Black Wind (Dirk Pitt 18)

"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 along the top of the aircraft hangar. "I'll go belowdecks and do the same."

Dirk glanced at the orange face of his Doxa dive watch, a gift from his father on his last birthday. "We've only got eight more minutes of bottom time. Let's be quick."

"I'll meet you back here in six," Dahlgren said, then disappeared with a kick of his fins through the gash in the hangar wall.

Dirk entered the gloomy crevice adjacent to the hangar, diving past a jagged edge of mangled and twisted steel. As he descended, he could make out the sub's unusual twin side-by-side pressured hulls, which ran lengthwise down the keel. He entered an open bay and quickly identified it as the remains of the control room, as evidenced by a large mounted helm's wheel, now covered in barnacles. An array of radio equipment was fixed to one side of the room-while an assortment of mechanical levers and controls protruded from another wall and ceiling. Shining his light on one set of valves, he made out barasuto tanku in white lettering, which he presumed operated the ballast tanks.

Kicking his fins gently, Dirk moved forward at a deliberate pace trying not to stir up sediment from the deck. As he passed from one compartment to the next, the submarine seemed to echo with the life from the Japanese sailors. Dining plates and silverware were strewn across the floor of a small galley. Porcelain sake vials were still standing in cabin shelves. Gliding into a large wardroom where officers' staterooms lined one side, Dirk admired a small Shinto shrine mounted on one wall.

He continued forward, cognizant of his dwindling bottom time but careful to take in all that his eyes could absorb. Moving past a maze

of pipes, wires, and hydraulic lines, he reached the chief's quarters, near the forward part of the ship. At last, he approached his objective, the forward torpedo room, which loomed just ahead. Thrusting ahead with a powerful scissors kick, he advanced to the torpedo room entrance and prepared to pass in. Then he stopped dead in his tracks.

He blinked hard, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Then he turned off his light and looked through the hatch again. He was not imagining what he saw.

In the inky bowels of the rusting warship, entombed at the bottom of the sea for over sixty years, Dirk was welcomed by a faint but distinct flashing green light.

Dirk pulled himself through the hatch and into the pitch-black darkness of the torpedo room, save for the penetrating beam of light. As his eyes adjusted to the blackness, the flashing green light became clearer. It appeared to be a pair of tiny lights, situated at eye level, and fixed at the far side of the room.

Dirk turned his own light back on and surveyed the room. He was in the upper torpedo room, one of two torpedo bays the I-403 had stacked vertically at the bow of the sub. Near the forward bulkhead, he could see the round chamber hatches for the four twenty-one-inch-diameter torpedo tubes. Lying in racks on either side of the room were six of the huge Type 95 torpedoes, large and deadly fish that were both more reliable and more explosive than the American counterpart during the war. Jumbled on the floor, Dirk shined his light on two additional torpedoes that had been jarred out of their racks when the submarine had slammed into the bottom. One torpedo lay flat on the floor, its nose angled slightly off bow from where it had rolled after

hitting the deck. The second torpedo was propped on some debris near its tip, pointing its nose lazily upward. It was just above this second torpedo where the eerie green light flashed on and off.

Dirk floated over to the pulsating light, putting his face mask up close to the mystery beam. It was nothing more than a small stick-on digital clock wedged at the end of the torpedo rack. Fluorescent green block numbers flashed a row of zeroes, indicating an elapsed time that had run out more than twenty-four hours before. Days, weeks, or months before, it would be impossible to tell. But it certainly could not have been placed there sixty years earlier.

Dirk plucked the plastic clock and stuffed it in a pocket of his BC, then peered upward. His expended air bubbles were not gathering at the ceiling, as expected, but were trailing upward and through a shaft of pale light. He kicked up with his fins and found that a large hatch to the open deck had been wedged open several feet, easily allowing a diver access to and from the torpedo bay.

A crackly voice suddenly burst through his earpiece. "Dirk, where are you? It's time to go upstairs," Dahlgren's voice barked.

"I'm in the forward torpedo room. Come meet me on the bow, I need another minute."

Dirk looked at his watch, noting that their eight minutes of bottom time had expired, then swam back down to the torpedo rack.

Two wooden crates were crushed beneath one of the fallen torpedoes, split open like a pair of suitcases. Constructed of hardwood mahogany, the crates had amazingly survived the ravages of salt water and microorganisms and were in a minimal state of decay. He curiously noted that no silt covered the broken crates, unlike every other object he had seen on the submarine. Someone had recently fanned away the sediment to reveal the crates' contents.

Dirk swam over to the closest crate and looked inside. Like a half carton of eggs, six silver aerial bombs were lined up in a custom-fitted casemate. Each bomb was nearly three feet long and sausage-shaped, with a fin-winged tail. Half of the bombs were still wedged under the torpedo, but all six had been broken up by the torpedo's fall. Oddly, to Dirk, they appeared to be cracked rather than simply crushed. Running his hand over an undamaged section of one of the bombs, he was surprised to feel the surface had a glassy smoothness to the touch.

Kicking his fins gentry, Dirk then glided over to the other crate and found a similar scene. All of the bomb canisters had been crushed by the falling torpedo in the second crate as well. Only this time, he counted five bombs, not six. One of the casings was empty. Dirk shined his light around and surveyed the area. The deck was clear in all directions, and no fragments were evident in the empty slot. One of the bombs was missing.

"Elevator, going up," Dahlgren's voice suddenly crackled.

"Hold the door, I'll be right there," Dirk replied, glancing at his watch to see that they had overrun their bottom time by almost five minutes. Examining the smashed crates a last time, he tugged on one of the less mangled bombs. The ordnance slipped out of its case but fell apart into three separate pieces in Dirk's hands. As best he could, he gently placed the pieces into a large mesh dive bag, then, holding tight, he kicked toward the open hatch above. Pulling the bag through the hatch after him, Dirk found Dahlgren hovering above the sub's bow a few yards in front of him. Joining his dive partner, the two wasted no time in kicking toward their decompression stop.

Tracking their depth as they rose, Dirk flared his body out like a sky-diver at forty feet to slow his ascent and purged a shot of air out of his BC. Dahlgren followed suit and the two men stabilized themselves at a depth of twenty feet to help rid their bodies of elevated levels of nitrogen in their blood.

"That extra five minutes on the bottom cost us another thirteen of decompression time. I'll be sucking my tank dry before thirty-eight minutes rolls around," Dahlgren said, eyeing his depleted air gauge. Before Dirk could answer, they heard a muffled metallic clang in the distance.

"Never

fear, Leo is here," Dirk remarked, pointing at an object forty feet to their side.

A pair of silver scuba tanks with attached regulators dangled at the twenty-foot mark, tied to a rope that ascended to the surface. At the other end of the rope, Delgado stood munching a banana on the back deck of the Grunion, tracking the men's air bubbles and making sure they didn't stray too far from the boat. After hovering for a fifteen-minute decompression stop at twenty feet, the men grabbed the regulators affixed to the dangling tanks and floated up to ten feet for another twenty-five-minute wait. When Dirk and Dahlgren finally surfaced and climbed aboard the boat, Delgado acknowledged the men with just a wave as he turned the boat for landfall.

As the boat motored into the calmer waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Dirk unwrapped the bomb canister fragments and laid them on the deck.

"No sign of one of these on the aircraft, or in the hangar?" Dirk asked.

"Definitely not. There was plenty of parts, tools, and other debris in the hangar, but nothing that looked like that," Dahlgren replied, eyeing the pieces. "Why would a canister crack open like that?"