Hell Ship (4 page)

“Sir?”

“You didn’t think I was up at this hour just to deal with a drunken sailor, did you?” A rare smile creased Maxie’s face then he was all business again. “Tonight, I received a call from the SECNAV asking a favor of me. A favor of the very hush-hush variety.”

Dane felt his pulse quicken, equal parts excitement and anxiety.
“A mission?”

“A
training exercise
,” Maxie emphasized.

“
Training exercise” was shorthand for a highly classified, off-the-books action, one for which there would be only minimal tactical support and complete deniability. If the mission was successful, there would be no official acknowledgement, and if things went south, the team would be on their own.

“It’s an underwater salvage operation,”
he continued. “You’ll be looking for a sunken wreck in the South China Sea. Find it, verify it’s really where we think it is, and then come home without attracting any attention. Zero attention, to be precise.”

Dane was pleasantly surprised by th
at. While it was true that SEALs were arguably the deadliest warriors in the US military, they were also some of the best trained divers anywhere.

Maxie slid a file folder across the desktop and Dane scooped it up, eager to learn the details of the mission. Would they be looking for an experimental stealth drone that crashed to close
to Chinese waters? An illegal arms shipment bound for North Korea?

There was a single sheet of paper inside and most of it was blank, but even after reading it three times, Dane still couldn’t make sense of what was written there.
“Is this correct sir? I’m supposed to find a Japanese ship from World War II?”

“The
Awa Maru
,” Maxie said.

The sheet of paper included a brief excerpt detailing the sinking of the
Awa Maru
, an ocean liner that had been impressed into Japanese naval service, running supplies and personnel between the island nation and her colonies in the South Pacific and Indonesia. On April 1, 1945, an American submarine, the
USS Queenfish
, under the command of Elliot Loughlin, had sunk the ship with torpedoes.

Dane lowered the brief and met Maxie’s impassive stare.
“Sir, maybe it’s not my place to ask why, but…why?”

“
Correct. It’s not your place to ask,” Maxie agreed in a clipped tone, but then his lips twitched into a smile. “Nor was it my place to ask the SECNAV, but I did anyway. What do you know about Admiral Loughlin?”

Dane faintly recalled Loughlin’s name from his classes at Annapolis.
Loughlin had been something of a legend during the war, and in the years that followed had become one of the most decorated officers in US Naval history, twice earning the prestigious Legion of Merit award. The incident with the
Awa Maru
was the only black spot on his record; the ship had been purportedly transporting supplies for POW camps, under the auspices of the Red Cross, and all US ships had been ordered not to engage her. After the sinking, Loughlin was immediately relieved of command, court-martialed, and found guilty of negligence, though ultimately his career had survived and he had gone on to earn the rank of rear admiral.

Maxie nodded as Dane finished his recollection.
“The
Awa Maru
went down with all hands, except for one lone survivor; over two thousand dead, mostly civilian businessmen, diplomats and merchant marines. The Navy brass feared that it would be a public relations disaster, generating sympathy for Japan, but strangely the incident was mostly hushed up. Loughlin received a slap on the wrist—a Letter of Admonition in his permanent record—and the US agreed to pay the Japanese reparations for the loss of the ship. But it turns out, there’s a lot more to the story. To begin with, the
Awa Maru
had already dropped off its supplies in Singapore. It was transporting cargo back to Japan, cargo which would have aided in their war effort.”

“Which would have made it a legitimate military target,” Dane said.
“No wonder the Japanese didn’t make more of a fuss; if word got out that they were using Red Cross designated ships to smuggle contraband, it would have been an even bigger PR disaster for them.”

“And if the
Awa Maru
had reached its destination, it would have been a military disaster for us. She was carrying enough war loot—gold, platinum, diamonds—to finance the war for several more years. It’s also believed that the ship was carrying the bones of the Peking Man, which went missing during the war and have never been found.”

Dane shook his head.
“Let me get this straight. The SECNAV wants us to go treasure hunting?”

“I asked him the same question.
As I said, there’s more to the story. Rumors about the
Awa Maru
’s cargo have been circulating for years; people don’t just give up when there’s five billion dollars worth of treasure out there for the taking. In 1976, the American astronaut Scott Carpenter, and Jon Lindbergh—the son of Charles Lindbergh and a former Navy frogman—discovered the
Queenfish
’s log, which pinpointed the location where the sinking occurred, and a few years later the Chinese government announced that they had found the wreck, but no treasure.”

“They had the wrong wreck?
”

“According to the SECNAV, the
Queenfish
’s log book was a fake, part of an elaborate ruse to probe China’s defensive posture in the Taiwan Strait. Carpenter and Lindbergh were part of the deception. The Chinese ran them off the site, which was not completely unexpected, and then took over. Whatever ship they found, or claim to have found, wasn’t the
Awa Maru
. Loughlin’s actual log book indicates that the ship was sunk several hundred miles away and remains undiscovered.”

“
Which brings me back to my original question: why does the Secretary of the Navy want us to go looking for buried treasure? Budget cuts?”

“It’s political.”
Maxie’s nose wrinkled, as if saying the word had been distasteful, but then he continued. “China has the best claim for the treasure, particularly the Peking Man, which is an invaluable piece of history. And in case you haven’t been reading the news, China holds our markers. Our national credit rating isn’t what it used to be. If China calls that debt in, we’re done, and a lot of folks think maybe that’s what the Chinese want. The President believes that pointing them to the real treasure would earn us some political capital with Beijing, but since we hoodwinked them once before, he wants to make sure that the ship is actually there before passing on the location. That’s why your job will be to find it and make sure it’s really the
Awa Maru
. Recon only. Under no circumstances are you to attempt recovery of the ship or its cargo.”

“And then when it’s politically expedient, the President can hand the
Awa Maru
to China, wrapped up in a bow. But why now? Why a middle of the night phone call?”

“SECNAV didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”
Maxie crossed his arms, signaling that he was done entertaining questions. “He made it very clear that this is a favor, Dane. It’s not such a bad thing to have the Secretary of the Navy owe you one, if you catch my drift. Particularly at this crossroads in your career.”

It took a moment for the significance of the last
statement to sink in. “You know about the
Valley Forge
?”

“
I may have mentioned your name in passing to Admiral Long.”

Dane suddenly felt numb.
“I don’t understand, sir. You want me to leave the team?”

Maxie recoiled a little.
“Hell no. You’re an excellent officer. I’m not cutting you loose; I’m trying to set you free to realize your potential. If you stay with the teams, the best you can hope for is to someday have my job. And in case you haven’t noticed, my job amounts to pushing papers, riding herd on drunken sailors, and taking late night phone calls from political appointees. If you ever want to wear a star on your collar, you’ve got to seize every opportunity that comes your way. That’s just the way the Navy works, and I don’t want to be responsible for holding you back. Or, I might add, depriving the service of a damned fine leader.”

D
ane wanted to protest, tell Maxie that he wasn’t interested in being an admiral, much less playing the political games necessary to achieve that goal. But there was a part of him that wondered if maybe that was exactly what he should be doing.

A
good leader knew the importance of listening to what his NCOs had to say, but sometimes—particularly with guys like Bones—that tested the limits of military discipline. Not to mention his patience.
It wouldn’t be like that on a ship
, that little voice inside told him.

Maxie seemed to sense his internal conflict.
“It’s not as if you have to decide right now. In fact, right now, you’ve got a ‘training exercise’ to do. I want you wheels up by dawn and running a search grid over the target zone ASAP.”

Dane put the matter of his career on a mental back burner.
“I’ll tell the guys.”

“Good.
Pour some coffee down Bonebrake’s throat. Maybe getting back out in the field will help him straighten up. Oh, and one other thing…”

“Sir?”

“I’ll need my name tag back.”

Washington DC

Alex found sanctuary
in a cheap hotel and didn’t venture outside for two days. She paid in cash and the desk clerk hadn’t batted an eye. Come to think of it, he hadn’t even made eye contact. It was the perfect place to lay low until she could figure out what was going on.

Survival was her first concern.

Don’s murder had not simply been a robbery gone wrong; the historian had been tortured, his office ransacked. The killer had been looking for something, and Alex was pretty sure she knew what that something was.

She wasn’t a believer in coincidence
. Don had been killed on the very day that he was to receive several recently declassified government documents that he had requested under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act—documents that would have been sitting on his desk when the killer arrived had she not been running late. She still had the envelope from the archives. It only stood to reason that if the killer was still looking for it, he would be looking for her as well.

But
who
was he? Who did he work for? Until she knew the answer to that question, she couldn’t trust anyone.

Her first stop after fleeing Don’s neighborhood had been a bank ATM where she’d taken the maximum allowable cash advance on her credit card
s. Most of the cash had gone toward the purchase of an IBM Thinkpad portable computer, which she felt sure she would need in order to puzzle out the deadly significance of the documents. Afterward, she’d stocked up on non-perishable foods, a few sundries, and then tried to lose herself in downtown DC.

As Don’s research assistant, she had a general idea of what was contained in the documents he had requested.
Don’s next book was to be a detailed history of the so-called “hell ships” which had been used by the Japanese during World War II to transport Allied prisoners-of-war to forced labor camps. The conditions on the ships were inhumane, with hundreds of prisoners crammed into holds, deprived of food, water, and even fresh air. Many of the prisoners died of dysentery and other diseases en route. Many more however died when the transports were targeted by Allied planes and submarines who often did not realize that the ships were carrying their brothers-in-arms. More than 18,000 prisoners had been killed when the hell ships carrying them had been sunk. It was a tragic chapter in a brutal story, and one that might prove potentially embarrassing to the Navy and the US government, even fifty years later. But was it something worth killing over?

She spent a full day poring over
facsimiles of log book pages from ships and submarines, engagement reports, transcripts and orders, all relating to the sinking of more than a dozen different hell ships. She recognized many of the names from the hours she had spent doing preliminary research for Don, so she decided to start by looking for any discrepancies between what was generally accepted as accurate history and the official and heretofore secret record. There were some, mostly incongruences in time and precise location, but nothing that sounded to her like motive for murder.

Exhausted, she ate a dinner of R
amen noodles soaked in hot tap water, and turned on the local news. There was no mention of Don’s death or her own disappearance. Nor, she discovered had it rated mention in any of the local newspapers.

Someone had moved quickly to
cover up the murder. She spent several sleepless hours listening to the noise of the city and pondering the implications of that.

The next morning she changed tactics, focusing her search on the handful of hell ships that she had not previously researched.
One document, a message from the commander of the Pacific fleet to the skipper of the submarine
USS Stingray
, immediately jumped out at her.