Sea Sprite's stern dug in and she shuddered under the strain from the tow, the blasting wind and the still-agonized sea. She began to fishtail, but Barnum quickly adjusted the angle of the thrusters and she straightened. For tortured minutes that seemed to last forever, nothing seemed to happen. The hotel appeared as if she was stubbornly continuing her journey toward a tumultuous death.
Below their feet on the stern deck, the engines did not throb and pound like diesels. The pumps that provided power for the thrusters whined like banshees. Barnum scanned the gauges and dials that registered the stress on the engines, not happy at what he saw.
Pitt came over and stood next to Barnum, whose hands bled white as he gripped the throttles and shoved them to their stops and beyond if it had been possible.
"I don't know how much more the engines can take," shouted Barnum above the noise from the wind and shriek from below in the engine room.
"Run the guts out of them," said Pitt, his tone cold and hard as glacial ice. "If they blow, I'll take responsibility."
There was no question of Barnum being the captain of his ship, but Pitt far outranked him in the NUMA hierarchy.
"That's easy for you to say," warned Barnum. "But if they blow, we end up on the rocks, too."
Pitt threw him a grin that was hard as granite. "We'll worry about that when the time comes."
To those on board Sea Sprite, the cause was becoming more hopeless with each passing second. It looked as if she was standing dead still in the water.
"Do it!" Pitt pleaded with Sprite. "You can do it!"
On board the hotel, deep anxiety was creeping over the passengers, followed by a growing panic as they stared in frozen fear at the surf crashing on the nearby rocks in a catastrophic display of raging water and exploding spray. Their mounting terror was accelerated by a sudden tremor as the bottom level of the hotel nudged into the rising seafloor. There was no insane rush to exits as in the event of a fire or an earthquake. There was no place to run. Jumping into the water was more than a simple act of suicide. It meant a horrible and painful death, either by drowning or being smashed to pieces on the jagged black lava rocks.
Morton tried to move about the hotel, calming and reassuring the passengers and his employees, but few paid any heed to him. He felt waves of frustration and defeat. One look out the windows was enough to turn the stoutest heart to paste. Children easily picked up on the fear written on their parents' faces and began crying. A few women screamed, some sobbed, others maintained a stony and blank exterior. The men for the most part were silent in their personal fear, holding their loved ones in their arms and trying to act brave.
The waves beating on the rocks below now came like thunder, but to many it was the toll of drums in a funeral procession.
IN the pilothouse, Maverick anxiously studied the digital speed indicator. The red numerals seemed frozen on zero. He saw the cables stretch out of the water with their fifty-gallon drums dangling like scales on a sea monster. He was not the only one mentally urging the ship to move. He turned his attention to the Global Positioning System readouts that recorded the exact position of the unit itself within a few feet. The numbers remained static. He glanced down through the rear windows at Barnum standing like a statue at the stern control console, then up at the Ocean Wanderer, still beset by the angry sea.
He glanced at the digital anemometer and noted the wind had dropped substantially in the last half hour. "That's a blessing," he muttered to himself.
Then, when he looked at the GPS again, the numbers had altered.
He rubbed his eyes, making sure he wasn't simply imagining a change. The numbers had slowly clicked over. Then he stared at the speed indicator. The digit on the far right was ticking back and forth between zero and one knot.
He stood numbed, wanting desperately to believe what he saw but not sure if it wasn't purely the harvest of an overly optimistic imagination. But the speed indicator didn't lie. There was forward movement, no matter how minuscule.
Maverick snatched up a bullhorn and ran out on the bridge wing. "She moved!" he shouted, half mad with excitement. "She's under way!"
Nobody cheered, not yet. Passage through the swirling waves was unreadable to the naked eye, so infinitesimal that they had no way of determining movement. They only had Maverick's word for it. Insufferable minutes passed as hope and excitement mounted as one. Then Maverick shouted again.
"One knot! We're moving at one knot!"
It was not illusory. With crawling awareness, it became apparent that the distance between Ocean Wanderer and the frenzied coastline was slowly but steadily widening.
There would be no death or disaster on these rocks this day.
13
Sea Sprite strained against the mooring cables, driving forward with her engines spinning wildly beyond limits never imagined by her designers. No one on the stern deck was looking at the murderous coastline or the endangered hotel. All eyes were locked on the capstan and the big mooring cables that creaked and groaned under extreme stress. If they snapped, the show was over. There would be no saving the Ocean Wanderer and all those within her glass walls.
But inconceivably in everyone's minds, the big cables remained in one piece just as Pitt had calculated.
Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, Sprite worked up to a speed of two knots, her bow bucking the great clouds of spray that swept the length of the ship. Only after the hotel had been towed nearly two miles off the cliffs did Barnum ease back on the throttles to relieve the overburdened engines. The danger diminished with each yard gained until the menacing rocks and the wild sea had been solidly cheated out of a major catastrophe.
The crew of Sea Sprite waved back at the joyous passengers of Ocean Wanderer, who were wildly waving and cheering behind the glass walls. With all fears of death lifted, pandemonium broke loose. Morton ordered the wine cellars opened and champagne was soon flowing in rivers throughout the hotel. To the passengers and his employees, he was the man of the hour. Hotel guests constantly surrounded and thanked him for his efforts in saving them from a horrible death, fully deserved or not.
Stealing away from the joyous bedlam, he returned to his office and sat at his desk in happy exhaustion. As waves of relief swept over him, his mind turned to his future. Though he hated to leave his position as manager of the Ocean Wanderer, he knew that any relationship with Specter was a thing of the past. He could never work again for the mysterious character who abandoned so many people who were fundamentally his responsibility.
Morton thought long and hard. There wasn't an international luxury hotel chain in the world that wouldn't hire him once his part in the drama became known. But becoming known and respected for his achievement was a problem.
It didn't take a Nostradamus to predict that once Specter realized the hotel had survived, he would order publicity and public relations people to grind out press releases, set up news conferences and arrange television interviews for the story of how he, Specter, had masterminded the rescue and was the savior of the famed hotel and everyone in it.