Hell Ship

CHAPTER 5

“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 where 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 agree, 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.

“Manila Bay,” Bones said.

“Why?”

“Does it matter? Maybe they need to refuel or pick someone up. Maybe they were supposed to meet a convoy. Maybe someone in Manila wanted to buy the bones of the Peking Duck. Whatever the reason, this ship was on its way to the Philippines, not Japan.”

“That’s an assumption,” Dane cautioned. “You know what they say happens when you assume.”

“Bullcrap.” Bones folded his arms. “Look, regardless of where the ship was headed, we know that it was sunk somewhere in our grid — Loughlin’s coordinates, plus or minus sixty miles. If she was going to Japan, we’ll probably find her in the northwest quadrant. But if she was heading for Manila, she’s somewhere in here — the middle of the grid. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll search this area sooner or later; we can do it today, or next week. So the question is, what does your gut tell you?”

“My gut?”

“Yeah. That thing you never learned to trust?”

The corner of Dane’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Well, if you’re willing to trust my gut, who am I to argue?”

With Bones still at the helm, the Jacinta motored thirty miles to the south and resumed the search. On the second pass, they found the ship.

Dane stared at the profile of the sea bottom, shown on the monochrome display of the sonar unit. A long flat protrusion, sharply angled on one end, jutted up from the otherwise smoothly undulating seafloor. It was, unquestionably, a man-made object; the keel and hull of a large ship, on its side.

Professor, who had joined them on the bridge during the trip south, clapped Willis on the shoulder, and Bones let out a war whoop worthy of his ancestors.

Dane, however, shook his head. “It’s too short.” He pointed at the screen. “The Awa Maru was over five hundred feet long. That ship is three hundred…maybe three-fifty. It’s not long enough.”

Bones waved him off. “Oh, come on, Maddock. Can’t you just let yourself be right once in a while? It’s exactly where you predicted it would be.”

“You think there’s only one sunken ship out here? They fought a war here, remember?”

Professor nodded sagely. “Actually, I’m surprised this is the first wreck we’ve found, given the history of the region.”

“Maybe the ass end broke off,” Bones said. “Like what happened to the Titanic.”

Dane just kept staring at the screen. He desperately wanted to believe that they had found it, but the numbers just weren’t on their side.

Bones wasn’t going to give up. “Look, it’s only thirty fathoms down. Let’s make the dive and be certain, one way or the other. What have we got to lose?”

“Half a day,” Dane answered, but his reply was half-hearted. They had come looking for a wreck, and even if it wasn’t the right one, at least it was a chance for a practice dive. A hundred and eighty feet was deep enough to work out the kinks. Besides, diving sure beat the hell out of pushing a shrimp boat back and forth across the sea. “Ah, why not? Let’s do it.”

No way am I giving this up, Dane thought as the green-gray depths enfolded him. If taking a promotion took him away from the sea, away from a chance to dive, then he had no use for it.

A lifelong SCUBA enthusiast, he had been drawn to the SEALs because of their legendary reputation as “frogmen,” and while amphibious operations were certainly a part of the job, it seemed like most days were spent high and dry, carrying out missions in jungles and landlocked desert countries. On those rare occasions when the job did require him to dive, the military had a way of taking all the fun right out of it. This was different; this was just him and the sea.

And Bones of course, lazily kicking his flippers to maintain the correct angle of descent, but like Dane, mostly letting the heavy weight belt and gravity do all the work.

Yeah, even if it means putting up with Bones.

The chicken soup warm water on the surface grew chilly with depth, and as the last bit of light filtering down from the surface disappeared, the temperature was positively bracing. Dane wrinkled his forehead beneath his face mask, waiting for the “ice cream” headache to subside, and then held the mask against his face and snorted to equalize the pressure in his ears. When he opened his eyes, he was in total darkness.

He savored the momentary vacation from all external stimuli. This was why he loved diving. The illusion of solitude evaporated when Bones flicked on his dive light, but Dane’s enthusiasm for the experience was undiminished.

His dive computer ticked off the depth, one-hundred fifteen feet…one-twenty…one-thirty. Somewhere below lay the wreck of a ship that had evidently remained undiscovered over the years since its sinking. Maybe it wasn’t the Awa Maru, but it was a previously undiscovered wreck — it certainly didn’t show up on the charts. They would have only a few minutes on the bottom — most of the air in their tanks would be consumed during decompression stops on the way back to the surface — but it was a small price to pay for being able to touch a previously lost piece of history.

One hundred-fifty.

Dane flicked on his light and played its beam into the darkness below. Through the faint motes of silt, he saw the ship.

Oxidation and centuries of calcium carbonate accretions made the hull look a little like an enormous vaguely ship-shaped stalagmite. If there were any identifying marks on her hull, they were covered by a mineral crust. The vessel lay on its side, appearing exactly as it had in the sonar image: a long flat hull with a raked bow and a blunt stern. The superstructure was a blocky shape, but Dane was able to distinguish the cylindrical outline of a funnel.

He added some air to his buoyancy compensator to slow his descent and kicked toward the superstructure. Bones was right behind him casting the beam of his dive light on the hull as if marking out the path Dane should take.

Up close, he could distinguish finer details: deck rails, the windows of the bridge, stairways leading to the upper decks, and a large open doorway. The latter feature was a dark void that reminded Dane of the towering black monolith in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. If there were any clues to the ship’s identity, they would surely be on the bridge. The ship’s bell or a dedication plaque perhaps — something that might have withstood the ravages of time and salt water. The bridge was the place to start, but his gaze kept wandering back to the open doorway amidships. It looked like a portal into another reality, enticing him a siren’s song of discovery.

A strange clanking sound broke him out his contemplative reverie. Bones was rapping on his air tank, trying to get Dane’s attention. When Dane tore his gaze away from the black void, he saw Bones gesturing first to his wristwatch, and then pointing a finger straight up repeatedly.

Time to head back up.

If they stayed much longer, they wouldn’t have enough air to make their decompression stops.

Just a few seconds more, Dane thought. I need to know what’s in there.

Later, he would wonder if his fascination with the doorway was perhaps the onset of nitrogen narcosis, a condition where excess nitrogen in a diver’s bloodstream causes symptoms ranging from euphoria to paranoia to full blown hallucinations, but at that moment, he didn’t care.

Just one look.

He kicked toward the door and thrust his dive light inside. It took a moment for his slightly addled brain to make sense of what he was seeing. His first impression was of the white blizzard of static from an old television, a three dimensional tableau of light and dark, stark white and impenetrable shadow. As he played the light back and forth, the entire image seemed to come alive, and it was only then that he realized that the strange white shapes were bones.

Human bones.

The skeletons lay piled up from one extremity of the room to the other, and so deep that his light could not reach through them to the bulkhead on the other side. There were hundreds, perhaps more; naked skulls, gazing up at him, skeletal hands reaching out in some final desperate and ultimately futile attempt to grasp salvation.

Perversely, nature had chosen to leave this crypt more or less untouched. A few rags of clothing were woven through the skeletal sculpture, but there was no accumulation of minerals or sediment.

Dane recalled the brief about the Awa Maru; more than two thousand had perished in the sinking. It wasn’t hard to imagine the desperate passengers and crew forced into a single compartment by the quickly rising waters…and yet, something about this explanation didn’t ring true.

Curiosity overpowered his characteristic caution, and before he quite knew what he was doing, he pulled through the opening and began swimming down to the tangled bones. As he drew closer, he saw that something else had survived. Hanging from almost every single bony neck was something that looked like strands of brown thread. Some were thin strings — bootlaces perhaps — while others appeared to be metal breakaway chain necklaces, tarnished and oxidized by years of immersion. The necklace Dane inspected first had two small semi-rectangular tabs, similarly in a state of incipient corrosion, which he recognized immediately.

Dog tags.

He reached out to touch one, rubbing it between a gloved thumb and forefinger. The rust crumbled away beneath his touch to reveal metal, embossed with words…a name, only partially legible, but written in familiar Roman letters. Howard? Edward?

American, maybe? Definitely Allied military. Was this a troop ship? If so, where were the helmets and guns?

Comprehension dawned like a spasm of nausea. These men weren’t troops on their way to the front lines. They had been prisoners of war, captured by the Japanese, destined for a brutal forced labor camps.

This was a hell ship.

The clanking sound came again, but because he was holding audience with the dead, the sound startled him. He twisted as if the skeletal arms were reaching out to grab him, and kicked away, swimming frantically for the opening where Bones — Dane grimaced around his regulator at the thought of his teammate’s nickname — was busy rapping the butt of his dive knife against his air tank.

Yes, thought Dane, flashing an eager thumb’s up. Time to go. Let’s get the hell out of here.

Just a few minutes after Maddock and Bones slipped below the surface, Willis glimpsed a dark speck on the horizon. He immediately pointed it out to Professor and in the sixty or so seconds it took for the latter to retrieve a pair of binoculars, the little dark spot grew larger; large enough for both men to recognize that it was another boat and that it was headed right for their position.

“Think we ought to prepare to repel boarders?” Willis asked, with only a little bit of sarcasm in his tone.

“Darn it. Forgot to pack the cutlasses,” Professor answered in the same uneasy tone.

They had kept a constant lookout during the search, mindful of the fact that their presence in internationally disputed waters might make them a target for a search or shakedown by military patrol, or worse, they might attract the notice of pirates rumored to be operating out of secret bases in the Spratly Islands. Unfortunately, their options for dealing with such an encounter were limited. They had made the difficult decision to limit their shipboard arsenal to a couple of rifles and one pistol apiece — enough, Maddock had explained, to fend off an opportunistic attack by poorly organized pirates, but not so much that an official Chinese or Vietnamese naval interdiction might lead to arrest, capture, or worse.

In the binoculars, the approaching vessel was revealed to be a sleek motor yacht, modern and far too expensive for outlaw mariners, though definitely not military. The radar put its approach speed at twenty-one knots. With divers in the water, running wasn’t an option, but even if the men remaining aboard Jacinta had been inclined to try, the yacht would have been able to easily overtake them.

“How are we gonna play this, Prof?” Willis asked, nervously.

Professor lowered his glasses. He wasn’t particularly bothered by the prospect of violence, but like any other SEAL, there was one thing that he was afraid of: failure…blowing the mission, letting his country and his swim buddies down.

“W-W-M-D,” he muttered. What would Maddock do? “Okay, let’s break out the rifles. Maybe if they know they we’re not toothless, they’ll hold back long enough to let Maddock and Bones finish the dive.”

Willis nodded and went off to retrieve the weapons while Professor maintained his vigil with the binoculars. He could see the silhouettes of men moving about on the approaching vessel, but little else. After a few more minutes, the yacht veered to port, and if the diminishing froth of its wake was any indication, cut its engines. Even as it coasted to a stop, a smaller vessel — Professor recognized it as a Zodiac, a civilian version of the Rigid Inflatable Boat that the SEALs often used — pulled out from sheltered side of the yacht and turned toward the Jacinta. There were five occupants, all wearing dark tactical gear and carrying assault weapons.

“Well, that answers one question,” Professor said, under his breath.

Willis returned a moment later with a rifle in each hand. He held one out to Professor, but before the other man could take it, there was a loud cracking sound, like someone smashing a hammer into the side of the boat. The bulkhead just behind them exploded in a spray of wood and fiberglass, and a couple seconds later, the report of a high-powered rifle echoed across the water.

Both men threw themselves flat on the deck, but Professor knew the shooter had missed on purpose; it was a warning shot from a sniper on the yacht, covering fire to protect the men on the assault boat.

Professor’s heart sank. They were outnumbered, outgunned…helpless. Worse, there was no way to warn Maddock and Bones about what would be waiting for them back on the surface.