they pirouetted. Bridges downed a shot of warm sake to help deaden the
pain of listening to the French ambassador drone on about the poor
quality of Asian wines while he watched the dancers spin.
As the first course was finished, a litany of corporate executives ok
to the stage to promote their self-importance with blustery speeches.
Bridges took the opportunity to visit the restroom and, with large
bodyguard leading the way, walked down a side corridor and into the
men's room.
The bodyguard scanned the tiled restroom, finding only a waiter washing
his hands in a sink at the far end. Letting Bridges pass to the
urinal, the bodyguard closed the door and stood facing the interior.
The bald waiter slowly finished washing his hands, then turned his back
to the bodyguard as he dried his hands from a paper towel rack. When
he spun back toward the door, the bodyguard was shocked to see a .25
automatic in the waiter's hand. A silencer was affixed to the muzzle
of the small handgun, with the business end pointed directly at the
bodyguard's face. Instinctively grabbing for his own weapon, the
bodyguard had barely moved his hand when the .25 emitted a muffled
cough. A neat red hole appeared just above the bodyguard's left
eyebrow and the large man raised up and back momentarily before
collapsing to the floor with a thud, a river of red blood running from
his head.
Bridges failed to detect the muffled gunshot but heard the bodyguard
collapse. Turning to see the waiter pointing the gun at him, Bridges
could only mutter, "What the hell?"
The bald man in the waiter suit stared back at him with deathly cold
black eyes, then broke into a sadistic grin that revealed a row of
crooked yellow teeth. Without saying a word, he squeezed the trigger
two times and watched as Bridges grasped his chest and fell to the
ground. The assassin pulled a typewritten note out of his pocket and
rolled it up tight into the shape of a tube. He then bent over and
wedged it into the dead diplomat's mouth like a flagpole. Carefully
disassembling his silencer and placing it in his pocket, he gingerly
stepped over the two bodies and out the door, disappearing down a hall
toward the kitchen.
The fiberglass bow of the twenty-five-foot Parker work-boat plunged
through the deep, wide swells, cutting a white foamy path as it rolled
through the trough before cresting on the peak of the next wave. Though
tiny in comparison to most vessels in the NUMA fleet, the durable
little boat, identified on the stern as the Grunion, was ideal for
surveying inland and coastal waterways, as well as supporting
shallow-water dive operations.
Leo Delgado rolled the helm's wheel to the right and the Grunion
quickly nosed to starboard and out of the path of a large red freighter
bearing down on them near the entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
"How far from the strait?" he asked, spinning the wheel hard to port a
moment later in order to take the passing freighter's wake bow on.
Standing alongside in the cramped cabin, Dirk and Dahlgren were hunched
over a small table studying a nautical chart of their present position
near the entrance to the Pacific Ocean, some 125 miles west of
Seattle.
"Approximately twelve miles southwest of Cape Flattery," Dirk said over
his shoulder, then dictated latitude and longitude coordinates to
Delgado. The Deep Endeavor's first officer reached over to a keyboard
and tapped the position into the small boat's computerized navigation
system. A few seconds later, a tiny white square appeared in the upper
corner of a flat-screen monitor that hung from the ceiling. At the
lower edge of the monitor, a small white triangle flashed on and off,
representing the Grunion as it motored into the Pacific. With the aid
of a satellite Global Positioning System interface, Delgado was able to
steer a path directly toward the marked position.
"Now, you guys are sure Captain Burch isn't going to find out we
borrowed his support boat and are burning his fuel just for a pleasure
dive?" Delgado asked somewhat sheepishly.
"You mean this is Burch's private boat?" Dirk replied with mock
horror.
"If he comes snooping, we'll just tell him that Bill Gates stopped by
and offered us a few million stock options if he could take the Grunion
out for a spin," Dahlgren offered.
"Thanks. I knew I could trust you guys," Delgado muttered, shaking his
head. "By the way, how good is your fix on the submarine's
location?"
"Came right out of the official Navy report on the sinking that
Perlmutter faxed me," Dirk replied, grabbing the cabin door sill for
balance as the boat rolled over a large swell. "We'll start with the
position that was recorded by the destroyer after she sank the
I-403."
"Too bad the Navy didn't have GPS back in 1945," Delgado lamented.
"Yes, the wartime action reports weren't always entirely accurate,
especially where locations are concerned. But the destroyer had not
traveled very far from shore when it engaged the sub, so their reported
position ought to put us in the ballpark."
When the Grunion reached the marked position, Delgado eased the
throttle into neutral and began keying a search grid into the
navigation computer. On the back deck, Dirk and Dahlgren unpacked a
Klein Model 3000 side-scan sonar system from a reinforced plastic
crate. As Dirk hooked up the cables to the operating system, Dahlgren
reeled a yellow cylindrical sonar tow fish out over the stern gunwale
and into the water.
"The fish is out," Dahlgren yelled from the back deck, whereupon
Delgado applied a light throttle and the boat edged forward. In a
matter of minutes, Dirk had the equipment calibrated, resulting in a
continuous stream of contrasting shadowy images sliding across a color
monitor. The images were reflections of sound waves emitted from the
tow fish which bounced off the seafloor and were recaptured and
processed into visual recordings of protrusions or cavities on the sea
bottom.
"I have a one-mile-square grid plotted around the Theodore Knight's
reported position at the time she rammed the sub," Delgado said.
"That sounds like a good starting range," Dirk replied. "We can expand
the grid if we need to."
Delgado proceeded to steer the boat down a white line on the monitor
until the end of the grid was reached, then he spun the wheel around
and brought the boat down the next line in the opposite direction. Back
and forth the Grunion sailed, in narrow two-hundred-meter paths, slowly
chewing up the grid while Dirk kept a sharp eye for a long, dark shadow
on the sonar monitor that would represent the I-boat lying on the
bottom.
An hour went by and the only recognizable image that appeared on the
sonar screen was a pair of fifty-five-gallon drums. After two hours,
Dahlgren broke out tuna sandwiches from an ice chest and tried to
relieve the tedium by telling an assortment of weakly humorous redneck
; jokes. Finally, after three hours of searching, Dirk's voice suddenly
cut through the damp air. "Target! Mark position." Gradually, the
fuzzy image of an elongated object rolled across the screen, joined by
two smaller protrusions near one end and a large object lying next to
it amidships.
"Lord have mercy!" Dahlgren shouted, studying the image. "Looks like
a submarine to me."
Dirk glanced at a scale measurement at the bottom of the screen. "She's
about 350 feet long, just as Perlmutter's records indicate. Leo, let's
take another pass to verify the position, then see if you can park us
right on top of her."
"Can do," Delgado replied with a grin while swinging the Grunion around
for another run over the target. The second-pass image showed that the
submarine was clearly intact and appeared to be sitting upright on the
bottom. As Delgado punched the precise location into the GPS system,
Dirk and Dahlgren hauled in the sonar tow fish then unpacked a pair of
large dive bags.
"What's our depth here, Leo?" Dahlgren called out as he poked his feet
through the leggings of a black neoprene wet suit.
"About 170 feet," Delgado replied, eyeing a humming fathometer.
"That will only give us twenty minutes of bottom time, with a
twenty-five-minute decompression stop on the way up," Dirk said,
recalling the recommended dive duration from the Navy Dive Tables.
"Not a lot of time to cover that big fish," Dahlgren considered.
"The aircraft armament is what I am most interested in," Dirk replied.
"According to the Navy report, both aircraft were on deck when the
destroyer attacked. I'm betting those two sonar images off the bow are
the Seiran bombers."
"Suits me fine if we don't have to get inside that coffin." Dahlgren
shook his head briefly, considering the scene in his head, then
proceeded to strap on a well-worn lead weight belt.
When Dirk and Dahlgren were suited up in their dive gear, Delgado
brought the Grunion back over the target position and threw out a small
buoy tied to two hundred feet of line. The two black-suited divers
took a giant step off the rear dive platform and plunged fin first into
the ocean.
The cold Pacific water was a shock to Dirk's skin as he dropped beneath
the surface and he paused momentarily in the green liquid, waiting for
the thin layer of water trapped by the wet suit surface to match the
warmth of his body heat.
"Damn, I knew we should have brought the dry suits," Dahlgren's voice
crackled in Dirk's ears. The two men wore full-face AGA Divator MKII
dive masks with an integrated wireless communication system, so they
could talk to each other while underwater.
"What do you mean, it feels just like the Keys," Dirk joked, referring
to the warm-water islands at the south end of Florida.
"I think you've been eating too much smoked salmon," Dahlgren
retorted.
Dirk purged the air out of his buoyancy compensator and cleared his
ears, then flipped over and began kicking toward the bottom following
the anchored buoy line. Dahlgren followed, tagging a few feet behind.
A slight current pushed them toward the east, so Dirk compensated by
angling himself against the flow as he descended, trying to maintain
their relative position over the target. As they swam deeper, they
passed through a thermocline, feeling the water temperature turn
noticeably colder in just an instant. At 110 feet, the green water
darkened as the murky water filtered the surface light. At 120 feet,
Dirk flipped on a small underwater light strapped to his hood like a
coal miner. As they descended a few more feet, the elongated, dark
shape of the Japanese submarine suddenly grew out of the depths.
The huge black submarine lay quietly at the bottom, a silent iron
mausoleum for the sailors who died on her. She had landed on her keel
when she sank and sat proudly upright on the bottom, as if ready to set
sail again. As Dirk and Dahlgren drew closer, they were amazed at the
sheer size of the vessel. Descending near the bow, they could barely
see a quarter of the ship before its bulk disappeared into the murky
darkness. Dirk hovered over the bow for a moment, admiring the
impressive girth, before examining the catapult ramp that angled down
the center deck.
"Dirk, I see one of the planes over here," Dahlgren said, pointing an
arm toward a pile of debris lying off the port bow. "I'll go take a
look."
"The second plane should be farther back, according to the sonar
reading. I'll head in that direction," Dirk replied, swimming along
the deck.
Dahlgren quickly darted over to the wreckage, which he could easily see
was the remains of a single-engine float plane dusted in a heavy layer
of fine silt. The Aichi M6A1 Seiran was a sleek-looking monoplane
specially designed as a submarine-launched bomber for the big I-boats.
Its rakish design, similar in appearance to a Messerschmitt fighter,
was made comical by the attachment of two huge pontoons braced several
feet below the wing, which looked like oversized clown shoes extending
beyond the fuselage. Dahlgren could see only a split portion of one
pontoon, though, as the left float and wing had been heared off by the
charging American destroyer. The fuselage and right wing remained
intact, propped up at an odd angle by the damaged pontoon. Dahlgren
swam to the seafloor in front of the plane, studying the visible
undercarriage and wing bottom of the bomber. Moving closer, he fanned
an accumulation of silt away from several protrusions, revealing a set
of bomb grips. The clasps that secured the bomber's payload were empty
of armament.
Gliding slowly up the side of the fuselage, Dahlgren kicked over to the
half-crushed cockpit canopy and wiped away a layer of silt from the
glass enclosure. Shining his light inside, he felt his heart pound
rapidly at the startling sight. A human skull stared up at him from
the pilot's seat, the bared teeth seeming to smile at him in a macabre
grin. Playing the light about the cockpit, he recognized a pair of
deteriorated flying boots on the floorboard, a sizable bone remnant
jutting out of one opening. The collapsed bones of the pilot still
occupied the plane, Dahlgren realized, the flier having gone down with
his ship.
Dahlgren slowly backed away from the aircraft, then called Dirk on the
radiophone.
"Say, old buddy, I've got the business end of one of the float planes
here, but it doesn't look like she had any weapons mounted when she
sank. Airman Skully sends his regards, though."
"I've found the remains of the second plane and she's clean as well,"
Dirk replied. "Meet me at the conning tower."
Dirk had found the second bomber lying thirty yards away from the sub,
flipped over on its back. The two large pontoons had been ripped off
the Seiran bomber when the sub went under, and the plane's fuselage,
with wings still attached, had fluttered down to the bottom. He could
easily see that no ordinance was m
ounted on the undercarriage and found
no evidence that a bomb or torpedo had fallen away when the plane
sank.
Swimming back to the sub's topside deck, he followed the
eighty-five-foot-long catapult ramp along the bow until reaching a
large round hatch. The vertical hatch capped the end of a large
twelve-foot-diameter tube, which was mounted at the base of the conning
tower and stretched aft for more than one hundred feet. The airtight
tube had been the hangar for the Seiran aircraft, storing the sectional
pieces of the planes until they were ready for launching. Set back
above the tubular section was a small platform containing
triple-mounted 25mm antiaircraft guns, which still sat with their
barrels pointed skyward waiting for an unseen enemy.
Instead of a large metal sail rising upward, Dirk found a huge hole in
the center of the I-403, the gaping remains of where the conning tower
had been sheared off in the collision. A small school of ling-cod swam
around the jagged crater's edge, feeding on smaller marine life and
adding a splash of color to the dark scene.
"Wow, you could drive your Chrysler through that hole," Dahlgren
remarked as he swam up alongside Dirk and surveyed the crater.
"With change to spare. She must have gone down in a hurry when the
sail ripped off." The two men silently visualized the violent
collision between the two war vessels so many years before and
imagined
the agony of the helpless crew of the I-403 as the submarine sank to
the bottom.
"Jack, why don't you take a pass through the hangar and see if you can
eyeball any ordnance," Dirk said, pointing a gloved hand toward a gash
Dirk Pitt18-Black Wind Page 10