Assassin's Honor (9781561648207) (4 page)

At the end of the second phase of deciphering, the translation from numbers into letters, I came up with this message in the German alphabet:

The double
X
s were endings of sentences, a standard practice in all navies. The final phase would be to get the correct sequence of letters formed into separate words. Consulting my German-English dictionary, as my knowledge of that language is woefully lacking, it took a while to find the words formed by the letters. It gave me the following:

Converting the message into English, a chill went through me. I repeated the entire procedure three times to make sure I had it right.

Unfortunately, I did.

Next I turned to the small section of chart. The coastline on it was oriented vertically, with the sea to the right, or east. Depths were in meters. Perusing my large area chart of the Venezuelan coast, I narrowed the north-south coastal possibilities to the western shore of Lake Maracaibo; the Caribbean coast northwest of Puerto Cabello; or the west coast of the Gulf of Paria, across from Trinidad. However, there were no Venezuelan places on my chart titled
Dzul
or
Xel-ha
, and nothing geographically matched the fragment.

Again consulting the German dictionary, I found the word
Verabredung
meant “rendezvous” or “appointment.” Next I looked up
Dzul
and
Xel-ha
, but neither were in the book. They didn't sound French or Spanish to me, but for some reason they seemed vaguely familiar. I wondered if they might be Dutch, for that country had island colonies off the coast of Venezuela.

Then I remembered, and cursed my stupidity. Because of the admiral's report about Simon Drake, I'd been thinking about
Venezuela, but was completely wrong. Those words weren't European, and they weren't even from that part of the Caribbean.

In fact, they were from an area almost a thousand miles away from Venezuela. Dredging up memories from a cruise along the Caribbean coast of Central America the previous September, I remembered Xel-ha was a village on the Mayan coast of Mexico, the Yucatán Peninsula. It was only a couple days steaming from Key West.

Now that I had the correct location, I recalled the other word's meaning. Dzul wasn't the name of a place, it was the name of a man—the current leader of the Mayan independence army, which had been fighting the Mexican national army for the last fifty years in something called the Caste War. It was a simmering conflict few outside of Mexico knew about. Occasionally, it would boil over into a pitched battle, but even then the U.S. press didn't deem it worthy of American readers.

Now, however, there were outside players in Mexico. Porfirio Díaz, president of Mexico, had enjoyed good relations with Germany's chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, for some time. Díaz and Bismarck had signed an immigration agreement several years prior, after five decades of immigration had already brought thousands of Germans to Mexico, mostly around the Gulf coast. More Germans were heading there. Two communities of them were in Yucatán, near Mérida.

Bismarck, ironically, was in retirement and out of the equation, sacked by the young Kaiser Wilhelm for being not aggressive enough internationally. Now that Wilhelm had no one to restrain him with wise counsel, German naval and commercial efforts were quickly expanding around the world, causing conflicts with other countries.

I recalled that the Mayan warriors had bought weapons and supplies through traders in neighboring British Honduras. Did this message and chart mean the German navy was going to rendezvous with Dzul, form some sort of alliance, and take over supplying him? For what purpose? Was it to secure an area
for the Caribbean naval base they had wanted for years? Or was Dzul the target of the killing, at the bidding of the Mexican government?

The chronometer on the bulkhead showed I had less than an hour before I was to give Admiral Walker an idea of what was happening. In the meantime, another pair of eyes was needed to look over this problem. Turning to the row of speaking tubes beside my desk, I opened the lid on the tube connected to the wheelhouse. “This is the captain. Pass the word for Bosun Rork to report to my cabin.”

I knew someone would be assassinated in six days, but three crucial questions were still unanswered. Who? Where? Why?

U.S.S. Bennington

Key West Naval Station

Saturday afternoon

10 December 1892

A knock sounded twice at my door. The nervous voice said he was the messenger from the officer of the deck. With my permission, a young sailor entered. Taking in everything at a glance, his face was a study in competing emotions: envy at the relative luxury of my quarters, and terror at being inside them. He knuckled his brow and began his recital.

“Ah . . . Seaman Bundle, Captain, sir, with a message from the officer of the deck. Mr. Manning presents his respects and reports the naval station just signaled
Chicago
and
Bennington
—a German warship entered the channel ten minutes ago. She's the . . . Genays . . . ayn . . . now . . . or something like that. Sorry, sir, but I just can't pronounce them foreign names.”

The morning was turning out to be rather interesting. It had been quite a while since a German warship visited Key West.

“I believe she will be the
Gneisenau
, Bundle. She's a well-armed corvette-cruiser and Germany's West Indies station ship. Pass along my compliments to Mr. Manning and tell him I want my gig ready in ten minutes.”

As Bundle departed, Rork arrived. Bosun Sean Rork is a curious study, worthy of a closer glance.

Born and raised County Wexford, Ireland, in 1831 he left that blighted isle at age twelve and grew up fast at sea on a coaster working ports on both sides of the Irish Sea. His sad childhood back in Wexford was something he never really explained to me, other than to deflect my inquiries into humorous anecdotes about girls, the church, and the despised English. By the late 1850s, Rork was a grizzled bosun working the Atlantic trade between Liverpool and Boston.

In January of 1863, after his desperation could be held in check no more, he had a life-altering decision to make. Either kill the maniacal new mate in the ship, or jump ashore and see what life in America would bring. Wisely, he chose the latter option, but after five months' search there was no work for a foreign seaman; all the maritime jobs went to locals, for to be without a seaman's exemption meant you were subject to be conscripted into the army. And that meant going south to live in the mud in disease-ridden camps, all the while being subjected to mindless army discipline, when not getting shot at by the Confederates.

But there was another opportunity at hand—go to sea for Uncle Sam. Rork joined the quickly expanding U.S. Navy, made bosun's mate immediately, and never looked back. We met in the East Gulf Blockading Squadron in the summer of 1863 and served against the Confederates in Florida and the West Indies for the rest of the war. That experience formed a friendship that has strengthened over decades of shared danger and despair on assignments around the world. Rork is a good man to have beside you in bad situations.

Such a friendship was not only rare between officer and
petty officer—ours was the sole example I've seen—it was severely frowned upon by the notoriously hidebound naval establishment. That didn't bother me a bit, for I was a persona non grata with those fools myself, not having attended the naval academy and thereby become a proper “gentleman.” One attribute Rork and I did have, however, was that we always accomplished the mission, albeit occasionally with innovation which deviated from regulations.

Rork's only major faults are a fondness for women and rum, necessitating a keen watch over him lest either lead him, and sometimes me too, into ruination. Unlike me, he was never married, has no legitimate children and, as he says, is a truly free man.

Admiral Walker was one of the few in the upper naval strata who appreciated what Rork and I had done for the country, and the admiral never harassed me about my old friend. Actually, I always thought him a bit envious of Rork's comparative freedom and love of life.

I bade Rork to close the door and then sit down, something enlisted men never were invited to do in a captain's quarters. When he had done so, I handed over the piece of chart and the deciphered message. Then I told him what I'd learned from Walker and deduced from the chart and message.

“So now I want you to examine those, Rork, and give me your opinion.”

He read the message through twice, tracing the numbers with his finger, then studied the chart closely. Looking up at me, the ghost of a smile showed on his weathered face. “Ooh, lookin' like a wee bit o' the old times, back in the shadows again. Been a while since we worked an ONI mission, sir.”

“That it has, Rork, and good riddance to it. So, what do you make of it all? The admiral wants answers in less than an hour.”

“Ah . . . so that's why we ran here so bloody hard. Well, sir, methinks you're right as rain about the Mayan boyo Dzul. An' bugger all if this don't have an evil sound to it. But it does plague
me mind with more questions than answers. Just who sent this message, an' to who is it sent? Is Dzul the Heinies' target, or one o' their mates? Aye, an' mark me words, sir—this is big. Me eyes see crazy Kaiser Willy's hand all o'er it.”

“I agree, Rork, something evil's stirring. And yes, for this afternoon, at least, I guess we're back in our old business again.” The clock showed one thirty, so I said, “I brief the admiral on this in half an hour.”

I pointed out the stern gallery toward
Gneisenau
, which was letting go her anchor a quarter-mile away. Her yards, ratlines, and weather decks were manned by sailors in white, standing at parade rest. Spars and rigging were taut and squared in perfect seamanlike fashion. The German navy was small, but impressive. And growing larger.

“Rork, I need more information, so you're going ashore immediately and you're going to befriend the German ship's petty officers over pints when they get their liberty. Then you're going to find out what they know about their destination and mission. Report back to me no later than the end of the second dog watch. That'll give you about five hours by the time their liberty section gets ashore.”

I handed him a ten dollar greenback, which quickly disappeared into a pocket. Once he'd secured the cash, Rork rubbed his false left hand and began unscrewing it from its base plate, revealing a wicked-looking five-inch marlinspike underneath. The phantom aches still bothered him, nine years after he lost that hand to a sniper in Indochina, and he massaged the stump of his forearm beneath the prosthetic base plate.

His right eyebrow cocked upward and a devilish grin creased his face.

“Aye, sir, methinks a wee bit o' skullduggery is jus' the thing to liven up the day. An' five hours is more than enough time to make the likes o' them Heinies me very best mates.”

Boom . . . boom . . . boom . . . 
Gneisenau
's thirteen-gun salute to Admiral Walker echoed across the anchorage. The last
time I'd heard a German warship fire her guns, they weren't firing saluting blanks. They were shooting a Maxim gun for real—at
me
.

This had been only three years earlier, on a beach in Samoa. War between our countries was inevitable at that point. We only avoided it by Divine intervention, in the form of a hurricane that destroyed both countries' squadrons and killed 221 sailors. The jagged scar on my right hip throbbed, a sharp reminder of that damnably accurate German Maxim gun, and a needed addendum to Rork's orders.

“Rork, remember, drinks and yarns only with these German fellows. No threats, no fights, and for God's sake, don't refer to what you and I did in the South Pacific.”