Raise the Titanic

"Order full speed ahead, damn it, or I'll run you down."

Butera dropped the phone and fought his way outside onto the bridge wing again. The hurricane was beating the sea into a froth so savage, so angry, that it was nearly impossible to separate air from water. It was all he could do to maintain a hold on the railing.

Then he saw it, the immense bow of the Titanic looming up through the curtain of the thrashing deluge, hardly more than a hundred feet off the starboard quarter. There was nothing he could do now except watch in frozen horror as the menacing mass moved inexorably closer to the Wallace.

"No!" he cried above the wind. "You dirty old corpse; you leave my ship alone."

It was too late. It seemed impossible that the Titanic could ever swing clear of the Wallace's stern. And yet the impossible happened. The great sixty-foot bow rose up on a mountainous wave and hung there suspended just long enough for the tug's screws to take bite and pull her clear. Then the Titanic dropped in the trough, missing the stern of the Wallace by no more than three feet, throwing up a surge that engulfed the entire smaller vessel, carrying away both its lifeboats and one of the ventilators.

The wave tore Butera's grip from the railing and swept him across the bridge, jamming his body against the wheelhouse bulkhead. He lay there totally submerged under the billow, his throat choking, his lungs gasping for air, his brain sluggishly taking strength from the strong pulsing beat of the Wallace's engines that transmitted through the deck. When the water finally drained away, he struggled to his feet and retched his stomach empty.

He clawed his way back into the safety of the wheelhouse. Butera, his senses stunned by the miracle of the Wallace's deliverance, watched the great black apparition that was the Titanic slide by astern until she disappeared again in the shroud of wind-whipped rain.

60

"Leave it to Dirk Pitt to pick up a dame in the middle of the ocean during a hurricane," Sandecker said. "What's your secret?"

"The Pitt curse," Pitt answered, as he tenderly bandaged the swelling on Dana's head. "Women are forever attracted to me under impossible circumstances when I'm in no mood to respond."

Dana began to moan softly.

"She's coming around," Gunn said. He was on his knees next to a cot they had wedged between the gymnasium's old exercise equipment to steady it from the ship's rolling and pitching.

Pitt covered her with a blanket. "She suffered a nasty tap, but her mass of hair probably saved her from anything worse than a concussion."

"How did she come to be on Sturgis's helicopter?" Woodson asked. "I thought she was babysitting the news people on board the Alhambra. "

"She was," Admiral Sandecker said. "Several television network correspondents requested permission to cover the Titanic's haul to New York from aboard the Capricorn. I gave authorization on the condition that Dana accompany them."

"I ferried them over," Sturgis said. "And, I saw Mrs. Seagram disembark when I landed on the Capricorn. It's a mystery to me how she re-entered the helicopter without being noticed."

"Yeah, a mystery," Woodson repeated caustically. "Don't you bother checking your cargo compartment between flights?"

"I'm not running a commercial airline," Sturgis snapped back. He looked as though he was about to hit Woodson. He glanced at Pitt and was met with a disapproving stare. Then, with a visible effort, he reined in his emotions and spoke slowly and firmly "I'd been flying that bird out there steady for twenty hours straight. I was tired. I easily convinced myself that there was no need to bother with a cargo-compartment check because I was certain it was empty. How was I to know Dana Seagram would sneak on board?"

Gunn shook his head. "Why did she do it? Why would she?..."

"I don't know why . . . how the hell should I?" Sturgis said. "Suppose you tell me why she threw a hammer through my rotor blades, wrapped herself up in a tarpaulin, and then clouted herself on the head? Not necessarily in that order."

"Why don't you ask her?" Pitt said. He nodded down at the cot.

Dana was staring up at the men, her eyes devoid of understanding. She looked as though she had just been dragged up from the sanctuary of exhausted sleep.

"Forgive me . . . for asking such a hackneyed question," she murmured. "But, where am I?"

"My dear girl," Sandecker said, kneeling at her side, "you're on the Titanic."

She looked dazedly at the admiral, disbelief written across her face. "That can't be?"

"Oh, I assure you it is," Sandecker said. "Pitt, there's a bit of scotch left. Bring me a glass."

Pitt obediently did as he was told and handed Sandecker the glass. Dana took a swallow of the Cutty Sark, choked on it and coughed, holding her head as if to contain the pain that had suddenly exploded in her skull.

"There, there, my dear." It was plain to see Sandecker was somewhat at a loss as to how to treat a woman in agony. "Rest easy. You've suffered a nasty blow on the head."

Dana felt the bandage circling her hair and then clutched the admiral's hand knocking the glass on the deck.

Pitt winced as the scotch spilled. Women just don't appreciate good booze.

"No, no, I'm all right." She struggled to a sitting position on the cot and stared in wonder at the strange mechanical contrivances. "The Titanic," she said the name reverently. "I'm actually on the Titanic?"

"Yes." Pitt's voice was edged with sharpness. "And, we'd like to know how you got here."

She looked at him, half-uncertainly, half-confused, and said, "I don't know. I honestly don't know. The last thing I recall I was on the Capricorn."

"We found you in the helicopter," Pitt said.

"The helicopter . . . I lost my make-up kit . . . must have dropped it on the flight from the Alhambra." She forced a wan smile. "Yes, that's it. I returned to the helicopter to search for my make-up kit. I found it jammed between the fold-up seats. I tried pulling it free when . . . well, I guess I fainted and hit my head when I fell."

"Fainted? You're sure you-" Pitt broke off his question and asked another instead. "What was the very last thing you remember seeing before you blacked out?"

She thought a moment, staring as if at some distant vision in time. Those coffee-brown eyes seemed unnaturally large against her pale and strained face.

Sandecker patted her hand paternally. "Just take your time."

Finally her lips formed a word. "Boots."

"Say again," Pitt ordered.

"A pair of boots," she answered as if seeing a revelation. "Yes, I remember now, a pair of sharp-toed cowboy boots."

"Cowboy boots?" Gunn asked, his expression blank.

Dana nodded. "You see, I was down on my hands and knees trying to extricate my make-up kit, and then . . . I don't know . . . they just seemed to be there . . ." She paused.

"What color were they?" Pitt prodded her.

"Kind of a yellow, cream color."

"Did you see the man's face?"

She started to shake her head and caught herself at the first stab of pain. "No, everything went dark then . . . that's all there is . . . ." Her voice trailed off.

Pitt could see that there was nothing to be gained by further interrogation. He looked down at Dana and smiled. She looked up and smiled back with an anxious-to-please smile.

"We dirty old men had best leave you alone to rest for a while," he said. "If you need anything, one of us will always be close by."

Sandecker followed Pitt over to the entrance to the grand staircase. "What do you make of it?" Sandecker asked. "Why would anyone want to harm Dana?"

"For the same reason they killed Henry Munk."

"You think she got wise to one of the Soviet agents?"

"More likely, in her case, it was a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"The last thing we need on our hands now is an injured woman." Sandecker sighed. "There'll be hell to pay when Gene Seagram gets my radio message about what happened to his wife."

"With all due respect, sir, I told Gunn not to send your message. We can't risk a change in plans at the last minute. Men make cautious decisions where women are concerned. We won't hesitate to risk the lives of a dozen members of our own sex, but we'll balk every time when it comes to endangering one of the female species. What Seagram, the President, Admiral Kemper, and the others in Washington don't know won't hurt them, at least for the next twelve hours."

"It would appear my authority means nothing around here," Sandecker said acidly. "Anything else you neglected to tell me, Pitt? Like who those outlandish cowboy boots belong to?"

"The boots belong to Ben Drummer."

"I've never seen him wear them. How would . . . how could you know that?"

"I discovered them when I searched his quarters on the Capricorn."

"Now you've added burglarizing to your other talents," Sandecker said.

"Drummer wasn't alone. Giordino and I have searched every one of the salvage crews' belongings over the past month."

"Find anything of interest?"

"Nothing incriminating."

"Who do you think injured Dana?"

It wasn't Drummer. That much is certain. He's got at least a dozen witnesses including you and me, Admiral, who will testify that he's been on board the Titanic since yesterday. It would have been impossible for him to attack Dana Seagram on a ship that was fifty miles away."

At that moment, Woodson came up and caught Pitt's arm. "Sorry for the interruption, boss, but we just received an urgent call from the Juneau. I'm afraid it's bad news."

"Let's have it," Sandecker said wearily. "The outlook can't possibly be painted any blacker than it is now."

"Oh, but it can," Woodson said. "The message is from the missile cruiser's captain and reads 'Have received distress call from eastbound freighter Laguna Star, bearing zero five degrees, a hundred and ten miles north of your position. Must respond. Repeat, must respond. Sorry to leave you. Good luck to the Titanic!'"

"'Good luck to the Titanic'," Sandecker echoed. His voice was flat and empty of life. "We might as well raise a flashing sign on the hull that says, 'Welcome thieves and pirates. Come one, come all'."

So now it begins, Pitt thought to himself.

But the only sensation that coursed through his body was a sudden, overwhelming urge to go to the bathroom.

61

The air in Admiral Joseph Kemper's Pentagon office reeked of stale cigarette smoke and half-eaten sandwiches, and it almost seemed to crackle under the invisible cloud of tension.

Kemper and Gene Seagram were huddled over the admiral's desk in quiet conversation while Mel Donner and Warren Nicholson, the CIA director, sat together on the sofa, their feet propped on a coffee table, and dozed. But they jerked upright in full wakefulness when the strange buzz that was specially tuned into Kemper's red telephone broke the hushed quiet. Kemper grunted into the receiver and laid it back in its cradle.

"It was the security desk. The President is on his way up."

Donner and Nicholson glanced at each other and heaved themselves off the sofa. They had no sooner cleared the coffee table of the evening's debris, straightened their ties and donned their coats when the door opened and the President strode in followed by his Kremlin security adviser, Marshall Collies.

Kemper came from behind his desk and shook the President's hand. "Nice to see you, Mr. President. Please make yourself at home. May I get you something?"

The President scanned his watch and then grinned. "Three hours yet before the bars close. How about a Bloody Mary?"

Kemper grinned back and nodded to his aide. "Commander Keith, will you do the honors?"

Keith nodded. "One Bloody Mary coming up, sir."

"I hope you gentlemen won't mind me standing watch with you," the President said, "but I have a heavy stake in this too!"

"Not at all, sir," Nicholson answered. "We're happy to have you."

"What is the situation at the moment?"

Admiral Kemper gave a full briefing to the President, describing the unexpected ferocity of the hurricane, showing the positions of the ships on a projected wall map, and explaining the Titanic's towing operation.

"Was it absolutely necessary that the Juneau be ordered off station?" the President asked.

"A distress call is a distress call," Kemper replied solemnly, "and must be answered by every ship in the area, regardless of the circumstances."

"We have to play according to the other team's rules until half time," Nicholson said. "After that, it's our game."

"Do you think, Admiral Kemper, that the Titanic can stand up to the battering of a hurricane?"

"As long as the tugs can keep her bow into the wind and sea, she's an odds-on favorite to come through with flying colors."

"And if for some reason the tugs cannot keep her from swinging broadside to the waves?"

Kemper avoided the President's gaze and shrugged.

"Then it's in God's hands."

"Nothing could be done?"

"No, sir. There is simply no way to protect any one vessel caught in the clutches of a hurricane. It becomes a case of every ship for herself."

"I see."

A knock at the door, and another officer entered, laid two slips of paper on Kemper's desk, and retreated.

Kemper read the notes and poked up, his face set in a grim expression. "A message from the Capricorn," he said. "Your wife, Mr. Seagram . . . your wife is reported missing. A search party aboard ship was unable to locate her. They fear she was lost overboard. I'm sorry."

Seagram sagged into Collins' arms, his eyes widened in stunned horror. "Oh my God!" he cried. "It can't be true. Oh God! What am I going to do. Dana . . . Dana. . ."

Donner rushed to his side. "Steady, Gene. Steady." He and Collins steered Seagram over to the sofa and gently lowered him to the cushions.

Kemper gestured to the President for his attention. "There's another message, sir. From the Samuel R. Wallace, one of the tugs towing the Titanic. The towing cable," Kemper said. "It snapped. The Titanic is adrift in the center of the hurricane."

The cable hung like a dead snake over the stern of the Wallace, its severed end swaying in the black depths a quarter of a mile below.

Butera stood frozen beside the great electric winch, refusing to believe his eyes. "How?" he shouted in Ensign Kelly's ear. "How could it part? It was built to take worse stress than this."

"Can't figure it," Kelly yelled back above the storm. "There was no extreme stress on her when she went."

"Bring her up, Ensign. Let's take a look."

The ensign nodded and gave the orders. The brake was released and the reel began turning, pulling the wire up from the sea. A solid sheet of spray dashed against the cablehouse. The dead weight of the wire acted as an anchor, dragging down the stern of the Wallace, and each time a column of water approached, it rose high over the wheelhouse and came thundering down upon it with a shock that jarred the entire tug.

At last the end of the tow cable appeared over the stern and snaked up onto the reel. As soon as the brake was applied, Butera and Kelly moved in and began examining the frayed strands.

Butera stared at it, his face twisted in stunned incomprehension. He touched the burned wire ends and looked dumbly at the ensign.

The ensign did not share Butera's muteness. "Jesus Christ in heaven," he shouted hoarsely. "It's been cut through with an acetylene torch."

Pitt was down on his hands and knees on the cargo floor of the helicopter, sweeping his flashlight under the folded passenger seats when the Titanic's tow cable dropped into the sea.

Outside the wind howled with demonic power. Pitt couldn't have known it, but without the tug's steadying influence, the Titanic's bow was being forced by the raging sea to leeward, exposing her entire flank to the unleashed furies. She was beginning to broach to.

It had taken him only two minutes to find Dana's make-up kit where it had solidly jammed behind one of the folded front seats immediately behind the control-cabin bulkhead. He could easily see why she had had difficulty retrieving the blue nylon case from its prison. Very few women are blessed with mechanical inclinations, and Dana was definitely not one of them. It hadn't occurred to her to simply unclasp the restraining straps and unfold the seat. Pitt did so and the kit fell free into his hand.

He didn't bother opening it; he wasn't interested. What he was interested in was the recessed compartment in the forward bulkhead, where a twenty-man life raft sat, or where it was supposed to sit. The yellow, rubberized cover was there all right, but the raft was gone.

Pitt had no time to appreciate the implication of his discovery. Even as he pulled the empty cover out of its compartment, a monstrous sea crashed against the flank of the helpless Titanic, heeling her great mass over on her starboard side as though she never meant to stop. Pitt made a desperate grab for one of the seat supports, but his fingers closed on air and he was spilled like a sack of potatoes down across the sloping floor, crashing against the partially opened cargo door with such force that he ripped a four-inch gash in his scalp.

Mercifully, the next few hours were lost to Pitt. He was aware of a cold gale sweeping into the fuselage, but not much else. His mind was a vague mass of gray wool and he felt remotely detached from his surroundings. He could not know or even sense when the helicopter shed its triplelashed moorings and was hurled sideways, dropping off the first-class lounge roof onto the Boat Deck, crumpling its tail section, tearing off its rotor blades, before grinding over the railing and falling toward the tormented sea.

62

The Russians came aboard the Titanic during the storm's lull. Deep down in the bowels of the engine and boiler rooms, Spencer and his pumping crew had no chance, not the least opportunity for any resistance. Their total surprise acknowledged Prevlov's dedication to exact planning and detailed execution.

The fight that occurred topside-massacre would have been closer to the truth-was over almost before it began. Five Russian marines, half the boarding force, their faces all but hidden by seaman caps pulled low on top and with huge mufflers wrapped below, were in the gymnasium with automatic machine pistols ready and aimed before anyone could comprehend what was happening.

Woodson was the first to react. He swung from the radio, his eyes widened in a look of recognition, and an expression of pure anger swept over his normally passive face. "You bastard!" he blurted, and then hurled himself at the nearest intruder.

But a knife materialized in the man's hand and he deftly rammed it into Woodson's chest, tearing the photographer's heart nearly in two. Woodson clutched at his killer, then slowly slid downward to the booted feet, shock in his eyes, then disbelief, then pain, and finally the emptiness of death.

Dana sat up on her cot and screamed and screamed. It was that stimulus that finally stung the other members of the salvage crew into action. Drummer caught Woodson's murderer on the cheek with his fist and received the barrel of a machine pistol across his face for his effort. Sturgis launched his body in a flying tackle but his timing was late. A gun butt caught him just above the temple at the same instant he crashed into his intended victim and they both fell to the deck in a heap, the assailant quickly regaining his feet while Sturgis lay there as if dead.

Giordino was in the act of bringing a wrench down on another Russian's skull when there was an ear-splitting crack. A bullet passed through his upraised hand and sent the wrench clattering across the deck. The shot seemed to freeze all movement. Sandecker, Gunn, and Chief Bascom and his men halted in mid action as they abruptly realized that their unarmed defense of the ship was hopeless in the face of guns held by highly trained killers.

At that precise moment a man strode into the room, his intense gray eyes taking in every detail of the scene. He wasted no more than three seconds-three seconds and no more was all Andre Prevlov needed to survey any given situation. He stared down at the still-screaming Dana and smiled graciously. "Do you mind, my dear lady," he said in fluent, idiomatic English. "I think female panic inflicts quite an unnecessary strain on the vocal chords."

Her round eyes were stricken. Her mouth closed and she sat huddled in a ball on the cot, staring at the spreading pool of blood under Omar Woodson and shuddering uncontrollably.

"There now, that's much better." Prevlov followed her eyes to Woodson, then to Drummer, who was sitting on the deck in the process of spitting out a tooth, and then to Giordino, who glared back holding his bleeding hand.

"Your resistance was foolish," Previov said. " One dead and three injured, and for nothing."

"Who are you?" Sandecker demanded. "By what right do you board this ship and murder my crew?"

"Ah! A pity we must meet under such remote and unpleasant circumstances," Prevlov apologized. "You are, of course, Admiral James Sandecker, are you not?"

"My questions still stand," Sandecker spat angrily.

"My name is of no consequence," Prevlov replied. "The answer to your other question is obvious. I am taking over this ship in the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

"My government will never stand idly by and let you get away with it."

"Correction," Prevlov murmured. "Your government will stand idly by."

"You underestimate us."

Prevlov shook his head. "Not I, Admiral. I am fully aware of what your countrymen are capable of. I also know they will not start a war over the legitimate boarding of a derelict ship."

"Legitimate boarding?" Sandecker echoed. "The Civil Salvage Service laws define a derelict vessel as one whose crew has abandoned at sea without intent of returning or attempt at recovery. Since this ship still retains its crew, your presence, sir, constitutes a blatant act of high-seas piracy."

"Spare me your interpretation of maritime legalities." Prevlov held up a protesting hand. "You are quite right, of course, for the moment."

The implication was clear. "You wouldn't dare cast us adrift in the middle of a hurricane."

"Nothing so mundane, Admiral. Besides, I am well aware that the Titanic is taking on water. I need your salvage engineer, Spencer, I believe his name is, and his crew to keep the pumps operating until the storm abates. After that, you and your people will be provided with a life raft. Your departure will then guarantee our right to salvage."

"We cannot be allowed to live to testify," Sandecker said. "Your government would never permit that. You know it, and I know it."

Prevlov looked at him, calm, unaffected. Then he turned casually, almost callously, dismissing Sandecker. He spoke in Russian to one of the marines. The man nodded and, tipped over the radio, and pounded it with the stock of his machine pistol into mangled pieces of metal, glass, and wiring.

"There is no further use for your operations room." Prevlov motioned around the gymnasium. "I have installed my communication facilities in the main dining room on D Deck. If you and the others will be so kind as to follow me, I will see to your comfort until the weather clears."

"One more question," Sandecker said without moving, "You owe me that."

"Of course, Admiral, of course."

"Where is Dirk Pitt?"

"I regret to inform you," Prevlov said with ironic sympathy, that Mr. Pitt was in your helicopter when it was swept over the side into the sea. His death must have come quickly."

63

Admiral Kemper sat opposite a grim-faced President and casually poured four teaspoons of sugar into his coffee cup.

"The aircraft carrier Beecher's Island is nearing the search area. Her planes will begin searching at first light." Kemper forced a thin smile. "Don't worry, Mr. President. We'll have the Titanic back in tow by mid-afternoon. You have my word on it."

The President looked up. "A helpless ship adrift and lost in the middle of the worst storm in fifty years? A ship that's rusted half through after lying on the bottom for seventy-six years? A ship the Soviet government is looking for any excuse to get their hands on? And you say not to worry. You're either a man of unshakable conviction, Admiral, or you're a hyperoptimist."

"Hurricane Amanda." Kemper sighed at the name. "We made allowances for every possible contingency, but nothing in our wildest imagination prepared us for a storm of such tremendous magnitude in the middle of May. It struck so fearfully hard, and on such short notice, that there was no time to reshuffle our priorities and time schedules."

"Suppose the Russians took it into their heads to make their play and are on board the Titanic this minute?"

Kemper shook his head. "Boarding a ship under a hundred-plus-mile-an-hour winds and seventy-foot seas? My years at sea tell me that's impossible."

"A week ago, Hurricane Amanda would have been considered impossible too." The President looked up dully as Warren Nicholson sank in the opposite sofa.

"Any news?"

"Nothing from the Titanic," Nicholson said. "They haven't reported since they entered the eye of the hurricane."

"And the Navy tugs?"

"They still haven't sighted the Titanic-which isn't too surprising. With their radar inoperative, they're reduced to a visual search pattern. A hopeless chore, I'm afraid, in near-zero visibility."

For long moments, there was a suffocating silence. It was finally broken by Gene Seagram. "We can't lose it now, not when we were so close," he said, struggling to his feet. "The terrible price we've paid . . . I've paid . . . the byzanium, oh God, we can't let it be taken away from us again." His shoulders drooped and he seemed to wither as Donner and Collins eased him back down on the sofa.

Kemper spoke in a whisper. "If the worst happens, Mr. President? What then?"

"We write off Sandecker, Pitt, and the others."

"And the Sicilian Project?"

"The Sicilian Project," the President murmured. "Yes, we write that off too."

64

The heavy gray wool slowly began to fade away and Pitt became aware that he was lying in an upside-down position on something hard and in something wet. He hung there long minutes, his mind in the twilight zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, until gradually he was able to pry open his eyes, or at least one eye; the other was caked shut by coagulated blood. Like a man who had just struggled up from a deep dark tunnel into the daylight, he squinted his good eye from right to left, up and down. He was still in the helicopter, his feet and legs curled upward along the floor and his back and shoulders lay against the aft bulkhead.

That accounted for the hardness. The wetness was an understatement. Several inches of water sloshed back and forth around his body. He wondered vaguely how he had come to be contorted in this awkward position.

His head felt as if little men were running around inside it, jabbing pitchforks into his brain. He splashed some water over his face, ignoring the sting of the salt, until the blood diluted and ran off, allowing the eyelid to open. Now that he had regained his peripheral vision he turned his body so that he was sitting on the bulkhead and looking up at the floor. It was like staring at the crazy room of an amusement park fun house.

There was to be no exiting through the cargo door; it had been jammed shut from the beating the fuselage had taken during its journey across the Titanic's decks. Left with no other choice but to get out through the control cabin hatch, Pitt began climbing up the floor, using the cargo tie-down rings for handgrips.

One ring at a time, he pulled himself toward the forward bulkhead. or what now constituted the ceiling. His head ached and he had to stop every few feet, waiting for the cobwebs to clear. At last, he could reach up and touch the door latch. The door wouldn't budge. He pulled out the Colt and pounded at the latch. The force of the blow knocked the pistol out of his wet hand, and it clattered all the way to the rear bulkhead. The door remained stubbornly closed.

Pitt's breath was coming now in heaving gasps. He was on the verge of blacking out from exhaustion. He turned and looked down. The aft bulkhead seemed a long way away. He gripped a cargo tie-down ring with both hands, swung in a series of ever-widening arcs, and then lashed out with both feet, using all the muscle a man can use when he knows it is his last try.

The latch gave and the door sprung upward at an angle of thirty degrees before gravity took over and brought it slamming back down. But the brief opening was all Pitt needed to thrust a hand over the door frame, using his fingers as a jam. He gasped in agony as the door fell across his knuckles. He hung there, soaking up the pain, gathering the strength for the final hurdle. He took a deep breath and heaved his body through the opening as one would climb through a trapdoor in an attic without benefit of a ladder. Then he rested again, waiting for the dizziness to pass and his heart to slow down to a near-normal beat.

He wrapped his bleeding fingers in a sodden handkerchief and took stock of the control cabin. No problem escaping here. The cabin hatch had been torn off its hinges and the windshield glass knocked from its frames. Now that his escape was assured, he began to wonder how long he had been unconscious. Ten minutes? An hour? Half the night? He had no way of knowing as his watch was gone, probably wrenched from his wrist.

What had happened? He tried to analyze the possibilities. Had the helicopter been blown into the sea? Not likely. It would have been Pitt's coffin in the abyss by now. But where had the water in the cargo section come from? Maybe the aircraft had been ripped loose from its moorings and swept against one of the Boat Deck bulkheads of the derelict. That didn't work either. It couldn't explain why the helicopter was standing in a perfect perpendicular position. What he did know for certain was that every additional second spent sitting around in the middle of a hurricane and playing question-and-answer games moved him one second closer to more serious injury or even death. The answers were waiting outside, so he worked himself over the pilot's seat and stared through the shattered cockpit windows into the darkness beyond.

He was staring straight up the side of the Titanic. The gargantuan rusty plates of the hull stretched off into the dim light to the right and left. A quick downward look revealed the angry sea.

The waves were swirling about in massive confusion, often coming together in huge collisions that sounded like an artillery barrage. Visibility was better now; no heavy rain was falling and the wind had slackened to no more than ten or fifteen knots. At first Pitt thought that he must have slept through the hurricane, but then he figured out why the sea was leaping skyward without any sense of direction the Titanic was drifting in the eye of the coil, and only a few more minutes would pass before the full fury of the storm's rear quadrant would fall upon the wallowing ship.

Pitt edged carefully through one of the broken windows over the nose of the helicopter and then dropped onto the deck of the Titanic. No sensuous or erotic interlude with the world's most beautiful woman could have come close to matching the thrill he felt at finding his feet on one side of the old liner's water-logged decks again.

But which deck? Pitt leaned over the railing, twisted around, and looked up. There on the deck above was the bent and broken handrail still clutching a part of the helicopter. That meant he was standing on the B Deck Promenade. He looked down and saw the reason behind the aircraft's ignominious posture.

Its journey toward the boiling sea had been abruptly halted by the landing skids, which had caught and then wedged into the observation openings along the Promenade Deck, leaving the helicopter hanging in an upright stance like some monstrous bug on a wall. The great swells had then slammed against its fuselage, damming it even tighter against the ship.

Pitt had no time to appreciate the miracle of his salvation. For, as he stood there, he felt the increasing pressure from the wind as the tail of the hurricane approached. He had trouble getting his footing and he realized that the Titanic's list had returned and she was leaning heavily to starboard again.

It was then that he noticed the running lights of another ship close by, no more than two hundred yards off the starboard beam. There was no way of telling what size she was; the sea and the sky began melting together as the driving rain returned, lashing his face with the cutting power of sandpaper. Could it be one of the tugs, he wondered? Or perhaps the Juneau had returned. But suddenly Pitt knew the lights were from none of these. A shaft of lightning flashed and he saw the unmistakable dome that could only be the Mikhail Kurkov's radar antennae shield.

By the time he had climbed a stairway and staggered to the helicopter pad on the Boat Deck, he was still wet to the skin and panting from the exertion. He paused to kneel and pick up one of the mooring lines, studying the parted ends of the nylon fibers. Then he rose and leaned into the howling wind and vanished into the curtain of water that enshrouded the ship.

65

The vastness of the Titanic's first-class dining saloon stretched under the ornate ceiling far into the dark shadows beyond the lights, the few remaining leaded glass windows reflecting eerie distortions of the bone-tired and defeated people standing under the guns of the unflinching Russians.

Spencer had been forced to join the group. The shock of incomprehension mirrored in his eyes. He stared at Sandecker incredulously.

"Pitt and Woodson dead? It can't be true."

"It's true all right," Drummer mumbled through a swollen mouth. "One of them sadistic bastards standing there shoved a knife into Woodson's gut."

"A miscalculation on your friend's part," Prevlov said with a shrug. He gazed speculatively at the frightened woman and the nine men standing before him, at their gaunt and blood-caked faces. He seemed to enjoy, in a detached sort of way, their struggle to retain their balance whenever the Titanic was struck broadside by an immense swell. "And speaking of miscalculations, Mr. Spencer, it seems your men have developed a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for manning the pumps. I needn't remind you that unless the water that is pouring in below the waterline is returned to the sea, this ancient monument to capitalistic extravagance will sink."

"So let it sink," Spencer said easily. "At least you and your Communist scum will go with it."

"Not a likely event, particularly when you consider that the Mikhail Kurkov is standing by for just such an emergency." Prevlov selected a cigarette from a gold case and tapped it thoughtfully. "So you see, a sensible man would accept the inevitable and perform his duties accordingly."

"It still beats hell out of letting you get your slimy hands on her."

"You won't get any of us to do your dirty work for you," Sandecker said. There was a quiet finality in his voice.

"Perhaps not." Prevlov was quite unruffled. "On the other hand, I think I shall have the cooperation I require and very soon." He motioned to one of the guards and muttered in Russian. The guard nodded, walked unhurriedly across the dining saloon, grabbed Dana by the arm and roughly pulled her under one of the portable lights.

As one, the salvage crew crowded forward only to be met by four unyielding machine pistols held at gut level. They froze helplessly, rage and hostility seething through their every pore.

"If you harm her," Sandecker whispered, his voice quivering in quiet anger, "you'll pay for it."

"Oh come now, Admiral," Prevlov said. "Rape is for the sick. Only a cretin would attempt blackmailing you and your crew with such a sorry ploy. American men still place their women on marble pedestals. You'd all willingly die in a useless attempt to protect her virtues, and where would that leave me? No, cruelty and torture are crude methods in the fine art of persuasion. Humiliation . . ." He paused, savoring the word. "Yes, humiliation, a magnificent incentive for inducing your men to return to their labors and keep the ship afloat."

Prevlov turned to Dana. She looked at him, pathetic and lost. "Now then, Mrs. Seagram, if you will be so good as to take off your clothes-all of them."

"What kind of cheap trick is this?" Sandecker asked.

"No trick. Mrs. Seagram's modesty will be laid bare, layer after layer until you order Mr. Spencer and his men to cooperate."

"No!" Gunn pleaded. "Don't do it, Dana!"

"Please, no appeals," Prevlov said wearily. "I will have one of my men strip her by force if necessary."

Slowly, barely perceptibly, a strange gleam of belligerence began spreading in Dana's eyes. Then without the slightest hesitation, she slipped out of her jacket, jumpsuit, and underclothing. In less than a minute she stood there in the halo of light, her body supple and alive and very nude.

Sandecker turned his back and one by one the other hardened salvage men followed suit until they were facing away into the darkness.

"You will look upon her," Prevlov said coldly. "Your gallant gesture is touching, but completely useless. Turn around, gentlemen, our little performance is just beginning-"

"I think this stupid, chauvinistic bullshit has gone far enough."

Every head jerked around as if yanked by the strings of a puppeteer at the sound of Dana's voice. She stood there with legs apart, hands on hips, breasts thrust outward, and her eyes blazed with a mocking awareness. Even with the unsightly bandage around her head she looked magnificent.

"The admission is free, boys, stare all you want. A woman's body is no big secret. You've all seen and undoubtedly touched one before. Why all the bashful glances?" Then her eyes changed to shrewd reflection and her lips lifted away from her teeth and she began laughing. She had decisively stolen the stage from Prevlov.

He stared at her, his mouth slowly tightening. "An impressive performance, Mrs. Seagram, an impressive performance indeed. But a typical display of Western decadence I hardly find amusing."

"Show me a Communist, and I'll show you an asshole every time," Dana taunted him. "If you shitheads only knew how the whole world laughs behind your threadbare backs every time you spout your gauche little Marxist terms like Western decadence, imperialistic war-mongering, or bourgeois-manipulating, you might straighten up and show a little class. As it is, your kind is the biggest diabolical farce played on mankind since we climbed down from the trees. And if you had any balls, you'd face up to it."

Prevlov's face went white. "This has gone far enough," he snapped. He was on the verge of losing his very carefully practiced control and it frustrated him.

Dana stretched her long and opulent body and said, "What's the matter, Ivan? To used to muscle-bound, hod-carrying Russian women? Can't get used to the idea of a liberated gal from the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave laughing at your sorry tactics?"

"It is your vulgarity that I find difficult to accept. At least our women do not act like common gutter sluts."

"Fuck you." Dana grinned sweetly.

Prevlov missed nothing. He caught the flickered glance between Giordino and Spencer, caught the flexing of Sturgis's fists, and the tiny inclination of Drummer's head. He became fully aware now that Dana's indolent yet continual movement away from the Americans and toward the rear of the Russian guards was neither unconscious nor unplanned. Her performance was nearly complete. The Soviet marines were twisting their necks to gawk; their guns were beginning to droop in their hands, when Prevlov shouted out a command in Russian.

The guards, jolted out of their laxity, swung back and faced the salvage crew, their weapons aimed and steady again.

"My compliments, dear lady." Prevlov bowed. "Your little display of theatrics very nearly worked. A clever, clever deception."

There was a curious clinical satisfaction in Prevlov's expression; a functional chill as if his cunning had been called and he had easily won the hand.

He watched Dana, appraising her fractional show of defeat. The grin had remained on her face, as though painted there, and her shoulders huddled in a slight shiver, but she shook it off and straightened once again, proud and self-assured.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course not." Prevlov sighed. He stared at her for a moment, and then turned and said something to one of the guards. The man nodded, pulled out a knife and slowly advanced toward Dana.

Dana stiffened and paled, as though turned to salt. "What are you going to do?"

"I ordered him to cut off your left breast," Prevlov said conversationally.

Spencer stared openmouthed at Sandecker, his eyes pleading for the admiral to back down.

"Good God!" Sandecker uttered desperately. "You can't allow-you promised, no cruelty or torture-"

"I am the first to admit there is no finesse in savagery," Prevlov said. "But you leave me no choice. It is the only solution to your obstinacy."

Sandecker sidestepped around the nearest guard. "You'll have to kill me first-"

The guard jammed his machine pistol muzzle into Sandecker's kidney, and the admiral fell to his knees, his face twisted in agony, his breath coming in loud, sucking noises.

Dana clenched her hands at her sides until they turned ivory. She had played her hand down to the last card, and now she looked lost; those beautiful coffee-brown eyes were sick in abhorrence when she saw the guard's eyes suddenly reflect a look of confusion as a steel hand fell on her shoulder and pushed her aside. Pitt walked slowly into the light.

66

Pitt stood frozen in time, like some unspeakable apparition that had risen from the depths of a watery hell. He was saturated from head to foot, his black hair plastered down across a bloodied forehead, his lips curled in a satanic smile. In the light of the lamps, the droplets of water sparkled as they trickled from his wet clothing and splattered on the deck.

Prevlov's face was a wax mask. Calmly, he pulled a cigarette from the gold case, lit it, and exhaled the smoke in a long sigh.

"Your name? May I assume that your name is Dirk Pitt?"

"That's what the fine print reads on the birth certificate."

"It seems you are an uncommonly durable man, Mr. Pitt, It was my understanding that you were dead."

"It just goes to prove you can't rely on shipboard gossip."

Pitt took off his damp jacket and gently draped it over Dana's shoulders. "Sorry, dear heart, it's the best I can do for the moment." Then he turned back to Prevlov. "Any objections?"

Prevlov shook his head. Pitt's offhand manner puzzled him. He scrutinized Pitt as a diamond cutter studies a stone, but saw nothing behind the veil of those sea-green eyes.

Prevlov gestured to one of his men who moved up to Pitt. "Simply a precautionary search, Mr. Pitt. Any objections?"

Pitt shrugged agreeably and held his hands in the air. The guard quickly, efficiently ran his hands up and down Pitt's clothing and then stepped back and shook his head.

"No arms," Prevlov said. "Very wise of you, but then I would have expected nothing less from a man of your reputation. I have read with considerable interest a dossier describing your exploits. I would have liked very much to have known you under less adversary circumstances."

"Sorry I can't return the compliment," Pitt said pleasantly, "but you're not exactly the type of vermin I'd like for a friend."

Prevlov stepped forward two paces and hit Pitt with all his strength with the back of his hand.

Pitt staggered back one step and stood there, a trickle of blood oozing from one corner of his still grinning lips. "Well, well," he said quietly, thickly. "The illustrious Andre Prevlov finally blew his cool."

Prevlov leaned forward, his eyes half-closed in wary speculation. "My name?" his voice was barely above a murmur. "You know my name?"

"Fair is fair," Pitt answered. "I know as much about you as you know about me."

"You're even cleverer than I was led to believe," Prevlov said. "You've discovered my identity-an astute piece of perception. On that I commend you. But you needn't bluff with knowledge you do not possess. Beyond my name, you know nothing."

"I wonder. Perhaps I can enlighten you further with a bit of local folklore."

"I have no patience for fairy tales," Prevlov said. He motioned to the guard with the knife. "Now if we can get on about the business of persuading Admiral Sandecker to inspire your pumping crew to greater efforts, I would be most grateful."

The guard, a tall. man, his face still hidden under the muffler, began advancing toward Dana once more. He extended the knife. Its blade gleamed in the light no more than three inches from Dana's left breast. She hugged Pitt's jacket tightly around her shoulders and stared at the knife, numbed beyond fear.

"Too bad you're not big on fairy tales," Pitt said conversationally. "This is one you'd have enjoyed. It's all about a pair of bumbling characters called Silver and Gold."

Prevlov glanced at him, hesitated, and then nodded the guard back. "You have my attention, Mr. Pitt. I will give you five minutes to prove your point."

"It won't take long," Pitt said. He paused to rub the eye that had caked closed from the hardening blood. "Now then, once upon a time there were two Canadian engineers who discovered that spying could be a lucrative sideline. So they shed all qualms of guilt and became professional espionage agents in every sense of the word, concentrating their talents on obtaining classified data about American oceanographic programs and sending it through hidden channels to Moscow. Silver and Gold earned their money, make no mistake. Over the past two years, there wasn't a NUMA project the Russians didn't have knowledge of down to the tiniest detail. Then, when the Titanic's salvage came up, the Soviet Navy's Department of Foreign Intelligence-- your department, Prevlov-- smelled, a windfall. Without the slightest degree of chicanery, you found yourself with not one, but two men in your employ who were in a perfect situation to obtain and pass along America's most advanced deep-water-salvage techniques. There was, of course, another vital consideration, but even you weren't aware of it at the time.

"Silver and Gold," Pitt went on, "sent regular reports concerning the raising of the wreck through an ingenious method. They used a battery-powered pinger, a device that can transmit underwater sound waves similar to sonar. I should have caught on to it when the Capricorn's sonar man detected the transmissions, but instead I dismissed it as loose debris caused by a deep water current knocking about the Titanic. The fact that someone was sending out coded messages never entered our heads. Nobody bothered to decipher the random noises. Nobody, that is, except the man sitting under a set of hydrophones on board the Mikhail Kurkov."

Pitt paused and glanced about the dining saloon. He had everyone's attention. "We didn't begin to smell either rat until Henry Munk felt the need for a poorly timed call of nature. On his way back to the head at the aft end of the Sappho II, he heard the pinging device in operation and investigated; he caught one of the agents in the act. Your man probably tried to lie his way out of it, but Henry Munk was an instrument specialist. He recognized a communications pinger when he saw one and quickly figured the game. It was a case of the cat killing curiosity. Munk had to be silenced, and he was, from a blow to the base of the skull by one of Woodson's camera tripods. This created an awkward situation for the murderer, so he bashed Munk's head against the alternator housing to make it look like an accident. However, the fish didn't take the bait. Woodson was suspicious; I was suspicious; and to top it off, Doc Bailey found the bruise on Munk's neck. But since there was no way of proving who the killer was, I decided to string along with the accident story until I could scratch up enough evidence to point an accusing finger. Later, I went back and searched the submersible and discovered one slightly used and very bent camera tripod along with the pinging device where our friendly neighborhood spy had, ironically, hidden them in Munk's own storage locker. Certain that it was a waste of time to have them checked on shore for fingerprints-I didn't need a bolt from the blue to tell me I was dealing with a professional-I left the tripod and the pinger exactly as I found them. I took the chance that it would only be a matter of time before your agent got complacent and began contacting the Mikhail Kurkov again. So I waited."

"A fascinating story," Prevlov said. "But very circumstantial. Absolute proof would have been impossible to come by."

Pitt smiled enigmatically and continued. "The proof came through a process of elimination. I was relatively sure the killer had to be one of the three men on board the submersible who were supposedly asleep during their rest period. I then alternated the Sappho II's crew schedule every few days so that two of them had duties on the surface while the third was diving below on the wreck. When our sonar man picked up the next transmission from the pinger, I had Munk's murderer."

"Who is it, Pitt?" Spencer asked grimly. "There are ten of us here. Was it one of us?"

Pitt locked eyes for an instant with Prevlov and then turned suddenly and nodded at one of the weary men huddled under the lamps.

"I regret that the only introductory fanfare I can offer is the pounding of the waves against the hull, but bear with me and take a bow anyway, Drummer. It may well be your final encore before you toast in the electric chair."

"Ben Drummer!" Gunn gasped. "I can't believe it. Not with him sitting there all battered and bloody after attacking Woodson's killer."

"Local color," Pitt said. "It was too early to raise the curtain on his identity, not at least until we had all walked the plank. Until then, Prevlov needed an informer to blow the whistle on any ideas we might have dreamed up for retaking the ship."

"He fooled me," said Giordino. "He's worked harder than any two men on the crew to keep the Titanic floating."

"Has he?" Pitt came back. "Sure, he's looked busy, even managed to work up a sweat and get dirty, but what have you actually seen him accomplish since we came on board?"

Gunn shook his head. "But he's . . . rather I thought that he'd been working day and night surveying the ship."

"Surveying the ship, hell. Drummer has been running around with a portable acetylene torch and cutting holes in her bottom."

"I can't buy that," said Spencer. "Why work at scuttling the ship if his Russian chums want to lay their claws on her, too?"

"A desperate gamble to delay the tow," Pitt answered.

"Timing was critical. The only chance the Russians had to board the Titanic with any degree of success was during the eye of the hurricane. It was clever thinking. The possibility never occurred to us. If the tugs could have towed the hulk without any complications, we'd have missed the eye by thirty miles. But thanks to Drummer, the instability of the listing hull made the tow job a shambles. Before the cable parted, she sheered all over the ocean, forcing the tugs to reduce their speed to minimum steerage way. And, as you can see, the mere presence of Prevlov and his band of cutthroats attests to the success of Drummer's efforts."

The truth began to register then. None of the salvage crew had actually witnessed Drummer slaving over a pump or offering to carry his share of the load. It registered that he'd always been off on his own, showing up only to complain of his frustration at not overcoming the obstacles that supposedly prevented his survey tour of the ship. They stared at Drummer as though he was some alien from another world, waiting for, expecting the indignant words of denial.

There was to be no denial, no shocked plea of innocence, only a flicker of annoyance that vanished as quickly as it had come. Drummer's transformation was nothing short of astounding. The sad droop to the eyes had disappeared; they suddenly took on a glinting sharpness. Gone too was the lazy curl from the corners of his lips and the slouched, indifferent posture of his body. The indolent facade was gone and, in its place, was a straight-shouldered, almost aristocratic-looking man.

"Permit me to say, Pitt," Drummer said in a precise tone, "your powers of observation would do a first-class espionage agent proud. However, you haven't uncovered anything that really changes the situation."

"Fancy that," Pitt said. "Our former colleague has suddenly lost his Jubilation T Cornpone accent."

"I mastered it rather skillfully, don't you think?"

"That's not all you mastered, Drummer. Somewhere in your budding career you learned how to win secrets and murder friends."

"A necessity of the trade," Drummer said. He had eased away from the salvage crew until he was standing beside Prevlov.

"Tell me, which one are you, Silver or Gold?"

"Not that it matters any longer," Drummer shrugged "I'm Gold."

"Then your brother is Silver."

Drummer's smug expression hardened. "You know this?" he said slowly.

"After I had you pegged, I turned over my evidence, meager as it was, to the FBI. I have to hand it to Prevlov and his comrades at Soviet Naval Intelligence. They laid a phony history on you that was as American as apple pie, or should I say Georgia peach pie, and seemingly as genuine as the Confederate flag. But the bureau finally broke through the false documents certifying your impeccable security clearance and tracked you all the way back to the old homestead in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where you and your brother were born . . . within ten minutes of each other I might add."

"My God!" Spencer muttered. "Twins."

"Yes, but nonidentical. They don't even look like brothers."

"So it became a simple case of one twin leading to the other," Spencer said.

"Hardly simple," Pitt replied. "They're a smart pair, Drummer and his brother. You can't take that away from them. That was my prime mistake, attempting to draw a parallel between two men who should have had the same likes and dislikes, who shared the same quarters or who palled around together. But Silver and Gold played opposite roles to the core. Drummer was equally chummy to everyone and lived alone. I was at a dead end. The FBI was trying to trace Drummer's brother while rechecking the security clearances of every member of the salvage crew, but nobody could make a definite connection. Then a break in the form of near-tragedy burst on the scene and pinned the tail on the donkey."

"The Deep Fathom accident," Gunn said, staring at Drummer through cold, unblinking eyes. "But Drummer had no relation with the submersible. He was on the crew of the Sappho II. "

"He had a very real relation. You see, his brother was on the Deep Fathom. "

"How did you guess that?" Drummer asked.

"Twins have a curious bond. They think and feel things as one. You may have masqueraded as two totally unrelated persons, Drummer, but the two of you were too close for one of you not to come unglued when the other was on the brink of death. You felt your brother's agony, just as surely as if you were trapped down there in the abyss with him."

"Of course," Gunn said. "We were all on edge at the time, but Drummer was damn-near hysterical."

"Again it became a process of elimination among three men; this time Chavez, Kiel, and Merker. Chavez is obviously of Mexican descent and you can't fake that. Kiel is eight years too young; you can't fake that either. That left Sam Merker."

"Damn!" Spencer muttered. "How could we have been taken in for so long?"

"Not hard to imagine when you consider that we were up against the best team the Russians could field." A smile tugged at Pitt's lips. "Incidentally, Spencer, you previously stated that there were ten of us here. You miscounted there are eleven. You neglected to include Jack the Ripper there." He turned to the guard who was still standing in front of Dana, still clutching the knife in his hand as if it had grown there. "Why don't you drop your stupid disguise, Merker, and join the party."

The guard slowly removed his cap and unwound the muffler that covered the lower half of his face.

"He's the dirty bastard that knifed Woodson," Giordino hissed.

"Sorry about that," Merker said calmly. "Woodson's first mistake was in recognizing me. He might have lived if he had let it go at that. His second mistake, and a very fatal one, was attacking me."

"Woodson was your friend."

"The business of espionage makes no allowances for friends."

"Merker," Sandecker said. "Merker and Drummer. Silver and Gold. I trusted you both, and yet you sold NUMA down the river. For two years you sold us. And for what? A few lousy dollars."

"I wouldn't say a few, Admiral." Merker eased the knife back into its sheath. "More than enough to support my brother and me in fashionable style for a long time to come."

"Hey, where did he come from?" Gunn asked. "Merker is supposed to be in Doc Bailey's sick bay on board the Capricorn. "

"He stowed away on Sturgis's helicopter," Pitt said, patting his bleeding head with a damp handkerchief.

"Can't be!" Sturgis blurted out. "You were there, Pitt, when I opened the cargo hatch. Except for Mrs. Seagram, the copter was empty."

"Merker was there all right. After he gave Doc Bailey the slip, he kept away from his own cabin and made for brother Drummer's quarters, where he borrowed a fresh change of clothing, including a pair of cowboy boots. Then he sneaked onto the helicopter, threw out the emergency life raft, and hid under its cover. Unfortunately for Dana, she happened along in search of her make-up kit. When she knelt down to retrieve it, her eye caught Merker's boots protruding from under the life raft cover. Not about to let her screw up his escape, he popped her on the head with a hammer he'd found lying around somewhere, wrapped her in a tarpaulin, and crawled back into his hiding space."

"That means he was still in the cargo compartment when we uncovered Mrs. Seagram."

"No. By then he was gone. If you recall, after you switched open the cargo door, we waited for a few moments, listening for any movement inside. There was none because Merker had already crept into the control cabin under the cover of the noise from the door-actuator motors. Then when you and I played Keystone Kops and entered the cargo compartment, he dropped down the cockpit ladder outside and walked peacefully into the night."

"But why throw the hammer into the rotor blades?" Sturgis persisted. "What was the purpose?"

"Since you flew the copter from the Capricorn empty," Merker said, "and there was no freight to unload, I couldn't risk the chance of your taking off again without opening the cargo door. You had me trapped back there and didn't know it.

"You became a busy little beaver after that," Pitt said to Merker, "flitting about the ship, guided no doubt by a diagram provided by Drummer. First, you took your brother's portable cutting rig and burned off the tow cable while Chief Bascom and his men were resting in the gymnasium between inspection tours. Next, you cut the mooring lines to the helicopter, taking great satisfaction, I'm certain, in knowing that it was swept over the side of the ship with me in it."

"Two birds with one slice," Merker admitted. "Why deny-"

Merker was cut short by a muffled burst from a submachine gun that echoed from somewhere on the decks below. Prevlov shrugged and looked at Sandecker.

"I fear your men below are proving difficult." He removed the cigarette from its holder and crushed it out with his boot. "I think this discussion has lasted long enough. The storm will be abating in a few hours and the Mikhail Kurkov will move into position for the tow. Admiral Sandecker, you will see to it your men cooperate in manning the pumps. Drummer will show you the locations where he's pierced the hull below the waterline so that the rest of your crew can stem the leakage."

"So it's back to the torture games," Sandecker said contemptuously.

"I am through playing games, Admiral." Prevlov had a determined look. He spoke to one of the guards, a short man with a coarsened toughness about him. The same guard who had shoved his gun into Sandecker's side. "This is Buski, a very direct fellow who happens to be the finest marksman in his regiment. He also understands a smattering of English, enough at any rate to translate numerical progression." He turned to the guard. "Buski, I am going to begin counting. When I reach five, you will shoot Mrs. Seagram in the right arm. At ten, in the left; at fifteen in the right knee; and so on until Admiral Sandecker mends his uncooperative ways."

"A businesslike concept," Pitt added. "And you'll shoot the rest of us after we've served your purpose, weight our bodies, and dump them in the sea so they're never found. Then you'll claim we abandoned the ship in the helicopter, which, of course, conveniently crashed. You'd even provide two witnesses, Drummer and Merker, who would testify after their miraculous survival about how the benevolent Russians plucked them from the sea just as they were going down for the third time."

"I see no need to prolong the agony any further," Prevlov said tiredly. "Buski."

Buski raised his machine pistol and took aim at Dana's arm.

"Your intrigue me, Prevlov," Pitt said. "You've shown little interest in how I learned Drummer and Merker's code names or why I didn't have them thrown in the brig after I ferreted out their identities. You don't even seem curious as to how I came to know your name."

"Curious, yes, but it makes no difference. Nothing can change the circumstances. Nothing and no one can help you and your friends, Pitt. Not now. Not the CIA or the whole United States Navy. The die is cast. There will be no more play with words."

Prevlov nodded at Buski. "One."

"When Captain Prevlov reaches the count of four, you will die, Buski."

Buski leered smugly and made no reply.

"Two."

"We knew your plans for taking the Titanic. Admiral Sandecker and I have known for the last forty-eight hours."

"You've run your last bluff," Prevlov said. "Three."

Pitt shrugged indifferently. "Then all blood is on your hands, Prevlov."

"Four."

An ear-shattering blam rang deafeningly through the dining saloon as the bullet caught Buski just below the hairline and between the eyes, catapulting a quarter of his skull in a crimson blur of slow-motion, snapping his head upward, and slamming him to the deck in an inert spreadeagle at Prevlov's feet.

Dana cried out in startled pain as she was slammed to the deck. There were no apologies from Pitt for throwing her there and then crushing the breath out of her as he used his hundred and ninety pounds for a protective shield. Giordino dove for Sandecker and hauled him down with all the intensity of a desperation tackle by a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers. The rest of the salvage crew wasted no more than a tenth of a second in demonstrating their fondness for self-preservation. They scattered and dropped like leaves in a windstorm, closely followed by Drummer and Merker, who fell as though shackled together.

The blast was still ringing in the far corners of the room when the guards came alive and began firing bursts from their submachine pistols into the darkness toward the dining-saloon entrance. It was a meaningless gesture. The first was cut down almost instantly, pitching forward on his face. The second flung his machine pistol into the air and clutched the river of red that burst from his neck while the third sank slowly to his knees, staring dumbly at the two small holes that had suddenly appeared in the center of his coat.

Now Prevlov stood alone. He stared down at them all and then at Pitt. His expression was one of acceptance, acceptance of defeat and death. He nodded a salute at Pitt and then calmly pulled his automatic from the holster and began firing into the darkness. He expended his clip and stood there, waiting for the gun flash, braced for the pain that must surely come. But there was no return fire. The room went silent. Everything seemed to slow down, and only then did the revelation burst on him. He was not meant to die.

It had been a trap, and he had walked into it as naively as a small child into a tiger's den.

A name began to tear at his very soul, taunting him, repeating itself over and over again.

Marganin . . . Marganin . . . Marganin . . .

67

A marine seal is usually defined as an aquatic carnivorous mammal with webbed flippers and soft fur, but the wraithlike phantoms who suddenly materialized around Prevlov and the fallen guards bore little resemblance to their name sake. The United States Navy SEAL, an acronym of sea, air, and land, were members of an extraordinary elite fighting group, trained in every phase of combat from underwater demolition to jungle warfare.

There were five of them encased in pitch-black rubber wetsuits, hoods, and tight slipperlike boots. Their faces were indistinguishable under the ebony warpaint, making it all but impossible to tell where the wetsuits left off and flesh began. Four men held M-24 automatic rifles with collapsible stocks, while the fifth tightly gripped a Stoner weapon, a wicked looking affair with two barrels. One of the SEALs detached himself from the rest and helped Pitt and Dana to their feet.

"Oh God," Dana moaned. "I'll be black and blue for a month." For perhaps five dazed seconds she massaged her aching body, oblivious to the fact that Pitt's jacket had come open. When shocked realization did come, when she saw the guards sprawled grotesquely in death, her-voice dropped to a whisper. "Oh shit . . . Oh shit. . ."

"I think it's safe to say the lady survived," Pitt said with a half grin. He shook the SEAL's hand, then introduced him to Sandecker, who was unsteadily clutching Giordino's shoulder for support.

"Admiral Sandecker, may I present our deliverer, Lieutenant Fergus, United States Navy SEALs."

Sandecker acknowledged Fergus's smart salute with a pleased nod, released his hold on Giordino, and stood ramrod straight.

"The ship, Lieutenant, who commands the ship?"

"Unless I'm mistaken, sir, you do--"

Fergus's words were punctuated by another burst of echoing gunfire from somewhere in the cavernous depths of the ship.

"The last stubborn holdout." Fergus smiled. It was obvious. His white teeth gleamed like a neon sign at midnight. "The ship is secure, sir. My ironclad guarantee on it."

"And the pumping crew?"

"Safe and sound and back at their work."

"How many men in your command?"

"Two combat units, Admiral. Ten men in all, including myself."

Sandecker's eyebrows raised. "Only ten men, did you say?"

"Ordinarily for an assault of this nature," Fergus said matter-of-factly, "we'd have used just one combat unit, but Admiral Kemper thought it best to double our force to be on the safe side."

"The Navy's advanced some since I served," Sandecker said wistfully.

"Any casualties?" Pitt asked.

"Until five minutes ago, two of my men wounded, nothing serious, and one missing."

"Where did you come from?" The question was from Merker's lips. He was staring malevolently over the shoulder of a wary SEAL. "There was no ship in the area, no aircraft was sighted. How . . . ?"

Fergus looked at Pitt questioningly. Pitt nodded. "Permission granted to inform our former colleague the facts of life, Lieutenant. He can muse over your answers while he's sitting in a cell on death row."

"We came aboard the hard way," Fergus obliged. "From fifty feet below the surface through the torpedo tubes of a nuclear submarine. That's how I lost one of my men; the water was rough as hell. A wave must have crushed him against the Titanic's hull while we were taking turns climbing the boarding ladders dropped over the side by Mr. Pitt."

"Strange that no one else saw you come on board," Spencer murmured.

"Not strange at all," Pitt said. "While I was helping Lieutenant Fergus and his team come over the aft cargo deck bulwarks, and then tucking thern away in the chief steward's old cabin on C Deck, the rest of you were assembled in the gymnasium awaiting my soul-stirring speech on personal sacrifice."

Spencer shook his head. "Talk about fooling all of the people some of the time."

"I have to hand it to you," Gunn said, "you had us all flim-flammed."

"At that, the Russians nearly stole the ballgame. We didn't expect them to make their play until the storm quieted down. Boarding during the lull of the hurricane's eye was a masterstroke. And it almost worked. Without either Giordino, or the admiral or me to warn the lieutenant-we three were the only ones privy to the SEALs' presence-Fergus would have never known when to launch his attack on the boarders."

"I don't mind admitting," Sandecker said, "for a while there I thought that we'd had it. Giordino and I prisoners of Prevlov, and Pitt thought to be dead."

"God knows," Pitt said, "if the helicopter hadn't wedged itself into the Promenade Deck, I'd be asleep in the deep right now."

"As it was," Fergus said, "Mr. Pitt looked like death warmed over when he stumbled in the chief steward's cabin. A hardy man, this one. Half-drowned, his head split open, and yet he still insisted on guiding my team through this floating museum until we located your Soviet visitors."

Dana was looking at Pitt in a peculiar way. "How long were you hiding in the shadows before you made your grand entrance?"

Pitt grinned slyly. "For a minute prior to your striptease."

"You bastard. You stood there and let me make an ass out of myself," she flared. "You let them use me like I was a cut of beef in a butcher store window."

"I used you too, dear heart, as a matter of necessity. After I found Woodson's body and the smashed radio in the gymnasium I didn't need a gypsy to tell me the boys from the Ukraine had boarded the ship. I then rounded up Fergus and his men and led them down to the boiler rooms figuring the Russians would already be guarding the pumping crew. I was right. First priorities first. Whoever controlled the pumps controlled the derelict. When I saw that I would be more hindrance than help in overcoming the guards, I borrowed a SEAL and came looking for the rest of you. After wandering through half the ship we finally heard voices coming out of the dining saloon. Then I ordered the SEAL to hightail it below for reinforcements."

"Then it was all a great big stalling tactic," Dana said.

"Exactly. I needed every second I could beg, borrow, or steal until Fergus showed up and evened the odds. That's why I held off until the last second to put in an appearance."

"A high stakes gamble," Sandecker said. "You cut Act Two a bit fine, didn't you?"

"I had two things going for me," Pitt explained. "One was compassion. I know you, Admiral. In spite of your gargoyle exterior, you still help little old ladies across streets and feed stray animals. You might have waited until the last instant to give in, but you would have given in." Then Pitt put his arms around Dana and slowly produced a nasty looking weapon from a pocket of the jacket draped on her shoulders. "Number two was my insurance policy. Fergus loaned it to me before the party began. It's called a Stoner weapon. It shoots a cloud of tiny needlelike flachettes. I could have cut down Prevlov and half his men with one burst."

"And I thought you were being a gentleman," Dana said with a contrived bitter tone. "You only hung your jacket on me so they wouldn't find the gun when they searched you."

"You have to admit, that your . . . ahem . . . exposed condition made for an ideal distraction."

"Beggin' your pardon, sir," said Chief Bascom. "But why on earth would this rusty old bucket of bolts interest the Russians?"

"My very thoughts," Spencer added. "What's the big deal?"

"I guess it's a secret no longer." Pitt shrugged. "It's not the ship the Russians were after. It's a rare element called byzanium that sank with the Titanic back in 1912. Properly processed and installed in a sophisticated defense system, so I'm told, it will make intercontinental ballistic missiles about as outdated as flying dinosaurs."

Chief Bascom let out a long low whistle. "And you mean to say that stuff is still below decks somewhere?"

"Buried under several tons of debris, but it's still down there."

"You'll never live to see it, Pitt. None of you . . . none of us will. The Titanic will be totally destroyed by morning." There was no anger in Prevlov's face, but something touching on complacent satisfaction. "Did you really think every contingency was not allowed for? Every possibility for failure not backed up by an alternate plan? If we cannot have the byzanium, then neither can you."

Pitt looked at him with what seemed to be bemusement.

"Forget any hopes you entertain of the cavalry, or in your case, the cossacks, galloping to the rescue, Prevlov. You made a hell of a try, but you were playing against an American idiom known as a stacked deck. You prepared for everything, everything, that is, except a setup in preparation for a double cross. I don't know how the scheme was nurtured. It must have been a wonder of creative cunning, and you fell for it hook, line, and sinker. I'm sorry, Captain Prevlov, but to the victor belong the spoils."

"The byzanium belongs to the Russian people," Prevlov said gravely. "It was raped from our soil by your government. It is not we who are the robbers, Pitt, it is you."

"A moot point. If it were a work of historical art, my State Department would no doubt see it off on the next ship back to Murmansk. But not when it's the prime ingredient for a strategic weapon. If our roles were reversed, Prevlov, you wouldn't give it away any more than we would."

"Then it must be destroyed."

"You're wrong. A weapon that does not take lives, but simply protects them, must never be destroyed."

"Your kind of sanctimonious philosophy simply affirms what our leaders have known all along. You cannot win against us. Someday, in the not too distant future, your precious experiment in democracy will go the way of the Greek senate. A piece of an era for students of communism to study, nothing more."

"Don't hold your breath, Comrade. Your kind will have to show a lot more finesse before you can run the world."

"Read your history," Prevlov said with an ominous smile. "The people whom the sophisticated nations down through the centuries have referred to as the barbarians have always won in the end."

Pitt smiled back courteously as the SEALS herded Prevlov, Merker, and Drummer up the grand staircase to a stateroom where they would be secured under heavy guard.

But Pitt's smile was not genuine. Prevlov was right.

The barbarians always won in the end.

SOUTHBY

June 1988

68

Hurricane Amanda was dying, slowly but inevitably. What would long be remembered as the Great Blow of 1988 had cut its devastating swath across three thousand miles of ocean in three and a half days, and it had yet to deliver its final apocalyptic blow. Like the final burst of a supernova before disintegrating into obscurity, it suddenly swung on an eastward track and slammed into the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, lashing the coast from Cape Race north to Pouch Cove.

In minutes, one town after another was inundated by the fallout from the storm's cloud mass. Several small seashore villages were swept out to sea by the runoff' that came thundering down into the valleys. Fishing boats were driven onto land and battered into unrecognizable, shattered hulks. Roofs were blown off downtown buildings in St. John's as its city streets were turned into rushing rivers from the deluge. Water and electricity were cut off for days and, until rescue ships arrived, food was at a premium and had to be rationed.

No hurricane on record had ever unleashed such raw fury that its winds would carry it so far, so fast with such terrible velocity. No one would ever evaluate the enormous cost of the damage. Estimates ran as high as $250 million. Of this, $155 million represented the almost totally destroyed Newfoundland fishing fleets. Nine ships were lost at sea; six with no survivors. The death toll behind the storm's wake ran between 300 and 325.

In the early hours of Friday morning, Dr. Ryan Prescott sat alone in the main office of the NUMA Hurricane Center. Hurricane Amanda had finally run her course, accomplished her destruction, taken her lives, and only now was she dissipating over the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The battle was over, there was nothing more the weathermen at the center could do. After seventy-two hours of frenzied tracking and nonsleep, they had all straggled home to bed.

Prescott stared through tired and bloodshot eyes at the desks strewn with charts, data tables, computer readout sheets, and half-empty coffee cups, the floors carpeted with sheets of paper filled with notations and the strange looking symbols common to meteorologists. He stared at the giant wall map and silently cursed the storm. The sudden swing to eastward had caught them all by surprise. A completely illogical pattern; it was unparalleled in hurricane history. No storm on record had ever behaved so erratically.

If only it had given some hint of its impending deviation, some minute clue as to its fanatical behavior, they might have better prepared the people of Newfoundland for the onslaught. At least half, a hundred and fifty lives, might have been spared. A hundred and fifty men, women, and children might have been alive now if the finest scientific sources available for weather prediction had not been swept aside like so much hokum at Mother Nature's capricious whim.

Prescott rose and took his last look at the wall chart before the janitors came and erased Hurricane Amanda out of existence, and wiped clean her confounding track in preparation for her as yet unborn descendant. One small notation out of all the rest caught his eye. It was a small cross, labeled "Titanic."

The last report he'd had from NUMA headquarters in Washington was that the derelict was in tow by two Navy tugs that were desperately attempting to drag her out from under the path of the hurricane. Nothing more had been heard of her for twenty-four hours.

Prescott raised a cup of cold coffee in a toast. "To the Titanic,"he said aloud in that empty room. "May you have taken every punch Amanda threw at you and still spit in her eye."

He grimaced as he downed the stale coffee. Then he turned and walked out of the room into the early-morning dampness.

69

At first light the Titanic still lived. There was no rhyme or reason for her continued existence. She still wallowed aimlessly broadside-on to the sea and wind, trapped in the churning turmoil of the tormented waves left in the wake of the departing hurricane.

Like a dazed fighter taking a fearful beating while hanging on the ropes, she rose drunkenly over the thirty-foot crests, shouldering each one, taking salt spray across her Boat Deck, and then struggling free and somehow staggering upright in time for the next assault.

To Captain Parotkin, as he stared through his binoculars, the Titanic looked a doomed ship. Her rusty old hull plates had been subjected to a stress far beyond anything he thought they could stand. He could see the popped rivets and opened seams, and he guessed that she was taking water in a hundred places along her hull. What he could not see were the exhausted men of the salvage crew, the SEALS, and the Navy tugmen laboring shoulder to shoulder deep in the black hell under the waterline in a desperate effort to keep the derelict afloat.

From Parotkin's viewpoint, safe from the elements inside the wheelhouse of the Mikhail Kurkov, it seemed a miracle that the Titanic hadn't vanished during the night. Yet she still clung to life, even though she was down a good twenty feet at the bow and was listing nearly thirty degrees to starboard.

"Any word from Captain Prevlov?" he asked without taking his eyes from the glasses.

"Nothing, sir," answered his first officer.

"I fear the worst has happened," Parotkin said. "I see no sign that Prevlov is in command of the derelict."

"There, sir," the first officer said pointing, "atop the remains of the aft mast. It looks like a Russian pennant."

Parotkin studied the tiny frayed cloth through the glasses as it snapped in the wind. "Unfortunately, the star on the pennant is white rather than the red of our Soviet ensign." He sighed. "I must assume that the boarding mission has failed."

"Perhaps Comrade Prevlov has had no time to report his situation."

"There is no time left. American search planes will be, here within the hour." Parotkin pounded his fist in frustration on the bridge counter. "Damn Prevlov!" he muttered angrily. "'Let us fervently hope our final option will not be required'; his exact words. He is the fortunate one. He may even be dead, and it is I who must take the responsibility for destroying the Titanic and all who remain on board her."

The first officer's face paled, his body stiffened. "There is alternative, sir?"

Parotkin shook his head. "The orders were clear. We must obliterate the ship rather than let her fall into the hands of Americans."

Parotkin took a linen handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes. "Have the crew ready the nuclear missile carrier and steer a course ten miles north of the Titanic for our firing position."

The first officer stared at Parotkin for a long moment, his face void of expression. Then he slowly wheeled and made for the radio telephone and ordered the helmsman to steer fifteen degrees to the north.

Thirty minutes later, all was in readiness. The Mikhail Kurkov dug her bow into the swells at the position laid for the missile launch as Parotkin stood behind the radar operator. "Any hard sightings?" he asked.

"Eight jet aircraft, a hundred and twenty miles west, closing rapidly."

"Surface vessels?"

"Two small ships bearing two-four-five, twenty-one miles southwest."

"That would be the tugs returning," the first officer said.

Parotkin nodded. "It's the aircraft that concern me. They will be over us in ten minutes. Is the nuclear warhead armed?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then begin the countdown."

The first officer gave the order over the phone and then they moved outside and watched from the starboard bridge wing as the forward cargo hatch swung smoothly aside and a twenty-six-foot Stoski surface-to-surface missile slowly rose from its concealed tube into the gusty dawn air.

"One minute to firing," came a missile technician's voice over the bridge speaker.

Parotkin aimed his glasses at the Titanic in the distance. He could just make out her outline against the gray clouds that crawled along the horizon. A barely perceptible shiver gripped his body. His eyes reflected a distant sad look. He knew he would be forever cursed among sailors as the captain who sent the helpless and resurrected ocean liner back to her grave beneath the sea. He was standing braced and waiting for the roar of the missile's rocket engine and then the great explosion that would pulverize the Titanic into thousands of molten particles when he heard the sound of running footsteps from the wheelhouse, and the radio operator burst onto the bridge wing.

"Captain!" he blurted. "An urgent signal from an American submarine!"

"Thirty seconds to firing," the voice droned over the intercom.

There was unmistakable panic in the radio operator's eyes as he thrust the message into Parotkin's hands. It read:

USS DRAGONFISH TO USSR MIKHAIL KURKOV DERELICT VESSEL RMS TITANIC UNDER PROTECTION OF UNITED STATES NAVY ANY OVERT ACT OF AGGRESSION ON YOUR PART WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE REPEAT IMMEDIATE RETALIATORY ATTACK

----SIGNED CAPTAIN USS SUBMARINE DRAGONFISH

"Ten seconds and counting," came the disembodied voice of the missile technician over the speaker. "Seven . . . six..' .

Parotkin looked up with the clear, unworried expression of a man who has just received a million rubles through the mail.

". . . five . . . four . . . three . . ."

"Stop the countdown," he ordered in precise tones, so there could be no misunderstanding, no misinterpretation.

"Stop countdown," the first officer repeated into the bridge phone, his face beaded with sweat. "And secure the missile."

"Good," Parotkin said curtly. A smile spread across his face. "Not exactly what I was told to do, but I think Soviet Naval authorities will see it my way. After all, the Mikhail Kurkov is the finest ship of her kind in the world. We wouldn't want to throw her away because of a senseless and foolish order from a man who is undoubtedly dead, now would we?"

"I am in complete accord." The first officer smiled-back. "Our superiors will also be interested to learn that in spite of all our sophisticated detection gear, we failed to discover the presence of an alien submarine practically on our doorstep. American undersea penetration methods must truly be highly advanced."

"I feel sure the Americans will be just as interested in learning that our oceanographic research vessels carry concealed missiles."

"Your orders, sir?"

Parotkin watched the Stoski missile as it sank back into its tube. "Set a course for home." He turned and peered across the sea in the direction of the Titanic. What had happened to Prevlov and his men? Were they alive or dead? Would he ever know the true facts?

Overhead the clouds began turning from gray to white and the wind dropped to a brisk breeze. A solitary sea gull emerged from the brightening sky and began circling the Soviet ship. Then, as if heeding a more urgent call to the south, it dipped its wings and flew off toward the Titanic.

70

"We're done in," Spencer said in a voice so low that Pitt wasn't sure he heard him.

"Say again."

"We're done in," he repeated through slack lips. His face was smeared with oil and a rustlike slime. "It's a hopeless case. We've plugged most of the holes Drummer opened with his cutting torch, but the sea has battered the hull all to hell and the old girl is taking water faster than a sieve."

"We've got to keep her on the surface until the tugs return," Pitt said. "If they can add their pumps to ours we can stay ahead of the leaks until the damage can be patched"

"It's a damned miracle that she didn't go down hours ago.

How much time can you give me?" Pitt demanded.

Spencer stared wearily down at the water sloshing around his ankles. "The pump engines are running on fumes now. When their fuel tanks are sucked dry, the pumps will die. A cold, hard, sad fact." He looked up into Pitt's face. "An hour, maybe an hour and a half. I can't promise any more than that when the pumps go."

"And if you had enough fuel to keep the diesels going?"

"I could probably keep her on the surface without assistance until noon," Spencer answered.

"How much fuel will it take?"

"Two hundred gallons would do nicely,

They both looked up as Giordino plunged down a companionway and splashed into the water covering the deck of the No. 4 boiler room.

"Talk about frustration," he moaned. "There are eight aircraft up there, circling the ship. Six Navy fighters and two radar recon planes. I've tried everything except standing on my head and exposing myself and all they do is wave every time they make a pass."

Pitt shook his head in mock sadness. "Remind me never to play charades on your team."

"I'm open for suggestions," Giordino said. "Suppose you tell me how to notify some guy who's flying by at four hundred miles an hour that we need help, and lots of it?"

Pitt scratched his chin. "There's got to be a practical solution."

"Sure," Giordino said sarcastically. "Just call the Automobile Club for a service call."

Pitt and Spencer stared with widened eyes at each other. The same thought had suddenly occurred to them in the same instant.

"Brilliance," Spencer said, "sheer brilliance."

"If we can't get to a service station," Pitt said grinning, "then the service station must come to us."

Giordino looked lost. "Fatigue has queered your minds," he said. "Where are you going to find a pay phone? What will you use for a radio? The Russians smashed ours, the one in the helicopter is soaked through, and Prevlov's transmitter caught two bullets during the brawl." He shook his head "And you can forget those flyboys upstairs. Without a brush and bucket of paint, there's no way to get a message across to their eager little minds."

"That's your problem," Spencer said loftily. "You always go around looking up when you should be looking down."

Pitt leaned over and picked up a sledgehammer that was lying among a pile of tools. "This should do the trick," he said casually, swinging the sledge against one of the Titanic's hull plates, sending a cacophony of echoes throughout the boiler room.

Spencer dropped wearily onto a raised boiler grating. "They ain't going to believe this."

"Oh I don't know," Pitt managed between swings. "Jungle telegraph. It always used to work in the Congo."

"Giordino was probably right. Fatigue has queered our minds."

Pitt ignored Spencer and kept hammering away. After a few minutes, he paused a moment to get a new grip on the sledge handle. "Let us hope and pray that one of the natives has his ear to the ground," he said between pants. And then he went on hammering.

Of the two sonar operators who were on watch aboard the submarine Dragonfish, the one tuned into the passive listening system was leaning forward toward his panel, his head cocked to one side, his mind intent on analyzing the strange beat that emitted through the earphones. Then he gave a slight shake of his head and held up the earphones for the officer who was standing at his shoulder.

"At first I thought it was a hammerhead shark," the sonarman said. "They make a funny pounding noise. But this has a definite metallic ring to it."

The officer pressed the headset against one ear. Then his eyes took on a puzzled look. "It sounds like an SOS."

"That's how I read it, sir. Someone is knocking out a distress call against their hull."

"Where is it coming from?"

The sonarman turned a miniature steering wheel that activated the sensors in the bow of the sub and eyed the panel in front of him. "The contact is three-zero-seven degrees, two thousand yards north of west. It has to be the Titanic, sir. With the departure of the Mikhail Kurkov, she's the only surface craft left in the area."

The officer handed back the earphones, turned from the sonar compartment, and made his way up a wide curving stairway into the conning tower, the nerve center of the Dragonfish. He approached a medium-height, round-faced man with a graying mustache, who wore the oak leaves of a commander on his collar.

"It's the Titanic all right, sir. She's hammering out an SOS."

"There's no mistake?"

"No, sir. The contact is firm." The officer paused and then asked, "Are we going to respond?"

The commander looked thoughtful for a few moments. "Our orders were to deliver the SEAL and fend off the Mikhail Kurkov. We were also to remain obscure in case the Russians decide to make an end run with one of their own submarines. We'd be in poor position to protect the derelict if we were to surface and move off station."

"During our last sighting, she looked to be in pretty rough shape. Maybe she's going down."

"If that was the case, her crew would be screaming for help over every frequency on their radio-" The commander hesitated, his eyes narrowing. He stepped over to the radio room and leaned in.

"What time was the last communication sent from the Titanic?"

One of the radio operators scanned a sheet in a log book. "A few minutes shy of eighteen hundred hours yesterday, Commander. They requested an up-to-the-minute report of the hurricane's speed and direction."

The commander nodded and turned back to the officer. "They haven't transmitted for over twelve hours. Could be their radio is out."

"It's quite possible."

"We'd better have a look," the commander said. "Up periscope."

The periscope tubing hummed slowly into the raised position. The commander gripped the handles and stared through the eyepiece.

"Looks quiet enough," he said. "She's got a heavy list to starboard and she's down by the bow, but not bad enough to be considered dangerous yet. No distress flags flying. No one in sight on her decks-wait a moment, I take that back. There's a man atop the bridgehouse roof." The commander increased the magnification. "Good lord!" he muttered. "It's a woman."

The officer stared at him with a disbelieving expression. "You did say a woman, sir?"

"See for yourself."

The officer saw for himself. There was indeed a young blond woman above the Titanic's bridgehouse. She seemed to be waving a brassiere.

Ten minutes later, the Dragonfish had surfaced and was lying under the shadow of the Titanic.

Thirty minutes later, reserve fuel from the sub's auxiliary diesel engine was coursing through a pipe that arched across the still thrashing swells and passed neatly into a hastily cut hole in the Titanic's hull.

71

"It's from the Dragonfish, " Admiral Kemper said, reading the latest in a long line of communications. "Her captain has sent a work party aboard the Titanic to assist Pitt and his salvage crew. He states that the derelict should remain afloat, even with numerous leaks, during the tow providing, of course, she's not struck by another hurricane."

"Thank God for small favors," Marshall Collins exhaled between yawns.

"He also reports," Kemper went on, "that Mrs. Seagram is on board the Titanic and is in rare stage form, whatever that means."

Mel Donner moved out of the bathroom, a towel still draped over his arm. "Would you repeat that, Admiral?"

"The captain of the Dragonfish says that Mrs. Dana Seagram is alive and well."

Donner rushed over and shook Seagram, who was sleeping fitfully on the couch. "Gene! Wake up! They've found Dana! She's all right!"

Seagram's eyes blinked open and for long seconds he looked up at Donner, astonishment slowly spreading across his face. "Dana . . . Dana is alive?"

"Yes, she must have been on the Titanic during the storm."

"But how did she get there?"

"We don't know all the details yet. We'll just have to wait it out. But the important thing is that Dana is safe and the Titanic is still afloat."

Seagram hung his head in his hands and sat there huddled and shrunken. He began sobbing quietly.

Admiral Kemper was thankful for the distraction when a very tired Commander Keith entered and handed him another signal. "This one's from Admiral Sandecker," Kemper said. "I think you'll be interested in what he has to say, Mr. Nicholson."

Warren Nicholson and Marshall Collins both eased away from Seagram and gathered around Kemper's desk.

"Sandecker says, 'Visiting relatives have been entertained and furnished with guest bedroom. Got something in my eye during the party last night but enjoyed belting out good old song favorites like "Silver Threads among the Gold." Say hello to Cousin Warren and tell him I have a present to give him. Having wonderful time. Wish you were all here. Signed Sandecker'."

"It seems the admiral has a strange way with words," said the President. "Just what in hell is it he's trying to get across?"

Kemper stared at him sheepishly. "The Russians apparently boarded during the eye of the hurricane."

"Apparently, " the President said icily.

"'Silver Threads among the Gold'," Nicholson said excitedly. "Silver and Gold. They've caught the two espionage agents."

"And your present, Cousin Warren," Collins said, grinning with every tooth, "must be none other than Captain Andre Prevlov."

"It's imperative that I get on board the derelict as soon as possible," Nicholson said to Kemper. "How soon can you arrange transportation for me, Admiral?"

Kemper's hand was already reaching for the phone. "Inside thirty minutes I can have you on a Navy jet that will land you on the Beecher's Island. From there you can take a helicopter to the Titanic. "

The President stepped over to a large window and gazed out at the rising sun as it crept above the eastern horizon and fingered its rays across the lazy waters of the Potomac. He yawned a long comfortable yawn.

72

Dana leaned over the forward railing of the Titanic's bridge and closed her eyes. The ocean breeze whipped her honey hair and tingled the skin on her upturned face. She felt soothed and free and completely relaxed. It was as though she were flying.

She knew now that she could never go back and slip into the painted puppet that had been the Dana Seagram of two days ago. She had made up her mind she would divorce Gene. Nothing between them mattered any more, at least to her. The girl he had loved was dead, never to return. She reveled in the knowledge. It was her rebirth. To begin again, start fresh with no holds barred.

"A dollar for your thoughts."

She opened her eyes and was greeted by the grinning and freshly shaven face of Dirk Pitt.

"A dollar? I thought it used to be a penny."

"Inflation strikes everything, sooner or later."

They stood for a while without saying anything and watched the Wallace and the Morse as they strained at the great leash that led to the Titanic's bow. Chief Bascom and his men were checking the tow cable and dabbing grease to the fair-lead to ease the chafing. The chief looked up and waved to them.

"I wish this voyage would never end," Dana murmured as they both waved back. "It's so strange and yet so wonderful." She turned suddenly and laid her hand on his. "Promise me we'll never see New York. Promise me that we'll sail on forever, like the Flying Dutchman."

"We'll sail on forever."

She flung her arms around his neck and pressed her body against his. "Dirk, Dirk!" she whispered urgently. "Nothing makes any sense any more. I want you. I want you now, and I don't really know why."

"It's because of where you are," Pitt said quietly.

He took her by the hand and led her down the grand staircase and into one of the two parlour suite bedrooms on B Deck. "There you are, madame. The finest suite of rooms on the entire ship. Cost for a one-way voyage came to better than four thousand dollars. Those were, of course, 1912 prices. However, in honor of the light in your eyes, I'll provide you with a handsome discount." He swept her up and carried her to the bed. It had been cleaned of the slime and rot and was covered with several blankets.

Dana , looked at the bed with wise eyes. "You prepared this?"

"Let's just say that like the little old ant who moved the rubber tree plant, I had high hopes."

"You know what you are?"

"A bastard, a lecher, a satyr-- I could think of a dozen apt descriptions."

She looked at him with a secret, womanly smile. "No, you're none of those. Even a satyr would not have been so thoughtful."

He pulled her lips to his and kissed her so hard she moaned.

Her performance in bed fooled him. He expected a body that would merely give response. Instead, he found himself merged with thrashing, undulating waves of flesh, piercing screams that he muffled with his hands, nails that dug oozing red trenches in his back, and finally soft, wet sobbings into his neck. He couldn't help wondering if all wives blossom with such abandon when they make love for the first time with someone other than their husbands. The storm lasted for nearly an hour, and the humid perfume of sweating skin began to soak the air of that old rotted, ghostly bedroom.

Finally she pushed him away and sat up. She raised her knees and hunched herself over them, feet crossed. "How was I?"

"Like a spastic tiger," Pitt said.

"I didn't know it could be like this."

"I wish I had a dime for every girl who said those very same words every time she turned on."

"You don't know what it's like to have your guts churning in both agony and delight at the same time."

"I dare say I don't. A woman's release burns from the inside. A man's erotic senses are mostly exterior. Anyway you look at it, sex is a female's game."

"What do you know about the President?" she suddenly asked in a soft nostalgic tone.

Pitt looked at her in amused surprise. "The President? What made you think of him at a time like this?"

"I hear he's a real man."

"I couldn't say. I've never slept with him."

She ignored his remark. "If we had a woman President and she wanted to make love to you, what would you do?"

"My country right or wrong," Pitt said. "Where is all this talk leading?"

"Just answer the question. Would you go to bed with her?"

"Depends?"

"On what?"

"President or not, I couldn't make my gun stand at attention if she was seventy, fat, and had skin like a prune. That's why men never make good prostitutes."

Dana smiled slowly and closed her eyes. "Make love to me again."

"Why? So you can let your imagination run wild and fancy that you're being laid by our Commander-in-Chief?"

Her eyes narrowed. "Does that bother you?"

"Two can play the same game. I'll just pretend that you're Ashley Fleming."

73

Prevlov looked up from his huddled position on the floor of stateroom C-95 as the SEAL guarding the passageway outside turned the newly oiled lock and swung the door open. The SEAL, his M-24 held at the ready, visually checked Prevlov, and then stepped aside to allow another man to enter.

He was carrying an attaché case and wore a business suit that begged to be pressed. A faint smile crossed his lips as Prevlov studied him with a speculative gaze of surprised Recognition.

"Captain Prevlov, I am Warren Nicholson."

"I know," Prevlov said as he uncoiled to his feet and gave a very correct half-bow. "I was not prepared to entertain the Chief Director of the Central Intelligence Agency himself. At least not under these rather awkward circumstances."

"I've come personally to escort you to the United States."

"I am flattered."

"It is we who are flattered, Captain Prevlov. You are considered a very big catch indeed."

"Then it is to be an internationally publicized trial, complete with grave accusations against my government for attempted piracy on the high seas."

Nicholson smiled again. "No, except for a few high-ranking members of your government and mine, I'm afraid your defection will remain a well-kept secret."

Prevlov squinted. "Defection?" This was clearly not what he had expected.

Nicholson nodded without answering.

"There is no method by which you can make me willingly defect," Prevlov said grimly. "I shall deny it at every opportunity."

"A noble gesture." Nicholson shrugged. "However, since there will be no trial and no interrogation, a request for political asylum becomes your only escape clause."

"You said, 'no interrogation.' I must accuse you of lying, Mr. Nicholson. No good intelligence service would ever pass up the chance of prying out the knowledge a man of my position could provide them."

"What knowledge?" Nicholson said. "You can't tell us anything that we don't already know."

Prevlov's mind was off-balance. Perspective, he thought. He must gain a perspective. There was only one way the Americans could have gained possession of the mass of Soviet intelligence secrets that were locked away in the files in his office in Moscow. The middle of the puzzle was incomplete, but the borders were neatly locked into place. He met Nicholson's steady gaze and spoke quietly. "Lieutenant Marganin is one of your people." It was more statement than question.

"Yes." Nicholson nodded. "His name is Harry Koskoski, and he was born in Newark, New Jersey."

"Not possible," Prevlov said. "I personally checked every phase of Pavel Marganin's life. He was born and raised in Komsomolsk-na-Amure. His family were tailors."

"True, the real Marganin was a native Russian."

"Then your man is a double, a plant?"

"We arranged it four years ago when one of your Kashin class missile destroyers exploded and sank in the Indian Ocean. Marganin was one of the few survivors. He was discovered in the water by an Exxon oil tanker, but died shortly before the ship docked in Honolulu. It was a rare opportunity, and we had to work fast. Of all our Russian speaking agents, Koskoski came the closest to Marganin's physical features. We surgically altered his face to make it look as though it had been disfigured in the explosion and then airlifted him to a small, out-of-the-way island two hundred miles from where your ship sank. When our bogus Soviet seaman was finally discovered by native fishermen and returned to Russia, he was delirious and suffering from an acute attack of amnesia."

"I know the rest," Prevlov said solemnly. "We not only repaired his face through plastic surgery to that of the Genuine Marganin, but we re-educated him to his own personal history as well."

"That's pretty much the story."

"A brilliant coup, Mr. Nicholson."

"Coming from one of the most respected men in Soviet intelligence, I consider that a rare compliment indeed."

"Then this whole scheme to place me on the Titanic was hatched by the CIA and carried through by Marganin."

"Koskoski, alias Marganin, was certain you would accept the plan, and you did."

Prevlov gazed at the deck. He might have known, he might have guessed, should have been suspicious from the beginning that Marganin was slowly and intricately positioning his neck on the headman's block. He should never have fallen for it, never, but his vanity had been his downfall, and he accepted it.

"Where does this all lead?" Prevlov asked bleakly.

"By now Marganin has produced solid proof of your-if you'll pardon the expression-traitorous activities and has also proven, aided by planted evidence, that you intended for the Titanic mission to fail from the start. You see, Captain, the trail leading to your defection has been carefully mapped for nearly two years. You yourself helped matters considerably with your fondness for expensive refinements. Your superiors can draw but one conclusion from your actions, you sold out for a very high price."

"And if I deny it?"

"Who would believe you? I venture to say that your name is already on the Soviet liquidation list."

"Then what's to become of me now?"

"You have two choices. One, we can set you free after a proper period of time."

"I wouldn't last a week. I am well aware of the KGB assassin network."

"Your second choice is to cooperate with us." Nicholson paused, hesitated, then looked directly at Prevlov. "You're a brilliant man, Captain, the best in your field. We don't like to let good brains go to waste. I don't have to paint you a picture of your value to the Western intelligence community. That's why it's my intention to set you up in charge of a new task force. A line of work you should find right up your alley."

"I suppose I should be grateful for that," Prevlov said dryly.

"Your facial appearance will be altered, of course. You'll get a cram course in English and American idioms along with our history, sports, music, and entertainment. In the end, there won't be the slightest trace of your former shell for the KGB to home in on."

Interest began to form in Prevlov's eyes.

"Your salary will be forty thousand a year, plus expenses and a car."

"Forty thousand dollars?" Prevlov asked, trying to sound casual.

"That will buy quite a bit of Bombay Gin." Nicholson grinned like a wolf sitting down to dinner with a wary rabbit. "I think that if you really try, Captain Prevlov, you might come to enjoy the pleasures of our Western-style decadence. Don't you agree?"

Prevlov said nothing for several moments. But the choice was obvious constant fear versus a long and pleasurable life. "You win, Nicholson."

Nicholson shook hands and was mildly surprised to see tears welling in Prevlov's eyes.

74

The final hours of the long tow brought a clear and sunny sky with a wandering wind that gently nudged the long ocean swells shoreward and brushed their green curving backs.

Ever since dawn, four Coast Guard ships had been busy riding herd on the huge fleet of pleasure craft that darted in and out vying for a closer look at the sea-worn decks and superstructure of the hulk.

High over the crowded waters, hordes of light aircraft and helicopters swarmed like hornets, their pilots jockeying to give photographers and cameramen the perfect angle from which to shoot the Titanic.

From five thousand feet higher, the still listing ship looked like a macabre carcass that was under attack from all sides by armadas of gnats and white ants.

The Thomas J. Morse reeled in her tow wire from the bow of the Samuel R. Wallace and fell back to the derelict's stem, here she attached a hawser and then eased astern to assist steering the unwieldy bulk through the Verrazano Narrows and up the East River to the old Brooklyn Navy Yard. Several harbor tugs also appeared and stood by to lend hand, if called upon, when Commander Butera gave orders to shorten the main tow cable to two hundred yards.

The pilot boat arrived within inches of the bulwarks of the Wallace and the pilot leaped aboard. Then it passed on by and thumped against the rusty plates of the Titanic, separated only by worn truck tires that hung along the smaller boat's freeboard. Within half a minute, the New York Harbor Chief Pilot had clutched a rope ladder and was scrambling up to the cargo deck.

Pitt and Sandecker greeted him and then led the way up to the port bridge wing, where the chief pilot placed both hands on the railing as though he were part of it and solemnly nodded for the tow to carry on. Pitt waved and Butera punched his whistle in reply. Then the tug commander ordered "slow ahead" and aimed the bow of the Wallace into the main channel under the Verrazano Bridge that arches from Long Island to Staten Island.

As the strange convoy probed its nose into Upper New York Bay, Butera began pacing from one side of the tug's bridge to the other, studying the hulk, the wind and the current, and the tow cable with the dedication of a brain surgeon who is about to perform a delicate operation.

Since the night before, thousands of people had lined the waterfront. Manhattan had come to a standstill, streets emptied and office buildings suddenly became silent, as workers crowded the windows in hushed awe as the tow crawled up the harbor.

On the shore of Staten Island, Peter Hull, a reporter from The New York Times, began his story:

Ghosts do exist. I know, I saw one in the mists of morning. Like some grotesque phantom that had been rejected from hell, she passed before my unbelieving eyes. Surrounded by the invisible pall of bygone tragedy, shrouded in the souls of her dead, she was truly an awesome relic from a past age. You could not lay your eyes upon her and not sense pride and sorrow together ....

A CBS commentator expressed a more journalistic view "The Titanic completed her maiden voyage today, seventy-six years after departing the dock at Southampton, England . . . ." By noon the Titanic was edging past the Statue of Liberty and a vast sea of spectators on the Battery. No one on shore spoke above a whisper, and the city became strangely silent; only an occasional toot from a taxi horn gave any hint of normal activity. It was as though the whole of New York City had been picked up and placed in a vast cathedral.

Many of the watchers wept openly. Among them were three of the passengers who had survived the tragic night so long ago. The air seemed heavy and hard to breathe. Most people, describing their feelings later, were surprised to recall nothing but an odd sense of numbness, as though they had been temporarily paralyzed and struck dumb. Most that is, except a rugged fireman by the name of Arthur Mooney.

Mooney was the captain of one of the New York Harbor fireboats. A big, mischief-eyed Irishman born of the city, and a seagoing fire-eater for nineteen years. He slammed a massive fist against the binnacle and shook off the spell. Then he shouted to his crew.

"Up off your asses, boys. You're not department store dummies." His voice carried into every corner of the boat. Mooney hardly ever required the services of a bullhorn. "This here's a ship arrivin' on her maiden voyage, ain't she? Then let's show her a good old-fashioned traditional New York welcome."

"But skipper," a crew member protested, "it's not like she was the QE II or the Normandie comin' up the channel for the first time. That thing is nothin' but a wasted hulk, a ship of the dead."

"Wasted hulk, your ass," Mooney shouted. "That ship you see there is the most famous liner of all time. So she's a little delapidated, and she's arrivin' a tad late. So who gives a damn? Turn on the hoses and hit the siren."

It was a re-enactment of the Titanic's raising all over again, but on a much grander scale. As the water spouted in great sheets over Mooney's fireboat, and his boat whistle reverberated off the city's skyscrapers, another fireboat followed his example, and another. Then whistles on docked freighters began to scream. Then the horns of cars lined up along the shores of New Jersey, Manhattan, and Brooklyn joined the outpouring of noise followed by the cheers and yells from a million throats.

What had begun with the insignificant shrill of a single whistle now built and built until it was a thunderous bedlam of sound that shook the ground and rattled every window in the city. It was a moment that echoed across every ocean of the world.

The Titanic had made port.

75

Thousands of greeters jammed the dock where the Titanic was tied up. The swarming antlike mass was made up of newspeople, national dignitaries, cordons of harried policemen, and a multitude of uninvited who climbed the shipyard fence. Any attempt at security was futile.

A battery of reporters and cameramen stormed up the makeshift gangplank and surrounded Admiral Sandecker, who stood like a victorious Caesar, on the steps of the main staircase rising from the reception room on D Deck.

This was Sandecker's big moment and a team of wild horses couldn't have dragged him off the Titanic this day. He never missed an opportunity to snatch good publicity in the name of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, and this was one occasion where he was going to milk every line of newsprint, every second of national television, for all they were worth. He enthralled the reporters with highly colored exploits of the salvage crew and stared at the mobile camera units, and smiled and smiled and smiled. The Admiral was in his own paradise.

Pitt could have cared less about the fanfare; his idea of paradise at the moment was a shower and a clean, soft bed. He pushed his way down the gangplank to the dock and melted into the crowd. He thought he'd almost gotten clear when a TV commentator rushed forward and thrust a microphone under his nose.

"Hey, fella, are you a member of the Titanic's salvage crew?"

"No, I work for the shipyard," Pitt said, waving like a yokel at the camera.

The commentator's face fell. "Cut it, Joe," he yelled to his cameraman. "We grabbed a bummer." Then he turned and moved his way toward the ship, shouting for the crowd to keep their feet off his mike cord.

Six blocks, and a whole half-hour later, Pitt finally found a cab driver who was more interested in hauling a fare than in ogling the derelict.

"Where to?" the driver asked.

Pitt hesitated, looking down at his grimly, sweat-stained shirt and pants under the torn and just as grimy windbreaker. He didn't need a mirror to see the bloodshot eyes and five o'clock shadow. He could easily imagine himself as the perfect reflection of a Bowery wino. But then he figured, what the hell, he'd just stepped off what was once the most prestigious ocean liner in the world.

"What's the most luxurious and expensive hotel in town?"

"The Pierre, on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-first, ain't cheap.

"The Pierre it is then."

The driver looked over his shoulder, studied Pitt, and wrinkled his nose. Then he shrugged and pulled into the traffic. He took less than a half hour to reach the curb in front of the Pierre, overlooking Central Park.

Pitt paid off the cabby and walked through the revolving doors and up to the desk.

The clerk gave him a look of disgust that was a classic. "I'm sorry, sir," he said haughtily before Pitt could open his mouth. "We're all filled up."

Pitt knew it would only be a matter of minutes before a mob of reporters discovered his whereabouts if he gave his real name. He wasn't ready to face the ordeal of celebrity status yet. All he wanted was uninterrupted sIeep.

"I am not what I appear," Pitt said, trying to sound indignant. "I happen to be Professor R. Malcolm Smythe, author and archaeologist. I have just stepped off the plane after a four-month dig up the Amazon, and I haven't had time to change. My man will be here shortly with my luggage from the airport."

The desk clerk was instantly transformed into peaches and cream. "Oh, I am sorry, Professor Smythe, I didn't recognize you. However, we're still filled up. The city is crowded with people who came to see the arrival of the Titanic. I'm sure you understand."

It was a masterful performance. He didn't buy Pitt or one word of his fanciful tale.

"I'll vouch for the professor," said a voice behind Pitt. "Give him your best suite and charge it to this address."

A card was thrown on the counter. The desk clerk picked it up and read it and lit up like a roman candle. Then with a flourish he laid a registration card before Pitt and produced a room key as if by sleight of hand.

Pitt slowly turned and met a face that was every bit as worn and haggard as his. The lips were turned up in a crooked smile of understanding, but the eyes were dulled with the lost and vacant stare of a zombie. It was Gene Seagram.

"How did you track me down so fast?" Pitt asked. He was lying in a bathtub nursing a vodka on the rocks. Seagram sat across the bathroom on the john.

"No great exercise in intuition," he said. "I saw you leave the shipyard and followed you."

"I thought you'd be dancing on the Titanic about now."

"The ship means nothing to me. My only concern is the byzanium in its vault, and I've been told it will be another forty-eight hours before the derelict can be moved into dry dock and the wreckage in the cargo hold removed."

"Then why don't you relax for a couple of days and have some fun. In a few weeks your problems will be over. The Sicilian Project will be off the drawing boards and a working reality."

Seagram's eyes closed for a moment. "I wanted to talk to you," he said quietly. "I wanted to talk to you about Dana."

Oh God, Pitt thought, here it comes. How do you keep a straight face, knowing you made love to the man's wife. Up to now, it had been all he could do to maintain a casual tone in his conversation. "How is she getting along after her ordeal?"

"All right, I suppose." Seagram shrugged.

"You suppose? She was airlifted off the ship by the Navy two days ago. Haven't you seen her since she came ashore?"

"She refuses to see me . . . said it was all over between us."

Pitt contemplated the vodka in the glass. "So it's hearts and flowers time. So who needs her? If I were you, Seagram, I'd find myself the most expensive hooker in town, charge her off on your government expense account, and forget Dana."

"You don't understand. I love her."

"God, you sound like a letter to Ann Landers." Pitt reached for the bottle on the tiled floor and freshened his drink. "Look, Seagram, you're a pretty decent guy underneath your pompous, bullshit facade. And who knows, you may go down in history as the great merciful scientist who saved mankind from a nuclear holocaust. You've still got enough looks to attract a woman, and I'm willing to bet that when you clean off your desk in Washington and bid a fond farewell to government service you'll be a rich man. So don't expect tears and violins from me over a lost love. You've got it made."

"What good is it without the woman I love?"

"I see I'm not getting through to you." Pitt was one third into the bottle and a warm glow had begun to course through his body. "Why throw yourself down the sewer over a broad who suddenly thinks she's found the fountain of youth. If she's gone, she's gone. Men come crawling back, not women. They persevere. There isn't a man alive a woman can't persevere into the grave. Forget Dana, Seagram. There are millions of other fish in the stream. If you need the phony security of a pair of tits making your bed and fixing your supper, go hire a maid; they're cheaper and a hell of a lot less trouble in the long run."

"So now you think you're Sigmund Freud," Seagram said, rising from the john. "Women are nothing to you. A beautiful relationship with you is a love affair with a bottle. You're out of touch with the world."

"Am I?" Pitt stood up in the tub and yanked open the door to the medicine cabinet so that Seagram was staring at his refection in the mirror. "Take a good look. There's the face of a man who's out of touch with the world. Behind those eyes there's a man who's driven by a thousand demons of his own making. You're sick, Seagram. Mentally sick over problems you've magnified out of all proportion. Dana's desertion is only a crutch to enhance your black depression. You don't love her as much as you think you do. She's only a symbol, a prop you lean on. Look at the glaze over the eyes; look at the slack skin around the mouth. Get yourself to a psychiatrist, and damned soon. Think about Gene Seagram for once. Forget about saving the world. It's time you saved yourself."

Seagram's face was violently flushed. He clenched his fists and trembled. Then the mirror before his eyes began to mist, not on the outside but from within, and another face slowly emerged. A strange face with the same haunted eyes.

Pitt stood mute and watched as Seagram's expression turned from anger to sheer terror.

"God, no . . . it's him!"

"Him?"

"Him!" he cried, "Joshua Hays Brewster!" Then Seagram struck the mirror with both fists, shattering the glass, and fled the room.

76

Pensive and dreamy-eyed, Dana stood in front of a full length mirror and scrutinized herself. The bruise on her head was neatly covered by a new hair style and, except for several fading black-and-blue marks, her body looked as lithe and perfect as ever. It definitely passed inspection. Then she stared at the eyes that stared back. There were no additional crow's feet, no new puffiness around the edges. The mythical hardened look of a fallen woman was nowhere to be seen. Instead, they seemed to gleam with a vibrant expectancy that hadn't been there before. Her rebirth as an unfettered woman of the world had been a complete success.

"Care for any breakfast?" Marie Sheldon's voice carried up the stairs.

Dana donned a soft lace dressing gown. "Just coffee, thanks," she said. "What time is it?"

"A few minutes after nine."

A minute later Marie poured the coffee as Dana stepped into the kitchen. "What's on the agenda for today?" she asked.

"Something typically feminine-I think I'll go shopping. Have lunch by myself at an intimate tearoom and then go over to the NUMA clubhouse and scare up a partner for an hour or so of tennis."

"Sounds charming," Marie said dryly; "but I suggest you stop playing Mrs. Rich Bitch, which you aren't, and start acting like a broad with responsibilities, which you are."

"What's the sense in it?"

Marie threw up her hands in exasperation. " `What's the sense in it?' For one thing, sweetie, you're the girl of the hour. In case you haven't noticed, the phone has been ringing off the hook for the past three days. Every woman's magazine in the country wants your exclusive story, and I've taken at least eight requests for you to appear on nationally televised talk shows. Like it or not, you're big news. Don't you think it's about time you came back down to earth and met the onslaught head-on?"

"What's there to say? So I was the only woman on board an old drifting derelict with twenty men. Big deal."

"You almost died out there in the ocean and you treat the whole episode as though it were just another cruise down the Nile on Cleopatra's barge. Having all those men catering to your every whim must have gone to your head."

If only Marie knew the whole truth. But Dana and everyone on board had been sworn to secrecy by Warren Nicholson. The attempted assault by the Russians was to be buried and forgotten by everyone. But she took a perverse sort of satisfaction in knowing that her performance on the Titanic that cold stormy night would linger in the minds of the men who were present for the rest of their lives.

"Too much happened out there." Dana sighed. "I'm not the same person any more."

"So what does that mean?"

"To begin with, I'm taking out papers to divorce Gene."

"It's come to that?"

"It's come to that," Dana repeated firmly. "Also, I'm going to take a leave of absence from NUMA and have a fling at life. As long as I'm the exalted female of the year, I'm going to make it pay. The personal stories, the TV appearances-they're going to enable me to do what every girl yearns to do all her life."

"Which is?"

"Spend money, and have a high old time doing it."

Marie shook her head sadly. "I'm beginning to feel like I've helped create a monster."

Dana took her gently by the hand. "Not you, dear friend. It took a brush with death for me to learn that I had condemned myself to an existence that led nowhere.

"It began, I suppose, with my childhood-" Dana's voice trailed off as the terrible memories came flickering back. "My childhood was a nightmare, and I've carried its effects with me all my adult life. I even infected my marriage with its sickness. Gene recognized the symptoms and married me more out of pity than deep love. Unwittingly, he treated me more as a father than as a lover.

"I can't force myself to go back now. The emotional responses that it takes to build and maintain a lasting relationship just aren't in me. I'm a loner, Marie; I know that now. I'm too selfish with my affections toward others; it's the albatross around my neck. From here on in, I'm going it alone. That way I can never hurt anyone ever again."

Marie looked up, tears in her eyes. "Well then, I guess between us we'll even up the sides. You're folding your marriage and going back to the single ways while I'm shucking the odd-woman-out syndrome and joining the great ranks of the matronly housewives."

Dana's lips parted in a wide smile. "You and Mel?"

"Me and Mel."

"When?"

"It had better be soon or I'm going to have to order my trousseau from the Blessed Event Maternity Shop."

"You're pregnant?"

"That ain't Betty Crocker that's rising in my oven."

Dana came around the table and hugged Marie. "You with a baby, I can't believe it."

"You better believe it. They tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and massive doses of adrenaline, but it was no go. The frog still died."

"You mean rabbit."

"Where've you been? They gave up rabbits years ago."

"Oh, Marie, I'm so happy for you. The two of us beginning whole new life patterns. Aren't you excited?"

"Oh sure," Marie said in a dry tone. "Nothing like starting anew with a big bang."

"Is there any other way?"

"I've got the easy path, sweetie." Marie kissed Dana on to cheek lightly. "It's you I'm worried about. Just don't go too far too fast and fall off the deep end."

"The deep end is where all the fun is."

"Take my word for it. Learn to swim in the shallows."

"Too tame." Dana's eyes grew thoughtful. "I'm going to start at the very crest."

"And just how are you going to initiate that little feat?"

Dana met Marie's eyes evenly. "All it takes is one little phone call."

The President came from behind his desk in the Oval Office and greeted the Majority Leader of the Senate, John Burdick, with warmth.

"John, it's good to see you. How are Josie and the kids?"

Burdick, a tall, thin man with a bush of black hair that seldom saw a comb, shrugged good naturedly. "Josie's fine. And you know kids. As far as they're concerned, good old Dad is nothing but a money machine."

After they were seated, the talk kicked off with their differences on budget programs. Although the two men were opposing party leaders and sniped at each other at every opportunity in the open, behind closed doors they were warm, intimate friends.

"Congress is beginning to think you've gone mad, Mr. President. During the past six months, you've vetoed every spending bill sent to the White House from the Hill."

"And I'm going to go right on vetoing until the day I walk through that door for the last time." The President paused to light a thin cigar. "Let's face the cold, hard truth, John. The government of the United States is broke, and it's been broke since the end of World War Two, but nobody will admit it. We go merrily on our way running up a national debt that defies comprehension, figuring that somewhere down the line the poor bastard that defeats us in the next election will pay the piper for the spending spree of the last fifty years."

"What do you expect Congress to do? Declare bankruptcy?"

"Sooner or later it may have to."

"The consequences are unthinkable. The national debt is carried by half the insurance companies, savings and loans, and banks in the nation. They'd all be wiped out overnight."

"So what else is new?"

Burdick shook his head. "I refuse to accept it."

"Damn it, John, you can't sweep it under the carpet. Do you realize that every taxpayer under the age of fifty will never see a Social Security check. In another twelve years it will be absolutely impossible to pay even a third of the people who are eligible for benefits. That's another reason I'm going to sound the warning. A small voice in the wilderness, I regretfully admit. But still, in the few months remaining of my term in office, I'm going to shout doom every chance I get"

"The American people don't like to hear sad tidings. You won't be very popular."

"I don't give a damn. I don't care one thin dime for what anybody thinks. Popularity contests are for egoists. A few months from now I'm going to be on my ketch, sailing peacefully somewhere south of Fiji, and the government can go straight to hell."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. President. You're a good man. Even your worst enemies will concede that."

But the President was not to be stopped. "We had a great republic going for a while, John, but you and I and all the other attorneys screwed it up. Government is a big business and attorneys shouldn't be allowed to take office. It's the accountants and the marketing people who should be congressmen and President."

"It takes attorneys to run a legislature."

The President shrugged wearily. "What's the use? Whatever course I take won't change a thing." Then he straightened in his chair and smiled. "My apologies, John, you didn't come here to hear me make a speech. What's on your mind?"

"The underprivileged children's medical bill." Burdick stared intently at the President. "Are you going to veto that one too?"

The President leaned back in his chair and studied his cigar. "Yes," he said simply.

"That's my bill," Burdick said quietly. "I nursed it through both the House and the Senate."

"I know."

"How can you veto a bill for children whose families can't afford to give them proper medical attention?"

"For the same reason I've vetoed added benefits for citizens over eighty, federal scholarship programs for the minorities, and a dozen other welfare bills. Somebody has to pay for them. And the working class who support this country has been pushed to the wall with a five-hundred. per-cent tax increase over the last ten years."

"For the love of humanity, Mr. President."

"For the love of a balanced budget, Senator. Where do you expect the funds to support your program to come from?"

"You might begin by cutting back the budget of Meta Section."

So there it was. Congressional snoops had finally breached the walls of Meta Section. It had to come sooner or later. At least it was later.

He decided to play it noncommittal. "Meta Section?"

"A super-classified think-tank you've supported for years. Surely, I don't have to describe its operation to you."

"No," the President said evenly. "You don't."

An uncomfortable silence followed.

Finally Burdick forged ahead "It took months of checking by my investigators-you covered the financial tracks very cleverly-but they finally managed to backtrail the source of the funds used to raise the Titanic to a supersecret organization, operating under the name of Meta Section, and then ultimately to you. My God, Mr. President, you authorized nearly three quarters of a billion dollars to salvage that worthless old wreck and then lied by saying that it costs less than half that amount. And here I am only asking for fifty million to get the children's medical bill off the ground. If I may say so, sir, your odd sense of priorities is a bloody crime."

"What do you intend to do, John? Blackmail me into signing your bill?"

"To be perfectly candid, yes."

"I see."

Before the conversation could go on, the President's secretary entered the room.

"Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. President, but you asked to check over your appointment schedule for this afternoon."

The President made an apologetic gesture to Burdick. "Excuse me, John, this will only take a moment."

The President scanned the schedule. He stopped at a name penciled in for 415. He looked up at his secretary, his eyebrows raised. "Mrs. Seagram?"

"Yes, sir. She called and said she had traced down the history of that model ship in the bedroom. I thought perhaps you might be interested in what she discovered, so I squeezed her in for a few minutes."

The President held his hands over his face and closed his eyes. "Call Mrs. Seagram and cancel the four-fifteen appointment. Ask her to join me for dinner on board the Presidential yacht at seven-thirty."

The secretary made the notation and left the room.

The President turned back to Burdick. "Now, John, if I still refuse to sign your bill, what then?"

Burdick held up. his hands. "Then you leave me no choice but to blow the whistle on your clandestine uses of government funds. In that event, I fear you can expect a scandal that will make the old Watergate mess look like an Easter egg hunt."

"You'd do that?"

"I would."

An icy calm seemed to settle ever the President. "Before you dash out the door and waste more of the taxpayers' dollars on a congressional hearing over my fiscal maneuverings, I suggest you hear from the horse's own mouth what Meta Section is all about and what they've produced in the defense of the country that keeps us both gainfully employed."

"I'm listening, Mr. President." Good.

One hour later, a thoroughly subdued Senator John Burdick sat in his office and carefully dropped his secret file on Meta Section into a shredding machine.

77

It was a staggering sight to see the Titanic propped high and dry in the huge canyon of a dry dock.

Already the noise had started. Welders were attacking the clogged passageways. Riveters were hammering against the scarred hull, beefing up the temporary repairs made at sea to the jagged wounds below the waterline. Overhead, two sky-reaching cranes dipped their jaws down into the darkened cargo holds only to have them reappear minutes later with mangled bits and pieces of debris clutched in their iron teeth.

Pitt took what he knew would be his last look about the gymnasium and Upper Deck. Like bidding a New Year's Eve good-by to a passing piece of his life, he stood there and soaked up the memories. The sweat of the salvage, the blood and sacrifice of his crew, the fragility of their hope that had in the end carried them through. It would all be left behind. Finally, he cast aside his reverie and walked down the main staircase and eventually found his way to the forward cargo hold on G Deck.

They were all present and accounted for and looking strangely unfamiliar under the silver hard hats. Gene Seagram, gaunt and trembling, paced back and forth. Mel Donner, wiping trickles of sweat from his neck and chin, and nervously keeping a concerned eye on Seagram. Herb Lusky, a Meta Section mineralogist, standing by with his analysis equipment. Admirals Sandecker and Kemper, huddled in one corner of the darkened hold and conversing in low tones.

Pitt carefully stepped around the twisted bulkhead supports and over the rippled deck of warped steel until he was standing behind a shipyard worker who was intently aiming his cutting torch at a massive hinge on the vault door. The cult, Pitt thought darkly, it was only a matter of minutes now before the secret hidden inside its gut was laid bare, suddenly, he became aware of an icy chill, everything around him seemed to turn cold, and he began to dread the opening of the vault.

As if sharing his uneasiness, the other men in the dank hold became quiet and gathered beside Pitt in restless apprehension.

At last, the worker turned off the fiery blue jet of his torch and raised his face shield.

"How's it look?" Pitt asked.

"They sure built them good in the old days," the worker replied. "I've torched out the lock mechanism and knocked off the hinges, but she's still frozen solid."

"What now?"

"We run a cable from the Doppleman crane above, attach it to the vault door and hope for the best."

It took the better part of an hour for a crew of men to wrestle a two-inch-thick cable into the hold and fasten it onto the vault. Then, when all was ready, a signal was relayed to the crane operator via a portable radio transmitter, and the cable began slowly to straighten out its curves and tighten. No one had to be told to move back out of the way. They all knew that if the wire took it in its head to snap, it would whiplash through the hold with more than enough force to split a man in two.

In the distance they could hear the engine of the crane straining. For long seconds nothing happened; the cable stretched and quivered, its strands groaning under the tremendous load. Pitt threw caution aside and edged closer. Still nothing happened. The vault's stubborn resolve seemed as firm as the steel of its walls.

The cable slackened as the crane operator eased off the strain to work up his engine's rpm's. Then he revved up and engaged the clutch once more, and the cable suddenly went taut with an audible twang. To the silent men who looked anxiously on, it seemed inconceivable that the old rusted vault could stand up to such a powerful assault, and yet the inconceivable was apparently happening. But then a tiny hairline crack made its appearance along the upper edge of the vault door. It was followed by two vertical cracks along the sides and, finally, a fourth, running across the bottom. Abruptly, with an agonizing screech of protest, the door reluctantly relinquished its grip and tore off the great steel cube.

No water came out of the yawning blackness. The vault had remained airtight during its long sojourn in the deep abyss.

Nobody made a move. They stood rooted, frozen, mesmerized by that uninviting black square hole. A musty stench rolled out from within.

Lusky was the first to find his voice. "My God, what is it? What in hell is that smell?"

"Get me a light," Pitt ordered one of the workmen.

Someone produced a fluorescent hand light. Pitt switched it on and danced its bluish-white beam on the interior of the vault.

They could see ten wooden boxes, tightly secured by stout leather straps. They could also see something else, something that turned every face ghostly pale. It was the mummified remains of a man.

78

He was lying in one corner of the vault, eyes closed and sunken in, skin as blackened as old tar paper on a warehouse roof. The muscle tissue was shrunken over the bony skeleton and a bacterial growth covered him from head to toe. He looked like a moldy piece of bread. Only the white hair of his head and beard were perfectly preserved. A pool of viscous fluid extended around the remains and moistened the atmosphere, as if a bucket of water had been thrown on the walls of the vault.

"Whoever it is is still wet," Kemper murmured, his faces mask of horror. "How can that be after so long?"

"Water accounts for over half the weight of the body," Pitt answered quietly. "There simply wasn't enough air trapped inside the vault to evaporate all of the fluids."

Donner turned away, repulsed by the macabre scene. "Who was he?" he managed, fighting the urge to vomit.

Pitt looked at the mummy impassively. "I think we will find that his name was Joshua Hays Brewster."

"Brewster?" Seagram whispered, his frightened eyes wild with fear.

"Why not?" Pitt said. "Who else knew the contents of the vault?"

Admiral Kemper shook his head in stunned wonderment. "Can you imagine," he said reverently, "what it must have been like dying in that black hole while the ship was sinking into the depths of the sea?"

"I don't care to dwell on it," Donner said. "I'll probably have nightmares every night for the next month as it is."

"It's positively ghastly," Sandecker said with difficulty, He studied the saddened, knowing expression on Pitt's face. `You knew about this?"

Pitt nodded. "I was forewarned by Commodore Bigalow."

Sandecker fixed him with a speculative look, but he let it drop at that and turned to one of the shipyard workers. "Call the coroner's office and tell them to come and get that thing out of there. Then clear the area and keep it cleared until I give you an order to the contrary."

The shipyard people needed no further urging. They disappeared from the cargo hold as if by magic.

Seagram grabbed Lusky's arm with an intensity that made he mineralogist start. "Okay, Herb, it's your show now."

Hesitantly, Lusky entered the cavity, stepped over the mummy and pried open one of the ore boxes. Then he set up his equipment and began analyzing the contents. After what seemed forever to the men pacing the deck outside the vault. he looked up, his eyes reflecting a dazed disbelief.

"This stuff is worthless."

Seagram moved in closer. "Say again."

"It's worthless. There isn't even a minute trace of byzanium."

"Try another box," Seagram gasped feverishly.

Lusky nodded and went to work. But it was the same story on the next ore box, and the next, until the contents of all ten were strewn everywhere.

Lusky looked as though he was suffering a seizure. "Junk . . . pure junk.. ." he stammered. "Nothing but common gravel, the kind you'd find under any roadbed."

The hushed note of bewilderment in Lusky's voice faded away and the quiet in the Titanic's cargo hold became heavy and deep. Pitt stared downward, stared dumbly. Every eye was held by the rubble and the broken boxes while numbed minds fought to grasp the appalling reality, the horrible, undeniable truth that everything-the salvage, the exhausting labor, the astronomical drain of money, the deaths of Munk and Woodson had all been for nothing. The byzanium was not on the Titanic, nor had it ever been. They were the victims of a monstrously cruel joke that had been played out seventy-six years before.

It was Seagram who finally broke the silence. In the final ignition of madness he grinned to himself in the gray light, the grin mushrooming into' a bansheelike laughter that echoed in the steel hold. He thrust himself through the door of the vault, snatched up a rock, and struck Lusky on the side of the head sending a spray of red over the yellow wood ore boxes.

He was still laughing, locked in the throes of black hysteria, when he fell upon the putrescent remains of Joshua Hays Brewster and began bashing the mummified head against the vault wall until it loosened from the neck and came off in his hands.

As he held the ugly, abhorrent thing before him, Seagram's conflicted mind suddenly saw the blackened, parchmentlike lips spread into a hideous grin. His breakdown was complete. The parallel depression of Joshua Hays Brewster had reached out through the mists of time and bequeathed Seagram a ghostly inheritance that hurled the physicist into the yawning jaws of a madness from which he was never to escape.

79

Six days later, Donner entered the hotel dining room where Admiral Sandecker was eating breakfast and eased into a vacant chair across the table. "Have you heard the latest?"

Sandecker paused between bites of his omelet. "If it's more bad news, I'd just as soon you keep it to yourself."

"They nailed me coming out of my apartment this morning." He threw a folded paper on the table in front of him. "A subpoena to appear in front of a congressional investigating committee."

Sandecker forked another slice of the omelet without looking at the paper. "Congratulations."

"Same goes for you, Admiral. Dollars-to doughnuts a federal marshal is lurking in your office anteroom this very minute, waiting to slap one on you."

"Who's behind it?"

"Some punk-eased freshman senator from Wyoming who's trying to make a name for himself before he's forty." Donner dabbed a crumpled handkerchief on his damp forehead. "The stupid ass even insists on having Gene testify."

"That I'd have to see." Sandecker pushed the plate away and leaned back in his chair. "How is Seagram getting along?"

"Manic depressive psychosis is the fancy term for it."

"How about Lusky?"

"Twenty stitches and a nasty concussion. He should be out of the hospital in another week."

Sandecker shook his head. "I hope I never have to live through anything like that ever again." He took a swallow of coffee. "How do we play it?"

"The President called me personally from the White House last night. He said to play it straight. The last thing he wants is to become entangled in a snarl of conflicting lies."

"What about the Sicilian Project?"

"It died a quick death when we opened the Titanic's vault," Donner said. "We have no alternative but to spill the entire can of worms from the beginning to the sorry end."

"Why does the dirty laundry have to be washed in the open? What good will it do?"

"The woes of a democracy," Donner said resignedly. "Everything has to be open and above board, even if it means giving away secrets to an unfriendly foreign government."

Sandecker placed his hands on his face and sighed. "Well, I guess I'll be looking for a new job."

"Not necessarily. The President has promised to issue a statement to the effect that the whole failure of the project was his responsibility and his alone."

Sandecker shook his head. "No good. I have several enemies in Congress. They're just drooling in anticipation of turning the screws on my resignation from NUMA."

"It may not come to that."

"For the past fifteen years, ever since I attained the rank of admiral, I've had to double-deal with politicians. Take my word for it, it's a dirty business. Before this thing is over with, everyone remotely connected with the Sicilian Project and the raising of the Titanic will be lucky if they can find a job cleaning stables."

"I'm truly sorry it had to end like this, Admiral."

"Believe me, so am I" Sandecker finished off his coffee and patted a napkin against his mouth. "Tell me, Donner, what's the batting order? Who has the illustrious senator from Wyoming named as the lead-off witness?"

"My understanding is that he intends taking the Titanic's salvage operation first, and then working backward to involve Meta Section and finally the President." Donner picked up the subpoena and shoved it back in his coat pocket. "The first witness they're most likely to call is Dirk Pitt."

Sandecker looked at him. "Pitt, did you say?"

"That's right."

"Interesting," Sandecker said softly. "Most interesting."

"You've lost me somewhere."

Sandecker neatly folded the napkin and laid it on the table. "What you don't know, Donner, what you couldn't know, is that immediately after the men in the little white coats carried Seagram off the Titanic, Pitt vanished into thin air."

Donner's eyes narrowed. "Surely you know where he is. His friends? Giordino?"

"Don't you think we all tried to find him?" Sandecker snarled. "He's gone. Disappeared. It's as though the earth swallowed him up."

"But he must have left some clue."

"He did say something, but it didn't make any sense."

"What was that?"

"He said he was going to look for Southby."

"Who in hell is Southby?"

"Damned if I know," Sandecker said. "Damned if I know."

80

Pitt steered the rented Rover sedan cautiously down the narrow, rain-slickened country road. The tall beech trees lining the shoulders seemed to close in and attack the moving car as they pelted its steel roof with the heavy runoff from their leaves.

Pitt was tired, dead tired. He had set out on his odyssey not sure of what it was he might find, if anything. He'd begun as Joshua Hays Brewster and his crew of miners had begun, on the docks of Aberdeen, Scotland, and then he'd followed their death-strewn path across Britain almost to the old Ocean Duck at Southampton from which the Titanic had set out on her maiden voyage.

He turned his gaze from the pounding wipers on the windshield and glanced down at the blue notebook lying on the passenger seat. It was filled with dates, places, miscellaneous jottings, and torn newspaper articles he had accumulated along the way. The musty files of the past had told him little.

"TWO AMERICANS FOUND DEAD"

The April 7, 1912, editions of the Glasgow papers noted fifteen pages back from the headline. The detail-barren stories were as deeply buried as the bodies of Coloradans John Caldwell and Thomas Price were in a local cemetery.

Their tombstones, discovered by Pitt in a small churchyard, offered virtually nothing other than their names and dates of death. It was the same story with Charles Widney, Walter Schmidt, and Warner O'Deming. Of Alvin Coulter he could find no trace.

And finally there was Vernon Hall. Pitt hadn't found his resting place either. Where had he fallen? Had his blood been spilled amid the neat and orderly landscape of the Hampshire Downs or perhaps somewhere on the back streets of Southampton itself?

Out of the corner of one eye he caught a marker that gave the distance to the great harbor port as twenty kilometers.

Pitt drove on mechanically. The road curved and then paralleled the lovely, rippling Itchen stream, famous throughout southern England for its fighting trout, but he didn't notice it. Up ahead, across the emerald-green farmlands of the coastal plain, a small town came into view, and he decided he would stop there for breakfast.

An alarm went off in the back of Pitt's mind. He jammed on the brakes, but much too hard-the rear wheels broke loose and the Rover skidded around in a perfect three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle, coming to rest still aimed southward but sunk to the hubcaps in the yielding muck of a roadside ditch.

Almost before the car had fully stopped, Pitt threw open the door and leaped out. His shoes sank out of sight and became stuck, but he pulled free of them and ran back down the road in his stocking feet.

He halted at a small sign beside the road. Part of the lettering was obscured by a small tree that had grown up around it. Slowly, as if he were afraid his hopes would be shattered by yet another disappointment, he pushed aside the branches and suddenly it all became quite clear. The key to the riddle of Joshua Hays Brewster and the byzanium was there in front of him. He stood there soaking up the falling rain and in that instant he knew that everything had been worthwhile.

81

Marganin sat on a bench by the fountain in Sverdlov Square across from the Bolshoi Theater and read a newspaper. He felt a slight quiver and knew without looking that someone had taken the vacant place beside him.

The fat man in the rumpled suit leaned against the backrest and casually gnawed on an apple. "Congratulations on your promotion, Commander," he mumbled between bites.

"Considering how events turned out," Marganin said without lowering the paper, "it was the least Admiral Sloyuk could do."

"And your situation now . . . with Prevlov out of the way?"

"With the good Captain's defection, I was the logical choice to replace him as Chief of the Foreign Intelligence Analysis Division. It was an obvious conclusion."

"It is good that our years of labor have paid such handsome dividends."

Marganin turned a page. "We have only opened the door. The dividends are yet to come."

"You must be more careful of your actions now than ever before."

"I intend to," Marganin said. "This Prevlov business badly burned the Soviet Navy's credibility with the Kremlin. Everyone in the Naval Intelligence Department is having their security clearances rechecked under tight scrutiny. It will be a long time before I am trusted as fully as Captain Prevlov was."

"We will see to it that things are speeded up a bit." The fat man pretended to swallow a large bite from the apple. "When you leave here, mingle with the crowd at the entrance to the subway across the street. One of our people who is adroit at lifting wallets from the unsuspecting will do a reverse routine and discreetly insert an envelope into your inside breast pocket. The envelope contains the minutes from the last meeting of the United States Navy Chief of Staff with his fleet commanders."

"That's pretty heady material."

"The minutes have been doctored. They may seem important, but in reality they have been carefully reworded to mislead your superiors."

"Passing along fake documents won't do my position any good."

"Ease your mind," the fat man said. "Tomorrow at this time an agent of the KGB will obtain the same material. The KGB will declare it bona fide. Since you will have produced your information twenty-four hours ahead of them, it will put a feather in your cap in the eyes of Admiral Sloyuk."

"Very cunning," Marganin said, staring at the newspaper. "Anything else?"

"This is good-by," the fat man murmured.

"Good-by?"

"Yes. I have been your contact long enough. Too long. We've come too far, you and I, to become lax in our security now."

"And my new contact?"

"Are you still living in the naval barracks?" the fat man replied with another question.

"The barracks will remain my home. I am not about to draw suspicion as a big spender and live in a fancy apartment like Prevlov's. I shall continue to lead a spartan existence on my Soviet naval pay."

"Good. My replacement is already assigned. He will be the orderly who cleans the officers' quarters of your barracks."

"I will miss you, old friend," Marganin said slowly.

"And I, you."

There was a long moment of silence. And then, finally, the fat man spoke again in a hushed undertone. "God bless, Harry."

When Marganin folded the newspaper and laid it aside, the fat man was gone.

82

"That's our destination over there to the right," the pilot of the helicopter said. "I'll set down in that pasture just across the road from the churchyard."

Sandecker looked out the window. It was a gray, overcast morning and soft blankets of mist were hovering over the low areas of the tiny village. A quiet lane wandered past several quaint houses and was bordered on both sides by picturesque rock walls. He stiffened as the pilot made a steep bank around the church steeple.

He glanced at Donner on the seat beside him. Donner was staring straight ahead. In front of him, occupying the seat next to the pilot, was Sid Koplin. The mineralogist had been called back on this one last assignment for Meta Section, because Herb Lusky was still not well enough to make the trip.

Sandecker felt the slight bump as the landing skids touched the ground, and a moment later the pilot cut the engine and the rotor blades drifted to a stop.

In the sudden stillness after the flight from London, the pilot's voice seemed overly loud. "We're here, sir."

Sandecker nodded and stepped out the side door. Pitt was waiting and walked toward him with an outstretched hand.

"Welcome to Southby, Admiral," he said smiling.

Sandecker smiled as he took Pitt's hand, but there was no humor in his face. "The next time you take a powder without notifying me as to your intentions, you're fired."

Pitt feigned a hurt expression and then turned and greeted Donner. "Mel, nice to see you."

"Likewise," Donner said warmly. "I believe you've already met Sid Koplin."

"A chance meeting," Pitt grinned. "We were never formally introduced."

Koplin took Pitt's hand in both of his. This was hardly the same man Pitt had found dying in the snows of Novaya Zemlya. Koplin's grip was firm and his eyes alert.

"It was my fondest wish," he said, his voice heavy with emotion, "that some day I would have the opportunity of thanking you in person for saving my life."

"I'm glad to see you in good health," was all Pitt could think of to mumble. He looked down at the ground nervously.

By God, Sandecker thought to himself, the man was actually embarrassed. He never dreamed he'd see the day when Dirk Pitt turned modest. The admiral rescued Pitt by grabbing him by the arm and pulling him toward the village church.

"I hope you know what you're doing," Sandecker said. "The British frown upon colonials who go around digging up their graveyards."

"It took a direct call from the President to the Prime Minister to cut through all the bureaucratic red tape of an exhumation," Donner added.

"I think you will find the inconvenience has been worth it," Pitt said.

They came to the road and crossed it. Then they passed through an ancient wrought-iron gate and walked into the graveyard that surrounded the parish church. They walked in silence for several moments, reading the inscriptions on the weather-worn headstones.

Then Sandecker motioned toward the little village. "It's so far off the beaten track. What steered you onto it?"

"Pure luck," Pitt answered. "When I began tracing the Coloradans' movements from Aberdeen, I had no idea of how Southby might fit in the puzzle. The final sentence in Brewster's journal, if you recall, said 'How I long to return to Southby.' And, according to Commodore Bigalow, Brewster's last words just before he shut himself in the Titanic's vault were 'Thank God for Southby.'

"My only inkling, and a meager one at that, was Southby had an English ring to it, so I began by pinpointing as nearly is I could the miners' trail to Southampton-"

"By following their grave markers," Donner finished.

"They read like signposts," Pitt admitted. "That and the fact that Brewster's journal recorded the times and places of their deaths, except, that is, for Alvin Coulter and Vernon Hall. Coulter's final resting place remains a mystery, but Hall lies here in the Southby village cemetery."

"Then you found it on a map."

"No, the village is so small it isn't even a dot in the Michelin Tour Guide. I just happened to notice an old, forgotten hand-painted sign some farmer had set along the main road years ago advertising a milk cow for sale. The directions gave the farm's location as three kilometers east in the next country lane to Southby. The last pieces of the puzzle then began dropping into place."

They walked along in silence and made their way over to where three men were standing. Two wore the standard work clothes of local farmers, the third was in the uniform of a county constable. Pitt made the brief introductions, and then Donner solemnly handed the constable the order for exhumation.

They all stared down at the grave. The tombstone stood at one end of a large stone slab that lay atop the deceased. The stone simply read:

VERNON HALL

Died April 8, 1912

R.I.P.

Neatly carved in the center of the arched horizontal slab was the image of an old three-wasted sailing ship.

"'. . . the precious ore we labored so desperately to rape from the bowels of that cursed mountain lies safely in the vault of the ship. Only Vernon will be left to tell the tale, for I depart on the great White Star steamer . . . '" Pitt recited the words from Joshua Hays Brewster's journal.

"Vernon Hall's burial vault," Donner said as if in a dream. "This is what he meant, not the vault of the Titanic."

"It's unreal," Sandecker murmured. "Is it possible that the byzanium lies here?"

"We'll know in a few minutes," Pitt said. He nodded to the two farmers who began shoving at the slab with pry bars. Once the slab was hefted aside, the farmers began digging.

"But why bury the byzanium here?" Sandecker asked. "Why didn't Brewster go on to Southampton and have it loaded on board the Titanic?"

"A myriad of reasons," Pitt said, his voice unnaturally loud in the quiet graveyard. "Hunted like a dog, exhausted beyond human endurance, his friends all brutally murdered before his eyes, Brewster was pushed into madness just as surely as Gene Seagram was when he learned that fate had snatched away his moment of success on the very verge of fulfillment. Add all that to the fact that Brewster was in a strange land; he was alone and friendless. Death stalked him constantly without letup, and his only chance for escaping to the United States with the byzanium was moored several miles away at the dock in Southampton.

"It's said that insanity breeds genius. Perhaps in Brewster's case it was so, or perhaps he was simply misguided by his delusions. He assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that he could never make it safely aboard the ship with the byzanium by himself. So, he buried it in Vernon Hall's grave and substituted worthless rock in the original ore boxes. Then he probably left his journal with the church vicar with instructions to turn it over to the American consulate in Southampton. I imagine his cryptic prose grew from the madness that had brought him to the point where he trusted no one-not even an old country vicar. He probably figured that some perceptive soul in the Army Department would decipher the true meaning of his wandering prose in the event of his murder."

"But he made it on board the Titanic safely," Donner said. "The French didn't stop him."

"My guess is that things were getting too warm for the French agents. The British police must have followed the trail of bodies, just as I did, and were breathing down the pursuers' back."

"So the French, afraid of an international scandal of gigantic proportions, backed off at the last moment," Koplin injected.

"That's one theory," Pitt replied.

Sandecker looked thoughtful. "The Titanic . . . the Titanic sank and queered everything."

"True," Pitt answered automatically. "Now a thousand ifs enter the picture. If Captain Smith had heeded the ice warnings and reduced speed; if the ice packs hadn't floated unusually far south that year, if the Titanic had missed the iceberg and docked in New York as scheduled; and, if Brewster had lived to tell his story to the Army, the byzanium would have simply been dug up and recovered at a later date. On the other hand, even if Brewster had been killed before he boarded the ship, the Army Department would have no doubt figured the double meaning at the end of his journal and acted accordingly. Unfortunately, the wheels of chance played a dirty trick the Titanic sank, taking Brewster along with it, and the veiled words of his journal threw everybody, including ourselves, completely off the track for seventy-six years."

"Then why did Brewster lock himself in the Titanic's vault?" Donner asked in puzzlement. "Knowing that the ship was doomed, knowing that any suicidal act was a meaningless gesture, why didn't he try and save himself?"

"Guilt is a powerful motive for suicide," Pitt said. "Brewster was insane. That much we know. When he realized that his scheme to steal the byzanium had caused a score of people, eight of whom were close friends, to die needlessly, he blamed himself. Many men, and women, too, have taken their own lives for much less-"

"Hold on a moment!" Koplin cut in. He was kneeling over an open case of mineral-analysis gear. "I'm getting a radioactive reading from the fill over the coffin."

The diggers climbed out of the hole. The rest clustered around Koplin and peered curiously as he went through his ritual. Sandecker pulled a cigar from his breast pocket and stuck it between his lips without lighting it. The air was cold, but Donner's shirt was wet right through his coat. No one spoke. Their breaths came in small wisps of vapor that quickly dissipated in the subdued gray light.

Koplin studied the rocky soil. It didn't match the composition of the moist brown earth that surrounded the grave's excavation. At last, he rose unsteadily to his feet. He held several small rocks up in his hand. "Byzanium!"

"Is . . . is it here?" Donner asked in a hushed whisper. "Is it really all here?"

"Ultra high grade," Koplin announced. His face broke into a wide smile. "More than enough to complete the Sicilian Project."

"Thank God!" Donner gasped. He staggered over to an above-ground crypt and unceremoniously collapsed on it, oblivious to the shocked stares of the local farmers.

Koplin looked back down into the grave. "Insanity does breed genius," he murmured. "Brewster filled the grave with the ore. Anyone except a professional mineralogist would have simply dug through it and finding nothing in the coffin but bones, would have walked off and left it."

"An ideal way to conceal it," Donner agreed. "Practically right out in the open."

Sandecker stepped over and took Pitt's hand and shook it. "Thank you," he said simply.

Pitt could only nod in reply. He felt tired and numb. He wanted to find himself a place where he could crawl away from the world and forget it for a while. He wished the Titanic had never been, had never slid down the ways of the Belfast shipyard to the silent sea, to the merciless sea that had transformed that beautiful ship into a grotesque, rusted old hulk.

Sandecker seemed to read Pitt's eyes. "You look like you need a rest," he said. "Don't let me see your ugly face around my office for at least two weeks."

"I was hoping you'd say that." Pitt smiled wearily.

"Mind telling me where you plan to hide out?" Sandecker asked slyly. "Only in the event an emergency arises at NUMA, of course, and I have to get in touch with you."

"Of course," Pitt came back dryly. He paused a moment. "There's a little airline stewardess who lives with her great grandfather in Teignmouth. You might try me there."

Sandecker nodded in silent understanding.

Koplin came over and grasped Pitt by both shoulders. "I hope we meet again sometime."

"My sentiments, too."

Donner looked at him without rising and said with emotional hoarseness, "It's finally over."

"Yes," Pitt said. "It's over and done with. Everything."

He felt a sudden chill, a feeling of cold familiarity, as though his words had echoed hauntingly from the past. Then he turned and walked from the Southby graveyard.

They all stood and watched him grow smaller in the distance, until he entered a shroud of mist and disappeared.

"He came from the mists and he returned to the mists," Koplin said, his mind drifting back to his first meeting with Pitt on the slopes of Bednaya Mountain.

Donner gazed at him oddly. "What was that you said?"

"Just thinking out loud." Koplin shrugged. "That's all."

August 1988

RECKONING

"Stop engines."

The telegraph rang in reply to the captain's command, and the vibrations coming from the engine room of the British cruiser H.M.S. Troy died away. The foam around the bow melted into the blackness of the sea as the ship slowly lost her momentum, silent except for the hum of her generators.

It was a warm night for the North Atlantic. The sea was glassy-calm and the stars blazed in a sparkling carpet across the sky from horizon to horizon. The Union Jack hung limp and lifeless in its halyards, untouched by even a hint of breeze.

The crew, over two hundred of them, was assembled on the foredeck as a lifeless body sewn in the traditional sailcloth of a bygone era and shrouded by the national flag, was carried out and poised at the ship's railing. Then the captain, his voice resonant and unemotional, read the sailor's burial service. As soon as he uttered the final words, He nodded. The slat was tilted, and the body slid into the waiting arms of the eternal sea. The bugle notes were clear and pure as they drifted into the quiet night; then the men were dismissed and they turned silently away.

A few minutes later, when the Troy was under way again, the captain sat dowry and made the following entry in the ship's log:

H.M.S Troy. Time 0220, 10 August 1988.

Pos. Lat. 41°46'N., Long. 50°14'W

At the exact time in the morning of the White Star steamer R.M.S Titanic's foundering, and in accordance with his dying wish that he spend eternity with his former shipmates, the remains of Commodore Sir John Bigalow, K.B.E., R.D.,. R.N.R. (Retired) were committed to the deep.

The captain's hand trembled as he signed his name. He was closing out the last chapter of a tragic drama that had stunned the world . . . a world the likes of which would never be seen again.

At almost the same moment, on the other side of the earth somewhere in the vast desolate wastes of the Pacific Ocean, a huge cigar-shaped submarine crept silently far below the languorous waves. Startled fish scattered into the depths at the monster's approach, while within its smooth black skin, men prepared to launch a quad of ballistic missiles at a series of divergent targets six thousand miles to the east.

At precisely 1500 hours, the first of the great missiles ignited its rocket engine and burst through the sun-danced swells in a volcanic eruption of white water, rising with a thunderous roar into the blue Pacific sky. In thirty seconds, it was followed by the second, and the third, and, finally, the fourth. Then, trailing long fiery columns of orange flame, the quartet of potential mass-destruction arched into space and disappeared.

Thirty-two minutes later, while homing in on their down-range trajectory, the missiles abruptly blew up, one by one, in gigantic balls of flame, and disintegrated while still some ninety miles from their respective targets. It was the first time in the history of American rocketry that anyone remembered that the attending technicians and engineers and military officers who held rein on the nation's defense programs had ever cheered the sudden and seemingly disastrous end to a perfect launch.

The Sicilian Project had proven itself an unqualified success on its first try.