Текст книги "Raise the Titanic"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Clive Cussler
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    I long for our early days, the gentle days when our concern for one another far outweighed the demands of our professional lives. It was simpler then. We taught our classes at the university, we laughed and made love as though each time were our last. Perhaps I drove the wedge between us for not wanting children. Perhaps a son or a daughter might have bound us tighter together. I don't know. I can only regret the things I did not do.

    I only know that it will be best for both of us if I set time and space between us for a while, for at present our living under the same roof seems to bring out a meanness and selfishness neither of us knew we possessed.

    I have moved in with Marie Sheldon, a marine geologist with NUMA. She has been kind enough to loan me a spare room in her Georgetown house until I can untangle my mental cobwebs. Please do not try to contact me. It would only result in more ugly words. Give me time to work things out, Gene. I implore you.

    They say time heals all wounds. Let us pray this is so. I do not mean to desert you, Gene, when you feel you need me most. I believe it will relieve one more burden from the heavy pressures of your position.

    Forgive my, feminine frailty, but from the other side of the coin, my side, it is as though you drove me away. Let us hope the future will allow our love to endure.

    Again, I love you.

    Dana

    Seagram reread the letter four times, his eyes refusing to turn from the neatly scripted pages. Finally, he clicked off the light and sat there in the darkness.

34

    Dana Seagram stood in front of her closet going through the feminine ritual of deciding what to wear when a knock sounded on the bedroom door.

    "Dana? You almost ready?"

    "Come on in, Marie."

    Marie Sheldon opened the door and leaned into the bedroom. "Good lord, sweetie, you're not even dressed yet.

    Marie's voice came from deep within her throat. She was a small, thin, vital woman with vivid blue eyes, a pert bobbed nose, and a mass of bleached blond hair shaped in a shag style. She might have been very provocative except for her square-cut chin.

    "I go through this every morning," Dana said irritably. "If only I could get organized and lay things out the night before, but I always wait until the last moment."

    Marie moved beside Dana. "How about the blue skirt?"

    Dana slipped the skirt off the hanger and then threw it down on the carpet. "Damn! I sent the matching blouse to the cleaners."

    "If you're not careful, you'll start foaming at the mouth."

    "I can't help it," Dana said. "Nothing seems to go right lately."

    "Since you walked out on your husband, you mean."

    "The last thing I need now is a sermon."

    "Settle down, sweetie. If you want to take out your wrath on somebody, then stand in front of a mirror."

    Dana stood, tense as a toy doll whose spring has been wound too tightly. Marie could see an emotional crying jag coming on and beat a strategic retreat.

    "Relax. Take your time. I'll go down and warm up the car.

    Dana waited until Marie's footsteps died before she went into the bathroom and downed two Librium capsules. As soon as the tranquilizer began to take effect, she calmly slipped on a turquoise linen dress, straightened her hair, pulled on a pair of flat-heeled shoes, and headed downstairs.

    On the way to NUMA headquarters, Dana sat bright and perky while tapping her foot to the music from the car radio.

    "One pill or two?" Marie said casually.

    "Umm?"

    "I said, one pill or two. It's a safe bet that when you instantly transform from a bitch into a Miss Goody Two-Shoes, you've been popping pills."

    "I meant it about the sermon."

    "Okay, but a warning, old roommate. If I find you flaked out on the floor some dark night from an overdose, I'm going to quietly fold my tent and silently steal off into the night. I can't stand traumatic death scenes."

    "You're exaggerating."

    Marie looked at her. "Am I? You've been hitting that stuff like a health nut gobbles vitamins."

    "I'm all right," Dana said defiantly.

    "Like hell you are. You're a classic case of an emotionally depressed and frustrated female. The worst kind, I might add."

    "It takes time for the ragged edges to dull."

    "Ragged edges, my ass. You mean it dulls your guilt."

    "I won't delude myself into believing I did the best thing by leaving Gene. But I'm convinced I did the right thing."

    "Don't you think he needs you?"

    "I used to hope he would reach out to me, yet every time we're together, we fight like alley cats. He's closed me out, Marie. It's the same old tired story. When a man like Gene becomes a slave to the demands of his work, he throws up a wall that can't be breached. And the stupid reason, the incredibly stupid reason, is because he imagines that sharing his problems automatically throws me on the firing line, too. A man accepts the thankless burden of responsibility. We women do not. To us, life is a game we play one day at a time. We never plan ahead like men." Her face became sad and drawn. "I can only wait and come back after Gene falls wounded in his private battle. Then, and only then, am I certain he'll welcome a return of my company."

    "It may be too late," Marie said. "From your description of him, Gene sounds like a prime candidate for a mental breakdown or a massive coronary. If you had an ounce of guts, you'd stick it out with him."

    Dana shook her head. "I can't cope with rejection. Until we can get together peacefully again, I'm going to make another life."

    "Does that include other men?"

    "Platonic love only." Dana forced a smile. "I'm not about to play the liberated female and jump onto every penis that wanders across my path."

    Marie grinned slyly. "It's one thing to be picky and pay lip service to high standards, sweetie, but quite another matter in actual practice. You forget, this is Washington, D.C. We outnumber the men eight to one. They're the lucky ones who can afford to be choosy."

    "If something happens, then something happens. I'm not going out and look for an affair. Besides, I'm out of practice. I've forgotten how to flirt.''

    "Seducing a man is like riding a bicycle," Marie said, laughing. "Once learned, never forgotten."

    She parked in the vast open lot of the NUMA headquarters building. They walked up the steps into the lobby, where they joined the stream of other staff members who were hurrying down the halls and up the elevators to their offices.

    "How about meeting me for lunch?" Marie said.

    "Fine."

    "I'll bring a couple of male friends for you to exercise your latent charms on."

    Before Dana could protest, Marie had melted into the crowd. As she stood in the elevator, Dana noted with a curious sense of detached pleasure that her heart was thumping.

35

    Sandecker pulled his car into the parking lot of the Alexandria College of Oceanography, climbed out from under the wheel, and walked over to a man standing beside an electric golf cart.

    "Admiral Sandecker?"

    "Yes."

    "Dr. Murray Silverstein." The round, balding little man stuck out his hand. "Glad you could come, Admiral. I think we've got something that will prove helpful."

    Sandecker settled into the cart. "We're grateful for every scrap of useful data you can give us."

    Silverstein took the tiller and guided them down an asphalt lane. "We've run an extensive series of tests since last night. I can't promise anything mathematically exact, mind you, but the results are interesting, to say the least."

    "Any problems?"

    "A few. The main snag that throws our projections from the precise side of the scale to the approximate is a lack of solid facts. For instance, the direction of the Titanic's bow when she went down was never established. This unknown factor alone could add four square miles to the search area."

    "I don't understand. Wouldn't a forty-five-thousand-ton steel ship sink in a straight line?"

    "Not necessarily. The Titanic corkscrewed and slid under the water at a depressed angle of roughly seventy-eight degrees, and, as she sank, the weight of the sea filling her forward compartments pulled her into a headway of between four and five knots. Next, we have to consider the momentum caused by her tremendous mass and the fact that she had to travel two and a half miles before she struck bottom. No, I'm afraid she landed on a horizontal line a fair distance from her original starting point on the surface."

    Sandecker stared at the oceanographer. "How could you possibly know the precise angle of descent when the Titanic sank? The survivors' descriptions were on the whole unreliable."

    Silverstein pointed to a huge concrete tower off to his right. "The answers are in there, Admiral." He stopped the cart at the front entrance of the building. "Come along and I'll give you a practical demonstration of what I'm talking about."

    Sandecker followed him through a short hallway and into a room with a large acrylic plastic window at one end. Silverstein motioned for the admiral to move closer. A diver wearing scuba equipment waved from the other side of the window. Sandecker waved back.

    "A deep-water tank," Silverstein said matter-of-factly. "The interior walls are made of steel and rise two hundred feet high with a diameter of thirty feet. There is a main pressure chamber for entering and exiting the bottom level and five air locks stationed at intervals along the side to enable us to observe our experiments at different depths."

    "I see," Sandecker said slowly. "You've been able to simulate the Titanic's fall to the sea floor."

    "Yes, let me show you." Silverstein lifted a telephone from a shelf under the observation window. "Oven, make a drop in thirty seconds."

    "You have a scale model of the Titanic?"

    "Not exactly a prize exhibit for a maritime museum, of course," Silverstein said, "but, for a scaled-down version of the ship's general configuration, weight, and displacement, it's a near-perfect, balanced replica. The potter did a damned fine job."

    "The potter?"

    "Ceramics," Silverstein said waving his hand in a vague gesture. "We can mold and fire twenty models in the time it would take us to fabricate a metal one." He laid a hand on Sandecker's arm and pulled him toward the window. "Here she comes."

    Sandecker looked up and saw an oblong shape about four feet in length falling slowly through the water, preceded by what looked to be a shower of marbles. He could see that there had been no attempt to authenticate detail. The model looked like a smooth lump of unglazed clay rounded at one end, narrowed at the other, and topped by three tubes, representing the Titanic's smokestacks. He heard a distinct clink through the observation window as the model's bow struck the bottom of the tank.

    "Wouldn't your calculations be thrown off by a flaw in the model's configuration?" Sandecker asked.

    "Yes, a mistake could make a difference." Silverstein looked at him. "But I assure you, Admiral, we missed nothing!

    Sandecker pointed at the model. "The real Titanic had four funnels; yours has only three."

    "Just before the Titanic's final plunge," Silverstein said, "her stern rose until she was completely perpendicular. The strain was too much for the guy wires supporting the number one funnel. They snapped and it toppled over the starboard side."

    Sandecker nodded. "My compliments, Doctor. I should have known better than to question the thoroughness of your experiment."

    "It's nothing, really. It gives me a chance to show off my expertise." He turned and motioned a thumbs-up sign through the window. The diver tied the model onto a line that traveled toward the top of the tank. "I'll run the test again and explain how we arrived at our conclusions."

    "You might begin by explaining the marbles."

    "They act the role of the boilers," Silverstein said.

    "The boilers?"

    "Perfect simulation, too. You see, while the Titanic's stern was pointing at the sky, her boilers broke loose from their cradle mounts and hurtled through the bulkheads toward the bow. Massive things they were-twenty-nine, all told; some of them were nearly sixteen feet in diameter and twenty feet long."

    "But your marbles fell outside the model."

    "'Yes, our calculations indicate that at least nineteen of the boilers smashed their way through the bow and dropped to the bottom separately from the hull."

    "How can you be sure?"

    "Because if their fall had been contained, the tremendous shift in ballast caused by their journey from amidships to the forward section of the ship would have pulled the Titanic on a ninety-degree course straight downward. However, the reports of the survivors watching from the lifeboats-for once, most all tend to agree-state that soon after the earsplitting rumble from the boilers' crazy stampede had died away, the ship settled back a bit at the stern before sliding under. This fact indicates to me, at any rate, that the Titanic vomited her boilers and once free of this super-incumbency, righted herself slightly to attain the seventy-eight-degree slant I mentioned previously."

    "And the marbles bear out this theory?"

    "To the letter." Silverstein picked up the telephone again. "Ready whenever you are, Owen." He replaced the receiver on its cradle. "Owen Dugan, my assistant above. About now he'll be setting the model in the water directly over that plumb line you see in the water off to one side of the tank. As the water begins coming in through holes drilled strategically in the bow of the model, she'll begin to go down by the head. At a certain angle the marbles will roll to the bow and a springloaded door will allow them to fall free."

    As if on cue, the marbles began falling to the floor of the tank, followed closely by the model. It struck about twelve feet from the plumb line. The diver made a tiny mark on the bottom of the tank and held up his thumb and index finger, indicating one inch.

    "There you have it, Admiral, a hundred and ten drops and she's never touched down outside a four-inch radius."

    Sandecker stared into the tank for a long moment, then turned to Silverstein. "So where do we search?"

    "After a few dazzling computations by our physics department," said Silverstein, "their best guess is thirteen hundred yards south of east from the point the Sappho I discovered the cornet, but at that, it's still a guess."

    "How can you be certain the horn didn't fall on an angle, too?"

    Silverstein feigned a hurt look. "You underestimate my genius for perfection, Admiral. Our evaluations here would be worthless without a clear-cut picture of the cornet's path to the sea floor. Included in my expense vouchers you will find a receipt from Moe's Pawnshop for two cornets. After a series of tests in the tank, we took them two hundred miles off Cape Hatteras and dropped them in twelve thousand feet of water. I can show you the charts from our sonar. They each landed within fifty yards of their vertical departure line."

    "No offense," Sandecker said equably. "I have a sinking feeling, if you'll pardon the pun, that my lack of faith is going to cost me a case of Robert Mondavi Chardonnay 1984 "

    "1981," Silverstein said, grinning.

    "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a schmuck with good taste."

    "Think how common the world would be without us."

    Sandecker made no reply. He moved up to the window and stared inside the tank at the ceramic model of the Titanic. Silverstein moved up behind him. "She's a fascinating subject, no doubt of it."

    "Strange thing about the Titanic, " Sandecker said softly. "Once her spell strikes, you can think of nothing else."

    "But why? What is there about her that grips the imagination and won't let go?"

    "Because She's the wreck that puts all the others to shame," Sandecker said. "She's modern history's most legendary yet elusive treasure. A simple photograph of her is enough to pump the adrenaline. Knowing her story, the crew who sailed her, the people who walked her decks in the few short days she lived, that's what fires the imagination, Silverstein. The Titanic is a vast archive of an era we'll never see again. God only knows if it is within our power to bring the grand old dame into daylight again. But, by heaven, we're going to try."

36

    The submersible Sea Slug looked aerodynamically clean and smooth from her outside, but to Pitt, as he contorted his six-foot-two frame into the pilot's chair, the interior seemed a claustrophobic nightmare of hydraulic plumbing and electrical circuitry. The craft was twenty feet long and tubular in shape, with rounded ends like its lethargic namesake. It was painted bright yellow and had four large portholes set in pairs on its bow, while mounted along the top, like small radar domes, were two powerful high intensity lights.

    Pitt completed the checklist and turned to Giordino, who sat in the seat to his right.

    "Shall we make a dive?"

    Giordino flashed a toothy smile. "Yes, let's."

    "How about it, Rudi?"

    Gunn looked up from his prone position behind the lower viewports and nodded. "Ready when you are."

    Pitt spoke into a microphone and watched the small television screen above the control panel as it showed the Modoc's derrick lift the Sea Slug from her deck cradle and gently swing her over the side and into the water. As soon as a diver had disconnected the lift cable, Pitt cracked the ballast valve and the submersible began to sink slowly under the rolling, deep-troughed waves.

    "Life-support timer on," Giordino announced. "An hour to the bottom, ten hours for the search, two hours for surfacing, leaving us a reserve of five hours just in case.

    "We'll use the reserve time for the search," Pitt said.

    Giordino knew well the facts of the situation. If the unthinkable happened, an accident at twelve thousand feet, there would be no hope of rescue. A quick death would be the only prayer against the appalling suffering of slow asphyxiation. He found himself actually amused at wishing he was back on board the Sappho I, enjoying the uncramped comfort of open space and the security of her eight-week life-support system. He sat back and watched the water darken as the Sea Slug buried her hull in the depths, his thoughts drifting to the enigmatic man who was piloting the craft.

    Giordino went back with Pitt to their high-school days, when they had built and raced hot rods together down the lonely farm roads behind Newport Beach, California. He knew Pitt better than any man alive; any woman, for that matter. Pitt possessed, in a sense, two separate inner identities, neither directly related to the other. There was the congenial Dirk Pitt, who rarely deviated from the middle of the road, and was humorous, unpretentious, and radiated an easygoing friendliness with everyone he met. Then there was the other Dirk Pitt, the coldly efficient machine who seldom made a mistake and who often withdrew into himself, remote and aloof. If there was a key that would unlock the door between the two, Giordino had yet to discover it.

    Giordino turned his attention back to the depth gauge. Its needle indicated twelve hundred feet. Soon they passed the two-thousand-foot mark and entered a world of perpetual night. From this point downward, as far as the human eye was concerned, there was only pure blackness. Giordino pushed a switch and, the outside lights burst on and sliced a reassuring path through the darkness.

    "What do you think our chances are of finding her on the first try?" he asked.

    "If the computer data Admiral Sandecker sent us holds true, the Titanic should lie somewhere within a hundred-and-ten-degree arc, thirteen hundred yards southeast of the spot where you reclaimed the cornet."

    "Oh, great," Giordino mumbled sarcastically. "That narrows it down from looking for a toenail in the sands of Coney Island to searching for an albino boll weevil in a cotton field."

    "There he goes again," Gunn said, "offering his negative thought for the day."

    "Maybe if we ignore him," Pitt laughed, "he'll go away."

    Giordino grimaced and motioned into the watery void.

    "Oh sure, just drop me off at the next corner"

    "We'll find the old girl," Pitt said resolutely. He pointed – illuminated clock on the control panel. "Let's see, it's oh-six-forty now. I predict we'll be over the Titanic's decks before lunch, say about eleven-forty."

    Giordino gave Pitt a sideways look. "The great soothsayer has spoken."

    "A little optimism never hurts," Gunn said. He adjusted the exterior camera housings and triggered the strobe. It flashed blindingly for an instant like a shaft of lightning, reflecting millions of planktonic creatures that hung in the water.

    Ten thousand feet and forty minutes later, Pitt reported to the Modoc, giving the depth and the water temperature thirty-five degrees. The three men watched fascinated as a small angler fish, ugly in its stubby appearance, slowly swept past the viewpoints; the tiny luminous bulb that protruded from the top of its head glowed like a lonely beacon.

    At 12,375 feet the sea floor came into view, moving up to meet the Sea Slug as though she were standing still. Pitt turned on the propulsion motors and adjusted the altitude angle, gently stopping the Sea Slug's descent and turning her on a level course across the bleak red clay that carpeted the ocean floor.

    Gradually, the ominous silence was broken by the rhythmic hum that came from the Sea Slug's electric motors. At first, Pitt had difficulty distinguishing rises and gradual drops on the bottom; there was nothing to indicate a three-dimensional scale. His eyes saw only a flatness that stretched beyond the reach of the lights.

    There was no life to be seen. And yet, evidence proved otherwise. Scattering tracks from the depth's habitants meandered and zig-zagged in every direction through the sediment. One might have guessed that they were made only recently, but the sea can be misleading. The footprints from deep-dwelling sea spiders, sea cucumbers, or starfish might have been made several minutes ago or hundreds of years past, because the microscopic animal and plant remains that comprise the deep-ocean ooze filters down from above at the rate of only one or two centimeters every thousand years.

    "There's a lovely creature," Giordino said pointing.

    Pitt's eye followed Giordino's finger and picked out a strange blue-black animal that seemed a cross between a squid and an octopus. It had eight tentacles linked together like the webbed foot of a duck, and it stared back at the Sea Slug through two large globular eyes that formed nearly a third of its body.

    "A vampire squid," Gunn informed them.

    "Ask her if she's got relatives in Transylvania?" Giordino grinned.

    "You know," Pitt said, "that thing out there sort of reminds me of your girl friend."

    Gunn jumped in. "You mean the one with no boobs?"

    "You've seen her?"

    "Rave on, envious rabble," Giordino grumbled. "She's mad about me and her father keeps me floating in quality booze."

    "Some quality," Pitt snorted. "Old Cesspool Bourbon, Attila the Hun Gin, Tijuana Vodka. Who the hell ever heard of those labels?"

    Throughout the next few hours, the wit and the sarcasm bounced off the walls of the Sea Slug. Actually, it was put on; a defense mechanism to relieve the gnawing pangs of monotony. Unlike romanticized fiction, wreck-hunting in the depths can be a grueling and tedious job. Add to that the aggravated discomfort of the cramped quarters, the high humidity and chilling temperatures inside the submersible, and you have the ingredients for provoking an accident through human error that could prove both costly and fatal.

    Pitt's hands stayed rock-steady as they handled the controls, guiding the Sea Slug a scant four feet above the bottom. Giordino's concentration was nailed to the life support systems, while Gunn kept his eyes skinned on the sonar and magnetometer. The long hours of planning were over. It was now a case of patience and persistence, mixed with that peculiar blend of eternal optimism and love of the unknown shared by all treasure seekers.

    "Looks like a pile of rocks up ahead," Pitt said.

    Giordino stared up through the viewports. "They're just sitting there in the ooze. I wonder where they came from."

    "Perhaps ballast thrown overboard from an old windjammer."

    "More likely came from icebergs," Gunn said. "Many rocks and bits of debris are carried over the sea and then dropped to the floor when the icebergs melt-" Gunn broke off in the middle of his lecture. "Hold on . . . I'm getting a strong response on the sonar. Now the magnetometer is picking it up, too."

    "Where away?" Pitt asked.

    "On a heading of one-three-seven."

    "One-three-seven it is," Pitt repeated. He swept the Sea Slug into a graceful bank, as though she was an airplane, and headed on the new course. Giordino peered intently over Gunn's shoulder at the green circles of light on the sonarscope. ''A small dot of pulsating brightness indicated a solid object three hundred yards beyond their range of vision.

    "Don't get your hopes up," Gunn said quietly. "The target reads too small for a ship."

    "What do you make of it?"

    "Hard to say. No more than twenty or twenty-five feet in length, about two stories high. Might be anything . . . ."

    "Or it might be one of the Titanic's boilers," Pitt cut in. "The sea floor should be littered with them."

    "You move to the head of the class," Gunn said, excitement creeping into his tone. "I have an identical reading, bearing one-one-five. And here comes another at one-six-zero. The last has an indicated length of approximately seventy feet."

    "Sounds like one of her smokestacks," Pitt said.

    "Lord!" Gunn murmured hoarsely. "It's beginning to read like a junkyard down here."

    Suddenly, in the gloom at the outer edge of the blackness, a rounded object became visible, haloed in the eerie light like an immense tombstone. Soon the three pairs of eyes inside the submersible could distinguish the furnace gratings of the great boiler, and then the row upon row of rivets along the iron seams and the torn, jagged tentacles of what was left of its steam tubing.

    "How would you like to have been a stoker in those days and fed that baby?" Giordino muttered.

    "I've picked up another one," Gunn said. "No, wait . . . the pulse is getting stronger. Here comes the length. One hundred feet . . . two. . ."

    "Keep coming, sweetheart," Pitt prayed.

    "Five hundred . . . seven . . . eight hundred feet. We got her! We've got her!"

    "What course?" Pitt's mouth was as dry as sand.

    "Bearing zero-nine-seven," Gunn replied in a whisper.

    They spoke no more for the next few minutes as the Sea Slug closed the distance. Their faces were pale and strained with anticipation. Pitt's heart was pounding painfully in his chest, and his stomach felt as if it had a great iron weight in it and a huge hand crushing it from the outside. He became aware that he was allowing the submersible to creep too close to the ooze. He pulled back the controls and kept his eyes trained -through the viewport. What would they find? A rusty old hulk far beyond hope of salvaging? A shattered, broken hull buried to its superstructure in the muck? And then his straining eyes caught sight of a massive shadow looming up ominously in the darkness.

    "Christ almighty!" Giordino mumbled in awe. "We've struck her fair on the bow."

    As the range narrowed to fifty feet, Pitt slowed the motors and turned the Sea Slug on a parallel course with the ill-fated liner's waterline. The mere size of the wreck when viewed from alongside her steel plates was a staggering sight. Even after nearly eighty years, the sunken ship proved to be surprisingly free of corrosion; the gold band that encompassed the 882-foot black hull glistened under the high-intensity lights. Pitt eased the submersible upward past the eight-ton portside anchor until they could all clearly make out the three-foot-high golden letters that still proudly proclaimed her as the Titanic.

    Spellbound, Pitt picked up the microphone from its cradle and pressed the transmit button. Modoc, Modoc. This is Sea Slug . . . do you read?"

    The radio operator on the Modoc answered almost immediately. "This is Modoc, Sea Slug. We read you. Over."

    Pitt adjusted the volume to minimize the background crackle. "Modoc, notify NUMA headquarters that we have found the Big T. Repeat, we have found the Big T. Depth twelve thousand three hundred and forty feet. Time, eleven-forty-two hours."

    "Eleven-forty-two?" Giordino echoed. "You cocky bastard. You only missed by two minutes."

REGENESIS

    The Titanic lay cloaked by the eerie stillness of the black deep and bore the grim scars of her tragedy. The jagged wound from her collision with the iceberg stretched from the starboard forepeak to the No. 5 boiler room nearly three hundred feet down her hull, while the gaping holes in her bow below the waterline betrayed the shattering impact made by her boilers when they tore from her bowels and smashed their way through bulkhead after bulkhead until they plunged free into the sea.

    She sat heavily in the ooze with a slight list to port, her forecastle set on a southerly course, as if she were still pathetically struggling to reach out and touch the waters of a port she had never known. The lights from the submersible danced over her ghostlike superstructure, casting long spectral shadows across her long teak decks. Her portholes, some open, some closed, marched in orderly rows along the broad expanse of her sides. She presented an almost modern, streamlined appearance now that her funnels were gone; the forward three were nonexistent, two probably having been carried away by her dive to the bottom, while number four lay fallen across the After Boat Deck. And, except for the scattered strands of rusty, disconnected funnel rigging that snaked over the railings, her Boat Deck showed only a few hulking air vents standing silent guard above the vacant Welin davits that had once held the great liner's lifeboats.