Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt 4)

Butera never moved from his bridge, keeping in constant contact with the men in the afterdeck cablehouse. Suddenly, a voice from the speaker crackled over the howl of the outside wind. "Captain?"

"This is the Captain," he replied into a hand phone.

"Ensign Kelly in the cablehouse, sir. Something mighty peculiar going on back here."

"Would you care to explain, Ensign?"

"Well, sir, the cable seems to have gone berserk. First she swung to port and now she's carried over to starboard at what I must say, sir, is an alarming angle."

"Okay, keep me posted." Butera switched off and opened another channel.

"Uphill, can you hear me? This is Butera."

On the Morse Uphill answered almost immediately. "Go ahead."

"I think the Titanic has sheered off to starboard."

"Can you make out her position?"

"Negative. The only indication is the angle of the cable."

There came a silence of several moments as Uphill thrashed the new development over in his mind. Then he came back through the speaker "We're hardly making four knots as it is. We have no alternative but to push on. If we stop to see what she's up to, she may swing broadside into the sea and roll over."

"Can you pick her up on your radar?"

"No can do, a sea swept away our antennae twenty minutes ago. How about yours?"

"Still have the antennae, but the same sea that took yours shorted, out my circuits."

"Then it's a case of the blind leading the blind."

Butera set the radio phone in its cradle and cautiously cracked the door leading to the starboard wing of the bridge. Shielding his eyes with his arm, he staggered outside and strained his eyes to penetrate the night gone crazy. The searchlights proved useless, their beams merely reflected the driving rain and revealed nothing. Lightning flashed astern, its thunder drowned out by the wind, and Butera's heart skipped a beat. The brief burst of backlighting failed to reveal any outline of the Titanic. It was as though she had never been. Water streaming down his oilskins, his breath coming in gasps, he pushed back past the door just as Ensign Kelly's voice rasped over the speaker again.

"Captain?"

/> Butera wiped the spray from his eyes and picked up the phone. "What is it, Kelly?"

"The cable, it's slackened."

"Is it a break?"

"No, sir, the cable's still pain out, but it's settled several feet lower in the water. I've never seen one act like this before. It's as if the derelict took it in her mind to pass us."

It was the words "pass us" that did it . . . and Butera would never forget the sudden shock of realization. A mental click triggered open a floodgate in his mind, released a nightmare of images in orderly sequence, images of a mad pendulum, its arc growing ever wider until it turned in on itself. The signs were there, the cable angled badly to starboard, the sudden slackness. He envisioned the whole scene in his mind the Titanic driven slightly ahead and parallel to the Wallace's starboard beam and now the pull from the cable snapping the derelict back in the manner of a line of school children playing Crack the Whip. Then something broke the nightmare inside Butera's head and released him from its numbing thrall.

He grabbed the radio phone and rang the engine room in almost the same movement. "Ahead full speed! Do you hear me, engine room? Ahead full speed!" And then he called the Morse. "I'm coming at you full speed," he shouted. "Do you read me, Uphill?"

"Please repeat," Uphill asked.

"Order full speed ahead, damn it, or I'll run you down."

Butera dropped the phone and fought his way outside onto the bridge wing again. The hurricane was beating the sea into a froth so savage, so angry, that it was nearly impossible to separate air from water. It was all he could do to maintain a hold on the railing.

Then he saw it, the immense bow of the Titanic looming up through the curtain of the thrashing deluge, hardly more than a hundred feet off the starboard quarter. There was nothing he could do now except watch in frozen horror as the menacing mass moved inexorably closer to the Wallace.

"No!" he cried above the wind. "You dirty old corpse; you leave my ship alone."

It was too late. It seemed impossible that the Titanic could ever swing clear of the Wallace's stern. And yet the impossible happened. The great sixty-foot bow rose up on a mountainous wave and hung there suspended just long enough for the tug's screws to take bite and pull her clear. Then the Titanic dropped in the trough, missing the stern of the Wallace by no more than three feet, throwing up a surge that engulfed the entire smaller vessel, carrying away both its lifeboats and one of the ventilators.