Clive Cussler: Black Wind

After setting the perforated blimp down on an unused runway at LAX, the men beat it down to Long Beach, where they met the docking Deep Endeavor. Slipping quietly aboard after the Sea Launch crew departed, they were warmly greeted by a relieved Summer and the ship's crew. Dahlgren was happy to see the mangled Badger sitting upright on the fantail deck.

“Kermit, we've got another search ahead of us,” Pitt said to Burch. “How soon can we be under way?”

“Just as soon as Dirk and Summer step ashore. Sorry, son,” he said, turning to the younger Pitt, “but I'm afraid Rudi called. He's been trying to track all four of you guys down for the last two hours. Says the top brass wants to talk to you and Summer. They need your insight on the bad guys, and right away.”

“Some guys get all the luck,” Giordino said, grinning at Dirk's misfortune.

“Seems like we never get much time with you,” Summer frowned at her father.

“We'll get the next dive in together,” Pitt said, throwing an arm around each of his kids' shoulders. “I promise.”

“I'll be counting on it,” Summer replied, giving her father a kiss to the cheek.

“Me too,” Dirk said. “And thanks for the blimp ride, Mad Al. Next time, I'm going Greyhound.”

“The highbrow type, eh?” Giordino replied, shaking his head.

Dirk and Summer said a quick good-bye to Dahlgren and the other men on the bridge, then hopped off the Deep Endeavor as the vessel backed away from the dock. A feeling of satisfaction should have beat through them, but, with Dirk, an underlying anger still brewed. The deadly virus strike had been prevented, the Koguryo was captured, and even Tongju was dead. More selfishly, Sarah was safe as well. But on the other side of the world, Kang still breathed. As they moved down the pier, Dirk felt Summer hesitating beside him and he turned and stopped so she could wave a friendly farewell to the ship. He stared and waved as well, but his mind was churning elsewhere. Together, they stood and watched a long while as the turquoise NUMA ship chugged out the harbor and eased slowly toward the western horizon.

Well before the Homeland Security investigation team thought to round up all available search and salvage vessels and comb for the sunken rocket debris, the Deep Endeavor had already slipped her towed sonar array fish over the side and was scanning the depths for the remains of the payload. Captain Burch had anticipated a salvage operation and knew precisely where to start searching. While standing on the deck of the Deep Endeavor watching the Zenit disintegrate across the sky, he had carefully tracked the trajectory of the debris and marked on a nautical chart an impact zone where he thought the nose cone struck the water.

“If the payload remained intact, it should be somewhere within that box,” he told Pitt as they chugged back to sea, pointing to a nine-square-mile grid penciled on the chart. “Though we're probably dealing with a scattered debris field.”

"Whatever is left has only been sitting on the bottom a few hours,

so we'll have a fresh profile at least," Pitt replied, studying the chart. Burch guided the Deep Endeavor to a corner of the grid, where they began running north south survey lanes. Just two hours into the search, Pitt identified the first scattering of debris visible against the rolling bottom. Pointing to the sonar monitor, he fingered a cluster of sharp-edged objects protruding in succession.

“We've got a string of man-made objects running in a rough line to the east,” he said.

“Either a local garbage scow spilled her goods or we've got a pile of rusting rocket parts,” Giordino agreed, eyeing the data.

“Kermit, why don't we break off the lane and run a tack to the east. Let's see if we can follow the debris trail and see where it leads.”

Burch ordered the ship about and they followed the trail of wreckage for several minutes as it intensified in quantity before slowly petering out. None of the debris appeared larger than a few feet long, however.

“That's one heckuva jigsaw puzzle someone's gonna have to piece together,” Burch said as the last of the wreckage fell away from the screen. “Shall we resume the survey lane?” he asked Pitt.

Pitt thought for a moment. “No. Let's hold our course. There's got to be more substantial remains.”

Pitt's years of underwater exploration had refined his senses to almost psychic ability. Like an underwater bloodhound, he could nearly sniff out the lost and hidden. There was a lot more of the Zenit still out there and he could feel it.

As the sonar monitor reeled off nothing but flat bottom, the men on the bridge began to have their doubts. But a quarter mile later, a few small pieces of ragged-edged debris crept onto the screen. Suddenly, the silhouette of a large rectangular object filled the monitor lying perpendicular to the other debris. As it rolled off the screen, a new image crawled into view. It was the shadow of a large, high cylinder.

“Boss, I think you've just found the whole enchilada,” Giordino grinned.

Studying the image with a nod, Pitt replied, “Let's go have a taste.”

Minutes later, the Deep Endeavor fixed its position by engaging its side thrusters and lowered a small remote-operated vehicle over the stern railing. A large winch unrolled the ROV's power cable as the machine sunk to the seafloor nine hundred feet beneath the surface. In a dimly lit electronics bay beneath the wheelhouse, Pitt sat in an oversized captain's chair where he controlled the unmanned submersible thrusters with a pair of joysticks. A rack of video monitors lined the wall in front of him, displaying multiple images of the sandy bottom fed from a half-dozen digital cameras mounted on the ROV.

Adjusting the thrusters so that the ROV hovered a few feet above the bottom, Pitt gently guided the submersible toward a pair of dark objects nearby. Protruding from the sandy bottom, the cameras revealed, were two jagged pieces of white metal several feet long, which were clearly chunks of skin from the Zenit rocket. Pitt kept the ROV moving past the debris until the initial sonar targets materialized in the inky water, two unmistakable sections of the launch vehicle rising high off the bottom. As the ROV moved closer, Pitt and Giordino could see the first section was nearly fifteen feet long, and almost as high, but flattened on one side. The rocket section had tumbled before impact, smacking the water lengthwise in a jarring blow that had given it the rectangle shape identified by the sonar. Guiding the ROV to one end, the cameras showed a large thruster nozzle protruding from a mass of pipes and chambers that constituted a rocket engine.

“An upper stage engine?” Giordino asked, eyeing the image.

“Probably the Zenit's third stage motor, the uppermost propulsion unit designed to drive the payload section into final orbit.”

The unfueled section appeared to have broken cleanly from the lower Stage 2 component during the explosion. But the payload section that rode above it had separated also and was no longer attached.

A few yards away, a large white object stretched into the murky range of the camera lens.

“Enough with the preliminaries. Let's go take a look at that big boy,” Giordino said, pointing to the edge of one of the video monitors.

Pitt guided the ROV toward the object, which quickly filled the video screens with white. It was clearly another section of the Zenit rocket, even more intact than the Stage 3 section. Pitt estimated it was about twenty feet long, and noticed that it appeared to have a slightly larger diameter. The nearest end was a mangled mass of carnage. Twisted and jagged edges of the white metal skin jutted inward as if mashed by a giant sledgehammer. Pitt maneuvered the ROV to peer inside but there was little to be seen besides mashed metal.