Raise the Titanic!

"I said, one pill or two. It's a safe bet that when you instantly transform from a bitch into a Miss Goody Two-Shoes, you've been popping pills."

  "I meant it about the sermon."

  "Okay, but a warning, old roommate. If I find you flaked out on the floor some dark night from an overdose, I'm going to quietly fold my tent and silently steal off into the night. I can't stand traumatic death scenes."

  "You're exaggerating."

  Marie looked at her. "Am I? You've been hitting that stuff like a health nut gobbles vitamins."

  "I'm all right," Dana said defiantly.

  "Like hell you are. You're a classic case of an emotionally depressed and frustrated female. The worst kind, I might add."

  "It takes time for the ragged edges to dull."

  "Ragged edges, my ass. You mean it dulls your guilt."

  "I won't delude myself into believing I did the best thing by leaving Gene. But I'm convinced I did the right thing."

  "Don't you think he needs you?"

  "I used to hope he would reach out to me, yet every time we're together, we fight like alley cats. He's closed me out, Marie. It's the same old tired story. When a man like Gene becomes a slave to the demands of his work, he throws up a wall that can't be breached. And the stupid reason, the incredibly stupid reason, is because he imagines that sharing his problems automatically throws me on the firing line, too. A man accepts the thankless burden of responsibility. We women do not. To us, life is a game we play one day at a time. We never plan ahead like men." Her face became sad and drawn. "I can only wait and come back after Gene falls wounded in his private battle. Then, and only then, am I certain he'll welcome a return of my company."

  "It may be too late," Marie said. "From your description of him, Gene sounds like a prime candidate for a mental breakdown or a massive coronary. If you had an ounce of guts, you'd stick it out with him."

  Dana shook her head. "I can't cope with rejection. Until we can get together peacefully again, I'm going to make another life."

  "Does that include other men?"

  "Platonic love only." Dana forced a smile. "I'm not about to play the liberated female and jump onto every penis that wanders across my path."

  Marie grinned slyly. "It's one thing to be picky and pay lip service to high standards, sweetie, but quite another matter in actual practice. You forget, this is Washington, D.C. We outnumber the men eight to one. They're the lucky ones who can afford to be choosy."

  "If something happens, then something happens. I'm not going out and look for an affair. Besides, I'm out of practice. I've forgotten how to flirt.''

  "Seducing a man is like riding a bicycle," Marie said, laughing. "Once learned, never forgotten."

  She parked in the vast open lot of the NUMA headquarters building. They walked up the steps into the lobby, where they joined the stream of other staff members who were hurrying down the halls and up the elevators to their offices.

  "How about meeting me for lunch?" Marie said.

  "Fine."

  "I'll bring a couple of male friends for you to exercise your latent charms on."

  Before Dana could protest, Marie had melted into the crowd. As she stood in the elevator, Dana noted with a curious sense of detached pleasure that her heart was thumping.

  35

  Sandecker pulled his car into the parking lot of the Alexandria College of Oceanography, climbed out from under the wheel, and walked over to a man standing beside an electric golf cart.

  "Admiral Sandecker?"

  "Yes."

  "Dr. Murray Silverstein." The round, balding little man stuck out his hand. "Glad you could come, Admiral. I think we've got something that will prove helpful."

  Sandecker settled into the cart. "We're grateful for every scrap of useful data you can give us."

  Silverstein took the tiller and guided them down an asphalt lane. "We've run an extensive series of tests since last night. I can't promise anything mathematically exact, mind you, but the results are interesting, to say the least."

  "Any problems?"

  "A few. The main snag that throws our projections from the precise side of the scale to the approximate is a lack of solid facts. For instance, the direction of the Titanic's bow when she went down was never established. This unknown factor alone could add four square miles to the search area."

  "I don't understand. Wouldn't a forty-five-thousand-ton steel ship sink in a straight line?"

  "Not necessarily. The Titanic corkscrewed and slid under the water at a depressed angle of roughly seventy-eight degrees, and, as she sank, the weight of the sea filling her forward compartments pulled her into a headway of between four and five knots. Next, we have to consider the momentum caused by her tremendous mass and the fact that she had to travel two and a half miles before she struck bottom. No, I'm afraid she landed on a horizontal line a fair distance from her original starting point on the surface."

  Sandecker stared at the oceanographer. "How could you possibly know the precise angle of descent when the Titanic sank? The survivors' descriptions were on the whole unreliable."

  Silverstein pointed to a huge concrete tower off to his right. "The answers are in there, Admiral." He stopped the cart at the front entrance of the building. "Come along and I'll give you a practical demonstration of what I'm talking about."

  Sandecker followed him through a short hallway and into a room with a large acrylic plastic window at one end. Silverstein motioned for the admiral to move closer. A diver wearing scuba equipment waved from the other side of the window. Sandecker waved back.

  "A deep-water tank," Silverstein said matter-of-factly. "The interior walls are made of steel and rise two hundred feet high with a diameter of thirty feet. There is a main pressure chamber for entering and exiting the bottom level and five air locks stationed at intervals along the side to enable us to observe our experiments at different depths."

  "I see," Sandecker said slowly. "You've been able to simulate the Titanic's fall to the sea floor."

  "Yes, let me show you." Silverstein lifted a telephone from a shelf under the observation window. "Oven, make a drop in thirty seconds."

  "You have a scale model of the Titanic?"

  "Not exactly a prize exhibit for a maritime museum, of course," Silverstein said, "but, for a scaled-down version of the ship's general configuration, weight, and displacement, it's a near-perfect, balanced replica. The potter did a damned fine job."

  "The potter?"

  "Ceramics," Silverstein said waving his hand in a vague gesture. "We can mold and fire twenty models in the time it would take us to fabricate a metal one." He laid a hand on Sandecker's arm and pulled him toward the window. "Here she comes."

  Sandecker looked up and saw an oblong shape about four feet in length falling slowly through the water, preceded by what looked to be a shower of marbles. He could see that there had been no attempt to authenticate detail. The model looked like a smooth lump of unglazed clay rounded at one end, narrowed at the other, and topped by three tubes, representing the Titanic's smokestacks. He heard a distinct clink through the observation window as the model's bow struck the bottom of the tank.

  "Wouldn't your calculations be thrown off by a flaw in the model's configuration?" Sandecker asked.

  "Yes, a mistake could make a difference." Silverstein looked at him. "But I assure you, Admiral, we missed nothing!

  Sandecker pointed at the model. "The real Titanic had four funnels; yours has only three."

  "Just before the Titanic's final plunge," Silverstein said, "her stern rose until she was completely perpendicular. The strain was too much for the guy wires supporting the number one funnel. They snapped and it toppled over the starboard side."

  Sandecker nodded. "My compliments, Doctor. I should have known better than to question the thoroughness of your experiment."

  "It's nothing, really. It gives me a chance to show off my expertise." He turned and motioned a thumbs-up sign through the window. The diver tied the model onto a line th
at traveled toward the top of the tank. "I'll run the test again and explain how we arrived at our conclusions."

  "You might begin by explaining the marbles."

  "They act the role of the boilers," Silverstein said.

  "The boilers?"

  "Perfect simulation, too. You see, while the Titanic's stern was pointing at the sky, her boilers broke loose from their cradle mounts and hurtled through the bulkheads toward the bow. Massive things they were-twenty-nine, all told; some of them were nearly sixteen feet in diameter and twenty feet long."

  "But your marbles fell outside the model."

  "'Yes, our calculations indicate that at least nineteen of the boilers smashed their way through the bow and dropped to the bottom separately from the hull."

  "How can you be sure?"

  "Because if their fall had been contained, the tremendous shift in ballast caused by their journey from amidships to the forward section of the ship would have pulled the Titanic on a ninety-degree course straight downward. However, the reports of the survivors watching from the lifeboats-for once, most all tend to agree-state that soon after the earsplitting rumble from the boilers' crazy stampede had died away, the ship settled back a bit at the stern before sliding under. This fact indicates to me, at any rate, that the Titanic vomited her boilers and once free of this super-incumbency, righted herself slightly to attain the seventy-eight-degree slant I mentioned previously."

  "And the marbles bear out this theory?"

  "To the letter." Silverstein picked up the telephone again. "Ready whenever you are, Owen." He replaced the receiver on its cradle. "Owen Dugan, my assistant above. About now he'll be setting the model in the water directly over that plumb line you see in the water off to one side of the tank. As the water begins coming in through holes drilled strategically in the bow of the model, she'll begin to go down by the head. At a certain angle the marbles will roll to the bow and a springloaded door will allow them to fall free."

  As if on cue, the marbles began falling to the floor of the tank, followed closely by the model. It struck about twelve feet from the plumb line. The diver made a tiny mark on the bottom of the tank and held up his thumb and index finger, indicating one inch.

  "There you have it, Admiral, a hundred and ten drops and she's never touched down outside a four-inch radius."

  Sandecker stared into the tank for a long moment, then turned to Silverstein. "So where do we search?"

  "After a few dazzling computations by our physics department," said Silverstein, "their best guess is thirteen hundred yards south of east from the point the Sappho I discovered the cornet, but at that, it's still a guess."

  "How can you be certain the horn didn't fall on an angle, too?"

  Silverstein feigned a hurt look. "You underestimate my genius for perfection, Admiral. Our evaluations here would be worthless without a clear-cut picture of the cornet's path to the sea floor. Included in my expense vouchers you will find a receipt from Moe's Pawnshop for two cornets. After a series of tests in the tank, we took them two hundred miles off Cape Hatteras and dropped them in twelve thousand feet of water. I can show you the charts from our sonar. They each landed within fifty yards of their vertical departure line."

  "No offense," Sandecker said equably. "I have a sinking feeling, if you'll pardon the pun, that my lack of faith is going to cost me a case of Robert Mondavi Chardonnay 1984 "

  "1981," Silverstein said, grinning.

  "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a schmuck with good taste."

  "Think how common the world would be without us."

  Sandecker made no reply. He moved up to the window and stared inside the tank at the ceramic model of the Titanic. Silverstein moved up behind him. "She's a fascinating subject, no doubt of it."

  "Strange thing about the Titanic, " Sandecker said softly. "Once her spell strikes, you can think of nothing else."

  "But why? What is there about her that grips the imagination and won't let go?"

  "Because She's the wreck that puts all the others to shame," Sandecker said. "She's modern history's most legendary yet elusive treasure. A simple photograph of her is enough to pump the adrenaline. Knowing her story, the crew who sailed her, the people who walked her decks in the few short days she lived, that's what fires the imagination, Silverstein. The Titanic is a vast archive of an era we'll never see again. God only knows if it is within our power to bring the grand old dame into daylight again. But, by heaven, we're going to try."

  36

  The submersible Sea Slug looked aerodynamically clean and smooth from her outside, but to Pitt, as he contorted his six-foot-two frame into the pilot's chair, the interior seemed a claustrophobic nightmare of hydraulic plumbing and electrical circuitry. The craft was twenty feet long and tubular in shape, with rounded ends like its lethargic namesake. It was painted bright yellow and had four large portholes set in pairs on its bow, while mounted along the top, like small radar domes, were two powerful high intensity lights.

  Pitt completed the checklist and turned to Giordino, who sat in the seat to his right.

  "Shall we make a dive?"

  Giordino flashed a toothy smile. "Yes, let's."

  "How about it, Rudi?"

  Gunn looked up from his prone position behind the lower viewports and nodded. "Ready when you are."

  Pitt spoke into a microphone and watched the small television screen above the control panel as it showed the Modoc's derrick lift the Sea Slug from her deck cradle and gently swing her over the side and into the water. As soon as a diver had disconnected the lift cable, Pitt cracked the ballast valve and the submersible began to sink slowly under the rolling, deep-troughed waves.

  "Life-support timer on," Giordino announced. "An hour to the bottom, ten hours for the search, two hours for surfacing, leaving us a reserve of five hours just in case.

  "We'll use the reserve time for the search," Pitt said.

  Giordino knew well the facts of the situation. If the unthinkable happened, an accident at twelve thousand feet, there would be no hope of rescue. A quick death would be the only prayer against the appalling suffering of slow asphyxiation. He found himself actually amused at wishing he was back on board the Sappho I, enjoying the uncramped comfort of open space and the security of her eight-week life-support system. He sat back and watched the water darken as the Sea Slug buried her hull in the depths, his thoughts drifting to the enigmatic man who was piloting the craft.

  Giordino went back with Pitt to their high-school days, when they had built and raced hot rods together down the lonely farm roads behind Newport Beach, California. He knew Pitt better than any man alive; any woman, for that matter. Pitt possessed, in a sense, two separate inner identities, neither directly related to the other. There was the congenial Dirk Pitt, who rarely deviated from the middle of the road, and was humorous, unpretentious, and radiated an easygoing friendliness with everyone he met. Then there was the other Dirk Pitt, the coldly efficient machine who seldom made a mistake and who often withdrew into himself, remote and aloof. If there was a key that would unlock the door between the two, Giordino had yet to discover it.

  Giordino turned his attention back to the depth gauge. Its needle indicated twelve hundred feet. Soon they passed the two-thousand-foot mark and entered a world of perpetual night. From this point downward, as far as the human eye was concerned, there was only pure blackness. Giordino pushed a switch and, the outside lights burst on and sliced a reassuring path through the darkness.

  "What do you think our chances are of finding her on the first try?" he asked.

  "If the computer data Admiral Sandecker sent us holds true, the Titanic should lie somewhere within a hundred-and-ten-degree arc, thirteen hundred yards southeast of the spot where you reclaimed the cornet."

  "Oh, great," Giordino mumbled sarcastically. "That narrows it down from looking for a toenail in the sands of Coney Island to searching for an albino boll weevil in a cotton field."

  "There he goes again," Gunn sa
id, "offering his negative thought for the day."

  "Maybe if we ignore him," Pitt laughed, "he'll go away."

  Giordino grimaced and motioned into the watery void.

  "Oh sure, just drop me off at the next corner"

  "We'll find the old girl," Pitt said resolutely. He pointed - illuminated clock on the control panel. "Let's see, it's oh-six-forty now. I predict we'll be over the Titanic's decks before lunch, say about eleven-forty."

  Giordino gave Pitt a sideways look. "The great soothsayer has spoken."

  "A little optimism never hurts," Gunn said. He adjusted the exterior camera housings and triggered the strobe. It flashed blindingly for an instant like a shaft of lightning, reflecting millions of planktonic creatures that hung in the water.