The Titanic Secret Page 4

  Pitt turned the screw handle furiously and could tell by how it lost resistance that it had broken the surface. He was ready right away to open the snorkel and let fresh air enter the sub for a few precious seconds before the snorkel again dipped beneath the waves and he had to reseal it.

  Because the screw and snorkels were taller than the hatch/conning tower, Pitt knew that it was unlikely the top of the submersible breached too. Still, he put his odds slightly above fifty/fifty that a sharp-eyed captain or crew member working one of the dozens of ships, boats, and ferries that ply the waters of New York Harbor would spot the Turtle as it rose and dove repeatedly while it floated ever southward on the tidal current.

  Forty minutes later, Pitt adjusted his odds downward to zero. He’d felt vibrations through the water twice that indicated a boat of some kind was near, but neither had spotted him. The physical effort to keep the Turtle close enough to the surface to draw in even a tiny amount of fresh air had run up against the law of diminishing returns. He wasn’t sufficiently replenishing the oxygen he was consuming turning the vertical propeller to raise the submersible. He could keep at it for a while longer, but he also knew that once he escaped the one-man sub, he’d still have to contend with the East River. Always a strong swimmer, Pitt was tiring and had to keep some reserves for a grueling struggle once he hit the water. It didn’t help that his core temperature had dropped considerably since his clothes had been soaked by the leaky hatch.

  Defeat was a bitter pill to swallow, especially for Pitt, as he was a man who had suffered its pangs far less than most. But defeat was something he must now accept. His gamble hadn’t paid off at all. It was time to make his escape. He needed the submersible to fill quickly so he could swim clear of it in as shallow a depth as possible. Pitt would use his knife to remove the strips of fabric he’d wedged around the hatch and again the drips would turn into a steady rain.

  He’d just started at it when he felt something through the Turtle’s stout wooden hull. It was like the vibrations he’d experienced earlier when a ship had passed close by, but this was somehow deeper, more menacing. He had a quick mental image of a giant vessel, a containership or tanker, bearing down on the submersible on a deadly collision course. He suddenly felt very exposed. The sound and vibration grew until it seemed to fill the submersible, and Pitt finally recognized the noise wasn’t a ship’s screws at all but the rotor downwash from a helicopter.

  Ignoring the water dribbling down on his head from the dislodged jury-rigged gasket, Pitt cranked hard on the vertical prop handle with one hand and furiously worked the bilge pump with the other, gritting his teeth against the sharp pain of muscle fiber pushed to its very limit. His lungs were soon sucking desperately at air that contained less and less of the life-giving oxygen and grew more toxic with his exhaled carbon dioxide.

  The chopper had to be directly overhead. He could even hear the screams of its turbines over the hurricane-like downdraft. The resistance against the screw blades vanished. Pitt had managed to surface the sub one last time. If no one saw him now there was nothing more that he could do.

  He waited, knowing the Turtle was already starting to sink again. He held out hope against hope, but as the seconds ticked by he had to admit defeat yet again.

  Then came two quick taps against the metal hatch that rang Pitt’s head like he was in a bell. A second later a gloved hand smeared away some of the grime from a window and a powerful flashlight beam flared in his eyes. The beam came away and the diver’s face mask came into view. Pitt had his cell phone lit and gave the man the index-finger-to-thumb diver’s okay, but then eagerly jerked his thumb upward to indicate he wanted to surface. The diver returned both gestures and threw a cocky salute as well.

  Pitt could just make out through the newly cleaned porthole that there were two men in the water with him and they were rigging a sling around the submersible. He recognized it as the gear the archeologists had planned on using to hoist the Turtle from its centuries-old home. He assumed a workboat with a large crane had been near enough to the accident for the netting to be transferred over to her. The chopper had been the boat’s spotter.

  It took the divers just a few minutes to sling the sub in the netting. One man tapped the glass again to make sure Pitt was ready and then he vanished into the gloom. Dirk braced his arms and legs just as the crane began lifting the Turtle out from its watery tomb. It came up much faster than he expected. He felt like he was being wrenched from the river. And then in a burst of weak sunlight the Turtle erupted from the water with white sheets of froth cascading from her rounded hull. Pitt immediately reached overhead to undo the hatch. The submersible turned and danced at the end of the line, spinning as the rigging became unkinked. Pitt put his eye close to the cleaner pane of glass. To his astonishment, he realized that he was a hundred feet in the air and still climbing. There was no workboat or crane.

  He managed to finally shove open the hatch. Above him was the massive under hull of a Navy CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. Its rear ramp was open, and two men in olive-drab flight suits and helmets were sitting at its edge with their legs dangling into space. When they spotted Pitt poking his head out of the Turtle, they waved jauntily as if this was the most normal thing they’d done all day. Pitt craned his head to look back at the receding river below. The two divers who’d secured the submersible in the netting were being picked up by a small police boat with red and blue strobes flashing on its radar arch.

  Before the bitterly cold wind forced him back down into the Turtle, Pitt noted that he’d floated halfway to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Considering his level of exhaustion and near hypothermia, he estimated that had he been forced to swim for it he’d have never made it to either shore.

  What had taken Pitt over an hour to cover in the submersible took just a few minutes for the jet-propelled transport chopper. Work crews back on the construction site were ready for the helo’s payload to be lowered onto a pile of soft sand that had been hastily mounded up by earthmovers. Coordination between the pilot and the loadmaster in the cargo section was precise. The Turtle touched down with barely a bump and its weight settled into the sand, so when the netting was hastily unhooked from the winch, the gawky little craft remained upright. The chopper roared off as Pitt emerged from the submersible to the rousing cheers of the construction crew, scientists, and the dozens of firefighters, police, and press that had arrived at the scene.

  A ladder was quickly brought, and Pitt’s back was slapped black and blue by the time he’d gotten to the ground. An EMT threw a blanket over his shoulders, and someone pressed a paper cup of hot coffee into his hand. He kept repeating that he was fine when nearly everyone thronging around him asked if he was all right. He allowed himself to be escorted to the back of an ambulance but refused the offer of a ride to the hospital. He knew from experience that all he needed was a long shower, three or so shots of Don Julio Blanco tequila, and a soft bed.

  Fortunately, the police kept the press back at a respectful distance. At Pitt’s insistence, Thomas Gwynn and Vin Blankenship were allowed to join him.

  “Hell of a stunt, Mr. Pitt,” Blankenship said. “I couldn’t imagine the paperwork I’d be doing had you not made it back.”

  Pitt chuckled at the man’s unflappable nature. It reminded him a little of how Al Giordino treated the world. “I am relieved that you’ve been saved that fate, but somehow I don’t think they’d blame you if the guy you’re guarding ran off to save an old submarine. Things might have been a lot grimmer if the Navy hadn’t gotten here so fast. Any ideas how that happened, by the way?”

  Gwynn said, “One of the workers out on the seawall actually saw the sub get flushed out into the river, so the police didn’t even bother sending divers down to look for you. They called in the Coast Guard to start scouring the river, and there was a Navy chopper doing search and rescue drills on Long Island Sound.”

  “Just before they reached Manhat
tan,” Blankenship added, “the crew were directed here to pick up the sling used to pull the sub from the water. It was a police drone that actually spotted you, and its operator vectored in the Navy bird.”

  “All in all, pretty slick,” Thomas Gwynn summed up.

  Pitt nodded. “I was just getting ready to pull the plug and swim for it when I heard them. Literally another few seconds later and the Turtle would have been lost.”

  “Was it really worth it?” Blankenship asked.

  Had he known Pitt better, he wouldn’t have posed the question. Dirk Pitt looked over to where the archeologists were swarming around their prize find. This wasn’t something he’d done for them—or even for himself, really—this was about preserving the past so someone in the future could look at the Turtle and find inspiration to make the world a better place. Pitt looked him square in the eye. “Absolutely.”

  Three hours later, Pitt stepped from the hotel bathroom with a plush robe wrapped around his body and splashed more room service tequila into a glass. He’d been interviewed by the police for the better part of two hours. Blankenship had driven Thom Gwynn back to his office and returned with some dry clothes he’d picked up at an outlet store. After the police were done with him, Pitt spoke to a few reporters for no other reason than to get some good press for NUMA, fudging that his presence at the archeological site had been official. He had no desire to spend hours on a train back to D.C., so he’d managed to extend his stay at his hotel near the UN. Outside, the skyline was jeweled by a million lights, as the storm had cleared, leaving the air clean and fresh.

  Pitt sat himself in one of the club chairs. Too much adrenaline was still pumping in his blood to sleep. The paperwork generated at the conference held no interest, so instead he removed Isaac Bell’s typewritten notes from their plastic sleeve.

  Not one to dwell on his own past, he didn’t think about his role in discovering and salvaging the Titanic. Instead, he thought about a miner named Joshua Hayes Brewster and how he had driven himself mad in his quest to get his cargo back to the United States. Pitt recalled that when he’d pieced together Brewster’s story, there had been some nagging questions about parts of the tale. He remembered thinking it was too fantastic that a miner from Colorado could have pulled off one of the greatest capers in history and yet the evidence of Brewster’s success was undeniable. But maybe, Pitt thought, he hadn’t sussed out the whole story. Maybe Bell’s version would shed some light on what had really taken place more than a hundred years earlier.

  Pitt adjusted the lamp and started reading.

  1

  Denver, Colorado

  November 18, 1911

  Jim Porter was a big man, thick through the gut and neck, with the florid complexion of a person whose heart is beating far too hard to get blood through his fat body. His doctor repeatedly told him that he had to lose weight or suffer the consequences, but Porter liked food far too much to worry about some potential problem when he was in his sixties or seventies.

  He ate most every morning at a small restaurant across from the post office branch where he was the manager. The place was cozy, just six tables, and the husband/wife team that owned it took good care of their customers. For Jim Porter, this meant serving him his bacon extra soft. He was just bringing two pieces speared on a fork to his mouth when the restaurant’s front door opened to the tinkling chime of its attached bell. He recognized the first man right away. They had known each other since they were schoolboys. Billy McCallister was a detective now with the Denver Police, and many figured he’d be running the whole department before too long. Behind him and coming in the rear were two men Porter didn’t know, and like they were bookends for the two strangers was Billy’s partner, Jack Gaylord.

  Billy scanned the room and focused in on the heavyset postal worker. Knowing he’d done nothing wrong, Porter was nonplused and finished shoving the limp strips of bacon into his mouth.

  “Morning, Jim,” the police detective said, removing his hat and taking a seat opposite his old friend.

  “Billy,” Porter said between bites. “What can I do for you?”

  One of the strangers took out official credentials and held them out for Porter’s inspection. Porter’s eyes widened when he read them, and he suddenly wished he were anyplace other than there. “As you can see,” the stranger said, “I’m from the Postmaster General’s Office in Washington, D.C. My name is Bob Northrop. And what you can do for us is help end a crime spree.”

  While the two cops looked like police—big, grim-faced, and competent—and Northrop had the look of a bureaucrat out of his element but still filled with purpose, it was the fourth man that held Porter’s attention. The other three had taken the last chairs at the table, so the stranger stood behind them with his hands clasped in front of him, his long fingers holding his hat by the brim. He wore a suit of good quality and cut and a black overcoat so long it almost swept the ground like a cape. He had bright blond hair and blue eyes with a world-weariness in them that gave him a timeless look. Once Porter had seen those eyes, he recognized that the innocent pose was a disguise and that this man was far more than he seemed.

  “Crime spree?” Porter repeated, unsettled and needing to refocus on the conversation.

  Detective McCallister replied, “Yes, a crime spree. At least four robberies so far, and, if Mr. Bell is right, a fifth took place last night. Oh, sorry. Jim, this is Isaac Bell of the Van Dorn Agency.”

  Bell leaned forward with his hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you,” he said affably.

  Porter wasn’t fooled. Bell was probably a nice enough fellow, but there was an edge to him that he did not share with the outside world. Bell was doubtless a dangerous man, but also one who hid it behind polish and poise.

  Porter suddenly understood what was happening, and some of his normal flush waned as his face went a little pale. He tossed his napkin on the table and was about to rise.

  “Hold on a second,” McCallister said.

  “You’re implying my branch was robbed last night. Right? That’s why you’re here now. We have to go check right away.”

  “No, Mr. Porter,” Bell said, and the postmaster froze. “There’s an accomplice coming today. It will make everyone’s job easier if we can catch him in the act rather than having to make a deal with the actual thief.”

  Porter looked to his friend for confirmation. McCallister nodded. Porter relaxed back into his chair.

  “There’s no rush just yet,” Bell continued. “We want everything to look as normal as possible when the accomplice comes to pick up the three trunks he shipped to you yesterday.”

  Porter knew exactly which three the private detective meant. Two were about the bulk of large suitcases and quite heavy for their size. The other was a monogrammed steamer trunk that looked like it had been around the world several times. “You know who owns them, then?”

  “Yes,” Bell said. “I watched him mail them yesterday. I had already briefed Mr. Northrop from the Postmaster General’s Office and Detective McCallister on my idea of putting an end to the crooks’ activities.”

  McCallister checked the time on a silver half hunter he had chained to his vest pocket. He turned to Bell. “We still have twenty minutes before the branch is to open. I’m sure you told Mr. Northrop here how you broke the case, but do you mind telling me the story from the beginning?”

  Bell nodded. “Certainly. The thieves started in Des Moines, where they hit a hotel storage room, before they moved to Omaha, where another hotel was robbed. Next came a railroad depot in Topeka. That’s where I was brought in on the case. The railroad’s owner is a friend of my boss. During my initial investigation, research informed me of the earlier robberies in Iowa and Nebraska. Next up was a robbery in Cheyenne. This time, they hit another railroad storage depot, though not the same line as my boss’s friend.

  “Two incidents don’t constitute a pattern for me—
nor do three, usually—but this was the fourth job, and I thought I had it figured out. At Cheyenne, I pieced together that the towns these thieves were hitting were getting progressively more westward, so Denver seemed like the logical next step. But the timing of the hits was a mystery. The two hotels appeared to have been robbed sometime four weeks ago. The thing was, the guests didn’t realize items had been removed from their stored luggage until days or weeks after the fact. I figure the thieves had cleared out of town long before anyone was onto them. But the railroad jobs were detected the day after the robbery, which didn’t give our thieves much time to move on.”

  Bell paused. He was a natural storyteller and he held the four men rapt. “But the real mystery was how they managed to rob four locked rooms without leaving a bit of evidence that the locks had been tampered with. In addition, the hotel strong rooms were near enough to the reception desk that anyone loitering nearby would be seen and the area around the two depots was guarded by railroad bulls.”

  “The yard dicks never saw anything?” McCallister’s partner, Gaylord, asked.

  “And they circled the building all night,” Bell told him. “The final piece of the puzzle was this.”

  Bell pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. It was a garish advertisement for a traveling circus and showed the ringmaster, in top hat and with arms thrown wide, while in the background the artist had drawn roaring lions and a string of elephants performing a trick, all backgrounded by the inside of a brightly colored big top tent with a pair of trapeze artists swinging between the poles. The men all recognized it, for not three days earlier thousands of these flyers had been plastered all over the city because the Fraunhofer & Fraunhofer Circus was soon arriving for their last show of the season before they moved on to their winter-over headquarters outside of Los Angeles.