Hell Ship

by David Wood

  “Why?” But even as he asked it, Dane knew the answer, and breathed a curse. Another figure stood in the doorway, watching them…watching him. Dane stiffened his spine and put on his best nonchalant expression as he strode up the walk to meet the team commander. “Evening, sir.”

  “Actually, Maddock, I think ‘good morning’ would be the correct greeting.” Maxie’s voice was stern, his visage typically unreadable. “What’s the problem here?”

  Dane spread his hand innocently. “No problem that I’m aware of, sir.”

  Maxie stared back at him for a moment longer then turned smartly on his heel. “My office,” he said, without looking back. Dane sighed and hustled after his boss. When they reached the utilitarian room, Maxie settled wearily into his chair. “Close the door.”

  Dane complied, groaning inwardly. A closed-door meeting was not a good sign.

  Maxie didn’t waste time with preamble. “Say the word and Bonebrake is gone.”

  Dane shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, sir. He’s a good SEAL. I’d trust him with my life.”

  “He’s a sledgehammer,” Maxie corrected. “When you need to smash something, a sledgehammer is a great thing to have. When you need to drive a nail…not so much. I’ve seen dozens of guys like him in my time; they thrive in combat, but can’t handle home port so well. Lord knows, I’ve done my best to straighten him out.”

  Dane wasn’t sure if Maxie was offering him a solution or testing his loyalty to his teammates, but either way, despite the friction between them, he wasn’t about to throw Bones under the bus. “He can handle it, sir. We’ll make sure of it.”

  “Being in command means making hard choices. I know you think that your first loyalty is to the men in your platoon, but you’re not doing them any favors by covering up a serious problem.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “I’m not so sure you do.” Maxie studied him a moment longer, then waved his hand. “Anyway, that’s not why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Sir?”

  “You didn’t think I was up at this hour just to deal with a drunken sailor, did you?” A rare smile creased Maxie’s face then he was all business again. “Tonight, I received a call from the SECNAV asking a favor of me. A favor of the very hush-hush variety.”

  Dane felt his pulse quicken, equal parts excitement and anxiety. “A mission?”

  “A training exercise,” Maxie emphasized.

  “Training exercise” was shorthand for a highly classified, off-the-books action, one for which there would be only minimal tactical support and complete deniability. If the mission was successful, there would be no official acknowledgement, and if things went south, the team would be on their own.

  “It’s an underwater salvage operation,” he continued. “You’ll be looking for a sunken wreck in the South China Sea. Find it, verify it’s really where we think it is, and then come home without attracting any attention. Zero attention, to be precise.”

  Dane was pleasantly surprised by that. While it was true that SEALs were arguably the deadliest warriors in the US military, they were also some of the best trained divers anywhere.

  Maxie slid a file folder across the desktop and Dane scooped it up, eager to learn the details of the mission. Would they be looking for an experimental stealth drone that crashed to close to Chinese waters? An illegal arms shipment bound for North Korea?

  There was a single sheet of paper inside and most of it was blank, but even after reading it three times, Dane still couldn’t make sense of what was written there. “Is this correct sir? I’m supposed to find a Japanese ship from World War II?”

  “The Awa Maru,” Maxie said.

  The sheet of paper included a brief excerpt detailing the sinking of the Awa Maru, an ocean liner that had been impressed into Japanese naval service, running supplies and personnel between the island nation and her colonies in the South Pacific and Indonesia. On April 1, 1945, an American submarine, the USS Queenfish, under the command of Elliot Loughlin, had sunk the ship with torpedoes.

  Dane lowered the brief and met Maxie’s impassive stare. “Sir, maybe it’s not my place to ask why, but…why?”

  “Correct. It’s not your place to ask,” Maxie agreed in a clipped tone, but then his lips twitched into a smile. “Nor was it my place to ask the SECNAV, but I did anyway. What do you know about Admiral Loughlin?”

  Dane faintly recalled Loughlin’s name from his classes at Annapolis. Loughlin had been something of a legend during the war, and in the years that followed had become one of the most decorated officers in US Naval history, twice earning the prestigious Legion of Merit award. The incident with the Awa Maru was the only black spot on his record; the ship had been purportedly transporting supplies for POW camps, under the auspices of the Red Cross, and all US ships had been ordered not to engage her. After the sinking, Loughlin was immediately relieved of command, court-martialed, and found guilty of negligence, though ultimately his career had survived and he had gone on to earn the rank of rear admiral.

  Maxie nodded as Dane finished his recollection. “The Awa Maru went down with all hands, except for one lone survivor; over two thousand dead, mostly civilian businessmen, diplomats and merchant marines. The Navy brass feared that it would be a public relations disaster, generating sympathy for Japan, but strangely the incident was mostly hushed up. Loughlin received a slap on the wrist—a Letter of Admonition in his permanent record—and the US agreed to pay the Japanese reparations for the loss of the ship. But it turns out, there’s a lot more to the story. To begin with, the Awa Maru had already dropped off its supplies in Singapore. It was transporting cargo back to Japan, cargo which would have aided in their war effort.”

  “Which would have made it a legitimate military target,” Dane said. “No wonder the Japanese didn’t make more of a fuss; if word got out that they were using Red Cross designated ships to smuggle contraband, it would have been an even bigger PR disaster for them.”

  “And if the Awa Maru had reached its destination, it would have been a military disaster for us. She was carrying enough war loot—gold, platinum, diamonds—to finance the war for several more years. It’s also believed that the ship was carrying the bones of the Peking Man, which went missing during the war and have never been found.”

  Dane shook his head. “Let me get this straight. The SECNAV wants us to go treasure hunting?”

  “I asked him the same question. As I said, there’s more to the story. Rumors about the Awa Maru’s cargo have been circulating for years; people don’t just give up when there’s five billion dollars worth of treasure out there for the taking. In 1976, the American astronaut Scott Carpenter, and Jon Lindbergh—the son of Charles Lindbergh and a former Navy frogman—discovered the Queenfish’s log, which pinpointed the location where the sinking occurred, and a few years later the Chinese government announced that they had found the wreck, but no treasure.”

  “They had the wrong wreck?”

  “According to the SECNAV, the Queenfish’s log book was a fake, part of an elaborate ruse to probe China’s defensive posture in the Taiwan Strait. Carpenter and Lindbergh were part of the deception. The Chinese ran them off the site, which was not completely unexpected, and then took over. Whatever ship they found, or claim to have found, wasn’t the Awa Maru. Loughlin’s actual log book indicates that the ship was sunk several hundred miles away and remains undiscovered.”

  “Which brings me back to my original question: why does the Secretary of the Navy want us to go looking for buried treasure? Budget cuts?”

  “It’s political.” Maxie’s nose wrinkled, as if saying the word had been distasteful, but then he continued. “China has the best claim for the treasure, particularly the Peking Man, which is an invaluable piece of history. And in case you haven’t been reading the news, China holds our markers. Our national credit rating isn’t what it used to be. If China calls that debt in, we’re done, and a lot of folks think maybe that’s what the Chinese want. Th
e President believes that pointing them to the real treasure would earn us some political capital with Beijing, but since we hoodwinked them once before, he wants to make sure that the ship is actually there before passing on the location. That’s why your job will be to find it and make sure it’s really the Awa Maru. Recon only. Under no circumstances are you to attempt recovery of the ship or its cargo.”

  “And then when it’s politically expedient, the President can hand the Awa Maru to China, wrapped up in a bow. But why now? Why a middle of the night phone call?”

  “SECNAV didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.” Maxie crossed his arms, signaling that he was done entertaining questions. “He made it very clear that this is a favor, Dane. It’s not such a bad thing to have the Secretary of the Navy owe you one, if you catch my drift. Particularly at this crossroads in your career.”

  It took a moment for the significance of the last statement to sink in. “You know about the Valley Forge?”

  “I may have mentioned your name in passing to Admiral Long.”

  Dane suddenly felt numb. “I don’t understand, sir. You want me to leave the team?”

  Maxie recoiled a little. “Hell no. You’re an excellent officer. I’m not cutting you loose; I’m trying to set you free to realize your potential. If you stay with the teams, the best you can hope for is to someday have my job. And in case you haven’t noticed, my job amounts to pushing papers, riding herd on drunken sailors, and taking late night phone calls from political appointees. If you ever want to wear a star on your collar, you’ve got to seize every opportunity that comes your way. That’s just the way the Navy works, and I don’t want to be responsible for holding you back. Or, I might add, depriving the service of a damned fine leader.”

  Dane wanted to protest, tell Maxie that he wasn’t interested in being an admiral, much less playing the political games necessary to achieve that goal. But there was a part of him that wondered if maybe that was exactly what he should be doing.

  A good leader knew the importance of listening to what his NCOs had to say, but sometimes—particularly with guys like Bones—that tested the limits of military discipline. Not to mention his patience. It wouldn’t be like that on a ship, that little voice inside told him.

  Maxie seemed to sense his internal conflict. “It’s not as if you have to decide right now. In fact, right now, you’ve got a ‘training exercise’ to do. I want you wheels up by dawn and running a search grid over the target zone ASAP.”

  Dane put the matter of his career on a mental back burner. “I’ll tell the guys.”

  “Good. Pour some coffee down Bonebrake’s throat. Maybe getting back out in the field will help him straighten up. Oh, and one other thing…”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ll need my name tag back.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Washington DC

  Alex found sanctuary in a cheap hotel and didn’t venture outside for two days. She paid in cash and the desk clerk hadn’t batted an eye. Come to think of it, he hadn’t even made eye contact. It was the perfect place to lay low until she could figure out what was going on.

  Survival was her first concern.

  Don’s murder had not simply been a robbery gone wrong; the historian had been tortured, his office ransacked. The killer had been looking for something, and Alex was pretty sure she knew what that something was.

  She wasn’t a believer in coincidence. Don had been killed on the very day that he was to receive several recently declassified government documents that he had requested under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act—documents that would have been sitting on his desk when the killer arrived had she not been running late. She still had the envelope from the archives. It only stood to reason that if the killer was still looking for it, he would be looking for her as well.

  But who was he? Who did he work for? Until she knew the answer to that question, she couldn’t trust anyone.

  Her first stop after fleeing Don’s neighborhood had been a bank ATM where she’d taken the maximum allowable cash advance on her credit cards. Most of the cash had gone toward the purchase of an IBM Thinkpad portable computer, which she felt sure she would need in order to puzzle out the deadly significance of the documents. Afterward, she’d stocked up on non-perishable foods, a few sundries, and then tried to lose herself in downtown DC.

  As Don’s research assistant, she had a general idea of what was contained in the documents he had requested. Don’s next book was to be a detailed history of the so-called “hell ships” which had been used by the Japanese during World War II to transport Allied prisoners-of-war to forced labor camps. The conditions on the ships were inhumane, with hundreds of prisoners crammed into holds, deprived of food, water, and even fresh air. Many of the prisoners died of dysentery and other diseases en route. Many more however died when the transports were targeted by Allied planes and submarines who often did not realize that the ships were carrying their brothers-in-arms. More than 18,000 prisoners had been killed when the hell ships carrying them had been sunk. It was a tragic chapter in a brutal story, and one that might prove potentially embarrassing to the Navy and the US government, even fifty years later. But was it something worth killing over?

  She spent a full day poring over facsimiles of log book pages from ships and submarines, engagement reports, transcripts and orders, all relating to the sinking of more than a dozen different hell ships. She recognized many of the names from the hours she had spent doing preliminary research for Don, so she decided to start by looking for any discrepancies between what was generally accepted as accurate history and the official and heretofore secret record. There were some, mostly incongruences in time and precise location, but nothing that sounded to her like motive for murder.

  Exhausted, she ate a dinner of Ramen noodles soaked in hot tap water, and turned on the local news. There was no mention of Don’s death or her own disappearance. Nor, she discovered had it rated mention in any of the local newspapers.

  Someone had moved quickly to cover up the murder. She spent several sleepless hours listening to the noise of the city and pondering the implications of that.

  The next morning she changed tactics, focusing her search on the handful of hell ships that she had not previously researched. One document, a message from the commander of the Pacific fleet to the skipper of the submarine USS Stingray, immediately jumped out at her.

  She kicked herself for not having noticed it sooner, but it hadn’t seemed conspicuous at first. It was only after reviewing dozens of reports, most of which were told with view to the ‘big picture,’ that the significance of the message became apparent.

  The message, just a few lines written for encryption, did not concern a particular ship or area of operations. It focused on a single man, a prisoner who was being transported in one of the hell ships from Singapore to a forced labor camp in the Philippines.

  “IDENTITY CONFIRMED XX PREVENT LT HANCOCK TREVOR RA FROM REACHING CABANATUAN BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY”

  She read the words over and over, trying to sublimate her incredulity. “Who are you, Trevor Hancock, and why did Allied Command want you dead?”

  She turned on her new computer, dialed up an Internet connection, and did a search for: “Trevor Hancock British Army.” The results were disappointing, so she amended her search to: “Trevor Hancock British Army WWII.”

  Alex was adept at navigating her way through Internet databases and newsgroups; she also knew how to navigate the labyrinth of tangential leads and separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus it was that, a mere twenty minutes after first discovering his name in the declassified documents, she was reading about Trevor Hancock, lieutenant of the Royal Army and a British baronet, taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1945, and subsequently missing and presumed dead when the transport bearing him to the Cabanatuan labor camp was sunk in the South China Sea.

  It took just thirty seconds for a sophisticated automated search monitoring program to make note of the fact that someone was p
erusing online sources for information relating to the disappearance of Trevor Hancock. In accordance with its coded protocols, the eavesdropping program immediately alerted its user, who in turn passed the information along to the next person in his chain of authority.

  Less than fifteen miles from the hotel where Alex sat hunched over her computer, the man who had, only forty-eight hours earlier put a bullet through Don Riddell’s forehead, opened his flip-phone to silence the chirping alert tones. “Scalpel, here.”

  He listened, saying nothing. At one point, he took out a notebook and scrawled a street address. Only when the other party was done speaking did he break his silence. “Understood.”

  Half an hour later, Scalpel was standing outside a coffee shop in downtown Washington DC, the approximate location of the user who was searching for information about Hancock.

  He stepped inside and quickly scanned the faces of the patrons. The woman wasn’t there.

  He stepped back outside and turned a slow circle, looking up and down the street in both directions until his spied the sign for the hotel.

  Of course.

  He crossed to the inconspicuously placed doorway and stepped inside. A man sitting behind a barricade of metal bars seemed oblivious. He rapped on the countertop, and when the bored desk clerk finally looked up, he drew back the hem of his jacket to reveal his holstered pistol. The clerk’s eyes went wide and he sat up.

  “Hey man, I don’t—”

  Scalpel held up a photograph. “Is she here?”

  The clerk’s eyes flicked upward, ever so slightly.

  “What room?”

  “I…” The clerk swallowed nervously as he consulted a sheet of paper on a clipboard. “Two-sixteen.”

  “Thanks for your assistance.” Scalpel shot the clerk between the eyes.

  He bolted up the stairs two at a time and continued down the second floor hallway at a walk so brisk it was almost a sprint. When he reached to door marked 216, he squared his body parallel to it, and with the pistol in a two-handed ready grip, delivered a forceful heel-kick that struck just below the doorknob. The door burst inward and Scalpel flowed into the room, finger on the trigger, searching for a target.