Clive Cussler - Trojan Odyssey

The Orion shuddered and fell off in an uncontrolled bank to the port.

Barrett felt a sudden loss of power and his eyes immediately swept the instrument panel as he struggled to level out the aircraft. "I'm getting no readings on number four engine. Can you see if she's still turning?"

"Oh God!" muttered Boozer, staring through his side window. "Number four engine is gone!"

"Then shut it down!" Barrett snapped.

"There's nothing left to shut down. It's fallen away."

His mind and strength fully concentrating on righting the Orion, Barrett twisted the wheel on the control column and fought the pedals, not comprehending Boozer's dire report. He sensed something terribly wrong with the aerodynamics. The plane was not responding to his physical commands. All response was extremely sluggish. It was as if a giant rope with a weight was pulling the starboard wing from behind.

At last he brought Gertie into level flight. Only then did Boozer's words come home to him. It was the loss of the engine, torn from its mountings by the violent assault of the storm that threw the Orion out of control and was causing the starboard drag. He leaned forward and stared past Boozer.

Where the Allison turboprop engine had been attached to the wing was now an empty gap with twisted and torn mountings, severed hydraulic, oil and fuel lines, mangled pumps and electrical wiring. It shouldn't have happened, thought Barrett, incredulous. Engines simply did not drop off aircraft, not even under the worst turbulence.

Then he counted nearly thirty empty, tiny holes in the wing where the rivets had popped out. His foreboding grew as he saw several cracks in the stressed aluminum skin.

A voice from the main compartment came over his headphones. "We have injuries back here and most of the equipment is damaged and malfunctioning."

"Those who are able, tend to the injured. We're heading for home."

"If we can make it," Boozer said pessimistically. He pointed out Barrett's side window. "We have a fire in number three."

"Shut it down!"

"In the process," Boozer answered calmly.

Barrett was tempted to call his wife and say goodbye, but he was far from giving up. Getting sorely wounded Gertie and her scientists out of the storm and safely back to land would take a miracle. He began to mutter a prayer under his breath as he used every fraction of his experience to fly the Orion through the vortex into calm air. If they escaped the worst of the chaos the rest would take care of itself.

After twenty minutes the wind and rain began to diminish and the clouds lighten. Then, just as he thought they were through the clouds, Lizzie threw one more punch and sent a wind blast that struck the Orion's rudder a punishing blow and crippled what little control Barrett and Boozer had.

All bets on a successful attempt to reach home were now off.

Most of the time, the oceans appear to be at rest. Unending waves no higher than the head of a German shepherd give the image of a sleeping giant, the surface of his chest slowly rising and falling with each breath. It is an illusion that beguiles the unwary. Sailors could fall asleep in their berths with clear skies and calm seas and wake up to a frenzied sea that quickly swept over thousands of square miles, engulfing every vessel in its path.

Hurricane Lizzie had all the ingredients for unmitigated disaster. If she looked nasty by morning, she was downright rotten by noon, and a shrieking hellion by evening. Two-hundred-and-twenty-mile-an-hour winds soon passed two hundred and fifty. They hurled and whipped the once-flat water into a giant turmoil that rose and fell a hundred feet between crest and trough as it advanced relentlessly toward Navidad Bank and the Dominican Republic, its first landfall.

The anchor was barely up and the Sea Sprite under way when Paul Barnum turned for perhaps the twentieth time and stared over the sea to the east. Earlier he noted no change. But this time the horizon where the tanzanite blue water met a sapphire blue sky was smudged by a dark gray streak like a distant chinook dust storm rolling over the prairie.

Barnum gazed at the advancing nightmare, stunned by how rapidly it grew and began filling the sky. He had never experienced nor had he conceived that a storm could move with what seemed the speed of an express train. Even before he could program the computerized automated controls for course and speed, the storm was covering the sun in a death shroud while painting the sky the lead gray on the bottom of a well-used skillet.

For the next eight hours Sea Sprite ran hard, as Barnum drove her in what seemed a futile attempt to put as much distance as possible between her hull and the sharp coral of Navidad Reef. But when he realized the worst of the storm was about to overtake him, he knew the most efficient way to survive was to head right into it, relying on Sea Sprite to fight her way through. He patted her helm affectionately, as if she was flesh and blood instead of cold steel. She was a staunch ship that had taken everything the sea could throw at her in her years of rigorous sailing in the polar regions. She might be mauled and hammered but Barnum didn't doubt she would survive.

He turned to his first officer, Sam Maverick, who looked like a high school dropout with his long red hair, shaggy beard and gold pendant dangling from his left ear. "Program a new course, Mr. Maverick. Bring her around on a heading of eighty-five degrees east. We can't outrun the storm so we'll ride into her bow-on."

Maverick looked at the seas that were cresting a good fifty feet over the stern and shook his head. He stared balefully at Barnum as if his captain had lost half his gray matter. "You want to bring her around in this sea?" he asked slowly.

"No time like the present," replied Barnum. "Better now than when the rogue waves hit."

It was ship handling at its most frightening. For an agonizing length of time, the ship's hull would swing and face the waves along her entire beam, leaving her vulnerable to a massive wave that would roll her over. Many a ship through the centuries was capsized by attempting the maneuver, going to the bottom without leaving a trace.

"When I see an interval between the swells, at my command, give her full speed." Then he spoke into the ship's radio. "We're coming around in a heavy sea. Everyone brace yourselves and hold on for dear life."

Hunched over the console in front of the bridge window, Barnum gazed unblinkingly through the windshield and waited with the patience of a rock until he saw a wave coming that was higher than any that had passed.

"Full speed, if you please, Mr. Maverick."

Maverick instantly obeyed Barnum's order, but was horrified, certain of disaster, as an enormous wave bore down on the research ship. He was about to curse Barnum for turning too soon, but realized what the captain had in mind. There were no timely intervals. The monstrous waves almost seemed to mesh on one another, like soldiers marching in close formation. Barnum had jumped the gun and begun the turn early, gaining a precious minute while the ship took the blunt of the wave on an angle.

The implacable wave tossed the bow up and shoved Sea Sprite almost over to her port side before sweeping her over and around. For fifteen seconds the ship was overwhelmed by a seething white mass of water as she struggled partially through the crest that towered above the bridge. Then she was fishtailing viciously down the other side, rolling heavily to port, the sea inundating her deck railings. Almost miraculously, with agonizing slowness, she righted in the trough and took the next sea bow-on, plunging through on an even keel.

Maverick had walked ships' decks for eighteen years, but he had never seen a more professional, more intuitive, display of seamanship. He stared at Barnum and was amazed to see a smile, perhaps a grim smile, but a smile nonetheless, on the captain's face. My God, Maverick thought, the man is actually enjoying himself.