Trojan Odyssey (Dirk Pitt 17)

"I'm lucky to be here," Pitt muttered back between gasps.

Now merely bystanders, they sagged to the deck under the gunwales and out of the water that blew over the deck, waiting for their heartbeats to slow and their breathing to come back to normal. They watched as Barnum gave the signal to Brown and the fifty-gallon drums that supported the mooring cables unseen below the surface began to spit out from beneath the hotel. The crane's winch turned, the thin Falcron line took up the slack and the drums began moving. The cable hanging under its steel floats was whipped by the current like a withering snake. Ten minutes later, the leading drums were bumping against the hull. The crane lifted them onto the stern deck along with the ends of both cables. The crew quickly moved in and shackled the ends together through the eyes spliced by Brown. Then, with the added muscle from Pitt and Giordino, who had recovered from their ordeal, they wrapped them around the big tow bit mounted in front of the crane.

"Ready for tow, Ocean Wanderer?" announced Barnum between heavy breaths.

"Ready as we'll ever be on this end," came back Brown.

Barnum hailed his chief engineer. "Ready in the engine room?"

"Aye, Captain," came back a heavily Scots-accented brogue.

Then to his first officer in the pilothouse, "Mr. Maverick, I will control from here."

"Acknowledged, Captain. She's all yours."

Barnum stood at a control console mounted forward of the big crane, legs spread apart, a set look on his face. He gripped the two chrome throttle levers and gently eased them ahead while he half turned and stared at the hotel that loomed over the seemingly midget research ship.

Pitt and Giordino stood on opposite sides of Barnum. Every member of the crew and scientific team was standing in the rain on the bridge wing above the waves now, staring at the Ocean Wanderer in hushed suspense laced with expectation. The two huge magnetohydrodynamic engines were not connected to shafts leading to propellers. They produced an energy force that pumped water through thrusters for propulsion. Instead of a churning mass of green water thrashing from under the stern, the surface was only stirred by twin rivers of water that roiled the water like horizontal tornadoes.

Sea Sprite's stern dug in and she shuddered under the strain from the tow, the blasting wind and the still-agonized sea. She began to fishtail, but Barnum quickly adjusted the angle of the thrusters and she straightened. For tortured minutes that seemed to last forever, nothing seemed to happen. The hotel appeared as if she was stubbornly continuing her journey toward a tumultuous death.

Below their feet on the stern deck, the engines did not throb and pound like diesels. The pumps that provided power for the thrusters whined like banshees. Barnum scanned the gauges and dials that registered the stress on the engines, not happy at what he saw.

Pitt came over and stood next to Barnum, whose hands bled white as he gripped the throttles and shoved them to their stops and beyond if it had been possible.

"I don't know how much more the engines can take," shouted Barnum above the noise from the wind and shriek from below in the engine room.

"Run the guts out of them," said Pitt, his tone cold and hard as glacial ice. "If they blow, I'll take responsibility."

There was no question of Barnum being the captain of his ship, but Pitt far outranked him in the NUMA hierarchy.

"That's easy for you to say," warned Barnum. "But if they blow, we end up on the rocks, too."

Pitt threw him a grin that was hard as granite. "We'll worry about that when the time comes."

To those on board Sea Sprite, the cause was becoming more hopeless with each passing second. It looked as if she was standing dead still in the water.

"Do it!" Pitt pleaded with Sprite. "You can do it!"

On board the hotel, deep anxiety was creeping over the passengers, followed by a growing panic as they stared in frozen fear at the surf crashing on the nearby rocks in a catastrophic display of raging water and exploding spray. Their mounting terror was accelerated by a sudden tremor as the bottom level of the hotel nudged into the rising seafloor. There was no insane rush to exits as in the event of a fire or an earthquake. There was no place to run. Jumping into the water was more than a simple act of suicide. It meant a horrible and painful death, either by drowning or being smashed to pieces on the jagged black lava rocks.

Morton tried to move about the hotel, calming and reassuring the passengers and his employees, but few paid any heed to him. He felt waves of frustration and defeat. One look out the windows was enough to turn the stoutest heart to paste. Children easily picked up on the fear written on their parents' faces and began crying. A few women screamed, some sobbed, others maintained a stony and blank exterior. The men for the most part were silent in their personal fear, holding their loved ones in their arms and trying to act brave.

The waves beating on the rocks below now came like thunder, but to many it was the toll of drums in a funeral procession.

IN the pilothouse, Maverick anxiously studied the digital speed indicator. The red numerals seemed frozen on zero. He saw the cables stretch out of the water with their fifty-gallon drums dangling like scales on a sea monster. He was not the only one mentally urging the ship to move. He turned his attention to the Global Positioning System readouts that recorded the exact position of the unit itself within a few feet. The numbers remained static. He glanced down through the rear windows at Barnum standing like a statue at the stern control console, then up at the Ocean Wanderer, still beset by the angry sea.

He glanced at the digital anemometer and noted the wind had dropped substantially in the last half hour. "That's a blessing," he muttered to himself.

Then, when he looked at the GPS again, the numbers had altered.

He rubbed his eyes, making sure he wasn't simply imagining a change. The numbers had slowly clicked over. Then he stared at the speed indicator. The digit on the far right was ticking back and forth between zero and one knot.

He stood numbed, wanting desperately to believe what he saw but not sure if it wasn't purely the harvest of an overly optimistic imagination. But the speed indicator didn't lie. There was forward movement, no matter how minuscule.

Maverick snatched up a bullhorn and ran out on the bridge wing. "She moved!" he shouted, half mad with excitement. "She's under way!"

Nobody cheered, not yet. Passage through the swirling waves was unreadable to the naked eye, so infinitesimal that they had no way of determining movement. They only had Maverick's word for it. Insufferable minutes passed as hope and excitement mounted as one. Then Maverick shouted again.