Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2) (47 page)

“Greg,” Cole said, “check out some of the distinctive characteristics, like the porthole up in the bow. We’ve got some other photos of her that also show the name was written on the bow in kanji characters on top and the Roman alphabet underneath.”

“Okay, I’m climbing up toward the bow now. It looks like there is a lot of growth on the outside of the hull. There’s thick, brownish-beige algae and some red-colored plants.”

“She should have the red-and-white crosses of the hospital ship painted on her, too. Probably on the stacks.”

“There is an anchor, so we must be all the way forward. I’ll start back now. There. Look. Those dark circles look like portholes.”

“I see them, too,” Riley said. “Go back down under the ports.”

Cole looked at the photo of the ship and then looked at the screen again. “There, stop,” he said. The screen was filled with what looked like a brown wall covered with algae. “See—it’s hard to make out because it’s so covered with growth, but that looks like a
T
.” He drew with his finger on the screen. “And just next to it, that’s the straight up and down of what looks like the vertical stroke of the capital letter
E
.”

Greg said, “I think I see it.”

“I’ve set the laptop to record this on video,” Theo said. “We can look at freeze frames later.”

Greg continued to move the ROV so as to pan the video camera across the deck of the ship. Considering that it had been underwater for more than sixty years, it was amazingly well preserved. Then one of the stacks came into view and there it was, a very clear image of a cross.

“Okay, Brian, that’s it. You ready to dive?”

“Let’s go, mate.”

Brian had spent the morning preparing their gear. They would be using heliox-filled tanks due to the extreme depth and the DPV scooters would help them to descend quickly. Cole was checking over his backpack and tanks when Nils Skar appeared on deck and approached him.

“Could I speak with you a minute?”

“I’m preparing to dive here, Nils. What do you want?”

The man pushed in too close and focused his huge eyes on Cole’s. “The voices have been talking to me.” The odor of cigarettes and days-old sweat wafted off his thin frame.

“Nils, what are you talking about? What voices?”

Brian walked over and looked at the Norwegian as though examining a museum exhibit. “You’d ought to listen to him. This is why I brought him along.”

Cole looked at the greasy, stringy hair that fell straight down from the crown of his head, parting around the ears. He couldn’t believe that Brian took this freak seriously.

Nils put his hands over his ears. “They’re getting louder. They’re saying you need to look in the master’s cabin. There is a small golden statue of a dragon. You will find what you are looking for inside the statue.”

“Okay, man. Okay. We’ll look.”

The Norwegian nodded, turned, and walked back to the cabin and disappeared.

Cole looked at Greg. She burst into a fit of giggles. Then she raised her shoulders and shook her head. “That was totally weird.”

Then Cole turned to Brian. “You believe that nonsense?”

“I tell you, he has been right more often than not. The map says there’s treasure here, and I’m hoping for lots more than one gold statue. I say let’s get wet.”

“I don’t believe in psychics,” Cole said. He picked up the head strap for his GoPro underwater video camera.

“Uh, guys,” Greg interrupted. “You’re going to want to take a look at this.”

Cole stepped around so he could see the screen. “What?”

“I just took the
Enigma
through that hole in the hull. Look at this.”

The light from the ROV shone on the steel frames of the inside of the hull. Greg tapped at the keys and the vehicle turned ninety degrees. The ROV was shining the light all around from the sides of the hull to the bulkhead and back to the gash in the hull.

“That can’t be,” Cole said. “The hold is empty.”

“Hey, mate, I thought you said this Dragon’s Triangle wreck was supposed to be the mother lode.”

“That’s what everyone thought. I’ve traced the documents back to Djakarta. Brian, this ship was supposed to be carrying gold—and uranium.”

Brian stared at him open-mouthed. It was the first time Cole had seen the Australian speechless.

Greg looked up at him. “So, I guess you’re gonna want me to show you where the master’s cabin is?”

Cole cleared his ears continuously as the DPV carried him downward at a speed of about two knots at a semi-steep incline. The wetsuit had felt like overkill in the warm water at the surface, but every few feet, the water around him grew both colder and darker. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Brian was still there off his flank. They wouldn’t have a whole lot of bottom time, and they needed to be as economical as possible with their movements. Theo had designed the DPV with a removable high-intensity LED light that worked like a headlight when attached, but could be pulled off to use as a flashlight. Cole carried a second light in a pocket of his buoyancy compensator.

Before getting into the water, they had watched as Greg navigated the ROV up over the deck, past the lifeboats still hanging in their davits, and up the face of the bridge structure, which appeared to be intact. All the glass had been blown out of the bridge windows, but by shining the light through the forward openings, they were delighted to see the wheel and engine telegraph, though encrusted with growth, were both still visible. The corridor that led aft from the bridge would certainly lead to the master’s cabin, so Cole told Greg to back the
Enigma
out of the opening before she got hung up on something. He and Brian would head down.

When they passed the hundred-foot mark he checked his watch out of habit. Then he looked at the band he wore on his other wrist. Theo had a friend at FEMA and he had sent them a couple of micro-electronic personal dosimeters that measured any radiation in the environment. These new models had been designed for work at nuclear reactors and they were supposedly waterproof to three hundred feet. So far, so good.

He could see the light from the ROV on the wreck down at the end of the cable he was following, and he felt both excitement and dread. Cole had spent some time in a decompression chamber in Guadeloupe, and he had become a much more cautious diver as a result.

The two divers hovered over the deck and Cole saw the remains of a deck gun on its side. Some of the covering for the hold must have been made out of wood because he could also see into the empty space and out the jagged hole where the sea floor was visible. Could the bomb that sank her have dropped into the hold and blown her cargo out to be spread across the sea floor? Surely there would be something left to show that had happened. No, Cole thought, there hadn’t been anything in her hold. The boat that had been reputed to be the treasure of all treasure ships was empty.

At the surface, they had agreed that Cole would enter the wreck while Brian would stay outside and enter only if Cole signaled for help. Cole had a safety line with one end attached to his buoyancy compensator, the rest coiled and tucked into his weight belt. When they reached the bridge, they discovered an open doorway on the starboard side. Cole parked his DPV on the deck, handed Brian the coiled safety line, and gave his friend a thumbs-up signal. He reached up and pushed the button to start his own video camera. With the light from his vehicle in his hand, he swam into the bridge. He checked his wrist. Still okay. If there was any uranium aboard, he was feeling confident that it was still well sealed.

He swam through the doorway into the dark corridor and the beam of his light showed two closed doors. Because the ship was lying partway on her side, everything inside was tilted over about thirty degrees, creating a funhouse-like sensation of disequilibrium. The first door broke loose when he pushed it and beyond he found only a small compartment with a hole in the floor. There must have been a steel toilet there that had since rusted away. The second door farther down the passageway would not yield to his pressure. He knew he mustn’t exert himself too much and use all his air. Then he spied what looked like a rusty steel bar on the floor of the bridge. He retraced his path, grabbed the bar, and finally he was able to force the door wide enough to get his arm and flashlight inside.

The first thing that surprised him was an almost intact gas mask that looked half-buried on the floor inside. As he panned the light across the floor, he saw more dishes poking out of the debris. He could not see the far side of the cabin so he braced his fins on the opposite wall and pressed his shoulder to the door. Slowly, the gap widened until it was wide enough for him to get through with the backpack and twin tanks.

Cole checked his watch. Six minutes remaining. He checked the radiation dosimeter. Zero. Still good. He swam through the narrow gap.

The master’s cabin had remained closed all those years. When he rounded the door, just his movement through the water stirred up the organic soup that lined the floor. The beam of his light caught all the specks of floating debris and the once-clear water turned opaque. Cole held still and waited, knowing that he was wasting time and precious air.

Slowly, the matter in the water began to settle. As the visibility cleared, Cole could make out a shape against the bulkhead. He tried to control his breathing and his heart rate, both of which had doubled. Despite the wetsuit, he felt a shiver that seemed to start in his bowels and raced to the back of his neck. Emerging from the layer of putrefied
organic matter on the floor were algae-covered bones and a human skull. If he had not been alerted by the Norwegian psychic, Cole never would have recognized the brown lump the skeleton had once cradled in his arms as the statue of a dragon.

Camiguin Island
The Philippines

December 5, 2012

By the time Greg announced that Cole had exited the wreck carrying something, Nils Skar and Peewee were already at the transom peering over the side of the boat. Greg had been giving a running account of what she saw on the screen so Theo could “see” what was happening below.

“Theo,” Greg said. “We don’t need video of the two of them decompressing down there, do we?”

“No, let’s bring up the
Enigma
.”

Riley tended to the cables while Greg brought the ROV back to the surface. She then jumped down onto the aft dive platform and attached the lifting cables.

Riley joined Peewee at the bulwark. “So, what do you think Cole found?”

He stared down at the water and worked his lips over his teeth for a long while before he spoke.
“A false tale often betrays itself,”
he said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Riley, I’m an old man. At some point, the lies catch up with you.”

She remembered what he’d told her about his hopes to afford a final resting place. “You talk about being old, Irv, but when I’m with you, it’s easy to forget just how old you are. You’re in great shape.”

He made a dismissive grunt. “Being here, looking at that wreck in the video—it’s making me remember the war. I was in the mountains just a few miles thataway”—he pointed toward the southwest—“when this ship went down.”

“I hadn’t really thought about that. You must have lost good friends in the war.”

“Yeah,” he said, and he started coughing to clear his throat. “There was this one gal.”

Riley smiled. “I knew there had to be a story about a girl.”

The old man looked up at her and waggled his eyebrows. “You bet. She was a firecracker. A local girl with the guerrillas. She could handle a Tommy gun like nobody’s business. Probably the only woman I ever loved.”

“What happened?”

“She died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Did she die in action?”

“No,” he said. He had been about to say more when they both heard splashing at the stern. Theo called out in a voice like an old-time radio announcer, “The divers return from another brush with death.”

“Somebody want to help me with this?” Cole said. “Damn thing’s heavy.”

At the sound of his voice, Riley rushed down the short ladder to the aft platform.

Nils Skar appeared at her side. He bent down and reached for the statue. “Could that be because it is made of gold?” he said.

Riley saw the look on Cole’s face and quickly stepped between Nils and Cole. “I’ll take it,” she said.

Cole was right. The statue was damn heavy, and though it was completely overgrown with aquatic plants and crustaceans, the head, forearms, and tail made it plenty clear what it was. She climbed back up the ladder and set the heavy object down on the back end of the cabin. Greg appeared at her side with a plastic wash basin half filled with water. Riley set the artifact in the basin.

“Look,” Greg said, “where you touched it there. You knocked some of the nasty brown slime off.”

The color of the metal beneath shone through.

“Just like that freak said,” Greg whispered.

Riley looked around for him. Nils was standing back at the stern, leaning against the bulwark. He nodded at her when their eyes met. She turned away. Peewee was leaning on the cabin on the other side of Riley and he stared at the statue with a faraway look on his face.