Текст книги "Trojan Odyssey"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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10

Ocean Wandererwas now totally helpless. Free of her moorings, the floating hotel was at the full mercy of the hurricane's assault. There was nothing left the men could do to save the guests and the hotel.

Morton was becoming more desperate by the minute. He faced one critical decision after another. He could either order the ballast tanks filled to higher levels, settling the hotel lower in the water to lessen the rate of drift under the vicious gale, or empty the tanks and allow the waves to toss the luxury structure and its passengers about like a house in a Kansas tornado.

On the face of it the first option seemed the most practical. But that meant a battering by an irresistible force against a nearly immovable object. Already, sections of the hotel were giving way, allowing flooding into the lower levels that pushed the pumps to their limits. The second option would mean extreme discomfort for everyone on board and speed up the inevitable impact on the Caribbean island's rocky coast.

He was about to opt for filling the tanks to the brim when the wind suddenly began to slacken. After half an hour it almost died away completely and the sun beamed down on the hotel. People in the ballroom and theater started to cheer, believing the worst of the storm was over.

Morton knew better. True gale winds had decreased but the sea was still rough. Looking through the salt-stained windows, he could see the gray inner walls of the hurricane soaring into the sky. The storm was moving directly over them and they were now in the hurricane's eye.

The worst was yet to come.

In the few short hours remaining before the eye passed, Morton called together all his maintenance people and every able male employee and passenger. Then he divided them up into work parties, assigning some to repair the damage and others to shore up the lower-level windows that were badly leaking and ready to give way. They labored heroically and soon their efforts paid off. The flooding decreased and the pumps began to gain on the leaks.

Morton realized they had merely gleaned a temporary reprieve as long they remained in the eye, but it was vital to keep up morale and assure everyone they had a fighting chance of survival, even though he didn't believe it himself.

He returned to his office and began studying charts of the Dominican Republic shoreline, attempting to predict where the Ocean Wanderermight be driven ashore. With luck they could be forced onto one of the many beaches, but most were too small, some even blasted out of the rock to build hotel resorts. His best estimate was that they had a ninety percent chance of striking rocks created out of volcanic lava many millions of years ago.

In his worst nightmare Morton could not conceive how he could remove a thousand human beings from the battered hotel and transport them safely to land while it was being bashed by giant waves against unyielding rocks.

There seemed no way of avoiding a terrible fate.

He had never felt so vulnerable, so impotent. He was rubbing his tired and reddened eyes when his communications operator burst through the door.

"Mr. Morton, help has come!" he shouted. Morton looked at him blankly.

"A rescue ship?"

The operator shook his head. "No, sir, a helicopter."

Morton's brief optimism sank. "What good is a single helicopter?"

"They radioed that they were going to lower two men onto the roof."

"Impossible." Then he realized that it waspossible as long as they were in the hurricane's eye. He rushed past the operator and stepped into his private elevator, taking it to the roof of the hotel. As the doors opened and he walked out onto the roof, he was dismayed to find the entire sporting complex had been swept away, leaving nothing but the swimming pool. He was especially horrified to see that the life rafts had all vanished.

Now that he had a clear three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the inner hurricane, he stood awestruck at the sheer malevolent beauty of it all. Then he looked straight up and saw a turquoise-colored helicopter descending down on the hotel. He could see the word numa in bold letters painted on the fuselage. The aircraft paused and hovered twenty feet above the deck, as two men in turquoise jumpsuits and crash helmets were lowered by cables to the roof of the hotel. Once they disengaged, two large bundles wrapped in orange plastic came down on another cable. They quickly disconnected the hook and signaled an all clear.

A man inside the helicopter pulled up the cables on a winch and gave a thumbs-up sign as the pilot banked away from the hotel and ascended up through the hurricane's eye. Seeing Morton, the two visitors approached, easily carrying the bulky bundles.

The taller of the two removed his helmet, revealing a thick head of black hair, graying on the temples. His face was craggy from a life in the elements and his opaline green eyes, edged in mirth lines, seemed to bore into Morton's brain.

"Please take us to Mr. Hobson Morton," he said in a voice strangely calm under the circumstances.

"I'm Morton. Who are you and why are you here?"

A glove was removed and a hand extended. "My name is Dirk Pitt. I'm special projects director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency." He turned to a short man with dark curly hair and heavy eyebrows who looked to be descended from a Roman gladiator. "This is my assistant director, Al Giordino. We came to effect a tow for the hotel."

"I was told the company tugs could not leave port."

"Not Odyssey tugs, but a NUMA research ship capable of towing a vessel the size of your hotel."

Willing to snatch at any straw, Morton motioned Pitt and Giordino into his private elevator and escorted them down to his office.

"Forgive the cold reception," he said, offering them a chair. "I was given no warning of your arrival."

"We haven't had much time to prepare," Pitt answered indifferently. "What is your current status?"

Morton shook his head bleakly. "Not good. Our pumps are barely staying ahead of the flooding, the structure is in danger of collapsing, and once we run onto the rocks surrounding the Dominican Republic" – he paused and shrugged—"then a thousand people, including yourselves, are going to die."

Pitt's face became as hard as granite. "We're not running on any rocks."

"We'll need the services of your maintenance personnel to assist us in hooking up with our ship," said Giordino.

"Where is this ship?" Morton questioned, his voice suggesting doubt.

"Our helicopter's radar put her less than thirty miles away."

Morton looked out the window at the ominous walls surrounding the hurricane's eye. "Your ship will never get here before the storm closes in again."

"Our NUMA Hurricane Center measured the eye at sixty miles in diameter and her speed at twenty miles an hour. With a little luck, she'll get here in time."

"Two hours to reach us and one to make the hookup," said Giordino, glancing at his watch.

"There is, I believe," said Morton in an official tone, "a matter of marine salvage to discuss."

"There is nothing to discuss," said Pitt, annoyed at being delayed. "NUMA is a United States government agency dedicated to ocean research. We are not a salvage company. This is not a no-cure, no-pay arrangement. If successful, our boss, Admiral James Sandecker, won't charge your boss, Mr. Specter, one thin dime."

Giordino grinned. "I might mention, the admiral has a love of expensive cigars."

Morton simply stared at Giordino. He was at a loss over how to deal with these men who had dropped from the sky unannounced and calmly informed him that they were going to save the hotel and everyone in it. They hardly looked like his salvation.

Finally, he acquiesced. "Please tell me what you gentlemen need."

The Sea Spriterefused to die. She went deeper than anyone could have believed a ship would dive and live. Totally immersed, her bow and stern buried deeply in the water, no one thought she could come back. For agonizing seconds, she seemed to hang suspended in the gray-green void. Then slowly, laboriously, her bow began to rise fractionally as she struggled defiantly back toward the surface. Then her thrashing screws dug in and propelled her forward. At last she burst into the fury of the storm again, her bow thrusting above the water like a porpoise. Her keel crashed down, jolting every plate in her hull that was weighted down with tons of water that flowed across her decks and cascaded back into the sea. The demonic gale had thrown her worst punch at the tough little ship and she had survived the boiling cauldron. Time and again she had suffered the great swirling mass of wind and water. It was almost as if Sea Spritehad a human determination about her, knowing without reservation that there was nothing left the sea could throw at her that she couldn't brush aside.

Marverick stared through the pilothouse windshield that had miraculously failed to shatter, his face white as a lily. "That was macabre," he said in a classic understatement. "I had no idea I'd signed aboard a submarine."

No other ship could have withstood such a freak occurrence and survived without sinking to the seabed. But Sea Spritewas no ordinary ship. She had been built tough to tolerate massive polar seas. The steel on her hull was far thicker than average to fight the solid mass of ice floes. But she did not escape unscathed. All but one boat had been swept away.

Gazing astern, Barnum was amazed that his communications gear had somehow survived. Those who suffered belowdecks had no inkling how close they came to ending up forever on the bottom of the sea.

Suddenly, sunlight beamed into the pilothouse. Sea Spritehad broken into Hurricane Lizzie's giant eye. It appeared paradoxical, with a blue sky above and maniacal sea below. To Barnum it seemed evil that a sight so tantalizing could still be so menacing.

Barnum glanced at his communications officer, Mason Jar, who was standing braced against the chart table, gripping the railing with ivory knuckles, looking like he'd seen an army of ghosts. "If you can come back on keel, Mason, contact the Ocean Wandererand tell whoever is in charge that we're coming as quickly as possible through heavy seas."

Still dazed by what he had experienced, Jar slowly emerged from shock, nodded without speaking and walked off toward the communications room as if he was in a trance.

Barnum scanned his radar system and studied the blip that he was certain was the hotel twenty-six miles to the east. Then he programmed his course into the computer and again turned over command to the computerized automated controls. When he finished, he wiped his forehead with an old red bandana and muttered, "Even if we reach her before they go on the rocks, what then? We have no boats to cross over, and if we had they'd be swamped by the heavy seas. Nor do we have a big tow winch with thick cable."

"Not a pretty thought," said Maverick. "Watching helplessly as the hotel crashes into the rocks with all those women and children on board."

"No," said Barnum heavily. "Not a pretty thought at all."

11

Heidi hadn't been home in three days. She caught catnaps on a cot in her office, drank gallons of black coffee and ate little but baloney-and-cheese sandwiches. If she was walking around the Hurricane Center like a somnambulist, it wasn't from lack of sleep but from the stress and anguish of working amid a colossal catastrophe that was about to cause death and destruction on an unheard-of scale. Though she had correctly forecast Hurricane Lizzie's horrifying power from her birth and sent out warnings early, she still felt a sense of guilt that she might have done more.

She watched the projections and images on her monitors with great trepidation as Lizzie raced toward the nearest land.

Because of her early warnings, more than three hundred thousand people had been evacuated to the mountainous hills in the center of the Dominican Republic and its neighbor, Haiti. Still, the death toll would be staggering. Heidi also feared that the storm might veer north and strike Cuba before crashing into southern Florida.

Her phone rang and she wearily picked it up.

"Any change in your forecast as to direction?" asked her husband Harley at the National Weather Service.

"No, Lizzie is still heading due east as if she's traveling on a railroad track."

"Most unusual to travel thousands of miles in a straight line."

"More than unusual. It's unheard-of. Every hurricane on record meandered."

"A perfect storm?"

"Not Lizzie," said Heidi. "She's far from being perfect. I'd class her as a deadly cataclysm of the highest magnitude. An entire fishing fleet has gone missing. Another eight ships – oil tankers, cargo ships and private yachts – have stopped transmitting. Their distress signals are no longer being received, only silence. We have to expect the worst."

"What's the latest word on the floating hotel?" asked Harley.

"At last reports, she broke her moorings and was being driven by gale-force winds and high seas toward the rocky coast of the Dominican Republic. Admiral Sandecker sent one of NUMA's research ships to its position in an effort to tow it to safety."

"Sounds like a lost cause."

"I fear that we're looking at a sea disaster beyond any in the past," said Heidi grimly.

"I'm going to head home for a few hours. Why don't you take a break and come too? I'll fix us a nice dinner."

"I can't, Harley. Not just yet. Not until I can predict Lizzie's next mood."

"With her infinite strength, that could be days, even weeks."

"I know," said Heidi slowly. "That's what scares me. If her energy doesn't begin to diminish as she passes over the Dominican Republic and Haiti, she'll strike the mainland in full force."

Summer had a fascination with the sea beginning when her mother insisted she learn to dive when she was only six years old. A small tank and air regulator was custom made for her small body and she was given lessons by the finest instructors, as was her brother Dirk. She became a creature of the sea, studying its inhabitants, its caprices and spirits. She came to understand it after swimming in its waters serene and blue. She also experienced its monumental power during a typhoon in the Pacific. But like a wife with a husband of twenty years who suddenly sees a man with a hateful and sadistic streak, she was witnessing firsthand just how cruel and malicious the sea could be.

Sitting in the front of Pisces,brother and sister stared up through the big transparent bubble at the boiling turmoil above. As the hurricane's outer rim slashed across Navidad Bank, the fury seemed remote and distant, but as its strength increased it soon became apparent that their cozy little habitat was in dire danger and ill-prepared to protect them.

The crests of the waves easily passed over them at their forty-foot depth, but soon the waves grew to towering dimensions, and when the troughs dropped down to the seabed, Dirk and Summer found the habitat completely exposed to the surface rain before the next sea swept over them.

Time after time Pisceswas battered and buffeted by the unending march of the huge waves. The inner-space station was built to take the pressure of the deep and her steel shell had no problem in repelling the besieging waters. But the terrible force exerted on her outer surface soon began to move her across the bottom. The four support legs were not connected to a base. They sat individually embedded only a few inches in the coral. Only Pisces'ssixty-five-ton mass kept the chamber from being lifted and hurled across the reef like an empty bottle.

Then the same pair of enormous waves that had buried Sea Spriteonly twenty miles distant struck Navidad Bank, relentlessly crushing the coral and shattering its delicate infrastructure into millions of fragments. The first one pitched Piscesover on her side and sent her tumbling round and round like a barrel rolling across a rocky desert. Despite the occupants' attempts to hang on to anything solid, they were tossed about as if they were rag dolls in a blender.

The habitat was pitched and tossed for nearly two hundred yards before it came to rest, perched precariously on the edge of a narrow coral crevasse. Then the second monstrous wave struck and threw the habitat over the edge.

Piscesdropped one hundred and twenty feet to the floor of the crevasse, bumping and grinding against the coral walls during its fall, striking the bottom in a great explosion of sand particles. Pisceslanded flat on its right side and lay wedged between the walls of the crevasse. Inside, everything that wasn't tied down had been thrown in a dozen different directions. Dishes, food supplies, dive equipment, bedding, personal clothing was strewn in mad confusion.

Ignoring the pain from a dozen bruises and a sprained ankle, Dirk immediately crawled to the side of his sister, who lay in a ball between the upended bunk beds. He looked into her wide gray eyes and for the first time since they were old enough to walk he saw sheer fright. He gently took her head in his hands and smiled tightly.

"How was that for a wild ride?"

She looked up into his face, saw the game smile and slowly breathed deeply as her fear subsided. "During the chaos I kept thinking that we were born together and we would die together."

"My sister the pessimist. We've got another seventy years to tease each other." Then he asked with concern, "Are you injured?"

She shook her head. "I wedged myself under the bunks and wasn't bounced around as badly as you." Then she looked outside the viewing bubble at the cauldron above. "The habitat?"

"Still sound and leakproof. No wave, no matter how gigantic, could break up Pisces.She's got a four-inch steel skin."

"The storm?"

"Still raging, but we'll be safe down here. The waves are passing over the canyon without causing turbulence."

Her gaze swept the jumbled clutter. "God, what a mess."

Pleased that Summer had survived the ordeal without injury, Dirk made an inspection of the life-support systems while his sister began tackling the debris. There was no hope of putting everything back where it belonged, not with the habitat lying on its side. She simply stacked everything into neat piles and laid blankets over sharp protrusions from instruments, valves, gauges and systems mountings. Without a floor, they had to climb over it all to move around. She felt strange to be existing in an environment where everything was turned on a ninety-degree angle.

She felt more secure knowing they had survived up until now. The storm could no longer threaten them in their coral canyon with its steep walls. Down deep, there was no howling wind to hear, no beating wind when the trough of a wave exposed the chamber to the atmosphere. Her fear and suspense of what might happen next began to fade. They were safe until Sea Spritebraved the hurricane and returned. And there was the warmth and comfort of her brother, who had the courage and strength of their legendary father.

But the expression of confidence she had come to expect was not in his face when he came and sat on the wall beside her, favoring the bruises on his body that were turning black and blue.

"You look glum," she said. "What is it?"

"The fall into the crevasse tore off the lines connecting the air bottles to our life-support system. According to the air pressure gauges, the four tanks that were undamaged will supply us with only fourteen hours of air before they run dry."

"What about the dive tanks we left in the entry lock?"

"Only one was left inside for a valve repair. It contains only enough to last the two of us for forty-five minutes at best."

"We could use it to go outside and bring back the others," Summer said hopefully. "Then wait a day or two until the storm deteriorates before abandoning the habitat, and use our inflatable raft to drift on the surface until rescued."

He shook his head solemnly. "The bad news is we're trapped. The hatch on the entry lock is jammed against the coral. Nothing short of dynamite could force it open far enough for us to slip outside."

Summer sighed very deeply and then said, "It looks like our fate is in Captain Barnum's hands."

"I'm sure we're still on his mind. He won't forget us."

"He should be informed of our situation."

Dirk straightened and put his hands on her shoulders. "The radio was smashed when we plunged into the crevasse."

"We could still release our homing device so they know we're alive," she said hopefully.

His voice came in a soft, controlled tone. "It was mounted on the side of the habitat that fell against the bottom. It must have been crushed. Even if it survived, there is no way to release it."

"When they come looking for us," she said tensely, "they won't have an easy time finding us down here in the crevasse."

"You can bet Barnum will send every boat and diver on board Sea Spriteto scour the reef."

"You're talking as if we had enough air for days instead of hours."

"Not to worry, sis," Dirk said confidently. "For the moment, we're safe and secure from the storm. The minute the sea flattens, the crew aboard Sea Spritewill come for us like a drunk after a case of Scotch that fell off a liquor truck." Then he added, "After all, we're their number one priority."