Black Wind (Dirk Pitt 18)

"You do not trust his obedience to Kang?" Kim asked, unaffected by the prospect of murdering two hundred of his fellow shipmates.

"No, it is not wise. No sea captain desires to sink his own ship and abandon his crew. We shall make our escape without him."

"How is the ship to be destroyed?"

Tongju reached under his cot and pulled out a small satchel, which he handed to Kim.

"Semtex plastic explosives with wireless detonators. I intend to activate the charges while the ship is in motion."

He walked to a bulkhead and pointed at a small cutaway diagram of the Koguryo pinned to the wall.

"By blasting a series of holes in the forward hull and bow sections beneath the waterline, the momentum of the ship will force a rapid flooding of the lower decks. The vessel will plunge to the bottom like a submarine before the crew has a chance to react."

"There may still be the chance for some to escape on the lifeboats," Kim countered.

Tongju shook his head with a malignant smile. "I have applied a liquid weld compound to all of the lifeboat davits. None of those boats will be leaving this vessel without a considerable effort."

"And what about us?" Kim asked, a slight uncertainty creeping into his voice.

"You and two others will leave with me on the assault boat. I will convince Lee to let us depart the ship for an advanced surveillance check once the freighter is detected within radar range. When he has brought the Koguryo back up to speed, we will detonate the charges."

Kim let out a quiet sigh and nodded deeply. "It will not be easy to abandon my assault team," he said quietly.

"They are all good men but expendable. I will leave it to you to pick the two men to join us. But first we must get the explosives planted. Take your demolitions man, Hyun, and set the charges in the forward bow compartments E, F, and G. Don't let any of the ship

's crew observe you."

Kim grasped the satchel tightly and nodded again. "It will be done," he said, then left the cabin.

After he left, Tongju stared at the diagram of the ship for several minutes. The whole operation was a hazardous mission fraught with risks and hidden dangers. But that was exactly the way he liked it.

On a collision course with evil, the Odyssey plodded along from Long Beach at its meager pace,-the ungainly assembly churning up ten miles of foam over the course of an hour. Cutting past the California channel island of San Clemente, the Odyssey cruised due west of San Diego shortly before midnight and soon after departed the territorial waters of the United States. Fishing boats and pleasure craft gradually vanished from the horizons as the platform pushed farther into a desolate section of the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California. By the end of the third day at sea, cruising some seven hundred miles from the nearest landfall, the Odyssey shared the ocean with only a small dot on the northeast horizon.

Captain Hennessey watched with mild interest as the distant speck slowly grew larger, bearing down on a southerly heading. When it approached within five miles, he aimed his binoculars at the vessel, eye-tog a stout blue ship with a yellow funnel. In the fading evening dusk,

Hennessey made it out to be a research vessel or special-purpose ship rather than a commercial freighter. He noted with annoyed curiosity that the ship was on a perfect collision course with the Odyssey's current heading. Hennessey stuck close to the helm for the next hour, watching the other vessel as it inched to within a mile of his starboard flank before appearing to slow and nose toward the southwest behind him.

"He's slowing to cross our wake," Hennessey said to the helmsman, dropping his binoculars from the mysterious blue ship. "The whole empty Pacific Ocean and he's got to run right down our path," he muttered, shaking his head.

The thought never occurred to him that it was anything more than a coincidental encounter. Nor would he ever suspect that a trusted crewman, one of a handful of Kang's men working on board as launch technicians, was feeding their exact position to the ship using a simple GPS receiver and portable radio transmitter. After crossing the length of the Pacific, the Koguryo had picked up the radio transmission twenty-four hours earlier and vectored in on the Odyssey's path like a homing pigeon to roost.

As the lights of the unknown ship twinkled off the Odyssey's port stern in the evening darkness, Hennessey put the ship out of his mind and focused on the empty blackness before him. They were still nearly ten days to the equator and there was no telling what other obstacles might cross their path.

The experienced assault team came quickly, in the dark of night and with complete surprise. After shadowing the Odyssey for most of the evening, the Koguryo had suddenly stopped its engines, letting the self-propelled platform churn on toward the horizon. In the pilothouse of the Odyssey, the night shift helmsman and watch officer relaxed as the lights of the other ship fell away. With an autopilot steering the platform, their only concerns were monitoring the radar screen and weather forecast. But on an empty sea in the dead of night, there was little cause for concern. Focus on duty waned as the two men paced the bridge, engaging in a tireless debate about World Cup soccer rather than studying the electronic monitors about them. Had either man watched the radarscope more closely, they would have had an inkling of things to come.

Far from changing course or making repairs, the Koguryo had stopped to launch its high-speed tender. The open-decked, thirty-foot boat was a spacious and luxurious assault craft for Tongju, Kim, and the dozen other men dressed in black commando outfits who sat brandishing their assault rifles on leather-cushioned seats. Though low on stealth, the boat provided a fast and stable means of crossing open water to strike the platform with an ample attack force.

The tender bounded in darkness across the rolling waves, racing across the open sea under a bright canopy of stars that spread from horizon to horizon. The speedy boat quickly gobbled up ground between itself and the moving platform, which was lit up against the night sky like a Times Square marquee. As the tender's pilot approached the shadow of the massive platform, he steered the boat dead center under the structure, threading the boat between the Odyssey's twin pontoons. Holding its speed, the boat darted under the platform and past the thick support columns, barely skimming under a set of massive triangular supports that horizontally crisscrossed the columns just twelve feet above the water. Slowing to match speeds with the Odyssey, he inched toward the forward starboard column, where a salt-encrusted steel stairway led up to the heights above. When he edged to within a few feet, one of the commandos leaped from the bow with a small line and quickly tied it to the stairwell post. One by one, the remaining commandos jumped onto the stairwell and began the long climb to the platform above. Pausing at the top steps to catch their breath, the team paused for a moment to regroup before Tongju nodded his head to proceed. The secure door to the stairwell had been left unlocked by one of Kang's crewmen already aboard and the commandos quickly slipped through and fanned out across the deck.

Though Tongju had studied photos and plans of the Odyssey, he was still overwhelmed by the massive scale of the launch deck, which stretched well over a football field in length. At the far end stood the launch tower, separated by a large tract of open deck that led to the launch vehicle hangar. Along the recessed starboard beam sat the massive fuel storage tanks, which would gas up the rocket shortly before launch. On either side of the launch vehicle hangar stood two small buildings that housed the crew's quarters, offering accommodations for sixty-eight men plus a galley and medical station. That would be the first target.

The assault team was primed to strike simultaneously, five men to the hangar, three to the bridge, and the balance to the crew's quarters. Most of the forty-two-man crew aboard the Odyssey had little to do until the platform reached the launch site and spent the hours reading, playing cards, or watching movies. By 3 a.m." only a handful of men were still awake, mostly crewmen assigned to sail the platform or monitor the launch vehicle. When the commandos struck the crew's quarters with drill precision, the confused technicians and engineers were too stunned to react. With a blast of light and prodding from the muzzles of AK-74 assault rifles, the sleeping men were quickly roused at gunpoint. Two men playing cards in the galley thought it was some sort of equatorial prank before a swinging rifle butt knocked one to the floor. A startled chef in the kitchen dropped a stack of pans at the sight of the armed men, doing more to wake the disbelieving crew than the gunmen themselves.

In the launch vehicle hangar, it was a similar story. The small commando team rapidly swept through the air-conditioned building that housed the cradled Zenit rocket, rounding up a handful of engineers without a fight. On the bridge situated high atop the launch vehicle hangar, the two men manning the helm couldn't believe their eyes when Tongju walked in and calmly leveled his Glock pistol at the executive officer's ear. In less than ten minutes, the entire platform was secured by Tongju's men. Not a shot fired, the Sea Launch crew never expected to be commandeered in the middle of the Pacific.

The commandos were surprised to find that most of the platform's marine crew were Filipino while the launch team was an assorted mix of American, Russian, and Ukrainian engineers. The subdued multinational crew was herded to the galley where they were held at gunpoint, except for the dozen of Kang's planted crew members and satellite company representatives, who took over operational control of sailing the platform. Even Captain Hennessey, captured and roughly bound by one of Kim's men, was forced to the galley in shock, with the rest of his crew.

On the bridge, Tongju radioed the Koguryo that the platform was taken with no resistance. Examining an unfurled navigation chart left on a side table, he barked at one of Kang's crewmen now manning the helm.