Текст книги "Black Wind"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

Long after the Zenit had climbed into the sky and detonated, a thick cloud of white smoke still hung over the Odyssey like a fog bank Ever so gently, the light sea breeze began poking holes through the exhaust, revealing sporadic patches of the launch platform through the haze.

“Looks like a bowl of clam chowder down there,” Giordino said as he banked the Icarus over the platform. While Giordino and Dahlgren visually surveyed the platform for any signs of Pitt, Dirk activated the LASH system and scanned for optical anomalies that might signify a human being.

“Don't quote me but I think that baby is sinking,” Dahlgren said as they glided around the aft end of the platform and could make out an exposed section down to the water. The men in the gondola could clearly see that the aft support columns appeared shorter than the bow columns.

a “She's definitely taking on water in the stern,” Dirk replied... “Wonder if that's the handiwork of your old man? He may have just cost somebody a new rocket,” Giordino said. “And maybe a new launchpad,” Dahlgren added.

“But where is he?” Dirk asked aloud. They could all detect that there was no apparent sign of life on the platform.

“The smoke is starting to clear. Once the helipad opens up, I'll take us in for a closer look,” Giordino replied.

As they drifted back toward the bow of the platform, Dahlgren looked down and grimaced.

“Damn. The Badger's gone, too. Must have sank during the launch.”

The threesome fell quiet, reflecting that the disappearance of the submersible was the least of their losses.

Three miles to the south, a gunnery crewman on the Koguryo was transferring the radar-derived coordinates of the blimp into a Chinese CSA-4 surface-to-air missile guidance system. The slow-moving airship was as easy an objective as the gunnery crew could ever hope to target. With such a large object at close range, the odds of failing to strike the blimp were nearly zero.

In an enclosed room adjacent to the dual missile canister, a weapons control expert stood at a console transferring the firing guidance through a missile command link. A row of green lights flashed at him as the engagement radar embedded in the missile acknowledged a tar-get lock. The man immediately picked up a telephone receiver that ran directly to the bridge.

“Target acquired and missile armed,” he said in monotone to Captain Lee. “Awaiting orders to fire.”

Lee looked out a bridge side window toward the blimp hovering over the platform in the distance. The high-powered missile exploding into the airship would make for a spectacular display, he thought childishly. Perhaps they should also destroy the distant turquoise vessel that lingered on the edge of their radar screen and then make a clean escape. But, first things first. He moved the receiver to his mouth to issue the command to fire when suddenly his lips froze. His eyes had detected a small pair of dark objects emerging from behind the airship. He stood frozen and watched as the objects quickly materialized into a pair of low-flying aircraft.

The F-16D Falcon fighter jets had been scrambled from an Air National Guard base in Fresno minutes after a NORAD satellite had detected the launch of the Zenit rocket. While flying toward the launch site, the pilots were directed to the Koguryo with the help of the Coast Guard distress call that had originated from the Deep Endeavor. The sleek gray jets flew low above the water and burst over the Koguryo just a few hundred feet above her fore bridge The crackling roar of the jets' engines struck a second after their shadows had whisked by overhead, rattling the windows of the bridge where Lee stood with a sickened look on his face.

“Stand down! Stand down and secure the battery!” he barked over the phone. As the SAM was stowed away, Lee watched as the two fighter jets gained altitude and began crisply circling the fast-moving ship.

“You!” he cursed at a crewman standing nearby. “Find Tongju and bring him to the bridge ... at once.”

The men in the blimp beamed in relief at the sight of the Air National Guard jets circling above the Koguryo, having no idea how close they were to being blasted out of the sky by the ship's SAM battery. They knew that a horde of Navy ships was on the way and that there was little chance the ship would escape apprehension now. They again turned their attention to the smoke-covered platform below.

“The haze is lifting off the helipad,” Giordino observed. “I'll set her down if you boys want to jump off and take a look around.”

“Absolutely,” Dirk replied. “Jack, we can start with the bridge, then move down to the hangar if the air is breathable.”

“I'd start with the ship's lounge,” Giordino said, trying to cut the somber mood. “If he's okay, my money says he's mixing a martini and eating up the ship's store of pretzels.”

Giordino swung the blimp wide of the platform, bringing the airship around with its nose into the wind. As he lined upon the helipad and began dropping altitude, Dahlgren stuck his head back into the cockpit and pointed out the side window.

“Take a look over there,” he said.

Several hundred feet off the side of the platform, a sudden surge of bubbles erupted from beneath the surface. A few seconds later, a mottled gray metallic object broke the surface.

“Launch debris?” Dahlgren asked.

“No, it's the Badger^” Giordino exclaimed.

Guiding the airship toward the object, the three men could see that it was in fact the NUMA submersible bobbing low in the water. The underwater vehicle's bright metallic paintwork had been cooked off in the launch blast, leaving its skin a dappled mix of primer and bare metal. The bow section was bent and mangled, as if it had been involved in a head-on traffic accident. How the thing still managed to float was anybody's guess, but there was no denying it was the experimental submersible Dirk and Dahlgren had sailed to the platform.

As Giordino brought the blimp down for a closer look, the three men were stunned to see the top hatch suddenly twist and pop open. A cloud of steaming vapor streamed from the open hatch as they looked on incredulously. For several agonizing seconds, their eyes hung glued to the hatch, hoping against hope. Finally, they saw the odd apparition of a pair of stockinged feet rise up and out of the hatch. A patch of dark hair then appeared and they realized that the feet they observed were actually hands covered in a pair of socks. The stocking-wrapped hands, protected from the hot metal, quickly hoisted up the lean, racked body of their owner from the enclosed oven.

“It's Dad! He's okay!” Dirk exclaimed with glaring relief.

Pitt climbed to his feet and swayed on the rocking sub, sucking in lungfuls of the cool ocean air. He was a haggard mass of blood and sweat, and his clothes stuck to him as if they were glued to his skin. But his eyes shined as he looked skyward and threw a jaunty wave to the men in the gondola.

“Going down,” Giordino announced as he proceeded to guide the blimp down toward the sea until the gondola was skimming just inches above the waves. With a deft touch, Giordino gently eased the blimp alongside the submersible. Pitt leaned down and secured the Badger's top hatch, then took a few steps and staggered into the open door of the gondola, where Dirk and Dahlgren grabbed his arms and yanked him safely aboard.

“I believe,” he said to Giordino in a dry parched voice, “I'll take that drink now.”

Pitt slipped into the blimp's copilot seat and gulped down a bottled water as Al, Dirk, and Jack described the fiery disintegration of the Zenit rocket minutes before. While studying the vapor trails in the sky and eyeing the Koguryo fleeing in the distance, Pitt countered with a description of his drilling attack on the Odyssey's support columns and the tumultuous assault from the wake of the blastoff.

“And here I had good money down that you were lolling about in the Odyssey's lounge nursing a martini,” Giordino grumbled.

“I was the one shaken and stirred,” Pitt laughed. “Would have been baked alive when the Badger got jammed against the side pontoon, but I was able to manually force the rudder against the surge and broke free into cooler water. Even with the ballast tanks purged, it took me a while to surface until I got the bilge pump working. There's still a lot of water sloshing around inside, but she should stay afloat a while longer.”

“I'll radio Deep Endeavor and have her fish the Badger out once they've picked up the platform crew on Santa Barbara Island,” Giordino replied.

“I will have a furious sister on my hands if you first don't let her know you are safe,” Dirk chided.

Summer nearly fell over when her father's voice crackled through the Deep Endeavor's radio, jokingly ordering a beer and a peanut butter sandwich.

“We feared the worst,” she gushed. “What on earth happened to you?”

“It's a long story. Suffice it to say that the Scripps Institute isn't going to be too happy with my submarine-driving skills,” he said, leaving all on the bridge of the Deep Endeavor scratching their heads.

As Giordino lifted the airship up off the water, Pitt noticed the F-16s circling the fleeing Koguryo.

“Cavalry finally arrive?” he asked.

“Just moments ago. The Navy has an armada headed this way as well. She's not going to get away.”

“Her tender is sure making haste,” Pitt said, nodding toward a white speck to the south.

Lost in the spectacle and confusion was the Koguryo's tender, which had slipped quietly away from her mother ship and was now motoring south toward the horizon at high speed.

“How do you know that's her tender?” Giordino asked, squinting downrange.

“Over here,” Pitt replied, tapping the WE SCAM monitor. Pitt had been fooling around with the zoom lens while talking and happened to catch the speeding boat flashing by. The focused image clearly showed it was the Koguryo's tender, which they had observed earlier.

“The jets definitely aren't tracking her,” Dirk said from the rear, noting the F-16s circling tightly around the Koguryo as she sailed farther to the west.

“Let's stay on her,” Pitt stated.

“She has nary a chance against our fleet wings aflutter,” Giordino snarled, pushing the throttles to full and watching as the airspeed indicator crept slowly toward 50 knots.

Why haven't they fired on the aircraft, or that infernal airship?" Tongju swore as he stared at the Koguryo through a pair of binoculars. The bouncing movement of the tender as it ran at full speed through the waves made it impossible for him to steady his gaze and he finally threw the glasses down harshly onto a cowling.

“The aircraft have intimidated Lee,” Kim said over his shoulder as he clutched the steering wheel tightly. “He will pay with his life in about two more minutes.”

The Koguryo was growing smaller on the horizon as the tender accelerated south. But when the planted explosives detonated, they could clearly see puffs of water spray into the air along the ship's hull line.

Standing on the bridge, Captain Lee at first thought that the F-16s had fired on him. But the warbirds still circled lazily above, and there was no sign that they had fired any missiles. As the damage assessments came in reporting that the lower hull was compromised in several locations, Lee suddenly realized the culprit. Minutes before, a crewman had reported observing Kim and Tongju board the tender and the small boat was now seen running south at high speed. With a sick sensation of betrayal, Lee knew that he and his ship had been deemed expendable.

But a miscalculation would save them. Kim's demolition team had planted ample explosives to rip the bowels out of a normal ship Koguryo's size. But a critical piece of information about the cable ship had not been considered: she had a double hull. The detonated charges easily ruptured the vessel's inner hull but only buckled the plates of the outer hull. Seawater gushed into the lower holds, but not with the massive force that would submerge the running ship as Tongju had envisioned. Lee immediately stopped the ship, deployed portable pumps to the damaged holds, and then sealed off the high-risk areas behind watertight doors. The ship would list and be unable to run at speed but she would not founder.

Once the flooding was halted, the captain peered through a set of field glasses at the speeding tender escaping in the distance. Lee knew that he had little to live for now. As the captain of the vessel that launched the aborted missile attack against the United States, he would be the prime scapegoat if captured. If he somehow escaped, or was released, there would be no telling what sort of reception he'd receive from Kang. Satisfied that the ship was stabilized, Lee excused himself from the bridge and retired to his cabin. Retrieving a Chinese-made Makarov 9mm pistol from beneath a dresser drawer filled with pressed shirts, Lee lay down neatly on his bed, held the barrel to his ear, and pulled the trigger.

While pursuing the speeding tender, the men in the Icarus caught sight of the series of explosions that ripped along the hull of the Koguryo. “Are those lunatics trying to scuttle her with all hands?” Dahlgren wondered.

For several minutes, they watched the ship as she slowed but held steady. Pitt noticed that there was no apparent rush for the lifeboats, and he could see several members of the crew standing idly at the rail watching the jets overhead. He studied the waterline for a significant change but could only detect a slight list.

“She's not going to disappear on us anytime soon,” he said. “Let's keep after the tender.”

Giordino glanced at the LASH system output on the laptop computer, spotting several gray shapes to the southeast approximately thirty miles away.

“Our Navy pals are on the way,” he said, tapping the screen. “They won't be alone for long.”

With a nearly 20-knot advantage in speed, the airship began easily gaining ground on the fleeing white boat. The Icarus had only ascended to a five-hundred-foot altitude when Giordino gave chase and he didn't waste power on any further climbing. The blimp glided smoothly toward the boat's wake, driving fast and low over the water. As the airship moved closer, Pitt focused the surveillance camera on the boat's open rear deck and cabin. Through the covered portico, he could only make out indiscriminate shapes at the helm.

“I count four men above decks,” he said.

“Apparently, they're not ones for a crowded escape,” Giordino replied.

Pitt scanned the camera about the deck, relieved to find no heavy armament but noting the extra drums of fuel near the stern.

“Plenty of gas for a run to Mexico,” he said.

“I think our Coast Guard friends in San Diego might have something to say about that,” Giordino replied, tightening his bearing on the boat.

Tongju and his men had been focused on the Koguryo, but one of the commandos finally noticed the approaching blimp. While Kim manned the helm, the other three men instinctively stepped to the rear open deck to better observe the airship. Pitt focused the zoom lens of the camera on the men until their faces could clearly be distinguished.

“Recognize any of these characters?” Pitt asked over his shoulder to Dirk and Dahlgren.

The younger Pitt studied the screen for just a moment before gritting his teeth hard. The flash of anger subsided quickly, though, as a contented smile returned to his face.

“The Fu Manchu character standing in the center. His name is Tongju. He's Kang's master of ceremonies for torture and assassination. Appeared to be calling the shots aboard the Odyssey earlier.”

“For such a nice guy, it would be kind of a shame to ruin his Mexican vacation,” Giordino replied.

As he spoke, he dipped the prow of the blimp down and held steady as the airship slowly dove toward the water. When it looked like he was going to drive the nose into the sea, Giordino gently pulled up on the controls, leveling the gondola just fifty feet above the water. The Icarus had closed the gap between the two vessels during the dive, and Giordino guided the airship along the port side of the tender until the gondola was suspended side by side.

“You want to step off and have a beer with these guys?” Pitt asked as he eyed the men on the boat just a few dozen feet away.

“No, just want to let them know that they ain't going to outrun Mad Al and his Magic Bag of Gas,” he grinned.

Giordino eased back on the throttles until he matched speeds with the bouncing tender, the large envelope of the blimp casting a shadow over the topsides of the boat. Above the din of the tender's twin inboard engines and the airship's Porsche motor-driven propellers, the men in the Icarus suddenly detected an unwelcome staccato. Glancing back at the tender, Pitt saw that Tongju and the two commandos had retrieved automatic weapons and were standing on the stern deck blasting away at the blimp.

“I hate to be the one to tell you but they're shooting holes in your gasbag, Mad Al,” Pitt said.

“The jealous lowlifes,” Giordino replied, goosing the throttles.

Before departing Oxnard, they had been told that the airship could withstand a profusion of holes and gashes to the air bags and still retain its lift. Tongju and his men would have to exhaust a crate of ammunition to threaten the airworthiness of the helium-filled blimp. But the safety of the gondola was less assured. After a momentary pause in the firing, the floor of the main cabin suddenly erupted in a spray of splinters as the gunmen redirected their weapons at the gondola.

“Everybody down!” Pitt yelled as a burst of fire smashed the side cockpit window, the bullets grazing just over his head. The sound of shattering glass resonated through the cabin as a rain of bullets poured into the gondola. Dirk and Dahlgren lay flat on the floor as several bursts stitched past them and into the ceiling above. Giordino jammed the throttles all the way forward, and, while waiting anxiously for the blimp to speed ahead, turned the yoke full to port to turn away from the tender.

“No,” Pitt yelled at him, “turn and fly over him.”

Giordino knew not to question Pitt's judgment and, without hesitation, threw the rudder over in the opposite direction, pushing the Icarus back toward the tender. Glancing at Pitt, he could see him studying the tender below with an arched brow. The blistering fire continued to tear into the gondola for a second, then abruptly stopped as Giordino steered the gondola above and slightly ahead of the tender's cabin roof, temporarily obscuring the field of fire.

“Everyone all right?” Pitt asked.

“We're okay back here,” Dirk replied, “but one of the engines isn't faring too well.”

As the sound of gunfire fell away, the men could hear sputtering and coughing emanating from the starboard gondola motor. Giordino glanced at the console gauges and shook his head.

“Oil pressure falling, temperature rising. Going to be tough to run away from these guys on one leg.”

Pitt peered down at the deck of the tender, spotting Tongju and the two gunmen moving toward the stern of the boat reloading their weapons.

“Al, hold your position,” he said. “And lend me your cigar.”

“It's one of Sandecker's finest,” he replied, hesitating before handing Pitt the saliva-soaked green stub.

“I'll buy you a box of 'em. Hold steady for ten seconds, then turn hard to port and get us the hell away from the boat.”

“You're not going to do what I think you are?” Giordino asked.

Pitt just flashed a sly look, then reached up for an overhead ripcord with one hand while he turned a dial marked fuel ballast to the open position. Pulling on the cord, he silently counted to eight, then released the line and closed the lever. At the stern of the gondola, an emergency dump valve opened on the fuel tank, releasing a flood of gasoline that surged out the bottom of the tank.

Pitt's quick discharge released more than seventy-five gallons of gasoline out of the gondola tank, which sprayed down directly onto the stern deck of the tender. Pitt looked down and could see that the rear deck was awash in fuel that sloshed along the rear gunwale as the boat charged through the waves. Tongju and the two gunmen covered their faces and sprinted under the portico as the rain of liquid splattered down on them but quickly returned after the deluge ended and raised their weapons again to finish off the blimp. Pitt watched curiously as the pool of gasoline washed around their feet and splashed over some deck chairs, a bench, and the four fifty-five-gallon drums tied to the side. He stoked a few puffs on the cigar to brighten its ember, then stuck his head out the shattered side cockpit window. Just a few yards away, Pitt eyed Tongju and smiled as the assassin looked up and swung his assault rifle toward him. Through his legs, Dirk could feel the blimp begin pulling to one side as Giordino threw the controls over. With a calm nonchalance, he took a last puff on the cigar and casually tossed it toward the stern of the tender.