Vulcan's Forge

by Jack Du Brul

  “Yes. A couple hours later, a helicopter from the navy came to pick me up. The doctor on board gave me a shot, and when I came to, I was in D.C.”

  “Can you describe the freighter?”

  “I don’t know, it was just a ship. I don’t know the length or anything like that. It had a bunch of cranes and booms. There was a black circle with a yellow dot on the funnel, which was near the back of the ship.”

  “What else can you tell me?”

  Tish paused, her smooth forehead furrowed. There was something she wanted to say, Mercer could tell, but he didn’t think she was sure of the facts herself.

  “I heard Russian,” she blurted out.

  “Russian? Are you sure?”

  “Well, no, not really.”

  “When did you hear it?”

  “When I was being pulled aboard the freighter. The crew were shouting orders to each other in Russian.”

  “How can you be sure it was Russian? Some of the Scandinavian languages sound similar.”

  “A year ago I was part of a research team in Mozambique, investigating the ruin that the government there has made of the prawn beds just off the coast. It was a joint venture between NOAA, Woods Hole, the Mozambique government, and a team of Soviets. I, well, I became involved with one of the Soviets. When we were alone together, he would always speak to me in Russian. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sound of that language.”

  She looked at Mercer, as if defying him to judge her.

  “Okay, so you heard Russian. Could be they had some expatriate Russian crewman or something like that. What happened when you were in the life raft?”

  “Nothing. I was unconscious until just before I was rescued.”

  “You don’t remember anything?”

  “I had just been blown off a ship, what the hell am I supposed to remember?” Fatigue was taking its toll on her.

  “I’m sorry. You must still be exhausted.” Mercer glanced at his watch. It was four-thirty in the afternoon. “Why don’t you get some sleep? I’ll wake you at seven. I’m sure you’re dying for a nonhospital meal.”

  “Yes, that would be wonderful.”

  Mercer led her to one of the two guest rooms. He showed her the bath and gave her several towels. He heard the water running even before he returned to the rec room.

  Mercer pulled two more beers from the fridge and went to his home office. He switched on the desk lamp and grabbed the phone.

  A moment later a female voice chirped, “Berkowitz, Saulman, and Little.”

  “David Saulman please. Tell him it’s Philip Mercer.”

  Of the dozens of lawyers that Mercer had dealt with in his life, David Saulman was the only one he liked. Saulman had been a ship’s officer during the late 1950s and early sixties, but an engine room accident had scalded his left hand so badly that it had to be amputated. Forced out of the Merchant Marine, he put himself through law school and within just a few years he was the man to talk to about maritime law.

  Thirty years later, his office in Miami had over one hundred associate attorneys and his counsel rated five hundred dollars an hour. At seventy-five, Saulman was still sharp and his knowledge of ships and shipping was voluminous.

  “Mercer, how are you? I haven’t heard your sorry voice in months. Tell me you’re in Miami and ready to get into trouble.”

  “Sorry, Dave, I’m in D.C. and I’m already in trouble.”

  “Don’t tell me the cops finally picked you up for flashing the tourists in front of the White House?”

  “Hell, no one even notices when I do it. Dave, what do you know about a ship called the September Laurel?”

  “An official call, is it?”

  “Yeah, charge it to NOAA.”

  “NOAA, huh? Do they know?”

  “Not yet, but if I’m right, they won’t mind.”

  “The September Laurel was the ship that rescued that woman from the NOAA research vessel last night, right?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “The Laurel’s owned by Ocean Freight and Cargo, head office in New York, but all of their ships are registered in Panama and have Italian crews. She’s just a tramp freighter, usually runs the north Pacific. Let me think, about four hundred feet, thirty thousand gross tons. Only notable thing about her is this rescue.”

  “Dave, I want you to check her out—normal cargoes, big contracts—also I want the lowdown on her parent company. Dig deep. Also, could you get me any information on all the ships that have sunk in the same waters as the Ocean Seeker?”

  “What’s going on in that paranoid mind of yours?”

  “I’m not sure yet, and I can’t really talk about what I suspect. Do you happen to know the design on her stack?”

  “Yeah, a bunch of laurels.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, it’s OF&C’s trademark. Their ship August Rose has a bunch of roses on the stack and the December Iris has irises on hers.”

  “So there’s no way that her stack could be painted with a black circle surrounding a yellow dot?”

  “Not unless the company has changed a forty-year tradition.”

  “Thanks, Dave, I owe you. Just fax the info to my home and I’ll take it from there.”

  “Are you up for a trivia challenge?” Saulman asked. This had been a tradition since they’d first met in 1983, at a reception honoring the few remaining Titanic survivors.

  “Fire away.”

  “Who was the last person to own the Queen Elizabeth and what did he change her name to?”

  “C. Y. Tung, and he called her Seawise University.”

  Mercer just barely heard Saulman call him a bastard before he hung up.

  Mercer flipped through his Rolodex for a second, searching for a number at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

  “Time to call in another favor,” he muttered as the phone began ringing.

  “Yo,” answered a familiar deep baritone.

  Mercer instantly recognized the easy negligence of the greeting. The voice was pure Harlem. “Spook, whatever happened to hello?”

  “Only one man dare call me that. Is that you, Mercer?”

  “No, this is the Massachusetts chapter of the KKK soliciting donations.”

  “So it is the Rock Jock, how the hell are you?”

  Three years earlier, Mercer had been contacted by a Pennsylvania mining firm about a piece of property they had just purchased in upstate New York. The company was hoping to reopen a hard-rock anthracite mine first excavated in the 1890s. While doing the first exploratory trips into the half-submerged mine, Mercer and a small team from the mining company had come across a school of swift but blind fish. Not recognizing them as a normal subterranean species, Mercer had called in Woods Hole to investigate the mutated specimens. They sent over two marine biologists and several assistants. The mine was never reopened, but the research had given a young grad student named Charles Washington his Ph.D. thesis and a guaranteed tenure at Woods Hole. Mercer had given Washington the nickname Spook, not because of his black skin and inner-city manner, but because of his love of Stephen King novels and the frightening stories he’d tell to keep the crew entertained while working in the dark mine tunnels.

  “Another day older and deeper in debt.”

  “Shit, man, you ain’t seen debt until you see the payments on my new BMW.”

  “Whatever happened to scientists with leather-elbowed jackets, untrimmed beards, and beat-up Saabs?”

  “That’s for old white farts, not us lean and mean black brothers. ’Sides which, last I knew you was drivin’ a Jag.”

  “Just to prove I’m not an old white fart, that’s all.”

  “Bullshit, but I love ya anyway. This ain’t no social call, what up?”

  “A year ago, Woods Hole sent a team to Mozambique to look at shrimp beds. You know anything about it?”

  “No, but hold on, I know someone who does.”

  Mercer could hear him shout to someone else in the room. A few minutes later
a frail female voice came on the line. “Hello, this is Dr. Baker.”

  “Good afternoon, Doctor, my name is Philip Mercer. I’m a geologist with the USGS.” Mercer thought it best to sound formal. “I’m trying to get some information about an expedition to Mozambique that Woods Hole was involved with last year.”

  “That’s what Charley said. I was on that expedition as lab director.”

  “Do you happen to remember any of the Russian scientists? A youngish man in particular. I’m sorry, I don’t have his name.”

  “Probably you’re referring to Valery Borodin. Supposedly he was a biologist, but he knew more about geology than anything else. He spent most of his time with one of the women from NOAA, lucky girl.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I may be sixty-six years old, Mr. Mercer, and have four delightful grandchildren, but these old eyes can still appreciate a handsome man. And Valery Borodin was a very handsome man.”

  “So you say he knew more about geology than anything else, huh?”

  “That’s right. If you want to know more about him, I suggest you contact the woman from NOAA. I can’t think of her name right off the top of my head, but if you give me a second I can get it.”

  “That’s okay, Dr. Baker, you’ve been more than kind. Thank you, and please thank Dr. Washington.” Mercer hung up and leaned far back into his seat.

  He reviewed the information he’d gathered. A bunch of dead whales. An explosion on a research vessel. An assassination attempt on the only survivor. A telegram from a dead friend. One freighter with two different designs on its stack. An Italian crew that speaks Russian. A Russian biologist that doesn’t know biology and probably has nothing to do with what’s going on, and, Mercer looked ruefully at the empty beer bottles on his desk, the beginning of a good buzz.

  “In other words, I’ve got nothing,” he said aloud, and switched off the desk lamp.

  Bangkok, Thailand

  While many of the Pacific islands are described as sparkling jewels by those who visit them, anyone seeing the Spratly Islands would agree that they are nothing more than a handful of gravel tossed haphazardly into the center of the South China Sea. The Spratlys are spread across an area the size of New England, yet comprise a total land area of less than two square miles. The more than one hundred islets, coral outcroppings, and atolls are completely unremarkable—except that they are claimed as sovereign territory by no less than six nations.

  These countries, in a bid to legitimize their claims, have gone so far as to set up gun emplacements on some of the larger islands and garrisons on the smaller ones, islands so small that high tide obliterates them and leaves the troops standing thigh high in the sea. Vietnam has occupied twenty-five of the islands while China claims seven, the Philippines eight, Malaysia three, and Taiwan one. The sultan of Brunei wants to claim one island in particular, but that tiny speck is underwater for more than six months of the year.

  At first, many Western observers scoffed at the conflicting claims, calling them a poor man’s imperialism. A naval engagement between China and Vietnam in March 1988, which claimed the lives of seventy-seven Vietnamese and an undisclosed number of Chinese, changed their attitudes.

  These two vehemently Communist countries did not come to blows for merely territorial reasons nor national pride. The motivation for the battle was the basest of interests: greed. Since oil was discovered off the coast of southern Vietnam in the mid-1980s, the nations ringing the South China Sea have shown a keen interest in what other natural resources might lie beneath the warm waters. Hydrocarbons, huge fishing banks, and the Spratlys’ location, in the middle of the shipping lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, have made them one of the most contested spots on the globe.

  To open a dialogue between the disputing parties, the government of Indonesia invited them all to Bandung, about sixty miles east of Jakarta, in 1992. For several weeks, ministers met to discuss their aims. China promised to consider joint economic development of the Spratlys, provided that all other claimants relinquished their territorial interests. In response, Malaysia purchased two guided missile corvettes from Great Britain.

  The meeting broke up with nothing resolved.

  Since then, the situation had continued to deteriorate. Vietnam began shelling vessels that strayed too close to the island of Amboyna Cay and Malaysia further solidified her position by building an airfield on Terumba Layang-Layang. Taiwan grabbed two more islands, setting up manned outposts. The Taiwanese also faced down a threat from a Chinese gunboat, an act that almost brought the two nations to war.

  Taiwan’s new aggressiveness, coupled with a massive infusion of money from American and European oil companies, prompted the government of Thailand to make a new attempt to bring about a peaceful settlement. Thus, ministers from the six rival nations, plus binding representatives from the United States and Russia, were meeting in Bangkok at the invitation of the Thai foreign minister.

  The meetings were held at the Shangri-la Hotel just off Sathon Road along the banks of the Chao Phraya River, the river which runs through the sprawling city of Bangkok the way the aorta runs through the human body. Behind closed teak doors in the hotel’s new convention center, the eight representatives, plus their coterie of aides and translators, had been hard at work for six straight weeks, meeting ten hours a day, and it was beginning to look like the conference would be a success.

  The Chinese representative, Minister Lujian, was willing to forgo total sovereignty of the islands if his nation was granted a continuation of Most Favored Nation status from the United States. In return, the United States representative, Undersecretary of Commerce Kenneth Donnelly, received guarantees that several American oil companies would be allowed exploratory rights to a couple of areas in the Spratlys.

  All of the assembled delegates agreed to this, yet the Taiwanese and Russian representatives continued to bring up fine points of law that served only as delaying tactics. The Bangkok Accords, as they were to be known, were ready, yet Minister Tren and Ambassador Gennady Perchenko continued to delay the final signing.

  Ambassador Perchenko had been mostly silent during the preceding weeks of negotiations, yet a week earlier he had taken his customary place at the round table in the richly tapestried room with a new set to his shoulders. He had begun to speak, and had rarely stopped since. At first, Minister Lujian thought Perchenko and Tren were buying time for a Taiwanese military buildup, but satellite images and hard data from spies around the naval bases at Kao-hsiung and Chi-lung showed no increase in activity. Kenneth Donnelly finally assumed that these tactics were a way for the Russians to gain some sort of economic interest in the Spratlys in exchange for a timely settlement.

  Drawing on his twenty-five years of adroit statecraft experience, Perchenko had changed his role from observer to dominator, ready to dictate terms.

  With a discreet click, a member of the king’s personal bodyguard closed the heavy doors to the conference room and took up station just to their left, a gleaming M-16 hanging from his thin shoulder. The Thai foreign minister, Prem Vivarya, paused for a few moments to let the men in the room settle down before opening the morning session. Set before the Asian delegates were cups of delicate porcelain decorated with ermine lotus blossoms, filled with steaming tea. The Americans and the Russians drank thick coffee from institutional white cups, the type found in hotels all over the world.

  Through the partially shaded plate-glass window, Minister Prem could see the gleaming concrete tower of the hotel. Beyond it, the green torpid river was choked with powerboats, barges, water taxis, and long-tailed skiffs caught in the midst of the city’s rush hour. He hoped that this day would not become as deadlocked as the river traffic.

  “Gentlemen, at yesterday’s meeting,” Prem intoned, and the assembled translators began whispering to their charges, “the representative from the Russian Federation, Ambassador Perchenko, was beginning to outline several concerns that his government had for the treaty that we are
all considering.”

  Even through the cumbersome translations, Prem’s annoyance at the Russian was plain. Perchenko, a heavy rumpled man in his late fifties, smiled tightly.

  As an aide, Perchenko had attended the landmark 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in Caracas. With more than 150 nations represented it was the largest gathering of its type in history, a truly global event. It took nine grueling months to write the final document. It pertained to every aspect of the oceans, from environmental protection to the harvesting of their bounty, from the free passage of vessels to undersea mining. In the end, every representative signed it, yet the convention was killed soon after its birth because the United States Congress refused to enact it into law.

  Though UNCLOS had miscarried, it had given Gennady Perchenko one of the finest educations possible on maritime law. Now he was using that knowledge for the Bangkok Accords. Or, more precisely, to stall the Bangkok Accords.

  After Minister Prem’s opening remarks, Perchenko launched into a ten-hour-long monologue, interrupted only by a one-hour pause for lunch. This speech, though informed, was entirely irrelevant. Perchenko chronicled sovereignty issues dating back more than a century and, although the conflict over the Spratlys was based on such historical clashes, they had been reviewed ad nauseam during earlier meetings. There was no logical reason for the wily Russian to bring them up again. As soon as the other delegates realized that Perchenko was stalling once again, they quickly tuned out the voices of their translators and blankly watched the shadows progress around the room as the hours passed.

  This was the third straight day of Perchenko’s monologues, and this one was as pointless as the preceding two.

  At six in the evening, Minister Prem politely interrupted Perchenko. “Ambassador Perchenko, the hour once again grows late. The hotel’s chef informed me earlier that his dishes cannot be held long, so it is in our best interest if we pause here and resume again in the morning.”

  “Of course, Minister.” Perchenko smiled mirthlessly. His voice was still controlled and level after hours of speaking, and unlike the other men in the room he showed not the slightest trace of discomfort or boredom.