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Pitt ht But when he looked up and saw an enor 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 hadher death and destruction on the island of the Do 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 o h for the hundreds of guests and ereat 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 fro 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 iined the difference it would have made But the tow bit would have to do Somehow the cable would have to be shackled manually

Barnu breeze and peered through his binoculars at the base of the hotel He and four of his creere tied to the railings to keep fro washed overboard He observed Pitt and Giordino enter the water and disappear beneath the rolling surface He could justin the doorways, battered by the seas, paying out the red Falcron line to the divers struggling below the aves

"Throw out a pair of lines with buoys," he ordered without lowering the glasses, "and prepare the grappling hooks"

Barnu hooks on the divers' bodies in an extreme crisis should they becoh stern of the ship The grappling hooks were connected to eight-foot alu theth 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," caine 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 thewith unearthly swiftness

After he swaet 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 beca increased with each foot it was paid out He was thankful the Falcron line was not heavy or bulky, which would haveas possible, he kept his head down and his hands clasped behind his back under the oxygen rebreathing apparatus