The Titanic Mission

by Dan Gutman

“Wait! Stop!” David shouted just before the door slammed shut.

  They could hear the key click inside the lock from the other side of the door. David tried to turn the doorknob. It wouldn’t budge. They were locked in.

  Luke had landed on the floor, his chest heaving. His leg was scratched, but more than that his pride was wounded. Luke was a big guy. He had been in a few playground fights, and he knew how to handle himself. But in the end, he was just a boy. John Jacob Astor’s thugs had simply overpowered him.

  It was a bare-bones room. There was a wooden bed with no mattress in the corner and pretty much nothing else. A light bulb hanging from a wire on the ceiling provided the only light. It looked like a prison cell.

  For a few long moments, none of the Flashback Four said anything. They just sat on the floor, trying not to make eye contact with each other.

  “I told you coming here was a bad idea,” Isabel finally said, breaking the silence. “You wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “You were right,” agreed David. “We never should have taken on this mission. It was too dangerous. Something was bound to go wrong.”

  “I thought we’d just be able to take the picture and leave,” Luke said. “Nobody could have predicted this was going to happen.”

  “Why not?” asked Isabel. “We tell some rich guy the ship is going to sink, and of course he’s going to react negatively. Did you think he was going to listen to us?”

  “How else were we going to get the point across?” asked Julia. “I didn’t see any of you coming up with a better idea.”

  “No idea is better than a bad idea,” David muttered.

  “Stop arguing!” Luke shouted. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s in the past. We need to live in the present.”

  The present meaning 1912. Luke was right, of course. Arguing over what caused a bad situation is usually a waste of time. Nobody likes to admit they’re wrong, and nobody likes to be criticized.

  “That Astor guy is a jerk,” Isabel said softly. “And he must have thought we were nuts.”

  “Where do you think we are?” Luke asked, looking around the dingy room.

  “All I know is, we were dragged down three flights of stairs to get here,” David said. “I counted. We’re below the main deck.”

  “What are we going to do now?” Julia asked.

  “Maybe we should send a text to Miss Z,” suggested Isabel.

  “Why? What’s she gonna do?” asked Luke. “She can’t help us in here. She’s just going to say we messed up again.”

  As if on cue, the TTT buzzed in Isabel’s pocket.

  DID YOU GET TO THE MEETING PLACE YET? the screen read.

  “What should I tell her?” Isabel whispered, as if Miss Z could hear her.

  “Don’t tell her what happened,” Julia advised. “She’ll be angry and blame us. Just lie. Tell her everything is fine.”

  Isabel hesitated before responding to Miss Z’s text. She didn’t like to lie. And like David, she wasn’t very good at it. Unlike Julia, she hadn’t had much practice.

  WE R THERE, Isabel typed, grimacing the whole time.

  GREAT, Miss Z texted back immediately. I WILL PICK YOU UP FROM THAT SPOT AT 2:05 AM.

  David looked at his watch and then remembered that it had stopped when he fell in the swimming pool. There was no way to know the exact time.

  “It must be after eleven o’clock by now,” Luke said. “If we don’t get out of here and get to the meeting spot by 2:05, we won’t be able to get back home.”

  “And if that happens, we’ll have to start life all over again in 1912,” David said.

  “That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Julia told him. “If we live the rest of our lives starting in 1912, we’ll know lots of stuff that nobody else knows. Think about it. We’ll be able to predict who will win the presidential elections. We’ll know which companies, like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, are going to become huge. We could make a fortune on the stock market!”

  “You have to have money to invest in the stock market,” said Luke.

  “That may be great for you guys, but what about me?” asked David. “The civil rights movement isn’t going to start for a long time. In case you didn’t know, they didn’t treat black folks so great in the 1920s and 1930s. I don’t want to start life all over again. I like our time better.”

  “Are you guys crazy?” Isabel asked. “I can’t believe you’re talking about starting over. None of us is going to start life all over again in 1912! This is going to be the end of our lives! If we don’t get out of here, we’re all going to die tonight! This will be the end of us.”

  Luke stood up.

  “Isabel’s right,” he said. “Let’s put our heads together and figure a way out of this. We’re locked in a room. It’s three floors below the main deck. We may even be below the waterline.”

  “That’s where the iceberg is going to tear open the ship,” Isabel said. “And that’s where the water is going to come in first. We’re sunk. Literally.”

  “So we’ve got to find a way out of this room, and fast,” Luke said.

  The door was locked. There was no window or porthole. Luke pushed his shoulder against the door to test it, but it was obvious that he wasn’t strong enough. He looked over at the bed in the corner.

  “Give me a hand with this,” he told David, picking up one side of the bed.

  “What are you doing?” asked Julia.

  “We’re going to ram the bed against the door and try to bust it down,” Luke explained.

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” asked Isabel.

  “Drowning is dangerous too,” David told her.

  He picked up the other side of the bed. It was heavy, and the two boys struggled to lift it.

  Luke angled the bed so that one of its corners was pointed directly at the door, about three feet away.

  “Okay,” Luke said. “On the count of three, let’s give it all we’ve got. Ready? One . . . two . . . three.”

  They rammed the corner of the bed against the metal door. It made a loud noise, but that was about it. They put the bed down to rest their shoulders.

  “I think we need to swing it a little,” David told Luke. “We need to get more momentum.”

  “Yeah, let’s try it again,” Luke said, picking up his side of the bed as David picked up the other side. Together they rocked the bed back and forth a few times, like it was a baby.

  “One . . . two . . . three!”

  Bang!

  Nothing. The bed made a big noise but only a small dent when it hit the door.

  “I think you guys need a little help,” Isabel said, jumping up to take a corner of the bed. Julia got up and took a corner as well. Luke and David slid over so that each of the Flashback Four was holding up one corner of the bed. With four people, it felt a lot lighter. The weight of it was distributed evenly.

  “I think the door might have buckled a little that last time,” David said. “One more time should do it.”

  “Okay, are you guys ready?” Luke asked.

  “Yeah!”

  They swung the bed back and forth a few times to build up momentum.

  “One . . . two . . . three!” everybody shouted.

  On three, they heaved the corner of the bed against the door as hard as they could.

  BAM!

  I’d like to be able to tell you that the door swung open and the Flashback Four dashed into the hallway to freedom. Unfortunately that’s not what happened.

  What happened was that the bed broke.

  The force of the wood slamming into the metal door caused the sides of the bed to come apart in their hands as the Flashback Four fell all over themselves on the floor. The door didn’t move an inch.

  “Okay!” David said. “That was a bad idea. Anybody have any other ideas?”

  “We’re going to get in trouble!” Isabel said. “Look at this bed! It’s in pieces.”

  “You think we’re not already in trouble?” David asked. “We’re locked in a
room inside the Titanic. That’s trouble!”

  “Don’t worry about the bed,” Luke said. “It’s going to end up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean anyway. With us.”

  “Well I’ve got a better idea,” Julia said.

  She picked up one of the planks of wood that used to make up one side of the bed. Then she slammed it, like a giant baseball bat, against the door. It made a loud slapping noise.

  “Did anybody out there hear that?” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “We’re locked up in here!”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Luke said, picking up one of the other planks. He swung it against the door, and Julia waited until he was finished before taking a second swing.

  David and Isabel each picked up a piece of wood, and soon all four kids were slamming planks against the door, the ceiling, the walls, anything that would make noise and hopefully attract some attention.

  “Help!” they screamed. “Let us out! Is anybody out there? Open the door!”

  After a few minutes of this frantic activity with no success, Julia, Isabel, David, and Luke were exhausted. One by one they sat back on the floor, panting and sweating. For a long time, they just sat there, trying to think of what to do next.

  Somewhere in the distance, a bell clanged three times.

  “It’s hopeless,” David said. “We’re stuck in here. We’re going to die in this room, you know. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Julia was the first one to begin sobbing. That set off a chain reaction, and before long all four of the Flashback Four were in tears.

  “I’m too young to die,” Julia sniffled.

  Before anybody could respond to that, there was a sound that came from outside the room. It was barely audible, but distinct, and different.

  “Did you hear that noise?” Isabel asked, no longer crying.

  “Hear what?” Luke said. “I didn’t hear anything. Did you hear somebody?”

  “No. There’s a sound outside,” Isabel said, closing her eyes so she could hear better. “Shhhh. Listen.”

  Everybody stopped talking. They could feel a faint vibration below them and to the right, almost like the sound of a large animal groaning.

  It was the sound of steel against ice.

  CHAPTER 8

  ICE

  TO THE READER: BEFORE WE CONTINUE WITH THE story, a word or two about icebergs. Now, if you think icebergs are boring, you can skip this part of the book and flip to the end of this chapter, when things get exciting again for the Flashback Four. But you’ll be missing out, because icebergs are very interesting.

  An iceberg isn’t just a giant ice cube floating in the ocean. It’s not simply water that has frozen. Icebergs are formed as glaciers on the land near the ocean, when snow falls and presses down on top of the layers of snow underneath it. The layers build up over time, sometimes over thousands of years.

  Because it’s been compacted, the ice in a glacier is harder and much more dense than the ice in your freezer at home. And it’s not salty, because it’s not made from salt water. When it melts, it becomes clean, fresh water. You could drink it. In fact, it would probably be the purest water you would ever drink.

  Very, very slowly, the weight of the glacier causes it to slide toward the edge of the water. Finally, a chunk of it will break off, slip into the ocean, and float away. Each year, forty thousand icebergs slide off the coast of Greenland. They get carried by the ocean currents into a part of the north Atlantic known as Iceberg Alley. From there, they float south into warmer water, and they usually melt within a year.

  You’ve probably heard the expression “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.” What a great expression! It means the problem you see in front of you is only a tiny part of a much larger problem. If you see an iceberg floating in the ocean, you’re only seeing the top of it. Almost all of it is under the water.

  So icebergs can be huge. The largest known iceberg in the Atlantic was the height of a fifty-five-story building. In 1956, there was an iceberg in the Pacific that was larger than Belgium!

  Okay, enough with the iceberg trivia. The point is, these things are big, solid, and obviously very dangerous to any ship that’s crossing the ocean.

  If a shark had attacked the Titanic, it wouldn’t have made a dent. If Godzilla or King Kong or some horrible movie monster had somehow managed to get loose, swim out into the ocean, and attack the Titanic, it wouldn’t have been able to do much damage. Just about anything could have happened to Titanic and the ship would have survived . . . except getting sideswiped for ten seconds by an iceberg.

  Let’s get back to the Flashback Four, who were locked in a room three levels below deck when the collision took place.

  “That’s it!” Isabel said, her eyes opened wide. “We hit the iceberg!”

  “Are you sure?” asked David, who hadn’t heard anything. “How do you know?”

  “I can tell,” she replied. “I’m sure. Listen.”

  Ten feet above the ship’s keel, the iceberg was still grinding against the hull, popping out the iron rivets and pushing aside the steel plates that made the exterior skin of the Titanic. It created a gash three hundred feet long. That’s the length of a football field.

  Water was pouring in at the rate of a hundred tons per minute. The lowest levels of the Titanic were already flooding. The stokers down there who shoveled coal into the boilers were fighting for their lives.

  The Flashback Four listened intently, but it was already over. The iceberg had moved on. The damage had been done.

  A few seconds later, a gong sounded. This was a warning to the crew that the doors of the watertight compartments had been sealed off. There were sixteen of these on the lower section of Titanic. The ship had been designed so that if four of them flooded, Titanic would still be able to float for two or three days—enough time for a rescue ship to get there.

  Unfortunately, six of the watertight compartments had been pierced. That was the tipping point, in more ways than one. Titanic was already doomed.

  Suddenly, there was absolute quiet. The engines had stopped. Most of the passengers didn’t hear or feel the collision with the iceberg, but just about all of them noticed that the constant hum of the engines had stopped. The heartbeat of the Titanic was gone. In its place was an eerie silence.

  “Okay, now we really gotta get out of here!” David said, picking up one of the wooden planks from the bed again. He slammed it against the door with renewed enthusiasm.

  “Let us out!” Isabel screamed, pounding on the wall with her fists. “Please! Help! Anybody!”

  It was no use. The ship might not have been watertight, but it seemed to be soundproof.

  “Nobody’s going to rescue us,” Luke said. “Our only hope is to break the door down. Come on, maybe if we all hit it at the same time.”

  The other three each grabbed a wooden plank. Luke and Julia took a position on the right side of the door. David and Isabel moved to the left side of the door so they wouldn’t get in one another’s way.

  “Okay,” Luke told the group. “On the count of three, give it all you’ve got. One . . . two . . . three!”

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Four planks hit the door hard. But it didn’t give.

  “Again!” Luke hollered. “One . . . two . . . three!”

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

  Nothing.

  “It’s no use,” Julia said mournfully. “It’s solid.”

  “One more time!” Luke shouted. “Come on! We can do this! One . . . two . . .”

  The door suddenly swung open.

  A steward wearing a navy blue White Star Line uniform was standing there. He had a very official-looking cap with a shiny black visor, and a shocked look on his face. Julia, Isabel, Luke, and David were about to swing planks at him.

  “What in the blazes are you doing?” he asked.

  “You saved us!” Isabel said. “Thank you!”

  She would have hugged the man, but he now had a very angry look on his face.


  “There was a bed in this room,” he said, looking around. “I put it here myself. What did you do to it? Did you take it apart?”

  “No, it, uh . . . broke,” David told him honestly. “When we rammed it into the door.”

  “You rammed it into the door?”

  “We were locked in,” Julia explained. “We were trying to get out.”

  “That bed was the property of the White Star Line!” the steward shouted. “You can’t go around destroying private property! It’s against the law.”

  “Mr. Astor told us this is international waters,” said David. “So we can do anything we want.”

  “You don’t understand,” Isabel tried to explain to the steward. “You see—”

  “I’m going to report this to my superior,” he said. “The four of you will be arrested as soon as we get to New York.”

  He tried to close the door to lock them in again, but Luke—thinking quickly—jammed his foot in the doorway to prevent the door from closing. He wasn’t about to get stuck in that room again.

  “I’ve got news for you, pal,” Luke told the steward through the crack in the doorway. “This ship will never make it to New York. We just hit an iceberg. Soon, all of this will be at the bottom of the ocean. Including your bed.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” the steward replied. “We’re making excellent time. We’re scheduled to arrive in New York the day after tomorrow.”

  “Look, we don’t have time to argue,” David said, pushing the door open all the way. “Let’s go!”

  They shoved the steward out of the way, and the Flashback Four dashed through the open doorway.

  “I’m reporting you kids!” the steward shouted as they ran down the hallway.

  “You do that!” Luke hollered.

  CHAPTER 9

  IT’S HAPPENING

  “SO LONG, SUCKER!” DAVID YELLED, CACKLING AS the Flashback Four ran down the hallway.

  There was really no cause for celebration. It was past midnight now. In about two hours, the mighty Titanic would break into two enormous pieces and sink beneath the ocean, eventually coming to rest two miles below on the floor of the Atlantic. Fifteen hundred people were going to lose their lives. But David couldn’t resist having a little fun, after being cooped up in that dismal room for so long.