Hell Ship (14 page)

“And if they don’t?”

“It’s out there,” Ray said confidently. “I’ll just come back and scour every square inch of the site until I find it.”

“So why not just do that now?
Let’s take them out and do this our way.”

Ray’s expression did not change, bu
t his blue eyes seemed to harden to the color of concrete. “We are going to do this
my
way.”

Nagata Maru
wreck site

“We finished clearing
the ship yesterday, and started sweeping the surrounding seafloor.” Bones motioned to a pile of encrusted debris on the deck. “So far, all we’ve found is a whole lot of nothing.”

“If you don’t include the remains of over four hundred Allied soldiers,”
remarked Alex, gesturing to the array of dog tags laid out on a table. There were a half-dozen different styles representing the same number of nationalities. The metal tags were badly corroded and would have to be meticulously restored if an identification was to be made, but some, such as the distinctive red disk and green octagon pair issued by the Royal Army which were made of vulcanized asbestos fiber, were perfectly legible.

Dane didn’t think that she had meant it to sound like an accusation, but he could tell from the way Bones stiffened that it had come out that way.
They were all tired and irritable. Bones and his crew had been working long, tedious and ultimately unfruitful hours sifting through the wreck of the
Nagata Maru
, while Dane, Alex and Professor had been traveling non-stop for too many days to count, first hopping their way across Europe and Asia to reach the Philippines, followed by a long journey aboard the
Sea Sprite
, a cramped—and not altogether sea-worthy—cabin cruiser, to rendezvous with
Jacinta
shortly before sunrise. The travel expenses alone had put quite a dent in their reserve—which consisted of several thousand dollars in Dane’s money belt—and every day they spent at sea was just adding to the final tally.

Da
ne quickly tried to smooth things over. “I appreciate all the work you’ve done. I wish there was a shortcut, but unfortunately this isn’t an exact science. More of a process of elimination, really.”

Bones stared suspiciously at
Alex a few seconds longer then turned his attention back to Dane. “Well, like the lady said, we did bring up a whole mess of dog tags. The grandkids of these missing soldiers will probably think that’s worth a hell of a lot more than some fairy tale treasure.”

“Ordinarily, I would feel the sam
e way, but unfortunately this is one fairy tale that people are willing to kill for.”

“People kill for less than that all the time,” intoned
Alex. “That doesn’t make any of it real.” She turned to Bones and stuck out her hand. “I’m sorry if I offended you. Truce?”

Bones grimaced, but there was a playful twinkle in his eye.
“My people have learned to be very suspicious when the white man asks for a truce.”

“I know this will tax your powers of observation,”
Alex countered in the same tone, “but I am not exactly lily-white, and I’m certainly not a man.”

Bones looked her up and down with an exaggerated lascivious grin. “Well, there’s no arguing that.”

Behind them, Gabby cleared her throat. “When you two are finished, maybe you’d like to tell me what to do next.”

Bones transferred his smile to Gabby for a moment then became serious.
“As I see it, we have two choices. We can keep searching the sea floor surrounding the wreck, or we can try to go back into the interior.”

He walked over and laid a han
d on the monitor screen which displayed the alien-looking sub-surface environment in dull hues of green and brown. “We found some remains in the area around the wreck. I’m no forensic expert, but judging by the way the bones were shattered, I’d guess they were shot, probably trying to escape. So, there’s a chance we’ll find our guy out there, but the further out we go, the less we’re finding. On the upside, it’s going quickly because we can sweep with the metal detector.”

“Okay, what are the pros and cons of going back to the wreck?”
Dane asked.

Gabby fielded this question.
“The metal detector is useless in there, so we have to do everything visually. We think that most of the prisoners were being kept in the ship’s ballroom—that’s the big enclosure you first explored. We were also able to access the bridge and a few other compartments on the main deck, but there are probably dozens of places below decks that we haven’t checked out yet. The engine room, galleys, crew quarters, staterooms. That will be slow going since a lot of those spaces will have collapsed or been silted in.”

“I doubt we’ll find our missing POW there
anyway,” Dane said.

Bones inclined his head in agreement.
“It’s your call. Gabby’s working by the hour, so she probably doesn’t care if we spend the next six months out here. The rest of us…” He shrugged.

Dane
thought he understood Bones’ subtext. There was no reason for them to still be out here. In finding the ship, they had accomplished the mission objective, or more precisely nullified that objective. Either way, the logical thing for them to do was to return to base, send their findings up the chain of command, and await further orders. SEALs were given a lot of latitude in how they accomplished their missions, but there were limits to their autonomy. Even if he didn’t trust the SECNAV, he knew he should, at the very least, turn the whole thing over to Maxie.

H
e had been operating under the belief that, once he had all the facts, the way forward would become clearer, but every new discovery only took them deeper into a labyrinth of uncertainty. If they could find Trevor Hancock, find the medallion that was supposedly affixed to his skull, they would have a piece of concrete evidence, but Dane was beginning to wonder if even that discovery would shed light on the mystery, or further muddy the waters.

Hancock and the Gatekeepers were still out there, a
nd there was no telling how deep the Templar influence extended, or to what lengths they would go to preserve their secret. There had already been one attempt to harm them; how long before the next one came? As much as Dane wanted to know the truth, he couldn’t justify putting the rest of the team in danger.

He watched Gabby drive the ROV for several minutes, during which time the scene on the monitor remained mostly unchanged and the me
tal detector remained quiescent, and came to a conclusion.

“All right, here’s what’s going to happen.
Bones, Professor and Willis are going to head home and report what we’ve found.” Dane realized that he was dangerously close to blowing their cover. As far as Alex and Gabby were concerned, they were fortune hunters, beholden to no one, and he wasn’t ready to reveal the truth to them just yet, so he hastily added. “Go public with it. Tell the newspapers that we found a missing ship from World War II. And of course, you should tell our friend Maxie about it. He might have some ideas.”

Bones nodded slowly.
“And while we’re doing that, you’re going to do…what?”

“I’ll stay here with Gabby and
Alex and keep looking.”

“
Ah, you want to send us away, so you can party with the hot chicks, is that right? Is that your idea of taking one for the team?” Bones tone was humorous, but Dane didn’t miss the subtle familiar criticism.

You don’t want to be part of the team
.

“I have to do this,” he insisted.
“You guys don’t. I won’t drag you down with me.”

Bones looked at
Professor and then at Willis. “You guys feeling drug down?”

Willis gave a succinct, “Hell
, no!”

Professor
was more eloquent. “All for one and one for all, boss.”

Dane shook his head.
“I appreciate the offer guys, but our best chance of surviving this is by getting the word out. Sending you back is the right call.”

Bones heaved an overly dramatic sigh.
“Fine. Willis and the Prof will go back. I’m staying.”

Dane would have preferred to keep
Professor with him, but got the sense that Bones had no intention of budging on the issue. He wondered if Bones first comment about the women hadn’t been a joke after all. Was he involved with Gabby?

Well, so what if he is?
At least he’s sober
. “Okay, if we’re done with that minor mutiny…Gabby, reel in the ROV.”

Bones craggy eyebrows drew together questioningly.

“We found this ship by throwing out what we thought we knew,” Dane explained. “Thinking outside the box; thinking like the people who were there, living it. So let’s put ourselves in Hancock’s shoes. We know he didn’t go down with the ship, and it’s looking like he didn’t get machine gunned by the guards. If either was the case, we’d have found him already.”

“Not necessarily,” countered
Professor. “It’s a big ocean. The odds of finding one person—”

“Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?” growled Bones.
Professor promptly fell silent. “Okay, C-3PO here makes a good point, but go on.”

“Like I said, put yourself in his shoes.
Your ship was just sunk. You’re alone in the middle of the sea. What do you do?”

Glances were exchanged but no one had an answer.

“You swim.”

“Sure,” joked Bones.
“The nearest land is only…what, three hundred miles away?”

“Hancock wouldn’t have known that.
He’d been shut up in that ship for days. He would have been swimming just to stay alive. Hell, he was probably just trying to stay afloat. And you’re wrong about the nearest land, Bones. Gabby, you want to tell him?”

The ROV operator looked surpris
ed to have been singled out, and considered the question for a moment. “Oh, duh. The Spratlys. Technically, we’re on the northern edge of them right now.”

“He wouldn’t have known about those either,” Dane continued, “but when you’re adrift in the ocean, you go where the current takes you.
Gabby, I’m guessing you know a thing or two about the currents here?”

“Umm, yeah.
What time of year was the ship sunk?”

“April,” said
Alex. “April 21, 1944, if that makes a difference.”

“Hmm.
It might, but the month is the important thing. The currents change with the onset of the monsoon season. And of course they’re always changing from one year to the next. But I can put you in the ballpark.”

Dane felt the same rush of excitement he’d experienced when they had first discovered the wreck.
His instincts—his gut, as Bones would say—told him he was on the right track.

With Gabby’s best-guess
plot of the currents to guide them, the crew of the
Jacinta
, minus Professor and Sanders who were en route to Manila aboard
Sea Sprite
, headed southwest. The current was only about three knots, an estimate that had been more or less verified by throwing a life ring overboard and clocking the time it took to drift away.

Dane knew this was a shot in the dark.
Ocean currents, driven by differences in water temperature and salinity, were predictable only at a very large scale. Perhaps with accurate historical data, crunched by a dedicated supercomputer, they would be able to narrow their focus, but without knowing exactly where—or if—Hancock had gone into the water, success or failure would probably be more dependent on luck than anything else.

Still, luck had gotten them this far.

About two hours after leaving the wreck site, the sea floor rose to within five fathoms—less than thirty feet of water separated the keel of the
Jacinta
from the bottom.

“It’s a seamount,” Gabby explained.
“An undersea mountain that didn’t quite make it to the surface to become an island. There are a lot of them out here. Seamounts, shallow reefs, islands that are submerged except at low tide.”

The landforms, she went on, would shunt the currents aside, creating stronger and faster movement of water, that would stay parallel to shallows.
Dane cut the engines and allowed the boat to drift, while watching the horizon in every direction for any sign of land. Soon, he spied the froth of waves breaking on a reef, but a closer inspection revealed a patch of ground about the size of a baseball infield—and just as flat and featureless, too—poking above the waves.

If Trevor Hancock had washed up on th
at beach fifty years earlier, he would just as surely have been washed away with the next tide. They kept looking.

Twenty minutes later, Bones
’ voice boomed like thunder across the decks. “Land, ho!”

Dane trained his binoculars in the direction Bones was pointing and saw another reef, this one only slightly larger and more pronounced than the first one they had seen, but ne
vertheless worth investigating.