Black Wind dp-18

by Clive Cussler

  Sprinting to the crane, he hopped into the cab and fired up its diesel engines, immediately shoving the hand controls to raise the boom. With unbearable slowness, the boom gradually rose into the air, lifting the massive hatch cover up with it. Ryan wasted no time rotating the boom a few feet to starboard before jumping out of the cab, leaving the hatch cover dangling in the air.

  Rushing to the edge of the hold, he found more than thirty men bobbing in the water fighting for their lives. The water level had already risen to within a foot of the hatch. Another two minutes, he figured, and the men would have all drowned. Reaching his arms in, he began tugging and grabbing at the men one by one, yanking them up and out of the hold. With those on deck helping, Ryan had every man out within a matter of seconds. He ensured that he personally eased the final man out of the water, Captain Morgan.

  “Nice work, Tim,” the captain winced as he wobbled to his feet.

  “Sorry that I didn't personally check the vent hatch in the first place, sir. We could have gotten everyone out sooner had we known it was actually unlocked.”

  “But it wasn't. Don't you get it? It was Dirk who unlocked it. He knocked on the door for us but we forgot to answer.”

  A look of enlightenment crossed Ryan's face. “Thank God for him and Summer, the poor devils. But I'm afraid we're not out of the woods yet, sir. She's going down fast.”

  “Spread the word to abandon ship. Let's get some lifeboats in the water, pronto,” Morgan replied, stumbling up the inclining deck toward the bow. “I'll see about sending a distress.”

  As if on cue, Melissa the communications officer came scrambling across the deck half out of breath.

  “Sir,” she gasped, “they've shot up the communications system ... and satellite equipment. There's no way to send a Mayday.”

  “All right,” Morgan replied without surprise. “We'll deploy our emergency beacons and wait for someone to come looking for us. Report to your lifeboat. Let's get everybody off this ship now.”

  While heading to assist with the lifeboats, Ryan now noticed that the Starfish was missing. Slipping into the auxiliary lab, he found that the recovered bomb canisters had been neatly removed, dissolving any doubts about the reason for the assault.

  After their ordeal in the storage hold, an unusual calmness fell over the crew as they abandoned ship. Quietly and in composed order, the men and women quickly made their way to their respective lifeboat stations, glad to have a second chance at life despite the fact their ship was sinking beneath their feet. The advancing water was proceeding rapidly up the deck and two lifeboats closest to the stern were already flooded before they could be released from their davits. The assigned crew was quickly dispersed to other boats, which were being launched to the water in a torrid frenzy.

  Morgan hobbled up the sloping deck, which was now inclined at a thirty-degree angle, till reaching the captain's boat, which sat loaded and waiting. Morgan stopped and surveyed the ship's decks a last time, like a gambler who had bet, and lost, the farm. The ship was creaking and groaning as the weight of the salt water filling its lower compartments tugged at the vessel's structural integrity. An aura of sadness enveloped the research ship, as if it knew that it was too soon for it to be cast to the waves.

  At last confident that all the crew were safely away, Morgan threw a sharp salute to his vessel, then stepped into the lifeboat, the last man off. The boat was quickly winched down to the rolling sea and motored away from the stricken ship. The sun had just crept over the horizon and cast a golden beam on the research ship as it struggled for its last moments. Morgan's lifeboat was just a few yards away from the Sea Rover when her bow suddenly rose sharply toward the sky, then the turquoise ship slipped gracefully into the sea stern first amid a boiling hiss of bubbles.

  As the ship slipped from view, its traumatized crew was overcome by a solitary sensation: silence.

  Something's rotten in Denmark." Summer ignored her brother's words and held a small bowl of fish stew up to her nose. After uninterrupted confinement for most of the day, the heavy door of their cabin had burst open and a galley cook wearing a white apron entered with a tray containing the stew, some rice, and a pot of tea. An armed guard watched menacingly from the hallway as the food was set down and the nervous cook quickly left without saying a word. Summer was famished and eagerly surveyed the food as the door was bolted back shut from the outside.

  Taking a deep whiff of the fish stew, she wrinkled her nose.

  “I think there's a few things rotten around here as well,” she said.

  Moving on to the rice, she drove a pair of chopsticks into the bowl and began munching on the steamed grains. At last bringing relief to her hunger pangs, she turned her attention back to Dirk, who sat gazing out the porthole window.

  “Aside from our crummy lower-berth cabin, what's bugging you now?” she asked.

  “Don't quote me on this, but I don't think we're headed to Japan.”

  “How can you tell?” Summer asked, scooping a mound of rice into ] her mouth.

  “I've been observing the sun and the shadows cast off the ship. We should be heading north-northeast if we were traveling to Japan, but it appears to me that our course heading is more to the northwest.”

  “That's a fine line to distinguish with the naked eye.”

  “Agreed. But I just call 'em as I see 'em. If we pull into Nagasaki,! then just send me back to celestial navigation school.”

  “That would mean we're heading toward the Yellow Sea,” she replied, picturing an imaginary map of the region in her head. “Do you think we're sailing to China?”

  “Could be. There's certainly no love lost between China and Japan. Perhaps the Japanese Red Army has a base of operations in China. That might explain the lack of success the authorities have had in tracking down any suspects in Japan.”

  “Possibly. But they'd have to be operating with state knowledge or sponsorship, and I would hope they'd think twice before sinking an American research vessel.”

  “True. Then again, there is another possibility.”

  Summer nodded, waiting for Dirk to continue.

  “The two Japanese hoods who shot up my Chrysler. A forensics doctor at the county morgue thought that the men looked Korean.”

  Summer finished eating the rice and set down the bowl and chopsticks.

  “Korea?” she asked, her brow furrowing.

  “Korea.”

  Ed Coyle's eyes had long since grown weary of scanning the flat gray sea for something out of the ordinary. He nearly didn't trust his eyes when something finally tugged at the corner of his vision. Focusing toward the horizon, he just barely made out a small light in the sky dragging a wispy white tail. It was exactly what the copilot of the Lockheed HC-130 Hercules search-and-rescue plane had been hoping to see.

  “Charlie, I've got a flare at two o'clock,” Coyle said into his micro-phoned headset with the smooth voice of an ESPN sportscaster. Instinctively, he pointed a gloved hand at a spot on the windshield where he'd seen the white burst.

  “I got her,” Major Charles Wight replied with a slight drawl while peering out the cockpit. A lanky Texan with a cucumber-cool demeanor, the HC-130's pilot gently banked the aircraft toward the fading smoke stream and slightiy reduced airspeed.

  Six hours after departing Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, the search-and-rescue pilots had started wondering whether their mission was a wild-goose chase. Now they crept to the edge of their seats, wondering what they would find in the waters beneath them. A grouping of white dots slowly appeared on the distant horizon, gradually growing larger as the aircraft approached.

  “Looks like we've got us some lifeboats,” Wight stated as the specks grew into distinguishable shapes.

  “Seven of them,” Coyle confirmed, counting the small boats stretched in a line. Morgan had rounded up all the lifeboats and lashed them together, bow to stern, in order to keep the survivors together. As the Hercules flew in low over them, the crew of the Sea Rover waved wildly i
n response and let out a collective cheer.

  “Roughly sixty heads,” Coyle estimated as Wight brought the plane around in a slow circle. “They look to be in pretty good shape.”

  “Let's hold the PJs, drop an emergency medical pack, and see if we can initiate a sea pickup.”

  The PJs were three medically trained para rescue jumpers in the back of the plane ready to parachute out of the HC-130 at a moment's notice. Since the crew of the Sea Rover appeared in no imminent danger, Wight opted to withhold their deployment for the time being. A lo adman at the back of the Hercules instead lowered a big hydraulic door beneath the tail and, at Coyle's command, shoved out several emergency medical and ration packs, which drifted down to the sea suspended from small parachutes.

  An airborne communications specialist had meanwhile issued a distress call over the marine frequency. Within seconds, several nearby ships answered the call, the closest being a containership bound for Hong Kong from Osaka. Wight and Coyle continued to circle the lifeboats for another two hours until the containership arrived on the scene and began taking aboard survivors off the first lifeboat. Satisfied they were now safe, the rescue plane took a final low pass over the castaways, Wight waggling the wingtips as he passed. Though the pilots could not hear it, the tired and haggard survivors let out a robust cheer of thanks that echoed across the water.

  “Lucky devils,” Coyle commented with satisfaction.

  Wight nodded in silent agreement, then banked the Hercules southeast toward its home base on Okinawa.

  The large freighter had let go a welcoming blast of its Kahlenberg air horn as it glided toward the lifeboats. A whaleboat was lowered to guide the shipwreck victims around to a lowered stairwell near the stern, where most of the Sea Rover's crew climbed up to the high deck. Morgan and a few other injured crewmen were transferred to the whaleboat and hoisted up to the containership's main deck. After a brief welcome and inquiry by the ship's Malaysian captain, Morgan was rushed down to the medical bay for treatment of his wounds.

  Ryan caught up with him after the ship's doctor had tended to the NUMA captain's leg and confined him to a bunk next to the crewman with the broken leg.

  “How's the prognosis, sir?”

  “The knee's a mess but I'll live.”

  “They do amazing things with artificial joints these days,” Ryan encouraged.

  “Apparently, I'll be finding that out in an intimate way. Beats a peg leg, I guess. What's the state of the crew?”

  “In good spirits now. With the exception of Dirk and Summer, the Sea Rover's crew is all aboard and accounted for. I borrowed Captain Malaka's satellite phone and called Washington. I was able to speak directly with Rudi Gunn and informed him of our situation after briefing him on the loss of the ship. I let him know that our recovered cargo, along with Dirk, Summer, and the submersible, is believed aboard the Japanese cable ship. He asked me to express his thanks to you for saving the crew and promised that the highest levels of the government will be activated to apprehend those responsible.”

  Morgan stared blankly at a white wall, his mind tumbling over the events of the past few hours. Who were these pirates that had attacked and sunk his ship? What was their intent with the biological weapons? And what had become of Dirk and Summer?. Not generating any answers, he simply shook his head slowly.

  “I just hope it won't be too late.”

  After sailing north for a day and a half, the Baekjegradually arched its bow around toward an easterly heading. Landfall was spotted at dusk, and the ship waited until dark before creeping into a large harbor amid a hazy fog. Dirk and Summer surmised that they had, in fact, sailed to Korea and correctly guessed that they were in the South's large port city of Inchon, based on the number of internationally flagged freighters and containerships they passed entering the port.

  The cable-laying ship moved slowly past the wide-spaced commercial docks that busily loaded and unloaded huge containerships around the clock. Turning north, the Baekje crept past an oil refinery terminal, snaking around a rusty tanker ship before entering a dark and less developed corner of the harbor. Drifting past a decrepit-looking shipyard housing scores of decomposing hulks, the ship slowed as it approached a small side channel that ran to the northwest. A guard hut with a small speedboat alongside stood at the entrance to the channel, beneath a rusting sign that proclaimed, in Korean: kang MARINE SERVICES----PRIVATE.

  The Baekje^ captain maneuvered the ship gently into the channel and proceeded several hundred yards at a slow creep before rounding a sharp bend. The channel fed into a small lagoon, which was dwarfed by a massive pair of covered docks that sat at the opposite end. As if pulling a car into the garage, the Baekjeh captain inched the ship into one of the cavernous hangars that towered a solid fifty feet above the ship's forecastle. The ship was tied off under a field of bright halogen lamps that hung from the ceiling, while a large hydraulic door quietly slid shut behind them, completely concealing the vessel from outside eyes.

  A crane immediately swung over and a half-dozen crewmen began unloading the ordnance containers, which were lowered to the dock under Tongju's supervision. Once the bomb canisters were stacked on the deck in an orderly pyramid, a large white panel truck backed down the dock to the cargo. Another group of men, wearing powder blue lab coats, carefully loaded the weapons into the back of the truck, then drove away from the ship. As it turned a corner at the end of the dock, Tongju could see the familiar blue lightning bolt emblazoned on the side of the truck, beneath the words kang satellite telecommunications CORP.

  Kim approached as Tongju watched the truck exit the hangar through a guarded doorway.

  “Mr. Kang will be quite pleased when he learns that we have recovered all of the ordnance,” Kim stated.

  “Yes, though two of the twelve are worthless. The submersible pilots cracked open the last two shells and released the armament into the water. An accident, they claim, due to a loss of visibility in the water.”

  “An inconsequential loss. The overall mission was quite successful.”

  “True, but there is still a difficult operation ahead of us. I am tak tag the prisoners to Kang in order for him to interrogate them. I trust that you will administer to the ship preparations satisfactorily,” he stated rather than asked.

  “The reconfiguration of the vessel, as well as the replenishment of fuel and provisions, will begin immediately. I will ensure that the ship is ready to depart the minute our cargo is reloaded.”

  “Very well. The sooner we get to sea, the better our chances of success.”

  “We have surprise on our side. There is no way we can fail,” Kim said confidently.

  But Tongju knew otherwise. Taking a long puff on a lit cigarette, he considered the element of surprise. It could indeed mean the difference between life and death.

  “Let us just hope that our deception endures,” he finally replied thoughtfully.

  Belowdecks, Dirk and Summer were roughly roused from their cabin cell, a thick-necked guard first handcuffing their wrists behind their backs before shoving them out of the room. They were marched at gunpoint to a gangway leading off the ship, where Tongju stood watching with a sneer on his face.

  “It was a lovely cruise. You never did show us where the shuffle-board court was located, however,” Dirk said to the assassin.

  “Now, be honest,” Summer piped in. “The food didn't exactly warrant a five-star rating.”

  “The American sense of humor is hardly amusing,” Tongju grunted, his cold eyes showing that he was not the least bit entertained.

  “By the way, what exactly is the Japanese Red Army doing in Inchon, Korea?” Dirk asked bluntly.

  A barely perceptible arch crossed Tongju's brow.

  “Most observant, Mr. Pitt.” Then, ignoring his captives further, he turned to Thick Neck, who cradled an AK-74 leveled at the pair.

  “Take them to the high-speed launch and lock them in the forward berth under guard,” he barked, then turned on his heels and mar
ched to the bridge.

  Dirk and Summer were marshaled down the gangplank and across the dock to a smaller side slip, where a sleek-looking motor yacht was tied up. It was a thirty-one-meter South Pacific marine high-speed catamaran, painted a teal blue. Designed and built for passenger ferry service, it had been refitted as a fast oceangoing personal luxury yacht. Equipped with four-thousand-horsepower diesel engines, the luxury cat could cruise along at speeds over 35 knots.

  “Now, this is more my style,” Summer commented as they were prodded aboard and locked in a small but plushly appointed center berth.

  “No windows this time. Guess Mr. Hospitality didn't like your Inchon crack,” Summer added as she curled her way into a small salon chair, her hands still cuffed behind her back.

  “Me and my big mouth,” Dirk replied. “At least we now have a rough idea of where we are.”

  “Yes ... right in the middle of deep kimchi. Well, if we got to go, at least we get to go first class,” she said, admiring the walnut paneling and expensive artwork adorning the walls. “These guys certainly have some deep pockets for a second-rate terrorist organization.”

  “Apparently, they have some friends at Kang Enterprises.”

  “The shipping company?”

  "A large conglomerate. We've seen their commercial freighters around for years. They're also involved in some other high-tech businesses as well, though I'm only familiar with their shipping division. I met a guy in a bar once who worked as an oiler on one of their ships. He told me about their enclosed repair and storage facility in Inchon. Never seen anything like it. There's supposedly a dry dock at one end,

  and the place is chock-full of state-of-the-art equipment. The cable ship had the Kang trademark blue lightning bolt on the funnel. This has to be the place."

  “Glad to see all that time you spent as a barfly is finally paying off,” Summer quipped.