While heading to assist with the lifeboats, Ryan now noticed that the Starfish was missing. Slipping into the auxiliary lab, he found that the recovered bomb canisters had been neatly removed, dissolving any doubts about the reason for the assault.
After their ordeal in the storage hold, an unusual calmness fell over the crew as they abandoned ship. Quietly and in composed order, the men and women quickly made their way to their respective lifeboat stations, glad to have a second chance at life despite the fact their ship was sinking beneath their feet. The advancing water was proceeding rapidly up the deck and two lifeboats closest to the stern were already flooded before they could be released from their davits. The assigned crew was quickly dispersed to other boats, which were being launched to the water in a torrid frenzy.
Morgan hobbled up the sloping deck, which was now inclined at a thirty-degree angle, till reaching the captain's boat, which sat loaded and waiting. Morgan stopped and surveyed the ship's decks a last time, like a gambler who had bet, and lost, the farm. The ship was creaking and groaning as the weight of the salt water filling its lower compartments tugged at the vessel's structural integrity. An aura of sadness enveloped the research ship, as if it knew that it was too soon for it to be cast to the waves.
At last confident that all the crew were safely away, Morgan threw a sharp salute to his vessel, then stepped into the lifeboat, the last man off. The boat was quickly winched down to the rolling sea and motored away from the stricken ship. The sun had just crept over the horizon and cast a golden beam on the research ship as it struggled for its last moments. Morgan's lifeboat was just a few yards away from the Sea Rover when her bow suddenly rose sharply toward the sky, then the turquoise ship slipped gracefully into the sea stern first amid a boiling hiss of bubbles.
As the ship slipped from view, its traumatized crew was overcome by a solitary sensation: silence.
Something's rotten in Denmark." Summer ignored her brother's words and held a small bowl of fish stew up to her nose. After uninterrupted confinement for most of the day, the heavy door of their cabin had burst open and a galley cook wearing a white apron entered with a tray containing the stew, some rice, and a pot of tea. An armed guard watched menacingly from the hallway as the food was set down and the nervous cook quickly left without saying a word. Summer was famished and eagerly surveyed the food as the door was bolted back shut from the outside.
Taking a deep whiff of the fish stew, she wrinkled her nose.
“I think there's a few things rotten around here as well,” she said.
Moving on to the rice, she drove a pair of chopsticks into the bowl and began munching on the steamed grains. At last bringing relief to her hunger pangs, she turned her attention back to Dirk, who sat gazing out the porthole window.
“Aside from our crummy lower-berth cabin, what's bugging you now?” she asked.
“Don't quote me on this, but I don't think we're headed to Japan.”
“How can you tell?” Summer asked, scooping a mound of rice into ] her mouth.
“I've been observing the sun and the shadows cast off the ship. We should be heading north-northeast if we were traveling to Japan, but it appears to me that our course heading is more to the northwest.”
“That's a fine line to distinguish with the naked eye.”
“Agreed. But I just call 'em as I see 'em. If we pull into Nagasaki,! then just send me back to celestial navigation school.”
“That would mean we're heading toward the Yellow Sea,” she replied, picturing an imaginary map of the region in her head. “Do you think we're sailing to China?”
“Could be. There's certainly no love lost between China and Japan. Perhaps the Japanese Red Army has a base of operations in China. That might explain the lack of success the authorities have had in tracking down any suspects in Japan.”
“Possibly. But they'd have to be operating with state knowledge or sponsorship, and I would hope they'd think twice before sinking an American research vessel.”
“True. Then again, there is another possibility.”
Summer nodded, waiting for Dirk to continue.
“The two Japanese hoods who shot up my Chrysler. A forensics doctor at the county morgue thought that the men looked Korean.”
Summer finished eating the rice and set down the bowl and chopsticks.
“Korea?” she asked, her brow furrowing.
“Korea.”
Ed Coyle's eyes had long since grown weary of scanning the flat gray sea for something out of the ordinary. He nearly didn't trust his eyes when something finally tugged at the corner of his vision. Focusing toward the horizon, he just barely made out a small light in the sky dragging a wispy white tail. It was exactly what the copilot of the Lockheed HC-130 Hercules search-and-rescue plane had been hoping to see.
“Charlie, I've got a flare at two o'clock,” Coyle said into his micro-phoned headset with the smooth voice of an ESPN sportscaster. Instinctively, he pointed a gloved hand at a spot on the windshield where he'd seen the white burst.
“I got her,” Major Charles Wight replied with a slight drawl while peering out the cockpit. A lanky Texan with a cucumber-cool demeanor, the HC-130's pilot gently banked the aircraft toward the fading smoke stream and slightiy reduced airspeed.
Six hours after departing Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, the search-and-rescue pilots had started wondering whether their mission was a wild-goose chase. Now they crept to the edge of their seats, wondering what they would find in the waters beneath them. A grouping of white dots slowly appeared on the distant horizon, gradually growing larger as the aircraft approached.
“Looks like we've got us some lifeboats,” Wight stated as the specks grew into distinguishable shapes.
“Seven of them,” Coyle confirmed, counting the small boats stretched in a line. Morgan had rounded up all the lifeboats and lashed them together, bow to stern, in order to keep the survivors together. As the Hercules flew in low over them, the crew of the Sea Rover waved wildly in response and let out a collective cheer.
“Roughly sixty heads,” Coyle estimated as Wight brought the plane around in a slow circle. “They look to be in pretty good shape.”
“Let's hold the PJs, drop an emergency medical pack, and see if we can initiate a sea pickup.”
The PJs were three medically trained para rescue jumpers in the back of the plane ready to parachute out of the HC-130 at a moment's notice. Since the crew of the Sea Rover appeared in no imminent danger, Wight opted to withhold their deployment for the time being. A lo adman at the back of the Hercules instead lowered a big hydraulic door beneath the tail and, at Coyle's command, shoved out several emergency medical and ration packs, which drifted down to the sea suspended from small parachutes.
An airborne communications specialist had meanwhile issued a distress call over the marine frequency. Within seconds, several nearby ships answered the call, the closest being a containership bound for Hong Kong from Osaka. Wight and Coyle continued to circle the lifeboats for another two hours until the containership arrived on the scene and began taking aboard survivors off the first lifeboat. Satisfied they were now safe, the rescue plane took a final low pass over the castaways, Wight waggling the wingtips as he passed. Though the pilots could not hear it, the tired and haggard survivors let out a robust cheer of thanks that echoed across the water.
“Lucky devils,” Coyle commented with satisfaction.
Wight nodded in silent agreement, then banked the Hercules southeast toward its home base on Okinawa.
The large freighter had let go a welcoming blast of its Kahlenberg air horn as it glided toward the lifeboats. A whaleboat was lowered to guide the shipwreck victims around to a lowered stairwell near the stern, where most of the Sea Rover's crew climbed up to the high deck. Morgan and a few other injured crewmen were transferred to the whaleboat and hoisted up to the containership's main deck. After a brief welcome and inquiry by the ship's Malaysian captain, Morgan was rushed down to the medical bay for treatment of his wounds.