Black wind

that a bomb or torpedo had fallen away when the plane sank.
    Swimming back to the sub’s topside deck, he followed the eighty-five-foot-long catapult ramp along the bow until reaching a large round hatch. The vertical hatch capped the end of a large twelve-foot-diameter tube, which was mounted at the base of the conning tower and stretched aft for more than one hundred feet. The airtight tube had been the hangar for the Seiran aircraft, storing the sectional pieces of the planes until they were ready for launching. Set back above the tubular section was a small platform containing triple-mounted 25mm antiaircraft guns, which still sat with their barrels pointed skyward waiting for an unseen enemy.
    Instead of a large metal sail rising upward, Dirk found a huge hole in the center of the I-403, the gaping remains of where the conning tower had been sheared off in the collision. A small school of ling-cod swam around the jagged crater’s edge, feeding on smaller marine life and adding a splash of color to the dark scene.
    “Wow, you could drive your Chrysler through that hole,” Dahlgren remarked as he swam up alongside Dirk and surveyed the crater.
    “With change to spare. She must have gone down in a hurry when the sail ripped off.” The two men silently visualized the violent collision between the two war vessels so many years before and imagined
    the agony of the helpless crew of the I-403 as the submarine sank to the bottom.
    “Jack, why don’t you take a pass through the hangar and see if you can eyeball any ordnance,” Dirk said, pointing a gloved hand toward a gash along the top of the aircraft hangar. “I’ll go belowdecks and do the same.”
    Dirk glanced at the orange face of his Doxa dive watch, a gift from his father on his last birthday. “We’ve only got eight more minutes of bottom time. Let’s be quick.”
    “I’ll meet you back here in six,” Dahlgren said, then disappeared with a kick of his fins through the gash in the hangar wall.
    Dirk entered the gloomy crevice adjacent to the hangar, diving past a jagged edge of mangled and twisted steel. As he descended, he could make out the sub’s unusual twin side-by-side pressured hulls, which ran lengthwise down the keel. He entered an open bay and quickly identified it as the remains of the control room, as evidenced by a large mounted helm’s wheel, now covered in barnacles. An array of radio equipment was fixed to one side of the room-while an assortment of mechanical levers and controls protruded from another wall and ceiling. Shining his light on one set of valves, he made out barasuto tanku in white lettering, which he presumed operated the ballast tanks.
    Kicking his fins gently, Dirk moved forward at a deliberate pace trying not to stir up sediment from the deck. As he passed from one compartment to the next, the submarine seemed to echo with the life from the Japanese sailors. Dining plates and silverware were strewn across the floor of a small galley. Porcelain sake vials were still standing in cabin shelves. Gliding into a large wardroom where officers’ staterooms lined one side, Dirk admired a small Shinto shrine mounted on one wall.
    He continued forward, cognizant of his dwindling bottom time but careful to take in all that his eyes could absorb. Moving past a maze
    of pipes, wires, and hydraulic lines, he reached the chief’s quarters, near the forward part of the ship. At last, he approached his objective, the forward torpedo room, which loomed just ahead. Thrusting ahead with a powerful scissors kick, he advanced to the torpedo room entrance and prepared to pass in. Then he stopped dead in his tracks.
    He blinked hard, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Then he turned off his light and looked through the hatch again. He was not imagining what he saw.
    In the inky bowels of the rusting warship, entombed at the bottom of the sea for over sixty years, Dirk was welcomed by a faint but distinct flashing green light.
    Dirk pulled himself through the hatch and into the pitch-black darkness of the torpedo room, save for the penetrating beam of light. As his eyes adjusted to the blackness, the flashing green light became clearer. It appeared to be a pair of tiny lights, situated at eye level, and fixed at the far side of the room.
    Dirk turned his own light back on and surveyed the room. He was in the upper torpedo room, one of two torpedo bays the I-403 had stacked vertically at the bow of the sub. Near the