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."

"I'm lucky to be here," Pitt muttered back between gasps.

Now merely bystanders, they sagged to the deck under the gunwales and out of the water that blew over the deck, waiting for their heartbeats to slow and their breathing to come back to normal. They watched as Barnum gave the signal to Brown and the fifty-gallon drums that supported the mooring cables unseen below the surface began to spit out from beneath the hotel. The crane's winch turned, the thin Falcron line took up the slack and the drums began moving. The cable hanging under its steel floats was whipped by the current like a withering snake. Ten minutes later, the leading drums were bumping against the hull. The crane lifted them onto the stern deck along with the ends of both cables. The crew quickly moved in and shackled the ends together through the eyes spliced by Brown. Then, with the added muscle from Pitt and Giordino, who had recovered from their ordeal, they wrapped them around the big tow bit mounted in front of the crane.

"Ready for tow, Ocean Wanderer?" announced Barnum between heavy breaths.

"Ready as we'll ever be on this end," came back Brown.

Barnum hailed his chief engineer. "Ready in the engine room?"

"Aye, Captain," came back a heavily Scots-accented brogue.

Then to his first officer in the pilothouse, "Mr. Maverick, I will control from here."

"Acknowledged, Captain. She's all yours."

Barnum stood at a control console mounted forward of the big crane, legs spread apart, a set look on his face. He gripped the two chrome throttle levers and gently eased them ahead while he half turned and stared at the hotel that loomed over the seemingly midget research ship.

Pitt and Giordino stood on opposite sides of Barnum. Every member of the crew and scientific team was standing in the rain on the bridge wing above the waves now, staring at the Ocean Wanderer in hushed suspense laced with expectation. The two huge magnetohydrodynamic engines were not connected to shafts leading to propellers. They produced an energy force that pumped water through thrusters for propulsion. Instead of a churning mass of green water thrashing from under the stern, the surface was only stirred by twin rivers of water that roiled the water like horizontal tornadoes.

Sea Sprite's stern dug in and she shuddered under the strain from the tow, the blasting wind and the still-agonized sea. She began to fishtail, but Barnum quickly adjusted the angle of the thrusters and she straightened. For tortured minutes that seemed to last forever, nothing seemed to happen. The hotel appeared as if she was stubbornly continuing her journey toward a tumultuous death.

Below their feet on the stern deck, the engines did not throb and pound like diesels. The pumps that provided power for the thrusters whined like banshees. Barnum scanned the gauges and dials that registered the stress on the engines, not happy at what he saw.

Pitt came over and stood next to Barnum, whose hands bled white as he gripped the throttles and shoved them to their stops and beyond if it had been possible.

"I don't know how much more the engines can take," shouted Barnum above the noise from the wind and shriek from below in the engine room.

"Run the guts out of them," said Pitt, his tone cold and hard as glacial ice. "If they blow, I'll take responsibility."

There was no question of Barnum being the captain of his ship, but Pitt far outranked him in the NUMA hierarchy.

"That's easy for you to say," warned Barnum. "But if they blow, we end up on the rocks, too."

Pitt threw him a grin that was hard as granite. "We'll worry about that when the time comes."

To those on board Sea Sprite, the cause was becoming more hopeless with each passing second. It looked as if she was standing dead still in the water.

"Do it!" Pitt pleaded with Sprite. "You can do it!"

On board the hotel, deep anxiety was creeping over the passengers, followed by a growing panic as they stared in frozen fear at the surf crashing on the nearby rocks in a catastrophic display of raging water and exploding spray. Their mounting terror was accelerated by a sudden tremor as the bottom level of the hotel nudged into the rising seafloor. There was no insane rush to exits as in the event of a fire or an earthquake. There was no place to run. Jumping into the water was more than a simple act of suicide. It meant a horrible and painful death, either by drowning or being smashed to pieces on the jagged black lava rocks.