Trojan Odyssey (14 page)

“Bless you, boys, and good luck,” replied Brown.

Pitt nodded at one of Brown's maintenance men, who was standing beside a reel containing the Falcron line. He was short and husky and insisted on being called “Critter.” “Pay out a little at a time. If you feel any tension, release it quickly or you'll halt my progress.”

“I'll send it along nice and easy,” Critter assured him.

Then Pitt hailed
Sea Sprite.
“Paul, are you ready to take the lines?”

“Soon as you hand them to me,” came Barnum's firm voice over Pitt's receiver. His words were transmitted from a transducer he had lowered in the water off the stern of
Sea Sprite.

“Al and I can only drag two hundred feet of line underwater. You'll have to move in closer to reach us.”

In these seas both Pitt and Barnum knew that one monstrous wave could sweep
Sea Sprite
into the hotel, taking them both to the bottom. Yet Barnum didn't hesitate to risk the dice on one throw. “All right, let's do it.”

Pitt slung a loop of the Falcron line over one shoulder line as a harness. He stood and tried to push open the door leading to a small balcony that hung twenty feet above the water, but the force of the wind beat against it from the other side. Before he could ask for help, the hotel maintenance man was beside him.

Together they rammed their weight and shoulders against the door. The second it was cracked, the wind cut through the opening and hurled the door back against its stops as though it was kicked by a mule. Now exposed in the open doorway, the maintenance man was blown back into the equipment room as if he was flung there by a catapult.

Pitt managed to stay on his feet under the onslaught. But when he looked up and saw an enormous wave heading his way, he leaped over the balcony handrail and somersaulted into the water.

 

T
HE WORST OF
the furies had passed. The hurricane's eye was hours gone and the
Ocean Wanderer
had somehow survived Lizzie's final fury. The winds had decreased to forty knots and the seas had dropped to an average of thirty feet. The water surface was still vicious, but not nearly as angered as earlier. Hurricane Lizzie had moved westward to continue casting her death and destruction on the island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti before spilling over into the Caribbean Sea. In another twenty-four hours the sea would flatten in the trail of history's greatest storm.

The crashing surf looked ominously closer with each passing minute. The hotel had drifted close enough for the hundreds of guests and employees to see the spray hurled into the sky in great clouds as the swells piled up and smashed into the rocky cliffs. They struck with the force of a mountainous avalanche. The foam swirled into the air in sheets as it met the backwash of the previous wave. Death was no more than a mile away and the
Ocean Wanderer
's rate of drift was close to a mile an hour.

Everyone's eyes swept back and forth from the shore to
Sea Sprite,
riding in the swells like a fat duck only a few hundred yards away.

Covered head to toe in yellow oilskins, Barnum braved the downpour, still lashed by heavy winds on the stern of his ship, and stood beneath the big crane. He looked down on the deck where the great winch used to sit and imagined the difference it would have made. But the tow bit would have to do. Somehow the cable would have to be shackled manually.

Barnum stood in the shelter of the crane, ignored the soaking breeze and peered through his binoculars at the base of the hotel. He and four of his crew were tied to the railings to keep from being washed overboard. He observed Pitt and Giordino enter the water and disappear beneath the rolling surface. He could just make out men standing in the doorways, battered by the seas, paying out the red Falcron line to the divers struggling below the wild waves.

“Throw out a pair of lines with buoys,” he ordered without lowering the glasses, “and prepare the grappling hooks.”

Barnum prayed he would not have to use the grappling hooks on the divers' bodies in an extreme crisis should they become unconscious or unable to reach the high stern of the ship. The grappling hooks were connected to eight-foot aluminum shafts that had been inserted into pipes, giving them an extra length of thirty feet.

They watched expectantly but doubtfully, unable to see Pitt or Giordino under the swirling seas nor spot their bubbles floating to the surface, since their rebreathing apparatus did not expel the diver's breath.

“Stop engines,” he ordered his chief engineer.

“You did say stop engines, Captain,” came back the chief of the engine room.

“Yes, there are divers bringing over the cable lines. We have to let the seas carry us within two hundred yards and narrow the gap so they can reach us with the cable lines.”

Then he trained his binoculars on the murderous coastline that seemed to be approaching with unearthly swiftness.

 

A
FTER HE SWAM
a hundred feet from the hotel, Pitt briefly surfaced to get his bearings. The
Ocean Wanderer,
whose mass was implacably coerced by the wind and waves away from him, rose like a skyscraper in Manhattan.
Sea Sprite
showed herself only when Pitt rose on the crest of a wave. She rolled in the sea what seemed like a mile away but was actually less than a hundred yards. He noted her position on his compass and ducked back under the surface and dove deep below the confusion above.

The line in his wake quickly became awkward to pull as the drag increased with each foot it was paid out. He was thankful the Falcron line was not heavy or bulky, which would have made it too unwieldy. To move with the least hydrodynamic drag as possible, he kept his head down and his hands clasped behind his back under the oxygen rebreathing apparatus.

He tried to stay just deep enough below the wave troughs so his progress wouldn't be hindered by the heavy seas. More than once he became disoriented, but a quick glance at his compass set him on the right course again. He kicked his fins with all the strength in his legs, doggedly dragging the line that was digging into his shoulder, gaining two feet and losing one from the strong current.

Pitt's leg muscles began to ache and his progress became sluggish. His mind was becoming giddy from deeply inhaling too much oxygen. His heart was beginning to pound from the heavy exertion and his lungs began to heave. He dared not pause or rest or the current would have wiped out all his gains. There could be no delay. Every minute counted as the
Ocean Wanderer
was impelled toward disaster by an uncaring sea.

Another ten minutes of all-out effort, his strength began to ebb. He sensed that his body was about played out. His mind urged him to try even harder, but there was only so much that muscle and flesh could be called on to achieve. Out of desperation he began to stroke with his hands and arms in an attempt to take the strain from his legs, whose numbness was growing by the minute.

He wondered if Giordino was in the same fix, but he knew Al would die before giving up, not with all those women's and children's lives at stake. Besides, his friend was built like a Brahma bull. If anyone could swim across a wild ocean with one hand tied behind him, Al could.

Pitt did not waste a breath to inquire of his friend's condition over the intercom. There were sickening moments when he felt as if he might not make it. The defeatist thought was brushed aside, and he reached deep within himself to tap his inner reserves.

His breath was coming in great heaves now. The escalating drag on the line made it feel as if he was in a tug-of-war against a herd of elephants. He started to recall the old ads of the muscleman Charles Atlas pulling a steam locomotive down the track. Thinking he might have been carried away from his goal, he spared another glance at his compass. Miraculously, he had managed to stay on a straight course toward
Sea Sprite.

The dark cloud of total exhaustion was beginning to creep over the edge of his vision, when he heard a voice speak his name.

“Keep coming, Dirk,” Barnum shouted through his headphone. “We can see you under the water. Surface now!”

Pitt obediently swam upward and broke the surface.

Then Barnum shouted again, “Look to your left.”

Pitt turned. No more than ten feet away was an orange buoy on the end of a line leading to the
Sea Sprite.
Pitt didn't bother acknowledging. He had about five good strong kicks of his fins left in him, and he gave them to the cause. With a physical relief he had never known, he grasped the safety line, threw his arm over it so that it was firmly embedded under his armpit with the buoy lodged against his back shoulder.

At last he could relax as Barnum and his crew pulled him up to the stern. Then they cautiously placed the grappling hook under the line three feet behind Pitt and carefully lifted him onto the deck.

Pitt raised his hands and Barnum deftly removed the looped end of the Falcron line from his shoulder and connected it to the winch on the crane along with the line already brought aboard by Giordino. Two of the crew removed Pitt's mouthpiece and full head mask. Taking a deep breath of pure ocean salt air, he found himself looking up into the grinning face of Giordino.

“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 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.”