ightened shirt clearly revealed the shapely contour of her full breasts
and midriff. Dirk helped open the escape hatch, then quickly returned
lo the manipulator arm controls as Summer burst out of the
submersible.
Tongju was busy talking to the crane operator with his back toward the
submersible when Summer crawled out. Seeing him turned away, she
hurriedly approached the nearest commando, who stood glaring at her
exposed features with a leer. His leer turned to shock as Summer
shouted at the top of her lungs, "Get your hands off me, creep!"
Her words were followed by an open-hand slap to the man's face that
nearly sent him sprawling. If her bikini and tight shirt hadn't
already attracted everyone's attention, then her decking one of their
fellow commandos suddenly brought every eye on the ship upon her.
Every eye except Dirk's. Capitalizing on the commotion, he powered the
mechanical arm to its full lateral reach, just barely stretching its
extended claw to the bulkhead vent hatch. Grabbing the lockdown handle
with the claw, he nudged it to the unlocked position and pulled n it
just a hair, to ensure the hatch would open. Quickly letting go,
he eased the arm back alongside the Starfish, then powered it down.
Scampering out the submersible's entry hatch, he stood casually in^
back of the submersible as if he'd been there all along.
"What is this all about?" Tongju hissed as he approached Summer, his
Glock pistol drawn and aimed at her midsection.
"This pervert tried to assault me," Summer screeched, jerking a thumb
toward the slack-jawed commando. Tongju let fly a stream of
obscenities until the confounded gunman shrank like a wilting violet.
The commando leader then turned back to Summer and Dirk, who now stood
behind his sister.
"You two, back in the submersible," he commanded in English, the muzzle
of his Glock pointing the way.
"Jeez, a guy can't even stretch his legs around here," Dirk complained
as if it were his biggest concern at the moment. As they made their
way back into the submersible, they noticed for the first time that the
Japanese cable-laying ship was heaving to alongside the Sea Rover.
Though little longer than the NUMA vessel, the Japanese ship had a much
higher superstructure and seemed to tower over the Sea Rover. The
Baekje was hardly alongside a minute before a huge crane on her stern
deck swung over the Sea Rover's side rail trailing a cable with an
empty pallet that spun lazily in the breeze. From inside the
submersible, they watched as the pallet was dropped to the deck beside
them. A trio of black-clad commandos then rolled several storage
containers out of the Sea Rover's auxiliary laboratory and secured
them to the pallet. Each container, they knew, held one of the
biological bombs encased in a cushioned sheath.
The Baekje's crane operator quickly transferred the pallet back and
forth several times in the predawn darkness until all of the bomb
containers were aboard the Japanese ship. The empty pallet then became
a bus, ferrying the commandos to the ship a handful at a time. From
belowdecks, a black-clad gunman appeared and conversed briefly with
Tongju. Dirk noticed Tongju break into a thin smile, then pointed to
the submersible and barked out an order. The cable hook was released from the pallet and attached to the Starfish.
"Guess we're changing rides," Dirk commented when the cable was pulled
taut.
This time the submersible was hoisted smoothly into the air. Dirk
rapidly jabbed the mechanical arm out and rapped three times on the
rear bulkhead with the claw before being pulled up and off the deck. He
and Summer watched the Sea Rover fall away beneath them as they were
carried over the water and deposited on a high stern deck of the
Baekje. Climbing out of the submersible, they were welcomed by a pair
of armed thugs, who prodded them toward the ship's railing with their
guns.
"I've had about enough of the assault rifle hospitality," Dirk
muttered.
"I bet they feel naked when they don't have a gun in their hands,"
Summer replied.
From their vantage point, they watched as the remaining commandos were
ferried over on the pallet, Tongju riding with the last batch.
"Dirk, is it my eyes or is the Sea Rover sitting lower in the water?"
Summer asked with alarm in her voice.
"You're right," he agreed, studying the ship. "They must have opened
the sea cocks. She's listing a little to starboard as well."
The pallet carrying Tongju swung to the deck and the commando leader
jumped off, landing lightly on his feet. He immediately approached the
two captives.
"I suggest you say good-bye to your ship," he said without feeling.
"The crew is trapped in the hold, you murderous swine!" Summer cried
out.
Charged by emotion, she took a lunging step toward Tongju in anger. The
trained killer reacted instinctively, launching a vicious right kick to
Summer's midsection, sending her sprawling backward. But his trained reflexes were not swift enough to ward off the unexpected
quickness of Dirk, who sprang forward and threw a solid left hook just
as Tongju regained his footing. The crushing blow landed on Tongju's
right temple, sending him dropping to one knee, where he teetered on
the verge of blacking out. The nearby gunmen immediately jumped on
Dirk, one of them ramming an assault rifle into his stomach as two
others held back his arms.
Tongju gradually regained his senses and rose to his feet, then stepped
purposely over to Dirk. Thrusting his face close to Dirk's chin, he
spoke in a calm voice dripping with menace.
"I shall enjoy watching you die in the manner of your shipmates," he
said, then brusquely turned and walked away.
The remaining commandos roughly herded Dirk and Summer down a side
stairwell and along a narrow corridor before shoving them into a small
cabin berth. The cabin door was slammed shut behind them and locked
from the outside, where two men remained on guard.
Dirk and Summer quickly shook off the pain from their blows. Staggering
past two twin beds wedged into the tiny cabin, they pressed their faces
against a small porthole on the outside bulkhead.
"She's lower in the water," Summer observed with dread in her voice.
Through the porthole, they could see the Sea Rover still floating
alongside the Baekje, the seawater creeping inexorably closer to the
tops of her gunwales. No sign of life appeared on the decks, and the
big research vessel had all the appearance of a listing ghost ship.
Dirk and Summer searched for signs of movement aft of the moon pool but
saw nothing.
"They've either relocked the vent hatch or Morgan can't get to it, Dirk
cursed.
"Or he doesn't know it exists," Summer whispered.
Beneath their feet, they heard then felt an increased rumbling as the
Baekje's engines were engaged and the big cable ship slowly pulled
away from the sinking NUMA vessel. The predawn light had yet to edge
over the blac
k night sky and it took just a few minutes before the
sight of the Sea Rover fell away into a fuzzy grouping of twinkling
lights.
Dirk and Summer strained to watch the NUMA ship as the Baekje increased
speed and distance. The twinkling lights eventually dissolved beneath
the horizon until they could see nothing more of their ship and
comrades.
SIR, we seem to have lost all contact with the Sea Rover?" Rudi Gunn
looked up slowly from his desk. His bespectacled blue eyes bore into
the NUMA field support analyst standing nervously before him.
"How long ago?" Gunn probed.
"Our communications link fell nonresponsive a little over three hours
ago. We continued to receive a digital GPS position update, which
showed they were still fixed on site in the East China Sea. That
signal was lost approximately twenty minutes ago."
"Did they issue a distress call?"
"No, sir, none that we received." Despite ten years of service with
the agency, the analyst displayed obvious discomfort at being the
bearer of bad news to senior management.
"What about the Navy vessel? They were assigned an escort."
"Sir, the Navy rescinded their frigate escort before Sea Rover left port
in Osaka due to an exercise commitment with the Taiwanese Navy.
"That's just great," Gunn exclaimed in frustration.
"Sir, we've requested satellite imagery from the National
Reconnaissance Office. We should have something within the hour."
"I want search and rescue craft in the air now," Gunn barked. "Contact
the Air Force and Navy. See who's got the closest resources and get
them moving. Quick!"
"Yes, sir," the young man replied, nearly jumping out of Gunn's
office.
Gunn mulled over the situation. NUMA research ships had the latest in
satellite communications equipment. They wouldn't just disappear
without warning. And the Sea Rover had one of the most experienced and
competent crews in the NUMA fleet. Dirk must be right, he feared.
There must be a powerful operation that was pursuing the biological
bombs on board the I-411.
With a foreboding sense of dread, Gunn picked up his telephone and
buzzed his secretary.
"Dark, get me the vice president."
Captain Robert Morgan was not a man to go down easy. Shaking off his
shattered femur and broken cheekbone as if they were a sprain and a
scratch, he quickly took order of his shaken crew after being
unceremoniously tossed into the confined storage hold. Seconds after
his arrival, the heavy steel hatch cover was slammed down above them,
the crash of the massive lid thrusting the compartment into complete
darkness. Frightened whispers echoed off the steel walls while the
dank air hung thick with the odor of diesel fuel.
"Don't panic," Morgan bellowed in response to the murmurs. "Ryan, are
you in here?"
"Over here," Ryan's voice rang back from a corner.
"There should be a spare lightweight ROV secured in the rear. Find
some batteries and see if you can't get the lights rigged," he
ordered.
A dim light suddenly glowed in the back of the hold, the narrow beam of
a portable flashlight clasped in the paw of the Sea Rover chief
engineer.
"We'll get it done, Cap'n," growled the Irish-tinged voice of the
engineer, a red-haired salt named Mcintosh.
Ryan and Mcintosh located the spare ROV in a storage cradle, and
further rummaging under the faint light produced a stockpile of battery
packs. Ryan proceeded to cut one end of the ROV's power cable and
spliced several internal lines to the battery pack terminals. Once he
configured a complete circuit, the ROV's bright xenon lights burst on
in a blinding shower of blue-white luminescence. Several crew members
standing near the ROV's lights squinted their eyes shut tight at the
sudden surge of light in the blackened hold. Under the bath of light,
Morgan was able to examine his shipboard crew and the onboard team of
scientists, which he noted were huddled in small groups throughout the
hold. A mix of confusion and fear was reflected in the faces of most
of the men and women.
"Nice work, Ryan. Mcintosh, move those lights across the hold, please.
Now, then, is anybody hurt?" the captain said, ignoring his own severe
injuries.
A quick tally revealed a score of cuts, bumps, and bruises. But aside
from the wounded machinist and a broken leg suffered by a geologist
when he fell into the hold, there were no other serious injuries.
"We're going to get out of this," Morgan lectured confidently. "These
goons just want the items we've been salvaging off the Japanese
submarine. Chances are, they'll let us out of here just as soon as
they've smuggled the materials off to their ship," he said, internally
doubting his own words. "But, just in case, we'll figure out a way to
pop the lid on our own. We've certainly got plenty of manpower to do
it with. Mcintosh, swing that light around again, let's see what we've
got to work with around here."
Mcintosh and Ryan picked up the portable ROV and walked it toward the
center of the hold, then slowly turned it in a 360-degree circle the
bright beams spraying an arc of light over the people and objects in
its path. As a storeroom for the Starfish, the hold resembled a large
electronic parts bin. Coils of cabling hung from the bulkheads, while
spare electronic components were stored in multiple cabinets mounted on
the aft wall. Racks of test equipment lined one side of the hold,
while at the forward end of the bay a sixteen-foot Zodiac inflatable
boat sat on a wooden cradle. Off to one corner, a half-dozen
fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline were wedged alongside two spare
outboard motors. Ryan held the light shining on the drums for several
minutes, illuminating a series of iron rungs that ran up the bulkhead
and under an overhang in back of the drums.
"Captain, there's a venting hatch located up those rungs that opens up
onto the aft moon pool deck," Ryan said. "It locks from the deck side,
but there's a chance it may have been left open."
"One of you men there," Morgan barked at a trio of scientists huddled
near the drums. "Climb up that ladder and see if the hatch is
unlocked."
A barefoot oceanographer clad in blue pajamas jumped at the captain's
request and scampered up the metal rungs, disappearing into a narrow
vent shaft that was carved through the overhang. A few moments later,
he climbed back into view, his feet now sensitive to the crude ladder
steps.
"It's locked solid, Captain," he said with disappointment.
Mcintosh suddenly piped up from the center of the hold.
"Cap'n, I think we can construct a couple of spars from the wooden
supports underneath that Zodiac," he said, pointing an arm toward the
rubber boat. "With six or eight men on each, we ought to be able to
prod up a corner of the main hatch."
"Poke it off with a couple of big chopsticks, eh? That, indeed, might
work. Go to it, Mcintosh. You men over there, help get that
Zodiac
off its stand," he growled at a party assembled near the boat.
Limping over, he grabbed hold of the boat's bow and helped muscle it
off the wooden stands and onto the deck. Several men assisted
Mcintosh in dissecting the support cradle and laying out its separate
pieces while the ship's carpenter assessed how to reassemble the material into several spars.
While they worked, they could hear the muffled voices of the commandos
on deck and the whirring and clanking of the Baekje's crane as it
loaded and hoisted away the I-411's ordnance. At one point, the faint
echo of machine-gun fire was heard emanating from a distant part of the
ship. A short time later, Morgan detected the sound of the Starfish
being hoisted out of the moon pool and dropped to the deck, followed by
the shrieking cry of a woman's voice he knew to be Summer's. The
activity above them grew quieter after some banging on the bulkhead
above their heads. Eventually, the humming of the cranes and the
sporadic voices fell silent. As it became evident that the commandos
had left the ship, Morgan quietly wondered about the fate of Dirk and
Summer. His thoughts were suddenly jarred by the rumble of the
Baekje's engines vibrating through the hold as the cable ship pulled
away from Sea Rover.
"How are we coming along, Mcintosh?" he asked loudly to mask the sound
of abandonment, although he could clearly see the progress in front of
him.
"We've two spars together and are close to completing a third," the
Dirk Pitt18-Black Wind Page 28