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Barnum stepped into the communications compartment and spoke to Mason Jar. "Have you heard anything from the hotel?"
"Nothing, sir. She's silent as a tomb."
"God, I hope we're not too late."
"I don't want to believe that."
"See if you can raise them again. The satellite communications. The guests and management are most likely to communicate with shore stations via phone than ship-to-shore radio."
"Let me try maritime radio first, Captain. At this distance there should be less interference. The hotel must have top-of-the-line equipment for communicating with other vessels when she's towed around the seas like a barge."
"Patch onto the bridge speakers so I can speak to them when they respond."
"Yes, sir."
Barnum returned to the pilothouse in time to hear Jar's voice through the speakers.
"This is Sea Sprite to Ocean Wanderer. We are two miles southeast of you and closing. Please respond."
There was half a minute of crackling static. Then a voice boomed through the speakers.
"Paul, are you ready to go to work?"
Because of the interference, Barnum did not recognize the voice at first. He picked up the bridge radio receiver and spoke into it. "Who is speaking?"
"Your old shipmate, Dirk Pitt. I'm in the hotel along with Al Giordino."
Barnum was stunned at putting a face with the voice. "How in God's name did you two come to be on a floating hotel in a hurricane?"
"It sounded like such a swell party, we didn't want to miss it."
"You must know we don't have the equipment to tow the Wanderer."
"All we need are your big engines."
Barnum had come to learn during their years with NUMA that Pitt and Giordino wouldn't be where they were without a plan. "What's on your devious mind?"
"We've already formed work crews to help us use the hotel's mooring cables for tow cables. Once you take them aboard Sea Sprite, you can join them together, then secure them to your stern capstan where they will form a bride for towing."
"Your plan sounds crazy," said Barnum, disbelieving. "How do you expect to send tons of cable that's dragging across the seabed under a hurricane-maddened sea over to my ship?"
There was a pause, and when the reply came Barnum could almost see the devilish grin on Pitt's face.
"We have apple-pie high-in-the-sky hopes."
The rain abated and visibility increased from two hundred yards to nearly a mile. Suddenly the Ocean Wanderer loomed through the storm dead ahead.
"God, just look at her," said Maverick. "She looks like a glass castle in a fairy tale."
The hotel seemed regal and magnificent amid the raging sea surrounding it. The crew and scientists, who were swept up in mounting excitement, had left their cabins and crowded onto the bridge to witness the spectacle of a modern edifice where none should have existed.
"It's so beautiful," murmured a blond, petite woman who was a marine chemist. "I never expected such creative architecture."
"Nor I," agreed a tall ocean chemist. "Coated with so much salt spray, she could pass for an iceberg."
Barnum trained a pair of binoculars on the hotel, whose mass swayed back and forth under the trouncing from the waves. "Her roof deck looks like it was swept clean."
"A miracle she survived," muttered Maverick in wonder. "Certainly beyond all expectations."
