Trojan Odyssey

'If four of our cables snapped earlier,' interrupted Morton, 'what makes you think these two will stand up to the stress?'

'For one thing,' Pitt rationalized patiently, 'the storm has abated considerably. Two, the lines will be shorter and less prone to excessive strain. And last, we'll be towing the hotel on her narrowest beam. When she was moored, her entire front face took the brunt of the storm.'

Without waiting for a comment from Morton, Pitt turned back to Brown.

'Next, I'll need a good mechanic or machinist to splice loops or eyes to the ends of the cables, so they can be shackled together once they're wound around the Sprite's tow bit.'

'I'll handle that chore myself,' Brown assured him. Then he said, 'I hope you have a plan for transporting the cables over to your NUMA ship? They won't float there on their own, certainly not in this sea.'

'That's the fun part,' answered Pitt. 'We'll require a few hundred feet of line, preferably a thin diameter but with the tensile strength of a steel cable.'

'I have two five-hundred-foot spools of Falcron line in the storeroom. It's finely woven, thin, lightweight and could lift a Patton tank.'

'Tie two hundred-yard lengths of the Falcron line to each end of the cables.'

'I understand using the Falcron lines to pull the heavy cables to your ship, but how do you intend to get them there?'

Pitt and Giordino exchanged knowing glances.

'That will be our chore,' said Pitt with a grim smile.

'I hope it won't take long,' Morton said darkly, pointing out the window. 'Time is a commodity we've little left.'

As if they were spectators at a tennis match, all heads turned in unison and saw that the menacing shoreline was little more than two miles away. And as far as they could see in either direction, an immense surf was pounding on what seemed a never-ending ridge of rocks.

Just inside an air-conditioning equipment room in one corner of the hotel, Pitt spread the contents of his large bundle across the floor. First he slipped on his custom shorty neoprene wet suit. He preferred this abbreviated suit for the job at hand because the water was blessed with tropical temperatures and he saw no need for a heavy suit, wet or dry. He also enjoyed the ease of movement because the arms above the elbows and legs below the knees were open. Then came his buoyancy compensator, followed by a ScubaPro dive mask. He cinched his weight belt and checked the quick-release safety snap.

Next he sat down as one of the hotel maintenance men helped mount a closed-circuit rebreather on his back. He and Giordino agreed that a compact rebreathing unit offered greater freedom of movement than two bulky steel air tanks. As with regular scuba gear, the diver inhales through a regulator, breathing compressed gas from a tank. But then the expired air is saved and recycled back through canisters that remove the carbon dioxide while replenishing the oxygen in the tank. The SIVA-55 unit they were using was developed for military underwater covert operations.

His final check was the underwater communications system from Ocean Technology Systems. A receiver was attached to the strap of his mask. 'Al, do you hear me?'

Giordino, who was going through the same procedure on the opposite corner of the hotel, answered in a voice that seemed wrapped in cotton. 'Every word.'

'You sound unusually coherent.'

'Give me a hard time and I'll resign and head up to the cocktail lounge.'

Pitt smiled at his friend's ever-constant sense of humor. If he could rely on anyone in the world, it was Giordino. 'Ready when you are.'

'Say when.'

'Mr. Brown.'

'Emlyn.'

'Okay, Emlyn, have your people stand by the winches until we give the signal to pay out the cables and drums.'

Answering from the rooms where the great mooring cable winches were mounted, Brown acknowledged, 'Just say the word.'

'Keep your fingers crossed,' said Pitt, as he pulled on his dive fins.

'Bless you, boys, and good luck,' replied Brown.

Pitt nodded at one of Brown's maintenance men, who was standing beside a reel containing the Falcron line. He was short and husky and insisted on being called 'Critter.'

'Pay out a little at a time. If you feel any tension, release it quickly or you'll halt my progress.'

'I'll send it along nice and easy,' Critter assured him.

Then Pitt hailed Sea Sprite. 'Paul, are you ready to take the lines?'

'Soon as you hand them to me,' came Barnum's firm voice over Pitt's receiver. His words were transmitted from a transducer he had lowered in the water off the stern of Sea Sprite.

'Al and I can only drag two hundred feet of line underwater. You'll have to move in closer to reach us.'

In these seas both Pitt and Barnum knew that one monstrous wave could sweep Sea Sprite into the hotel, taking them both to the bottom. Yet Barnum didn't hesitate to risk the dice on one throw. 'All right, let's do it.'

Pitt slung a loop of the Falcron line over one shoulder line as a harness. He stood and tried to push open the door leading to a small balcony that hung twenty feet above the water, but the force of the wind beat against it from the other side. Before he could ask for help, the hotel maintenance man was beside him.

Together they rammed their weight and shoulders against the door. The second it was cracked, the wind cut through the opening and hurled the door back against its stops as though it was kicked by a mule. Now exposed in the open doorway, the maintenance man was blown back into the equipment room as if he was flung there by a catapult.

Pitt managed to stay on his feet under the onslaught. But when he looked up and saw an enormous wave heading his way, he leaped over the balcony hand railing and somersaulted into the water.

The worst of the furies had passed. The hurricane's eye was hours gone and the Ocean Wanderer had somehow survived Lizzie's final fury. The winds had decreased to forty knots and the seas had dropped to an average of thirty feet. The water surface was still vicious, but not nearly as angered as earlier. Hurricane Lizzie had moved westward to continue casting her death and destruction on the island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti before spilling over into the Caribbean Sea. In another twenty-four hours the sea would flatten in the trail of history's greatest storm.

The crashing surf looked ominously closer with each passing minute. The hotel had drifted close enough for the hundreds of guests and employees to see the spray hurled into the sky in great clouds as the swells piled up and smashed into the rocky cliffs. They struck with the force of a mountainous avalanche. The foam swirled into the air in sheets as it met the backwash of the previous wave. Death was no more than a mile away and the Ocean Wanderer's rate of drift was close to a mile an hour.

Everyone's eyes swept back and forth from the shore to Sea Sprite, riding in the swells like a fat duck only a few hundred yards away.

Covered head to toe in yellow oilskins, Barnum braved the downpour, still lashed by heavy winds on the stern of his ship, and stood beneath the big crane. He looked down on the deck where the great winch used to sit and imagined the difference it would have made. But the tow bit would have to do. Somehow the cable would have to be shackled manually.

Barnum stood in the shelter of the crane, ignored the soaking breeze and peered through his binoculars at the base of the hotel. He and four of his crew were tied to the railings to keep from being washed overboard. He observed Pitt and Giordino enter the water and disappear beneath the rolling surface. He could just make out men standing in the doorways, battered by the seas, paying out the red Falcron line to the divers struggling below the wild waves.

'Throw out a pair of lines with buoys,' he ordered without lowering the glasses, 'and prepare the grappling hooks.'

Barnum prayed he would not have to use the grappling hooks on the divers' bodies in an extreme crisis should they become unconscious or unable to reach the high stern of the ship. The grappling hooks were