"Not strange at all," Pitt said. "While I was helping Lieutenant Fergus and his team come over the aft cargo deck bulwarks, and then tucking thern away in the chief steward's old cabin on C Deck, the rest of you were assembled in the gymnasium awaiting my soul-stirring speech on personal sacrifice."
Spencer shook his head. "Talk about fooling all of the people some of the time."
"I have to hand it to you," Gunn said, "you had us all flim-flammed."
"At that, the Russians nearly stole the ballgame. We didn't expect them to make their play until the storm quieted down. Boarding during the lull of the hurricane's eye was a masterstroke. And it almost worked. Without either Giordino, or the admiral or me to warn the lieutenant-we three were the only ones privy to the SEALs' presence-Fergus would have never known when to launch his attack on the boarders."
"I don't mind admitting," Sandecker said, "for a while there I thought that we'd had it. Giordino and I prisoners of Prevlov, and Pitt thought to be dead."
"God knows," Pitt said, "if the helicopter hadn't wedged itself into the Promenade Deck, I'd be asleep in the deep right now."
"As it was," Fergus said, "Mr. Pitt looked like death warmed over when he stumbled in the chief steward's cabin. A hardy man, this one. Half-drowned, his head split open, and yet he still insisted on guiding my team through this floating museum until we located your Soviet visitors."
Dana was looking at Pitt in a peculiar way. "How long were you hiding in the shadows before you made your grand entrance?"
Pitt grinned slyly. "For a minute prior to your striptease."
"You bastard. You stood there and let me make an ass out of myself," she flared. "You let them use me like I was a cut of beef in a butcher store window."
"I used you too, dear heart, as a matter of necessity. After I found Woodson's body and the smashed radio in the gymnasium I didn't need a gypsy to tell me the boys from the Ukraine had boarded the ship. I then rounded up Fergus and his men and led them down to the boiler rooms figuring the Russians would already be guarding the pumping crew. I was right. First priorities first. Whoever controlled the pumps controlled the derelict. When I saw that I would be more hindrance than help in overcoming the guards, I borrowed a SEAL and came looking for the rest of you. After wandering through half the ship we finally heard voices coming out of the dining saloon. Then I ordered the SEAL to hightail it below for reinforcements."
"Then it was all a great big stalling tactic," Dana said.
"Exactly. I needed every second I could beg, borrow, or steal until Fergus showed up and evened the odds. That's why I held off until the last second to put in an appearance."
"A high stakes gamble," Sandecker said. "You cut Act Two a bit fine, didn't you?"
"I had two things going for me," Pitt explained. "One was compassion. I know you, Admiral. In spite of your gargoyle exterior, you still help little old ladies across streets and feed stray animals. You might have waited until the last instant to give in, but you would have given in." Then Pitt put his arms around Dana and slowly produced a nasty looking weapon from a pocket of the jacket draped on her shoulders. "Number two was my insurance policy. Fergus loaned it to me before the party began. It's called a Stoner weapon. It shoots a cloud of tiny needlelike flachettes. I could have cut down Prevlov and half his men with one burst."
"And I thought you were being a gentleman," Dana said with a contrived bitter tone. "You only hung your jacket on me so they wouldn't find the gun when they searched you."
"You have to admit, that your . . . ahem . . . exposed condition made for an ideal distraction."
"Beggin' your pardon, sir," said Chief Bascom. "But why on earth would this rusty old bucket of bolts interest the Russians?"
"My very thoughts," Spencer added. "What's the big deal?"
"I guess it's a secret no longer." Pitt shrugged. "It's not the ship the Russians were after. It's a rare element called byzanium that sank with the Titanic back in 1912. Properly processed and installed in a sophisticated defense system, so I'm told, it will make intercontinental ballistic missiles about as outdated as flying dinosaurs."
Chief Bascom let out a long low whistle. "And you mean to say that stuff is still below decks somewhere?"
"Buried under several tons of debris, but it's still down there."
"You'll never live to see it, Pitt. None of you . . . none of us will. The Titanic will be totally destroyed by morning." There was no anger in Prevlov's face, but something touching on complacent satisfaction. "Did you really think every contingency was not allowed for? Every possibility for failure not backed up by an alternate plan? If we cannot have the byzanium, then neither can you."
Pitt looked at him with what seemed to be bemusement.
"Forget any hopes you entertain of the cavalry, or in your case, the cossacks, galloping to the rescue, Prevlov. You made a hell of a try, but you were playing against an American idiom known as a stacked deck. You prepared for everything, everything, that is, except a setup in preparation for a double cross. I don't know how the scheme was nurtured. It must have been a wonder of creative cunning, and you fell for it hook, line, and sinker. I'm sorry, Captain Prevlov, but to the victor belong the spoils."
"The byzanium belongs to the Russian people," Prevlov said gravely. "It was raped from our soil by your government. It is not we who are the robbers, Pitt, it is you."
"A moot point. If it were a work of historical art, my State Department would no doubt see it off on the next ship back to Murmansk. But not when it's the prime ingredient for a strategic weapon. If our roles were reversed, Prevlov, you wouldn't give it away any more than we would."
"Then it must be destroyed."
"You're wrong. A weapon that does not take lives, but simply protects them, must never be destroyed."
"Your kind of sanctimonious philosophy simply affirms what our leaders have known all along. You cannot win against us. Someday, in the not too distant future, your precious experiment in democracy will go the way of the Greek senate. A piece of an era for students of communism to study, nothing more."
"Don't hold your breath, Comrade. Your kind will have to show a lot more finesse before you can run the world."
"Read your history," Prevlov said with an ominous smile. "The people whom the sophisticated nations down through the centuries have referred to as the barbarians have always won in the end."
Pitt smiled back courteously as the SEALS herded Prevlov, Merker, and Drummer up the grand staircase to a stateroom where they would be secured under heavy guard.
But Pitt's smile was not genuine. Prevlov was right.
The barbarians always won in the end.
SOUTHBY
June 1988
68
Hurricane Amanda was dying, slowly but inevitably. What would long be remembered as the Great Blow of 1988 had cut its devastating swath across three thousand miles of ocean in three and a half days, and it had yet to deliver its final apocalyptic blow. Like the final burst of a supernova before disintegrating into obscurity, it suddenly swung on an eastward track and slammed into the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, lashing the coast from Cape Race north to Pouch Cove.
In minutes, one town after another was inundated by the fallout from the storm's cloud mass. Several small seashore villages were swept out to sea by the runoff' that came thundering down into the valleys. Fishing boats were driven onto land and battered into unrecognizable, shattered hulks. Roofs were blown off downtown buildings in St. John's as its city streets were turned into rushing rivers from the deluge. Water and electricity were cut off for days and, until rescue ships arrived, food was at a premium and had to be rationed.
No hurricane on record had ever unleashed such raw fury that its winds would carry it so far, so fast with such terrible velocity. No one would ever evaluate the enormous cost of the damage. Estimates ran as high as $250 million. Of this, $155 million represented the almost totally destroyed Newfoundland fishing fleets. Nine ships were lost at sea; six w
ith no survivors. The death toll behind the storm's wake ran between 300 and 325.
In the early hours of Friday morning, Dr. Ryan Prescott sat alone in the main office of the NUMA Hurricane Center. Hurricane Amanda had finally run her course, accomplished her destruction, taken her lives, and only now was she dissipating over the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The battle was over, there was nothing more the weathermen at the center could do. After seventy-two hours of frenzied tracking and nonsleep, they had all straggled home to bed.
Prescott stared through tired and bloodshot eyes at the desks strewn with charts, data tables, computer readout sheets, and half-empty coffee cups, the floors carpeted with sheets of paper filled with notations and the strange looking symbols common to meteorologists. He stared at the giant wall map and silently cursed the storm. The sudden swing to eastward had caught them all by surprise. A completely illogical pattern; it was unparalleled in hurricane history. No storm on record had ever behaved so erratically.
If only it had given some hint of its impending deviation, some minute clue as to its fanatical behavior, they might have better prepared the people of Newfoundland for the onslaught. At least half, a hundred and fifty lives, might have been spared. A hundred and fifty men, women, and children might have been alive now if the finest scientific sources available for weather prediction had not been swept aside like so much hokum at Mother Nature's capricious whim.
Prescott rose and took his last look at the wall chart before the janitors came and erased Hurricane Amanda out of existence, and wiped clean her confounding track in preparation for her as yet unborn descendant. One small notation out of all the rest caught his eye. It was a small cross, labeled "Titanic."
The last report he'd had from NUMA headquarters in Washington was that the derelict was in tow by two Navy tugs that were desperately attempting to drag her out from under the path of the hurricane. Nothing more had been heard of her for twenty-four hours.
Prescott raised a cup of cold coffee in a toast. "To the Titanic,"he said aloud in that empty room. "May you have taken every punch Amanda threw at you and still spit in her eye."
He grimaced as he downed the stale coffee. Then he turned and walked out of the room into the early-morning dampness.
69
At first light the Titanic still lived. There was no rhyme or reason for her continued existence. She still wallowed aimlessly broadside-on to the sea and wind, trapped in the churning turmoil of the tormented waves left in the wake of the departing hurricane.
Like a dazed fighter taking a fearful beating while hanging on the ropes, she rose drunkenly over the thirty-foot crests, shouldering each one, taking salt spray across her Boat Deck, and then struggling free and somehow staggering upright in time for the next assault.
To Captain Parotkin, as he stared through his binoculars, the Titanic looked a doomed ship. Her rusty old hull plates had been subjected to a stress far beyond anything he thought they could stand. He could see the popped rivets and opened seams, and he guessed that she was taking water in a hundred places along her hull. What he could not see were the exhausted men of the salvage crew, the SEALS, and the Navy tugmen laboring shoulder to shoulder deep in the black hell under the waterline in a desperate effort to keep the derelict afloat.
From Parotkin's viewpoint, safe from the elements inside the wheelhouse of the Mikhail Kurkov, it seemed a miracle that the Titanic hadn't vanished during the night. Yet she still clung to life, even though she was down a good twenty feet at the bow and was listing nearly thirty degrees to starboard.
"Any word from Captain Prevlov?" he asked without taking his eyes from the glasses.
"Nothing, sir," answered his first officer.
"I fear the worst has happened," Parotkin said. "I see no sign that Prevlov is in command of the derelict."
"There, sir," the first officer said pointing, "atop the remains of the aft mast. It looks like a Russian pennant."
Parotkin studied the tiny frayed cloth through the glasses as it snapped in the wind. "Unfortunately, the star on the pennant is white rather than the red of our Soviet ensign." He sighed. "I must assume that the boarding mission has failed."
"Perhaps Comrade Prevlov has had no time to report his situation."
"There is no time left. American search planes will be, here within the hour." Parotkin pounded his fist in frustration on the bridge counter. "Damn Prevlov!" he muttered angrily. "'Let us fervently hope our final option will not be required'; his exact words. He is the fortunate one. He may even be dead, and it is I who must take the responsibility for destroying the Titanic and all who remain on board her."
The first officer's face paled, his body stiffened. "There is alternative, sir?"
Parotkin shook his head. "The orders were clear. We must obliterate the ship rather than let her fall into the hands of Americans."
Parotkin took a linen handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes. "Have the crew ready the nuclear missile carrier and steer a course ten miles north of the Titanic for our firing position."
The first officer stared at Parotkin for a long moment, his face void of expression. Then he slowly wheeled and made for the radio telephone and ordered the helmsman to steer fifteen degrees to the north.
Thirty minutes later, all was in readiness. The Mikhail Kurkov dug her bow into the swells at the position laid for the missile launch as Parotkin stood behind the radar operator. "Any hard sightings?" he asked.
"Eight jet aircraft, a hundred and twenty miles west, closing rapidly."
"Surface vessels?"
"Two small ships bearing two-four-five, twenty-one miles southwest."
"That would be the tugs returning," the first officer said.
Parotkin nodded. "It's the aircraft that concern me. They will be over us in ten minutes. Is the nuclear warhead armed?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then begin the countdown."
The first officer gave the order over the phone and then they moved outside and watched from the starboard bridge wing as the forward cargo hatch swung smoothly aside and a twenty-six-foot Stoski surface-to-surface missile slowly rose from its concealed tube into the gusty dawn air.
"One minute to firing," came a missile technician's voice over the bridge speaker.
Parotkin aimed his glasses at the Titanic in the distance. He could just make out her outline against the gray clouds that crawled along the horizon. A barely perceptible shiver gripped his body. His eyes reflected a distant sad look. He knew he would be forever cursed among sailors as the captain who sent the helpless and resurrected ocean liner back to her grave beneath the sea. He was standing braced and waiting for the roar of the missile's rocket engine and then the great explosion that would pulverize the Titanic into thousands of molten particles when he heard the sound of running footsteps from the wheelhouse, and the radio operator burst onto the bridge wing.
"Captain!" he blurted. "An urgent signal from an American submarine!"
"Thirty seconds to firing," the voice droned over the intercom.
There was unmistakable panic in the radio operator's eyes as he thrust the message into Parotkin's hands. It read:
USS DRAGONFISH TO USSR MIKHAIL KURKOV DERELICT VESSEL RMS TITANIC UNDER PROTECTION OF UNITED STATES NAVY ANY OVERT ACT OF AGGRESSION ON YOUR PART WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE REPEAT IMMEDIATE RETALIATORY ATTACK
----SIGNED CAPTAIN USS SUBMARINE DRAGONFISH
"Ten seconds and counting," came the disembodied voice of the missile technician over the speaker. "Seven . . . six..' .
Parotkin looked up with the clear, unworried expression of a man who has just received a million rubles through the mail.
". . . five . . . four . . . three . . ."
"Stop the countdown," he ordered in precise tones, so there could be no misunderstanding, no misinterpretation.
"Stop countdown," the first officer repeated into the bridge phone, his face beaded with sweat. "And secure the missile."
"Good," Parotkin said curtly. A smile
spread across his face. "Not exactly what I was told to do, but I think Soviet Naval authorities will see it my way. After all, the Mikhail Kurkov is the finest ship of her kind in the world. We wouldn't want to throw her away because of a senseless and foolish order from a man who is undoubtedly dead, now would we?"
"I am in complete accord." The first officer smiled-back. "Our superiors will also be interested to learn that in spite of all our sophisticated detection gear, we failed to discover the presence of an alien submarine practically on our doorstep. American undersea penetration methods must truly be highly advanced."
"I feel sure the Americans will be just as interested in learning that our oceanographic research vessels carry concealed missiles."