Black wind

and help them onto the Icarus. Let Al know there’s more on the way,” Pitt said. “Dirk, you bring up the last group, make sure everyone makes it out of here. Captain, we need to visit the bridge now,” he said, turning to Christiano.
    Christiano, Ohlrogge, Dahlgren, and Pitt crowded into the elevator with eight other men and waited impatiently as the elevator zipped up to the bridge level above the hangar. Dahlgren quickly located a stairwell off to one side that led to the helipad and herded the crewmen up to the exposed deck.
    As promised, the silver airship hung hovering several feet above the pad, Giordino at the controls smoking a fat cigar. He quickly rotated the swiveling propulsion ducts and brought the gondola down to the deck as Jack ran up.
    “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 unnecessary weight if we want to get off the ground. Just make it quick, as I have an aversion to getting baked alive.”
    “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