Black Wind (Dirk Pitt 18)

"There's plenty of places on a ship outside of the cargo containers where somebody could hide a bomb," Dahlgren stated.

"That's a more difficult problem, but it's where the dogs come into play," Aimes replied, nodding his head toward the far end of the bridge. Dirk noticed for the first time that a pair of yellow Labrador retrievers were tied to a bulkhead stanchion and lay asleep on the deck. Summer had already made her way over to the dogs and begun scratching them contentedly behind the ears.

"The dogs are trained to sniff out a variety of explosive compounds commonly used in bomb manufacture. Best of all, they can run through a ship in quick order. If a biological bomb is being smuggled in on a containership, there's a good chance those boys could sniff out the explosives component of it."

"That's what we're looking for," Dirk said. "So, we'll be working off of San Diego?"

"No," Aimes replied, shaking his head. "There's only minimal commercial traffic that moves through San Diego and the regional Coast Guard vessels are more than adequate to handle the volume. We've

been ordered to patrol a quadrant southwest of the Port of Los Angeles in support of the L.A.-Long Beach Coast Guard Marine Safety Group. Once on site, we'll coordinate local positioning and boarding through Icarus!"

"Icarus?" Dahlgren asked.

"Our all-seeing eye in the sky on the project," Dirk said with a knowing smile.

As the Deep Endeavor chugged toward the Pacific, cruising past Coronado Island and a Navy aircraft carrier inbound from the Indian Ocean, Dirk and Summer went aft and studied the strange submersible that faintly resembled a steroid-augmented earthworm. The bullet-shaped vessel was dotted with a series of bladed propulsion units mounted irregularly about the main body like glued-on heat pumps. Strutted beneath the front of its bullet nose stood a giant coring device that stood ten feet long, protruding upward like a unicorn's horn. Bathed in its garish orange red metallic hue, the submersible reminded them of a giant insect from a fifties horror film.

"What's the story on this contraption?" Summer asked of Dahlgren.

"Your father didn't tell you about the Badger? It's a prototype that he authorized. That's why we were here in San Diego. Some of our engineers have been working on a joint venture with Scripps Institute to develop this hot rod. It's a deep-water corer designed to gather sediment samples from the seabed. The scientific community is anxious to gather sediment and organism samples around volcanic hydrothermal vents, many of which are located ten thousand feet or deeper."

"What's with a

ll the propulsion units?" Dirk asked. "To get to the bottom in a hurry. She's a real speed buggy. Rather than waiting for gravity to pull her to the seafloor, she has a hydrogen fuel cell power plant that allows her to submerge at speed to the bottom. She allows you to descend, take a core sample, and then pop back to the surface without twiddling your thumbs all day. Less time spent diving and surfacing means more core samples for the geologists to pick through."

"And the boys at Scripps were actually willing to trust you behind the wheel?" Summer asked with a laugh.

"They didn't ask how many speeding tickets I have on land so I didn't feel compelled to tell them," Dahlgren replied with mock innocence.

"Little do they know," Dirk grinned, "that they just loaned their new Harley-Davidson to Evel Knievel."

The Deep Endea vor steamed up the California coast for three hours before turning out to sea just before darkness. Dirk stood on the bridge watching the ship's progress on a colored navigation map displayed on an overhead monitor. As the coastline fell away behind them, he observed the island of San Clemente scroll up on the map to the west of their aligned path. He studied the map for a moment, then turned to Aimes, who stood nearby examining a radarscope.

"I thought your interdictions were restricted to no more than twelve miles from the coast? We're headed by San Clemente Island, which is over fifty miles from the mainland."

"For normal coastal duty, we recognize the twelve-mile limit from the mainland. The Channel Islands are technically a part of California, however, so, legally, we can operate from the islands as an origination point. For this mission, we have been given temporary authorization to expand our normal interdiction zone, with the Channel Islands as a baseline. We'll set up position about ten miles west of Santa Catalina as our base monitoring position."

Two hours later, they cruised beyond the large island of Catalina

and the engines slowed as they neared their station point. At a slow crawl, the Deep Endeavor began patrolling a large north-to-south loop west of the island, using the ship's radar as surveillance eyes. A sprinkling of pleasure craft and fishing boats was all the radar detected, along with a Coast Guard cutter on patrol nearby to the north.

"We are positioned well south of the main shipping lane to L.A. and not likely to catch much night traffic in this quadrant," Aimes said. "We'll get tossed into the fray in the morning when Icarus shows up for work. In the meantime, I suggest we take shifts and get some sleep."

Dirk took the hint and walked out onto the bridge wing, inhaling a deep breath of sea air. The night was still and damp and the seas almost as flat as a pancake. As he stood in the darkness, his mind tumbled over his meeting with Kang and the less-than-implicit threat that the mogul had delivered to Summer and him. Another week and the South Korean Assembly vote would be history and the legal authorities could pursue Kang with full fury. That's all they needed. A week without incident. As he stared at the sea, a chilled gust of wind suddenly whisked his face, then fell away again just as suddenly, leaving a tranquil and seeming calm.

By 9 p.m." the Odyssey had backtracked some three hundred miles and was now approaching the designated launch position calibrated in Inchon. Tongju, catching up on some lost sleep in Captain Hennessey's cabin, was startled awake by a rapid pounding at the door. An armed commando entered the room and bowed as Tongju sat up and began pulling on his boots.

"So sorry to intrude," the commando said apologetically. "It's Captain Lee. He has requested that you return to the Koguryo at once. There is some sort of dispute with the Russian launch engineers."

Tongju nodded, then shook off the cobwebs and made his way to the pilothouse, where he verified that the platform was still cruising north-northeast at 12 knots. Radioing for the Koguryo's tender, he made his way down the long flight of stairs on the forward piling and hopped into the idling boat that awaited him. A short ride took him to the nearby support ship, where Captain Lee was waiting for him.

"Come with me to the Launch Control Center. It's those damn

Ukrainians," the captain cursed. "They can't agree on where to position the platform for launch. I think they're going to kill one another." The two men made their way down a flight of stairs and along an interior passageway to the expansive Launch Control Center. As Lee opened a side entry door, a loud staccato of foreign swearing burst upon their ears. At the center of the room, a group of launch engineers were huddled loosely around the two Ukrainian launch specialists, who stood toe-to-toe with their arms in the air arguing violently with each other. The crowd of engineers parted as Tongju and Lee approached, but the Ukrainians didn't skip a beat. Looking on in disgust, Tongju turned and grabbed a padded console chair, then lifted it over his head and hurled it at the two jabbering engineers. The gathered spectators gasped as the chair flew into the two men, smashing into their heads and chests before ricocheting to the floor with a crash. The stunned Ukrainians finally fell silent as they shook off the blow from the flying chair and turned toward the two men. "What is the issue here?" Tongju growled.

One of the Ukrainians, a goateed man with shaggy brown hair, cleared his throat before speaking.

"It is the weather. The high-pressure front over the eastern Pacific, specifically off North America, has stalled due to the push from a low-pressure system in the south." "And what does this mean?"