There was a pause, and when the reply came Barnum could almost see the devilish grin on Pitt's face.
"We have apple-pie high-in-the-sky hopes."
The rain abated and visibility increased from two hundred yards to nearly a mile. Suddenly the Ocean Wanderer loomed through the storm dead ahead.
"God, just look at her," said Maverick. "She looks like a glass castle in a fairy tale."
The hotel seemed regal and magnificent amid the raging sea surrounding it. The crew and scientists, who were swept up in mounting excitement, had left their cabins and crowded onto the bridge to witness the spectacle of a modern edifice where none should have existed.
"It's so beautiful," murmured a blond, petite woman who was a marine chemist. "I never expected such creative architecture."
"Nor I," agreed a tall ocean chemist. "Coated with so much salt spray, she could pass for an iceberg."
Barnum trained a pair of binoculars on the hotel, whose mass swayed back and forth under the trouncing from the waves. "Her roof deck looks like it was swept clean."
"A miracle she survived," muttered Maverick in wonder. "Certainly beyond all expectations."
Barnum lowered his glasses. "Bring us around and set our stern on her windward side."
"After we take another battering getting in position to take on a tow-line, Captain, what then?"
Barnum stared pensively at the Ocean Wanderer. "We wait," he said slowly. "We wait and see what Pitt has up his sleeve after he waves his magic wand."
Pitt studied the detailed plans of the mooring cables given him by Morton. He, Giordino, Morton and Emlyn Brown, the hotel's chief maintenance superintendent, were standing around a table in Morton's office.
"The cables will have to be reeled in before we know their length after parting."
Brown, who had the wiry build of a college track-and-field miler, ran a hand through a bush of jet-black hair. "We've already reeled in what was left of them right after they snapped. I was afraid that if they snagged in the rocks it might cause the hotel to twist around under the devil's waves and cause damage."
"How far out did cables three and four break from their moorings?"
"I can only guess, mind you, but I'd say they both gave up the ghost about two hundred, maybe two hundred and twenty yards out."
Pitt looked at Giordino. "That doesn't leave Barnum enough safe latitude for maneuver. And if the Ocean Wanderer should sink, Barnum's crew will have no time to cut the cable. The Sea Sprite will be dragged down to the bottom along with the hotel."
"If I know Paul," said Giordino, "he won't hesitate to take the gamble with so many lives at stake."
"Am I to understand, you intend to use the mooring cables as towing lines?" inquired Morton, who stood on the opposite side of the table. "I was told your NUMA vessel is an oceangoing tugboat."
"She was once," replied Pitt. "But no more. She was converted from an icebreaker tug into a research ship. The big winch and tow cable were removed when she was refitted. All she has now is a crane for lifting submersibles. We'll have to improvise and make do with what we've got."
"Then what good is she?" Morton demanded angrily.
"Trust me." Pitt looked him in the eye. "If we can make a hookup, Sprite has enough power in her engines to tow this hotel."
"How will you get the ends of the cables over to the Sea Sprite?" Brown queried. "Once they're unreeled, they'll sink to the bottom."
Pitt looked at him. "We float them over."
"Float?"
"You must have fifty-gallon drums on board?"
"Very clever, Mr. Pitt. I see what you're aiming at." Brown paused and thought a moment. "We have quite a few that contain oil for the generators, cooking oil for the kitchens and liquid soap for cleaning personnel."
"We can use as many empty drums as you can scrape up."
Brown turned to four of his maintenance crew, who were standing nearby. "Assemble all the empties and drain the rest as quick as you can."
"As you and your people unreel the cables," Pitt explained, "I want you to tie a drum every twenty feet. By making the cables buoyant, they can float and be hauled over to Sea Sprite."
Brown nodded. "Consider it done--"
"If four of our cables snapped earlier," interrupted Morton, "what makes you think these two will stand up to the stress?"
"For one thing," Pitt rationalized patiently, "the storm has abated considerably. Two, the lines will be shorter and less prone to excessive strain. And last, we'll be towing the hotel on her narrowest beam. When she was moored, her entire front face took the brunt of the storm."
Without waiting for a comment from Morton, Pitt turned back to Brown.
"Next, I'll need a good mechanic or machinist to splice loops or eyes to the ends of the cables, so they can be shackled together once they're wound around the Sprite's tow bit."
"I'll handle that chore myself," Brown assured him. Then he said, "I hope you have a plan for transporting the cables over to your NUMA ship? They won't float there on their own, certainly not in this sea."
"That's the fun part," answered Pitt. "We'll require a few hundred feet of line, preferably a thin diameter but with the tensile strength of a steel cable."
"I have two five-hundred-foot spools of Falcron line in the storeroom. It's finely woven, thin, lightweight and could lift a Patton tank."
"Tie two hundred-yard lengths of the Falcron line to each end of the cables."
"I understand using the Falcron lines to pull the heavy cables to your ship, but how do you intend to get them there?"
Pitt and Giordino exchanged knowing glances.
"That will be our chore," said Pitt with a grim smile.
"I hope it won't take long," Morton said darkly, pointing out the window. "Time is a commodity we've little left."
As if they were spectators at a tennis match, all heads turned in unison and saw that the menacing shoreline was little more than two miles away. And as far as they could see in either direction, an immense surf was pounding on what seemed a never-ending ridge of rocks.
Just inside an air-conditioning equipment room in one corner of the hotel, Pitt spread the contents of his large bundle across the floor. First he slipped on his custom shorty neoprene wet suit. He preferred this abbreviated suit for the job at hand because the water was blessed with tropical temperatures and he saw no need for a heavy suit, wet or dry. He also enjoyed the ease of movement because the arms above the elbows and legs below the knees were open. Then came his buoyancy compensator, followed by a ScubaPro dive mask. He cinched his weight belt and checked the quick-release safety snap.
Next he sat down as one of the hotel maintenance men helped mount a closed-circuit rebreather on his back. He and Giordino agreed that a compact rebreathing unit offered greater freedom of movement than two bulky steel air tanks. As with regular scuba gear, the diver inhales through a regulator, breathing compressed gas from a tank. But then the expired air is saved and recycled back through canisters that remove the carbon dioxide while replenishing the oxygen in the tank. The SIVA-55 unit they were using was developed for military underwater covert operations.
His final check was the underwater communications system from Ocean Technology Systems. A receiver was attached to the strap of his mask. "Al, do you hear me?"
Giordino, who was going through the same procedure on the opposite corner of the hotel, answered in a voice that seemed wrapped in cotton. "Every word."
"You sound unusually coherent."
"Give me a hard time and I'll resign and head up to the cocktail lounge."
Pitt smiled at his friend's ever-constant sense of humor. If he could rely on anyone in the world, it was Giordino. "Ready when you are."
"Say when."
"Mr. Brown."
"Emlyn."
"Okay, Emlyn, have your people stand by the winches until we give the signal to pay out the cables and drums."
Answering from the rooms where the great mooring cable winches were mou
nted, Brown acknowledged, "Just say the word."
"Keep your fingers crossed," said Pitt, as he pulled on his dive fins.
"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 hand railing and somersaulted into the water.
The 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.
After 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.