Dugan nodded and pulled a remote from his own pocket. He stared at the device a long moment, then looked back at the ships.
“These are very bad people, Dyed,” Borgdanov said. “I think you should not worry about their fate. Whatever chance they have is better than chance they give people they burn to death and shoot in head, da?”
Dugan nodded and hit the button, sending a single signal to turn on half a dozen battery-powered jammers hidden on each ship. It was a one-time thing. As soon as the jammers came online, they blocked the signal that had activated them. Along with everything else.
M/T Marie Floyd
At anchor
Harardheere, Somalia
The deck vibrated under Zahra’s feet from a series of muffled explosions, and he looked across the water to see the water roiled by a similar series of explosions along the hull of the Pacific Endurance.
“They’ve sabotaged us,” Zahra said, his mind racing. “Very well. Forget the Liberians for now, Omar. Organize the seamen among our men. We’ll ground the ships in shallow water to save the cargo. Get them started, then call all available boats from ashore, just in case.”
Zahra actually had good cause for optimism. Contrary to popular perception, tankers typically have a great deal of reserve buoyancy and can survive significant damage, given calm water and fair weather.
But this wasn’t a casualty. This was destruction orchestrated by a man who spent his life keeping tankers floating, and who sure as hell knew how to sink one. So as much as Woody had griped as he crawled through tank after tank watching Dugan mark places to cut with a can of spray paint, he’d followed instructions to the letter. As had the Russians when Dugan showed them where to place the shaped charges for maximum effect.
The ships were going down, and they were going down fast.
Omar rushed from the deckhouse to where Zahra stood, watching the main deck a foot above the water.
“Zahra,” he said. “The engine room is flooded. We can’t move the ship!”
Zahra nodded, never taking his eyes off the water. “Have you managed to reach anyone ashore?”
“No,” Omar said. “No phones. No radio. No nothing. We’re being jammed.”
Zahra looked up. Pirates boiled out of the deckhouse, alerted to the fact the engine room was flooded and that sinking was imminent.
“We must escape,” he said, quiet urgency in his voice. “There aren’t enough lifeboats. It’ll be every man for himself when this mob realizes that. Go get them started launching the boats, then pick four of our most loyal men and sneak away to meet me on the stern. I saw a small life raft near there. We’ll launch it and escape while the rest of these fools kill themselves over a place in the boats. Go now!”
“At once, Zahra,” Omar said, and scurried away.
Zahra moved calmly, reassuring men as he met them. Telling them that tankers took a long time to sink, and that boats were on the way from shore, and that they were readying the lifeboats as a last resort.
He lied his way aft, then slipped from sight into the alleyway between the deckhouse and the machinery casing. He waited there impatiently until Omar arrived with four men in tow.
“Here,” Zahra called, and motioned them aft to where the life-raft canister rested in its cradle near the ship’s rail. “Quickly now,” Zahra said. “Two men on each end. Lift the canister and toss it into the sea on my count of three. Omar, hold the rope, and don’t let go!”
The men positioned themselves as instructed and prepared to heave.
“One. Two. Three. Heave!” Zahra shouted.
The men heaved on command, and an almost-weightless fiberglass canister shot ten feet in the air and plunged the short distance to the sea, splitting in two halves and revealing—nothing.
“It … it’s empty,” Omar said, holding a rope attached to nothing.
Zahra looked farther up the deck, where two other pirates intent on survival had attempted to launch another life-raft canister. It too was empty.
“They’ve sabotaged all the rafts,” Zahra said. “That leaves only the lifeboats. Listen to me, all of you. We’ll go to the nearest lifeboat. As soon as it’s launched, shoot down anyone who gets in our way and get aboard. Is that clear?”
The men nodded, and Zahra led them up the port side to the lifeboat station. But they soon found they had no cause to use their weapons.
“It’s welded!” Zahra heard a man cry as he neared the lifeboat. “The lifeboat davit is welded together! We can’t launch the boat!”
Zahra looked around. The main deck was awash now and the tank vents were starting to go under, water boiling around them as the last pockets of air were forced from the tanks. He raced up the exterior stairway to the bridge wing, his underlings close behind. They gained the bridge wing and flew across it to the stairway up to the flying bridge above the wheelhouse, the highest spot on the ship.
And there they stopped.
Soon they were joined by others, and the small space was an island of humanity, its population staring down at the sea rushing to claim them, each knowing there was no escape.
Zodiacs
Harardheere, Somalia
Dugan watched the main deck of the Marie Floyd dip below the water, with that of the Pacific Endurance not far behind. He did his best to ignore the masses of humanity collecting above the bridge on both vessels.
“Seen enough?” he yelled over to Blake.
Blake nodded, and headed toward the Luther Hurd, undoubtedly thinking of dead shipmates. Dugan gritted his teeth and fell in behind.
Halfway back to the Luther Hurd he saw them, two large black triangles cutting the water. He turned as the sharks swam past, and looked out over the water at a dozen fins converging on the sinking ships.
Dugan closed his eyes and thought of Bosun Luna, flaming tire around his neck, his agonizing death recorded to brutalize his family. He thought of other families in the Philippines, India, Europe, and the US—and victims yet to be. And his heart grew hard. What goes around, comes around.
“Bon appétit, boys,” he whispered, and turned toward Luther Hurd without looking back.
Author’s Notes
The Facts behind the Fiction
A novelist never lets the facts get in the way of a good story, but I firmly believe the strategic use of facts make a tale more compelling. Given that truth is often stranger than fiction, I thought a review of the facts behind Deadly Coast might be of interest.
Unit 731
Epidemic Prevention Research Lab
Hygiene Corp
Japanese Imperial Army
I’ve visited Japan many times, and found the Japanese to be gracious and friendly. So much so, it’s often difficult to believe the events of the Second World War and the period leading up to it. Horrifying human experimentation carried out by Unit 731 was rumored for some time, and in the last fifteen years, well documented. The Dr. Ishii Shiro mentioned in the book was a real person. Under his leadership, Unit 731 committed atrocities that are almost beyond belief.
None of the perpetrators of these atrocities were brought to justice. At the war’s end, members of Unit 731 were the world’s foremost experts on chemical and biological warfare (largely as a result of their inhuman experimentation). Much documentation was destroyed before it was captured by occupying forces, and the world in 1945 was still a dangerous place. In that context, Ishii Shiro and his colleagues, a group unknown to the world at large, traded expertise for immunity. The rank and file of Unit 731 were sworn to secrecy and melted back into the general population, while higher-ranking members became advisors to classified US chemical- and biological-warfare programs. The official position was that Unit 731 never existed.
The Japanese government never changed that stance, but a decade or more ago, something extraordinary happened. Former members of the rank and file of Unit 731 began to tell their individual stories. Local governments, assisted by volunteers, many of whom were academics, set up exhibitions in sixty-one locations
across Japan. In the course of eighteen months, the truth was told. Many of those testimonies are chronicled in a book by Hal Gold, titled Unit 731 Testimony. It isn’t reading for the faint of heart.
While Mr. Gold’s book provided the historical background, I did take license. None of the dialogue or actions attributed Ishii Shiro in Deadly Coast are factual, and the relationship with his Nazi counterparts is also my invention, as is Dr. Imamura. There was never an Operation Minogame, but there was an operation conceived by Dr. Ishii for a last-ditch biological attack against the US mainland.
Operation PX was finalized on March 26, 1945. It was to be a suicide attack against the US West Coast by the I-400, the largest Japanese submarine and one of only three vessels of its class. I-400 carried three seaplanes in watertight hangars, and the sub’s range was to be extended by converting ballast tanks to fuel tanks. She was to launch a seaplane attack against West Coast population centers with plague, cholera, and perhaps hantavirus. The crew was then to run the vessel aground and carry other pathogens ashore.
Ishii’s plan was scrapped just prior to launch by General Umezu Yoshijiro, Chief of the General Staff. Umezu reportedly stated, “If bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world.” Umezu remained steadfast against the plan through the last five months of the war, even as the US bombed Tokyo to rubble. He faced violent opposition for his reticence.
General Umezu was given the inglorious duty of representing the Japanese Imperial Army at the surrender aboard the USS Missouri, and later was tried as a war criminal. He received a life sentence and died in Sugamo Prison in 1949. Dr. Ishii never served a day in prison, and died of throat cancer in 1959. Go figure. One can only hope Ishii’s demise was a painful one.
The Liberty Ship
SS John Barry
Every good pirate tale needs a treasure ship, and I was pleased to find a real one in the neighborhood. Owned by the US War Shipping Administration and operated by Lykes Brothers Steamship Company of New Orleans, Louisiana, the SS John Barry sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, on July 24, 1944. She was bound for Iran with war materiel, with an intermediate stop in Saudi Arabia to deliver three million newly minted silver riyal coins. She never made it.
On the night of August 28, 1944, the John Barry was torpedoed by the German submarine U-859, and sank in over 8,500 feet of water, 127 nautical miles off the coast of Oman. Two seamen died in the attack, and the rest took to lifeboats. These survivors’ tales placed the John Barry solidly in the ranks of history’s lost treasure ships.
According to the captain’s statement, there was an additional secret cargo of $26 million (at 1944 silver prices) in silver bullion aboard the John Barry. The captain’s statement was backed by anecdotal evidence from other crewmen, and cryptic, if inconclusive, references scattered throughout official records. The existence of the additional silver was never established. Clearly out of reach over a mile and a half deep, the John Barry and her cargo became another legend in the pantheon of lost treasures.
And so it remained until 1992, when an unlikely alliance of American treasure hunters and an Omani sheik employed a British salvage expert and a French drilling vessel in an ambitious attempt to wrest treasure from the depths. Using an unmanned remotely operated vehicle to place explosives, the operators of the drillship Flex LD blew open the John Barry’s hull and used a mechanical grab of their own invention to scoop up the exposed silver coins. The salvors managed to raise 1.8 million of the confirmed cargo of 3 million silver riyals.
Unfortunately, the silver bullion (if it exists) couldn’t be identified in the jumbled wreckage, and the rest of the silver coins were too mixed in the wreckage to allow easy extraction. The salvors terminated operations with a stated intention of making another attempt. To date, the remaining riches of the John Barry remain unrecovered.
I took obvious liberties with the story, but the methods employed by my fictional drillship, Ocean Goliath, closely parallel those used by the very real drillship Flex LD. Most importantly, the U-859 was not sunk immediately after her attack on the John Barry as indicated in the story, but sailed on to make some very interesting history of her own.
U-859
Contrary to the portrayal in the novel, the real U-859 was outward-bound from Germany to the German-Japanese submarine base in Malaysia when she encountered and sank the John Barry. U-859 was a type IXD2 boat, the latest class of submarine in the Kriegsmarine, and on her maiden voyage. Class IXD2 boats were large, with a range of 30,000 miles, and charged with the increasingly perilous task of maintaining a sea link between the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan. By 1944, the subs provided the only remaining method for sharing technology and scarce resources. U-859, like many eastbound subs, carried a cargo of mercury, in perpetual short supply in Japan and vital in the manufacture of munitions. Other boats carried not only mercury but also parts and drawings for the Messerschmitt ME163, an early jet fighter. Drawings the Japanese used to develop the Mitsubishi J8M1. Five of these advanced planes were captured when the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Records show that radar technology, optical instruments, and parts for V-2 rockets, along with German technicians, all made the long undersea voyage in the bellies of German U-boats. Reading of the technology transfer from Germany to Japan, I wondered what Germany might have received in return, and the idea of Unit 731 transferring biological-warfare expertise was born.
Before encountering the John Barry, the real U-859 had already sunk two Allied ships and survived an air attack from a British Catalina off South Africa. She managed to shoot down the British plane, but was depth-charged and damaged in the fight. By the time she found and sank the John Barry, the limping U-boat was the subject of a search by British forces, which the loss of the Barry intensified. Undeterred, three days later Korvettenkapitan Jan Jebsen, the skipper of U-859, attacked and sank the M/V Troilus of the Blue Funnel Line. U-859 sailed on, evading all British attempts to locate her.
But all was not well aboard U-859. Her snorkel was damaged in the earlier depth-charging and was only partially effective. Forced to remain submerged almost constantly by British patrols, the atmosphere inside the boat was increasingly toxic. It was with great relief that Jebsen surfaced on the night of 16 September and received radio orders to proceed to base at Penang, Malaysia.
A week later, on the morning of 23 September, U-859 was approximately twenty nautical miles northwest of the base at Penang. Confident he’d finally shaken pursuit, Jebsen was cruising on the surface and allowing his weary men the luxury of coming topside in shifts to suck in lungfuls of fresh sea air. He was a bit more than an hour from the safety of the port. At Swettenham Pier in Penang, garlands of flowers were prepared for U-859’s crew and a Japanese naval band was tuning up. A crowd of Japanese and German naval personnel stood ready to welcome U-859, giving the base a carnival air.
Much closer to U-859, HMS Trenchant slipped beneath the azure waters of the Malacca Straits as her captain, Commander Arthur Hezlet, RN, studied the approaching U-boat in his periscope—the Royal Navy had found U-859 at last. Or more accurately, the U-boat found the Royal Navy, since the British had intercepted the Germans’ signals to base and broken the code. Commander Hezlet had been in position for thirty-six hours, awaiting U-859’s arrival.
HMS Trenchant fired a spread of three torpedoes from her stern tubes, with the middle torpedo striking the German sub just astern of the conning tower. U-859 broke in half and sank immediately. Of the sixty-seven men aboard, nineteen survivors were in the water, including seven who made an astonishing escape from inside the sinking boat. Among the seven was the only officer to survive, twenty-two-year-old Oberleutnant Horst Klatt, the sub’s first engineer. Much like my fictional Japanese, Dr. Imamura, Oberleutnant Klatt was in the toilet at the time. I based my description of Imamura’s escape on Klatt’s firsthand account of his own harrowing and miraculous experi
ence.
Though perilously close to Japanese forces, Commander Hezlet ordered HMS Trenchant to surface and rescue survivors. Minutes into that exercise, Japanese ships appeared on the horizon and a Japanese fighter appeared overhead. Hezlett managed to pick up eight survivors, including Oberleutnant Klatt, before the attack forced him to submerge and evade. The remaining eleven Germans were rescued by the Japanese.
The story doesn’t quite end there, for U-859 did indeed contain a biological hazard and she was salvaged years later. After researchers turned up the fact that the submarine sank with some thirty-one tons of toxic mercury aboard, there were wide-spread concerns the flasks would eventually leak, poisoning the seafood chain. After diplomatic discussions between West Germany and Malaysia, the West German government launched a salvage operation in the winter of 1973.
There were ethical as well as environmental concerns. Containing the bodies of almost fifty German submariners, the wreck had long since been designated a burial site by the German War Graves Commission. As U-859’s only surviving officer and the individual most familiar with the sub, Horst Klatt, then fifty-one years old, was asked to lead the expedition. And lead it he did, eventually recovering some thirty of the estimated thirty-one tons of mercury.
The Pirates
The world has a romanticized view of piracy; but with apologies to Johnny Depp and Captain Hook, there’s nothing romantic about it. As I write these words on September 2, 2012, Somali pirate gangs hold eleven ships and 178 hostages of various nationalities. Yesterday, pirates in Haradheere murdered a crewman from the M/V Orna in cold blood and wounded another, announcing in a phone call to the press “More killings will follow if the owners continue to lie to us — we have lost patience with them.” To most folks, those numbers and events mean little, but they represent a threat all too real to those who make their living on the world’s oceans and their friends and families.
Deadly Coast (A Tom Dugan Novel) Page 28
