"When I see an interval between the swells, at my command, give her full speed." Then he spoke into the ship's radio. "We're coming around in a heavy sea. Everyone brace yourselves and hold on for dear life."
Hunched over the console in front of the bridge window, Barnum gazed unblinkingly through the windshield and waited with the patience of a rock until he saw a wave coming that was higher than any that had passed.
"Full speed, if you please, Mr. Maverick."
Maverick instantly obeyed Barnum's order, but was horrified, certain of disaster, as an enormous wave bore down on the research ship. He was about to curse Barnum for turning too soon, but realized what the captain had in mind. There were no timely intervals. The monstrous waves almost seemed to mesh on one another, like soldiers marching in close formation. Barnum had jumped the gun and begun the turn early, gaining a precious minute while the ship took the blunt of the wave on an angle.
The implacable wave tossed the bow up and shoved Sea Sprite almost over to her port side before sweeping her over and around. For fifteen seconds the ship was overwhelmed by a seething white mass of water as she struggled partially through the crest that towered above the bridge. Then she was fishtailing viciously down the other side, rolling heavily to port, the sea inundating her deck railings. Almost miraculously, with agonizing slowness, she righted in the trough and took the next sea bow-on, plunging through on an even keel.
Maverick had walked ships' decks for eighteen years, but he had never seen a more professional, more intuitive, display of seamanship. He stared at Barnum and was amazed to see a smile, perhaps a grim smile, but a smile nonetheless, on the captain's face. My God, Maverick thought, the man is actually enjoying himself.
Fifty miles to the south of Sea Sprite, the outer edge of Hurricane Lizzie was within minutes of slamming into the Ocean Wanderer. The forward edge of the menacing clouds swept past, cutting off the sun and plunging the sea into an eerie gray darkness. A dense sheet of rain followed, pelting the windows of the floating hotel like the blast from a thousand machine guns.
"Too late!" Morton moaned to himself while standing in his office staring at the tumult that was headed directly for the hotel as if it was an enraged Tyrannosaurus rex with a vendetta. Despite the warnings and updates from Heidi Lisherness at the Hurricane Center, he did not conceive the incredible speed and distance the rampage had traveled since morning. Though Heidi Lisherness had given him up-to-date forecasts on the magnitude and speed, it didn't seem possible that calm seas and quiet skies could turn so fast. He could not believe Lizzie's forward fringe was already assaulting the building.
"Inform every staff director to assemble in the conference room immediately!" he snapped to his executive secretary as he marched into his office.
His anger at Specter's indecision to evacuate eleven hundred guests and employees when there was still of chance of transporting them to safety in the Dominican Republic only a few scant miles away bordered on fury. He became even more infuriated as the sound of aircraft engines warming up vibrated the windows. He walked over and stared below just in time to see Specter and his entourage board the Beriev Be-210 executive jet. The entry hatch was barely closed before the engines revved up and the plane began gathering speed, planing over the rising waves, throwing great billowing sheets of spray before lifting into the air and banking on a course toward the Dominican Republic.
"You rotten cowardly scum," Morton hissed at seeing Specter flee for his life without the least concern for the eleven hundred souls he left behind.
He watched until the plane was lost in the menacing clouds, and turned as his staff entered and gathered around the conference table. It was obvious by the expressions of apprehension on their faces that they were standing on the fine line between calm and panic.
"We underestimated the speed of the hurricane," he began. "Its full force is less than an hour away. Since it's too late to evacuate, we must move all guests and employees to the upper level of the hotel, where it's the safest."
"Can't the tugboats pull us out of harm's way?" inquired the reservation's director, a tall, perfectly groomed lady of thirty-five.
"The tugs were alerted early and should arrive shortly, but a rising sea will make it extremely difficult for them to make a connection with our towing capstans. If the procedure proves impossible then we have no choice but to weather the storm."
The concierge raised his hand. "Wouldn't it be safer to ride out the storm on the guest floors below the surface?" asked the concierge.
Morton slowly shook his head. "If the worst happens and the crush of the storm waves break our mooring lines, and the hotel drifts..." he paused and shrugged his shoulders. "I don't want to think about what would happen if we are driven onto Navidad Bank forty miles to the east or onto a rocky shoreline of the Dominican Republic that would tear out the glass walls of the lower floors."
The concierge nodded. "We understand. Once the water flooded into the lower levels the ballast tanks could not keep the hotel afloat and the waves would bash her to pieces on the rocks."
"And if it looks like that will happen?" asked Morton's assistant manager.
Morton's face turned very solemn indeed as he looked around the conference table. "Then we abandon the hotel, enter the life rafts and pray to God a few will survive."
9
Battered and lashed by Hurricane Lizzie, Barrett and Boozer fought to keep the plane on a level flight path. The double satanic gusts coming from flip-side directions and slamming into Galloping Gertie at almost the same time nearly tore her out of the air. Both pilots struggled with the controls together, fighting to keep Gertie on a straight course. With the rudder slack, they angled direction by reducing or increasing the rpms of their remaining two engines in unison with the ailerons.
Never in their combined years of chasing tropical storms had they ever encountered one that unleashed such incredible strength as Hurricane Lizzie. It was as though she was trying to twist the world apart.
Finally, after what seemed thirty hours but was closer to thirty minutes, the sky gradually turned from solid gray to dirty white to brilliant blue, as the badly pounded Orion escaped the fringes of the storm and staggered into calm weather.
"We'll never make it back to Miami," said Boozer, studying a navigation chart.
"A long shot with only two engines, a fuselage barely hanging together and our rudder frozen," Barrett said grimly. "Better divert to San Juan."
"San Juan, Puerto Rico, it is."
"She's all yours," said Barrett, taking his hands off the controls. "I'm going to check the science guys. No telling what I'll find back there."
He released his safety harness and stepped through the cockpit door into the main cabin of the Orion. The interior was a shambles. Computers, monitors and the racks of electronic instruments were scattered and piled as if thrown off a truck at a salvage yard. Equipment that had been mounted to sustain the worst turbulence had sheared from their bolts and screws as if ripped apart by a giant hand. Bodies were sprawled in different positions, a few unconscious and badly injured, lying against bulkheads, a few still on their feet tending to those who needed medical attention the most.
But that was not the most horrendous sight that met Barrett's eyes. The Orion's fuselage was cracked in a hundred places, rivets having popped out like bullets from a gun. In some areas he could actually see daylight. It was obvious that if they had lingered in the worst of the storm another five minutes, the plane would have ripped apart and crashed in a thousand pieces into the waiting arms of the murderous sea.
Weather scientist Steve Miller looked up from caring for an electrical engineer with a compound fracture of the lower arm. "Can you believe this?" he said, motioning around the destruction. "We were smashed by a wind blast of two hundred and ten miles an hour on the starboard side only seconds before an even stronger gust struck the port."
"I've never heard of wind driving that hard," muttered Barrett in awe.
"Take my
word for it. Nothing like this has ever been measured. Two opposing gusts colliding in the same storm is a meteorological rarity, yet it happened. Somewhere in this mess we've got the records to prove it."
"Galloping Gertie is in no condition to make Miami," said Barrett, nodding at the fuselage that was barely hanging together. "We'll try for San Juan instead. I'll ask for emergency vehicles to stand ready."
"Don't forget to make a request for extra paramedics and ambulances," said Miller. "No one got off with less than cuts and bruises. The injuries on Delbert and Morris are serious, but no one is critical."
"I've got to get back to the cockpit and help Boozer. If there's anything..."
"We'll manage," answered Miller. "Just keep us in the air and not in the ocean."
"Don't think we won't work at it."
Two hours later they sighted the San Juan airport. Handling the controls with a masterful touch, Barrett flew the plane barely above stalling speed to reduce all the stress possible on the weakened aircraft. With flaps lowered, he took a long sweeping approach toward the runway. There would be one attempt and one attempt only. He knew his chances were slim for another approach if he botched this one.
"Gear down," he said, as the runway lined up through the windshield.
Boozer dropped the landing gear. Mercifully, the wheels came down and locked. Fire engines and ambulances lined the strip in expectation of a disaster, the emergency crews having heard the extent of the damage over the radio.
Staring through binoculars at the plane as it grew from a speck into full view, no one in the control tower could believe what they saw. With one engine dead and trailing smoke and one completely missing from the wing, it seemed impossible the Orion could still claw the air. They diverted all commercial traffic into holding patterns until the final curtain on the drama dropped. Then they watched and waited in hushed apprehension.
The Orion came in low and slow. Boozer worked the throttles, maintaining a straight flight while Barrett finessed the controls. He flared out and touched down as gently as humanly possible all too close to the end of the runway. There was just the slightest indication of a bounce when the tires screeched and settled onto the asphalt. There was no reversing the two props. Boozer pulled the throttles back to the stops and let the remaining engines idle as the plane sped down the runway.
Barrett gently tapped the brake pedals, staring at the fence just beyond the runway that loomed ahead. If worse came to worst, he could stand on the left brake and cut a sharp turn into the grass. But everything worked in his favor and Gertie dragged her feet and slowed down, rolling to a stop with less than two hundred feet of runway left to go.
Barrett and Boozer sat back in their seats and sighed with relief just as the aircraft shuddered and shook. They threw off the safety harnesses and rushed back into the science compartment. On the opposite end of the trashed instruments and injured scientists, they stared through a huge opening in the fuselage at the runway they'd just covered.
The entire tail section had twisted off and fallen to the ground.
The wind hurled itself at the flat-angled ocean side of the Ocean Wanderer. The engineers had done their job well. Though designed to take a one-hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour wind, the structure with its heavy plate windows was sustaining gusts up to two hundred without breakage. The only damage sustained in the early hours of the hurricane came on the roof where the sports center, with its golf greens, basketball and tennis courts, and dining tables and chairs, was swept away until there was nothing left but a freshwater swimming pool that overflowed, its water spilling down the slides to the sea far below.
Morton was proud of his staff. They had performed admirably. His worst initial fear was panic. But the managers, desk clerks, concierge and maids all worked together in moving the guests from their suites below the waterline and accommodating them in the ballroom, spas, theater and restaurants on the upper levels. Life jackets were passed out along with directions to the life rafts and instructions on which ones to enter.
What no one knew, not even Morton, because none of the employees had risked stepping out on the roof in the two-hundred-mile-an-hour gale, was that the life rafts had been swept away along with the sports facilities twenty minutes after the hurricane struck the floating hotel.
Morton kept in constant touch with his maintenance people, who roamed the hotel reporting on any damage and organizing repairs. So far the stout structure was holding its own. It was a horrifying experience for the guests to watch a monstrous wave rear up as high as the tenth floor and break against the angled side of the hotel, hearing the groan from below of the mooring cables and the shriek of the framework as it was stretched and twisted against its riveted steel joints.
So far there were only a few reports of minor leakage. All the generators and electrical and plumbing systems were still functioning. The Ocean Wanderer might shake off the assault for another hour, but Morton knew the beautiful structure was only stalling off the inevitable.
The guests and those of the hotel employees who were released from their regular work assignments stared in hypnotic horror at the maelstrom of confused water whipped by gale winds into swirling white vapor and spray. They watched helplessly as gigantic hundred-foot-tall waves thousands of feet in length and impelled by a two-hundred-mile-an-hour wind rushed toward the hotel, knowing that the only barrier separating them from millions of tons of water was a thin pane of reinforced glass. It was unnerving, to say the least.
The spectacular height of the waves defied comprehension. They could only stand and watch, men clutching women, women clutching children, gazing in rapt fear and fascination as the wave engulfed the hotel, then staring into a massive liquid void until the trough appeared.
Their shocked minds could not grasp the immensity of it all. Everyone hoped and prayed the next wave would be smaller, but it was not to be. If anything, they seemed to grow taller.
Morton took a momentary break and sat at his desk, his back to the windows, not wishing to be distracted from the responsibilities falling like an avalanche on his narrow shoulders. But mostly he faced away from the windows because he couldn't bear to watch the massive green seas surging against his exposed hotel. He sent frantic messages requesting immediate assistance in evacuating the guests and employees, begging for rescue before it was too late.
His pleas were answered and yet they were ignored.
Every ship within a hundred miles was worse off than the hotel. Already, a six-hundred-foot containership's Maydays had stopped transmitting. An ominous sign. Two other ships also failed to respond to radio signals. All hope was gone of nearly ten fishing vessels that had the misfortune of being caught in the path of Hurricane Lizzie...
All Dominican Republic military and sea rescue aircraft were grounded. All naval vessels were kept in port to brave out the storm. All Morton heard was "Sorry, Ocean Wanderer, you're on your own. We will respond as soon as the storm abates."
He kept in contact with Heidi Lisherness at the NUMA Hurricane Center, giving her reports on the magnitude of the storm.
"Are you certain about the height of the waves?" she asked, disbelieving his description.
"Believe me. I'm sitting a hundred feet above the waterline of the hotel and every ninth wave sweeps over the roof of the hotel."
"It's unheard-of."
"Take my word for it."
"I will," said Heidi, now in deep concern. "Is there anything I can do?"
"Just keep me informed as to when you think the sea and winds will decrease."
"According to our storm-hunter aircraft and satellite reports, not anytime soon."
"If you don't hear from me again," said Morton, finally turning and staring through a wall of water outside, "you'll know the worst has happened."
Before Heidi could reply, he switched off as another call came in. "Mr. Morton?"
"Speaking."
"Sir, this is Captain Rick Tapp of the Odyssey tug fleet."
"Go ahead, Capt
ain. The storm is causing interference, but I can hear you."
"Sir, I regret to inform you that the tugs Albatross and Pelican cannot come to your aid. The seas are far too rough. No one has ever experienced a storm of this magnitude. We could never reach you. As sturdy as our vessels are, they weren't built to make way through a sea this violent. Any attempt would be inviting suicide."
"Yes, I understand," Morton said heavily. "Come when you can. I don't know how much longer our mooring cables can withstand the strain. It's a miracle the hotel structure has stood up to the waves as long as it has."
"We'll do everything humanly possible to reach you the minute the worst of the storm passes the harbor."
Then as an afterthought, "Have you received any instructions from Specter?"
"No, sir, we've heard no word from him or his directors."