Black wind

dive.
    Cries of alarm wafted from the rear passengers as it appeared Giordino was deliberately trying to crash into the sea. Ignoring the pleas, he turned to Dirk in the copilot’s seat.
    “Above your head there is a water ballast release control. At my command, hit the release.”
    While Dirk located the button on the overhead console, Giordino
    focused his eyes on the altimeter. The dial was rolling backward quickly from two hundred feet as their descent speed increased. Giordino hesitated until the dial read sixty feet, then barked: “Now!”
    In unison, Giordino yanked back on the yoke while Dirk activatec the water ballast system, which instantly dumped a thousand pounds of water stored in a compartment beneath the gondola. Despite the sudden actions, there was no immediate response from the blimp. The massive airship moved at its own deliberate pace, and, for an instant Giordino thought he had acted too late. As the approaching ocean filled the view out the cockpit windshield in a rush of speed, the nose gently began to pull up in a sweeping arc. Giordino eased of the yoke to level the airship as the gondola surged closer toward the sea, its nose rising with agonizing slowness. With a sudden jolt, the base of the gondola slapped the water’s surface as the airship flattened from out of its dive but bounded quickly up and off the surface. As every man aboard held his breath, the blimp staggered forward a short distance before slowly climbing a few feet above the water and holding steady. As the seconds ticked by and the airship held in the air, in became apparent that Giordino had pulled it off. Though risking high-speed impact, the accelerated dive and last-second ballast release had been just enough to keep them airborne.
    The relieved men in the passenger compartment let out a cheer as Giordino gingerly coaxed the blimp up to an altitude of one hundred feet, the big airship slowly stabilizing under his steady hand.
    “I guess you showed us who’s master of the airship,” Dirk laudedl
    “Yeah, and almost commander of a submarine,” Giordino replied as he eased the nose of the blimp to the east and away from the platform.
    “Uprange and away from shore isn’t exactly the direction I’d like to be going at this altitude,” he added, eyeing the Koguryo warily out the window to port. “I radioed Deep Endeavor to get out of the way of the rocket’s flight path, so they should be cutting a wide swath around to the north. We ought to keep them in sight in case we have to ditch.”
    Dirk scanned the horizon, keeping one eye locked on the launch platform. Far to the southwest, he spotted the distant mass of San Nicolas Island. Peering to the northeast, he saw a tiny blue dot, which he knew to be the Deep Endeavor. Then, just to the north of the NUMA ship, he noticed a small brown mass rising from the sea.
    “That landmass up ahead. I recall from the navigation charts that it’s a small channel island called “Santa Barbara.” Why don’t we head that way? We can drop the crew there and have Deep Endeavor pick them up before we get into any more trouble.”
    “And get back to find your dad,” Giordino said, finishing Dirk’s thought. Dirk looked back at the platform with hesitation.
    “Can’t be much time left,” he muttered.
    “About ten minutes,” Giordino replied, wondering like Dirk what Pitt could possibly pull off in such little time.
    Physically surviving A launch on board the Odyssey was not impossible. When a rocket was fired, the main thrust was directed beneath the platform at ignition. The Odyssey had been constructed as a reusable launch platform, and, in fact, had already withstood more than a dozen launches. The deck, hangar, crew compartment, and pilothouse were all built to withstand the fiery heat and exhaust generated from a powerful rocket launch. What a human inhabitant was not likely to survive, however, was the noxious fumes that engulfed the platform at blastoff. A massive billow of exhaust from the spent kerosene and liquid oxygen fuel all but buried the Odyssey in a thick cloud of smoke for several minutes after liftoff, smothering the breathable air in the vicinity of the platform.
    But that was of little concern to Pitt as he jumped off the elevator and raced out a back door of the hangar. He had no interest in hanging around the platform when the Zenit was lit off. Instead, he was hell-bent on making it to the bright red submersible he saw bobbing
    in the water