Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2)

by Christine Kling

  “What’s this about?”

  “I’ll explain when I see you.”

  There was a long silence. Riley was certain Cole understood the need for camouflage. They had no idea who might be listening.

  “So I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

  “Okay. We’ll be there.”

  “Good. Trust me on this, Cole. You’ll be happy you did.”

  She shut down the radio after they had both signed off. Businesslike. From this point forward that would be how she would deal with him. It was foolish to think their six days in the Caribbean meant as much to him as it did to her. If it had, he wouldn’t have stayed away from her for four long years.

  She was tired and she wanted to get some much-needed sleep. She hurried to the door. When she stepped out into the hall, she saw a man with shoulder-length hair hurrying off toward the bar. Where had he come from? She walked to the door a few steps away in the opposite direction. It was locked. He hadn’t been in there. There was only one other logical explanation. He’d been outside the door to the office. She followed him.

  When Riley stepped into the bar she couldn’t see a man with long hair in the crowd at first. Then she saw him on the other side of the bar—at least she assumed it was him because she hadn’t seen his face in the hall. It was a face you wouldn’t forget. His eyes bulged out of his head to such an extreme degree it had to be some physical ailment. On the bar in front of him was a half-finished beer and a cigarette burning in the ashtray. He certainly didn’t look like he’d just been lurking down that hall.

  “Riley, come here!” Brian shouted. “I want to introduce you to some of my mates here.”

  She walked over to the bar and one of the fellas gave up his stool for her. She slid onto the seat and found herself directly across from the long-haired guy. Brian went around the bar, telling her names. When he got to the bug-eyed fellow, he said, “This guy’s got experience working up in the Babuyan Islands. We’re in luck. He just flew in from Manila. You might want to talk to him. Nils Skar, meet Riley.”

  The guy nodded at her and lifted the hand with the burning cigarette.

  Brian continued. “Folks around here call him the Norwegian Psychic on account he hears voices. The good part is the voices tell him where to dig!”

  There was good-natured laughter around the bar.

  “Since he knows the area up there, I’ve invited him to come along with us tomorrow.” Brian set a beer in front of her and he lifted his own glass in the air.

  Riley raised her glass.

  “To good hunting!” he said.

  Camiguin Island

  The Philippines

  December 4, 2012

  Cole stood on the bow of his trawler with his forearms resting on the steel bulwark. He had just dropped the anchor in thirty-five feet of clear water and watched it hit the white sand bottom before letting out a little more than a hundred feet of chain. The four-hour trip over from their anchorage off Calayan Island had been rough, with twenty- to thirty-knot winds on the nose and fifteen-foot seas. Here in the anchorage off the west side of Camiguin Island they had found excellent protection, and the water was calm, with a pleasant cooling breeze off the land. Cole didn’t know why Riley had asked him to come to this place, but he hoped her reason was sound. He didn’t want to have to retrace his route across that channel anytime soon.

  Ashore was a white sand beach backed by a fringe of palms with assorted structures that mostly looked like homes. Just back from the village, the island rose up at a steep incline toward the jungle-covered mountains. He could count at least two volcanoes, the southernmost of which actually had steam rising out of it. On his chart that one was called Mount Camiguin. After what had happened to him in the Caribbean, being this close to active volcanoes made him uneasy.

  He turned at the click of dog’s nails on the deck to see Theo and Leia walking toward him.

  “Hey, boss,” Theo said, “what does it look like ashore?”

  “You’d like it, my friend.”

  Theo rested his arms on the bulwark next to Cole and they both turned their faces toward shore.

  “It looks a bit like Dominica. It would remind you of home. Two volcanoes in sight. There’s a small village and I can count at least five good-sized fishing canoes pulled up onto the beach. So far nobody seems to be paying too much attention to us, but if I know small islands like this, that won’t last for long.”

  “No, I imagine the village is all abuzz already about the new boat that just dropped anchor offshore. The coconut wireless is humming.”

  “Just wait until a seaplane drops out of the sky. That will really get the gossips started.”

  Theo chuckled. “You’re right there. Is there plenty of open water for them to land?”

  “Yeah. You could bring an aircraft carrier in here.”

  Theo nodded. “Judging from the number of wrecks marked on the chart, this harbor has been used by ships quite a bit. I wonder how many of those wrecks are from the war.”

  “Most, I suspect. But I hope Riley asked us to bash our way over here based on something more concrete than the number of old wrecks marked on a chart. If the wrecks are charted, they’ve also been well picked over.”

  “You’ll be able to ask her yourself soon enough.”

  “Yeah—if she’s speaking to me.”

  “Hey, all you did was steal her treasure map. Why should she hold that against you?”

  Cole opened his mouth and started to protest, but he saw his friend grinning.

  Theo said, “You know what, mon? You make it too easy. Come on, Leia, let’s leave Cole to his misery and go get this boat ready for company.”

  Misery was right, he thought after Theo left. When he’d decided three years ago that he couldn’t risk contacting Riley and endangering her, he thought he had lost her forever. Now he’d been offered this second chance, and he was afraid he may have blown it already.

  Cole didn’t know how long he’d been standing out there when Theo called out to him from the wheelhouse.

  “I just heard from Brian on the VHF. They’re about twenty minutes out. He says it’s him and four passengers.”

  “What the hell?” Cole walked back to the door to the bridge and the boat’s navigation center. Theo sat in one of the two raised chairs that faced an impressive array of electronics. “We’ve got five guests coming?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Where are we going to put everybody?”

  Theo laughed. “I see what you’re getting at. We don’t have enough bunks. I guess somebody is going to have to double up. Like maybe Riley can bunk with you?”

  “That’s not what I was thinking.”

  “Right. You keep telling yourself that.”

  “I’m going to go launch the Boston Whaler. Somebody is going to have to ferry this lot from the plane to the boat.”

  Cole headed to the afterdeck to use the crane to lift the boat out of its chocks on the cabin top. He’d just splashed the boat into the water and was releasing the lifting harness when he heard the distant sound of an aircraft engine. He looked up and searched the sky to the south. After several seconds, he finally located the tiny dot in the sky. He stowed the dinghy harness and returned to the wheelhouse.

  “I don’t like this, Theo. It’s too many people.”

  “Relax, boss. I know being paranoid is your thing, but this time, just focus on the girl.”

  “No, seriously. There is a reason why we have survived and been left alone for all these years. My paranoia has served a purpose and kept us alive. I never should have contacted Riley. You know how much they want this Dragon’s Triangle. And we’ve got to stop that from happening.”

  “Cole, can you see the plane?”

  “Yeah. It’s about to touch down on the bay.”

  “Okay, mon. Focus on the plane. Get in the dinghy and go pick them up.”

  Cole sighed as the floatplane splashed down on the sparkling blue water. He guessed there wasn
’t much he could do to change the situation now. Brian and the others had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

  “While you’re gone,” Theo said, “I’ll put together some lunch for everyone.”

  “Okay,” Cole said. But inside he was thinking, Great, now we’ve got the blind feeding the blind.

  Brian’s was the first face he saw when Cole pulled his Whaler alongside the floatplane.

  “G’day, mate,” the pilot called out through the open window after he shut down the engines. “I see you’ve shaved all that hair off your face for this great occasion.”

  Cole waved and rubbed his hand across his freshly shaved upper lip and chin. “Yeah, I figured the beard wasn’t worth putting up with a leaky face mask.”

  Brian looked back over his shoulder into the plane, then back at Cole. Brian gave him the thumbs-up. “Right,” he said.

  Then the door in the body of the plane swung open, and Cole saw Riley’s gray eyes smiling at him.

  Unfortunately, that moment of elation was short-lived as he next saw who the two additional passengers were: Nils Skar and the old man, Peewee. The needle on his paranoia meter was suddenly pegged.

  It only took two trips in the dinghy to get all the passengers delivered to the trawler. They got the seaplane tied off on a long line trailing behind his anchored boat. Riley and Brian were the last two off the plane.

  “How was your trip?” he asked.

  Brian said, “The weather was pretty good. No thunderstorms, anyway. But we will want to get back first thing in the morning if we can. I’m worried about that Typhoon Bopha. You heard the news?”

  “Not much. What’s happening?”

  “They say it’s causing massive devastation down in Mindanao. It’s not likely it’ll come this far north, but you never know. I’d like to get back home.”

  “I can certainly understand that,” Cole said.

  They were approaching the swim step of the trawler and Riley grabbed the dinghy’s painter. “I’d never have recognized the boat,” she said as she climbed out of the dinghy.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve done a bit of work on her since the last time you saw her.” As soon as he’d said it, Cole wished he could take the words back. The last time Riley had seen his boat, she believed that he had just died and been entombed in the submarine Surcouf. Seeing his boat again must be bringing up those old memories.

  Brian said, “You got any cold beer on this tub?”

  “See Theo in the galley.”

  Brian climbed up the ladder to the afterdeck and Riley followed him.

  “Riley, could you hold up a minute?” Cole said.

  She turned and waited as he climbed up and joined her.

  “I’d like to have a few minutes to talk to you alone. I want to apologize to you. I overstepped. I get so—” He stopped. There was always so much to tell her but when it came time to do it, he felt like a tongue-tied schoolboy.

  “Cole, I get it. It’s just as well it happened this way. It’s clarified things. Made your priorities clear. I’ve had a little taste of the way these Enterprise guys operate, and you’re right. We’ve got to stop them.”

  She turned and walked away from him.

  What the hell just happened? he thought.

  As Riley approached the door to the galley he heard her call out, “Yummy, I smell something cooking. Where is that Theo?”

  Cole thought, Theo! Oh, shit! She doesn’t know. He called out, “Riley. Wait up!” But he was too late. She turned and disappeared through the doorway. He trotted up to the opening fearing the worst.

  He stepped through the oval metal door and saw Brian, Greg, Peewee, and Skar all jammed onto the tufted vinyl bench seats at the dinette. They were chowing down on pizza, drinking cans of San Miguel beer, and chatting. But there was no sign of either Riley or Theo.

  The sound of her voice caused him to turn his head, and he saw her standing in the wheelhouse facing forward out the front windshield. Cole walked up to join her, and it was only when he reached the threshold into the wheelhouse that he saw Theo was there with her. Riley’s back was facing Cole and of course Theo, standing opposite her, couldn’t see Cole either.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Theo, what happened?”

  “Riley, it’s been more than two years now. It no longer matters how it happened. They tried to kill me and they didn’t succeed. That’s the good news.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve learned to live with it.”

  “Cole didn’t say a word to me about it. I can’t believe he didn’t tell me.”

  Cole eased slowly back into the passageway, but he could still hear their voices.

  “Go easy on him, Riley. In some ways, it’s been harder on him than on me.”

  “I don’t see how—”

  “He blames himself. And because of what happened to me, he decided he had to stay away from you—to keep you safe. I know these past four years have been painful for you, but believe me, he was suffering, too.”

  “Oh, Theo,” she said.

  Cole peered around the corner of the bulkhead, and he saw her slide her arms around his waist and embrace him.

  “Enough of this mushy stuff,” Theo said, pushing her away. “Let me introduce you to the newest member of the crew.” He leaned down and rested his hand on the head of his yellow Labrador retriever. “This is Princess Leia, or just Leia for short. Go ahead. Shake hands.”

  Riley dropped to one knee. “Hey girl, shake.” Leia lifted her paw. “I’m Riley,” she said as she shook the dog’s paw. “I’m glad to discover these guys have another female in their lives.”

  “So, Riley, you think what we’re looking for is here at Camiguin?”

  She stood and looked at the array of instruments and screens. “Yeah. You guys have really outfitted this boat with all sorts of new toys, haven’t you?”

  Theo reached up and touched a screen. The image of the map from the prayer gau appeared.

  Riley looked at him. “Okay, I can see that. But what about you?”

  “In this case, I’ve studied this map for so long, I don’t need to see it. But here.” He reached up on the dash and grabbed a stiff piece of paper. He handed it to her. “I developed a tactile printer that does for images what Braille does for letters. It can’t do color and it’s difficult to read very intricate designs, but I’ve been reading nautical charts with this for over a year now.”

  “You really are amazing.”

  “I know,” he said. “So are you going to tell us what you figured out about this map?”

  “Okay.”

  “Here you are,” Cole said, stepping into the wheelhouse as though he hadn’t been skulking in the passageway listening.

  Riley turned to look at him, and he saw the dampness on her eyelashes before she tried to rub it away. She shot him a look that told him he would have more to explain later.

  Theo said, “Riley was about to show me what makes her think Camiguin is the place.”

  “Before we get to that,” Cole said, “I’d like to know more about what Irv and Nils Skar are doing here. I don’t trust either one of them.”

  “I wondered about that, too,” Theo said. “The old guy was pretty funny when I served them the pizza, but I thought Cole said he was a member of the Enterprise.”

  “Was is the key word there,” Riley said. “I guess we’ve all had our secrets. About a day out of Singapore, I was intercepted by our friend from Bangkok. Remember Benny?”

  “Intercepted? What happened?”

  “He pulled alongside in a fishing boat that was a lot faster than my boat, and he shot me with one of his darts.”

  “What?” Cole said.

  “Yeah, the next thing I knew I woke up aboard some pirate boat at anchor off Natuna Besar, and this weird American guy named Hawkes was trying to get me to give him the prayer gau and to tell him your name.”

  Cole turned away from her and swore. This was all the old man’s fault. He’d started all this. “Then what happened?”


  “Irv was there with them. It seems he’s an expert crypto-analyst, and he has been working for them.”

  “I knew it.”

  “But listen, it’s thanks to him that I got away. We went back to my boat supposedly to fetch the prayer gau, and Irv and I managed to escape. We’ve just spent more than a week on my boat together. It was a pleasant change having company at sea.”

  “You mean when we talked on the radio—”

  “Yeah. He was right there next to me.” The look on her face told him she was back there in her memory. “A man his age, even a man in great shape for his age like Irv, he’s got to know his time left on this earth is short. The way I caught him looking at me sometimes—it gave me the feeling there’s more to his story than he’s letting on. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I believe him when he says he’s done working for the Enterprise. And it was thanks to his help that I figured out the map.”

  Theo said, “So explain it to me. What did you figure out?”

  “Hang on, now. We still haven’t heard what she has to say about that freaky Norwegian.”

  “I don’t know anything about him,” Riley said. “First time I saw him was last night. I think he was eavesdropping outside the door to Brian’s office when I called you on the radio. Then he somehow got himself invited along. I can’t figure out why Brian trusts him.”

  “I didn’t like him the first time we met him,” Theo said.

  Riley grabbed Cole’s arm. With her other arm she pointed out the window at the front of the pilothouse. “Look. There’s a boat coming out.”

  “Great,” Theo said. “That’s all we need.”

  “I’d better get back to the galley quick,” Cole said, “to make sure we have our story straight.

  A few minutes later the entire party was standing on the aft deck. Brian was acting as spokesperson and Greg was translating. Of the four men in the boat that came alongside, one said he was the mayor of the village, and he wanted to know what they were doing in his bay.