The Titanic Secret (38 page)

Tremayne had just jammed the back of a chair under the handle of the lock inside their stateroom when he heard two dull explosions, and the whole ship seemed to ring like a bell, a bell struck twice by a massive hammer. He looked at Maria and shook his head.

‘What was that?’ she demanded.

‘Unless I’m very much mistaken,’ Tremayne replied, his voice subdued, ‘that was the sound of Mansfield Cumming deciding to use both belt and braces. I think he ordered the submarine to attack the ship anyway, because that was definitely the sound of two torpedoes smashing into the side of the
Titanic
.’

‘Are you serious?’ Maria asked.

‘I’ve never been more serious,’ Tremayne said, his voice urgent. ‘What the hell happened to our message? We need to get out of here, right now. Unless we’re incredibly lucky, this ship is going to sink. I know that the
Titanic
’s huge, and a lot of people seem to think that it’s unsinkable, but its hull was never designed to withstand the impact of torpedoes. I’d give the ship maybe an hour before it’s gone.’

For a few moments, Maria didn’t reply. Then she nodded slowly.

‘I really hope you’re wrong, Alex,’ she said, ‘but I have a horrible feeling you’re not. We need to get out onto the upper decks as quickly as we can. And, by the way, I can’t swim.’

Tremayne smiled bleakly at her. ‘With the water temperature out there, whether or not you can swim won’t make any difference. If we end up in the water, it’ll be the cold that kills us, not drowning.’

They took the minimum they thought they’d need. The clothes they were standing up in and heavy overcoats to go on top, because if they ended up in a lifeboat they knew it was going to be extremely cold.

They knew Voss was still on the loose somewhere in the ship, though ironically both Tremayne and Maria could now relegate him to the status of an irritant, rather than a problem, simply because of the much greater danger they now knew they were facing. But just in case they did meet him somewhere, they took their Brownings but didn’t bother with the suppressors. The chaos of the sinking ship – and Tremayne was still certain that was going to be the outcome – would cover up any noise. Finally, Tremayne took the envelope containing the copies, while Maria made sure that she had the original documents in the waterproof pouch.

They saw no sign of Voss, though already other passengers were hurrying along the corridors. They took the aft first-class staircase and, a few minutes later, stepped out onto the Boat Deck and into the darkness of the night. There was no moon, and little that they could see. Tremayne peered around, shielding his eyes from the glow of the deck lights as he studied the area around the ship.

‘I can’t see anything,’ he said, then paused. ‘No, wait a moment. There’s something over there.’ He pointed down the starboard side of the ship, towards some dark object that lay at the very limit of his visibility, beyond the stern of the vessel. ‘It’s definitely not another ship – the outline is wrong – I suppose it must be an iceberg. We’ve seen a few of them already on this voyage.’

‘What about the submarine?’ Maria asked.

‘If the captain’s following the usual tactics, he’ll have retreated as soon as he fired his weapons. But even if the boat was still here, and on the surface, it’s far too dark to see it.’

Maria looked around. ‘It’s strange. I know what we heard, but up here everything seems to be absolutely normal.’

There was no sign of any unusual activity on the deck, no officers or crewmen in sight, just a handful of other passengers. But there was something else, something that they both noticed at almost the same moment.

‘The engines have stopped,’ Tremayne said suddenly. ‘And the ship’s not moving.’

The ship seemed strangely quiet, almost peaceful, in the blackness of the night, and they immediately knew that this was because the engines were no longer working. The ship was dying slowly under their feet, the beat of its mighty heart already beginning to slow down.

15 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

By midnight, only twenty minutes after the iceberg had been sighted, everything had changed, and there was absolutely no doubt that the great liner was doomed. The bow of the ship was much lower in the water than it should have been, and the stern was slowly beginning to rise.

‘The torpedoes must have hit somewhere near the bow,’ Tremayne said. ‘That section of the ship is flooding fast, which is why there’s such a bow-down attitude.’

Maria was strangely silent. If anything, she simply felt more numb than afraid. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, their lives had been completely turned around. Their very chances of survival now looked slim indeed. But something else, something very specific, was also concerning her. This was not the first time Maria had been on board a passenger ship, and she was perfectly capable of doing the mathematics.

When she and Tremayne had been exploring the ship after they’d boarded, she’d noted the number and type of the lifeboats, and had immediately spotted a discrepancy. She knew that the
Titanic
was carrying over 2,200 passengers and crew, and had been built to accommodate a maximum of sixty-four lifeboats, well in excess of the current Board of Trade requirement, which was based upon the gross tonnage of the ship and not upon the number of people it could accommodate. Unfortunately, there were only twenty lifeboats on board, four of which were canvas-sided collapsible boats which were not mounted in davits and would have to be launched by hand. The reality was that there were only sixteen wooden lifeboats on board, the biggest of which had a maximum capacity of sixty-five people, but some only forty. So at best, if every lifeboat could be launched, and every lifeboat was full, only about 1,000 people – well under half of the total number on the ship – could possibly be saved.

No matter what happened, or what anyone did, if the ship sank, over half of the people then on board the great luxury liner were going to end up in the Atlantic Ocean, and that meant they were going to die.

15 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Gunther Voss had been asleep when the two torpedoes smashed into the bow of the
Titanic
, fatally wounding the mighty ship.

The noise of the explosions and the shudder that ran through the hull of the liner woke him immediately. He had no idea what had happened, but he’d been on enough ships to know that something was badly wrong. Either the
Titanic
had hit something – quite a difficult feat to pull off in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean – or there’d been some kind of explosion inside the ship itself. Possibly a boiler had blown up or something of that sort.

He wasn’t concerned for the safety of the ship itself. Everything he’d read about the
Titanic
, about its double bottom and multiple watertight doors, had convinced him that in most circumstances the ship was effectively unsinkable. Rather, he saw the incident as playing to his advantage. No matter what had occurred, it would cause panic and alarm on board, and with any luck that might provide him with the opportunity to tackle either Tremayne or Maria Weston, or better still both of them, and dispose of them in the confusion.

He got out of bed, dressed quickly in warm clothing, and tucked the Luger into his waistband. Then he removed the chair which he’d been using to barricade the door, undid the lock and stepped cautiously out into the corridor.

Passengers were running about in all directions, clearly aware that something was wrong, and he heard one or two of them saying something about the ship sinking. Nonsense. It was panic, pure and simple.

He guessed that Tremayne and the woman would have already left their stateroom, but he reckoned it was worth checking anyway. He strode along the corridor, stopped outside their door and rapped sharply on it. There was no reply, so he tried the handle, and to his surprise it opened beneath his touch. Holding his pistol at the ready, he stepped into the room.

As far as he could tell, almost all their possessions were still there, and for a moment he felt a prickle of unease. Why would they abandon everything and leave the door of their stateroom unlocked? Only one explanation fitted the facts as he saw them, ridiculous though he thought it was. Perhaps the passenger he had overheard had been right, and the ship was going down.

Voss abandoned his hasty search of the stateroom, walked out and headed for the staircase.

15 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

At five minutes past midnight, there was a sudden flurry of activity on the Boat Deck as a group of officers and men appeared and immediately set to work to remove the covers from the lifeboats.

‘That’s it, then,’ Tremayne said. ‘The
Titanic
is definitely sinking, and they’re preparing to abandon ship.’

Almost as soon as the covers had been removed, teams assembled by each of the lifeboats and swung them out on their davits before lowering them to the level of the Boat Deck. And then they heard orders being shouted from below, and a stream of passengers began to appear, being shepherded towards the lifeboats by members of the
Titanic
’s crew.

Most of them were women and children, who had probably been asleep because they’d obviously dressed hurriedly, and started walking onto the Boat Deck, looking around them in confusion. Although the ship was lower in the water at the bow and the engines had stopped, the lights were still working, the heating system was keeping the temperature at a comfortable level, and there was, at that stage, no apparent sense of urgency being shown, and certainly no panic. But Tremayne knew that that would change over the next hour or so.

He again shielded his eyes against the glow of the deck lighting, and stared out to sea, looking all around the ship. The night was still absolutely black, with no moon, and no sign of what he’d been hoping to see.

‘As far as I can see,’ he said to Maria, ‘there are no other ships anywhere near us. I just hope the captain’s sent out a distress signal. Unless there’s another ship within a few miles, just over the horizon, the loss of life is going to be horrendous.’

In fact, nobody had ordered any messages to be sent, and it wasn’t until fifteen minutes past midnight, almost exactly thirty-five minutes after the collision with the iceberg, that the captain finally issued instructions to the wireless operator to transmit a distress call. The message sent by the stricken ship was brief:

The prefix ‘CQ’ had been in use for some time to identify telegraph messages of general interest, and also been adopted as a maritime radio call prefix. In 1904, Marconi had added the suffix ‘D’ to create a recognisable distress call, and ‘CQD’ was understood to mean ‘All stations: distress’. It was also popularly believed at the time that ‘CQD’ meant ‘Come Quick Danger’ or ‘Come Quickly Distress’, but actually this was never the case.

The ‘DE’ simply stood for ‘from’ and indicated the identity of the calling station, in this case ‘MGY’, the international radio trigraph allocated to the
Titanic
, followed by the position of the ship at the time.

Two minutes later, at seventeen minutes past midnight, the radio operator sent a further distress message, this time including the other international distress signal ‘SOS’, which had been adopted in 1908 as the international Morse code distress signal. The new signal read:

The emergency messages quickly generated replies from two ships. The closest was the SS
Frankfurt
, about 170 miles away, and the second was the
Titanic
’s sister ship, the RMS
Olympic
, over 500 miles away.

Even steaming at its maximum speed, the SS
Frankfurt
would still take about ten hours to reach the
Titanic
’s position, far too late to render any assistance.

15 April 1912
RMS
Carpathia

About sixty miles to the south-east of the
Titanic
’s position, the RMS
Carpathia
was steaming steadily eastwards towards the Mediterranean out of New York. The radio operator, Harold Thomas Cottom, was in his cabin, a room which doubled as both his accommodation on board the ship and the radio room, getting undressed and preparing to go to bed. Periodically, as he removed his garments, he would pick up the earphones and listen in to the radio messages being pumped through the ether using Morse code.

Suddenly, his ears, highly attuned to the subtle nuances of Morse transmissions, detected a message which he had never heard before. The three letters that had been transmitted consisted of three dots, followed by three dashes, followed by three dots. ‘SOS’, the recently introduced international distress signal.

Immediately, Cottom forgot about everything but his equipment. He sat down and waited for the message to be repeated, which came within seconds. The full message read:

With practised haste, he wrote down the entire message. Immediately, the
Carpathia
’s radio operator replied, to confirm that the message was accurate, and received an almost immediate acknowledgement.

The moment he knew that the transmission was genuine, Cottom ran out of his cabin, found the ship’s First Officer, and showed him the signal. Together they briefed the captain, Arthur Rostron, who immediately realized that he was in a position to help. He ordered the ship to turn round and head north-west towards the
Titanic
’s stated position at its maximum speed of seventeen knots. The steam heating for the passenger cabins was switched off to provide more steam pressure for the engines, so that the vessel could travel as quickly as possible. Captain Rostron also told the radio operator to contact the
Titanic
again, advise the ship that the
Carpathia
was on its way and to obtain as much information about the situation on board the liner as possible.