Night Probe! (Dirk Pitt 6)

"The pot is in the galley." Le Mat spoke without turning, his hands loosely gripped on the wheel, his gaze straight ahead. "Please help yourself. I have to keep a sharp eye for ice floes. They're thicker than flies on manure this time of year."

Pitt poured a steaming cup. He sat on a high swivel chair and looked out at the river. Le Mat was right.

The water was littered with ice floes about the same size as the boat.

"What was it like the night the Empress of Ireland went down?" he asked, breaking the silence.

"Clear skies," Le Mat answered. "The river was calm, its waters a few degrees above freezing, no wind to speak of. A few patches of fog, common in the spring when the southern warm air meets the cold river."

"The Empress was a good ship?"

"One of the best." Le Mat replied seriously to what he considered a naive question. "Built to the finest standards of the day for her owners, the Canadian Pacific Railway. She and her sister ship, the Empress of Britain, were handsome liners, fourteen thousand, tons and five hundred and fifty feet long. Their accommodations were not as elegant, perhaps, as those on the Olympic or the Mauritania, but they achieved a solid reputation for providing their passengers with a comfortable sort of luxury on the Atlantic crossing."

"As I recall, the Empress departed Quebec bound for Liverpool on its final voyage."

"Cast the mooring lines close to four thirty in the afternoon. Nine hours later she lay on the river bottom, her starboard side stove in. It was the fog that wrote the ship's epitaph."

"And a coal collier called the Storstad." Le Mat smiled. "You've done your homework, Mr. Pitt. The mystery was never completely laid to rest how the Empress and the Storstad collided. Their crews sighted each other eight miles apart. When they were separated by less than two miles a low fog bank drifted across their path. Captain Kendall, master of the Empress, reversed his engines and-stopped the ship. It was a mistake; he should have kept underway. The men in the wheelhouse on the Storstad became confused when the Empress vanished in the mists. They thought the liner was approaching off their port bow when indeed, it was drifting with engines stopped to their starboard. The Storstad's first mate ordered the wheel to the right and the Empress of Ireland and her passengers were condemned to disaster."

Le Mat paused to point at an ice floe nearly an acre in size. "We had an unseasonably cold winter this year. The river is still frozen solid a hundred and fifty miles upstream."

Pitt kept silent, slowly sipping the tea.

"The six-thousand-ton Storstad," Le Mat continued, "laden with eleven thousand tons of coal, cut into the Empress amidships, slicing a gaping wound twenty-four feet high and fifteen feet wide. Within fourteen minutes the Empress fell to the bed of the St. Lawrence, taking over a thousand souls with her."

"Strange how quickly the ship vanished into the past," Pitt said pensively.

"Yes, you ask anyone from the States or Europe about the Empress and they'll tell you they never heard of her. It's almost a crime the way the ship was forgotten."

"You haven't forgotten her."

"Nor has Quebec Province," said Le Mat, pointing toward the east. "Just behind Pointe au POre,

"Father's Point in English, lie eighty-eight unidentified victims of the tragedy in a little cemetery still maintained by the Canadian Pacific Railroad." A look of great sorrow came on Le Mat's face. He spoke of the terrible mathematics of the dead as though the sinking had happened yesterday. "The Salvation Army remembers. Out of a hundred and seventy-one who were going to London for a convention, only twenty-six survived. They hold a memorial service for their dead at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto on the anniversary of the sinking."

"I'm told you've made the Empress a life's work."

"I have a deep passion for the Empress. It's like a great love that overwhelms some men in seeing the painting of a woman who died long before they were born."

"I lean more on flesh than fantasy," said Pitt.

"Sometimes fantasy is more rewarding," Le Mat replied, a dreamlike expression on his face. Suddenly he came alert and spun the wheel to avert an ice floe that loomed in the path of the boat. "Between June and September, when the weather warms, I dive on the wreck twenty, maybe thirty times."

"What is the condition of the Empress?"

"A fair amount of disintegration. Though not as bad as you might think after seventy-five years of submersion. I think it's because the fresh water from the river dilutes the salinity from the eastern sea. The hull lies on its starboard side at a list of forty-five degrees. Some of the overhead bulkheads have fallen in on the upper superstructure, but the rest of the ship is pretty much intact.

"Its depth?"

"About a hundred and sixty-five feet. A bit deep for diving on compressed air, but I manage it." Le Mat closed the throttles and shut down the engines, allowing the boat to drift in the current. Then he turned and faced Pitt. "Tell me, Mr. Pitt, what is your interest in the Empress? Why did you seek me out?"

"I'm searching for information on a passenger by the name of Harvey Shields, who was lost with the ship. I was told that no one knows more about the Empress than Jules Le Mat."

Le Mat considered Pitt's reply for some time, then said: "Yes, I recall a Harvey Shields was one of the victims. There is no mention of him during the sinking by survivors. I must assume he was one of nearly seven hundred who still lie entombed within the rotting hulk."

"Perhaps he was found but never identified, like those buried in Father's Point cemetery."

Le Mat shook his head. "Mostly third-class passengers. Shields was a British diplomat, an important man. His body would have been recognized."