Black Wind (Dirk Pitt 18)

Christiano anticipated the results before his eyes reached the console. They had simply known too much. How to navigate and ballast the platform, how to fuel the Zenit, how to control and launch the rocket from their own support ship. There was simply too much inside knowledge for the terrorists not to have sabotaged the manual override. With disappointing confidence in his beliefs, he looked down at a jumbled mass of cut wires and smashed controls that offered the last hope of halting the launch.

"Here's your manual override control," he swore, flinging a segregated clump of wires and switches across the bridge. The three men stood in silence as the mass of electronics bounced across the deck before coming to a halt against the bulkhead. Then the bridge door opened and Dirk thrust his head into the bay. From the looks on the other men's faces, he knew that their attempt to prevent the launch had failed.

"The crew is all aboard the airship. I respectfully suggest we abandon the platform, and now."

As the last four men aboard the platform began to scramble up the helipad stairwell to the waiting airship, Pitt stopped and grabbed his son by the shoulder.

"Get the captain aboard the blimp and tell Al to take off without me. Make sure he gets the airship up range of the platform before the rocket fires."

"But they said there was no getting around the automated launch controls," the younger Pitt protested.

"I may not be able to stop the rocket from launching, but I just might be able to change its destination."

"Dad, you can't stay aboard the platform, it's too dangerous."

"Don't worry about me, I don't intend to stick around," Pitt replied, giving his son a gentle shove. "Now get going."

Dirk looked his father in the eye. He had heard numerous tales of his father placing the safety of others above himself and now he was seeing it firsthand. But there was something else in his eyes. It was a calm look of assurance. Dirk took a step toward the stairwell, then turned back to wish his father luck but he had already vanished down the elevator.

Sprinting up the stairwell two steps at a time, the younger Pitt leaped onto the deck of the helipad and looked on in amazement at the waiting blimp. The gondola looked like a windowed can of sardines, with the fish replaced by humans. The entire Sea Launch crew had managed to squeeze aboard the passenger compartment, cramming into every available square inch. The weakest of the crew were given the three passenger seats that Dahlgren did not remove while the rest of the men stood shoulder to shoulder in the remaining space. Scores of men hung their heads out the side windows while one or two were even jammed into the small bathroom at the rear of the gondola. The sight made a New York City subway at rush hour look spacious by comparison.

Dirk ran over and wedged himself through the door, hearing Dahlgren's voice somewhere in the mass telling him that the copilot's seat was vacant. Half-crawling, he squirmed his way into the cockpit, taking the empty seat alongside Giordino, who had moved to the left-hand pilot's seat.

"Where's your dad? We need to get off this barbecue grill, pronto."

"He's staying put. Has one last trick up his sleeve, I guess. He said to get the blimp up range of the platform, and that he'll meet you for a tequila on the rocks after the show."

"I hope he's buying," Giordino replied, then tilted the propeller ducts to a forty-degree angle and boosted the throttles. The gondola chugged forward, pulling the helium-filled envelope with it. But in

stead of rising gracefully into the air as before, the gondola clung to the deck, dragging across the helipad with a dull scraping sound.

"We've got too much weight," Dirk stated.

"Get up, baby, get up," Giordino urged the mammoth airship.

The gondola continued to skid across the pad, heading to the forward edge, which dropped straight down two hundred feet to the sea. As they approached the lip of the helipad, Giordino adjusted the propellers to a higher degree of inclination and jammed the throttles to their stops but the gondola continued to scrape along the deck. An eerie silence filled the cabin, as every man held his breath while the gondola slipped over the edge of the helipad.

A falling surge suddenly hit the pit of everyone's stomach as the gondola lurched down ten feet, then halted. The occupants were roughly thrown forward as the blimp's fabric-covered tail bounced off the helipad, pushing the nose of the blimp at a steep decline as the airship's balance of weight cleared the edge. Continuing to jar forward, the tail finally scraped past the platform edge and the entire blimp rushed nose first toward the sea.

Giordino had a split-second decision to make in order to save the airship. He could either pull the thrusters all the way back to a ninety-degree vector and hope the engine propulsion would overcome the excess weight and hold the blimp at altitude. Or he could do the complete reverse: by pushing down the thrusters, he could try to increase the blimp's forward velocity, which would generate lift if he gained sufficient speed. Staring at the looming ocean, he let the momentum of the blimp guide his decision and calmly pushed the yoke forward, accelerating their downward dive.

Cries of alarm wafted from the rear passengers as it appeared Giordino was deliberately trying to crash into the sea. Ignoring the pleas, he turned to Dirk in the copilot's seat.

"Above your head there is a water ballast release control. At my command, hit the release."

While Dirk located the button on the overhead console, Giordino

focused his eyes on the altimeter. The dial was rolling backward quickly from two hundred feet as their descent speed increased. Giordino hesitated until the dial read sixty feet, then barked: "Now!"

In unison, Giordino yanked back on the yoke while Dirk activatec the water ballast system, which instantly dumped a thousand pounds of water stored in a compartment beneath the gondola. Despite the sudden actions, there was no immediate response from the blimp. The massive airship moved at its own deliberate pace, and, for an instant Giordino thought he had acted too late. As the approaching ocean filled the view out the cockpit windshield in a rush of speed, the nose gently began to pull up in a sweeping arc. Giordino eased of the yoke to level the airship as the gondola surged closer toward the sea, its nose rising with agonizing slowness. With a sudden jolt, the base of the gondola slapped the water's surface as the airship flattened from out of its dive but bounded quickly up and off the surface. As every man aboard held his breath, the blimp staggered forward a short distance before

slowly climbing a few feet above the water and holding steady. As the seconds ticked by and the airship held in the air, in became apparent that Giordino had pulled it off. Though risking high-speed impact, the accelerated dive and last-second ballast release had been just enough to keep them airborne.

The relieved men in the passenger compartment let out a cheer as Giordino gingerly coaxed the blimp up to an altitude of one hundred feet, the big airship slowly stabilizing under his steady hand.

"I guess you showed us who's master of the airship," Dirk laudedl

"Yeah, and almost commander of a submarine," Giordino replied as he eased the nose of the blimp to the east and away from the platform.