Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2)
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Authors: Christine Kling
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Christine Kling
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781477823132
ISBN-10: 1477823131
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013958063
To Irv Kaine and his brothers in arms, the veterans of World War II
CONTENTS
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
—Edmund Burke
The real USS
Bonefish
(SS-223) was a Gato-class diesel-electric submarine launched in March of 1943. On her eight patrols, she sank a total of twelve Japanese ships, five of those under her last captain, Commander Lawrence Edge. Her story, and that of the other eight Hellcat subs, is a tale of one of the most daring submarine raids in the history of World War II. Called Operation Barney, this effort at the end of the war saw a wolf pack of American subs enter the Sea of Japan in June of 1945, using the very new technology of FM sonar to map the minefields that had protected that piece of water. These subs delivered a final blow to both Japan’s merchant and military shipping.
Tragically, the
Bonefish
did not return from her final mission and her wreck has never been found. Japanese records released after the war have led the US Navy to assume she was sunk by Japanese vessels in Toyama Wan, Honshu, on June 18, 1945.
My novel,
Dragon’s Triangle,
is a work of fiction and the characters herein bear no resemblance or relation to the real eighty-five men who lost their lives defending their country, nor does my imaginary story reflect the true respect I have for the men and women of the United States and the Philippines whose devotion to country and service put an end to that war. This book is dedicated to the veterans of World War II.
Christine Kling
Ao Chalong Anchorage
Phuket, Thailand
November 15, 2012
When the voice erupted from the VHF radio, Riley jumped. The sandpaper in her hand slid off the teak handrail and scratched the boat’s gel coat.
“
Bonefish, Bonefish
, this is
Merlin II
.”
Eerie to hear this call just when she was thinking about him—as though he were reading her mind. She wanted to talk to him, too. His wet swimsuit lay on the cabin sole where he had stepped out of it, and his iPad and sheet music covered the main salon table. He had been sitting below playing guitar and crooning his Carolina bluegrass while she sanded and put another coat of varnish on the starboard handrail. Okay, it wasn’t his boat, so she couldn’t expect him to do the maintenance, but before he hopped into that dinghy and raced off to the yacht club, he might have cleaned up after himself. He now spent so much of his life with the 1 percent he often forgot how the rest got by.
In two steps she was at the chart table, and she grabbed the microphone.
“This is
Bonefish
. Up one?”
He started speaking immediately on the new frequency. “Riley, glad you were listening. I think you’ll want to come ashore.”
“Okay, what’s up?”
“There’s something here you’re going to want to see right away.”
She climbed up the steps and peered across the still, flat water of the bay. She spotted the lighthouse and then looked right until she could make out the low structure of the Ao Chalong Yacht Club.
“What’s going on? Are you at the club?”
“Yeah, I played one set, and when I went to the bar for a cold one, Roger told me he had something for you.”
Riley cocked her head to one side and stared at the mike in her hand as though it could explain what he was talking about. When it didn’t, she pressed the button and said, “Go on.”
“It’s a letter, babe. Postmark is Bangkok. No return address. Funny-looking handwriting. Kinda looks weird, nervous-like. Anyway, I figured you’d want to know.”
A letter for her? Addressed to the Ao Chalong Yacht Club? Who even knew she was here? When she communicated with her employers at Mercury Security or with her best friend, Hazel, it was always by email. Snail mail was about as relevant to her as a vinyl record.
Still, someone had sent her a letter. Who the hell wrote letters anymore?
There was one very remote possibility. She shook her head. No way. She was done chasing after that dream.
Only one way to find out. She keyed the mike. “Thanks, Billy. I’m on my way in.”
The oars struck bottom, and with one last pull she drove the flat-hulled dinghy onto the beach. Riley hopped out and pulled the boat a few feet up the sand. She ran her cable around a palm tree and through the
dinghy pad eye, then snapped on the big combination lock. Security was never far from her thoughts, just as when she set her alarm system before leaving the boat. The sun had already set behind the island’s mountaintop Big Buddha statue. Even with the sun gone, the sweat dripped from her brow and upper lip. She’d rowed as if there were some hurry, and harder still when her old Marine Corps shoulder injury began complaining. Somehow it felt right to punish herself for even considering that
remote possibility
. After chasing shadows from Martinique to Venezuela to Panama and across the Pacific for more than three years, she had moved on. Billy was proof of that, wasn’t he? She dug her grapnel anchor into the sand and started up the beach toward the lights of the Ao Chalong Yacht Club.
