Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt 4)

"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?"