Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt 4)

"There has to be a way," Sandecker said. "Somewhere down there she's taking water. If we don't get ahead of it by this time tomorrow, she'll roll belly up and head back to the bottom."

The thought of losing the Titanic after she was sitting pretty and upright again on a smooth sea had never entered their minds, but now everyone in the gym began to feel a sickening ache deep in their stomachs. The ship had yet to be taken in tow and New York was twelve hundred sea miles away.

Pitt sat there staring at the ship's interior diagrams. They were woefully inadequate. No set of detailed blueprints of the Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic, existed. They had been destroyed, along with files full of photographs and construction data, when the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding yards in Belfast were leveled by German bombers during World War II.

"If only she wasn't so damned big," Drummer muttered. "The boiler rooms are damn near a hundred feet below the Boat Deck."

"Might as well be a hundred miles," Spencer said. He looked up as Woodson emerged from the grand stairway entrance. "Ah, the great stoneface is with us. What's the official photographer of the operation been up to?"

Woodson lifted a battery of cameras from around his neck and gently laid them on a makeshift worktable. "Just taking some pictures for posterity," he said with his usual deadpan expression. "Never know, I just might write a book about all this someday, and naturally, I'll want credit for the illustrations."

"Naturally," Spencer said. "You didn't by chance find a clear companionway down to the boiler rooms?"

He shook his head. "I've been shooting in the first-class lounge. It's remarkably well preserved. Except for the obvious ravages of water on the carpeting and furniture, it could pass for a sitting room in the Palace of Versailles." He began changing film cartridges. "How's chances of borrowing the helicopter? I'd like to get some bird's-eye shots of our prize before the tugs arrive."

Giordino raised up on one elbow. "Better use up your film while you can. Our prize may be back on the bottom by morning."

Woodson 's brows pinched together. "She's sinking?"

"I think not."

Every eye turned to the man who uttered those words. Pitt was smiling. He smiled with the confidence of a man who just became chairman of the board of General Motors.

He said, "As Kit Carson used to say when he was surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by Indians, 'We ain't done in yet, not by a damned sight.' In ten hours time the engine and boiler rooms will be bone-dry." He quickly fumbled through the diagrams on the table until he found the one he wanted. "Woodson said it, the bird's-eye view. It was right under our noses all the time. We should have been looking from overhead instead of from inside."

"Big deal," Giordino said. "What's so interesting from the air?"

"None of you get it?"

Drummer looked puzzled. "You missed me at the last fork in the road."

"Spencer?"

Spencer shook his head.

Pitt grinned at him and said, "Assemble your men topside and tell them to bring their cutting gear."

"If you say so," Spencer said, but made no move for the door.

"Mr. Spencer is mentally measuring me for a strait jacket," Pitt said. "He can't figure why we should be cutting holes on the roof of the ship to penetrate a distance of a hundred feet through eight decks of scrap. Nothing to it, really. We have a built-in tunnel, free of any debris, that leads straight to the boiler rooms. In fact, we have four of them. The boiler casings where the funnels once sat, gentlemen. Torch away the Wetsteel seals over the openings and you have a clear shot directly down to the bilges. Do you see the light?"

Spencer saw the light all right. Everyone else saw it, too. They headed out the door as one, without giving Pitt the benefit of an answer.

Two hours later, the diesel pumps were knocking away in chorus and two thousand gallons of water a minute were being returned over the side to the mounting swells that were being pushed ahead of the approaching hurricane.

55

They had dubbed her Hurricane Amanda, and by that sable afternoon the great steamer tracks running across her projected path were devoid of most vessels. All freighters, tankers, and passenger liners that had put to sea between Savannah, Georgia, and Portland, Maine, had been ordered back to port after NUMA's Hurricane Center in Tampa sent out the first warnings. Nearly a hundred vessels along the Eastern seaboard had postponed their sailing dates, while all ships bound from Europe that were already far at sea hove to, waiting for the hurricane to pass.

In Tampa, Dr. Prescott and his weather people swarmed around the wall chart, feeding new data into the computers, and plotting any deviation of Hurricane Amanda's track. Prescott's original predicted track was holding up to within a hundred and seventy-five miles.

A weatherman came up and handed him a sheet of paper. "Here's a report from a Coast Guard reconnaissance plane that penetrated the hurricane's eye."

Prescott took the report and read parts of it aloud. "Eye approximately twenty-two miles in diameter. Forward speed increased to forty knots. Wind strength one hundred and eighty plus . . ." his voice trailed off.

His assistant looked at him, her eyes wide. "A hundred-and-eighty-mile-an-hour winds?"

"And more," Prescott murmured. "I pity the ship that gets caught in this one."