Clive Cussler - Raise the Titanic

It was Seagram who finally broke the silence. In the final ignition of madness he grinned to himself in the gray light, the grin mushrooming into' a bansheelike laughter that echoed in the steel hold. He thrust himself through the door of the vault, snatched up a rock, and struck Lusky on the side of the head sending a spray of red over the yellow wood ore boxes.

He was still laughing, locked in the throes of black hysteria, when he fell upon the putrescent remains of Joshua Hays Brewster and began bashing the mummified head against the vault wall until it loosened from the neck and came off in his hands.

As he held the ugly, abhorrent thing before him, Seagram's conflicted mind suddenly saw the blackened, parchmentlike lips spread into a hideous grin. His breakdown was complete. The parallel depression of Joshua Hays Brewster had reached out through the mists of time and bequeathed Seagram a ghostly inheritance that hurled the physicist into the yawning jaws of a madness from which he was never to escape.

79

Six days later, Donner entered the hotel dining room where Admiral Sandecker was eating breakfast and eased into a vacant chair across the table. "Have you heard the latest?"

Sandecker paused between bites of his omelet. "If it's more bad news, I'd just as soon you keep it to yourself."

"They nailed me coming out of my apartment this morning." He threw a folded paper on the table in front of him. "A subpoena to appear in front of a congressional investigating committee."

Sandecker forked another slice of the omelet without looking at the paper. "Congratulations."

"Same goes for you, Admiral. Dollars-to doughnuts a federal marshal is lurking in your office anteroom this very minute, waiting to slap one on you."

"Who's behind it?"

"Some punk-eased freshman senator from Wyoming who's trying to make a name for himself before he's forty." Donner dabbed a crumpled handkerchief on his damp forehead. "The stupid ass even insists on having Gene testify."

"That I'd have to see." Sandecker pushed the plate away and leaned back in his chair. "How is Seagram getting along?"

"Manic depressive psychosis is the fancy term for it."

"How about Lusky?"

"Twenty stitches and a nasty concussion. He should be out of the hospital in another week."

Sandecker shook his head. "I hope I never have to live through anything like that ever again." He took a swallow of coffee. "How do we play it?"

"The President called me personally from the White House last night. He said to play it straight. The last thing he wants is to become entangled in a snarl of conflicting lies."

"What about the Sicilian Project?"

"It died a quick death when we opened the Titanic's vault," Donner said. "We have no alternative but to spill the entire can of worms from the beginning to the sorry end."

"Why does the dirty laundry have to be washed in the open? What good will it do?"

"The woes of a democracy," Donner said resignedly. "Everything has to be open and above board, even if it means giving away secrets to an unfriendly foreign government."

Sandecker placed his hands on his face and sighed. "Well, I guess I'll be looking for a new job."

"Not necessarily. The President has promised to issue a statement to the effect that the whole failure of the project was his responsibility and his alone."

Sandecker shook his head. "No good. I have several enemies in Congress. They're just drooling in anticipation of turning the screws on my resignation from NUMA."

"It may not come to that."

"For the past fifteen years, ever since I attained the rank of admiral, I've had to double-deal with politicians. Take my word for it, it's a dirty business. Before this thing is over with, everyone remotely connected with the Sicilian Project and the raising of the Titanic will be lucky if they can find a job cleaning stables."

"I'm truly sorry it had to end like this, Admiral."

"Believe me, so am I" Sandecker finished off his coffee and patted a napkin against his mouth. "Tell me, Donner, what's the batting order? Who has the illustrious senator from Wyoming named as the lead-off witness?"

"My understanding is that he intends taking the Titanic's salvage operation first, and then working backward to involve Meta Section and finally the President." Donner picked up the subpoena and shoved it back in his coat pocket. "The first witness they're most likely to call is Dirk Pitt."

Sandecker looked at him. "Pitt, did you say?"

"That's right."

"Interesting," Sandecker said softly. "Most interesting."

"You've lost me somewhere."

Sandecker neatly folded the napkin and laid it on the table. "What you don't know, Donner, what you couldn't know, is that immediately after the men in the little white coats carried Seagram off the Titanic, Pitt vanished into thin air."

Donner's eyes narrowed. "Surely you know where he is. His friends? Giordino?"

"Don't you think we all tried to find him?" Sandecker snarled. "He's gone. Disappeared. It's as though the earth swallowed him up."

"But he must have left some clue."

"He did say something, but it didn't make any sense."

"What was that?"

"He said he was going to look for Southby."

"Who in hell is Southby?"

"Damned if I know," Sandecker said. "Damned if I know."

80

Pitt steered the rented Rover sedan cautiously down the narrow, rain-slickened country road. The tall beech trees lining the shoulders seemed to close in and attack the moving car as they pelted its steel roof with the heavy runoff from their leaves.

Pitt was tired, dead tired. He had set out on his odyssey not sure of what it was he might find, if anything. He'd begun as Joshua Hays Brewster and his crew of miners had begun, on the docks of Aberdeen, Scotland, and then he'd followed their death-strewn path across Britain almost to the old Ocean Duck at Southampton from which the Titanic had set out on her maiden voyage.

He turned his gaze from the pounding wipers on the windshield and glanced down at the blue notebook lying on the passenger seat. It was filled with dates, places, miscellaneous jottings, and torn newspaper articles he had accumulated along the way. The musty files of the past had told him little.

"TWO AMERICANS FOUND DEAD"

The April 7, 1912, editions of the Glasgow papers noted fifteen pages back from the headline. The detail-barren stories were as deeply buried as the bodies of Coloradans John Caldwell and Thomas Price were in a local cemetery.

Their tombstones, discovered by Pitt in a small churchyard, offered virtually nothing other than their names and dates of death. It was the same story with Charles Widney, Walter Schmidt, and Warner O'Deming. Of Alvin Coulter he could find no trace.

And finally there was Vernon Hall. Pitt hadn't found his resting place either. Where had he fallen? Had his blood been spilled amid the neat and orderly landscape of the Hampshire Downs or perhaps somewhere on the back streets of Southampton itself?

Out of the corner of one eye he caught a marker that gave the distance to the great harbor port as twenty kilometers.

Pitt drove on mechanically. The road curved and then paralleled the lovely, rippling Itchen stream, famous throughout southern England for its fighting trout, but he didn't notice it. Up ahead, across the emerald-green farmlands of the coastal plain, a small town came into view, and he decided he would stop there for breakfast.

An alarm went off in the back of Pitt's mind. He jammed on the brakes, but much too hard-the rear wheels broke loose and the Rover skidded around in a perfect three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle, coming to rest still aimed southward but sunk to the hubcaps in the yielding muck of a roadside ditch.

Almost before the car had fully stopped, Pitt threw open the door and leaped out. His shoes sank out of sight and became stuck, but he pulled free of them and ran back down the road in his stocking feet.