laughing.
Barnum looked at him quizzically, so mentally and physically exhausted he could barely mutter, "What's that you say?"
"You're the only one of your crew not wearing a life jacket."
He looked down at his unhindered oil slickers and smiled. "I guess I got too carried away by the excitement to think of putting one on." He turned and faced forward and spoke through his headset. "Mr. Maverick."
"Sir?"
"The ship is yours. You have control."
"Aye, Captain, the bridge has command."
Barnum turned to Pitt and Giordino. "Well, gentlemen, you saved a lot of lives today. That was a brave thing you did, pulling those cable lines over to Sprite."
Both Pitt and Giordino looked genuinely embarrassed.
Then Pitt grinned and said dryly, "It was nothing, really. Just another one of our many accomplishments."
Barnum wasn't fooled by the sarcastic wit. He knew both men well enough to know that they would go to their graves in silence before they ever boasted of what they did this day. "You can make light of the magnitude of your actions if you wish, but I for one think you did a damn fine job. Now, enough talk. Let's go up to the pilothouse and get out of the wet. I could use a cup of coffee."
"Got anything stronger?" asked Giordino.
"I think I can accommodate you. I picked up a bottle of rum for my brother-in-law when we were last in port."
Pitt looked at him. "When did you get married?"
Barnum didn't answer, merely smiled and began walking toward the ladder to the bridge.
Before he took a well-deserved rest, Pitt stepped into the communications room and asked Jar to call young Dirk and Summer. After repeated attempts, Jar looked up and shook his head. "Sorry, Mr. Pitt. They don't respond."
"I don't like the sound of that," Pitt said pensively. "Could be any number of minor problems," Jar said optimistically. "The storm probably damaged their antennas."
"Let's hope that's all it is."
Pitt walked down a passageway to Barnum's cabin. He and Giordino were sitting at a table enjoying a glass of Gosling's Rum.
"I can't raise Pisces," said Pitt.
Barnum and Giordino exchanged concerned glances. Suddenly the happy mood faded. Then Giordino reassured Pitt.
"The habitat is built like a tank. Joe Zavala and I designed her. We built in every possible safety device. No way her hull could be punctured. Not at fifty feet below the storm's surface. Not when we built her to reach a depth of five hundred."
"You're forgetting the hundred-foot waves," said Pitt. "Pisces might have sat high and dry during the passing of a trough, but then she could have been smashed off her mounts by a solid wall of water into exposed rock amid the coral. An impact that strong could easily have shattered her view port."
"Possible," Giordino admitted, "but not likely. I specified a reinforced plastic for the view port that could repel a mortar shell."
Barnum's phone buzzed and he took the call from Jar. He rang off and sat down. "We just heard from the captain of one of the Ocean Wanderer's tugs. They left port and should arrive on station in another hour and a half."
Pitt stepped to the chart table and picked up a pair of dividers. He measured the distance between their current position and the X marked on the chart that depicted Pisces. "An hour and a half for the tugs," he said thoughtfully. "Another half hour to release the mooring cables and be on our way. Then two hours, maybe less at full speed, to the habitat. Slightly more than four hours to reach the site. I pray to God the kids are all right."
"You sound like a distressed father whose daughter is out after midnight," said Giordino, trying to ease Pitt's fears.
"I must agree," added Barnum. "The coral reef would have protected them from the worst of the storm."
Pitt wasn't fully convinced. He began to pace the deck of the pilothouse. "You may both be right," he said quietly. "But the next few hours are going to be the longest of my life."
Summer reclined on the mattress from her bunk that she had laid on the angled wall of the habitat. Her breath was shallow as she inhaled and exhaled slowly. She made no attempt at exertion in an effort to conserve as much air as possible. She could not help staring out the view port at the brightly colored fish that returned after the turbulence and darted around the habitat, gazing curiously at the creatures inside. She could not help but wonder if this was to be her final vision before death took her by asphyxiation.
Dirk was trying every imaginable scenario for escape. Nothing panned out. Using the remaining air tank to reach the surface was not a practical idea. Even if he could somehow break the main portal, which was doubtful even with a sledgehammer, the water pressure at one
hundred and twenty feet was sixty pounds per square inch. It would explode into the interior of the habitat with the force of a cannon blast and assault their bodies with deadly results.
"How much air do we have left?" asked Summer softly.
Dirk looked at the array of gauges. "Two hours, maybe a few minutes more."
"What happened to Sea Sprite? Why hasn't Paul come looking for us?"
"The ship is probably out there right now," said Dirk without conviction. "They're searching, but just haven't found us in the crevasse yet."