Black wind

forward bulkhead, he could see the round chamber hatches for the four twenty-one-inch-diameter torpedo tubes. Lying in racks on either side of the room were six of the huge Type 95 torpedoes, large and deadly fish that were both more reliable and more explosive than the American counterpart during the war. Jumbled on the floor, Dirk shined his light on two additional torpedoes that had been jarred out of their racks when the submarine had slammed into the bottom. One torpedo lay flat on the floor, its nose angled slightly off bow from where it had rolled after
    hitting the deck. The second torpedo was propped on some debris near its tip, pointing its nose lazily upward. It was just above this second torpedo where the eerie green light flashed on and off.
    Dirk floated over to the pulsating light, putting his face mask up close to the mystery beam. It was nothing more than a small stick-on digital clock wedged at the end of the torpedo rack. Fluorescent green block numbers flashed a row of zeroes, indicating an elapsed time that had run out more than twenty-four hours before. Days, weeks, or months before, it would be impossible to tell. But it certainly could not have been placed there sixty years earlier.
    Dirk plucked the plastic clock and stuffed it in a pocket of his BC, then peered upward. His expended air bubbles were not gathering at the ceiling, as expected, but were trailing upward and through a shaft of pale light. He kicked up with his fins and found that a large hatch to the open deck had been wedged open several feet, easily allowing a diver access to and from the torpedo bay.
    A crackly voice suddenly burst through his earpiece. “Dirk, where are you? It’s time to go upstairs,” Dahlgren’s voice barked.
    “I’m in the forward torpedo room. Come meet me on the bow, I need another minute.”
    Dirk looked at his watch, noting that their eight minutes of bottom time had expired, then swam back down to the torpedo rack.
    Two wooden crates were crushed beneath one of the fallen torpedoes, split open like a pair of suitcases. Constructed of hardwood mahogany, the crates had amazingly survived the ravages of salt water and microorganisms and were in a minimal state of decay. He curiously noted that no silt covered the broken crates, unlike every other object he had seen on the submarine. Someone had recently fanned away the sediment to reveal the crates’ contents.
    Dirk swam over to the closest crate and looked inside. Like a half carton of eggs, six silver aerial bombs were lined up in a custom-fitted casemate. Each bomb was nearly three feet long and sausage-shaped, with a fin-winged tail. Half of the bombs were still wedged under the torpedo, but all six had been broken up by the torpedo’s fall. Oddly, to Dirk, they appeared to be cracked rather than simply crushed. Running his hand over an undamaged section of one of the bombs, he was surprised to feel the surface had a glassy smoothness to the touch.
    Kicking his fins gentry, Dirk then glided over to the other crate and found a similar scene. All of the bomb canisters had been crushed by the falling torpedo in the second crate as well. Only this time, he counted five bombs, not six. One of the casings was empty. Dirk shined his light around and surveyed the area. The deck was clear in all directions, and no fragments were evident in the empty slot. One of the bombs was missing.
    “Elevator, going up,” Dahlgren’s voice suddenly crackled.
    “Hold the door, I’ll be right there,” Dirk replied, glancing at his watch to see that they had overrun their bottom time by almost five minutes. Examining the smashed crates a last time, he tugged on one of the less mangled bombs. The ordnance slipped out of its case but fell apart into three separate pieces in Dirk’s hands. As best he could, he gently placed the pieces into a large mesh dive bag, then, holding tight, he kicked toward the open hatch above. Pulling the bag through the hatch after him, Dirk found Dahlgren hovering above the sub’s bow a few yards in front of him. Joining his dive partner, the two wasted no time in kicking toward their decompression stop.
    Tracking their depth as they rose, Dirk flared his body out like a sky-diver at forty feet to slow his ascent and purged a shot of air out of his BC. Dahlgren followed suit and the two men stabilized themselves at a depth of twenty feet to help rid their bodies of elevated levels of nitrogen in their blood.
    “That extra five