Black Wind (Dirk Pitt 18)

"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 mounted 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.