Typhoon Fury

43

Gerhard Brekker sat in the driver’s seat of the yacht, one hand resting lazily on the wheel as he massaged his neck with the other. It still ached from the SUV wreck in Manila when he’d hit the air bag. Luckily, all of his men had made it out of the fire truck chase alive, but each of them was recovering from an array of cuts, sprains, and bruises.

The busy ferry and shipping lanes between Manila and Cebu were now five miles behind them, and a low uninhabited island lay dead ahead, far from the normal tourist dive sites. No wonder that the Pearsall hadn’t been discovered until now.

The sea was calm, but the weather reports forecast that Typhoon Hidalgo had a fifty percent chance of passing over this very spot in two days, so they’d have to make short work of their recovery and demolition operation. Since their negotiations with Locsin had fallen apart, Brekker had decided to investigate the wreck himself. If there was more of the drug on board, he’d take it and sell it to the highest bidder. If he couldn’t find any in the time he had, he’d wire the sunken destroyer to blow up and hold it for ransom after he reconnected with Locsin and told him where it was.

One of Brekker’s men rushed into the cockpit and said, “We’ve lost Alastair Lynch.”

Brekker whipped around and glared at the man who was supposed to be guarding Lynch’s door. He’d kept the Interpol official around in case he provided any other info about Locsin’s operations. So far, the only thing he’d given them was headaches from his periodic bouts of caterwauling during moments of consciousness.

“He escaped?” Brekker demanded.

“He’s dead.”

Brekker eased the throttle back to idle and went down to find the door wide open and two men milling around the cabin, looking at the body sprawled on the blood-soaked bed.

Brekker said, “What happened?”

The closer man shrugged. “Looks like his hand became so skinny that he was able to pull it out of the cuff. He found a pair of scissors in the drawer and slit his wrists with them. Guess we’re not getting our damage deposit back.”

Lynch’s corpse was a mere shadow of the brawny man they’d captured in Bangkok. His ropey muscles had atrophied, and his shirtless torso was so gaunt that Brekker could count the ribs. Lynch’s body had literally consumed itself. Even if he hadn’t committed suicide, he would have been dead in a day or two anyway. The pain must have been unbearable.

“Wrap him up in the sheet,” Brekker said.

“Same treatment we gave Polten and his friend?”

Brekker nodded. They’d disposed of the two American chemists’ bodies by weighting them down and dumping them overboard during the trip from Manila.

He went up on deck. And, several minutes later, the men brought up the body with the bloody sheet around it. It was fastened with a nylon rope, and a kettlebell weight was lashed to Lynch’s feet.

“With that much blood to attract the sharks,” Brekker said, “they’ll make short work of him.”

He looked around to see if there were any witnesses but shouldn’t have bothered. The only visible ship was a ferry on the horizon.

“Do it,” Brekker said, and the men tossed the body into the water. It immediately sank from view.

“Get the dive gear ready,” he told the men. Although it was late afternoon, they’d still have a few hours of daylight to do an initial reconnaissance.

Brekker went to the cockpit and put them back on course. NUMA had helpfully provided the longitude and latitude of the wreckage to Polten, and the GPS system was guiding him to that precise spot only five hundred yards from the islet.

Though fishermen had discovered the Pearsall weeks ago, the wreck was located far from the normal tourist dive spots, and recreational companies had been warned to stay away until NUMA had completed its survey to assess the danger from unexploded ordnance on board.

It looked like the warning had worked because when the yacht arrived, they had the place all to themselves. At the indicated location, Brekker motored back and forth over the coordinates, a sandy stretch of seafloor fifty feet deep. He kept an eye on the bottom-scanning sonar until he saw the angular shape of a ship’s bow jutting from the sand.

After dropping anchor and shutting off the engine, he went back to the aft deck to find his four mercenaries already donning their wetsuits.

“How could the Pearsall have been undiscovered here for more than seventy years?” one of them asked as he checked his oxygen tank. “It’s deserted right now, but we’re not exactly in the middle of nowhere.”

Brekker shrugged into his own suit. “It was probably covered by sand in a typhoon like the one that’s approaching and then uncovered by normal erosion, which is why we need to get down there now. Hidalgo might cover it up again.”

When they were ready, the five of them went over the side.

Brekker immediately spotted the prow of the destroyer in the crystal clear water. He could make out the top of the ship’s hull number stenciled on the side: DD-542. The warship must have come to rest on the bottom with its stern lower than the bow. The top of the superstructure barely peeked above the surface of the sand. Most of the metal showed very little corrosion, supporting the theory that the entire ship had been buried in the sand until recently.

If they were going to explore the interior of the Pearsall, they’d have to find a way inside, but all of the visible port hull was intact. Brekker had acquired underwater cutting torches, but he hoped to find an easier way in.

He led his men around the ship and saw just what he was looking for: a jagged hole where the Japanese torpedo had hit. Most of the hole was filled with sand, but Brekker thought they could dig their way through.

And if they couldn’t, carefully placed explosives would make sure no one else would be able to, either.