Raise the Titanic! (14 page)

“Sadly, his odyssey wasn't finished.” Seagram's hands began to tremble. “The French consulate in the port city blew the whistle on the Coloradans. One night, before they could unload the byzanium onto a truck, the French agents struck without warning from the shadows of the landing dock. No shots were fired. It was fists and knives and clubs. The hard-rock men from the legendary towns of Cripple Creek, Leadville, and Fairplay were no strangers to violence. They gave better than they took, tossing six bodies into the black waters of the harbor before the rest of their assailants melted into the night. But it was only the beginning. Crossroad after crossroad, from one village to the next, on city streets, and from behind every tree and doorway it seemed, the piratical attacks continued until the running flight across Britain had bloodied the landscape with a score of dead and wounded. The battles took on the aspects of a war of attrition; the men from Colorado were up against a massive organization that threw in five men for every two the miners eliminated. The attrition began to tell. John Caldwell, Alvin Coulter, and Thomas Price died outside of Glasgow. Charles Widney fell at Newcastle, Walter Schmidt near Stafford, and Warner O'Deming at Birmingham. One by one, the tough old miners were whittled away, their gore staining the cobblestone streets far from home. Only Vernon Hall and Joshua Hays Brewster lived to set the ore on the Ocean Dock at Southampton.”

The President tightened his lips and clenched his fists. “Then the French won out.”

“No, Mr. President. The French never touched the byzanium.” Seagram picked up Brewster's journal and thumbed to the back. “I'll read the last entry. It's dated April 10, 1912:

A cold silence fell on the study. The President turned from the window and settled in his chair once more. He sat there a moment, saying nothing. Then he spoke: “Can it mean the byzanium is in the United States? Is it possible that Brewster…?”

“I'm afraid not, sir,” Seagram murmured, his face pale and beaded with sweat.

“Explain yourself!” the President demanded.

Seagram took a deep breath. “Because, Mr. President, the only White Star steamship that departed Southampton, England, on April the tenth, 1912, was the R.M.S.
Titanic
.”

“The
Titanic
!” The President looked as if he had been shot. The truth had suddenly hit him. “It fits,” he said tonelessly. “It would explain why the byzanium has been lost all these years.”

“Fate dealt the Coloradans a cruel hand,” Donner muttered. “They bled and died only to send the ore on a ship that was destined to sink in the middle of the ocean.”

Another silence, deeper even than the one that had gone before.

The President sat granite-faced. “What do we do now, gentlemen?”

There was a pause of perhaps ten seconds, then Seagram rose unsteadily to his feet and stared down at the President. The strain of the past days, plus the agony of defeat, swept over him. There was no other door open to them; they had no choice but to see it through to the finish. He cleared his throat. “We raise the
Titanic
,” he mumbled.

The President and Donner looked up.

“Yes, by God!” Seagram said, his voice suddenly hard and determined. “We raise the
Titanic
!”

SEPTEMBER 1987

The forbidding beauty
of pure, absolute black pressed against the viewport and blotted out all touch with earthly reality. The total absence of light, Albert Giordino judged, took only a few minutes to shift the human mind into a state of confused disorder. He had the impression of falling from a vast height with his eyes closed on a moonless night; falling through an immense black void without the tiniest fragment of sensation.

Finally, a bead of sweat trickled over his brow and dropped into his left eye, stinging it. He shook off the spell, wiped a sleeve across his face, and gently eased a hand over the control panel immediately in front of him, touching the various and familiar protrusions until his probing fingers reached their goal. Then he flicked the switch upward.

The lights attached to the hull of the deep-sea submersible flashed on and cut a brilliant swath through the eternal night. Although the narrow sides of the beam abruptly turned a blackish-blue, the tiny organisms floating past the direct glare reflected the light for several feet above and below the area around the viewport. Turning his face so as not to fog the thick Plexiglas, Giordino expelled a heavy sigh and then leaned back against the soft padding of the pilot's chair. It was nearly a full minute before he bent over the control console and began bringing the silent craft to life again. He studied the rows of dials until the wavering needles were calibrated to his satisfaction, and he scanned the circuit lights, making certain they all blinked out their green message of safe operation before he reengaged the electrical systems of the
Sappho I
.

The
Sappho I
. He swung the chair and gazed idly down the center passageway toward the stern. It might have been the newest and largest research submersible in the world to the National Underwater and Marine Agency, but, to Al Giordino, the first time he set eyes on it, the general design looked like a giant cigar on an ice skate.

The
Sappho I
wasn't built to compete with military submarines. She was functional. Scientific survey of the ocean bottom was her game, and her every square inch was utilized to accommodate a seven-man crew and two tons of oceanographic research instruments and equipment. The
Sappho I
would never fire a missile or cut through the sea at seventy knots, but then she could operate where no other submarine had ever dared to go: 24,000 feet below the ocean's surface. Yet Giordino was never totally at ease. He checked the depth gauge, wincing at the reading of almost 12,500 feet. The pressure of the sea increases at the rate of fifteen pounds per square inch for every thirty feet. He winced again when his mental gymnastics gave him an approximate answer of nearly 6,200 pounds per square inch, the pressure which at that moment was pushing against the red paint on the
Sappho I
's thick titanium skin.

“How about a cup of fresh sediment?”

Giordino looked up into the unsmiling face of Omar Woodson, the photographer on the mission. Woodson was carrying a steaming mug of coffee.

“The chief valve- and switch-pusher should have had his brew exactly five minutes ago,” said Giordino.

“Sorry. Some idiot turned out the lights.” Woodson handed him the mug. “Everything check out?”

“Okay across the board,” Giordino answered. “I gave the aft battery section a rest. We'll juice off the center section for the next eighteen hours.”

“Lucky we didn't drift into a rock outcropping when we shut down.”

“Surely you jest.” Giordino slid down in his seat, squinted his eyes, and yawned with effortless finesse. “Sonar hasn't picked out anything larger than a baseball-size rock in the last six hours. The bottom here is as flat as my girlfriend's stomach.”

“You mean chest,” Woodson said. “I've seen her picture.” Woodson was smiling, which was rare for him.

“Nobody's perfect,” Giordino conceded. “However, considering the fact her father is a wealthy liquor distributor, I can overlook her bad points—”

He broke off as Rudi Gunn, the commander of the mission, leaned into the pilot's compartment. He was short and thin, and his wide eyes, magnified by a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, peered intently over a large Roman nose, giving him the look of an undernourished owl about to strike. Yet his appearance was deceiving. Rudi Gunn was warm and kind. Every man who ever served under his command respected him enormously.

“You two at it again?” Gunn smiled tolerantly.

Woodson looked solemn. “The same old problem. He's getting horny for his girl again.”

“After fifty-one days on this drifting closet, even his grandmother would forgive the gleam in his eye.” Gunn leaned over Giordino and gazed through the viewport. For a few seconds only a dim blue filled his eyes, then gradually, just below the
Sappho I
, he could make out the reddish ooze of the top layer of bottom sediment. For a brief moment a bright red shrimp, barely over an inch long, floated across the beam of the light before it vanished into the darkness.

“Damned shame we can't get out and walk around,” Gunn said as he stepped back. “No telling what we might find out there.”

“Same thing you'd find in the middle of the Mojave Desert,” Giordino grunted. “Absolutely zilch.” He reached up and tapped a gauge. “Colder temperature though. I read a rousing thirty-four-point-eight degrees Fahrenheit.”

“A great place to visit,” Woodson said, “but you wouldn't want to spend your golden years there.”

“Anything show on sonar?” Gunn asked.

Giordino nodded at a large green screen in the middle of the panel. The reflected pattern of the terrain was flat. “Nothing ahead or to the sides. The profile hasn't wavered for several hours.”

Gunn wearily removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Okay, gentlemen, our mission is as good as ended. We'll give it another ten hours, then we surface.” Almost as a reflex action, he looked up at the overhead panel. “Is Mother still with us?”

Giordino nodded. “Mother is hanging in there.”

He needed only to glance at the fluctuating needle on the transducer instrument to know that the mother ship, a surface support tender, was continuously tracking the
Sappho I
on sonar.

“Make contact,” Gunn said, “and signal Mother that we'll begin our ascent at oh-nine hundred hours. That should leave them plenty of time to load us aboard and take the
Sappho I
in tow before sunset.”

“I've almost forgotten what a sunset looks like,” Woodson murmured. “It's off to the beach to recapture a suntan and ogle all those gorgeous bikini-clad honeys for Papa Woodson. No more of these deep-sea funny farms for me.”

“Thank God, the end is in sight,” Giordino said. “Another week cooped up in this overgrown wiener and I'll start talking to the potted plants.”

Woodson looked at him. “We don't have any potted plants.”

“You get the picture.”

Gunn smiled. “Everybody deserves a good rest. You men have put on a fine show. The data we've compiled should keep the lab boys busy for a long time.”

Giordino turned to Gunn, gave him a long look, and spoke slowly: “This has been one hell of a weird mission, Rudi.”

“I don't get your meaning,” Gunn said.

“A poorly cast drama is what I mean. Take a good look at your crew.” He gestured to the four men working in the aft section of the submersible—Ben Drummer, a lanky Southerner with a deep Alabama drawl; Rick Spencer, a short, blond-haired Californian who whistled constantly through clenched teeth; Sam Merker, as cosmopolitan and citified as a Wall Street broker; and Henry Munk, a quiet, droopy-eyed wit who clearly wished he were anywhere but on the
Sappho I
. “Those clowns aft, you, Woodson, and myself; we're all engineers, nuts-and-bolts mechanics. There isn't a Ph.D. in the lot.”

“The first men on the moon weren't intellectuals, either,” Gunn countered. “It takes the nuts-and-bolts mechanics to perfect the equipment. You guys have proven the
Sappho I
; you've demonstrated her capabilities. Let the next ride go to the oceanographers. As for us, this mission will go down in the books as a great scientific achievement.”

“I am not,” Giordino declared pontifically, “cut out to be a hero.”

“Neither am I, pal,” Woodson added. “But you've got to admit it beats hell out of selling life insurance.”

“The drama of it all escapes him,” Gunn said. “Think of the stories you can tell your girlfriends. Think of the enraptured looks on their pretty faces when you tell them how you unerringly piloted the greatest undersea probe of the century.”

“Unerringly?” Giordino said. “Then suppose you tell me why I'm running this scientific marvel around in circles five hundred miles off our scheduled course?”

Gunn shrugged. “Orders.”

Giordino stared at him. “We're supposed to be under the Labrador Sea. Instead, Admiral Sandecker changes our course at the last minute and makes us chase all over the abyssal plains below the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. It doesn't make sense.”

Gunn smiled a sphinxlike smile. For several moments none of the men spoke, but Gunn didn't require a concentrated dose of ESP to know the questions that were running through their minds. They were, he was certain, thinking what he was thinking. Like himself, they were three months back in time and two thousand miles in distance at the headquarters of the National Underwater and Marine Agency in Washington, D.C., where Admiral James Sandecker, chief director of the agency, was describing the most incredible undersea operation of the decade.

 

“God damn,” Admiral Sandecker had thundered. “I'd give up a year's salary if I could join you men.”

A figure of speech, Giordino reflected. Next to Sandecker, Ebenezer Scrooge spent money like a drunken sailor. Giordino relaxed in a deep leather sofa and tuned into the admiral's briefing, while idly blowing smoke rings between puffs on a giant cigar, lifted from a box on Sandecker's immense desk when everyone's attention was focused on a wall map of the Atlantic Ocean.

“Well, there she is.” Sandecker rapped the pointer loudly on the map for the second time. “The Lorelei Current. She's born off the western tip of Africa, follows the mid-Atlantic ridge north, then curves easterly between Baffin Island and Greenland, and then dies in the Labrador Sea.”

Giordino said: “I don't hold a degree in oceanography, Admiral, but it would seem that the Lorelei converges with the Gulf Stream.”

“Not hardly. The Gulf Stream is surface water. The Lorelei is the coldest, heaviest water in the world's oceans, averaging fourteen thousand feet in depth.”

“Then the Lorelei crosses under the Gulf Stream,” Spencer said softly. It was the first time in the briefing he had spoken.

“That seems reasonable.” Sandecker paused, smiled benevolently, then continued: “The ocean is basically made up of two layers—a surface or upper layer, heated by the sun and thoroughly churned by winds, and a cold, very dense layer consisting of intermediate, deep and bottom water. And the two never mix.”

“Sounds very dull and forbidding,” Munk said. “The mere fact that some character with a black sense of humor named the current after a Rhine nymph who lured sailors onto the rocks makes it the last place I'd want to visit.”

A grim smile crawled slowly over Sandecker's griffin face. “Get used to the name, gentlemen, because deep in the Lorelei's gut is where we're going to spend fifty days. Where
you're
going to spend fifty days.”

“Doing what?” Woodson asked defiantly.

“The Lorelei Current Drift Expedition is exactly what it sounds like. You men will descend in a deepwater submersible five hundred miles northwest of the coast of Dakar and begin a submerged cruise in the current. Your main job will be to monitor and test the sub and its equipment. If there are no malfunctions that would necessitate cutting short the mission, you should surface around the middle of September in the approximate center of the Labrador Sea.”

Merker cleared his throat softly. “No submersible has stayed that long that deep.”

“You want to back out, Sam?”

“Well…no.”

“This is a volunteer expedition. Nobody is twisting your arm to go.”

“Why us, Admiral?” Ben Drummer uncoiled his lean frame from the floor where he had been comfortably stretched. “Ah'm a marine engineer. Spencer here is an equipment engineer. And Merker is a systems expert. Ah can't see where we fit in.”

“You're all professionals in your respective capacities. Woodson is also a photographer. The
Sappho I
will be carrying a number of photographic systems. Munk is the best instrument-component man in the agency. And you'll all be under the command of Rudi Gunn, who has captained, at one time or another, every research ship in NUMA.”

“That leaves me,” Giordino said.

Sandecker glared at the cigar jutting from Giordino's mouth, recognized it as one from his private brand, and gave him a withering look that was completely ignored. “As assistant projects director for the agency, you'll be in overall charge of the mission. You can also make yourself useful by piloting the craft.”