Hell Ship

PROLOGUE — A Different Sort of Hell

In his lucid moments, Trevor Hancock knew that he was already dead and in hell. Mercifully, those moments were few and far between.

At the beginning, during the long march through the jungle, he had dared to nurture hope. The ordeal would end… he would be placed in a legitimate prisoner of war camp where the rules of the Geneva Conventions were observed and treatment monitored by the Red Cross…he would be rescued in a daring commando raid…he would escape on his own.

It had been easier to hope at the beginning, easier to believe in the possibility that this trial would eventually pass, for the simple reason that he was not alone. Archie was with him, and despite the fact that the Nips would beat them savagely if they attempted to speak among themselves, they’d managed to befriend several other chaps from the service, as well as a pair of Aussies and an American, and as they trudged along, they would whisper words of encouragement to each other.

Encouragement was a good thing, but it didn’t fill their stomachs or slake their thirst, and even though most of them were still alive when they reached Singapore, they were all alone now, barely able to acknowledge each other with a look. Hope was reserved for nothing more than the next mouthful of water… the next chance to simply drop in their tracks and sleep…the sweet release of death.

By the time the column of prisoners reached the ship, Hancock was more an automaton than a living human, trudging forward with almost no awareness whatsoever of his surroundings. If asked, he might have been able to provide his name, rank and roster number, but an hour later he would have no recollection of the exchange.

The ship was a different sort of hell.

He did not remember being shuffled onto the vessel or crammed into the dark furnace-like environs of what he could only assume was the cargo hold of a steam freighter. The fetid air left him dizzy, unable to do much more than slump in place. There wasn’t enough room for any of the prisoners to stretch out and lay down, so arms and legs were splayed and interwoven in a tapestry of misery.

“Hold faith,” a voice whispered, and for just a moment, his consciousness was tugged back into the present.

Archie?

He couldn’t recall the last time he’d heard his old friend’s voice, and he realized that, without consciously thinking it, he had already given Archie up for dead.

Maybe he is dead, and maybe I am, too.

“You might as well be for all the good you are to this outfit,” spat another voice, contemptuously. Hancock recognized the speaker instantly — the old sergeant major who had overseen their training back home. But that didn’t make any sense; the sergeant major hadn’t shipped out with the regiment, and he certainly hadn’t been taken prisoner. “You are an officer in Her Majesty’s service, Lord Hancock. You were meant for better things than this,”

The honorific was pronounced with a sarcastic sneer, as the sergeant major was wont to do, but as the last sentence was uttered, the voice changed and Hancock heard his father speaking.

“Greatness was entrusted to you. You carry our future and all our hopes. Will you die in this hole?”

Do I have a choice?

He did not of course; whether he lived or died was completely dependent on the whim of his captors. But the words lingered in his consciousness and he raised a weak hand, almost involuntarily and touched the side of his head just above his right ear. His fingertips were drawn almost magnetically to the exact spot, and he traced the outline beneath his scalp as if doing so might unlock all of its magical potential.

How long had it been since he had even thought about this?

A secret, entrusted to him almost from the day he was born, his alone to carry and keep safe until….

Until he had a son of his own.

That wasn’t going to happen now. He was going to die in this floating pit of hell, and his body would be pitched into the sea without marker or memory.

“No,” Archie persisted. “You’ll make it if you keep faith. Don’t give up, Trev.”

Despite the pervasive darkness, Archie’s face appeared a few inches from his own and a firm hand reached out to grasp his. Hancock accepted the handclasp, and allowed himself to be pulled erect.

He immediately regretted the move; nausea and dizziness gripped him, and for a moment, he was sure that he would collapse again, but Archie held him upright until the worst of it was past. The sweltering darkness was filled with the groans of dying men, but through it Hancock could make out the faint rumble of the engines and the hum of water sliding against the hull.

“Right,” he mumbled. “Now what?”

“Survive.” The voice was not Archie’s, nor did it belong to his father or the sergeant major, but was somehow a chorus of all three, and then, as if to emphasize the exhortation, a peal of thunder split the darkness.

Not thunder, Hancock realized with a swell of dread. An explosion.

The deck heaved beneath him, and no amount of encouragement from persons past or present, living or dead, could have made it possible for him to stay on his feet. Because he was standing however, when the floor beneath him pitched sideways, he was not crushed in the tangle of bodies, but instead landed atop the undulating wave of flesh that piled up against an unseen bulkhead.

Almost immediately, the ship rolled back to the other side. Fully aware now, and fueled by a primal instinct for survival, Hancock began clutching for a handhold. He was not alone in this effort; all around him, prisoners were scrambling to avoid being swept away and crushed in the receding human tide. The dark hold was filled with groans of pain and exertion, and desperately shouted blasphemies. His fingers grazed an exposed beam, and for just a moment, he managed to grasp it, but then the deck sloped away and he fell, slamming hard against the floor.

The ship rocked back and forth for a few seconds, but when it finally settled again, the deck was no longer a horizontal surface. The ship was listing to one side, and Hancock could only assume that it was taking on water. It was a conclusion that the other prisoners — or at least those still able to think and act — quickly reached, and in an instant, they began surging across the hold. Hancock was caught up in the deluge, pushed by panicked souls behind to fill in the gap left by those in the front who had inexplicably moved down the sloping deck. A few seconds later, the British officer saw the reason for the mass migration: a rectangle of light perforated the oppressive darkness.

A door.

Even as he registered this fact, Hancock heard the familiar rattling-piston noise of a machine gun report. Cries rose up from the tangled throng ahead of Hancock, and he intuitively grasped that the bullets were being directed at the prisoners as they flooded through that narrow exit, but there was no turning away from it. There was another burst and more cries and then suddenly he was through the door.

The gun roared again, almost deafeningly loud because of its close proximity. Hancock expected at any moment to feel the sharp bite of metal tearing through his body, but he made it through the chokepoint and was disgorged into blinding daylight without being hit. Unable to see where he was going, he ricocheted between his fellow fleeing prisoners, following the downward slope like the ball in a coin-operated Ballyhoo machine. He caught just a glimpse of something gray and endless directly ahead — the ocean, stretching on forever — and then he was swept into it.

After weeks in the jungle and God alone knew how many days locked up in sweltering enclosure aboard the ship, the water felt invigorating. For a moment, he was content to simply float there in the sea’s salty embrace. Then the machine gun chattered again and the water around him erupted with bullet strikes.

The ship was still coasting forward, but her screws had stopped turning and the water pouring into the gaping wound amidships was dragging her to a halt. Nevertheless, in the space of just a few seconds, Hancock found himself fifty yards astern of the listing vessel. He couldn’t make out the name painted in white letters on the black hull, but he recognized that he had been wrong in some of his assumptions about the ship. It was not a freighter at all, but a small passenger liner, with a single smokestack and a pair of radio masts bracketing the superstructure. The Japanese, like all the powers fighting in the war, had conscripted civilian ocean liners for use as troop transports. What he had mistaken for a cargo hold had in reality been the ship’s dining hall, or perhaps even a grand ballroom, shuttered with steel armor plates to keep out both sunlight and bullets from strafing aircraft.

He saw no other vessels, which meant that there was probably a submarine lurking nearby, perhaps already lining up to loose another torpedo at the ocean liner. An Allied submarine, Hancock realized with a twist of dread. They saw only the Rising Sun emblazoned above her transom; they could not know that the liner was transporting their captive brothers-in-arms.

There was another explosion from the ship, probably a boiler or a fuel tank rupturing, and the vessel rolled over onto its starboard side, flinging prisoners and Japanese troops alike into the sea. Only now did Hancock realize just how many men were in the water, some thrashing to get away from the doomed vessel, but many more just floating face down, the last of their lifeblood leaking away from gaping bullet wounds.

There was blood in the water; a lot of it.

Creaking and groaning, the ship burrowed deeper into the sea. The bow rose up for a moment, thrusting skyward as the inundated stern aimed for the bottom, and then with a rushing sound, the black hull slipped down like a sword thrust and disappeared.

Hancock rolled over and began swimming frantically to put some distance between himself and the sinking ship, lest the cavitation suck him down as well. He must have been far enough away, for he didn’t feel even the slightest bit of pull, but that was soon the least of his worries.

“Shark!”

The screamed warning echoed again and again so that it was impossible to tell where the threat was coming from. Hancock scanned the water all around for the knife edge shape of a dorsal fin plowing toward him, but saw nothing. This did not reassure him; he’d heard that sharks struck from below, drawn to the smell of blood and the thrashing of swimmers.

The survival instinct that had energized him to escape the sinking ship drained away in the face of this realization. He had been on the verge of collapse before, his reserves exhausted. With nothing left, not even hope to propel him onward, he surrendered himself to the whim of fate and let the water carry him away.