Black wind

forensics doctor at the county morgue thought that the men looked Korean.”
    Summer finished eating the rice and set down the bowl and chopsticks.
    “Korea?” she asked, her brow furrowing.
    “Korea.”
    Ed Coyle’s eyes had long since grown weary of scanning the flat gray sea for something out of the ordinary. He nearly didn’t trust his eyes when something finally tugged at the corner of his vision. Focusing toward the horizon, he just barely made out a small light in the sky dragging a wispy white tail. It was exactly what the copilot of the Lockheed HC-130 Hercules search-and-rescue plane had been hoping to see.
    “Charlie, I’ve got a flare at two o’clock,” Coyle said into his microphoned headset with the smooth voice of an ESPN sportscaster. Instinctively, he pointed a gloved hand at a spot on the windshield where he’d seen the white burst.
    “I got her,” Major Charles Wight replied with a slight drawl while peering out the cockpit. A lanky Texan with a cucumber-cool demeanor, the HC-130’s pilot gently banked the aircraft toward the fading smoke stream and slightiy reduced airspeed.
    Six hours after departing Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, the search-and-rescue pilots had started wondering whether their mission was a wild-goose chase. Now they crept to the edge of their seats, wondering what they would find in the waters beneath them. A grouping of white dots slowly appeared on the distant horizon, gradually growing larger as the aircraft approached.
    “Looks like we’ve got us some lifeboats,” Wight stated as the specks grew into distinguishable shapes.
    “Seven of them,” Coyle confirmed, counting the small boats stretched in a line. Morgan had rounded up all the lifeboats and lashed them together, bow to stern, in order to keep the survivors together. As the Hercules flew in low over them, the crew of the Sea Rover waved wildly in response and let out a collective cheer.
    “Roughly sixty heads,” Coyle estimated as Wight brought the plane around in a slow circle. “They look to be in pretty good shape.”
    “Let’s hold the PJs, drop an emergency medical pack, and see if we can initiate a sea pickup.”
    The PJs were three medically trained para rescue jumpers in the back of the plane ready to parachute out of the HC-130 at a moment’s notice. Since the crew of the Sea Rover appeared in no imminent danger, Wight opted to withhold their deployment for the time
    being. A lo adman at the back of the Hercules instead lowered a big hydraulic door beneath the tail and, at Coyle’s command, shoved out several emergency medical and ration packs, which drifted down to the sea suspended from small parachutes.
    An airborne communications specialist had meanwhile issued a distress call over the marine frequency. Within seconds, several nearby ships answered the call, the closest being a containership bound for Hong Kong from Osaka. Wight and Coyle continued to circle the lifeboats for another two hours until the containership arrived on the scene and began taking aboard survivors off the first lifeboat. Satisfied they were now safe, the rescue plane took a final low pass over the castaways, Wight waggling the wingtips as he passed. Though the pilots could not hear it, the tired and haggard survivors let out a robust cheer of thanks that echoed across the water.
    “Lucky devils,” Coyle commented with satisfaction.
    Wight nodded in silent agreement, then banked the Hercules southeast toward its home base on Okinawa.
    The large freighter had let go a welcoming blast of its Kahlenberg air horn as it glided toward the lifeboats. A whaleboat was lowered to guide the shipwreck victims around to a lowered stairwell near the stern, where most of the Sea Rover’s crew climbed up to the high deck. Morgan and a few other injured crewmen were transferred to the whaleboat and hoisted up to the containership’s main deck. After a brief welcome and inquiry by the ship’s Malaysian captain, Morgan was rushed down to the medical bay for treatment of his wounds.
    Ryan caught up with him after the ship’s doctor had tended to the NUMA captain’s leg and confined him to a bunk next to the crewman with the broken leg.
    “How’s the prognosis, sir?”
    “The knee’s a mess but I’ll live.”
    “They do amazing things with artificial joints these days,” Ryan encouraged.
    “Apparently, I’ll be finding that out in an intimate way. Beats a peg leg, I guess. What’s the state of the crew?”
    “In