“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 black 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 pat
h. 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 chief engineer grunted. At his feet were three uneven-looking wooden poles, roughly ten feet in length. Each was constructed of three separate pieces of timber, crudely indented at either end with a hammer and screwdriver and fitted together in a notched tongue-and-groove fashion. Metal sheeting cannibalized from a test rack was hammered around the joints for stability and finished off in a wrapped layer of the handyman's favored duct tape.
As Mcintosh sifted through the remaining pieces of scrap wood, a sudden rushing noise drifted up from the bowels of the ship. In a few minutes, the sound doubled in intensity, resembling the rumbling waters of a turbulent stream. Mcintosh stood slowly and addressed the captain in a somber, matter-of-fact voice.
“Sir, they've opened the sea cocks. They mean to sink her.”
Several unseen voices gasped in horror at Mcintosh's words and numerous cries of “No!” echoed through the hold. Morgan ignored them all.
“Looks like we'll have to make do with three spars,” the captain replied calmly. “I need seven men on each pole. Let's get them up now.”
A rush of men moved forward and grabbed the spars as the first drops of seawater began trickling into the hold through a half-dozen small bilge drains mounted flush on the hold's deck. Within minutes, they were sloshing around in ankle-deep water as the men positioned the ends of the spars against the forward corner of the hatch, next to the entry ladder. On the top step, a man stood with a two-foot-high triangular block of timber, his job to insert it under the open hatch lid and keep it wedged open.
“Ready ... lift!” Morgan shouted.
In unison, the three teams of men pressed the tips of their spars against the hatch cover eight feet over their heads and pushed up with all their might. To everyone's surprise, the hatch cover burst open several feet, letting in a spray of muted light from the deck lights, before its weight shifted and the heavy cover slammed back down.
The forlorn man at the top of the ladder froze an instant before trying to insert the block wedge and was too late. The hatch crashed down about his head as he tried to shove the wedge into the open gap, the lip nearly taking off the fingers of his right hand. The shaken man took a deep breath, then nodded at Morgan that he was okay to try again.
“All right, let's give it another try,” Morgan commanded as water now swirled about his knees, the salt water stinging his open leg wound. “One ... two ... three!”
A loud crack ripped through the hold as the top joint on one of the spars broke clean in two, the loose section falling into the water with a splash. Mcintosh waded over and examined the damaged end piece, finding the grooved joint had broken completely off.
“Not good, sir,” he reported. “Will take some time to repair.” “Do what you can,” Morgan barked. “Let's continue with two spars ... Heave!”
The remaining men shoved at their spars but it was a lost cause. There was no way of getting enough manpower behind the two spars to apply enough leverage. Additional men crowded in to try and help, but there was simply not enough room to put more hands on the timbers and push. Twice the men strained with the additional force and were able to pry the hatch open a few inches, but it was not nearly enough to block it so that a man could escape. The surging seawater was now up to Morgan's waist and he could see in the faces of the crew that the terror of drowning was about to incite panic in the hold.
“One more try, men,” he urged on while somewhere in the back of his own mind he morbidly calculated the estimated duration it took for a man to drown.
With adrenaline pumping, the men jammed the two spars against the hatch cover one last time with all their might. This time, they seemed to find their strength and the lid began to creak up. But just as they pressed their leverage, another crack echoed through the hold. A second spar splintered at the joint and the hatch cover clanged back shut. Somewhere in a darkened corner a voice blurted out, “That's it, we're finished.”
It was enough for a trembling cook standing near the gasoline drums to lose his nerve.
“I can't swim, I can't swim!” he cried out as the water level inched up his chest.
In a frightened panic, he grabbed onto the iron rungs that ran to the vent hatch and scurried up into the shaft. Reaching the top rung in darkness, his frenzied terror continued and he began pounding on the small round hatch cover with his fists, crying to be let out. In a state of complete shock, he suddenly felt the hatch give way under his hands and drift open. With his heart pounding in disbelief, he squirmed through the hatch and stood on the deck beside the moon pool dumbfounded. It took nearly a full minute before his racing pulse began to slow and he regained composure over his senses. Realizing that he wasn't going to die just yet, he scrambled back into the hatch and down the ladder a few steps, then shouted into the hold at the top of his lungs.
“The hatch is open! The hatch is open! This way, everybody!”
Like an arm
y of angry fire ants, the panicked crew swarmed to the ladder, crushing one another to escape. By now, most of the crew were treading water or clinging to the bulkheads, while a few drifted about the hold clinging to the now-floating rubber Zodiac. The small ROV also drifted freely, casting its bright lights in a surreal glow about the hold.
“Ladies first,” Morgan shouted, deferring to the traditional rule of the sea.
Ryan, who stood near the ladder on his toes chin high to the water, tried to restore order amid the chaos.
“You heard the captain. Ladies only. Back off, you,” he growled at a pair of male biologists clamoring to get up the ladder. As the female crew members rapidly scurried up the vent and out the hatch, Ryan succeeded in maintaining some semblance of order with the dozens waiting their turn. Across the hold, Morgan could see that the water level was rising too fast. There was no way everyone was going to get out in time, assuming the ship didn't suddenly sink from under their feet to begin with.
“Ryan, get up that ladder. See if you can get the main hatch off,” Morgan ordered.
Ryan didn't take time to answer, following a ship's nurse up the ladder as fast as his legs would carry him. Squirming through the hatch and falling to the deck, he was shocked at what his eyes beheld. In the early dawn light, he could see that the Sea Rover was sinking fast by the stern. Seawater was already washing over the sternpost, while the bow poked up toward the sky at better than a twenty-degree angle. Scrambling to his feet, he saw a young assistant communications officer helping others move to a higher level on the ship.
“Melissa, get to the radio room and issue a Mayday,” he shouted, running past her.
He climbed a short stairwell to the rear hatch, his eye catching the sparkle of a light in the far distance to the north, the cable ship heading off over the horizon. Jumping up onto the hatch, he allowed himself a second to let out a brief sigh of relief. The rising waters off the stern had not yet lapped over the edge of the hatch nor had inundated the aft crane. In their haste, the commandos had even left the crane's hook-and-boom assembly attached to the hatch.
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