Seawitch

Chapter 3

COFFIELD had been wrong in his guess. Lord Worth was possessed of no private arsenal. But the United States armed services were, and in their dozens, at that.

The two break-ins were accomplished with the professional expertise born of a long and arduous practice that precluded any possibility of mistakes. The targets in both cases were government arsenals, one army and one naval. Both, naturally, were manned by round-the-clock guards, none of whom was killed or even injured if one were to disregard the cranial contusions—and those were few—caused by sandbagging and sapping: Lord Worth had been very explicit on the use of minimal violence.

Giuseppe Palermo, who looked and dressed like a successful Wall Street broker, had the more difficult task of the two, although, as a man who held the Mafia in tolerant contempt, he regarded the exercise as almost childishly easy. Accompanied by nine almost equally respectable men—sartorially respectable, that is—three of whom were dressed as army majors, he arrived at the Florida arms depot at fifteen minutes to midnight. The six young guards, none of whom had even seen or heard a shot fired in anger, were at their drowsiest and expecting nothing but their midnight reliefs. Only two were really fully awake—the other four had dozed away—and those two, responding to a heavy and peremptory hammering on the main entrance door, were disturbed, not to say highly alarmed, by the appearance of three army officers who announced that they were making a snap inspection to test security and alertness. Five minutes later all six were bound and gagged—two of them uncon-cious and due to wake up with very sore heads because of their misguided attempts to put up a show of resistance—and safely locked up in one of the many so-called secure rooms in the depot.

During this period and the next twenty minutes, one of Palermo's men, an electronics expert called Jamieson, made a thorough search for all the external alarm signals to both the police and nearest military HQ. He either bypassed or disconnected them all.

It was when he was engaged in this that the relief guards, almost as drowsy as those whom they had been expecting to find, made their appearance and were highly disconcerted to find themselves looking at the muzzles of three machine carbines. Within minutes, securely bound but not gagged, they had joined the previous guards, whose gags were now removed. They could now shout until doomsday, as the nearest habitation was more than a mile away: the temporary gagging of the first six guards had been merely for the purpose of preventing their warning off their reliefs.

Palermo now had almost eight hours before the break-in could be discovered.

He sent one of his men, Watkins, to bring round to the front the concealed minibus in which they had arrived. All of them, Watkins excepted, changed from their conservative clothing and military uniforms into rough workclothes, which resulted in rather remarkable changes in their appearance and character. While they were doing this, Watkins went to the depot garage, picked a surprisingly ineffectual lock, selected a two-ton truck, hot-wired the ignition—the keys were, understandably, missing—and drove out to the already open main loading doors of the depot.

Palermo had brought along with him one by the name of Jacobson who, between sojourns in various penitentiaries, had developed to a remarkable degree the fine art of opening any type of lock, combination or otherwise. Fortunately his services were not needed, for nobody, curiously enough, had taken the trouble to conceal some score of keys hanging on the wall in the main office.

In less than half an hour Palermo and his men had loaded aboard the truck—chosen because it was a covered-van type—a staggering variety of weaponry, ranging from bazookas to machine pistols, together with sufficient ammunition for a battalion and a considerable amount of high explosives. Then they relocked the doors and took the keys with them—when the next relief arrived at eight in the morning it would take them that much longer to discover what had actually happened. After that, they locked the loading and main entrance doors.

Watkins drove the minibus, with its load of discarded clothes, back to its place of concealment, returned to the truck and drove off. The other nine sat or lay in varying degrees of discomfort among the weaponry in the back. It was as well for them that it was only twenty minutes' drive to Lord Worth's private, isolated and deserted heliport—deserted, that is, except for two helicopters, their pilots and copilots.

The truck, using only its sidelights, came through the gates of the heliport and drew up alongside one of the helicopters. Discreet portable loading lights were switched on, casting hardly more than a dull glow, but sufficient for a man only eighty yards away and equipped with a pair of night glasses to distinguish clearly what was going on. And Roomer, prone in the spinney with the binoculars to his eyes, was only eighty yards away. No attempt had been made to wrap or in any way to disguise the nature of the cargo. It took only twenty minutes to unload the truck and stow its contents away in the helicopter under the watchful eye of a pilot with a keen regard for weight distribution.

Palermo and his men, with the exception of Watkins, boarded the other helicopter and sat back to await promised reinforcements. The pilot of this helicopter had already, as was customary, radio-filed his flight plan to the nearest airport, accurately giving his destination as the Seawitch. To have done otherwise would have been foolish indeed. The radar tracking systems along the Gulf states are as efficient as any in the world, and any course deviation from a falsely declared destination would have meant that, in very short order, two highly suspicious pilots in supersonic jets would be flying alongside and asking some very unpleasant questions.

Watkins drove the truck back to the garage, Jewired the ignition, locked the door, retrieved the minibus and left. Before dawn, all his friends* clothes would have been returned to their apartments, and the minibus, which had of course been stolen, to its parking lot.

Roomer was getting bored and his elbows were becoming sore. Since the minibus had driven away some half hour ago he had remained in the same prone position, his night glasses seldom far from his eyes. His sandwiches were gone, as was all his coffee, and he would have given much for a cigarette but decided it would be unwise. Clearly those aboard the helicopters were waiting for something, and that something could only be the arrival of Lord Worth.

He heard the sound of an approaching engine and saw another vehicle, with only sidelights on, turn through the gateway. It was another minibus. Whoever was inside was not the man he was waiting for, he knew: Lord Worth was not much given to traveling in minibuses. The vehicle drew up alongside the passenger helicopter and its passengers disembarked and climbed aboard the helicooter. Roomer counted twelve in all.

The last was just disappearing inside the helicopter when another vehicle arrived. This one didn't pass through the gateway; it swept through it, with only parking lights on. A Rolls Royce. Lord Worth, for a certainty. As if to redouble his certainty, there caine to his ears the soft swish of tires on the grass. He twisted round to see a car, both lights and engine off, coasting to a soundless stop beside his own.

«Over here,» Roomer called softly. Mitchell joined him, and together they watched the white-clad figure of Lord Worth leave the Rolls and mount the steps to the helicopter. «I guess that completes the payload for the night.»

«The payload being?»

«There are twenty-one other passengers aboard that machine. I can't swear to it, but instinct tells me they are not honest, upright citizens. They say that every multimillionaire has his own private army. I think I've just seen one of Lord Worth's platoons filing by.»

«The second chopper's not involved?»

«It sure is. It's the star of the show—loaded to the gunwales with armament.»

«That’s not a crime in itself. Could be part of Lord Worth's private collection. He's got one of the biggest in the country.»

«Private citizens aren't allowed to have bazookas, machine guns and high explosives in their collections.»

«He borrowed them, you think?»

«Yeah. Without payment or receipt.»

«The nearest government arsenal?»

«I'd say so.»

«They're still sitting there. Maybe they're waiting a preset time before takeoff. Might be some time. Let's go to one of the cars and radio the law.»

«The nearest army command post is seven miles from here.»

«Right.»

The two men were on their feet and had taken only two steps toward the cars when, almost simultaneously, the engines of both helicopters started up with their usual clattering roar. Seconds later both machines lifted off.

Mitchell said: «Well, it was a thought.»

« 'Was' is right. Look at 'em go: honest Godfearing citizens with all their navigational lights on.»

«That's in case someone bumps into them,» Mitchell said. «We could call up the nearest air force base and have them forced down.»

«On what grounds?»

«Stolen government property.»

«No evidence. Just our say-so. They'll find out Lord Worth is aboard. Who's going to take the word of a couple of busted cops against his?»

«No one. A sobering thought. Ever felt like a pariah?»

«Like now. I feel goddamned helpless. Well, let's go and find some evidence. Where's the nearest arsenal from here?»

«About a mile from the command post. I know where.»

«Why don't they keep their damned arsenals inside the command posts?»

«Because ammunition can and does blow up. How would you like to be sitting in a crowded barracks when an ammo dump blew up next door?»

Roomer straightened from the keyhole of the main door of the arms depot and reluctantly pocketed the very large set of keys which any ill-disposed law officer could have jailed him for carrying.

«I thought I could open any door with this bunch. But not this one. Give you one guess where the keys are now.»

«Probably sailing down from a chopper into the Gulf.»

«Right. Those loading doors have the same lock. Besides that, nothing but barred windows. You don't have a hacksaw on you, do you, Mike?»

«I will next time.» He shone his flashlight through one of the barred windows. All he could see was his own reflection. He took out his pistol and, holding it by the barrel, struck the heavy butt several times against the glass, without any noticeable effect—hardly surprising, considering that the window lay several inches beyond the bars and the force of the blows was minimal.

Roomer said: «What are you trying to do?»

Mitchell was patient. «Break the glass.»

«Breaking the glass won't help you get inside.»

«It'll help me see and maybe hear. I wonder if that's just plate glass or armored stuff.» «How should I know?»

«Well, we'll find out. If it's armored, the bullet will ricochet. Get down.» Both men crouched and Mitchell fired one shot at an upward angle. The bullet did not ricochet. It passed through, leaving a jagged hole with radiating cracks. Mitchell began chipping away round the hole but desisted when Roomer appeared with a heavy car j ack-handle: a few powerful blows and Roomer had a hole almost a foot in diameter. Mitchell shone his flash through this: an office lined with filing cabinets and an open door beyond. He put his ear as close to the hole as possible and he heard it at once, the faint but unmistakable sound of metal clanging against metal and the shouting of unmistakably hoarse voices. Mitchell withdrew his head and nodded to Roomer, who leaned forward and listened in turn.

Roomer straightened and said: «There are a lot of frustrated people in there.»

About a mile beyond the entrance to the army command post they stopped by a roadside telephone booth. Mitchell telephoned the army post, told them the state of defenses at their arsenal building would bear investigation and that it would be advisable for them to bring along a duplicate set of keys for the main door. When asked who was speaking he hung up and returned to Roomer's car.

'Too late to call in the Air Force now, I suppose?»

«Too late. They'll be well out over extraterritorial waters by now. There's no state of war. Not yet.» He sighed. «Why, oh why, didn't I have an infrared movie camera tonight?»

Over in Mississippi Conde's task of breaking into the naval depot there turned out to be ridiculously easy. He had with him only six men, although he had sixteen more waiting in reserve aboard the 120-foot vessel Roomer, which was tied up dockside less than thirty feet from the arsenal. Those men had already effectively neutralized the three armed guards who patrolled the dock area at night.

The arsenal was guarded by only two retired naval petty officers, who regarded their job not only as a sinecure but downright nonsense, for who in his right mind would want to steal depth charges and naval guns? It was their invariable custom to prepare themselves for sleep immediately upon arrival, and asleep they soundly were when Conde and his men entered through the door they hadn't even bothered to lock.

They used two forklift trucks to trundle depth charges, light, dual-purpose antiaircraft guns, and a sufficiency of shells down to the dockside, then used one of the scores of cranes that lined the dockside to lower the stolen equipment into the hold of the Roamer, which was then battened down. Clearing customs was the merest formality. The customs official had seen the Roamer come and go so many times that they had long ago lost count. Besides, no one was going to have the temerity to inspect the oceangoing property of one of the very richest men in the world: the Roamer was Lord Worth's seismo-logical survey vessel.

At its base not far from Havana, a small, conventionally powered and Russian-built submarine slipped its moorings and quietly put out to sea. The hastily assembled but nonetheless hand-picked crew was informed that they were on a training cruise designed to test the seagoing readiness of Castro's tiny fleet. Not a man aboard believed a word of this.

Meanwhile Cronkite had not been idle. Unlike the others, he had no need to break into any place to obtain explosives. He had merely to use his own key. As the world's top expert in capping blazing gushers he had access to an unlimited number and great variety of explosives. He made a selection of those and had them trucked down to Galveston from Houston, where he lived; apart from the fact that Houston was the oil-rig center of the South, the nature of Cronkite's business made it essential for him to live within easy reach of an airport with international connections.

As the truck was on its way, another seismological vessel, a converted coast guard cutter, was also closing in on Galveston. Without explaining his reasons for needing the vessel, Cronkite had obtained it through the good offices of Durant, who had represented the Galveston-area companies at the meeting of the ten at Lake Tahoe. The cutter, which went by the name of Tiburon, was normally based at Freeport, and Cronkite could quite easily have taken the shipment there, but this would not have suited his purpose. The tanker Crusader was unloading at Galveston, and the Crusader was one of the three tankers that plied regularly between the Seawitch and the Gulf ports.

The Tiburon and Cronkite arrived almost simultaneously sometime after midnight. Mul-hooney, the Tiburorfs skipper, eased his ship into a berth conveniently close to the Crusader. Mulhooney was not the regular captain of the Tiburon. That gentleman had been so overcome by the sight of two thousand dollars in cash that he had fallen ill, and would remain so for a few days. Cronkite had recommended his friend Mulhooney. Cronkite didn't immediately go aboard the Tiburon. Instead he chatted with a night-duty dock inspector, who watched with an idle eye as what were obviously explosives were transferred to the Tiburon. The two men had known each other for years. Apart from observing that someone out in the Gulf must have been careless with matches again, the port official had no further pertinent comment to make. In response to idle questioning, Cronkite learned that the Crusader had finished off-loading its cargo and would be sailing in approximately one hour.

He boarded the Tiburon, greeted Mulhooney and went straight to the crew's mess. Seated among the others at this early hour were three divers already fully clad in wetsuits. He gave brief instructions and the three men went on deck. Under cover of the superstructure and on the side of the ship remote from the dock the three men donned scuba gear, went down a rope ladder and slid quietly into the water. Six objects — radio-detonated magnetic mines equipped with metallic clamps — were lowered to them. They were so constructed as to have a very slight negative buoyancy, which made them easy to tow under water.

In the predawn darkness the hulls of the vessels cast so heavy a shadow from the powerful shorelights that the men could have swum unobserved on the surface. But Cronkite was not much given to taking chances. The mines were attached along the stern half of the Crusader's hull, thirty feet apart and at a depth of about ten feet. Five minutes after their departure the scuba divers were back. After a further five minutes the Tiburon put out to sea.

Despite his near-legendary reputation for ruth-lessness, Cronkite had not lost touch with humanity: to say that he was possessed of an innate kindliness would have been a distortion of the truth, for he was above all an uncompromising and single-minded realist, but one with no innate killer instinct. Nonetheless, there were two things that would at that moment have given him considerable satisfaction.

The first of those was that he would have preferred to have the Crusader at sea before pressing the sheathed button before him on the bridge. He had no wish that innocent lives should be lost in Galveston, but it was a chance that he had to take. Limpet mines, as the Italian divers had proved at Alexandria in World War —and this to the great distress of the Royal Navy— could be devastating^ effective against moored vessels. But what might happen to high-buoyancy limpets when a ship got under way and worked up to maximum speed was impossible to forecast, as there was no known case of a vessel under way having been destroyed by limpet mines. It was at least possible that water pressure on a ship under way might well overcome the tenuous magnetic hold of the limpets and tear them free.

The second temptation was to board the helicopter on the Tiburorfs after helipad—many such vessels carried helicopters for the purpose of having them drop patterned explosives on the seabed to register on the seismological computer—and have a close look at what would be the ensuing havoc, a temptation he immediately regarded as pure self-indulgence.

He put both thoughts from his mind. Eight miles out from Galveston he unscrewed the covered switch and leaned firmly on the button beneath. The immediate results were wholly unspectacular, and Cronkite feared that they might be out of radio range. But in the port area in Galveston the results were highly spectacular. Six shattering explosions occurred almost simultaneously, and within twenty seconds the Crusader, her stern section torn in half, developed a marked list to starboard as thousands of tons of water poured through the ruptured side. Another twenty seconds later the distant rumble of the explosions reached the ears of listeners on the Tiburon. Cronkite and Mulhooney, alone on the bridge—the ship was on automatic pilot— looked at each other with grim satisfaction. Mulhooney, an Irishman with a true Irishman's sense of occasion, produced an opened bottle of champagne and poured two brimming glassfuls. Cronkite, who normally detested the stuff, consumed his drink with considerable relish and set his glass down. It was then that the Crusader caught fire.

Its gasoline tanks, true, were empty, but its engine diesel fuel tanks were almost completely topped up. In normal circumstances ignited diesel does not explode but burns with a ferocious intensity. Within seconds the smoke-veined flames had risen to a height of two hundred feet, the height increasing with each moment until the whole city was bathed in a crimson glow, a phenomenon which the citizens of Galveston had never seen before and would almost certainly never see again. Even aboard the Tiburon the spectacle had an awe-inspiring and unearthly quality about it. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the fire stopped as the Crusader turned completely over on its side, the harbor waters quenching the flames into hissing extinction. Some patches of floating oil still flickered feebly across the harbor, but that was all that there was to it.

Clearly Lord Worth was going to require a new tanker, a requirement that presented quite a problem. In this area of a gross oversupply of tankers, any one of scores of laid-up supertankers could be had just through exercising enough strength to lift a telephone. But 50,000-ton tankers, though not a dying breed, were a dwindling breed, principally because the main shipyards throughout the world had stopped producing them. «Had» is the operative word. Keels of that size and even smaller were now being hastily laid down, but would not be in full operation for a year or two to come. The reason was perfectly simple. Supertankers on the Arabian Gulf-Europe run had to make the long and prohibitively expensive circuit around the Cape of Good Hope because the newly reopened Suez Canal could not accommodate their immense draft, a problem that presented no difficulties to smaller tankers. It was said, and probably with more than a grain of truth, that the notoriously wily Greek shipowners had established a corner on this particular market. The dawn was in the sky.

At that precise moment there were scenes of considerable activity around and aboard the Seawitch. The Panamanian-registered tanker Torbetto was just finishing off-loading the contents of the SeawitcWs massive floating conical oil tank. As they were doing so, two helicopters appeared over the northeastern horizon. Both were very large Sikorsky machines which had been bought by the thrifty Lord Worth for the traditional song, not because they were obsolete but because they were two of the scores that had become redundant since the end of the Vietnam War, and the armed forces had been only too anxious to get rid of them: civilian demand for ex-gunships is not high.

The first of those to land on the helipad debarked twenty-two men, led by Lord Worth and Giuseppe Palermo. The other twenty, who from their appearance were not much given to caring for widows and orphans, all carried with them the impeccable credentials of oil experts of one type or another. That they were experts was beyond question; what was equally beyond question was that none of them would have recognized a barrel of oil if he had fallen into it. They were experts in diving, underwater demolition, the handling of high explosives, and the accurate firing of a variety of unpleasant weapons.

The second helicopter arrived immediately after the first had taken off. Except for the pilot and copilot, it carried no other human cargo. What it did carry was the immense and varied quantity of highly offensive weapons from the Florida arsenal, the loss of which had not yet been reported in the newspapers.

The oil-rig crew watched the arrival of gunmen and weapons with an oddly dispassionate curiosity. They were men to whom the unusual was familiar; the odd, the incongruous, the inexplicable, part and parcel of their daily lives. Oil-rig crews are a race apart, and Lord Worth's men formed a very special subdivision of that race.

Lord Worth called them all together, told of the threat to the Seawitch and the defensive measures he was undertaking, measures which were thoroughly approved of by the crew, who had as much regard for their own skins as had the rest of mankind. Lord Worth finished by saying that he knew he had no need to swear them to secrecy.

In this the noble Lord was perfectly correct. Though they were all experienced, hardly a man aboard had not at one time or another had a close and painful acquaintanceship with the law. There were ex-convicts among them. There were escaped convicts among them. There were those whom the law was very anxious to interview. And there were parolees who had broken their parole. There could be no safer hideouts for those men than the Seawitch and Lord Worth's privately owned motel where they put up during then* off-duty spells. No law officer in his sane mind was going to question the towering respectability and integrity of one of the most powerful oil barons in the world, and by inevitable implication this attitude of mind extended to those in his employ.

In other words, Lord Worth, through the invaluable intermediacy of Commander Larsen, picked his men with extreme care.

Accommodation for the newly arrived men and storage for the weaponry presented no problem. Like many jack-ups, drill ships and sub-mersibles, the Seawitch had two complete sets of accommodation and messes—one for Westerners, the other for Orientals: there were at that time no Orientals aboard.

Lord Worth, Commander Larsen and Palermo held their own private council of war in the luxuriously equipped sitting room which Lord Worth kept permanently reserved for himself. They agreed on everything. They agreed that Cronkite's campaign against them would be distinguished by a noticeable lack of subtlety: outright violence was the only course open to him. Once the oil was off-loaded ashore, there was nothing Cronkite could do about it. He would not attempt to attack and sink a loaded tanker, just as he would not attempt to destroy their huge floating storage tank. Either method would cause a massive oil slick, comparable to or probably exceeding the great oil slick caused by the Torrey Canyon disaster off the southwest coast of England some years previously. The ensuing international uproar would be bound to uncover something, and if Cronkite were implicated he would undoubtedly implicate the major oil companies—who wouldn't like that at all. And that there would be a massive investigation was inevitable: ecology and pollution were still the watchwords of the day.

Cronkite could attack the flexible oil pipe that connected the rig with the tank, but the three men agreed that this could be taken care of. After Conde and the Roamer arrived and its cargo had been hoisted aboard, the Roamer would maintain a constant day-and-night patrol between the rig and the tank. The Seawitch was well-equipped with sensory devices, apart from those which controlled the tensioning anchor cables. A radar scanner was in constant operation atop the derrick, and sonar devices were attached to each of the three giant legs some twenty feet under water. The radar could detect any hostile approach from air or sea, and the dual-purpose antiaircraft guns, aboard and installed, could take care of those. In the highly unlikely event of an underwater attack, sonar would locate the source, and a suitably placed depth charge from the Roamer would attend to that.

Lord Worth, of course, was unaware that at that very moment another craft was moving out at high speed to join Cronkite on the Tiburon. It was a standard and well-established design irreverently known as the «push-pull,» in which water was ducted in through a tube forward under the hull and forced out under pressure at the rear. It had no propeller and had been designed primarily for work close inshore or in swamps, where there was always the danger of the propeller being fouled. The only difference between this vessel—the Starlight—and others was that it was equipped with a bank of storage batteries and could be electrically powered. Sonar could detect and accurately pinpoint a ship's engines and propeller vibrations; it was virtually helpless against an electric push-pull.

Lord Worth and the others considered the possibility of a direct attack on the Seawitch. Because of her high degree of compartmentaliza-tion and her great positive buoyancy, nothing short of an atom bomb was capable of disposing of something as large as a football field. Certainly no conventional weapon could. The attack, when it came, would be localized. The drilling derrick was an obvious target, but how Cronkite could approach it unseen could not be imagined. But Lord Worth was certain of one thing: when the attack came it would be leveled against the Seawitch,

The next half hour was to prove, twice, just how wrong Lord Worth could be.

The first intimations of disaster came as Lord Worth was watching the fully laden Torbello just disappearing over the northern horizon; the Crusader, he knew, was due alongside the tank late that afternoon. Larsen, his face one huge scowl of fury, silently handed Lord Worth a signal just received in the radio office. Lord Worth read it, and his subsequent language would have disbarred him forever from a seat in the House of Lords. The message told, in cruelly unsparing fashion, of the spectacular end of the Crusader hi Galveston. -»'

Both men hurried to the radio room. Larsen contacted the Jupiter, their third tanker then off-loading at an obscure Louisiana port, told its captain the unhappy fate of the Crusader and warned him to have every man on board on constant lookout until they had cleared harbor. Lord Worth personally called the chief of police in Galveston, identified himself and demanded more details of the sinking of the Crusader. These he duly received, and none of them made him any happier. On inspiration, he asked if there had been a man called John Cronkite or a vessel belonging to a man of that name in the vicinity at the time. He was told to hang on while a check was made with Customs. Two minutes later he was told yes, there had been a John Cronkite aboard a vessel called the Tiburon, which had been moored directly aft of the Crusader. It was not known whether Cronkite was the owner or not. The Tiburon had sailed half an hour before the Crusader blew up.

Lord Worth peremptorily demanded that the Tiburon be apprehended and returned to port and that Cronkite be arrested. The police chief pointed out that international law prohibited the arrest of vessels on the high seas except in time of war and, as for Cronkite, there wasn't a shred of evidence to connect him with the sinking of the Crusader. Lord Worth then asked if he would trace the owner of the Tiburon. This the police chief promised to do, but warned that there might be a considerable delay. There were many registers to be consulted.

At that moment the Cuban submarine steaming on the surface at full speed was in the vicinity of Key West and heading directly for the Sea-witch. At almost the same time a missile-armed Russian destroyer slipped its moorings in Havana and set off in apparent pursuit of the Cuban submarine. And very shortly after that, a destroyer departed its home base in Venezuela.

The Roamer, Lord Worth's survey vessel under the command of Conde, was now halfway to its destination.

The Starlight, under the command of Easton, was just moving away from the Tiburon, which was lying stopped in the water. Men on slings had already painted out the ship's name, and with the aid of cardboard stencils were painting in a new name—Georgia. Cronkite had no wish that any vessel with whom they might make contact could radio for confirmation of the existence of a cutter called Tiburon. From aft there came the unmistakable racket of a helicopter engine starting up, then the machine took off, circled and headed southeast, not on its usual pattern-bombing circuit but to locate and radio back to the Tiburon the location and course of the Torbello, if and when it found it. Within minutes the Tiburon was on its way again, heading in approximately the same direction as the helicopter.