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 from the pilothouse window. Like a contestant running a timed obstacle course, Pitt ran, jumped, and hurdled his way across the platform to the corner column support and sprinted down the steps to the water's edge. In their haste to evacuate the platform, Tongju and his men had not thought it necessary to let adrift the NUMA sub. Pitt was thankful to find her still tied to the column steps as he exhaustedly reached the water's edge.
Untying the line, he jumped aboard and scrambled down the Badger's top hatch, sealing it closed behind him. In seconds, he had activated the submersible's power systems and opened the ballast tank for submersion. Engaging the throttles, he quickly maneuvered away from the Odyssey's forward column and proceeded down the interior length of the platform before positioning the submersible for the task at hand. Holding the submersible steady, Pitt activated the controls to the bow-mounted coring device and, with just minutes to spare, prayed that his cockamamie plan would work.
The Korean launch team aboard the Koguryo watched the video screen with curiosity as the silver blimp touched down on the Odyssey's helipad and the crew of the platform jammed into the gondola. Kim grimaced with anger but noted that Tongju remained calm.
“We should have killed the crew and destroyed that airship when we had the opportunity,” Kim hissed as they watched the Icarus lurch off the platform. An alternate camera was turned toward the blimp, showing the airship fight for altitude before turning out to sea. Tongju nodded toward the video image with assurance.
“She is overloaded and unable to make speed. We shall easily catch and destroy her after the launch,” he said quietly to Kim.
His eyes returned to the launch countdown and the noisy jabber of the engineers within the control center. The room was a flurry of activity and pressure as the final minutes drew to a close. Ling stood nearby, reviewing the output from a series of launch vehicle assessments. Beads of sweat rolled from his forehead in tense anticipation despite the cool temperature of the air-conditioned bay.
For Ling, there was every reason to be nervous. In the world of space vehicle delivery, there was an astounding rate of mortality. He knew all too well that roughly one in ten satellite launches ended in failure, and that the fault could come from a thousand and one sources. Failure of the rocket at launch was still not an uncommon occurrence, though most satellite losses were due to deploying the payload in an incorrect orbit. The short, suborbital flight of the mission at hand eliminated a great deal of the problematic issues associated with most rocket flights, but the risk of a catastrophic launch failure never went away.
Ling breathed easier as he digested the latest status updates. All critical systems appeared operational. There was nothing to indicate that the trustworthy Zenit rocket would not fire off in its usual dependable manner. With less than five minutes to go, he turned to Tongju and spoke with a glimmer of confidence.
“There will be no launch holds. The countdown will proceed unimpeded.”
Their attention turned to the image of the rocket on the video screen in its last minutes before takeoff. Despite the multitude of studious eyes converged on the image of the rocket and platform, no one in the room noticed the tiny movement at the periphery of the picture. Only the camera saw as a dark-haired man ran to the edge of the platform and scrambled out of sight down the corner column stairwell.