stood ready as always to draw his sword at. the first sign of a Barbary pirate.
All this was about to be lost.
The passengers were the captain's first responsibility. He was about to give the order to abandon ship when an officer reported on the lifeboat situation. The lifeboats on the port side were unlaunchable. That left eight boats on the starboard side. They were hanging far out over the water. Even if they could be lunched, there was room enough for only half the passengers. He didn't dare give the. order to abandon ship. Panicstricken passengers would rush to the port side, and there'd be chaos.
He prayed that passing ships had heard their SOS and could find them in the fog.
There was nothing he could do but wait.
Angelo Donatelli had just delivered a trayful of martinis to a raucous table of New Yorkers celebrating their last night aboard the Doria when he glanced toward one of the draped windows that tookup three walls of the elegant Belvedere Lounge. Something, a flicker of movement, had caught his eye.
The lounge was on the . front _ of the boat deck, with its open promenade, and in the daytime or on dear nights firstclass passengers normally had a wide view of the sea. Most passengers had given up trying to see anything through the soft gray wall that enclosed the lounge. It was only dumb luck that Angelo looked up and saw the lights and rails of a big white ship moving through the fog.
Dios mio,' ' he murmured
The words had barely left his lips when there was an explosion that sounded like a monster firecracker. The lounge was plunged into darkness.
The deck shifted violently. Angelo lost his balance,, fought to regain it, and, with the circular tray clutched in one hand, did a tolerable imitation of the famous Greek statue of a discus thrower. The handsome Sicilian from Palermo was a natural athlete who'd kept his agility tuned to a fine edge weaving in and out of tables and bang drinks.
The emergency lights kicked in as he scrambled to his feet. The three couples at his table had been thrown from their chairs onto the floor. He helped the women up first. No one seemed seriously hurt. He looked around.
The beautiful lounge, with its softly lit tapestries, paintings, and wood carvings and its glossy blond paneling, was in a turmoil. The shiny dance floor, where seconds before couples had been gliding to the strains of 'Arrivederci Roma,' was a jumble of squirming bodies. The music had stopped abruptly, to be replaced by criesof pain and dismay. Band members extricated themselves from the tangle of instruments. There were broken .bottles and glasses everywhere, and the sir reeked with the smell of alcohol. Vases of fresh flowers had spilled onto the floor.
'What in God's name was that?' one of the men said.
Angelo held his tongue, not sure even now of what he had seen. He looked at the window again and saw only the ,fog.
'Maybe we hit. an iceberg,' the man's wife ventured tentatively.
An iceberg? For Chrissakes, Connie, you're talking the coast of Massachusetts. In July. '
The woman pouted. 'Well, then; maybe it was a mine.'
He looked over at the band and grinned. 'Whatever it was, it got their to stop playing that goddamn song.'
They all laughed at the joke. Dancers were brushing their clothes off, the musicians inspecting their instruments for damage. Bartenders and waiters rushed about.
'We've got nothing to worry about,'_ another man said. 'One of the officers told me they built this ship to be unsinkable.'
His wife stopped checking her makeup in the mirror of her compact. 'That's what they said about the Titanic,' she said with alarm.
Tense silence. Then a quick exchange of fearful glances. As if they'd heard a silent signal, the three couples .hastily made for
the nearest exit like binds flying off a clothesline.
Angelo's first instinct was to dear the table of glasses and wipe it down. He laughed softly. 'You've been a waiter too long,' he said under his breath.
Most of the people in the room were back on their feet, and they were using them to move toward the exits. The lounge was quickly emptying out. If Angelo didn't leave, he'd be all alone. He shrugged, tossed his dish towel on the floor, then headed for the nearest doorway to find out what was going on.
Black waves threatened to drag Jake Carey under for good. He fought against the dark current tugging at his body, crawled onto the slippery .edge of consciousness, and hung on grimly. He heard a moan and realized it was coming from his own lips. He moaned again, this time on purpose. Good. Dead men don't moan. His next thought was of his wife.
'Myra!' he called out.
He heard a faint stirring in the gray darkness. Hope surged in his breast. He called his wife's name again.
'Over here.' Myra's voice was muffled as if coming from a distance.
'Thank God! Are you all. right?'
A pause. 'Yes. What happened? I was asleep'
'I don't know. Can you move?'
'No.'
'I'll come help you,' Carey said. He lay on his left side, arm pinned under his body, a weight pressing on his right side. His legs were locked tight. Icy fear gripped him. Maybe his back was broken. He tried again. Harder. The jagged pain that shot up from his ankle to his thigh brought tears to his eyes; but it meant he wasn't paralyzed. He stopped struggling. He'd have to think this thing through. Carey was an engineer who'd made a fortune building bridges. This was no different from any other problem that could be solved by applications of logic and persistence. And lots of luck.
He pushed with his right, elbow and felt .soft fabric. He was under the mattress. He shoved harder, angling his body for leverage. The mattress gave, then would move no more. Christ, the whole bloody ceiling could be on top of him. Carey took a deep breath, and, using every ounce of strength in his muscular arm,
he pushed again. The mattress slid off onto the floor.
With both arms free he reached down and felt something solid on top of his ankle. Exploring the surface with his fingers; he figured out it was the chest of drawers that had been between the twin beds. The, mattress must have shielded him from pieces of the wall and ceiling. With two hands free, he lifted the dresser a few inches and slid his legs out one at a time. He rubbed circulation gently back into his ankles. They were bruised and painful but not broken. He slowly got up on his hands and knees.
'Jake.' Myra's voice again. Weaker.
'I'm coming, sweetheart Hold on.'
Something was wrong. Myra's voice seemed to issue from the other side of the cabin wall. He flicked on a light switch. The cabin, remained in darkness. Disoriented, he crawled through the . wreckage. His groping fingers found a door. He cocked his head, listening, to what sounded like surf against the shore and gulls screaming in the background. He staggered to his feet, cleared rubble from around the door, and opened it on a nightmare.
The corridor was crowded with pushing and shoving passengers who were cast in an amber hue by the emergency lighting. Men, women, and children, some fully dressed, some in their nightclothes under their coats, some barehanded, others lugging bags, pushed, shoved, walked, or crawled as they fought their way toward the upper deck. The hallway was filled with dust and smoke and tilted like the floor of a fun house. A few passengers trying to get to their cabins struggled against the human river like salmon swimming against the current.
Carey glanced back at the door he had just come through 'and realized from the numbers that he'd crawled out of the cabin adjoining his. He must have been thrown from one cabin to the other. That night in the lounge he and Myra had talked to the cabin's occupants, an older ItalianAmerican couple returning from a family reunion. He prayed that they hadn't followed their usual practice of retiring early.
Carey muscled his. way through the throng to his cabin door. It was locked. He went back into the cabin he'd just come out of and pushed through the debris toward the wall. Several times he stopped to move furniture and push pieces of ceiling or wall aside. Sometimes he crawled over the wreckage, sometimes he wriggled under it,
