Black Wind (Dirk Pitt 18)

"Sorry that I didn't personally check the vent hatch in the first place, sir. We could have gotten everyone out sooner had we known it was actually unlocked."

"But it wasn't. Don't you get it? It was Dirk who unlocked it. He knocked on the door for us but we forgot to answer."

A look of enlightenment crossed Ryan's face. "Thank God for him

and Summer, the poor devils. But I'm afraid we're not out of the woods yet, sir. She's going down fast."

"Spread the word to abandon ship. Let's get some lifeboats in the water, pronto," Morgan replied, stumbling up the inclining deck toward the bow. "I'll see about sending a distress."

As if on cue, Melissa the communications officer came scrambling across the deck half out of breath.

"Sir," she gasped, "they've shot up the communications system ... and satellite equipment. There's no way to send a Mayday."

"All right," Morgan replied without surprise. "We'll deploy our emergency beacons and wait for someone to come looking for us. Report to your lifeboat. Let's get everybody off this ship now."

While heading to assist with the lifeboats, Ryan now noticed that the Starfish was missing. Slipping into the auxiliary lab, he found that the recovered bomb canisters had been neatly removed, dissolving any doubts about the reason for the assault.

After their ordeal in the storage hold, an unusual calmness fell over the crew as they abandoned ship. Quietly and in composed order, the men and women quickly made their way to their respective lifeboat stations, glad to have a second chance at life despite the fact their ship was sinking beneath their feet. The advancing water was proceeding rapidly up the deck and two lifeboats closest to the stern were already flooded before they could be released from their davits. The assigned crew was quickly dispersed to other boats, which were being launched to the water in a torrid frenzy.

Morgan hobbled up the sloping deck, which was now inclined at a thirty-degree angle, till reaching the captain's boat, which sat loaded and waiting. Morgan stopped and surveyed the ship's decks a last time, like a gambler who had bet, and lost, the farm. The ship was creaking and groaning as the weight of the salt water filling its lower compartments tugged at the vessel's structural integrity. An aura of sadness enveloped the research ship, as if it knew that it was too soon for it to be cast to the waves.

At last confident that all the crew were safely away, Morgan threw a sharp salute to his vessel, then stepped into the lifeboat, the last man off. The boat was quickly winched down to the rolling sea and motored away from the stricken ship. The sun had just crept over the horizon and cast a golden beam on the research ship as it struggled for its last moments. Morgan's lifeboat was just a few yards away from the Sea Rover when her bow suddenly rose sharply toward the sky, then the turquoise ship slipped gracefully into the sea stern first amid a boiling hiss of bubbles.

As the ship slipped from view, its traumatized crew was overcome by a solitary sensation: silence.

Something's rotten in Denmark." Summer ignored her brother's words and held a small bowl of fish stew up to her nose. After uninterrupted confinement for most of the day, the heavy door of their cabin had burst open and a galley cook wearing a white apron entered with a tray containing the stew, some rice, and a pot of tea. An armed guard watched menacingly from the hallway as the food was set down and the nervous cook quickly left without saying a word. Summer was famished and eagerly surveyed the food as the door was bolted back shut from the outside.

Taking a deep whiff of the fish stew, she wrinkled her nose.

"I think there's a few things rotten around here as well," she said.

Moving on to the rice, she drove a pair of chopsticks into the bowl and began munching on the steamed grains. At last bringing relief to her hunger pangs, she turned her attention back to Dirk, who sat gazing out the porthole window.

"Aside from our crummy lower-berth cabin, what's bugging you now?" she asked.

"Don't quote me on this, but I don't think we're headed to Japan."

"How can you tell?" Summer asked, scooping a mound of rice into ] her mouth.

"I've been observing the sun and the shadows cast off the ship. We should be heading north-northeast if we were traveling to Japan, but it appears to me that our course heading is more to the northwest."

"That's a fine line to distinguish with the naked eye."

"Agreed. But I just call 'em as I see 'em. If we pull into Nagasaki,! then just send me back to celestial navigation school."

"That would mean we're heading toward the Yellow Sea," she replied, picturing an imaginary map of the region in her head. "Do you think we're sailing to China?"

"Could be. There's certainly no love lost between China and Japan. Perhaps the Japanese Red Army has a base of operations in China. That might explain the lack of success the authorities have had in tracking down any suspects in Japan."

"Possibly. But they'd have to be operating with state knowledge or sponsorship, and I would hope they'd think twice before sinking an American research vessel."

"True. Then again, there is another possibility."

Summer nodded, waiting for Dirk to continue.

"The two Japanese hoods who shot up my Chrysler. A forensics doctor at the county morgue thought that the men looked Korean."

Summer finished eating the rice and set down the bowl and chopsticks.