Water sputtered from the tube. Pitt waited a moment to make sure it wasn’t just some residue in the line but rather that the snorkel’s mouth was still submerged. He retightened the plug. He was definitely still underwater. But judging by the light oozing in from above, the surface was tantalizingly close.
He checked the orange-faced Doxa watch that had been strapped to his wrist for decades. Only twenty minutes had elapsed since he’d raced to save the Turtle. Rescue teams would certainly be on the scene by now, though he doubted police divers would have had time to reach the construction site, let alone get into their diving suits and tanks. Pitt figured he still had enough air in the submersible to last long enough for the divers to reach the old sump. His problem came from the fact that he was no longer where they expected to find him, and he doubted anyone saw the underwater craft get swept out of the worksite and into the river. Recalling the speed of the current before the accident, Pitt estimated he was a mile south of where they expected to find him. For all he knew, he could be abreast of Roosevelt Island.
Logic told him he’d gambled and lost and that the right course of action was to let the Turtle refill and escape so that, with luck, the an
tique could be recovered from the river. If he waited too long, it was likely that the little submersible would be borne along until it passed Governors Island and be lost for all time in the lower reaches of the harbor where it widened considerably.
Pitt wasn’t one to give in to logic too quickly. Not when he still had options. The vertical propeller hadn’t spun in two hundred and fifty years and its blades were encrusted with dried tar that warped their shape and severely degraded their hydrodynamics, but Pitt went for it gamely. At first he couldn’t get the prop to crank at all, and it wasn’t until he put both hands on the knurled wooden handle and braced his feet against the hull did he succeed in turning it through one tortured revolution. He kept at it, turning it a second, and slightly easier, rotation, and then a third and fourth time, until he could crank the propeller with one hand only and could feel through the contraption that the spindly blades were actually biting into the frigid river water.
He cast a hopeful eye on the one viewport that let some light filter through but couldn’t tell if his efforts had brought the Turtle closer to the surface. The glass was just too murky. He knew he had succeeded at further depleting his air supply. Now he had to pull air deep into his lungs to feel he was getting enough oxygen. He did a multiplication question in his head to make certain he wasn’t suffering from carbon dioxide intoxication, which manifested itself in loss of cognitive function. A quick check of his watch told him that thirty minutes had passed since he’d sealed himself inside the submersible and he’d just about reached his limit.
One last gamble paid off, however, when he opened the snorkel valve again. Moist, icy air came in through the inch-wide tube, and Pitt drew it deep into his lungs. He’d managed to surface the Turtle. And no sooner had he taken a half dozen deep breaths, water again sluiced from the snorkel’s mouth, forcing Pitt to hastily replace the plug. Negatively buoyant even with her bilge dry, the Turtle needed the added boost of the vertical screw to stay on the surface. Once it cleared the water, the craft immediately started to sink again.
Pitt turned the screw handle furiously and could tell by how it lost resistance that it had broken the surface. He was ready right away to open the snorkel and let fresh air enter the sub for a few precious seconds before the snorkel again dipped beneath the waves and he had to reseal it.
Because the screw and snorkels were taller than the hatch/conning tower, Pitt knew that it was unlikely the top of the submersible breached too. Still, he put his odds slightly above fifty/fifty that a sharp-eyed captain or crew member working one of the dozens of ships, boats, and ferries that ply the waters of New York Harbor would spot the Turtle as it rose and dove repeatedly while it floated ever southward on the tidal current.
Forty minutes later, Pitt adjusted his odds downward to zero. He’d felt vibrations through the water twice that indicated a boat of some kind was near, but neither had spotted him. The physical effort to keep the Turtle close enough to the surface to draw in even a tiny amount of fresh air had run up against the law of diminishing returns. He wasn’t sufficiently replenishing the oxygen he was consuming turning the vertical propeller to raise the submersible. He could keep at it for a while longer, but he also knew that once he escaped the one-man sub, he’d still have to contend with the East River. Always a strong swimmer, Pitt was tiring and had to keep some reserves for a grueling struggle once he hit the water. It didn’t help that his core temperature had dropped considerably since his clothes had been soaked by the leaky hatch.
Defeat was a bitter pill to swallow, especially for Pitt, as he was a man who had suffered its pangs far less than most. But defeat was something he must now accept. His gamble hadn’t paid off at all. It was time to make his escape. He needed the submersible to fill quickly so he could swim clear of it in as shallow a depth as possible. Pitt would use his knife to remove the strips of fabric he’d wedged around the hatch and again the drips would turn into a steady rain.
He’d just started at it when he felt something through the Turtle’s stout wooden hull. It was like the vibrations he’d experienced earlier when a ship had passed close by, but this was somehow deeper, more menacing. He had a quick mental image of a giant vessel, a containership or tanker, bearing down on the submersible on a deadly collision course. He suddenly felt very exposed. The sound and vibration grew until it seemed to fill the submersible, and Pitt finally recognized the noise wasn’t a ship’s screws at all but the rotor downwash from a helicopter.
Ignoring the water dribbling down on his head from the dislodged jury-rigged gasket, Pitt cranked hard on the vertical prop handle with one hand and furiously worked the bilge pump with the other, gritting his teeth against the sharp pain of muscle fiber pushed to its very limit. His lungs were soon sucking desperately at air that contained less and less of the life-giving oxygen and grew more toxic with his exhaled carbon dioxide.
The chopper had to be directly overhead. He could even hear the screams of its turbines over the hurricane-like downdraft. The resistance against the screw blades vanished. Pitt had managed to surface the sub one last time. If no one saw him now there was nothing more that he could do.
He waited, knowing the Turtle was already starting to sink again. He held out hope against hope, but as the seconds ticked by he had to admit defeat yet again.
Then came two quick taps against the metal hatch that rang Pitt’s head like he was in a bell. A second later a gloved hand smeared away some of the grime from a window and a powerful flashlight beam flared in his eyes. The beam came away and the diver’s face mask came into view. Pitt had his cell phone lit and gave the man the index-finger-to-thumb diver’s okay, but then eagerly jerked his thumb upward to indicate he wanted to surface. The diver returned both gestures and threw a cocky salute as well.
Pitt could just make out through the newly cleaned porthole that there were two men in the water with him and they were rigging a sling around the submersible. He recognized it as the gear the archeologists had planned on using to hoist the Turtle from its centuries-old home. He assumed a workboat with a large crane had been near enough to the accident for the netting to be transferred over to her. The chopper had been the boat’s spotter.
It took the divers just a few minutes to sling the sub in the netting. One man tapped the glass again to make sure Pitt was ready and then he vanished into the gloom. Dirk braced his arms and legs just as the crane began lifting the Turtle out from its watery tomb. It came up much faster than he expected. He felt like he was being wrenched from the river. And then in a burst of weak sunlight the Turtle erupted from the water with white sheets of froth cascading from her rounded hull. Pitt immediately reached overhead to undo the hatch. The submersible turned and danced at the end of the line, spinning as the rigging became unkinked. Pitt put his eye close to the cleaner pane of glass. To his astonishment, he realized that he was a hundred feet in the air and still climbing. There was no workboat or crane.
He managed to finally shove open the hatch. Above him was the massive under hull of a Navy CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. Its rear ramp was open, and two men in olive-drab flight suits and helmets were sitting at its edge with their legs dangling into space. When they spotted Pitt poking his head out of the Turtle, they waved jauntily as if this was the most normal thing they’d done all day. Pitt craned his head to look back at the receding river below. The two divers who’d secured the submersible in the netting were being picked up by a small police boat with red and blue strobes flashing on its radar arch.
Before the bitterly cold wind forced him back down into the Turtle, Pitt noted that he’d floated halfway to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Considering his level of exhaustion and near hypothermia, he estimated that had he been forced to swim for it he’d have never made it to either shore.
What had taken Pitt over an hour to cover in the submersible took just a few minutes for the jet-propelled transport chopper. Work crews back on the construction site were ready for the helo’s payload to be lowered onto a pile of soft sand that had been hastily mounded up by earthmovers. Coordination between the pilot and the loadmaster in the cargo section was precise. The Turtle touched down with barely a bump and its weight settled into the sand, so when the netting was hastily unhooked from the winch, the gawky little craft remained upright. The chopper roared off as Pitt emerged from the submersible to the rousing cheers of the construction crew, scientists, and the dozens of firefighters, police, and press that had arrived at the scene.
A ladder was quickly brought, and Pitt’s back was slapped black and blue by the time he’d gotten to the ground. An EMT threw a blanket over his shoulders, and someone pressed a paper cup of hot coffee into his hand. He kept repeating that he was fine when nearly everyone thronging around him asked if he was all right. He allowed himself to be escorted to the back of an ambulance but refused the offer of a ride to the hospital. He knew from experience that all he needed was a long shower, three or so shots of Don Julio Blanco tequila, and a soft bed.
Fortunately, the police kept the press back at a respectful distance. At Pitt’s insistence, Thomas Gwynn and Vin Blankenship were allowed to join him.
“Hell of a stunt, Mr. Pitt,” Blankenship said. “I couldn’t imagine the paperwork I’d be doing had you not made it back.”
Pitt chuckled at the man’s unflappable nature. It reminded him a little of how Al Giordino treated the world. “I am relieved that you’ve been saved that fate, but somehow I don’t think they’d blame you if the guy you’re guarding ran off to save an old submarine. Things might have been a lot grimmer if the Navy hadn’t gotten here so fast. Any ideas how that happened, by the way?”
Gwynn said, “One of the workers out on the seawall actually saw the sub get flushed out into the river, so the police didn’t even bother sending divers down to look for you. They called in the Coast Guard to start scouring the river, and there was a Navy chopper doing search and rescue drills on Long Island Sound.”
“Just before they reached Manhat
tan,” Blankenship added, “the crew were directed here to pick up the sling used to pull the sub from the water. It was a police drone that actually spotted you, and its operator vectored in the Navy bird.”
“All in all, pretty slick,” Thomas Gwynn summed up.
Pitt nodded. “I was just getting ready to pull the plug and swim for it when I heard them. Literally another few seconds later and the Turtle would have been lost.”