Serpent nf-1

by Clive Cussler

  The ship's position was puzzling. Eastbound ships were supposed to follow a route twenty miles to the south. Fishing boat, maybe.

  Under the rules of the road, ships coming directly at each other on the open sea are supposed to pass porttoport, left side to left side, like cars approaching from opposite directions: If ships maneuvering to comply with this rule are forced into a dangerous crossover, they may instead pass starboardtostarboard.

  From the look of the radar, the other vessel would pass safely to the right of the Doria if the two vessels held their same course. Like autos on an English highway, where drivers stay to the left.

  Calamai ordered his crew to keep, a close eye on the other ship. It never hurt to be cautious.

  The ships were about ten miles apart when Nillson switched on the light underneath the Bial maneuvering board next to the radar set and prepared to transfer the blip's changing position to paper.

  He called out, "What's our heading, Hansen?"

  "Ninety degrees," the helmsman replied evenly.

  Nillson marked X's on the plotting board and drew lines between them, checked the blip again, then ordered the standby lookout to keep watch from the port bridge wing. His plot line had shown the other ship speeding in their direction on a parallel course, slightly to the left. He went out onto the wing and probed the night with binoculars. No sign of another vessel. He paced back and forth from wing to wing, stopping at the radar with each pass. He called for another heading report.

  "Still ninety degrees, sir," Hansen said.

  Nillson started over to check the gyrocompass. Even the slightest deviation could be critical, and he wanted to make certain the course was true. Hansen reached up and pulled the lanyard over his head. The ship's belt rang out six times. Eleven o'clock. Nillson loved hearing ship's time. On a late shift, when loneliness and boredom combined, the pealing of the ship's bell embodied the romantic attachment he had felt for the sea as a youngster. Later' he would remember that clanging as the sound of doom.

  Distracted from his intended chore, Nillson peered into the radar scope and made another mark on the plotting board.

  Eleven o'clock. Seven miles separated the two ships.

  Nillson calculated that the ships would pass each other port-toport with more than enough distance in between. He went out on the wing again and peered through binoculars off to the left. Maddening. There was only darkness where radar showed a ship to be. Maybe the running lights were broken. Or it was a navy ship on maneuvers.

  He looked off to the right. The moon was shining brightly on the water. Back to the left. Still nothing. Could the ship be in a fog bank? Unlikely. No ship would move that fast in dense fog. He considered decreasing the Stockholm's speed. No. The captain would hear the jangle of the ship's telegraph and come running. He'd call that frostyassed bastard after the ships had safely passed.

  At 11:03 radar on both vessels showed them four miles apart.

  Still no lights.

  Nillson again considered calling the captain, and again dismissed the idea. Nor did he give the order to sound warning signals as required by international law. A waste of time. They were on open ocean, the moon was out, and visibility must be five miles.

  The Stockholm continued to cut through the night at eighteen knots.

  The man in the crow's nest called out, "Lights to port!"

  Finally.

  Later, analysts would shake their heads in puzzlement, wondering how two radarequipped ships could be drawn together like magnets on the open ocean.

  Nillson strode onto the left bridge wing and read the other ship's lights. Two white pinpoints, one high, one low, glowed in darkness. Good. The position of the lights indicated that the ship would pass off to the left: The red portside light came into view, confirming that the ship was heading away from the Stockholm. The ships would pass porttoport. Radar put the distance at more than two miles. He glanced at,, the clock. It was 11:06 p.m.

  From what the Andrea Doria's captain could see on the radar screen, the ships should pass each other safely on the right. When the ships were less than three and a half miles apart, Calamai ordered a fourdegree turn to the left to open up the gap been them. Soon a spectral glow appeared in the fog, and gradually white running lights became visible. Captain Calamai expected to see the green light on the other ship's starboard side. Any time now

  One mile apart.

  Nillson remembered how an observer said the Stockholm cold turn on a dime and give you eight cents change It was time to put that nimbleness to use.

  "Starboard two points," he ordered the helm. Like Calamai, h wanted more breathing room. `

  Hansen brought the wheel two complete turns to the right.. The ship's bow went twenty degrees to starboard: .

  "Straighten out to midships and keep her steady"

  The telephone rang on the wall. Nillson went over to answer it.

  "Bridge," Nillson said. Confident of a safe passing, he faced the wall, his back to the windows.

  The crow's nest lookout was calling. "Lights twenty degrees to port.

  "Thank you," Nillson replied, and hung up. He went over and checked the radar, unaware of the Doria's new trajectory. The blips were now so dose to each other the reading didn't make any sense to him. He went to the port wing and, without arty urgency, .raised his binoculars to his eyes and focused on the fights.

  Calmness deserted him.

  "My God." He gasped, seeing the change in the masthead lights for the first time.

  The high and low lights had reversed themselves: The ship no longer had its red portside light to him. The light was green. Starboard side. Since he'd last looked, the other ship seemed to have made a sharp turn to its left.

  Now the blazing deck lights of a huge black ship loomed from the thick fog balk .that had kept it hidden and presented its right side directly in the path of the speeding Stockholm.

  He shouted a course change. "Hard astarboard!"

  Spinning around, he gripped the levers of the ship's telegraph with both hands, yanked them to Stop, then all the way down as if he could bring the ship to a halt by sheer determination. An insane jangle filled the air.

  Full Speed Astern.

  Nillson turned back to the helm. Hansen stood there like a stone guardian outside a pagan temple.

  "Damn it, I said hard astarboard!" Nillson shouted, his voice hoarse.

  Hansen began to turn the wheel. Nillson couldn't believe his eyes. Hansen wasn't rotating the wheel to starboard, which would have given them a chance, even a slight one, to avoid a collision. He spun it slowly and deliberately to the left.

  The Stockholm's bow swung into a deadly turn.

  Nillson heard a foghorn, knew it must belong to the other ship.

  The engine room was in chaos: The crew was frantically turning the wheel that would stop the starboard engine. They scrambled to open the valves that would reverse power and stop the port engine. The ship shuddered as braking took hold Too late. The Stockholm flew like an arrow at the unprotected ship.

  In the port wing Nillson hung on grimly to the ship's telegraph.

  Like Nillson, Captain Calamai had watched the masthead, lights materialize, reverse themselves, saw the red portside light glowing like a ruby on back velvet. Realized the other ship had made a sharp right turn directly into the Doria's path.

  No warning. No foghorn or whistle.

  Stopping was out of the question at this speed. The ship would need miles of room to skid to a halt.

  Calamai had seconds to act. He could order a right turn,

  directly toward the danger, hoping that the ships would brush each other. Maybe the speeding Maria could outrun the attacking ship..

  Calamai made a desperate decision.

  All left," he barked.

  A bridge officer called out. Did the captain want the engines shut down? Calamai shook his head. "Maintain full speed." He knew the Doria turned better at higher velocity. .

  In a blur of spokes the helmsman whipped t
he wheel around to port using both hands. The whistle shrieked twice to signal the left. turn. The big ship struggled against its forward momentum for a half mile before it heeled into the start of the turn.

  The captain knew he was taking a big risk in exposing the Doria's broad side. He prayed that the other vessel would bear off while there was still time. He still couldn't believe the ships were on a collision course. The whole thing seemed like a dream.

  A shout from one of his officers snapped him back to reality. "She's coming right at us]"

  The oncoming ship was pointed at the starboard wing where Calamai watched in horror. The sharp upturned bow seemed to be aimed directly at him..

  The Doria's skipper had a reputation for being tough and in control. But at that moment he did what any sane man would have done in his position. He ran for his life.

  The Swedish ship's reinforced bow pierced the metal skin of the speeding Andrea Doria as easily as a bayonet, penetrating almost a third of the liner's ninetyfoot width before it came to rest.

  With a weight of 29,100 tons, more than twice that of the Stockholm, the Italian liner dragged the vessel with it, pivoting around the point of impact below and aft of the starboard bridge wing. As the stricken Doria plunged ahead, the Stockholm's crumpled prow pulled free, ripping open seven of the liner's ten passenger decks like a raptor's beak tearing into the flesh of its victim. It scraped along the long black hull in a bright shower of sparks.

  The gaping wedgeshaped hole that yawned in the Doria's side was forty feet at the top and narrowed to seven feet below sea level at the bottom.

  Thousands of gallons of seawater rushed into the massive wound and filled empty outboard fuel tanks tom open in the collision. The ship tilted to the right under the weight of five hundred tons of seawater that flooded into the generator room. An oily river poured through an access tunnel and manholes and began to rise through the floor gratings of the engine room. The struggling engine crew slid on the oilslicked decks like circus clowns taking pratfalls.

  More water gushed in, surged around the undamaged empty fuel tanks on the port side, and buoyed them up like soap bubbles.

  Within minutes of being hit, the Doria had heeled over into a severe list.

  Nillson expected to be flung to the floor by the impact. The jolt was surprisingly soft yet strong enough to jar him from his paralysis. He dashed from the wheelhouse into the chartroom and lunged for the alarm button that would close the Stockholm's watertight doors.

  The captain roared onto the bridge. "What in God's name happened?° .

  Nillson tried to mouth an answer. The words stuck in his throat. He was at a loss to describe the scene. Hansen ignoring his order to go to starboard. The blurred spin of the wheel to port. Hansen leaning forward into the wheel, hands tightly clutching the spokes as if frozen in time. No fear, no horror in his eyes. Only a glacial blue coldness. Nillson thought it was a trick of the light at first, the illumination from the gyrocompass housing catching the ugly scar. There was no mistake. As the ships hurtled toward certain disaster, the man was smiling.

  There was no doubt in his mind. Hansen had deliberately rammed the other ship, aiming the Stockholm as if he were riding a torpedo. No doubt, too, that nobody, not the captain or anyone else on the ship, would ever believe such a thing could happened

  Nillson's anguished eyes shifted from the captain's angry ` face to the helm. as if the answer lay there. The deserted wheel spun madly out of control.

  In all the confusion Hansen had vanished.

  Jake Corey was shocked from his slumber by a doomful metallic thunderclap. The hollow boom lasted only an instant before it was followed by the tortured shriek of steel against steel and a terrifying crumple and crunch as if the upper deck cabin were imploding. Corey's eyes blinked open, and he stared fearfully at what looked to be a moving grayishwhite wall, only a few feet away

  Carey had drifted off to sleep minutes before. He had kissed his wife, Myra, good night and slipped beneath the cool sheets of a twin bed in their firstclass cabin. Myra read a few pages of her novel until her eyelids drooped. She switched off the light, pulled the blanket dose around her neck, and sighed, with pleas. ant memories of the sunbaked Tuscan vineyards still in her head.

  Earlier, she and Jake had toasted the success of their Italian sojourn with champagne in the firstclass dining room. Carey had suggested a nightcap in the Belvedere Lounge, but Myra replied that if she heard the band play "Arrivederci Roma" one more time, she'd swear off spaghetti forever. They retired shortly before tenthirty P.m.

  After strolling handinhand past the shops .in the foyer deck, they took the elevator one level up and walked forward to their large upperdeck cabin on the starboard side. They put their luggage out in the corridor, where the stewards would collect it in anticipation of the ship's arrival in New York the next day There was a slight roll to the ship because the vessel had become more topheavy as fuel in the big hull tanks was used up. The motion was like being naked in a giant cradle, and before long Myra Carey, too, fell asleep.

  Now her husband's bed lurched violently. He was catapulted into the air as if he'd been launched from a siege machine. He floated in free fall for several lifetimes before splashing into a deep pool of darkness.

  Death stalked the decks of the Andrea Doria.

  It roamed from the posh cabins on the higher levels to the touristclass accommodations below the waterline. Fiftytwo people lay dead or dying in the wake of the crash. Ten cabins were demolished in the firstclass deck where the hole was at its widest. The hole was at its narrowest at the bottom, but the cabins below the waterline were smaller and more crowded, so the effect was even more devastating.

  Passengers died or lived according to the whims of fate. A firstclass passenger who'd been brushing his teeth ran back to the bedroom to find the wall gone, his wife vanished. On the deluxe foyer deck two people were killed instantly. Twentysix Italian immigrants in the smaller, cheaper cabins of the lowermost deck were right in line with the collision and died in a mass of crushed steel. Among them were a woman and her four young children. There were miracles as well. A young girl scooped out of a firstclass cabin woke up in the Stockholm's crumpled bow. In another cabin the ceiling crashed down on a couple, but they managed to crawl out into the corridor. '

  Those from the two lowest decks had the toughest struggle, fighting their way up the slanting smokefilled passageways against a stream of oilslicked black water. Gradually people began to work their way to the muster stations and waited for instructions. .

  Captain Calamai was at the far side of the undamaged bridge when the ships hit. Recovering from his initial shock, he pulled the ship's telegraph lever to Stop. The ship eventually came to a halt in the deep fog.

  The second officer strode to the inclinometer; the instrument that measured the ship's angle.

  "Eighteen degrees," he said. A few minutes later he said, 'Nineteen degrees.'

  Cold fingers brushed the captain's heart. The list should be no more than fifteen degrees, even with two compartments flooded. A tilt of more than twenty degrees would overwhelm the watertight compartments.

  Logic was telling him the situation was impossible. The designers guaranteed that the ship would remain on an even keel with any group of two compartments flooded. He called for damage reports from each deck; especially on the status of the watertight doors, and ordered an SOS sent out with the ship's position.

  Officers rushed back to the bridge with damage reports. The engineroom crew was pumping the starboard compartments, but water was coming in faster than they could get it out. The boiler room was flooded, and water was flowing into two more compartments.

  The problem was at A Deck, supposed to serve as a steel lid over the transverse bulkheads that divided the ship into compartments. Water was flowing down those passenger stairways into the other compartments.

  The officer called out the new reading. "Twentytwo degrees."

  Captain Calamai didn't have to look at the
inclinometer to know the list had, passed the point where it could be corrected. The evidence was in the slant of the chartlittered floor right at his feet.

  The ship was dying.

  He was numb with grief. The Andrea Doria was not just any ship. The twentyninemilliondollar Queen of the Italian Line was the most magnificent and luxurious passenger vessel afloat. Barely four years old, it was launched to show the world that the Italian merchant marine was back in business after the war. With its graceful black hull and white superstructure, the rakish red, white, and green funnel, the liner looked more like the work of a sculptor than a marine architect.

  Moreover, this was his ship. He had commanded the Doria on her trial runs and in a hundred Atlantic crossings. He knew her decks better than the rooms of his own home. He never tired of strolling from one end to the other, like a spectator in a museum, breathing in the work of thirtyone of Italy's finest artists and artisans, glorying in the Renaissance beauty of the mirrors, gilt, crystal, rare woods, fine tapestries, and mosaics. Surrounded by the massive mural that lionized Michelangelo and other Italian masters, he would pause in the firstclass lounge before the massive bronze statue of Andrea Doria, second only to Columbus in greatness. The old Genoese admiral stood ready as always to draw his sword at. the first sign of a Barbary pirate.

  All this was about to be lost.

  The passengers were the captain's first responsibility. He was about to give the order to abandon ship when an officer reported on the lifeboat situation. The lifeboats on the port side were unlaunchable. That left eight boats on the starboard side. They were hanging far out over the water. Even if they could be lunched, there was room enough for only half the passengers. He didn't dare give the. order to abandon ship. Panicstricken passengers would rush to the port side, and there'd be chaos.

  He prayed that passing ships had heard their SOS and could find them in the fog.

  There was nothing he could do but wait.

  Angelo Donatelli had just delivered a trayful of martinis to a raucous table of New Yorkers celebrating their last night aboard the Doria when he glanced toward one of the draped windows that tookup three walls of the elegant Belvedere Lounge. Something, a flicker of movement, had caught his eye.