"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?"
Woodson lifted a battery of cameras from around his neck and gently laid them on a makeshift worktable. "Just taking some pictures for posterity," he said with his usual deadpan expression. "Never know, I just might write a book about all this someday, and naturally, I'll want credit for the illustrations."
"Naturally," Spencer said. "You didn't by chance find a clear companionway down to the boiler rooms?"
He shook his head. "I've been shooting in the first-class lounge. It's remarkably well preserved. Except for the obvious ravages of water on the carpeting and furniture, it could pass for a sitting room in the Palace of Versailles." He began changing film cartridges. "How's chances of borrowing the helicopter? I'd like to get some bird's-eye shots of our prize before the tugs arrive."
Giordino raised up on one elbow. "Better use up your film while you can. Our prize may be back on the bottom by morning."
Woodson 's brows pinched together. "She's sinking?"
"I think not."
Every eye turned to the man who uttered those words. Pitt was smiling. He smiled with the confidence of a man who just became chairman of the board of General Motors.
He said, "As Kit Carson used to say when he was surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by Indians, 'We ain't done in yet, not by a damned sight.' In ten hours time the engine and boiler rooms will be bone-dry." He quickly fumbled through the diagrams on the table until he found the one he wanted. "Woodson said it, the bird's-eye view. It was right under our noses all the time. We should have been looking from overhead instead of from inside."
"Big deal," Giordino said. "What's so interesting from the air?"
"None of you get it?"
Drummer looked puzzled. "You missed me at the last fork in the road."
"Spencer?"
Spencer shook his head.
Pitt grinned at him and said, "Assemble your men topside and tell them to bring their cutting gear."
"If you say so," Spencer said, but made no move for the door.
"Mr. Spencer is mentally measuring me for a strait jacket," Pitt said. "He can't figure why we should be cutting holes on the roof of the ship to penetrate a distance of a hundred feet through eight decks of scrap. Nothing to it, really. We have a built-in tunnel, free of any debris, that leads straight to the boiler rooms. In fact, we have four of them. The boiler casings where the funnels once sat, gentlemen. Torch away the Wetsteel seals over the openings and you have a clear shot directly down to the bilges. Do you see the light?"