'A cheerful conjecture, Captain; I appreciate that.' His pipe had gone out and he relit it, filling the room with a sweet aromatic odor. 'However, should you fail, the Americans will be in the same position to say the same of us.'
'We will not fail.'
'Words,' Antonov said. 'A good lawyer plans the prosecutor's case as well as his own. What measures have you taken in the event of an unavoidable mishap?'
'The byzanium will be destroyed,' Prevlov said. 'If we cannot possess it, then neither can the Americans.'
'Does that include the Titanic as well?'
'It must. By destroying the Titanic, we destroy the byzanium. It will be accomplished in such a way that another recovery operation will be totally out of the question.'
Prevlov fell silent, but Antonov was satisfied. He had already given his approval for the mission. He studied Prevlov carefully. The captain looked like a man who was not used to failure. His every movement, every gesture, seemed thoughtfully planned in advance; even his words carried an air of confident forethought. Yes, Antonov was satisfied.
'When do you leave for the North Atlantic?' he asked.
'With your permission, Comrade Secretary, at once. A long-range reconnaissance bomber is on standby at Gorki Airfield. It is imperative that I be standing on the bridge of the Mikhail Kurkov within twelve hours. Good fortune has sent us a hurricane, and I will make full use of its force as a diversion for what will seem our perfectly legal seizure of the Titanic.'
'Then I will not keep you.' Antonov stood and embraced Prevlov in a great bear hug. 'The hopes of the Soviet Union go with you, Captain Prevlov. I beg you. do not disappoint us.
54
The day began going badly for Pitt right after he wandered away from the salvage activity and made his way down to No. 1 cargo hold on G Deck.
The sight that met his eyes in the darkened compartment was one of utter devastation. The vault containing the byzanium was buried under the collapsed forward bulkhead.
He stood there for a long time, staring at the avalanche of broken and twisted steel that prevented any easy attempt to reach the precious element. It was then that he sensed someone standing behind him.
'It looks like we've been dealt a bum hand,' Sandecker said.
Pitt nodded. 'At least for the moment.'
'Perhaps if we--'
'It would take weeks for our portable cutting equipment to clear a path through that jungle of steel.'
'There's no other way?'
'A giant Dopplemann crane could clear the debris in a few hours.'
'Then what you're saying is that we have no choice but to stand by and wait patiently until we reach the dry-dock facilities in New York.'
Pitt looked at him in the dim light and Sandecker could see the look of frustration that cracked his rugged features. There was no need for an answer.
'Removing the byzanium to the Capricorn would have been a break in our favor,' Pitt said. 'It'd certainly have saved us a lot of grief.'
'Maybe we could fake a transfer.'
'Our friends who work for the Soviets would smell a hoax before the first crate went over the side.'
'Assuming they're both on board the Titanic, of course.'
'I'll know this time tomorrow.'
'I take it you have a line on who they are?'
'I've got one of them pegged, the one who killed Henry Munk. The other is purely an educated guess.'
'I'd be interested in knowing who you've ferreted out,' Sandecker said.
'My proof would never convince a federal prosecutor, much less a jury. Give me a few more hours, Admiral, and I'll lay them both, Silver and Gold, or whatever their stupid code names are, right in your lap.'
Sandecker stared at him, then said, 'You're that close?'
'I'm that close.'
Sandecker passed a weary hand across his face arid tightened his lips. He looked at the tons of steel covering the vault. 'I leave it with you, Dirk. I'll back your play to the last hand. I don't really have much choice.'
Pitt had other worries, too. The two Navy tugs that Admiral Kemper promised to send were still hours away, and sometime during the late morning, for no apparent reason, the Titanic took it into her mind to increase her starboard list to seventeen degrees.
The ship rode far too low in the water; the crests of the swells lapped at the sealed portholes along E Deck just ten feet below the scuppers. And although Spencer and his pumping crew had managed to drop suction pipes down the loading hatches into the cargo holds, they had not been able to fight their way through the debris crowding the companionways to reach the engine and boiler rooms, where the greatest volume of water still lay- remote and inaccessible.
Drummer sat in the gymnasium, dirty and exhausted after working around the clock. He sipped at a mug of cocoa. 'After almost eighty years of submersion and rot,' he said, 'the wood paneling in the passageways has fallen and jammed them worse than a path in a Georgia junkyard.'
Pitt sat where he'd been all afternoon, bent over a drafting table next to the radio transmitter. He stared out of red rimmed eyes at a transverse drawing of the Titanic's superstructure.
'Can't we thread our way down the main staircase or the elevator shafts?'
'The staircase is filled with tons of loose junk once you get down past D Deck,' Spencer declared.
'And there isn't a prayer of penetrating the elevator shafts,' Gunn added. 'They're crammed with jumbled masses of corroded cables and wrecked machinery. If that wasn't bad enough, all the watertight double-cylinder doors in the lower compartments are frozen solid in the closed position.'
'They were shut automatically by the ship's first officer immediately after she struck the iceberg,' Pitt said.
At that moment, a short bull of a man covered from head to toe with oil and grime staggered into the gym. Pitt looked up and faintly smiled. 'That you, Al?'
Giordino hauled himself over to a cot and collapsed like a sack of wet cement. 'I'd appreciate it if none of you lit any matches around me,' he murmured. 'I'm too young to die in a fiery blaze of glory.'
'Any luck?' asked Sandecker.
'I made it as far as the squash court on F Deck. God, it's blacker than sin down there . . . fell down a companionway. It was flooded with oil that had seeped up from the engine room. Stopped cold. There was no way down.'
'A snake might make it to the boiler rooms,' Drummer said, 'but it's for sure a man ain't gonna. At least, not until he spends a week clearing a passage with dynamite and a wrecking crew.'
'There has to be a way,' Sandecker said. 'Somewhere down there she's taking water. If we don't get ahead of it by this time tomorrow, she'll roll belly up and head back to the bottom.'
The thought of losing the Titanic after she was sitting pretty and upright again on a smooth sea had never entered their minds, but now everyone in the gym began to feel a sickening ache deep in their stomachs. The ship had yet to be taken in tow and New York was twelve hundred sea miles away.
Pitt sat there staring at the ship's interior diagrams. They were woefully inadequate. No set of detailed blueprints of the Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic, existed. They had been destroyed, along with files full of photographs and construction data, when the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding yards in Belfast were leveled by German bombers during World War II.
'If only she wasn't so damned big,' Drummer muttered. 'The boiler rooms are damn near a hundred feet below the Boat Deck.'
'Might as well be a hundred miles,' Spencer said. He looked up as Woodson emerged from the grand stairway entrance. 'Ah, the great stoneface is with us. What's the official photographer of the operation been up to?'
