Black wind

the grounds of the airport and soon leveled the blimp off at a height of twenty-five hundred feet. The Pacific Ocean resonated a deep aqua color under a bright sun, and the men easily counted out the northerly Channel Islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel under the clear skies. As they floated east, Pitt noticed dew dripping off of the blimp, its fabric sides warming under the rays of the morning sun. He glanced at a helium pressure gauge, noting a slight rise in the needle as the helium expanded from the warming temperatures and higher cruising altitude. An automatic venting system would release any excess gas if the pressure rose too high, but Pitt kept the blimp well below its pressure height so as not to needlessly stave off helium.
    The controls of the Sentinel 1000 were heavy in his hands and he noted that the sensation of flying the blimp felt closer to sailing a twenty-meter racing yacht than piloting an airplane. Turning the huge rudders and elevators required some muscling of the yoke, which resulted in an anxious pause before the ship’s nose would gradually respond. Correcting course, he absentmindedly watched the lines dangling off the blimp’s nose sway back and forth. A boat bobbed into view beneath them, which he recognized as a charter fishing boat. The tiny-looking day fishermen on the boat’s stern suddenly waved up
    at them with friendly abandon. There was something about an airship that always seemed to strike a warm chord with people. They captured the romance of the air, Pitt decided, offering a reminder of times past when flying was still a novelty. With his hands on the controls, he could feel the nostalgia himself. Floating at a leisurely pace over the water, he let his mind churn back to the days of the thirties when mammoth dirigibles like the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg shared the skies with the huge Navy airships Akron and Macon. Like the opulent cruise ships of the same era, they offered a certain relaxed majesty that simply no longer existed in modern travel.
    When they reached a distance of thirty miles offshore, Pitt angled the blimp south and began navigating a large, lazy arc off the Los Angeles metropolis. Giordino powered up the LASH optical system, tied into a laptop computer, which enabled him to spot the images of incoming surface vessels up to thirty-five miles away. The freighters and containerships came chugging in toward the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach at a sporadic yet endless pace. The big vessels hailed from a variety of exotic-sounding home ports from Mumbai to Jakarta, though China, Japan, and Taiwan accounted for the largest volume of traffic. More than three thousand vessels a year entered the adjacent ports, creating a constant stream of traffic that crawled across the Pacific toward America’s busiest port like ants to a picnic. As Giordino studied the laptop, he reported to Pitt that he could spot two large vessels inbound in the distance that figured to be commercial ships. Squinting out the cockpit window, Pitt could just make out the leading vessel on the horizon.
    “Let’s go take a look,” Pitt replied, aiming the nose of the airship toward the approaching ship. Flicking a button on the Coast Guard radio set newly installed in the cockpit, he spoke into his headset.
    “Coast Guard Cutter Halibut, this is airship Icarus. We are on station
    and preparing to survey two inbound vessels approximately forty-five miles due east of Long Beach, over.”
    “Roger, Icarus” came a deep-voiced reply. “Glad to have you and your eyes in the sky with us. We have three vessels deployed and engaged in current interdiction actions. We’ll await your surveillance reports on new inbound vessels as they approach. Out.”
    “Eyes in the sky,” Giordino grumbled. “I’d rather be the stomach on the sofa,” he said, suddenly wondering if anyone had packed them a lunch aboard the airship.
    Throughout the night, the Odyssey had churned west, inching her way closer to the California coast that she had departed just days before. Tongju returned to the platform after resolving the launch position dispute and stole a few hours of sleep in the captain’s cabin before rising an hour before dawn. Under the first trickles of morning light, he watched from the bridge as the platform followed in the Koguryo’s wake, noticing the shadow of a sizable island in the distance off the starboard bow. It was San Nicolas Island, a dry and windblown rock farthest