along the top of the aircraft hangar. "I'll go belowdecks and do the
same."
Dirk glanced at the orange face of his Doxa dive watch, a gift from his
father on his last birthday. "We've only got eight more minutes of
bottom time. Let's be quick."
"I'll meet you back here in six," Dahlgren said, then disappeared with
a kick of his fins through the gash in the hangar wall.
Dirk entered the gloomy crevice adjacent to the hangar, diving past a
jagged edge of mangled and twisted steel. As he descended, he could
make out the sub's unusual twin side-by-side pressured hulls, which ran
lengthwise down the keel. He entered an open bay and quickly
identified it as the remains of the control room, as evidenced by a
large mounted helm's wheel, now covered in barnacles. An array of
radio equipment was fixed to one side of the room-while an assortment
of mechanical levers and controls protruded from another wall and
ceiling. Shining his light on one set of valves, he made out barasuto
tanku in white lettering, which he presumed operated the ballast
tanks.
Kicking his fins gently, Dirk moved forward at a deliberate pace trying
not to stir up sediment from the deck. As he passed from one
compartment to the next, the submarine seemed to echo with the life
from the Japanese sailors. Dining plates and silverware were strewn
across the floor of a small galley. Porcelain sake vials were still
standing in cabin shelves. Gliding into a large wardroom where
officers' staterooms lined one side, Dirk admired a small Shinto shrine
mounted on one wall.
He continued forward, cognizant of his dwindling bottom time but
careful to take in all that his eyes could absorb. Moving past a
maze
of pipes, wires, and hydraulic lines, he reached the chief's quarters,
near the forward part of the ship. At last, he approached his
objective, the forward torpedo room, which loomed just ahead. Thrusting
ahead with a powerful scissors kick, he advanced to the torpedo room
entrance and prepared to pass in. Then he stopped dead in his
tracks.
He blinked hard, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Then
he turned off his light and looked through the hatch again. He was not
imagining what he saw.
In the inky bowels of the rusting warship, entombed at the bottom of
the sea for over sixty years, Dirk was welcomed by a faint but distinct
flashing green light.
Dirk pulled himself through the hatch and into the pitch-black darkness
of the torpedo room, save for the penetrating beam of light. As his
eyes adjusted to the blackness, the flashing green light became
clearer. It appeared to be a pair of tiny lights, situated at eye
level, and fixed at the far side of the room.
Dirk turned his own light back on and surveyed the room. He was in the
upper torpedo room, one of two torpedo bays the I-403 had stacked
vertically at the bow of the sub. Near the forward bulkhead, he could
see the round chamber hatches for the four twenty-one-inch-diameter
torpedo tubes. Lying in racks on either side of the room were six of
the huge Type 95 torpedoes, large and deadly fish that were both more
reliable and more explosive than the American counterpart during the
war. Jumbled on the floor, Dirk shined his light on two additional
torpedoes that had been jarred out of their racks when the submarine
had slammed into the bottom. One torpedo lay flat on the floor, its
nose angled slightly off bow from where it had rolled after
hitting the deck. The second torpedo was propped on some debris near
its tip, pointing its nose lazily upward. It was just above this
second torpedo where the eerie green light flashed on and off.
Dirk floated over to the pulsating light, putting his face mask up
close to the mystery beam. It was nothing more than a small stick-on
digital clock wedged at the end of the torpedo rack. Fluorescent green
block numbers flashed a row of zeroes, indicating an elapsed time that
had run out more than twenty-four hours before. Days, weeks, or months
before, it would be impossible to tell. But it certainly could not
have been placed there sixty years earlier.
Dirk plucked the plastic clock and stuffed it in a pocket of his BC,
then peered upward. His expended air bubbles were not gathering at the
ceiling, as expected, but were trailing upward and through a shaft of
pale light. He kicked up with his fins and found that a large hatch to
the open deck had been wedged open several feet, easily allowing a
diver access to and from the torpedo bay.
A crackly voice suddenly burst through his earpiece. "Dirk, where are
you? It's time to go upstairs," Dahlgren's voice barked.
"I'm in the forward torpedo room. Come meet me on the bow, I need
another minute."
Dirk looked at his watch, noting that their eight minutes of bottom
time had expired, then swam back down to the torpedo rack.
Two wooden crates were crushed beneath one of the fallen torpedoes,
split open like a pair of suitcases. Constructed of hardwood mahogany,
the crates had amazingly survived the ravages of salt water and
microorganisms and were in a minimal state of decay. He curiously
noted that no silt covered the broken crates, unlike every other object
he had seen on the submarine. Someone had recently fanned away the
sediment to reveal the crates' contents.
Dirk swam over to the closest crate and looked inside. Like a half
carton of eggs, six silver aerial bombs were lined up in a
custom-fitted casemate. Each bomb was nearly three feet long and
sausage-shaped, with a fin-winged tail. Half of the bombs were still wedged under the torpedo,
but all six had been broken up by the torpedo's fall. Oddly,
to Dirk, they appeared to be cracked rather than simply crushed. Running
his hand over an undamaged section of one of the bombs, he was
surprised to feel the surface had a glassy smoothness to the touch.
Kicking his fins gentry, Dirk then glided over to the other crate and
found a similar scene. All of the bomb canisters had been crushed by
the falling torpedo in the second crate as well. Only this time, he
counted five bombs, not six. One of the casings was empty. Dirk
shined his light around and surveyed the area. The deck was clear in
all directions, and no fragments were evident in the empty slot. One
of the bombs was missing.
"Elevator, going up," Dahlgren's voice suddenly crackled.
"Hold the door, I'll be right there," Dirk replied, glancing at his
watch to see that they had overrun their bottom time by almost five
minutes. Examining the smashed crates a last time, he tugged on one of
the less mangled bombs. The ordnance slipped out of its case but fell
apart into three separate pieces in Dirk's hands. As best he could, he
gently placed the pieces into a large mesh dive bag, then, holding
tight, he kicked toward the open hatch above. Pulling the bag through
the hatch after him, Dirk found Dahlgren hovering above the sub's bow a
few yards in front of him. Joining hi
s dive partner, the two wasted no
time in kicking toward their decompression stop.
Tracking their depth as they rose, Dirk flared his body out like a
sky-diver at forty feet to slow his ascent and purged a shot of air out
of his BC. Dahlgren followed suit and the two men stabilized
themselves at a depth of twenty feet to help rid their bodies of
elevated levels of nitrogen in their blood.
"That extra five minutes on the bottom cost us another thirteen of
decompression time. I'll be sucking my tank dry before thirty-eight
minutes rolls around," Dahlgren said, eyeing his depleted air gauge.
Before Dirk could answer, they heard a muffled metallic clang in the
distance.
"Never fear, Leo is here," Dirk remarked, pointing at an object forty
feet to their side.
A pair of silver scuba tanks with attached regulators dangled at the
twenty-foot mark, tied to a rope that ascended to the surface. At the
other end of the rope, Delgado stood munching a banana on the back deck
of the Grunion, tracking the men's air bubbles and making sure they
didn't stray too far from the boat. After hovering for a
fifteen-minute decompression stop at twenty feet, the men grabbed the
regulators affixed to the dangling tanks and floated up to ten feet for
another twenty-five-minute wait. When Dirk and Dahlgren finally
surfaced and climbed aboard the boat, Delgado acknowledged the men with
just a wave as he turned the boat for landfall.
As the boat motored into the calmer waters of the Strait of Juan de
Fuca, Dirk unwrapped the bomb canister fragments and laid them on the
deck.
"No sign of one of these on the aircraft, or in the hangar?" Dirk
asked.
"Definitely not. There was plenty of parts, tools, and other debris in
the hangar, but nothing that looked like that," Dahlgren replied,
eyeing the pieces. "Why would a canister crack open like that?"
"Because it's made of porcelain," Dirk replied, holding a shard up for
Dahlgren's closer inspection.
Dahlgren ran a finger over the surface, then shook his head. "A
porcelain bomb. Very handy for attacking tea parties, I presume."
"Must have something to do with the payload." Dirk rearranged the
fragments until they fit roughly together, like pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle. The payload armament had long since washed away in the sea,
but several compartmentalized sections formed in the interior were
clearly evident.
"Looks like different combustibles were to react together when
detonated."
"An incendiary bomb?" Dahlgren asked.
"Perhaps," Dirk replied quietly. He then reached into the side
pocket of his BC and pulled out the digital timer. "Someone went to a
fair amount of trouble to retrieve one of these bombs," he said,
tossing the timer over to Dahlgren.
Dahlgren studied the device, turning it over in his hands.
"Maybe it was the original owner," he finally said with seriousness.
Raising his arm with the timer in his palm, he showed Dirk the backside
of the clock. In raised lettering on the plastic case was an
indecipherable line of Asian script.
Like A pack of hyenas fighting over a freshly killed zebra, the
president's security advisers were biting and yipping at each other in
a self-serving attempt to dodge responsibility over the events in
Japan. Tempers flared across the Cabinet Room, situated in the West
Wing of the White House.
"It's a breakdown of intelligence, clear and simple. Our consulates
are not getting the intelligence support they need and two of my people
are dead as a result," the secretary of state complained harshly.
"We had no advance knowledge of an increase in terrorist activity in
Japan. Diplomatic feeds from State reported that Japanese security
forces were in the dark as well," the deputy CIA director fired back.
"Gentlemen, what's done is done," the president interjected as he
attempted to light a large old-fashioned smoking pipe. Bearing the
physical appearance of Teddy Roosevelt and the no-nonsense demeanor of
Harry Truman, President Garner Ward was widely admired by the public
for his common sense and pragmatic style. The
first-term president from Montana welcomed spirited debate among his staff
and cabinet but had a low tolerance for finger-pointing and
self-serving pontification.
"We need to understand the nature of the threat and the motives of our
opponent, and then calculate a course of action," the president said
simply "I'd also like a recommendation as to whether Homeland Security
should issue an elevated domestic security alert." He nodded toward
Dennis Jimenez, sitting across the Cabinet Room conference table, who
served as secretary of the homeland security department. "But first,
we need to figure out who these characters are. Martin, why don't you
fill us in on what we know so far?" the president said, addressing FBI
Director Martin Finch.
An ex-Marine Corps MP, Finch still sported a crew cut and spoke with
the blunt voice of a basic training drill sergeant.
"Sir, the assassinations of Ambassador Hamilton and Deputy Chief of
Mission Bridges appear to have been performed by the same individual.
Surveillance video from the hotel where Bridges was killed exposed a
suspect dressed as a waiter who was not known to be an employee of the
hotel. Photographs from the video were matched to eyewitness accounts
of an individual seen at the Tokyo area golf course shortly before
Ambassador Hamilton was shot."
"Any tie-in to the killing of the executive Chris Gavin and the Sem-Con
plant explosion?" the president inquired.
"None that we have been able to identify, although there is a potential
indicator in the note left with Bridges's body. We are, of course,
treating it as a related incident."
"And what of the suspect?" the secretary of state asked.
"The Japanese authorities have been unable to make a match in their
known criminal files, or provide a possible identification, for that
Matter. He was not a previously recognized member of the Japanese Red
Army cell. He is apparently something of an unknown. The Japanese law
enforcement agencies are cooperating fully in the manhunt and have
placed their immigration checkpoints on high alert."
"Despite no prior connection, there would seem to be little doubt that
he is operating under the auspices of the Japanese Red Army," the CIA
deputy added.
"The note left with Bridges. What did it say?" asked Jimenez.
Finch rifled through a folder, then pulled out a typewritten sheet.
"Translated from Japanese, it says: "Be vanquished, American
imperialists who soil Nippon with greed, or death will blow her cold,
sweet breath to the shores of America. JRA." Classic fringe cult
hyperbole."
"What is the state of the Japanese Red Army? I thought they were
essentially dissolved a number of years ago," President Ward asked.
Waiting for the reply, he tilted his head back and blew a cloud of
cherry-scented tobacco smoke toward the paneled ceiling
before Finch
answered.
"As you may know, the Japanese Red Army is a fringe terrorist group
that grew out of a number of communist factions in Japan during the
seventies. They promote an anti-imperialist rant and have supported
the overthrow of the Japanese government and monarchy by both
legitimate and illegitimate means. With suspected ties to the Middle
East and North Korea, the JRA was behind a number of bombings and
hijackings, culminating in the attempted takeover of the U.S. embassy
in Kuala Lumpur in 1975. They seemed to lose support in the nineties,
and by 2000 the known leadership of the organization had been largely
apprehended. Though many believed the organization was dead,
indications of the group's stirrings have been seen again in the last
two years. Published doctrines and active media reporting in Japan
have provided a new sounding board, gaining more reception in the
country's declining economic climate. Their message has focused on
anti-American and anticapitalist tenets, rather than the anarchistic
overthrow of the government, which has found a degree of support within
a fragment of the population's youth. Oddly, there is no visible front
man, or poster child, for the group."
"I can endorse Marty's comments, Mr. President," the deputy CIA
director offered. "Until the hits on our people, we've had no overt
record of activity from these people in a number of years. The known
leadership is behind bars. Quite frankly, we don't know who is now
calling the shots."
"Are we confident there is no Al Qaeda connection here?"
Dirk Pitt18-Black Wind Page 11
