70
"We're done in," Spencer said in a voice so low that Pitt wasn't sure he heard him.
"Say again."
"We're done in," he repeated through slack lips. His face was smeared with oil and a rustlike slime. "It's a hopeless case. We've plugged most of the holes Drummer opened with his cutting torch, but the sea has battered the hull all to hell and the old girl is taking water faster than a sieve."
"We've got to keep her on the surface until the tugs return," Pitt said. "If they can add their pumps to ours we can stay ahead of the leaks until the damage can be patched"
"It's a damned miracle that she didn't go down hours ago.
How much time can you give me?" Pitt demanded.
Spencer stared wearily down at the water sloshing around his ankles. "The pump engines are running on fumes now. When their fuel tanks are sucked dry, the pumps will die. A cold, hard, sad fact." He looked up into Pitt's face. "An hour, maybe an hour and a half. I can't promise any more than that when the pumps go."
"And if you had enough fuel to keep the diesels going?"
"I could probably keep her on the surface without assistance until noon," Spencer answered.
"How much fuel will it take?"
"Two hundred gallons would do nicely,
They both looked up as Giordino plunged down a companionway and splashed into the water covering the deck of the No. 4 boiler room.
"Talk about frustration," he moaned. "There are eight aircraft up there, circling the ship. Six Navy fighters and two radar recon planes. I've tried everything except standing on my head and exposing myself and all they do is wave every time they make a pass."
Pitt shook his head in mock sadness. "Remind me never to play charades on your team."
"I'm open for suggestions," Giordino said. "Suppose you tell me how to notify some guy who's flying by at four hundred miles an hour that we need help, and lots of it?"
Pitt scratched his chin. "There's got to be a practical solution."
"Sure," Giordino said sarcastically. "Just call the Automobile Club for a service call."
Pitt and Spencer stared with widened eyes at each other. The same thought had suddenly occurred to them in the same instant.
"Brilliance," Spencer said, "sheer brilliance."
"If we can't get to a service station," Pitt said grinning, "then the service station must come to us."
Giordino looked lost. "Fatigue has queered your minds," he said. "Where are you going to find a pay phone? What will you use for a radio? The Russians smashed ours, the one in the helicopter is soaked through, and Prevlov's transmitter caught two bullets during the brawl." He shook his head "And you can forget those flyboys upstairs. Without a brush and bucket of paint, there's no way to get a message across to their eager little minds."
"That's your problem," Spencer said loftily. "You always go around looking up when you should be looking down."
Pitt leaned over and picked up a sledgehammer that was lying among a pile of tools. "This should do the trick," he said casually, swinging the sledge against one of the Titanic's hull plates, sending a cacophony of echoes throughout the boiler room.
Spencer dropped wearily onto a raised boiler grating. "They ain't going to believe this."
"Oh I don't know," Pitt managed between swings. "Jungle telegraph. It always used to work in the Congo."
"Giordino was probably right. Fatigue has queered our minds."
Pitt ignored Spencer and kept hammering away. After a few minutes, he paused a moment to get a new grip on the sledge handle. "Let us hope and pray that one of the natives has his ear to the ground," he said between pants. And then he went on hammering.
Of the two sonar operators who were on watch aboard the submarine Dragonfish, the one tuned into the passive listening system was leaning forward toward his panel, his head cocked to one side, his mind intent on analyzing the strange beat that emitted through the earphones. Then he gave a slight shake of his head and held up the earphones for the officer who was standing at his shoulder.
"At first I thought it was a hammerhead shark," the sonarman said. "They make a funny pounding noise. But this has a definite metallic ring to it."