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Pitt managed to stay on his feet under the onslaught. But when he looked up and saw an enormous wave heading his way, he leaped over the balcony hand railing and somersaulted into the water.
The worst of the furies had passed. The hurricane's eye was hours gone and the Ocean Wanderer had somehow survived Lizzie's final fury. The winds had decreased to forty knots and the seas had dropped to an average of thirty feet. The water surface was still vicious, but not nearly as angered as earlier. Hurricane Lizzie had moved westward to continue casting her death and destruction on the island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti before spilling over into the Caribbean Sea. In another twenty-four hours the sea would flatten in the trail of history's greatest storm.
The crashing surf looked ominously closer with each passing minute. The hotel had drifted close enough for the hundreds of guests and employees to see the spray hurled into the sky in great clouds as the swells piled up and smashed into the rocky cliffs. They struck with the force of a mountainous avalanche. The foam swirled into the air in sheets as it met the backwash of the previous wave. Death was no more than a mile away and the Ocean Wanderer's rate of drift was close to a mile an hour.
Everyone's eyes swept back and forth from the shore to Sea Sprite, riding in the swells like a fat duck only a few hundred yards away.
Covered head to toe in yellow oilskins, Barnum braved the downpour, still lashed by heavy winds on the stern of his ship, and stood beneath the big crane. He looked down on the deck where the great winch used to sit and imagined the difference it would have made. But the tow bit would have to do. Somehow the cable would have to be shackled manually.
Barnum stood in the shelter of the crane, ignored the soaking breeze and peered through his binoculars at the base of the hotel. He and four of his crew were tied to the railings to keep from being washed overboard. He observed Pitt and Giordino enter the water and disappear beneath the rolling surface. He could just make out men standing in the doorways, battered by the seas, paying out the red Falcron line to the divers struggling below the wild waves.
"Throw out a pair of lines with buoys," he ordered without lowering the glasses, "and prepare the grappling hooks."
Barnum prayed he would not have to use the grappling hooks on the divers' bodies in an extreme crisis should they become unconscious or unable to reach the high stern of the ship. The grappling hooks were connected to eight-foot aluminum shafts that had been inserted into pipes, giving them an extra length of thirty feet.
They watched expectantly but doubtfully, unable to see Pitt or Giordino under the swirling seas nor spot their bubbles floating to the surface, since their rebreathing apparatus did not expel the diver's breath.
"Stop engines," he ordered his chief engineer.
"You did say stop engines, Captain," came back the chief of the engine room.
"Yes, there are divers bringing over the cable lines. We have to let the seas carry us within two hundred yards and narrow the gap so they can reach us with the cable lines."
Then he trained his binoculars on the murderous coastline that seemed to be approaching with unearthly swiftness.
After he swam a hundred feet from the hotel, Pitt briefly surfaced to get his bearings. The Ocean Wanderer, whose mass was implacably coerced by the wind and waves away from him, rose like a skyscraper in Manhattan. Sea Sprite showed herself only when Pitt rose on the crest of a wave. She rolled in the sea what seemed like a mile away but was actually less than a hundred yards. He noted her position on his compass and ducked back under the surface and dove deep below the confusion above.
The line in his wake quickly became awkward to pull as the drag increased with each foot it was paid out. He was thankful the Falcron line was not heavy or bulky, which would have made it too unwieldy. To move with the least hydrodynamic drag as possible, he kept his head down and his hands clasped behind his back under the oxygen rebreathing apparatus.
He tried to stay just deep enough below the wave troughs so his progress wouldn't be hindered by the heavy seas. More than once he became disoriented, but a quick glance at his compass set him on the right course again. He kicked his fins with all the strength in his legs, doggedly dragging the line that was digging into his shoulder, gaining two feet and losing one from the strong current.
Pitt's leg muscles began to ache and his progress became sluggish. His mind was becoming giddy from deeply inhaling too much oxygen. His heart was beginning to pound from the heavy exertion and his lungs began to heave. He dared not pause or rest or the current would have wiped out all his gains. There could be no delay. Every minute counted as the Ocean Wanderer was impelled toward disaster by an uncaring sea.
Another ten minutes of all-out effort, his strength began to ebb. He sensed that his body was about played out. His mind urged him to try even harder, but there was only so much that muscle and flesh could be called on to achieve. Out of desperation he began to stroke with his hands and arms in an attempt to take the strain from his legs, whose numbness was growing by the minute.
He wondered if Giordino was in the same fix, but he knew Al would die before giving up, not with all those women's and children's lives at stake. Besides, his friend was built like a Brahma bull. If anyone could swim across a wild ocean with one hand tied behind him, Al could.
Pitt did not waste a breath to inquire of his friend's condition over the intercom. There were sickening moments when he felt as if he might not make it. The defeatist thought was brushed aside, and he reached deep within himself to tap his inner reserves.
His breath was coming in great heaves now. The escalating drag on the line made it feel as if he was in a tug-of-war against a herd of elephants. He started to recall the old ads of the muscleman Charles Atlas pulling a steam locomotive down the track. Thinking he might have been carried away from his goal, he spared another glance at his compass. Miraculously, he had managed to stay on a straight course toward Sea Sprite.
The dark cloud of total exhaustion was beginning to creep over the edge of his vision, when he heard a voice speak his name.
"Keep coming, Dirk," Barnum shouted through his headphone. "We can see you under the water. Surface now!"
Pitt obediently swam upward and broke the surface.
Then Barnum shouted again, "Look
to your left."
Pitt turned. No more than ten feet away was an orange buoy on the end of a line leading to the Sea Sprite. Pitt didn't bother acknowledging. He had about five good strong kicks of his fins left in him, and he gave them to the cause. With a physical relief he had never known, he grasped the safety line, threw his arm over it so that it was firmly embedded under his armpit with the buoy lodged against his back shoulder.
At last he could relax as Barnum and his crew pulled him up to the stern. Then they cautiously placed the grappling hook under the line three feet behind Pitt and carefully lifted him onto the deck.
Pitt raised his hands and Barnum deftly removed the looped end of the Falcron line from his shoulder and connected it to the winch on the crane along with the line already brought aboard by Giordino. Two of the crew removed Pitt's mouthpiece and full head mask. Taking a deep breath of pure ocean salt air, he found himself looking up into the grinning face of Giordino.
"Slowpoke," muttered Giordino, still in the throes of exhaustion. "I beat you on board by a good two minutes."
