Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2)

by Christine Kling

  The USS Bonefish was due to rendezvous with the other eight Hellcat subs on the twenty-fourth—in six days—at which time they had orders to exit out of what the crew now called “Lake Hirohito,” via the La Pérouse Strait. But Johnson had only racked up two kills thus far, and he was determined to increase that number before they had to skedaddle back to Guam. Ozzie couldn’t quite believe that there was still a rah-rah patriot around at this point in the war. Not after all they’d seen.

  Admiral Lockwood, ComSubPac, had dubbed this adventure Operation Barney. Nine American subs loose in the virgin hunting grounds of the Sea of Japan thanks to this newfangled invention called FM sonar. Ozzie didn’t understand exactly how it worked, but when he, a Coast Guard officer and member of the OSS Maritime Unit, had been assigned to this boat back in Guam his superiors told him the sub would be able to thread its way through the lethal minefields and enter through Tsushima Strait. Once inside, their mission was simple: Sink as many Japanese ships as possible.

  Ozzie covered the few steps from the wardroom aft to the control room. Commander Elmer Johnson stood stooped over, one arm slung over a fold-down handle, his eye pressed to the periscope lens.

  “Steady on one-two-zero,” he said.

  Six torpedo-ready lights glowed below the firing plungers.

  The executive officer repeated the range and bearing.

  “Fire one!”

  At the captain’s order, the sub lurched as the blast of compressed air sent the first torpedo on its way.

  “Fire two!”

  No one spoke until the sonar operator raised his fist over his head; then they felt and heard the distant explosion through the hull. There were smiles all round.

  “Oh, shit,” Johnson said.

  Now what? Ozzie thought. He tried not to flinch at the pinch of searing pain in his gut.

  The skipper straightened up to his full six foot four height, stepping aside to dodge around some low-hanging piping. Again Ozzie wondered how the hell a man of his height had ended up in submarines.

  The skipper slapped the side of the periscope tube. “Down scope.” He turned to the chart table, reached out straight-armed, and placed his hands on either side of the chart. “All ahead flank. Take her down to one-nine-zero.”

  The diving officer repeated Johnson’s orders and the sub rattled and groaned as she started the fast descent. All eyes were on the skipper, wondering what he had seen at the surface.

  “What is it?” Ozzie asked. He was a guest aboard this boat, and he had no business questioning the captain, but military discipline had never been his strongpoint—a fact that had served him well in the OSS.

  “Sank that transport, all right, about eight hundred tons. First one missed, went too deep, but the second hit amidships—broke her back. What I didn’t see through the haze at first was the goddamn destroyer escort on the other side of her.”

  The skipper’s words were greeted by silence in the control room. All but Ozzie were experienced submariners, and it was clear they all knew what was coming, and it wasn’t good. Ozzie had survived this war from the start, and had every intention of making it to the end. Back in Guam, they’d told him there was no better commander than Johnson. Now if only he could convince his stomach.

  “Rig for depth charges,” the skipper said.

  For the next several minutes, the sub descended and the skipper took them away from the position they’d fired from. Their strategy had shifted from that of predator to prey—hide and live to fight another day. Johnson issued the order for silent running. In the quiet that followed, they heard the distant pings from the destroyer’s search at the surface.

  The first depth charges went off not long after. It started as three distant booms, but over the course of the next half hour, the explosions grew closer and louder as the destroyer zeroed in on their location. One of the planesmen crossed himself after every boom. It was warm inside the sub, but the sweat that beaded up on every man’s face was due more to the bone-jarring explosions just outside the hull than the heat.

  BOOM.

  It was the waiting between explosions, Ozzie thought, that was likely to drive men mad. The trick was going somewhere else in your head, because there was nothing you could do to change the situation. If your time was up, it was up.

  BOOM.

  Ozzie imagined he was at the helm of a sleek racing yacht headed across the sunlit sound for Block Island.

  He could handle his fear, but not his stomach. It wasn’t seasickness—not him, the dinghy-racer kid who’d used the sailing team to get admitted to Yale. But life on this submarine was going to give him an ulcer before he hit his twenty-eighth birthday. Just when you started to hope the depth charges were over, when around the room men’s lips were moving with prayers of thanks, they would start again with a huge kaboom that made the whole boat shudder and creak.

  Ozzie remained standing with one arm wrapped around the ladder that led up to the conning tower.

  Then two depth charges blasted so close by, the skipper staggered and had to grab at the chart table to keep from falling. Several lightbulbs exploded and patches of cork used to insulate the hull hung down from the overhead.

  BOOM.

  Ozzie’s ears were ringing. He saw the CO’s lips moving next to the ear of his exec. The young man tore off forward at a run and soon returned, heading back through the control room with two seamen. They carried chairs and the small writing desk from the captain’s cabin.

  Curious, Ozzie followed them through the engine rooms to the aft torpedo room. There a couple of machinists were pushing a wood barrel into a torpedo tube. The place stank even worse than usual with the odor of hot diesel oil. The sailors smashed the furniture up into small pieces and shoved clothing and bags of trash from the galley in alongside the leaking barrel of diesel. The exec slammed the door to the torpedo tube and flashed a thumbs-up sign that was relayed forward to the control room.

  Moments later another depth charge exploded so close Ozzie felt as if his teeth were rattling in his head. Seconds after the explosion, the sub shuddered as the blast of compressed air flushed into the torpedo tube and sent the bubbles, oil, and debris out toward the surface.

  Clothing, bits of wood, oil. That was all that made it to the surface when one of those depth charges broke open a sub.

  Ozzie smiled. Brilliant.

  Hua Lamphong Station

  Bangkok, Thailand

  November 17, 2012

  The train’s conductor stopped outside Riley’s berth and indicated with sign language that he was there to strip the bedding and rearrange the sleeper into the two-seat configuration it had been in when she boarded. On this second-class train, there were no private compartments, only curtains to close off the fold-down bunk beds.

  She nodded, then swung her feet over the side of the berth and slipped them into her sandals. She hadn’t slept much on the overnight train from Surat Thani. The AC was freezing and the thin blanket they provided hadn’t done much good.

  The train was moving at a crawl as they entered the outskirts of the city, and she stretched her arms and yawned. She could have walked faster. There had better be coffee at the station. She needed it. A quick glance at her watch showed that it was only 7:30 a.m.—she had plenty of time before the noon meeting with Peewee—but she felt antsy. Once she had made the decision to travel the nearly five hundred miles to meet this mystery character, she wanted to see it through. She still had so many unanswered questions about her family.

  Grabbing her small backpack, she headed to the toilet compartment. She’d packed light, hoping to keep this Bangkok trip brief. After a quick wash and change into her only clean khaki capris and a polo, Riley returned to her seat to watch the slow parade of dark wood shacks slip by. Close by the tracks and constructed out of bits of trash and debris, the shanties were squeezed between the traffic-clogged streets and the trains. Sometimes, a few banana or papaya trees grew among the weeds, and lazy-looking dogs glanced with disinterest as t
he train clanked past. Just beyond, rising through the smog stood the metal and glass high-rise hotels and office buildings of downtown Bangkok.

  She unzipped her backpack, removed her iPhone, and opened the web browser. Billy was right when he said all the folks on cruising boats were blogging these days, but her site was different. Her single WordPress page offered her services as a security consultant and system designer and referred any inquiries to her current employer, Mercury Security. On the header was a tab with the name Bonefish. She clicked on the tab and typed the password tombolo into the box that appeared. This led to a blog page where she posted her latitude and longitude and a few words in the comments section. She reread her notes about taking the train to Bangkok. Then she lifted her head and turned toward the window, but her eyes were not focused on the scene outside.

  Six days.

  It was hard to believe that was all the time she and Cole had spent together from the time she plucked him out of the Caribbean Sea until that terrible Monday when the earth shook and he’d disappeared.

  She looked back at the screen on her phone. Still no comments there other than her own. She was certain that if Cole were alive, that Bonefish tab would lead him to this blog. But she was not the only one looking for Cole Thatcher, and she didn’t want to facilitate their efforts. When the authorities don’t recover a body, friends and foes stay alert to all possibilities. She’d set it up so that he could leave an encrypted comment on the page, and she’d been checking it every day for more than three years. To date there’d been nothing.

  Here in Thailand, Riley had studied the Buddhist idea of karma. She wanted answers but she only found more questions. Were daughters responsible for the sins of their fathers? She had done something long ago, and she’d never had the opportunity to tell Cole before he was gone. As the Buddha said, “We are the heirs of our own actions.” Perhaps the deaths of her brother Michael, her father, Cole, even Diggory Priest were all karmically related to that day down in Lima when she had carried that package into the Marine House.

  At least her work for Mercury Security gave her life some purpose. She sailed her boat from island to island and worked for Mercury as an independent consultant designing custom security systems. They emailed her blueprints; she designed the systems and emailed them back. She was helping people, keeping them safe.

  She slid her phone back into the backpack and her fingers touched the envelope. She pulled it out and unfolded the single sheet of paper.

  Now, here was this letter from a stranger claiming he knew her grandfather. Her father’s father. She wasn’t sure she believed a word of it, but the letter had lit a spark of something inside her. Of what? Hope?

  Outside the train window the buildings grew more dense. Plain, featureless concrete block buildings backed onto the train tracks, while between them stood a few traditional Thai stilt houses, their steep roofs distinguished by the curving points at the gable ends. Tangled webs of electrical wires sagged from pole to pole. The occasional streets that crossed the tracks showed bumper-to-bumper cars, motorbikes, and tuk-tuk tricycles crammed together waiting for the train to pass.

  On a clear patch of dirt, a couple of little kids sat cross-legged playing tug-of-war with a stick while a man she assumed was their father leaned against a rusty car body smoking a cigarette and watching them with a bemused look on his face.

  Riley pressed her forehead to the window, trying to keep them in view, but they disappeared as the train climbed onto a bridge over a wide brown river. Compact little tugboats pulled strings of barges piled high with cargo while long-tail boats buzzed around them. In the distance tall golden spires glittered in the sunlight where a wat, or temple, stood a few blocks from the water’s edge.

  How her brother would have loved this scene. “I miss you, Mikey,” she whispered and her breath fogged the glass. She felt the familiar ache, and her throat tightened as it always did when she thought of him. The river disappeared as she conjured up a vision of her brother’s face, his snaggle-toothed smile, his thick glasses making his eyes look even bigger than they already were. “What do you make of this weirdness? Our grandfather?”

  Even now, more than fifteen years after Michael’s death, she often talked to her brother’s ghost—although they never discussed the truth about her father. Had her grandfather been a better man than his son? Had he been a member of Skull and Bones? He had been the first Riley to go to Yale, after all.

  “Mikey, I feel like I’m poking a sore tooth. Like maybe if I can learn something about Grandpa, I’ll be able to understand what Dad did. I keep thinking, I’ve got his blood in my veins. I wish I could let it go.”

  Her brother had been that rare breed of human who was both a math whiz and socially and emotionally intelligent. In spite of his odd appearance, people found him so sweet and empathetic, they soon felt as though they had known him all their lives. People told him their secrets. Or he found them out on his own.

  Riley shook her head. “Mikey, I have to see this thing through, but I don’t have a good feeling about it,” she said. Secrets had been the death of too many in her family.

  The station was crowded, even at that early hour, but Riley stopped in the midst of the throng to take in the high, arched ceiling, the curving designs of the floor tiles, and the shuttered restaurants on the second-floor terraces on either side of the huge terminal. She hooked her thumbs under the straps for her backpack and slowly turned around, taking it all in. Around her rushed families, uniformed school kids with white wires snaking into their ears, men in suits and jeans, and women all dressed more elegantly than Riley in her khakis. In spite of the heat and humidity, the Thai people never seemed to sweat. Looking around, she saw a sea of dark-colored hair. She reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, knowing the sun had streaked her brown hair even lighter. And even at her meager five foot seven, she felt tall in the Thai crowd.

  And that was when she felt it—that prickly, tingling sensation that creeps up the back of the neck. That feeling of being watched. Riley turned in a slow circle, surveying the station from the crowded lower floor to the elevated terraces. No one appeared to be paying any special attention to her. But she trusted her intuition.

  She sniffed the air. Over the stench of train and traffic exhaust, she smelled coffee. One place did look open. The sign read BLACK MOUNTAIN COFFEE. She headed for the stairs.

  She had no appetite, so she ordered a café au lait and sat at a table next to the railing overlooking the crowds below. The few Westerners certainly stood out, clustered in little knots of backpacks around unfolded maps. Riley couldn’t tell whether they were Americans, Canadians, or Europeans, but they all fell into the category of tourist. As did she. In Phuket, she’d learned the Thai word was farang. The word embodied the constant feeling of “otherness” she felt in this country. Maybe that was what had triggered that feeling of being watched earlier.

  The hot, rich coffee tasted so good. She took another big gulp and held it in her mouth a few seconds, knowing the heat would make her sweat more, dampening the clean clothes she’d changed into on the train.

  Riley reached up and rubbed at the scar tissue beneath the fabric of her shirt, then she rotated her arm and shoulder to loosen it up. It had been more than seven years since she’d been injured while serving as a Marine Security Guard at the embassy in Lima. When they’d told her at the Bethesda Burn Unit that it would be slow to heal, she had never imagined feeling pain all these years later.

  As she stretched, she noticed a man who’d appeared at the top of the stairs. He paused and looked around the tables before he walked to the counter to order. His eyes had remained trained on her a few seconds longer than any of the others sitting around her. She was not unaccustomed to men noticing her, but there were several younger, and in her view, far more beautiful Thai women at another table, but his eyes had not lingered there at all. Perhaps it was only because she was a farang.

  Riley looked back out across the crowds a
nd processed the information. She went through the details she had observed as he paused at the top of the stairs. Flat nose, sharp cheekbones, and a Fu Manchu mustache. He was Southeast Asian of some sort, but she did not think he was Thai. Most men here were small, but there was something more solid about this man. He wasn’t tall—only about her height—but he seemed to take up more space. Broad shoulders, narrow waist. Long hair, mostly gray with black streaks, pulled up into an odd knot at the top of his head. She put him in his late forties. Blue jeans, leather sandals, a denim shirt with sleeves rolled partway up his forearms showing the blue ink of tattoos. And he carried a tooled leather satchel embossed with an exotic primitive design slung over his shoulder.

  She was pleased with the number of details she had been able to recall. It was important to her to keep in training. After two tours as an MSG, some behaviors were so ingrained, she would probably not be able to give them up if she wanted to. She didn’t really think he was any threat, but her training had taught her not to make that judgment too soon.

  Turning her head away from the lower terminal, she pretended to check the time on her watch. He was sitting at a table off to her left and slightly behind her. An unopened bottle of water stood on the table in front of him.

  She stood and walked toward the stairs. As she passed him, the man looked up and their eyes met. His eyes looked hard and flat as black glass. Riley walked on and continued down the stairs.

  As she crossed the terminal floor, following the signs that directed her to the Metro, Riley took one last glance at the second-floor coffee shop. The man was standing at the rail watching her. When she reached the top of the stairs leading into the tunnel, he still had not moved.