Hell Ship

by David Wood

  That frightened her a little, but there was no turning back now. The old man had a kindly expression and she couldn’t picture him harming anything but the dandelions. She hiked the rest of the way and stuck out her hand. “Hello, sir. I’m trying to find the Hancock place. Is this it?”

  “It is indeed.” His smiled only seemed to deepen. “Though not for much longer I suppose, seeing as I’m the last of my name.”

  “Then you must be Lord Hancock.” She extended her hand. “I’m Alex.”

  “Please, just call me Edward. The title is rubbish and I squandered the last of my inheritance long ago. Can’t even afford a proper gardener now.” He bowed, pressing her hand to his lips in a gesture that seemed more quaint than debonair. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Alex. You’re a Yank if my ears do not deceive?”

  “That’s right, Lord…Edward. I’m a historian. That’s why I’m here.”

  He cocked his head sideways and the smile seemed to slip a little. “Not much history here, I’m afraid. I’ve done rather a good job of staying out history’s way.”

  “I…uh…” Alex realized that she had been so focused on surviving the journey that she’d given little thought to what she wanted to accomplish upon arriving. “Actually, I’m looking for information about one of your relatives. At least I think he was. Trevor Hancock?”

  The smile vanished completely, replaced by a sad wistful look. “Trevor was my brother. I was just a boy when he…well, went off to war.” He returned his gaze to her. “I’m not sure I can be of much help to you, Miss. It was a long time ago, and he died before I ever really got to know him.”

  “I understand. If I could just ask a few questions?”

  “You can ask.” He walked over to the table and shut off the music. “If you don’t mind waiting a little longer for my woefully inadequate answers, I’ll put on a kettle and we can have a spot of tea.”

  She nodded, and while Hancock headed into the house, she set about brushing moss from the chairs. He returned a few minutes later and set down a tray, upon which sat a silver tea service, along with a plate of scones, a dish of butter, and a small jar of marmalade. Alex was famished after the long walk, but thought it best to ask her questions before digging into the snack.

  “Your brother served in Asia, right?”

  Hancock decanted hot water into a pair of delicate china teacups on matching saucers. “Among other places. He was captured in Burma and died there as a prisoner of war.”

  “I came across his name on the manifest of a ship that was transporting POWs.” She chose her words carefully so as not to upset her host. “Does that sound right?”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps. As I told you, it was long ago and I was only a boy when the letter came. The War Ministry wasn’t exactly forthcoming; not like today where we always have to know every last bloody detail.” He blushed suddenly. “Ah, forgive me. I should have better manners. Truthfully though, all I know is that he went away and that was the last we ever saw. There’s an empty coffin beneath his gravestone.”

  Alex sensed that she wouldn’t get anything more from Hancock without revealing the whole truth about her search. She reached into her backpack and brought out the file containing all the information about the hell ships.

  “I found a message in a file relating to the sinking of the Nagata Maru, a Japanese liner sunk in the South China Sea.” She shuffled out the paper and passed it to him.

  He studied it for a moment then handed it back with a perplexed expression. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this sheds any new light on my brother’s fate. Nor, I might add, how it rates the attention of an historian.”

  “This is a message from the Pacific Command of Allied Forces.” She shook the paper emphatically. “It’s an order to sink the ship that was carrying your brother…to sink it because it was carrying your brother. Don’t you see? ‘Prevent LT Hancock Trevor RA from reaching Cabanatuan by any means necessary.’ They wanted him dead.”

  Edward Hancock shuddered but quickly regained his implacable demeanor. “It was war, and in a war, tough decisions must be made. Perhaps dear Trevor was keeping some bit of information vital to the war effort, and the Allies couldn’t allow the Nips to get their hands on it. Who can know why the order was given? You’d do better to ask your own government, though I can’t imagine anyone will remember the answer fifty years later.”

  “Edward…Lord Hancock, listen to me. This isn’t just old dusty history. Someone is willing to kill for this information.”

  The old man’s eyes widened. “Kill? And you’ve come here? Led these killers to my doorstep?” His clipped precise accent made the words sound even more accusatory, and Alex felt her face go hot with embarrassment. “Who exactly is after you?”

  “I don’t know. And until I can figure out why, I can’t trust anyone. Not even the government. I have to know why your brother was specifically targeted.” She could see in his eyes that she was finally getting through to him, and sensed that he might know something after all. “Do you know why?” she pressed.

  Hancock reached across the table. “May I see those papers, all of them?”

  She gave them up. “All the files relating to the sinking of the Nagata Maru are on the top. The rest are about other ships.”

  “Thank you.” Hancock commenced scanning the papers, flipping each one over after a few moments of scrutiny. His eyes no longer had the watery look of advanced years, but moved back and forth with laser-like intensity. “There’s a discrepancy here,” he said. “This page gives a different latitude and longitude for the sinking.”

  “Let me see.” Alex was surprised that she had missed that in her own review of the documents but Hancock was correct. The first page, the official report on sinking of the Nagata Maru did indeed have a different set of coordinates than the second—an excerpt from the log of the USS Stingray, the submarine that had torpedoed the hell ship. The latter document, she noticed, had only been recently declassified. It was very likely that she and Hancock were the first persons to read the sub skipper’s words in five decades. “You’re right. They must have changed the official report.”

  “So that no one could find the ship,” said Hancock. “Or Trevor’s body.”

  Alex tried to process this. “Why would that matter? Whatever he knew died with him when that ship sank?”

  Hancock started to say something, but closed his mouth and simply stared hard at her for several seconds. “Were you followed here? Did you leave any kind of trail that might lead them here?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And these papers; are there other copies?”

  “The originals are in the National Archives. Anyone can request them, but unless they know what to ask for…” She shrugged.

  “I see. Well, perhaps the men pursuing you have already done so, and consider you merely a loose end.” He lapsed into silence again, chewing his lip as if to gather his courage, and then got to his feet. “I may be able to answer your question after all, Alex. Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”

  Alex felt a rush of excitement, but it quickly turned to confusion when her host led her, not to the house, but deeper into the tangled maze that had once been the garden. Through a clearing in the brambles, she spied a small cemetery with a single ornate crypt and several more less impressive headstones. Like the garden, the burial grounds had been badly neglected. For a moment, she wondered if Hancock was leading her to his brother’s cenotaph, but their path skirted past the cemetery and continued toward a wooded hillside beyond.

  Hancock seemed to grow spryer with each step, and when they reached the tree line, it was all Alex could do to keep up. At one point, she lost sight of him when he rounded a thick oak, and when she passed the same tree, she found him standing beside a knee-high boulder. As she approached, he bent over the rock and attempted to roll it aside.

  “If it’s no bother,” he said expectantly.

  “What? Oh, sorry.” She joined him, and the
ir combined strength was sufficient to shift the rock a couple feet away, to reveal a dark cleft in the hillside. Hancock gestured to it expectantly and Alex’s earlier anticipation turned to horror. He wanted her to go underground.

  She wasn’t claustrophobic, not like people in movies were sometimes. She could get into elevators and ride subway trains without the slightest hesitation. But that comfort did not extend to crawling around in a dugout tunnel barely wide enough to let her through.

  “Than answers you seek are in there,” said Hancock. “It’s perfectly safe. I’ve even brought a torch.” He took a small flashlight from his jacket pocket and played its bright beam into the opening as if that would somehow reassure her.

  “Well aren’t you the Boy Scout,” she muttered. But the light did help a little, and Hancock’s confidence was infectious. He promptly lowered himself into the opening and was swallowed up by the darkness. “Oh, fine.”

  She extended a cautious foot into the darkness, felt solid ground sloping away, and then advanced further. Those first tentative steps were the hardest. Once her head and shoulders cleared the opening, she found that there was actually quite a lot of room to move. She could even make out Hancock’s silhouette, a dark outline in a corona of diffuse golden illumination, just a few paces ahead. She soon caught up to him and in the beam of his flashlight, saw that they were not in a natural cave formation, but rather a manmade passage, reinforced with brick walls and an arched ceiling. The passage was wide enough for her to walk alongside him.

  The passage was short and ended in a large circular room, which immediately reminded Alex of a chapel. There were about a dozen wooden benches, arranged in two rows like pews. Sculpted figures of metal and stained glass were mounted on the walls at regular intervals like decorative lighting fixtures. At the far end stood a large table or altar, and three more passages branched off like the apse and transepts of a cruciform chapel. The place felt old but not unused or forgotten.

  “What is this place?” Alex noted that the cloth covering the altar was adorned with a red cross with arms that were equal in length and tipped with serifs. “That’s a Templar Cross.”

  Hancock continued forward to the altar, dipping his head slightly as if to pray then turned to her. “You are correct. I am a sworn brother of the Poor-Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon—a Templar Knight, in the common parlance—as was my dear older brother, Trevor.”

  “The Templars are extinct.”

  Even as she said it, Alex knew that wasn’t quite the whole truth. Of course the Templars were gone, the real Templars, but that didn’t mean there was anything preventing modern pretenders from assuming their mantle or co-opting the mystique associated with the crusading holy knights.

  “You know something of the order then? Ah, well of course you would. You are an historian after all.”

  He carefully balanced the flashlight on the altar so that its light shone up to illuminate the ceiling, revealing a random assortment of intricately carved symbols—crosses, stars, moons, and other glyphs that looked like occult runes. Alex wondered if they were a coded message, instructions to unlocking some mysterious source of Templar power. She understood why people were so fascinated with the Templars—people like Hancock who evidently believed himself an inheritor of their cause.

  “I don’t understand how this has anything to do with what happened to your brother.”

  “Trevor was the keeper of our greatest secret. That of course did not exempt him from his duty to the Crown, nor would he have wanted it to. He was a true knight, worthy of our heritage. None of us could have imagined that he would not return.”

  “Allied Command knew about Trevor’s secret and didn’t want to let the Japanese get their hands on him. But that secret died with him.” Alex knew she was missing something important. “It was war. You had to know that there was a chance he might die and that there would be no way to get your secret back.”

  Hancock smiled patiently. “You misunderstand. I did not speak of his survival, but rather his return.”

  “It was an object,” she deduced aloud. “Something he was carrying.”

  Hancock laid his hands flat on the altar and stared at a fixed point between his outstretched fingers. “For nearly two hundred years—almost as long as your country has been in existence—the knights of the Temple ruled an empire that stretched from the British Isles to Jerusalem. Six hundred years ago, when our enemies conspired to destroy the order, our predecessors took immediate action to preserve the source of our power. A select group of knights were chosen to be the keepers of this secret. Many more, including our revered Grand Master, sacrificed themselves to protect that knowledge.”

  “I’m familiar with the stories.”

  “Are you indeed? Well, there are stories and then there’s the truth.”

  “Where does Trevor come in?”

  “Have you ever heard the saying, ‘Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead’?”

  Alex smiled. “I think the original quote was: ‘Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’ Benjamin Franklin.”

  “The surviving knights knew that their enemies would stop at nothing to hunt them down, torture them until they revealed the secret. The location of the vault, where the secret was kept, was marked on a map.” Hancock waved a hand over the light. “A map in this very room.”

  Alex’s gaze was drawn to the domed ceiling, which she now realized contained more than just elaborate symbols. The entire dome was a single enormous relief map. As she found a few familiar shapes—the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula, the Strait of Gibraltar—the entire picture emerged in a cascade of recognition. The symbols she now saw, marked specific locations, cities perhaps, or Templar outposts, scattered across Europe, ringing the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and even dotting some of the islands within. The symbols were grouped in sets of two or three at each location, though never in the same order, to form a unique sigil for each. A closer look revealed that no two shapes or symbols were exactly identical.

  “The key to understanding this map was inscribed on a medallion,” Hancock went on. “Only one man in each generation would possess the key.”

  The medallion fits into one of those symbols. And that’s where the treasure is. Alex didn’t verbalize this revelation. She studied the ceiling a moment longer, trying to take a mental snapshot of the map, but there were so many symbols, so many possibilities. Finally, sensing that Hancock was growing impatient, she said, “Trevor was the keeper of the medallion. But surely the Japanese would have taken it from him when they captured him.”

  “In the beginning,” said Hancock. “The medallion was worn, as one might wear a crucifix or a St. Christopher’s medal.”

  Alex absently fingered the gold crucifix which hung from a chain about her own neck.

  “But the Gatekeepers—that is what we have called ourselves for these past six centuries—quickly realized that there was great risk in doing so. If the medallion was stolen or captured, the means of unlocking the map would be lost forever. So they hit upon a way of ensuring that the medallion would not be lost while its bearer lived. A surgeon would make an incision in the scalp here—” He touched a finger to his head, just behind the ear “—and the medallion would be affixed to the skull. When the wound healed and the scar was covered by a growth of hair, there would be no outward indication of the medallion’s presence.”

  Alex nodded slowly in understanding. “So even though Trevor has been dead for fifty years, he still has the secret to unlocking your map.”

  “Just so. At least, I assume he does. Trevor was made the keeper of the secret as a youth. I remain one of the Gatekeepers, but none of us—no one alive today in fact—has the key.”

  “So the people who are after me… they know about all this. The Templars. Your map. The medallion.” More pieces fell into place, but the big picture remained maddeningly elusive.

  “And now you know.” Hancock sighed then reached into his poc
ket. When his hand emerged, he was holding a small revolver. He pointed it at her. “Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”

  A cold spike of adrenaline slammed into Alex’s chest. She opened her mouth to protest, to plead, but found she didn’t have the breath to speak.

  “I am so very sorry, Alex.” Hancock actually sounded sincere. “You are an innocent, caught up in something you can’t possibly understand. But you know about Trevor, you know where he might be found. The secret must be kept.”

  He extended the gun in a two-handed grip, aimed at her heart.

  “For someone who goes on about secrecy, you sure are a blabbermouth.”

  Because she was so focused on Hancock and the gun, it took Alex a moment to realize that there was someone else in the chapel with them. Hancock however reacted much quicker. He snatched up the flashlight and shone it into the shadows to Alex’s left, revealing a handsome, solidly built man with close cropped blond hair. His eyes were a stormy blue and he didn’t so much as blink when the light fell upon them. Nor did he flinch when the barrel of Hancock’s gun swung toward him.

  “Killing her won’t keep your secret. Too many people know it already.”

  Alex could almost hear Hancock’s finger tightening on the trigger. “Who the devil are you?”

  The blue-eyed man cocked an eyebrow. “I’m the guy who found your brother’s skeleton at the bottom of the South China Sea. That’s all you need to know.” He turned to Alex and winked. “You however, can call me Dane Maddock.”

  CHAPTER 9

  When Dane turned to Alex, so did Hancock. His aim wavered, and that was the moment Dane had been waiting for. He sprang to the side, away from the cone of illumination cast by the flashlight, and then darted in close. Before the old man could so much as try to find him again, Dane snared his gun hand and slammed it down on the altar. There was no shot; only the sound of frail bones breaking and Hancock’s cry of pain.