Night Probe!

"Are your life-support systems functioning?"

"Roger. They should keep us healthy for a while yet. The problem is, we'll drown a good fifteen hours before our oxygen supply goes."

"Can you make a free ascent?"

"I might," replied Klinger. "I only lost a tooth from the jolt. Marv Powers, though, is in a bad way. Both his arms are busted and he took a bad crack on the head. He'd never make it to the surface."

Pitt closed his eyes for a moment. He did not relish playing God with men's lives, designating priorities over who was saved first or last. When he looked up again, he had made his decision.

"You'll have to hold on for a while, Klinger. We'll get to you just as soon as we can. Keep me posted every ten minutes."

Pitt stepped out on the bridge wingpnd peered down. Four divers were disappearing over the side.

"I have a picture," said Hoker in triumph as one of the video monitors brightened into life.

The monitor showed a view of the excavation pit as seen from the upper promenade deck. The support columns were collapsed and the decks below had fallen inward. There was no sign of the two JIM suits or the saturation divers.

The cold, abstract eye of the camera saw only a crater ringed with grotesquely distorted steel, but to Pitt it was as though he was staring into an open grave.

"God help them," Hoker muttered under his breath. "They must all be dead."

Seventy miles away, Captain Toshio Yubari, a solid, weatherworn man in the prime of his early forties, sat erect in a bridge chair, intent on the small boat traffic that dotted the water ahead. The tide was ru

The Honjo Maru had carried 400 new electric mini cars from Kobe, Japan, and was making the return voyage with a cargo of newsprint paper from the great pulp mills of Quebec. The massive rolls that filled the containers were far heavier per unit volume than the small cars, and the hull rode low in the water, a scant three inches above the waterline.

First Officer Shigaharu Sakai stepped from the wheelhouse and stood beside the captain. He stifled a yawn and rubbed his reddened eyes.

"Fun night ashore?" Yubari asked, smiling.

Sakai mumbled an unintelligible reply and changed the subject.

"Lucky we didn't cast off on a Sunday," he said, nodding at a fleet of sailing sloops that were racing around a buoyed course about a mile off their port bow.

"Yes, I'm told the traffic is so heavy on weekends you can almost walk across the river on the yachts."

"Shall I take the bridge, captain, while you enjoy a noonday meal?"

"Thank you," replied Yubari, keeping his gaze straight ahead, "but I prefer to remain until we reach the gulf. You might ask the steward, though, to bring me a bowl of noodles with duck and a beer."

Sakai started to comply and then stopped in mid-turn, pointing down the river. "There comes a brave soul or a very reckless one."

Yubari had already spotted the hydroplane and stared with the fascination men have with high speed. "He must be doing close to ninety knots."

"If he hits one of those sloops, there won't be enough left to make a pair of chopsticks."

Yubari came to his feet. "The fool is heading straight for them."

The hydroplane charged into the massed sloops like a coyote through a flock of chickens. The skippers wildly slewed their boats in all directions, losing the wind, full sails suddenly collapsing and flapping uncontrollably.

The inevitable occurred as the hydroplane slashed across the bow of one yacht, tearing away its bowsprit and losing a windshield in the bargain. Then it was free, leaving the fleet scattered and rolling heavily in its whipping wake.

Yubari and Sakai were entranced by the mad antics of the hydroplane as it made a sweeping curve and set a course for the Honjo Maru. The small, darting craft was close enough now so they could make out a form hunched over the wheel in the cockpit.

Suddenly it became obvious to them that the driver had been injured when the sloop's bowsprit swept away the windshield.

There was no time for shouted commands or warning blasts from the horn, no time for Yubari and Sakai to do anything but stand in frozen impotence like pedestrians on a street corner witnessing an accident in the making and helpless to prevent it.

They instinctively ducked as the hydroplane crashed square into the Honjo Maru's port beam and erupted in an instantaneous, blinding sheet of gasoline flames. The engine flew from its mountings high into the air end over end before smashing onto the forecastle. Scattered bits of fiery debris splattered the ship like shrapnel from a bomb. Several of the wheelhouse windows were broken in. Things fell of it of the sky for several seconds, raining about the ship and splashing in the river.

Miraculously no one was hurt on board the containership. Yubari ordered "all stop" on the engines. A boat was lowered to search the area astern, where oil was drifting up from the bottom and spreading on the low swells.

All that was found of the hydroplane's driver was a charred leather jacket and a pair of broken plastic goggles.

As the afternoon wore on, the mood of the Ocean Venturer's crew began to be tinged with guarded optimism. A steady stream of men and equipment poured aboard from the Phoenix and the Huron. Soon auxiliary pumps stalemated the advance of the water gushing into the lower decks. And once the remains of the derrick were cut away, the list was reduced to nineteen degrees.

Most of the seriously injured, including Heidi, were transferred to the more spacious medical facilities on board the Phoenix. Pitt met her on deck as her litter was carried up from below.

"Wasn't much of a cruise, was it?" he said, brushing the ash-blond hair from her eyes.

"I wouldn't have missed it for the world," she replied, smiling gamely. He leaned over and kissed her. "I'll visit you first chance I get."

Then he turned and climbed up the slanting ladder to the control room. Rudi Gu

"A JIM suit was spotted floating downriver," he said. "The Huron is towing it in with their launch."

"Any word from the dive rescue team?"

"The team master, Art Du

"They were laid before we arrived," said Pitt thoughtfully. "Or after."

"No way an amount large enough to create this kind of havoc could have been smuggled through our security ring."

"That ape of Shaw's beat the system."

"Once maybe, not several times, lugging heavy containers of underwater explosives. They must have stored the stuff in the bow section of the Empress until they could figure out where to place it throughout the ship to cause the greatest destruction."

"Blow the wreck and the treaty out of existence before we steamed over the horizon."

"But we showed up early and knocked them off their time schedule. That's why they stole the probe. They were afraid it might spot the explosives cache."

"Was Shaw so desperate to stop us he'd resort to mass murder?"

"That part throws me," Pitt admitted. "He somehow didn't strike me as the butchering kind."