Black wind

feeling somewhat bashful. “I guess I owe you a big thanks, Mr. Pitt.”
    “Please, call me “Dirk.” “
    “Okay, Dirk,” Sarah replied with a smile, feeling an odd flutter as she spoke his name. “How are the Coast Guard people?”
    Dirk’s face went dark and a look of sorrow crossed his brow. “I’m afraid we didn’t make it in time. We found two men and a dog at the station. They were all dead.”
    A shiver went up Sarah’s spine. Two men dead, and she and her companions nearly as well. None of it made any sense.
    “What on earth happened?” Sarah asked in shock.
    “We don’t know for sure. Our ship’s doctor is running some tests, but, as you can imagine, his resources are somewhat limited. It appears to have been some sort of airborne fume or toxin. All we know for sure is that the Coast Guard station thought there was something in the air. We flew in with gas masks and were not impacted. We even took some white mice from our shipboard lab with us. They all survived fine, without any apparent symptoms. Whatever it was, it must have dissipated by the time we landed at the Coast Guard station. You and your team were apparently far enough away from the source to be impacted less severely. You probably didn’t receive a full dose of whatever it was.”
    Sarah’s eyes dropped and she fell quiet. The horror and pain of the whole ordeal came back to her with a showering of fatigue. She wanted to sleep it all off and hope it was just a bad dream.
    “Sarah, I’ll have the doctor check on you, then let you sleep some more. Perhaps later I can buy you a plate of king crab legs for dinner?” Dirk asked with a smile.
    Sarah smiled briefly in return. “I’d like that,” she murmured, then fell fast asleep.
    Kermit Burch stood at the helm reading a fax communique when Dirk stepped into the bridge from the starboard wing door. The seasoned captain of the Deep Endeavor shook his head slightly as he read the document, then turned to Dirk with a slightly annoyed look on his face.
    “We’ve notified the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security, but nobody intends to do anything until the local authorities have filed their report. The village public safety officer from Atka is the area law enforcement official and he can’t get to the island until morning,” Burch snorted. “Two men dead and they treat it as an accident.”
    “We don’t have much to go on,” Dirk replied. “I spoke with Carl Nash, our saltwater environmental analyst, who is well versed on terrestrial pollutants. According to Nash, there are naturally occurring environmental emissions, such as sulfuric volcanic releases, which could have killed the men. High concentrations of industrial pollutants are another potential culprit, although I’m not aware of any neighborhood chemical plants in the Aleutians.”
    “The public safety officer told me it sounds to him like a classic case of carbon monoxide poisoning from the station house generator. Of course, that doesn’t explain our friends from the CDC succumbing to similar effects four miles away.”
    “Nor does it explain the dog I found dead outside of the station house,” Dirk added.
    “Well, perhaps the CDC crew can shed some light on the matter. How are our three guests doing, by the way?”
    “A little groggy still. They don’t remember much, other than that it struck pretty rapidly.”
    “The sooner we get them to a proper medical facility, the sooner
    I’ll rest easier. The nearest airfield is Unalaska, which we can make in under fourteen hours. I’ll radio ahead for a medical flight to transfer them to Anchorage.”
    “Captain, I’d like to take the helicopter back out and reconnoiter the island. We didn’t have much of a chance to look around on the last flight. Maybe there’s something we missed. Any objections?”
    “No … just so long as you take that Texas joker with you,” Burch replied with a pained grin.
    As Dirk ran through a preflight checklist from the pilot seat of the NUMA Sikorsky S-76C+ offshore helicopter, a sandy-haired man with a bushy mustache ambled across the flight platform. With scuffed cowboy boots, chiseled arms, and a ubiquitous scowl that hid a mordant sense of humor, Jack Dahlgren looked like a bull rider who got lost on the way to the rodeo. A notorious practical joker, Dahlgren had already worked his way under Burch’s skin by spiking the galley’s coffee urn with a cheap bottle of rum on their first night at sea. An