Next he sat down as one of the hotel maintenance men helped mount a closed-circuit rebreather on his back. He and Giordino agreed that a compact rebreathing unit offered greater freedom of movement than two bulky steel air tanks. As with regular scuba gear, the diver inhales through a regulator, breathing compressed gas from a tank. But then the expired air is saved and recycled back through canisters that remove the carbon dioxide while replenishing the oxygen in the tank. The SIVA-55 unit they were using was developed for military underwater covert operations.

His final check was the underwater communications system from Ocean Technology Systems. A receiver was attached to the strap of his mask. "Al, do you hear me?"

Giordino, who was going through the same procedure on the opposite corner of the hotel, answered in a voice that seemed wrapped in cotton. "Every word."

"You sound unusually coherent."

"Give me a hard time and I'll resign and head up to the cocktail lounge."

Pitt smiled at his friend's ever-constant sense of humor. If he could rely on anyone in the world, it was Giordino. "Ready when you are."

"Say when."

"Mr. Brown."

"Emlyn."

"Okay, Emlyn, have your people stand by the winches until we give the signal to pay out the cables and drums."

Answering from the rooms where the great mooring cable winches were mounted, Brown acknowledged, "Just say the word."

"Keep your fingers crossed," said Pitt, as he pulled on his dive fins.

"Bless you, boys, and good luck," replied Brown.

Pitt nodded at one of Brown's maintenance men, who was standing beside a reel containing the Falcron line. He was short and husky and insisted on being called "Critter."

"Pay out a little at a time. If you feel any tension, release it quickly or you'll halt my progress."

"I'll send it along nice and easy," Critter assured him.

Then Pitt hailed Sea Sprite. "Paul, are you ready to take the lines?"

"Soon as you hand them to me," came Barnum's firm voice over Pitt's receiver. His words were transmitted from a transducer he had lowered in the water off the stern of Sea Sprite.

"Al and I can only drag two hundred feet of line underwater. You'll have to move in closer to reach us."

In these seas both Pitt and Barnum knew that one monstrous wave could sweep Sea Sprite into the hotel, taking them both to the bottom. Yet Barnum didn't hesitate to risk the dice on one throw. "All right, let's do it."

Pitt slung a loop of the Falcron line over one shoulder line as a harness. He stood and tried to push open the door leading to a small balcony that hung twenty feet above the water, but the force of the wind beat against it from the other side. Before he could ask for help, the hotel maintenance man was beside him.

Together they rammed their weight and shoulders against the door. The second it was cracked, the wind cut through the opening and hurled the door back against its stops as though it was kicked by a mule. Now exposed in the open doorway, the maintenance man was blown back into the equipment room as if he was flung there by a catapult.

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.