Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2)

by Christine Kling

  His contact at the Enterprise had been able to provide him with the name of the woman’s boat and a general description, but there were many white sailboats anchored off the Ao Chalong Yacht Club. He had a tourist map of the area and the yacht club was marked on the shore. That was where the old man had contacted her. He would watch for her to arrive from that direction once he located the boat.

  Benny worked out a search pattern and traveled throughout the anchorage for thirty minutes before finding the one boat with the name Bonefish on the transom. Homeport Annapolis, Maryland.

  He throttled the engine down and approached slowly. The sun had just set, but there was still enough light for him to see that the sailboat was boarded up and padlocked. He had beat her here, and that pleased him. He motored several hundred feet away from her boat and dropped his anchor over the side. He opened up the bundle of provisions to discover what he would eat for his evening meal, then settled down to wait for the woman to return to her boat.

  Ao Chalong Pier

  Phuket, Thailand

  November 18, 2012

  When the taxi dropped them off at the curb, Riley knew they were going to have to talk at some point. From the time they’d tied up their borrowed boat before dawn on the Mae Klong River to their all-day ordeal on buses, they had spoken only when necessary. The tension between them was so palpable, even the usually friendly Thai people on the express bus had whispered around them. But the time for talk would come later. For now, she simply wanted to make sure her boat was safe.

  She hiked her pack onto her back. “Come on. We can see my boat from the end of the pier.”

  Cole was carrying a small duffel bag he had collected when they left the Bangkok canal boat on the Klong River. He tossed it over his shoulder and looked up and down the street. “I don’t like it, Riley. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to locate your boat. That guy with the blowgun could have flown down. He could be standing around here anywhere waiting for us.”

  “If he knows that my boat is here, he probably knows that my dinghy is at the Ao Chalong Yacht Club. That’s way up there.” She pointed up the coast. “My boat is what he would focus on. I don’t think anyone would be looking for us on the pier.”

  “That’s a marina right there.”

  “True, but there aren’t many cruising boats in it. The cruising boats are in the anchorage.”

  “I think you might be attributing too much local knowledge to these guys.”

  “Look, Cole, the fact is, they could be anywhere. I can’t let that fear paralyze me. Yeah, we can take some precautions, but a good first step is to go out on that pier and take a look at my boat while there’s still enough light.”

  He looked around the streets. She could see that he really didn’t want to give in on this. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  When they moved out into the open area at the base of the pier, Cole kept turning around so he could watch the restaurant and the shops along the waterfront. She thought it was very unlikely that anyone would be waiting here, but she knew better than to try to stop Cole from doing his paranoid thing, his “protecting her” thing. She ignored him. She just wanted to see if there were any strange boats anchored too close to hers.

  Before they were halfway out the pier she was able to spot her boat in the crowded anchorage, but what really drew her attention was a fishing boat that seemed to be milling about the cruising boats. It was an unusual sight. They usually kept clear of the yachts. She saw the boat reach the far edge of the anchored boats, and instead of continuing on it turned around and started back through the fleet. She saw him pass the huge Merlin II, the gold-plated racing sailboat that Billy Barber lived on. She wondered if Billy was aboard right then, but already it seemed like she had known him in another life.

  When the fishing boat approached her boat, Bonefish, it slowed.

  “Cole, look out there.” She reached over his shoulder and pointed so he could follow her finger. She felt the jolt she always did when he touched her hand. “See that open Thai fishing boat way out there?”

  “Yeah. Wait. That white sailboat he’s circling—”

  “Uh-huh, that’s mine.”

  “I’d need binoculars to see the guy from here, but what do you want to bet that’s our friend with the blowpipe?”

  “Yeah, that’s my guess, too.”

  They continued walking and watched as the boat motored away from the Bonefish around a big catamaran, then doubled back toward the far side of Merlin II. The small figure in the boat moved up forward.

  “Looks like he’s anchoring right there,” Cole said.

  “Shit,” Riley said. “I was hoping to sleep in my own bunk tonight.”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  Ao Chalong

  Phuket, Thailand

  November 18, 2012

  They took a table in the rear of the bar owned by her Aussie friend where they could keep a close eye on the entrance but where the other patrons couldn’t eavesdrop on their conversation. After the waitress set down their frosty Singha beers, they sat in silence.

  Finally when his beer was nearly gone, Cole said, “I have so much to tell you, I don’t know where to begin.”

  Riley nodded. “How about starting with the Philippines. What are you doing there?”

  He examined her face. Those intelligent gray eyes were studying him. So that was how this was going to go. He was being interrogated. “It started with what was in that pouch I told you about. From the Surcouf. Remember when Henri said he’d seen those papers?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He saw the words ‘Operation Magic.’”

  “That’s right. The documents were decrypts of intercepted Japanese messages from November and December of 1942. Some were done by the Brits, but most were by the American naval code-breaker division called OP-20-G. Operation Magic had to do with breaking the Japanese military code JN-25. Riley, the guy who decoded those messages knew about the Japanese plan to bomb Pearl Harbor and didn’t pass the information on. He kept quiet and let all those men die.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah. There’ve been all sorts of theories about Pearl Harbor, but there I was on Dominica holding the actual messages in my hands. Proof that they had known about the attack and let it happen out of pure greed. All the deciphered intercepts had the same initials on them: A. K. They had numbers, too, and I worked out that the numbering corresponded to the station that picked up the signal. It took some work, but I finally connected those numbers to Station CAST on Corregidor.”

  Riley’s head jerked up. “Corregidor?”

  “Yeah. It’s an island in the Philippines inside Manila Harbor.”

  “I know. It’s just that’s the second time I’ve heard Corregidor mentioned today.”

  “What?”

  She waved her hand in the air. “I’ll tell you later. You finish.”

  “Okay.” He would make sure she did explain later. “Like I said, I matched those initials to this guy, Andrew Ketcham. He was a supersmart mathematician who graduated from Yale.”

  Riley froze, her beer bottle halfway to her mouth. “Aw geez, not again.”

  “Yeah, that got my attention, too. I’m not as good at this online research stuff as Theo is, but I found a list of all the members of Skull and Bones up to the 1990s, and I found Ketcham in the class of thirty-eight.”

  Riley sat back in her chair. “So that’s why Diggory wanted to get his hands on those documents from the Surcouf. He knew what kind of power that proof would give him, along with a direct link to Skull and Bones.”

  “Yeah. And I knew what the Patriarchs would do if they knew I’d found those documents. Eisenhower had warned America about the rise of the military–industrial complex after the war, but I had proof they had engineered our entry into that war. I had to stay dead, Riley. Can you see that? I knew I was in way over my head, and I just couldn’t bring you into it. I wasn’t sure I could keep myself alive. But I also knew I could
n’t do it alone. That was when I made a very tough decision—I contacted Theo. It was selfish and I’m to blame for everything that’s happened since.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He waved his hand and took a long slug of beer. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll get to that in a minute. Since Dominica was Theo’s home, we knew no one would think it odd when he brought Shadow Chaser down to Scotts Head Bay. We used his family’s connections in the government of Dominica to get those documents into the right hands in the US. And Theo and I set about designing a new and better ROV for deepwater salvage while learning everything we could about Andrew Ketcham.”

  “I can’t believe you were able to get deep enough to reach the Surcouf.”

  “We didn’t get all the gold. But we got enough to finance the next stage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wanted my life back. I wanted to be able to contact you, to be with you. I thought all I had to do was bring all these secrets out into the light, and then there would be no more reason for anyone to want me or you dead.”

  Riley’s face softened. “Still battling those windmills, huh?”

  “When I made this plan I had no idea how far the tentacles of this octopus reached. I might have done things differently had I known. Scratch that. I know I would have.”

  She smiled and lowered her eyes.

  “You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? You think I’m always seeing conspiracies everywhere. I was right about the Surcouf, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes, but Cole, it’s not that I don’t believe you, but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that the tentacles of your so-called octopus have reached us here in Thailand. That what is happening now is somehow connected to the Surcouf.”

  “Riley, finding the Surcouf wasn’t the end of that story. I needed to know more about how those decrypts got on that sub in the first place. Once I had Theo’s help we put together a better picture of the life of Andrew Ketcham. We found out that while the US claims they didn’t break the JN-25 code until much later, there was our mathematical wonder boy in Corregidor reading all the messages between Tokyo and Yamamoto. Messages that never made it to anyone else in the government. Henri said while he was on Surcouf, they met a Canadian frigate at sea and that diplomatic pouch was transferred to the Brit officer on the Surcouf. Henri said the Brit Woolsey had planned to take those message intercepts to New Haven.”

  “To the Patriarchs,” she said.

  “Yeah. So how did they get on that Canadian boat? It wasn’t Ketcham. He went to Australia with MacArthur when the Japanese took the Philippines.”

  “So the Patriarchs had a network.”

  “Then get this. After the war most of those code-breaker guys went to work for the NSA. But not Ketcham. He went back to the Philippines, where he worked under Captain Edward G. Lansdale, a guy who was quite the spook during the postwar years. Then Ketcham suddenly died in a car crash in the Philippines in 1948.”

  “What’s so weird about that?”

  “Lansdale had nothing to do with Skull and Bones or the Patriarchs, near as I could tell, so I started looking at what he was into. The deeper I dug, the more I started to see that the Patriarchs were just one small group in a much larger structure. It’s like this worldwide web of loosely connected covert extreme right-wing organizations whose mandate seems to be to fight all enemies of capitalism—whether that’s in the form of communists or Muslim extremists. The guys working in the Philippines are part of a PIO—a private intelligence organization. They fancy themselves a sort of shadow CIA and they call themselves the Enterprise.”

  “Shadow CIA called the Enterprise? This does get wilder the more you talk.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. But you haven’t heard the best part. Have you ever heard of the Legend of Yamashita’s Gold?”

  Aboard the USS Bonefish

  Sea of Japan

  June 21, 1945

  After the navigator’s evening star sights showed them to be ten miles from the minefields in Tsushima Strait, the new skipper issued the order for them to submerge. Afterward, Westbrooke asked Ozzie to meet him in the wardroom. They each grabbed a cup of coffee and sat.

  “It’s going to be a hell of a night,” Westbrooke said.

  “We made it in this way. We’ll make it out.”

  “We’re taking the western channel. Last time through here, the skipper took us through at a keel depth of one hundred twenty feet. He reckoned the deepest they set their mines was seventy-five feet, but the anchor cables go all the way to the bottom. Still, since it worked for us last time, I’m planning to do the same thing. We threaded our way between the cables, but at least didn’t see a single mine at that depth.”

  Ozzie had not taken the con during their last transit. That task had fallen only to the skipper and his executive officer, along with the secondary officers of the deck. “And we hope they haven’t moved any of the mines while we’ve been playing in the Sea of Japan.”

  “Exactly. So we can’t even go up to periscope depth.”

  “It would be a helluva thing to set off a mine with the periscope.”

  “Lieutenant Flores will be your assistant officer of the deck. I know you don’t have much experience in submarines.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Ozzie said. “Nothing to worry about. Like you said, last time, we didn’t even come close to a mine.”

  Westbrooke looked down into his coffee. “I wish I felt as confident as you.”

  “Look, man, you can’t let the men see your doubts.”

  “I know.” Westbrooke looked up at the overhead, then closed his eyes and rubbed his palm across his mouth. “I just can’t get over my bad luck. I get the chance to serve under one of the best skippers in submarines, and he suddenly dies of a heart attack.”

  “Some men would see the opportunity to take command as good luck.”

  Westbrooke sat up straighter. “Right.”

  Ozzie noted that he didn’t sound convinced.

  Westbrooke stood the first watch, so when Ozzie came on at midnight, he walked into a tense conning tower. They’d been traveling at three knots for four hours, knowing that at any moment, the sub could come in contact with a spiked mine. One touch and they would all be dead. The FMS sonar rang out with a bell-like sound every time it made contact with a fish or a rock. Since the transducer was on the bottom of the hull, it made contact with many different objects. While the crew had spent several months training in the use of the equipment, and learning to recognize the difference between the sound and the appearance on screen of mines as opposed to fish, it was still very new and untested equipment. He could tell by looking at the faces of the men in the control room that they had lost their faith in the sonar.

  Ozzie remembered how different the situation had been when they had passed through the minefields the first time. For the most part, the men aboard the USS Bonefish were, like him, battle-hardened sailors. For months they had lived day to day with the knowledge that each day could be their last. They’d learned not to focus on that—instead they did their duty, knowing that it was out of their hands, and put their trust in their officers. They believed in the sonar because their captain did.

  That situation had changed with the loss of their skipper. They didn’t trust Ozzie and Westbrooke the way they had trusted Commander Johnson. Ozzie hoped they could all hold it together long enough to get him to the Philippines—he only wanted this sub for the ride that far. He intended to leave them there, but for now, he had to make sure they arrived.

  For the first couple of hours of Ozzie’s watch, they saw nothing. No bells rang out. But just past 0200 hours all that changed. The bell sounded loud in the early-morning quiet. Ozzie glanced at the screen and saw the mine about one point off the port bow.

  “Right full rudder!” he said. He kept his voice calm. He didn’t need to shout. The helmsman had plenty of motivation to be quick about it.

  Ev
en if Ozzie had not wanted the whole ship to witness this drama, it would not have been possible. It was tradition in submarines to have a talker stationed in the conning tower with a microphone to report to the rest of the ship just exactly what was going on. The talker described the situation.

  “The contact on the screen looks like a big blob. The bow is starting to swing away. The blob is out of sight now alongside.”

  The men in the forward compartments heard it first. It sounded like a banshee. The loud screech of metal on metal traveled back through the submarine as the anchor cable for the mine they had just seen on screen came in contact with the hull. How far above them was the mine? They did not know. And there were so many places, from the antennas to the stern planes to the propellers, that could catch and hold onto the cable. If the cable caught on any one of a dozen obstructions on their exterior, it would reel the mine down like a fish on a hook until it touched their hull. The scraping and screeching seemed to go on forever, but Ozzie kept his face expressionless. He knew the men were looking to him for their cues. Ozzie didn’t pray, and he did his best not to look worried. If it happened, it happened. At this moment, there was nothing he could do to change that.

  The screeching was past the control room now, growing more and more faint as the cables neared the stern.

  And then it stopped.

  Ozzie gave orders to resume their course and asked the navigator to plot their current position.

  He wasn’t about to let a few Japanese mines come between him and his treasure.

  Ao Chalong

  Phuket, Thailand

  November 18, 2012

  The waitress came to their table and asked if they wanted another beer.

  “Cole, much as I want to hear about your gold legend, I’m going to fall asleep right here on the table if I have another beer,” she said.

  After the waitress was out of earshot, Cole said, “Let’s find someplace safe where you can get some sleep.”

  And plan how to get rid of the crazy guy watching my boat, she thought.