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.
A wave jostled the tender, and Tongju braced himself against a side
railing as he jerked the stock of the AK-74 assault rifle to his
shoulder. He barely noticed the small green object that fluttered down
and struck the deck beside him as he took aim at Pitt's head poking out
the cockpit window. His finger was just tightening on the trigger when
a loud poof erupted at his feet.
The cigar's glowing ember ignited the gasoline vapors rising off the
deck before the stogie even struck the surface. The airship's rain of
gasoline had sprayed everywhere and in seconds the whole stern of the
boat was a wall of flame. A commando standing beside Tongju had been
drenched in fuel and the flames shot up his legs and torso in a rush.
The panicked man dropped his weapon and danced frantically about the
Dirk Pitt18-Black Wind Page 54