Prescott stared through tired and bloodshot eyes at the desks strewn with charts, data tables, computer readout sheets, and half-empty coffee cups, the floors carpeted with sheets of paper filled with notations and the strange looking symbols common to meteorologists. He stared at the giant wall map and silently cursed the storm. The sudden swing to eastward had caught them all by surprise. A completely illogical pattern; it was unparalleled in hurricane history. No storm on record had ever behaved so erratically.
If only it had given some hint of its impending deviation, some minute clue as to its fanatical behavior, they might have better prepared the people of Newfoundland for the onslaught. At least half, a hundred and fifty lives, might have been spared. A hundred and fifty men, women, and children might have been alive now if the finest scientific sources available for weather prediction had not been swept aside like so much hokum at Mother Nature's capricious whim.
Prescott rose and took his last look at the wall chart before the janitors came and erased Hurricane Amanda out of existence, and wiped clean her confounding track in preparation for her as yet unborn descendant. One small notation out of all the rest caught his eye. It was a small cross, labeled "Titanic."
The last report he'd had from NUMA headquarters in Washington was that the derelict was in tow by two Navy tugs that were desperately attempting to drag her out from under the path of the hurricane. Nothing more had been heard of her for twenty-four hours.
Prescott raised a cup of cold coffee in a toast. "To the Titanic,"he said aloud in that empty room. "May you have taken every punch Amanda threw at you and still spit in her eye."
He grimaced as he downed the stale coffee. Then he turned and walked out of the room into the early-morning dampness.
69
At first light the Titanic still lived. There was no rhyme or reason for her continued existence. She still wallowed aimlessly broadside-on to the sea and wind, trapped in the churning turmoil of the tormented waves left in the wake of the departing hurricane.
Like a dazed fighter taking a fearful beating while hanging on the ropes, she rose drunkenly over the thirty-foot crests, shouldering each one, taking salt spray across her Boat Deck, and then struggling free and somehow staggering upright in time for the next assault.
To Captain Parotkin, as he stared through his binoculars, the Titanic looked a doomed ship. Her rusty old hull plates had been subjected to a stress far beyond anything he thought they could stand. He could see the popped rivets and opened seams, and he guessed that she was taking water in a hundred places along her hull. What he could not see were the exhausted men of the salvage crew, the SEALS, and the Navy tugmen laboring shoulder to shoulder deep in the black hell under the waterline in a desperate effort to keep the derelict afloat.
From Parotkin's viewpoint, safe from the elements inside the wheelhouse of the Mikhail Kurkov, it seemed a miracle that the Titanic hadn't vanished during the night. Yet she still clung to life, even though she was down a good twenty feet at the bow and was listing nearly thirty degrees to starboard.
"Any word from Captain Prevlov?" he asked without taking his eyes from the glasses.
"Nothing, sir," answered his first officer.
"I fear the worst has happened," Parotkin said. "I see no sign that Prevlov is in command of the derelict."
"There, sir," the first officer said pointing, "atop the remains of the aft mast. It looks like a Russian pennant."
Parotkin studied the tiny frayed cloth through the glasses as it snapped in the wind. "Unfortunately, the star on the pennant is white rather than the red of our Soviet ensign." He sighed. "I must assume that the boarding mission has failed."
"Perhaps Comrade Prevlov has had no time to report his situation."
"There is no time left. American search planes will be, here within the hour." Parotkin pounded his fist in frustration on the bridge counter. "Damn Prevlov!" he muttered angrily. "'Let us fervently hope our final option will not be required'; his exact words. He is the fortunate one. He may even be dead, and it is I who must take the responsibility for destroying the Titanic and all who remain on board her."
The first officer's face paled, his body stiffened. "There is alternative, sir?"
Parotkin shook his head. "The orders were clear. We must obliterate the ship rather than let her fall into the hands of Americans."
Parotkin took a linen handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes. "Have the crew ready the nuclear missile carrier and steer a course ten miles north of the Titanic for our firing position."
The first officer stared at Parotkin for a long moment, his face void of expression. Then he slowly wheeled and made for the radio telephone and ordered the helmsman to steer fifteen degrees to the north.
Thirty minutes later, all was in readiness. The Mikhail Kurkov dug her bow into the swells at the position laid for the missile launch as Parotkin stood behind the radar operator. "Any hard sightings?" he asked.
"Eight jet aircraft, a hundred and twenty miles west, closing rapidly."
"Surface vessels?"
"Two small ships bearing two-four-five, twenty-one miles southwest."
"That would be the tugs returning," the first officer said.
Parotkin nodded. "It's the aircraft that concern me. They will be over us in ten minutes. Is the nuclear warhead armed?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then begin the countdown."
The first officer gave the order over the phone and then they moved outside and watched from the starboard bridge wing as the forward cargo hatch swung smoothly aside and a twenty-six-foot Stoski surface-to-surface missile slowly rose from its concealed tube into the gusty dawn air.
"One minute to firing," came a missile technician's voice over the bridge speaker.
Parotkin aimed his glasses at the Titanic in the distance. He could just make out her outline against the gray clouds that crawled along the horizon. A barely perceptible shiver gripped his body. His eyes reflected a distant sad look. He knew he would be forever cursed among sailors as the captain who sent the helpless and resurrected ocean liner back to her grave beneath the sea. He was standing braced and waiting for the roar of the missile's rocket engine and then the great explosion that would pulverize the Titanic into thousands of molten particles when he heard the sound of running footsteps from the wheelhouse, and the radio operator burst onto the bridge wing.
"Captain!" he blurted. "An urgent signal from an American submarine!"
"Thirty seconds to firing," the voice droned over the intercom.
There was unmistakable panic in the radio operator's eyes as he thrust the message into Parotkin's hands. It read:
USS DRAGONFISH TO USSR MIKHAIL KURKOV DERELICT VESSEL RMS TITANIC UNDER PROTECTION OF UNITED STATES NAVY ANY OVERT ACT OF AGGRESSION ON YOUR PART WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE REPEAT IMMEDIATE RETALIATORY ATTACK
----SIGNED CAPTAIN USS SUBMARINE DRAGONFISH
"Ten seconds and counting," came the disembodied voice of the missile technician over the speaker. "Seven . . . six..' .
Parotkin looked up with the clear, unworried expression of a man who has just received a million rubles through the mail.