Black Wind

“Hi, sailor. Give a few girls a ride?” Dahlgren asked, poking his head into the gondola doorway.

“Certainly,” Giordino replied. “How many do you have?”

“About thirty, give or take,” Dahlgren replied, looking suspiciously at the gondola's passenger compartment.

“Shove 'em in, we'll make them fit. But we better toss any u

“You and me both, pardner,” Dahlgren replied, herding the first of the crewmen aboard.

In addition to the two-seat cockpit, the gondola's passenger compartment was configured to seat eight passengers in oversized leather airplane-type seats. Dahlgren studied the arrangement and grimaced at the prospect of squeezing all the men in and possibly grounding the blimp. As the crew climbed aboard, he checked the mountings of the seats and found that they had a quick-release mechanism for temporary removal. He quickly unlatched five of the seats and, with the help of a Russian engineer, tossed them out the door of the gondola.

“Everybody to the back of the bus,” he barked. “It's going to be standing room only.”

As the last man in his group wedged into the passenger compartment, Dahlgren turned to Al.

“How much time do we have?”

“About fifteen minutes, by my count.”

The next group of crewmen began spilling off the stairs and sprinting across the deck of the helipad. Dahlgren let out a slight sigh. There would be time, if not room, to get every man to the blimp before blastoff. But would it be enough time to stop the launch, he wondered, catching sight of the Zenit rocket standing fueled and ready across the platform.

Inside the Odyssey's bridge, Captain Christiano turned pale and shook his head silently as he surveyed the bullet-ridden computer stations and shattered glass that littered the floor. Walking to the navigation station, he curiously noticed a lonely computer mouse dangling by its cord, its companion keyboard nowhere to be seen. Ohlrogge observed that the computer drive itself was undamaged.

“I've got scores of laptop computers downstairs. We can plug one in and activate the platform controls,” he offered.

“They have no doubt secured the automated controls,” Christiano said with disgust, thrusting a thumb over his shoulder toward the window. Pitt followed his motion, observing the Koguryo sitting defiantly in the distance. Returning his gaze to the captain, Pitt caught sight of the Badger, still tied up in the water off the starboard support column far below.

“There is no time. It might take hours to work around,” Christiano continued, moving to the bridge's center console with a look of despair on his face.

“You said there was a manual override on the bridge?” Pitt asked.

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.