The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

A dark spot appeared on the striated face of the earthworks berm. It quickly spread, opening like an obscene stain. It remained black for a fraction of a second before it turned muddy brown, and the soil became gelatinous and bulged.

Pitt didn’t need to see anything further. He started running across the bottom of the site, his rubber boots flopping and splashing through the accumulating rainwater. Drops seared his eyes but didn’t slow him at all. His legs pistoned and his arms swung, and his breath came in deep, measured draws, while a few hundred feet away the bulge burst in an explosion of roiling mud. An instant later the entirety of the berm above the hole collapsed into it, the hundreds of tons of dirt and rock and industrial fill vanishing into a cauldron of muck and icy water.

While he didn’t turn to see the wave that would now be racing across the floor of the workings, Pitt could hear its sloshing roar and feel the chill wind as it pushed air ahead of it. He might not have been the younger version of himself who’d spearheaded the raising of the Titanic, but he’d kept in shape. He was almost to the blue tarpaulin shelter the archeologists had erected around their find when the first of the surge raced past him and almost knocked his feet out from underneath him with its power.

The water hampered his gait, but he fought on, pushing through as fast as he could, actually managing to get ahead of the rising water so what had once swirled around his ankles now fell to an easy half-inch puddle. He saw a seam in one of the tarped walls and rushed through it. The room the scientists had created inside was dim. There were sets of construction lamps on poles, but none were lit, and Pitt didn’t have the time to waste.

* * *

—

The Turtle was made of wooden staves, like a barrel, and bound with thick wrought iron rings. It had a round conning tower rising from its squat hull that was ringed with glass portholes. Two curled tubes rose from it. These were snorkels for when the Turtle was traveling just below the surface. Once it was completely submerged, the operator only had as much air as the volume of the ungainly craft allowed. Next to the conning tower was the hand-cranked vertical propeller. Its blades, like everything else, were blacked with tar pitch, but Pitt guessed they would be bronze. Deeper into the stone-lined sump, he could see the Turtle’s larger main prop and a square rudder operated by mechanical levers.

He took in all that detail on the fly because the water had reached the edge of the sump and would fill it in mere seconds. He leapt across the five feet of open air between the edge of the pit and the Turtle’s metal-shod upper deck and threw himself feetfirst down the hatch. His rubber boots landed on a padded seat. The hatch encircled his hips. He blindly felt around with his feet to figure the best way to shoehorn himself into the one-man submersible. The water was a frothing boil as it rose up the filthy walls of the sump. In seconds, Pitt’s mad attempt to save the relic would be for naught.

He finally worked his body down into the submersible’s dank hull. Just as the water was about to sweep across the rounded upper deck, Pitt slammed the hatch closed. There was a mechanism with a butterfly screw to tighten the seal. Water began spurting in where a cork gasket had long ago rotted away. He worked his fingers to twist the mechanism and eventually turned the nut enough to expand an inner ring that compressed the hull and the hatch together.

He realized his lungs were heaving from his breakneck race to save the Turtle and was acutely aware that air had become a precious commodity. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and activated its flashlight.

The inside of the submersible had an H. G. Wells feel to it, with brightworks mechanisms, gears and cogs made of brass and bronze, as well as rack-and-pinion devices as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. His seat had been padded in leather, although his weight had cracked it apart and pieces had fallen to the floor. By his left knee was a hand-operated pump for clearing out the bilge, which he could hear burbling down below the floorboards. Next to him was a wire rack containing what appeared to be a journal or diary wrapped in oilskin. It looked to be in better shape than the leather seat, but Pitt wisely didn’t touch it.

The little light that had shone in through the hatch widows went completely dark as the sump filled and a river began inundating the construction site.

P

itt tried to calculate how long it would take to rescue him. Judging by the torrent of water he’d seen rushing over the seawall, he figured the river would inundate the blocks-long excavation completely in about thirty minutes. By then, police and fire crews would be on hand, as well as divers he’d told Thomas Gwynn to request. There was a crane on-site with more than enough lifting ability, and the divers would be able to rig a sling easy enough. He estimated forty-five minutes, tops, and he’d be able to pop the hatch once again. Unlike the original pilot, Ezra Lee, Pitt had no need to crank the screws in order to propel the Turtle. He could sit quietly in his dark little cocoon and wait to be pulled free.

Unseen above Pitt, the upstream breach created by the steel plate continued to widen in fits and starts as the gushing water clawed at more of the concrete and dissolved more of the berm. In all, the excavation was filling, but at a steadily increasing pace. Just as Pitt settled in his wait, the backflow of water along the inner side of the earthen buttress began to rip away great slabs of dirt and rock that fell into the construction site like ice calving off a glacier. It was the deadweight of the berm that helped the old seawall keep the river from collapsing into the pit, but at a critical tipping point enough of the plug had been dissolved by the flood’s scouring action that in a single catastrophic failure a forty-foot-long section of the stone wall and what was left of the inner berm failed spectacularly. A raging wall of seawater exploded into the site, washing against all sides and throwing spume high into the air and sending a wave of water speeding nearly three blocks inland with enough force to shove parked cars away from curbs and topple any pedestrian unlucky enough to be in its way.

For Dirk Pitt, it was like he’d been tossed into an industrial washing machine and it had been set on spin-dry. The colossal surge had created undercurrents in the water already filling the excavation, and like a leaf caught in a gutter the little submersible was yanked from its centuries-old home and borne along like any other bit of flotsam that eventually found itself in New York Harbor.

* * *

—

Freezing cold water from the bilge soaked Pitt to the skin while he braced his arms and legs across the tight cockpit to keep from bashing himself against any of the sharp handles and mechanisms used to propel and steer the craft. Once the initial surge subsided, the weight of water and a ballasted keel righted the submersible. Pitt knew he’d been wrenched from the sump and could now feel the bottom of the Turtle scraping ever so slowly along the rocky floor of the excavation. Any chance of a quick rescue was over. The added pressure of the deepening water increased the seepage from around the hatch above Pitt’s head. What had been an occasional drip was quickly becoming a steady downpour.

The craft would fill swiftly, but Pitt wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet.

He reached for the brass handle that operated the bilge pump and gave it a push. The lever moved with relative ease. What didn’t was the rubberized canvas bellows that actually created the suction. Like the leather padding for the bench seat, the old material had lost all pliability in the past quarter millennium and turned to so much dust with the slightest pressure.

As a hobby, Pitt restored classic automobiles. He was good with his hands, understood machines, and when he studied the pump with his phone’s flashlight he could tell that all it needed to operate properly was some way of building and releasing air pressure. The weave of his rain jacket was too porous to be effective against the water pressure outside the Turtle’s hull, but in a flash of inspiration he knew what he had to do.

Pitt wedged his phone into the wire rack so that it shone down on the pumping mechanism and he got to work.

He usually carried a multi-tool in his pocket. It wasn’t something the airlines would have let him keep on board, which was why he preferred Amtrak when traveling to New York or Boston. He fished the knife/pliers from his pants and toed off one of his boots. The pliers gave him the leverage he needed to release the tension on the binding ring holding the tattered remains of the old bellows to the pump. Next he cut the uppers from the bottom of the boot. He slipped what was essentially a Croc back onto his foot and was left with a rubber tube more than tall enough to fit the diminutive pump. He trimmed the rubber down a few inches and set the bottom edge in place and clamped it tight with the pliers. He then forced the stiff rubber into the upper part of the pump so that it fit under the pump’s metal cap. He ratcheted the binding ring closed with the pliers, creating an airtight seal again.

He began to work the pump handle back and forth. Each time, the hollow leg of his boot sucked flat, then expanded out. In moments he’d built up enough pressure in the system to begin pulling water out of the bilge and through a pipe fitted with a one-way valve that led outside the hull.

Not sure if the pump would allow him to get ahead of the water leaking into the cylindrical compartment, Pitt took an extra minute to slice part of his jacket into strips, then used his multi-tool’s knife blade to wedge into the gap between the hatch and the inner ring. The cloth quickly soaked through and water dripped from it, but at one-tenth the previous rate. Pitt was just turning his attention back to the pump when the sound of the Turtle rasping against the bottom suddenly stopped and the craft shook violently. Pitt braced himself. He immediately knew that the current had sucked the relic from the excavation and it was now floating in the main channel of the East River. He had no idea how deep the river ran or the crush depth of the ancient craft, and he had no intention of discovering either.

He went to work on the pump like a man abandoned, trying not to dwell on the fact that with all the old tar stuck to its hull the Turtle may no longer be buoyant enough to float. He could feel the submersible twist and spin as it was caught in the eddies and current.

Back and forth he moved the pump handle, each stroke taking tiny sips of the mass of water sloshing across the Turtle’s floor. For ten solid minutes, changing hands when his arm grew stiff, he sucked the bilge almost dry and was rewarded with the faint aura of weak light coming through the cleanest of the conning tower windows. Pitt couldn’t tell if the sub had breached the surface or not. Even turning off his flashlight didn’t give him a better perspective. The glass was still dirty and the sun was hidden by storm clouds, but he felt inordinately pleased with his efforts so far.

He turned his flashlight back on.

“Okay, let’s see how we’re doing,” Pitt muttered and reached for the screw stopper of one of the twin snorkel tubes. He couldn’t work it with his fingers and attacked it with the pliers. Once he broke the initial seal, the brass plug remained tight. He worked at an awkward angle, and the metal fought him for every degree it turned, and while Pitt wasn’t in any immediate danger from asphyxia the air was getting a bit heavy to breathe.