Raise the Titanic - Cussler Clive. Страница 45

    For several moments, a stunned silence gripped the room. Then, suddenly, shattering the embarrassed quiet, a voice burst from the audience. "Atta girl, Doc," yelled the little white-haired lady from the Chicago Daily. "That's putting her down."

    A sea of applause rippled and then roared, sweeping the auditorium in a storm of approval. The battle-hardened Washington correspondents offered her their respect with a standing ovation.

    Connie Sanchez sat in her seat and stared coldly in flushed anger. Dana saw Connie's lips form the word "bitch" and she returned a smug, derisive kind of smile that only women do so well. Adulation, Dana thought, how sweet it is.

40

    Since early morning the wind had blown steadily out of the northeast. By later afternoon it had increased to a gale of thirty-five knots, which in turn threw up mountainous seas that pitched the salvage ships about like paper cups in a dishwasher. The tempest carried with it a numbing cold borne of the barren wastes above the Arctic Circle. The men dared not venture out onto the icy decks. It was no secret that the greatest barrier against keeping warm was the wind. A man could feel much colder and more miserable at twenty degrees above zero Fahrenheit with a thirty-five-knot wind than at twenty degrees below zero with no wind. The wind steals the body heat as quickly as it can be manufactured-a nasty situation known as chill factor.

    Joel Farquar, the Capricorn's weatherman, on loan from the Federal Meteorological Services Administration, seemed unconcerned with the storm snapping outside the operations room as he studied the instrumentation that tied into the National Weather Satellites and provided four space pictures of the North Atlantic every twenty-four hours.

    "What does your prognosticating little mind see for our future?" Pitt asked, bracing his body against the roll.

    "She'll start easing in another hour," Farquar replied "By sunrise tomorrow the wind should be down to ten knots."

    Farquar didn't look up when he spoke. He was a studious, little red-faced man with utterly no sense of humor and no trace of friendly warmth. Yet, he was respected by every man on the salvage operation because of his total dedication to the job, and the fact that his predictions were uncannily accurate.

    "The best laid plans . . ." Pitt murmured idly to himself. "Another day lost. That's four times in one week we've had to cast off and buoy the air line."

    God can make a storm," Farquar said indifferently. He nodded toward the two banks of television monitors that covered the forward bulkhead of the Capricorn's operations room. "At least they're not bothered by it all."

    Pitt looked at the screens which showed the submersibles calmly working on the wreck twelve thousand feet below the relentless sea. Their independence from the surface was the saving grace of the project. With the exception of the Sea Slug, which only had a downtime of eighteen hours and was now securely tied on the Modoc's deck, the other three submersibles could be scheduled to stay down on the Titanic for five days at a stretch before they returned to the surface to change crews. He turned to Al Giordino, who was bent over a large chart table.

    "What's the disposition of the surface ships?"

    Giordino pointed at the tiny two-inch models scattered about the chart. "The Capricorn is holding her usual position in the center. The Modoc is dead ahead, and the Bomberger is trailing three miles astern."

    Pitt stared at the model of the Bomberger. She was a new vessel, constructed especially for deep-water salvage. "Tell her captain to close up to within one mile."

    Giordino nodded toward the bald radio operator, who was moored securely to the slanting deck in front of his equipment. "You heard the man, Curly. Tell the Bomberger to come up to one mile astern."

    "How about the supply ships?" Pitt asked.

    "No problem there. This weather is duck soup to big ten-tonners the likes of these two. The Alhambra is in position to port, and the Monterey Park is right where she's supposed to be to starboard."

    Pitt nodded at a small red model. "I see our Russian friends are still with us."

    "The Mikhail Kurkov?" Giordino said. He picked up a blue replica of a warship and placed it next to the red model. "Yeah, but she can't be enjoying the game. The Juneau, that Navy guided-missile cruiser, hangs on like glue."

    "And the wreck buoy's signal unit?"

    "Serenely beeping away eighty feet beneath the uproar," Giordino announced. "Only twelve hundred yards, give or take a hair, bearing zero-five-nine, southwest that is."

    "Thank God we haven't been blown off the homestead," Pitt sighed.

    "Relax." Giordino grinned reassuringly. "You act like a mother with a daughter out on a date after midnight every time there's a little breeze."

    "The mother-hen complex becomes worse the closer we get," Pitt admitted. "Ten more days, Al. If we can get ten calm days, we can wrap it up."

    "That's up to the weather oracle." Giordino turned to Farquar. "What about it, O Great Seer of Meteorological Wisdom?"

     "Twelve hours' advance notice is all you'll get out of me," Farquar grunted, without looking up. "This is the North Atlantic. She's the most unpredictable of any ocean in the world. Hardly one day is ever the same. Now, if your precious Titanic had gone down in the Indian Ocean, I could give you your ten day prediction with an eighty percent chance of accuracy."

    "Excuses, excuses," Giordino replied. "I bet when you make love to a woman, you tell her going in that there's a forty-per-cent chance she'll enjoy it."

    "Forty per cent is better than nothing," Farquar said casually.

    Pitt caught a gesture by the sonar operator and moved over to him. "What have you got?"

    "A strange pinging noise over the amplifier," the sonar man replied. He was a pale-faced man, about the size and shape of a gorilla. "I've picked it up off and on during the last two months. Strange sort of sound, kind of like somebody was sending messages."

    "Make anything of it?"

    "No, Sir. I had Curly listen to it, but he said it was pure gibberish."

    "Most likely a loose object on the wreck that's being rattled about by the current."

    "Or maybe it's a ghost," the sonar man said.

    "You don't believe in them, but you're afraid of them, is that it?"

    "Fifteen hundred souls went down with the Titanic," the sonar man said. "It's not unlikely that at least one came back to haunt the ship."

    "The only spirits I'm interested in," Giordino said from the chart table, "are the kind you drink . . . ."

    "The interior cabin camera of Sappho II just blacked out." This from the sandy-haired man seated at the TV monitors.

    Pitt was immediately behind him, staring at the blackened monitor. "Is the problem at this end?"

    "No, Sir. All circuits here and on the buoy's relay panel are operable. The problem must be on the Sappho II. It just seemed like somebody hung a cloth over the camera lens."

    Pitt swung to face the radio operator. "Curly, contact Sappho II and ask them to check their cabin TV camera."

    Giordino picked up a clipboard and checked the crew schedule. "Omar Woodson is in command of the Sappho II this shift."