"Forgive the cold reception," he said, offering them a chair. "I was given no warning of your arrival."
"We haven't had much time to prepare," Pitt answered indifferently. "What is your current status?"
Morton shook his head bleakly. "Not good. Our pumps are barely staying ahead of the flooding, the structure is in danger of collapsing, and once we run onto the rocks surrounding the Dominican Republic" — he paused and shrugged—"then a thousand people, including yourselves, are going to die."
Pitt's face became as hard as granite. "We're not running on any rocks."
"We'll need the services of your maintenance personnel to assist us in hooking up with our ship," said Giordino.
"Where is this ship?" Morton questioned, his voice suggesting doubt.
"Our helicopter's radar put her less than thirty miles away."
Morton looked out the window at the ominous walls surrounding the hurricane's eye. "Your ship will never get here before the storm closes in again."
"Our NUMA Hurricane Center measured the eye at sixty miles in diameter and her speed at twenty miles an hour. With a little luck, she'll get here in time."
"Two hours to reach us and one to make the hookup," said Giordino, glancing at his watch.
"There is, I believe," said Morton in an official tone, "a matter of marine salvage to discuss."
"There is nothing to discuss," said Pitt, annoyed at being delayed. "NUMA is a United States government agency dedicated to ocean research. We are not a salvage company. This is not a no-cure, no-pay arrangement. If successful, our boss, Admiral James Sandecker, won't charge your boss, Mr. Specter, one thin dime."
Giordino grinned. "I might mention, the admiral has a love of expensive cigars."
Morton simply stared at Giordino. He was at a loss over how to deal with these men who had dropped from the sky unannounced and calmly informed him that they were going to save the hotel and everyone in it. They hardly looked like his salvation.
Finally, he acquiesced. "Please tell me what you gentlemen need."
The Sea Sprite refused to die. She went deeper than anyone could have believed a ship would dive and live. Totally immersed, her bow and stern buried deeply in the water, no one thought she could come back. For agonizing seconds, she seemed to hang suspended in the gray-green void. Then slowly, laboriously, her bow began to rise fractionally as she struggled defiantly back toward the surface. Then her thrashing screws dug in and propelled her forward. At last she burst into the fury of the storm again, her bow thrusting above the water like a porpoise. Her keel crashed down, jolting every plate in her hull that was weighted down with tons of water that flowed across her decks and cascaded back into the sea. The demonic gale had thrown her worst punch at the tough little ship and she had survived the boiling cauldron. Time and again she had suffered the great swirling mass of wind and water. It was almost as if Sea Sprite had a human determination about her, knowing without reservation that there was nothing left the sea could throw at her that she couldn't brush aside.
Marverick stared through the pilothouse windshield that had miraculously failed to shatter, his face white as a lily. "That was macabre," he said in a classic understatement. "I had no idea I'd signed aboard a submarine."
No other ship could have withstood such a freak occurrence and survived without sinking to the seabed. But Sea Sprite was no ordinary ship. She had been built tough to tolerate massive polar seas. The steel on her hull was far thicker than average to fight the solid mass of ice floes. But she did not escape unscathed. All but one boat had been swept away.
Gazing astern, Barnum was amazed that his communications gear had somehow survived. Those who suffered belowdecks had no inkling how close they came to ending up forever on the bottom of the sea.
Suddenly, sunlight beamed into the pilothouse. Sea Sprite had broken into Hurricane Lizzie's giant eye. It appeared paradoxical, with a blue sky above and maniacal sea below. To Barnum it seemed evil that a sight so tantalizing could still be so menacing.
Barnum glanced at his communications officer, Mason Jar, who was standing braced against the chart table, gripping the railing with ivory knuckles, looking like he'd seen an army of ghosts. "If you can come back on keel, Mason, contact the Ocean Wanderer and tell whoever is in charge that we're coming as quickly as possible through heavy seas."
Still dazed by what he had experienced, Jar slowly emerged from shock, nodded without speaking and walked off toward the communications room as if he was in a trance.
Barnum scanned his radar system and studied the blip that he was certain was the hotel twenty-six miles to the east. Then he programmed his course into the computer and again turned over command to the computerized automated controls. When he finished, he wiped his forehead with an old red bandana and muttered, "Even if we reach her before they go on the rocks, what then? We have no boats to cross over, and if we had they'd be swamped by the heavy seas. Nor do we have a big tow winch with thick cable."
"Not a pretty thought," said Maverick. "Watching helplessly as the hotel crashes into the rocks with all those women and children on board."
"No," said Barnum heavily. "Not a pretty thought at all."
11
Heidi hadn't been home in three days. She caught catnaps on a cot in her office, drank gallons of black coffee and ate little but baloney-and-cheese sandwiches. If she was walking around the Hurricane Center like a somnambulist, it wasn't from lack of sleep but from the stress and anguish of working amid a colossal catastrophe that was about to cause death and destruction on an unheard-of scale. Though she had correctly forecast Hurricane Lizzie's horrifying power from her birth and sent out warnings early, she still felt a sense of guilt that she might have done more.
She watched the projections and images on her monitors with great trepidation as Lizzie raced toward the nearest land.
Because of her early warnings, more than three hundred thousand people had been evacuated to the mountainous hills in the center of the Dominican Republic and its neighbor, Haiti. Still, the death toll would be staggering. Heidi also feared that the storm might veer north and strike Cuba before crashing into southern Florida.
Her phone rang and she wearily picked it up.
"Any change in your forecast as to direction?" asked her husband Harley at the National Weather Service.
"No, Lizzie is still heading due east as if she's traveling on a railroad track."
"Most unusual to travel thousands of miles in a straight line."
"More than unusual. It's unheard-of. Every hurricane on record meandered."
"A perfect storm?"
"Not Lizzie," said Heidi. "She's far from being perfect. I'd class her as a deadly cataclysm of the highest magnitude. An entire fishing fleet has gone missing. Another eight ships — oil tankers, cargo ships and private yachts — have stopped transmitting. Their distress signals are no longer being received, only silence. We have to expect the worst."
"What's the latest word on the floating hotel?" asked Harley.
"At last reports, she broke her moorings and was being driven by gale-force winds and high seas toward the rocky coast of the Dominican Republic. Admiral Sandecker sent one of NUMA's research ships to its position in an effort to tow it to safety."
"Sounds like a lost cause."
"I fear that we're looking at a sea disaster beyond any in the past," said Heidi grimly.
"I'm going to head home for a few hours. Why don't you take a break and come too? I'll fix us a nice dinner."
"I can't, Harley. Not just yet. Not until I can predict Lizzie's next mood."