Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2) (49 page)

“I’ll meet you on the aft deck.”

When she stepped outside, it was that time of the evening when the sun is about to set and the light has a golden cast to it. She walked to the aft deck and leaned on the railing, her hair whipping around her face in the wind.

She heard him walk up behind her and stop. Turning her head, she looked at him over her shoulder. He had a glass of pinot noir in each hand and his teeth were blazing white against the coppery glow of his skin.

“What are you up to?” she said.

“I’m taking mental pictures of you on my boat in this magical light and storing them for when we are old and gray.”

“For when I get old and ugly, you mean?”

He laughed and handed her a glass. “No, you’ll never be ugly. When we’re both in our nineties, I’m sure you’ll still be the most beautiful woman I know.”

She clinked her glass against his. “Keep this up and I might just stick around until I’m ninety.”

They stood then in a comfortable silence watching the waves and the seabirds. The sun kissed the horizon and sank into the sea.

“Are you terribly disappointed?” she asked after a while.

“About the dive?”

She nodded.

“No, it’s still out there. I’m certain of it. I’ll find it eventually—before they do.”

“Ah. It’s
them
again.”

He chuckled. “One of the many reasons I like having you around, Magee. You keep me on my toes.
They
aren’t just shadows for you anymore, are they?”

“Their Mr. Hawkes is a particularly nasty piece of work. I’m all for making sure he doesn’t get what he wants.”

Cole took a long sip of wine. After he swallowed, he said, “Being inside that ship this afternoon certainly did feel creepy.”

“I guess. Seeing those bones?” She shivered. “I’m glad it wasn’t me.”

“I’m not a superstitious type, but there was something down there that felt, I don’t know. Ominous. That’s not quite the right word. Evil, maybe?”

“Knowing some of the atrocities that both sides engaged in, I think
evil
is a word that would fit.”

“After that business with Nils telling me what to look for and then finding it—it felt spooky.”

“How did he know?”

“I intend to have a nice long talk with him and your buddy Irv in the morning before we reach land. I want to know how both of them know what they know. Say—later tonight when you’re on watch with the old man, why don’t you see what you can learn?”

“I’d be happy to.”

Greg appeared out the side door of the wheelhouse. “Hey, captain. Sorry to bother you. Theo’s got a question for you.”

Cole’s eyes met Riley’s and she saw disappointment. “Duty calls.”

“It’s all right. It’s getting chilly anyway. I’m going to head into your cabin.”

“Our cabin,” he said, and he turned and walked forward.

When Riley closed the door to the cabin, the boat was starting to pitch and roll in the swells. She was afraid to set down her wineglass, but she wanted to look again at the prayer gau and the documents within. Maybe she would be able to figure out something to help Cole find this Golden Lily treasure mother lode site.

With her glass held tight in one hand, she searched through the pockets of her backpack until she felt the silk cloth. She pulled out the artifact rolled up in the cloth covering and took it over to the desk. She sat down in the chair, unrolled the silk, and set it aside. She was struggling to keep the gold tube from rolling off the desk without letting go of her wineglass when she heard a knock at the door.

The noise startled her and her hand jerked. A splash of red wine hit a part of the silk and made an oblong pool across the desk.

“Shit,” she said as she looked around for a box of tissues or paper towels or anything to clean up the mess before it rolled onto the floor.

The knock came again. “Coming,” she called. She pushed back the chair and stood. She tilted back the glass and drained the rest of her wine.
I can’t spill any more if my glass is empty
, she thought.

She reached for the door handle. Peewee stood outside with his hat in his hand.

“Can we talk?”

She laughed. “I thought those were the words men most hated. Come on in. Excuse me while I clean up here.” She left the door open and returned to the desk.

The old man came in and sat on the edge of the bunk while she rummaged through the drawers. She found a legal pad and tore off several sheets of paper to mop up the wine. It wasn’t the most absorbent material, but she finally had the desk clean. She blotted the piece of silk between two sheets and was sad to see the fabric had discolored to a strange brown in some places, while the rest was pink from the wine. The brown tint was probably due to age.

Riley sat back down in the chair and faced the old man. “So what’s this about?”

“I haven’t exactly been honest with you.”

“Gee, Irv, I’m shocked.”

He took in a deep breath and slowly exhaled.

“Okay, I’ll help you out a little,” she said. “It was you who put Nils up to that psychic business with the voices, right? You were the one who knew the dragon would be there.”

His mouth was working feverishly at his dentures as he nodded.

“Do you want to tell me how you knew?” she said.

He nodded. “That’s why I’m here. Nils Skar and I have known each other for years. But there’s more.”

“Go on.”

“Has your boyfriend told you about the uranium?”

“What?”

“He was expecting to find uranium on the
Teiyō Maru
. And he was part right. The Japanese had their own atomic bomb project under way. The
Teiyō Maru
did pick up uranium from a German sub in Djakarta and bring it to Luzon. But she unloaded it before going up to Camiguin.”

Riley was startled by the sound of a voice behind her.

“And how do you know that?”

Cole was standing in the open doorway. Riley stood and moved next to Peewee on the bed. “Come on in and listen, okay?” She turned to the old man. “You all right with him hearing this too, Irv?”

“If we’re going to find this mother lode site, he’ll need to know this, too.”

Cole closed the stateroom door and sat in the desk chair. He hiked it up close to the knees of the other two. “So, what do you know, Irv?”

“When I was in the mountains with the Philippine Scouts, we heard the Japs had found a huge sea cave and they were using it to off-load equipment. By this time, the Americans had retaken Manila and
Yamashita was still holding out with an estimated ten thousand troops in the mountains of northern Luzon. The Japs were having a hell of a time getting supplies and ammunition past the Americans. Any ships anchored in a cove were likely to get bombed.”

“But they could take all the time they needed if they were inside a cave. I get it.”

“The cave was primarily used as a sub base, but a small ship like the
Teiyō Maru
was able to fit inside as well. The cave was huge. It went back for several kilometers following an underground river. There were several large chambers and they were using it as a Golden Lily treasure site, too. From what I’ve heard through the years, and what I’ve seen, it’s the biggest of all the Golden Lily sites. The only map to the location of the cave was inside that dragon.”

“And it’s now pulp soup,” Riley said.

“How do you know the uranium was off-loaded there?”

“The Japs’ plan was to bring the uranium to the cave and then load it onto a sub to take it back to the homeland. After that, they intended to blow the entrance to hide their treasure, probably leaving the few troops still there to die inside. They did that a lot with Golden Lily so no survivors other than the royal family would know the locations. Then they’d get away back home in the sub. The problem was they were even losing their subs at an unacceptable rate. That was when this royal prince came up with the plan to hijack a Yank sub. That way they’d be assured of a safe passage.” Peewee looked at Riley. “We’re talking about the
Bonefish
. That’s how I know all this. Your gramps told me.”

Riley noticed the boat’s roll was getting worse.

Cole said, “We’re starting to feel some swell from the storm, I think.”

“Feels like it,” she said. Then she faced Irv again. “So where is this sea cave?”

“All I know is it’s somewhere south of Vigan. You’ve got about fifteen miles of mountainous coastline there. Today, the mountains inland are part of a national park. You know, we didn’t have GPS in those days, and I never actually saw the cave. When the Japs were placing the charges to blow the entrance, something went off accidentally and they buried themselves and the front cave entrance.”

Riley caught something in the tone of his voice. “You said
front
entrance. Was there another way in?”

He nodded. “That’s how Ozzie got out. After the war, I went back and I searched, but it’s hundreds of square miles of very difficult terrain. It was Ozzie who told me there was a map that was inside a dragon statue on the
Teiyō Maru
. The captain stole it, never knowing what it contained.”

“So you focused on trying to find the map.”

“Yup. I came up with the code name Dragon’s Triangle. That gold and the uranium are still in there. And you aren’t the only one after it.”

“My
friends
back at Natuna Besar.” Riley’s eyes met Cole’s and they nodded in silent agreement.

“Right. And it’s not just that they want to sell it to the highest bidder. They already have a buyer. The Saudis are pissed that Iran is getting a bomb, and they want one of their own.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Cole said.

The bow of the boat rose up on an especially large swell. Riley remembered the glass she’d left on the desk and jumped up to grab it. The prayer gau rolled off the desk onto the cabin sole. She picked it up and went to roll it back up in the silk, then stopped.

“Cole, come here a minute.” She spread the piece of silk out on the flat surface. The piece was about eighteen inches square. Half of it had been wetted by the wine and the more she looked at it, the more she thought it wasn’t just age that had turned the fabric brown. “When I was a kid, my mother taught me how to do silk painting. You use
something called resist to stop the dye from spreading across the fabric. See how this brown coloring stops here?” She pointed at the fabric.

“Yeah,” he said. “It looks deliberate.”

Peewee got up and crossed to the desk. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “That son of a gun. That’s invisible ink. It’s an old OSS trick. I’ve only ever seen it used on paper. You dissolve sodium bicarbonate in water and use it as ink. Put grape juice”—he looked up at Riley—“or in this case wine on it and it will ‘develop.’ He used something as a resist—probably wax.”

“He?” Riley said.

“Yeah, Prince Kaya Masako.”

Riley turned to Cole. “You got any more of that wine?”

Cole disappeared for a minute and returned with a plate and the wine bottle. He spread the dry part of the cloth out on the plate and then poured the wine on it. They watched as the edges of the cloth turned pink but a distinct shape formed in the center.

Riley took hold of the edge of the plate and gave it a quarter turn. “Does that look to you like a pretty good map of northern Luzon?”

“Sure does,” Cole said. “And just south and a little inland from where Vigan would be, that sure looks to me like a little X.”

“As in X marks the spot?” she said.

Riley turned to Peewee. His head was up, facing the bulkhead, but it was clear from the look on his face he was a hundred miles away.

“You okay, Irv?” She touched his arm and he flinched, then gave his head a shake.

“What?” he said. “Oh, sorry. I was just thinking about the path this piece of silk took to get here. So while we’ve been spinning our wheels trying to decode the map to the location of the
Teiyō Maru
—”

Riley smiled and nodded. “We had the map to the treasure site with us all along.”

“I’ll go tell Theo to change course. If we turn now, we could be entering the Abra River at Vigan by late tomorrow afternoon.” Cole disappeared out the door.

“Doesn’t that mean we’ll be heading toward the typhoon?” she asked aloud, but he was already gone.

Camp John Hay
Baguio, Philippines

December 5, 2012

The Manor at Camp John Hay was the closest one could find to a five-star hotel in Baguio, and Elijah was pleased that they had offered him a suite. Those were usually booked up far in advance, especially as the holidays were approaching. Camp Hay had been built in 1903 as a place where American troops could enjoy a little R & R. Even after the end of the Second World War when the Philippines became independent, Camp Hay had remained under the control of the United States Air Force. The property had been turned over to the Philippines in 1991, and it remained a favorite of the military, corporate, and intelligence communities for meetings and holidays. At an elevation of five thousand feet, the cool, dry air was a welcome respite from the heat and humidity of Manila.

When they drove through Baguio City, Elijah had directed Benny to stop at a hardware store. He had found the tools he needed: a metal file, a fine whetstone, light oil, and a few sheets of four-hundred-grit
sandpaper. Then they had driven out to Camp Hay and Elijah had dismissed the savage and sent him back to the mine.