Raise the Titanic


Boy, when I re-read this book, I was all ready to sit down and whip out a brilliant review of what’s actually a rather old book. Now that I’m sitting here with a computer, it’s suddenly become a black hole of creativity. OK, maybe not that bad, let’s see if I can’t think of something witty.

The story starts as the Titanic is going down, and some crazy guy gets a deckhand to lock him in a large safe in a rapidly flooding cargo hold. Jump forward several decades to the president obsessing about his latest secret governmental project. The Sicilian Project, named after a chess move, is an anti-missile defense system that use high intensity sound waves to destroy the incoming projectiles -- in theory anyway. The transducer for the system can be made of only one substance, Byzanium -- a substance so rare, that apart from short lived particles produced in a lab, the only supply appears to be in Russia. Or at least it was in Russia, it appears that a group of Colorado miners, acting under the deepest secrecy, managed to mine the entire amount at the turn of the century. To make matters worse, they apparently sent it home on the Titanic. So how do you solve this dilemma -- you Raise the Titanic, and who do you call to do it? Dirk Pitt! Step one, find the ship -- a beautifully preserved cornet leads them on the right track. Once there, they decide to use a high strength plastic to seal up the holes, and special ultra-high pressure air pumps to float the ship to the surface. With the exception of a mysterious murder in one of the submersibles, all goes well, until one of the submersibles becomes trapped and disabled on the ship when one of the deck cranes collapses on it. The only way to save the crew is to attempt to raise the ship early -- explosives are placed and detonated -- and miracle of all, the ship rises from her watery grave. So, they start towing her to New York. Unfortunately, the untimely arrival of a hurricane, and the Russians make things difficult -- and the unplanned arrival of the unhappy wife of the project director adds even more complications. The Russians have two agents onboard, disguised as members of the salvage team, and they have been sabotaging the towing operations, so the Russians can attack during the hurricane -- which they do. But, unknown to the Russians, Dirk has made arrangements with some Navy SEALs, and the CIA have been busy setting up the head Russian agent for a fall. So, after the project director wife looses her clothes, the SEALs whup the Russians, and the hurricane passes by, Titanic finally reaches New York -- just a few decades late. The dock crew digs it’s way through several decks of rubble until they reach the vault. They use a massive crane to open the door, and discover the partially mummified remains of the last surviving miner, and several boxes of worthless rocks. This is the last straw for the poor project director, who has lost his wife, his project, and now -- his mind. Dirk Pitt himself manages to get lost -- at least for a while. He’s following up on a cryptic statement made by the partially mummified surviving miner (before he became partially mummified of course). It turns out, that in desperation, he buried the Byzanium with the last of his comrades, in hopes of keeping it out of the hands of the French terrorists who had been chasing them since they arrived in England. They ship the ore to the states, and in the last bit of the book, they have a successful test of the Sicilian project.

So, what do I think of the book? On the whole it’s not a bad book, though it does suffer from relying on less than accurate information. Of course, when it was written, the inaccurate information was generally accepted as what happened, but we know better now. For instance, the author assumed that the ship was in one piece, and well preserved due to the lack of oxygen at that depth, and the cold temperature. The big crashing noise wasn’t the ship splitting in two, it was all the boilers breaking loose and falling out a big hole in the bow. And of course, the assumption that there was any possible way of getting the silly thing off the seafloor -- it’s buried 60 ft into the silt. But aside from all that, it’s still fairly interesting, though not quite up to Clancy. And what kind of name is Dirk Pitt?

 

Copyright 1999, Tuesday Nite, Ink