CV

49

After a delay of twenty-four hours, the Sea Venture plans began scrolling out of the fax machine. They made a stack more than a foot high. Markey turned them over to his engineering officer, Ed Jensen, and said, “Find something.”

After dinner Jensen came to him with a printout in his hand.

“Here’s what we want. We know one of their lifeboats is gone—that means there’s an empty launching tube.” He pointed to the diagram. “This passage is closed by the door of the lifeboat itself when it’s in the tube. Back here is a watertight door. Get in there, wedge that door open, and then they can’t submerge. If we take them by surprise, we walk into the bridge, what they call the Control Center, and that’s all she wrote.”

“Pretty slick,” said Markey. “Yes, that might just work.”

Lieutenant Avery N. Hamling, Jr., was forty-seven years old. and still the strongest diver in his group. His father, a Navy Commander and a fine swimmer, had taught him from the age of four how to push himself to his limits, and the Special Underwater Section had given him the opportunity to do so. Hamling kept himself fit, and kept his men fit, ready at any time for the most hazardous and demanding duty in the Navy.

He found Markey, Pugliese, and Jensen in the conference room. “You sent for me. Captain?"

“That’s right. Sit down, Hamling, and I’ll fill you in. Show him those printouts, Ed.”

Jensen passed a sheaf of papers across the table. “Here’s a plan and elevation of one of Sea Venture’s lifeboat tubes. As you can see, it’s a cylinder fourteen and a half feet across by thirty-one and a half deep. Here’s the passenger entrance, twenty feet back from the mouth of the tube. It leads to a passage eight feet long with a watertight door at the end. That’s where we want you to go in.”

Hamling studied the diagram. “The door can be opened manually from the tube side?”

“Yes.” Jensen passed him another diagram. Hamling glanced at it, then returned his attention to the tube plan. “Where’s the waterline?” he asked.

"Here, right at the bottom of the tube.”

“And there are no handholds—nothing to grip?”

“Not in the tube. We think there are handrails in the passage. Unfortunately they don’t show on these plans. They’ve got to be there, but we can’t tell you how close they run to the doorway.”

Hamling stared at the diagrams, trying to translate them into an image. “Which way does the lifeboat door open?” he asked.

"Good question,” said Markey, lifting an eyebrow. “Where are those plans, Ed?”

“Wait a minute.” Jensen got the stack of printouts, shuffled through them. “Here we are.” He pushed across a plan and elevation of the lifeboat. "The door opens inboard into the passage, and the hinge is on the left as you face the tube.”

Hamling nodded. “All right, so if there is a handrail, it'll be on the right side. Next question: Is this tube port or starboard?”

“Starboard,” said Markey. He picked a photograph out of the pile of papers and showed it to Hamling. “Copter got this with a telephoto lens—you can see the empty tube right here.”

Hamling examined the photograph. “When was this taken?”

“This morning.”

“Looks like the swells are coming in from her starboard quarter. Every time one of those swells hits the tube, there’s going to be a hell of a surge. What are the chances the weather will be calmer in a day or two?”

“Zero,” said Markey. “Typhoon Tony is due to pass over us two days from now.”

They were silent a moment. “If it was up to me,” Markey went on, “I’d wait for decent weather. But there are civilians on board with urgent appointments. CINCAF wants us to get them off right now, if not sooner.”

“When do you want us to go?”

“Oh-four-hundred tomorrow.”

Hamling was silent for a minute. “We can do it.”

“Sure?” asked Markey.

“Yes.”

“All right, now here’s the other part of the problem. We can't get near Sea Venture in daylight, and we don’t dare use a minisub—they might be listening for the motors. The best we can do is drop you before dawn, as near as we can get to the position where Sea Venture ought to be when she surfaces. That’s going to be partly guesswork. How close do you want to be to make that swim underwater?”

“Anything up to five miles would be good.”

“All right, that we can do. If we don’t, though, your men are going to have to stay in the water, holding onto the raft, until we can pick you up after nightfall. It’ll be a long day.”

“I understand.”