Night Probe! Page 26

  Suddenly the stillness of the morning was shattered by a rumbling thunder that seemed to come from far away and then heighten with terrible swiftness, and a caldron of boiling water erupted and burst toward the sky arouqd the Ocean Venturer as the explosives on the bow of the Empress detonated.

  The research vessel seemed to porpoise above the maelstrom, hang suspended for a few seconds, and then fall back on its starboard side, down, down until it seemed to drown under the massive column of water.

  Even on shore the violence of the explosion was shocking. Shaw steadied himself on the tripod of the scope and stared, numb with disbelief.

  The spray rose whitely in a vast cloud, swirling above the masts of Huron and Phoenix, fighting gravity and finally raining in a drenching torrent that entirely saturated the superstructures of both ships. There wasn't a man left standing on any deck. They were all knocked flat or overboard by the force of the blast.

  When Shaw retrained the scope of Gly, the hydroplane was hurtling far up the river toward Quebec.

  Stony-faced, bitter at his helplessness, Shaw could only watch in agonized frustration as Gly once again escaped.

  He turned back to the Ocean Venturer.

  It looked like a dead ship. Its stern had settled ominously and its hull was heeled far over to starboard.

  Slowly and frighteningly the derrick teetered crazily sideways, hung, then ponderously toppled over the side with a great splash, leaving an incredible tangle of debris and cable heaped on the decks. God only knew how many men had been killed or maimed inside the steel walls.

  Shaw could not bear to see any more. He picked up the scope and walked heavily away. from the shoreline, the deep rumble of the explosion rolling across the river and echoing back in his ears.

  For some inexplicable reason the Ocean Venturer refused to die.

  Perhaps it was the heavy double hull, especially designed for ramming through ice, that saved the ship.

  Many of the outer plates were smashed, the seams split and the keel twisted. The damage was extensive and severe, but still the ship survived.

  Pitt had watched the derrick go over. He stared numbly through the shattered windows of the control room, released his grip on a doorway and staggered uncontrollably into Hoker's console, his sense of balance telling him what his eyes refused. The deck was tilting at an angle of thirty degrees.

  His first thought was the grim appreciation that the ship was mortally hurt. Hard on the heels of that came the sickening realization of what the frightful blast must have done to the divers on the wreck. He shook off the fog and the dull ache that tried to creep back in his mind. He logically categorized the steps to be taken. Then he went into action.

  He grabbed the phone and rang up the chief engineer. Nearly a minute crawled by before an impersonal voice replied in dazed shock. "Engine room."

  "Metz, is that you?"

  "You'll have to speak louder, I can't hear."

  It dawned on Pitt that to the men on the lower decks and in the engine room, the roar and concussion must have been ear shattering He shouted into the mouthpiece. "Metz, this is Pitt!"

  "Okay, that's better," Metz replied in a metallic monotone. "What in hell is going on?"

  "My best guess, my only guess is an explosion from below."

  "Damn, I thought the Canadians stuck a torpedo in us."

  "Report on damage."

  "It's like working under a hundred running faucets down here. Water is gushing in everywhere. I doubt if the pumps have the capability to handle it. That's all I can tell you until I sound the hull."

  "What about injuries?"

  "We were catapulted around like drunken gymnasts. I think Jackson has a broken knee, and Gilmore a skull fracture. Beyond that, a few battered eardrums and a gang of bruises."

  "Come back to me every five minutes," Pitt ordered. "And whatever you do, keep the generators turning."

  "I don't have to be reminded. If they go, we go."

  "You got the idea."

  Pitt crammed the phone in its receiver and looked worriedly at Heidi. Gunn was kneeling over her, cradling her head in his arms. She lay crumpled against the chart table, barely conscious, staring through vacant eyes at her left leg. It lay at a queer angle.

  "Funny," she whispered. "It doesn't hurt a bit."

  The pain would come, thought Pitt. Already her face was flour-white from shock. He took her hand.

  "Just lie still until we can get a stretcher."

  He wanted to say more, to comfort her, but there was no time. Reluctantly he turned away at the anguished interruption of Hoker's voice.

  "The board is out." Hoker was fighting to recover, picking his fallen chair off the deck, staring dumbly at his darkened console panel and monitors.

  "Then fix the damned thing!" Pitt rapped out. "We've got to know what happened to the underwater crew."

  He took a headset and patched himself into all the stations of the Ocean Venturer. On and below decks the scientists and engineers of NUMA began pulling their senses together and toiling like madmen to save their ship. The more seriously injured were carried to the hospital bay, where they soon overfilled the facilities and were placed in rows outside in the hallway. Those who did not have critical jobs labored to tear aside the wreckage of the derrick or seal the cracks in the hull as they stood in waist-high frigid water. A team of divers was hurriedly assembled to go below.

  The messages kept pouring in as Pitt directed the recovery. A still bewildered radio operator turned to him. "Just in from the captain of the Phoenix. He wishes to know if we need assistance?"

  "Hell, yes, we need assistance!" Pitt shouted. "Request he bring his ship alongside. We need every available pump he's got and all the damage control men he can spare."

  He broke off and dabbed a damp towel on his forehead, waiting impatiently for the answer.

  "The message is: 'Hold the fort,' " said the radio operator excitedly. " 'We will tie up on your starboard side.' " Then a few seconds later: "Commander Weeks on the Huron asks if we're abandoning ship."

  "He'd like that," Pitt growled. "It would solve all his problems.

  "Standing by for an answer."

  "Tell him we'll abandon ship when we can step off on the bottom. Then repeat the request for men and pumping equipment-"

  "Pitt?" Metz voice broke in over the headset.

  "Go ahead."

  "Looks like the stern took the brunt of the blast. From midships forward the hull is tight and dry. From there back it's got more cracks than a jigsaw puzzle. I'm afraid we've had it."

  "How long can you keep us afloat?"

  "At the rate the water's rising it should reach and short the generators in twenty or twenty-five minutes.

  Then we lose the pumps. After that, maybe ten minutes."

  "Help is on the way. Open the side loading doors so that damage control men and pumping equipment can be transferred from the naval vessels."

  "They'd better hustle, or we won't be around to throw a welcome party."

  The radio operator gestured and Pitt made his way toward him across the slanting deck.

  "I've reestablished contact with Sappho I," he said. "I'll tie you in on the phone."

  "Sappho I, this is Pitt, please reply."

  "This is Klinger on Sappho I, or what's left of us."

  "What is your condition?"

  "We're lying about a hundred and fifty meters southeast of the wreck with our bow buried in the mud.

  The hull stood up to the concussion-it was like sitting inside a clanging bell-but one of the view ports cracked and we're taking on water."

  "Are your life-support systems functioning?"

  "Roger. They should keep us healthy for a while yet. The problem is, we'll drown a good fifteen hours before our oxygen supply goes."

  "Can you make a free ascent?"

  "I might," replied Klinger. "I only lost a tooth from the jolt. Marv Powers, though, is in a bad way. Both his arms are busted and he took a bad crack on the head
. He'd never make it to the surface."

  Pitt closed his eyes for a moment. He did not relish playing God with men's lives, designating priorities over who was saved first or last. When he looked up again, he had made his decision.

  "You'll have to hold on for a while, Klinger. We'll get to you just as soon as we can. Keep me posted every ten minutes."

  Pitt stepped out on the bridge wingpnd peered down. Four divers were disappearing over the side.

  "I have a picture," said Hoker in triumph as one of the video monitors brightened into life.

  The monitor showed a view of the excavation pit as seen from the upper promenade deck. The support columns were collapsed and the decks below had fallen inward. There was no sign of the two JIM suits or the saturation divers.

  The cold, abstract eye of the camera saw only a crater ringed with grotesquely distorted steel, but to Pitt it was as though he was staring into an open grave.

  "God help them," Hoker muttered under his breath. "They must all be dead."

  Seventy miles away, Captain Toshio Yubari, a solid, weatherworn man in the prime of his early forties, sat erect in a bridge chair, intent on the small boat traffic that dotted the water ahead. The tide was running home toward the sea, and the 665-foot containership Honjo Maru loafed along at a steady fifteen knots. Yubari had decided to wait and ring for twenty knots once the ship had rounded Cape Breton Island.

  The Honjo Maru had carried 400 new electric mini cars from Kobe, Japan, and was making the return voyage with a cargo of newsprint paper from the great pulp mills of Quebec. The massive rolls that filled the containers were far heavier per unit volume than the small cars, and the hull rode low in the water, a scant three inches above the waterline.

  First Officer Shigaharu Sakai stepped from the wheelhouse and stood beside the captain. He stifled a yawn and rubbed his reddened eyes.

  "Fun night ashore?" Yubari asked, smiling.

  Sakai mumbled an unintelligible reply and changed the subject.

  "Lucky we didn't cast off on a Sunday," he said, nodding at a fleet of sailing sloops that were racing around a buoyed course about a mile off their port bow.

  "Yes, I'm told the traffic is so heavy on weekends you can almost walk across the river on the yachts."

  "Shall I take the bridge, captain, while you enjoy a noonday meal?"

  "Thank you," replied Yubari, keeping his gaze straight ahead, "but I prefer to remain until we reach the gulf. You might ask the steward, though, to bring me a bowl of noodles with duck and a beer."

  Sakai started to comply and then stopped in mid-turn, pointing down the river. "There comes a brave soul or a very reckless one."

  Yubari had already spotted the hydroplane and stared with the fascination men have with high speed.

  "He must be doing close to ninety knots."

  "If he hits one of those sloops, there won't be enough left to make a pair of chopsticks."

  Yubari came to his feet. "The fool is heading straight for them."

  The hydroplane charged into the massed sloops like a coyote through a flock of chickens. The skippers wildly slewed their boats in all directions, losing the wind, full sails suddenly collapsing and flapping uncontrollably.

  The inevitable occurred as the hydroplane slashed across the bow of one yacht, tearing away its bowsprit and losing a windshield in the bargain. Then it was free, leaving the fleet scattered and rolling heavily in its whipping wake.

  Yubari and Sakai were entranced by the mad antics of the hydroplane as it made a sweeping curve and set a course for the Honjo Maru. The small, darting craft was close enough now so they could make out a form hunched over the wheel in the cockpit.

  Suddenly it became obvious to them that the driver had been injured when the sloop's bowsprit swept away the windshield.

  There was no time for shouted commands or warning blasts from the horn, no time for Yubari and Sakai to do anything but stand in frozen impotence like pedestrians on a street corner witnessing an accident in the making and helpless to prevent it.

  They instinctively ducked as the hydroplane crashed square into the Honjo Maru's port beam and erupted in an instantaneous, blinding sheet of gasoline flames. The engine flew from its mountings high into the air end over end before smashing onto the forecastle. Scattered bits of fiery debris splattered the ship like shrapnel from a bomb. Several of the wheelhouse windows were broken in. Things fell of it of the sky for several seconds, raining about the ship and splashing in the river.

  Miraculously no one was hurt on board the containership. Yubari ordered "all stop" on the engines. A boat was lowered to search the area astern, where oil was drifting up from the bottom and spreading on the low swells.

  All that was found of the hydroplane's driver was a charred leather jacket and a pair of broken plastic goggles.

  As the afternoon wore on, the mood of the Ocean Venturer's crew began to be tinged with guarded optimism. A steady stream of men and equipment poured aboard from the Phoenix and the Huron. Soon auxiliary pumps stalemated the advance of the water gushing into the lower decks. And once the remains of the derrick were cut away, the list was reduced to nineteen degrees.

  Most of the seriously injured, including Heidi, were transferred to the more spacious medical facilities on board the Phoenix. Pitt met her on deck as her litter was carried up from below.

  "Wasn't much of a cruise, was it?" he said, brushing the ash-blond hair from her eyes.

  "I wouldn't have missed it for the world," she replied, smiling gamely. He leaned over and kissed her. "I'll visit you first chance I get."

  Then he turned and climbed up the slanting ladder to the control room. Rudi Gunn met him in the doorway.

  "A JIM suit was spotted floating downriver," he said. "The Huron is towing it in with their launch."

  "Any word from the dive rescue team?"

  "The team master, Art Dunning, reported in a minute ago. They haven't found the chamber yet, but he did say it looked as though the blast centered around the bow of the Empress. The entire forecastle has disintegrated. The mystery is, where did the explosives come from?"

  "They were laid before we arrived," said Pitt thoughtfully. "Or after."

  "No way an amount large enough to create this kind of havoc could have been smuggled through our security ring."

  "That ape of Shaw's beat the system."

  "Once maybe, not several times, lugging heavy containers of underwater explosives. They must have stored the stuff in the bow section of the Empress until they could figure out where to place it throughout the ship to cause the greatest destruction."

  "Blow the wreck and the treaty out of existence before we steamed over the horizon."

  "But we showed up early and knocked them off their time schedule. That's why they stole the probe.

  They were afraid it might spot the explosives cache."

  "Was Shaw so desperate to stop us he'd resort to mass murder?"

  "That part throws me," Pitt admitted. "He somehow didn't strike me as the butchering kind."

  Pitt's eyes wandered away and he caught sight of Chief Engineer Metz walking slowly into the control room. He looked like a man who was ready to drop. His face was drawn and haggard, clothes soaked from cap to boots, and he reeked of diesel oil.

  "Guess what?" He smiled a tired smile. "The old girl is gonna make it. The Venturer ain't what it used to be, but by Jesus, it'll take us home."

  It was the best news Pitt had heard since the explosion. "You've stopped the flooding?"

  Metz nodded. "We're eight inches down from an hour ago. As soon as you can release a few divers, I can have the worst of the leaks sealed from the outside."

  "The Huron," Pitt said anxiously. "Can you disengage the Huron's pumps?"

  "I think so," replied Metz. "Between our own equipment and that of the Phoenix, we should be able to cope."

  Pitt wasted no more time. Skipping normal radio protocol, he roared into the microphone on his headset.

  "Klinger!"
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br />   The reply took a few seconds, and when it came, the voice was slurred. "Hi there, this is Captain Nemo of the submarine Nautilus speaking. Over."

  "You're who?"

  "The guy in Twenty Zillion Leagues Under the Sea. You know. Great flick. Saw it when I was a kid in Seattle. Best part was the fight with the giant squid." Pitt had to shake off a sense of unreality, and then he realized what was wrong. "Klinger!" he shouted, turning every head in the control room. "Your carbon dioxide level is too high! Do you understand? Check your air-scrubbing unit. Repeat. Check your air-scrubbing unit."

  "Hey, how about that?" Klinger replied cheerily. "The indicator says we're breathing ten percent CO2-"

  "Dammit, Klinger, listen to me! You've got to get down to point-oh-five percent. You're suffering from anoxia."

  "Scrubber is on. How does that grab you?"

  Pitt sighed with relief. "Hold on a little longer and activate your locator pinger. The Huron is coming to lift you on board."

  "Whatever you say," Klinger replied, his tone like mush.

  "How is the leakage?"

  "Two, maybe three hours before the batteries are flooded."

  "Increase your oxygen. Got that? Increase your oxygen. We'll see you for dinner."

  He turned to speak to Gunn, but the little man had already anticipated him. He was halfway through the doorway.

  "I'll direct the Sappho rs retrieval from the Huron personally," he said, and then was gone.

  Pitt looked through the open windows and saw a small boom lifting the JIM suit out of the water as a launch from the Phoenix stood by. The dome was unloosened and swung open. Three crewmen from the Phoenix reached it and lifted out a limp figure and laid him on the deck. Then one of them looked up at Pitt and gave a thumbs-up sign.