Hell Ship (5 page)

She kicked herself for not having noticed it sooner, but it hadn’t seemed conspicuous at first.
It was only after reviewing dozens of reports, most of which were told with view to the ‘big picture,’ that the significance of the message became apparent.

The message
, just a few lines written for encryption, did not concern a particular ship or area of operations. It focused on a single man, a prisoner who was being transported in one of the hell ships from Singapore to a forced labor camp in the Philippines.

“IDENTITY CONFIRMED XX PREVENT LT HANCOCK TREVOR RA FROM REACHING CABANATUAN BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY”

She read the words over and over, trying to sublimate her incredulity. “
Who are you, Trevor Hancock, and why did Allied Command want you dead?”

She
turned on her new computer, dialed up an Internet connection, and did a search for: “Trevor Hancock British Army.” The results were disappointing, so she amended her search to: “Trevor Hancock British Army WWII.”

Alex
was adept at navigating her way through Internet databases and newsgroups; she also knew how to navigate the labyrinth of tangential leads and separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus it was that, a mere twenty minutes after first discovering his name in the declassified documents, she was reading about Trevor Hancock, lieutenant of the Royal Army and a British baronet, taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1945, and subsequently missing and presumed dead when the transport bearing him to the Cabanatuan labor camp was sunk in the South China Sea.

It took just
thirty seconds for a sophisticated automated search monitoring program to make note of the fact that someone was perusing online sources for information relating to the disappearance of Trevor Hancock. In accordance with its coded protocols, the eavesdropping program immediately alerted its user, who in turn passed the information along to the next person in his chain of authority.

Less than fifteen miles from the hotel where
Alex sat hunched over her computer, the man who had, only forty-eight hours earlier put a bullet through Don Riddell’s forehead, opened his flip-phone to silence the chirping alert tones. “Scalpel, here.”

He listened, saying nothing.
At one point, he took out a notebook and scrawled a street address. Only when the other party was done speaking did he break his silence. “Understood.”

Half an hour later, Scalpel was standing outside a coffee shop in downtown Washington DC, the
approximate location of the user who was searching for information about Hancock.

He stepped inside and quickly scanned the face
s of the patrons. The woman wasn’t there.

He stepped back outside and turned a slow circle, looking up and down the street in both directions until his spied the sign for the hotel.

Of course
.

He crossed to the
inconspicuously placed doorway and stepped inside. A man sitting behind a barricade of metal bars seemed oblivious. He rapped on the countertop, and when the bored desk clerk finally looked up, he drew back the hem of his jacket to reveal his holstered pistol. The clerk’s eyes went wide and he sat up.

“Hey man, I don’t—”

Scalpel held up a photograph. “Is she here?”

The clerk’s eyes flicked
upward, ever so slightly.

“What room?”

“I…” The clerk swallowed nervously as he consulted a sheet of paper on a clipboard. “Two-sixteen.”

“Thanks for your assistance.” Scalpel
shot the clerk between the eyes.

He bol
ted up the stairs two at a time and continued down the second floor hallway at a walk so brisk it was almost a sprint. When he reached to door marked 216, he squared his body parallel to it, and with the pistol in a two-handed ready grip, delivered a forceful heel-kick that struck just below the doorknob. The door burst inward and Scalpel flowed into the room, finger on the trigger, searching for a target.

The sound of
a door crashing open startled Alex. She looked up sharply, turning in the direction of the disturbance. She had heard a lot of strange noises during her brief stay at the hotel—fights, lovemaking, parties—but those things almost always happened late at night, not in the middle of the day when most of the rooms were empty.

It sounded like someone had just broken into the room across the hall.

Against her better judgment, she crept to her front door and eased it open a crack. The angle was just right for her to see a man standing in the doorway of room 216. He had his back to her, but she knew with certainty that the dark haired, broadly built man was the same person who had murdered Don and tried to kill her. The silenced pistol in his right hand was the giveaway.

The man surveyed the room for a moment, then swore loudly
. He took out his phone and held it to his ear. “John Lee, I missed her. She’s gone.”

Alex
made a mental note of the name

There was a long silence, in which she assumed the killer was being berated for having failed his assignment.
Finally, the man said, “She’ll turn up again.”

Another pause.

“And where exactly would that be?”

The man nodded absently
as he listened. He stashed the pistol under his jacket, and Alex barely had time to pull her door shut before he turned to leave. Through the thin wood door, she heard him say: “I’ll start packing.”

Alex
desperately looked for a place to hide, certain that the man would begin a methodical search of the other rooms. She decided her best chance was to wait beside the door, where she might be able to slip past the man as he entered, but after several minutes of quiet, she realized the danger had passed. She cracked the door again, but the hallway was empty. The killer was gone.

The South China Sea—approximately 300 miles southwest of the Philippines

“Man, this ain’t
what I signed up for,” Willis complained.

Bones,
manning the wheel of the
Jacinta
, an 85-foot converted shrimp boat, made no effort to hide his smile. “Dude, you’re on a boat at sea, in the company of manly men. You were expecting something else from Navy life?”

Willis stretched in his chair, tilting his head to one side then the other, and then rubbed his eyes.
“Easy for you to say. You’ve got a view.”

Bones could have argued that
point. The “view” which had inflamed Willis’ envy was a vast featureless expanse of green-gray water. There were no waves or swells to break up the monotony; the only changing feature was the angle of the sun’s reflection which had been dazzling in the early morning hours. In Bones’ estimation, Willis had the more interesting job of interpreting the data received from the sonar fish that was being towed along behind the boat. There was a lot more variation to the sea floor they were scanning than the sea surface upon which they were riding, though so far the sonar had not revealed the squared outlines of a manmade object, such as a five-hundred foot long ocean liner.

He was a little fuzzy about the particulars of the mission.
When the last of the cobwebs from his bender finally evaporated, he discovered that he, along with Maddock, Willis and Professor, were already on the move, cruising over the Pacific in a military transport plane. It was not the strangest wake up he’d ever experienced.

By the time the plane put down in Hawaii, he was fully sober and, more importantly, ready for action, even if the “action” amounted to nothing more than driving a boat back and forth across the sea, looking for some old shipwreck.
In a way, he was kind of excited about finding the Japanese treasure ship. His adventures with Maddock in New England had awakened in him a nascent interest in historical puzzles and lost relics, just as long as it didn’t have anything to do with Native American culture. He’d had enough of that crap to last a lifetime.

It occurred to him that he might have
said some stupid stuff to Maddock; he did that sometimes when he was drunk. He made a mental note to apologize when an opportunity presented itself. Then again, Maddock was kind of a tight-ass sometimes; he needed an occasional reminder, just to keep things real.

Before leaving Coronado
, Maddock had arranged for the lease of the
Jacinta
and the rental of all the equipment they would need, which meant that they were able to hit the ground running when they set down in Manila. After a quick inspection to make sure that the boat and everything else was in good working order, they had left port and headed directly out to sea, to the coordinates where, according to Maddock’s information, the
USS Queenfish
had fired her torpedoes at the
Awa Maru
.

Commander Loughlin had only been able
to make an estimate of his position. His coordinates were precise only to the degree and meridian, which meant a potential margin for error of as much as sixty miles in any direction. The officially accepted version of history placed the encounter in the Taiwan Strait, dangerously close to the Chinese mainland, but Maddock’s information put the sinking more than four hundred miles to the south, near the Spratly Islands, which were claimed by six different nations, including China and Vietnam. The claims were disputed and mostly symbolic, so there was little chance of running afoul of a military patrol, but the SEALs were acutely aware of the fact that the longer they spent crisscrossing the search zone, the more unwanted attention they would attract.

Jacinta
made about fourteen knots, so it had taken them a night and a day to reach the eastern edge of the search grid. Maddock and Bones were trading turns at the helm, while Willis and Professor watched the sonar. The grid was sixty miles square, bracketing the best interpretation of Loughlin’s coordinates. They had started at the northern limit of the search zone, reasoning that the ship’s course would have kept it closer to the mainland, and were running east-west lanes, half a mile apart working their way gradually south. Running the full grid would require one hundred and twenty passes. Each pass took about four hours, so at an average of six passes per twenty-four hour day it would take twenty days of constant operation to cover the entire grid. That didn’t include trips back to refuel and reprovision, each of which would add two more full days to the effort. The math wasn’t that hard; they were going to be here a while. Worse, there was no guarantee that the wreck was even in the waters they were searching.

Maddock
joined them on the bridge a few minutes later, bearing cups of coffee and sandwiches. “Did you find it yet?” he asked, half-joking, half-hopeful.

“No,” Bones answered, deadpan. “But we did find a spot wher
e we were picking up the Playboy Channel on the sonar. Want me to circle back and drop anchor?”

“I’
ll consider it.” Maddock’s expression grew serious. “Actually, what I’m really considering right now is a change of tactics.”

“
I heard that,” Willis agreed. “Anything is better than this.”

Bones was inclined to a
gree, but recalled the old proverb about switching horses in midstream. Before he could voice his concerns, Maddock went on. “The longer we stay out here, the more likely we are to attract attention, and Maxie was very clear about us not doing that. We need to narrow our focus.”

“Well, unless you’ve
got psychic powers you haven’t told us about, I don’t see how we can do that.”

Maddock
put down the plate of sandwiches and took out a nautical chart. Like many such maps, they showed a best guess about the shape of the sea floor extrapolated from spotty data accumulated over many years. He circled an area with one forefinger. “We are here.”

“Doesn’t look so big on paper,” Bones remarked. “But that’s
close to four thousand square miles.”

“You’re right.
What else do you see?”

Bones looked again.
He let his eyes rove over the map, taking in the surrounding area. To the southwest the depths rose and fell chaotically breaking the surface with the hundreds charted islets and reefs—merely a token representation of the more than three thousand land formations that comprised the Spratly Islands. To the east lay Palawan and the Philippines. The upper region of the map was mainland Asia, along with the southern tip of Taiwan.

“What were you doing out here?”
Maddock murmured, tapping the chart. “The
Awa Maru
picked up cargo in Singapore…” He moved his finger to the lower left corner of the map. “She traveled alone, without convoy escort, carrying billions of dollars in gold, heading for Japan. The safest and most direct route would have been to stay closer to the mainland, and head toward the Taiwan Strait, which is how it was originally reported. So, what was she doing way over here?”

“If the original reports were wrong about where she was sunk,” Bones mused, “maybe they were also wrong about her destination.”

“Not Japan? Where then?” Maddock moved his finger back to the starting point in Indonesia and retraced the ship’s route along a north-northwest azimuth that brought him to the search zone, but instead of stopping there, he kept going, following the same imaginary straight line until his finger reached land.