"Are we?"
"What in hell for? Cuba is the best advertising campaign we've got running that promotes communism as a big economic bust. Besides, better the Soviet Union throws twelve million dollars a day down Castro's toilet than us."
"You've received no orders to keep an eye on a blimp that left on a flight from the Keys this morning?"
There was an ominous silence on the other end of the line.
"I probably shouldn't be telling you this, Jim, but I did receive a verbal order concerning the blimp. I was told to keep our ships and aircraft out of the Bahama Banks and to put a blackout on all communications coming from the area."
"The order come direct from the White House?"
"Don't press your luck, Jim."
"Thanks for setting me straight, Clyde."
"Any time. Let's get together next time I'm in Washington."
"I'll look forward to it."
Sandecker hung up, his face red with anger, his eyes fired with fury.
"God help them," he muttered through clenched teeth. "We've all been had."
>
Jessie's smooth, high cheekboned face was tense from the strain of fighting the wind gusts and rain squalls that pounded against the skin of the blimp. Her arms and wrists were turning numb as she orchestrated the throttles and the big elevator pitch control. With the added weight from the rain it was becoming nearly impossible to keep the wallowing airship level and steady. She began to feel the icy caress of fear.
"We'll have to head for the nearest land," she said, her voice uneven. "I can't keep her aloft much longer in this turbulence."
Pitt looked at her. "The nearest land is Cuba."
"Better arrested than dead."
"Not yet," Pitt replied from his seat to the right and slightly behind her. "Hang on a little longer. The storm will sweep us back to Key West."
"With the radio out, they won't know where to look if we're forced to ditch in the sea."
"You should have thought of that before you spilled coffee on the transmitter and shorted its circuitry."
She stole a glance at him. God, she thought, it was maddening. He was leaning out the starboard window, nonchalantly peering through a pair of binoculars at the sea below. Giordino was observing out the port side, while Gunn was taking readings off the VIKOR navigating computer and laying out their course on a chart. Every so often, Gunn calmly examined the stylus markings on the recorder of a Schonstedt gradiometer, an instrument for detecting iron by measuring magnetic intensity. All three men looked at though they didn't have a care in the world.
"Didn't you hear what I said?" she asked in exasperation.
"We heard," Pitt replied.
"I can't control her in this wind. She's too heavy. We've got to drop ballast or touch down."
"The last of the ballast was dumped an hour ago."
"Then get rid of that junk you brought on board," she ordered, gesturing to a small mountain of aluminum boxes strapped to the deck.
"Sorry. That junk, as you call it, may come in handy."
"But we're losing lift."
"Do the best you can."
Jessie pointed through the windshield. "The island off to our starboard is Cayo Santa Maria. The landmass beyond is Cuba. I'm going to bring the blimp around on a southerly course and take our chances with the Cubans."
Pitt swung from the window, his green eyes set and purposeful. "You volunteered for this mission," he said roughly. "You wanted to be one of the boys. Now hang in there."
"Use your head, Pitt," she snapped. "If we wait another half hour the hurricane will tear us to pieces."
"I think I have something," Giordino called.
Pitt moved from his seat over to the port side. "What direction?"
Giordino pointed. "We just passed over it. About two hundred yards off our stern."
"A big one," Gunn said excitedly. "The markings are going off the scale."
"Come about to port," Pitt ordered Jessie. "Take us back over the same course.
Jessie didn't argue. Suddenly caught up in the fervor of the discovery, she felt her exhaustion fall away.
She slammed the throttles forward and rolled the blimp to port, using the wind to crab around on a reverse course. A gust slammed into the aluminum envelope, causing a shudder to run through the ship and rocking the control car. Then the buffeting eased and the flight smoothed as the eight tail fins came around and the wind beat from astern.
The interior of the control car was as hushed as the crypt of a cathedral. Gunn unreeled the line from the gradiometer's sensing unit until it dangled four hundred feet below the belly of the blimp and skimmed the rolling swells. Then he turned his attention back to the recorder and waited for the stylus to make a horizontal swing across the graph paper. Soon it began to waver and scratch back and forth.
"Coming up on target," Gunn announced.
Giordino and Pitt ignored the wind stream and leaned farther out the windows. The sea was building and foam was spraying from the wave crests, making it difficult to see into the transparent depths. Jessie was having a tougher time of it now, struggling with the controls, trying to reduce the violent shaking and swaying of the blimp, which behaved like a whale fighting its way up the Colorado River rapids.
"I've got her!" Pitt suddenly shouted. "She's lying north and south, about a hundred yards to starboard."
Giordino moved to the opposite side of the control car and gazed down. "Okay, I have her in sight too."
"Can you detect any sign of derricks?" Gunn asked.
"Her outline is distinct, but I can't make out any detail. I'd say she's about eighty feet under the surface."
"More like ninety," said Pitt.
"Is it the Cyclops?" Jessie asked anxiously.
"Too early to tell." He turned to Gunn. "Mark the position from the VIKOR."
"Position marked," Gunn acknowledged.
Pitt nodded at Jessie. "All right, pilot, let's make another pass. And this time, as we come about into the wind, try to hover over the target."
"Why don't you ask me to turn lead into gold," she snapped back.
Pitt came over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. "You're doing great. Stick in a little longer and I'll spell you at the controls."
"Don't patronize me," she said testily, but her eyes took on a warm glow and the tension lines around her lips softened. "Just tell me when to stop the bus."
Very self-willed she was, thought Pitt. For the first time he felt himself envying Raymond LeBaron. He returned aft and put a hand on Gunn's shoulder.
"Use the clinometer and see if you can get a rough measurement of her dimensions."
Gunn nodded. "Will do."
"If that's the Cyclops," said Giordino happily, "you made a damned good guess."
"A lot of luck mixed with a small amount of hindsight," Pitt admitted. "That, and the fact Raymond LeBaron and Buck Caesar aimed us toward the ballpark. The puzzle is why the Cyclops lies outside the main shipping lane."
Giordino gave a helpless tilt to his head. "We'll probably never know."
"Coming back on target," Jessie reported.
Gunn set the distance on the clinometer and then sighted through the eyepiece, measuring the length of the shadowy object under the water. He managed to hold the instrument steady as Jessie fought a masterful battle against the wind.
"No way of accurately measuring her beam because it's impossible to see if she lies straight up or on her side," he said, studying the calibrations.
"And the overall length?" asked Pitt.
"Between five hundred thirty and five hundred fifty feet."
"Looking good," Pitt said, visibly relieved. "The Cyclops was five hundred and forty-two feet."
"If we drop down closer, I might be able to get a more precise reading," said Gunn.
"One more time, Jessie," Pitt called out.
"I don't think so." She lifted a hand from the controls and pointed out the forward window. "A welcoming committee."
/> Her expression appeared calm, almost too calm, while the men watched in mild fascination as a helicopter materialized out of the clouds a thousand feet above the blimp. For several seconds it seemed to hang there, fastened in the sky like a hawk eyeing a pigeon. Then it swelled in size as it approached and banked around on a parallel course with the Prosperteer. Through the binoculars they could clearly see the grim faces of the pilots and the two pairs of hands grasping the automatic guns that poked through the open side door.
"They brought friends," Gunn said succinctly. He was aiming his binoculars at a Cuban gunboat about four miles away that was planing through the swells, throwing up great wings of sea spray.
Giordino said nothing. He tore the holding straps from the boxes and began throwing the contents on the deck as fast as his hands could move. Gunn joined him as Pitt began assembling a strange looking screen.
"They're holding up a sign in English," Jessie announced.
"What does it say?" Pitt asked without looking up.
" `Follow us and do not use your radio,' " she read aloud. "What should I do?"
"Obviously we can't use the radio, so smile and wave to them. Let's hope they won't shoot if they see you're a woman."
"I wouldn't count on it," grunted Giordino.
"And keep hovering over the shipwreck," Pitt added.
Jessie didn't like what was going on inside the control car. Her face noticeably paled. She said, "We'd better do what they want."
"Screw them," Pitt said coldly. He unbuckled her seat belt and lifted her away from the controls.
Giordino held up a pair of air tanks and Pitt quickly adjusted the straps over her shoulders. Gunn handed her a face mask, swim fins, and a buoyancy compensator vest.
"Quickly," he ordered. "Put these on."
She stood there baffled. "What are you doing?"
"I thought you knew," said Pitt. "We're going for a swim."
"We're what?" The dark gypsy eyes were wide, not so much from alarm as astonishment.
"No time for the defense to make a closing argument," Pitt said calmly. "Call it a wild plan for staying alive and let it go at that. Now do as you're told and lie down on the deck behind the screen."
Giordino stared dubiously at the inch-thick screen. "Let's hope it does the job. I'd hate to be around if a bullet finds an air tank."
"Fear not," Pitt replied, as the three men hurriedly strapped on their diving gear. "High-tensile plastic.
Guaranteed to stop anything up to a twenty-millimeter shell."
With no hands at the controls, the blimp lurched sideways under the onslaught of a fresh gust and pitched downward. Everyone instinctively dropped to the deck and snatched at the nearest handgrip.
The boxes that held the equipment skidded madly across the deck and crashed into the pilots' seats.
There was no hesitation, no further attempt at communication. The Cuban commander of the helicopter, thinking the sudden erratic movement of the blimp meant it was trying to escape, ordered his crew to open fire. A storm of bullets struck the starboard side of the Prosperteer from no more than thirty yards away. The control car was immediately turned into a shambles. The old yellowed windows melted away in a shower of fragments that splashed cross the deck. The controls and the instrument panel were blasted into twisted junk, filling the shattered cabin with smoke from shorted circuitry.
Pitt lay prone on top of Jessie, Gunn and Giordino blanketing him, listening to the steel-nosed shells thump against the bulletproof screen. Then the gunmen in the helicopter altered their aim and concentrated on the engines. The aluminum cowlings were torn and mangled by the devastating fire until they shredded and blew away in the air stream. The engines coughed and sputtered into silence, their cylinder heads shot away, oil spewing out amid torrents of black smoke.
"The fuel tanks!" Jessie heard herself shouting above the mad din. "They'll explode!"
"The least of our worries," Pitt yelled back in her ear. "The Cubans aren't using incendiary bullets, and the tanks are made out of selfsealing neoprene rubber."
Giordino crawled over to the ripped and jumbled pile of equipment boxes and retrieved what looked to Jessie like some kind of tubular container. He pushed it ahead of him up the steeply tilted deck.
"Need any help?" Pitt yelled.
"If Rudi can brace my legs. . ." His voice trailed off.
Gunn didn't require a lecture on instructions. He jammed his feet against a bulkhead for support and clutched Giordino around the knees in a vise grip.
The blimp was totally out of control, dead in the sky, the nose pointing at a forty-degree angle toward the sea. All lift was gone and it began to sink from the sky as the Cubans sprayed the plump, exposed envelope. The stabilizer fins still reached for the clouds, but the old Prosperteer was in her death throes.
She would not die alone.
Giordino wrestled the tube open, pulled out an M-72 missile launcher, and loaded the 66-millimeter rocket. Slowly, moving with great caution, he eased the snout of the bazookalike weapon over the jagged glass left in the frame of the window and took aim.
To the astonished men in the patrol boat, less than one mile away, the helicopter appeared to disintegrate in a huge mushroom of fire. The sound of the explosion burst through the air like thunder, followed by a flaming rain of twisted metal that hissed and steamed when it hit the water.
The blimp still hung there, pivoting slowly on its axis. Helium surged through gaping rents in the hull.
The circular supports inside began snapping like dried sticks. As if heaving out her final breath the Prosperteer caved in on herself, collapsing like an eggshell, and fell into the seething whitecaps.
The raging devastation all happened so quickly. In less than twenty seconds both engines were torn from their mounts, and the support beams holding the control car twisted apart, accompanied by a banshee screeching sound. Like a fragile toy thrown on the sidewalk by a destructive child, the rivets burst and the internal structure shrieked in agony as it disintegrated.
The control car kept sinking into the deep, the water flooding through the shattered windows. It was as if a giant hand was pressing the blimp downward until at last she slipped into the depths and disappeared. Then the control car broke free and dropped like a falling leaf, trailed by a confused maze of wire and cable. The remains of the duraluminum envelope followed, flapping wildly like a drunken bat in flight.
A school of yellowtail snappers darted from under the plunging mass an instant before it struck the sea floor, the impact throwing up billowing clouds of fine sand.
Then all was as quiet as a grave, the deathly stillness broken only by the gentle gurgle of escaping air.
On the turbulent surface the stunned crew of the gunboat began sweeping back and forth over the crash sites, searching for any sign of survivors. They only found spreading pools of fuel and oil.
The winds from the approaching hurricane increased to Force 8. The waves reached a height of eighteen feet, making any further search impossible. The boat's captain had no choice but to turn about on a course toward a safe harbor in Cuba, leaving behind a swirling and malignant sea.
>
The opaque cloud of silt that hid the shredded remains of the Prosperteer was slowly carried away by a weak bottom current. Pitt rose to his hands and knees and looked around the shambles that had been the control car. Gunn was sitting upright on the deck, his back pressed against a buckled bulkhead. His left ankle was swelling into the shape of a coconut, but he sucked on his mouthpiece and raised one hand with the fingers formed in a V
Giordino doggedly pulled himself upright and tenderly pressed the right side of his chest. One broken ankle and probably a few ribs between them, thought Pitt. It could be worse. He bent over Jessie and lifted her head. Her eyes appeared blank through the lens of the face mask. The hollow hiss of her regulator and the rise and fall of her chest indicated her breathing was normal, if a bit on the rapid side.
He ran his fingers over he
r arms and legs but found no sign of a fracture. Except for a rash of black-and-blue marks that would bloom in the next twenty-four hours, she seemed whole. As if to assure him, she reached out for his arm and gave it a firm squeeze.
Satisfied, Pitt turned his attention to himself. All the joints swiveled properly, the muscles functioned, nothing seemed distorted. Yet he didn't escape unscathed. A purplish lump was rising on his forehead, and he noticed a strange stiffening sensation in his neck. Pitt canceled out the discomfort with the consolation that no one appeared to be bleeding. One hairline brush with death was enough for one day, he mused. The last thing they needed now was a shark attack.
Pitt focused on the next problem, getting out of the control car. The door was jammed, small wonder after the beating it had taken. He sat on his buttocks, grasped both hands on the bent frame, and lashed out with his feet. Lashed out was an exaggeration. The water pressure impeded the thrust of his legs. He felt as though he was trying to kick out the bottom of a huge jar of glue. On the sixth attempt, when the balls and heels of his feet could take no more, the metal seal gave and the door swung outward in slow motion.
Giordino emerged first, his head swathed by a surge of bubbles from his breathing regulator. He reached back inside, dug his feet into the sand, braced himself for the chest pain that was sure to come, and gave a mighty heave. With Pitt and Gunn shoving from the inside, a large, unwieldy bundle slowly squeezed through the door and dropped to the sand. Then eight steel tanks containing 104 cubic feet of air were passed out to the waiting hands of Giordino.
Inside the mangled control car Jessie fought to equalize her ears with the water pressure. The blood roared and a stabbing pain burst in her head, blanking out the trauma of the crash. She pinched her nose and snorted furiously. On the fifth try her ears finally popped, and the relief was so marvelous that tears came to her eyes. She clamped her teeth on the regulator's mouthpiece and sucked in a lungful of air.