“Come on,” Kurt urged.
It felt as if the tower of rock was drawing them in like a black hole. And with the weight they were towing, they seemed almost incapable of rising at anything more than the slowest of speeds.
“Climb, damn it,” Kurt grunted.
They were heading right into it, like a plane flying into a cliff. All light from the surface was cut off by the shadow of the rock. They were rising but not fast enough. It looked like they were going to hit it head-on.
“Come on,” Kurt said.
“Kurt?” Joe said, his hand over the ballast control.
“Come on, you—”
Suddenly, they saw light again, and at the last second they rose up over the tower. Kurt leveled off, allowing their speed to increase.
“Think we scraped the paint,” Kurt said.
Behind him, Joe breathed a sigh of relief. “Look at the magnetometer,” he said.
Kurt didn’t really hear him.
“It’s pointing dead aft, right at that tower of rock. This is some kind of high-intensity magnetic field,” Joe said.
At any other time, Kurt would have found that interesting, but ahead of him, lit up by the blazing yellow-green lights, he gazed upon a sight he found hard to believe.
The mast of a great ship sprouted from the ocean floor like a single limbless tree. Beyond it lay a smaller fishing vessel, and just to the left of that was what might have once been the hull of a tramp steamer.
“Joe, do you see this?” he asked.
As Joe angled for a better view, Kurt took the Barracuda right over the three vessels. As he did, they spotted several more. Cargo vessels that looked like the old Liberty ships, rusting hulks covered in a thin layer of algae and sediment. All around them, boxy containers lay strewn about as if they’d been dumped over the side of some ship at random.
He saw the wing of a small aircraft, and four or five more unrecognizable objects that appeared to be man-made.
“What is this place?” Kurt wondered aloud.
“It’s like some kind of ship graveyard,” Joe said.
“What are they all doing here?”
Joe shook his head. “I have no idea.” They passed over the wrecks, and the ocean bottom slowly returned to normal, mostly sediment and silt, with plant life and bits of coral here and there.
Wanting to go back but realizing they had a more important rendezvous with the surface, Kurt put the Barracuda into a nose-up climb once again. Slowly, the seafloor began to recede.
Then, just before their lights lost contact, Kurt saw something else: the fuselage of a large aircraft, half buried in the silt. Its long, narrow cabin swooped back in graceful flowing lines until it ended in a distinctive triple tail.
Kurt knew that plane. When he was younger, he and his father had built a model of it, which Kurt and a friend had blown to pieces with fireworks they’d found.
The aircraft with the sweeping lines and the triple tail was unique. It was the beautiful Lockheed Constellation.
13
New York City, June 19
THE NEW YORK OFFICES of the Shokara Shipping Company occupied several floors of a modern glass-and-steel structure in midtown Manhattan. An international operator of a hundred seventeen merchant vessels, Shokara kept track of its ships from a control room on the forty-sixth floor, wined and dined potential clients on the forty-seventh, and handled its accounting on the forty-eighth. The forty-ninth floor was reserved for VIPs and corporate executives, and was usually empty except for the cleaning crews, who kept the feng shui — designed space immaculate.
This week, however, was vastly different. Shokara’s president and CEO, Haruto Takagawa, was in residence. As a result, both the level of activity and the level of security had increased many times over.
Takagawa had originally planned to spend a month in New York, enjoying Broadway, the nightlife, and the marvelous museums of the city. At the same time, he would meet with various stockbrokers and members of the Securities and Exchange Commission. By the end of the month he hoped to be announcing Shokara’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange, a private offering to raise more capital and a new subsidiary, Shokara New York, which would begin to handle shipping from the U.S. to Europe and back.
And while those tasks still loomed on his schedule, Takagawa had spent most of the past week dealing with the aftermath of a pirate attack and the sinking of one of his ships, the Kinjara Maru.
The situation was doubly tricky for Takagawa, first because it came at a terrible time, right before the planned corporate moves, and second because the ship itself had been listed as operating out of Singapore for Australia, not out of Africa headed for Hong Kong. That fact had the insurance company claiming the policy was void, as ships off the African coast were hijacked far more often than ships traveling from Asia to Perth or Sydney.
And while those two thorns irritated his side, they would be inconsequential in the long run. A deal would be struck with the insurance company, once they’d weaseled a percent or two off the price, and in a few days no one in New York would care about his sunken ship any more intensely than they cared about a truck that had a flat tire. These things happened.
What did matter was the demands from the buyer in China that they be reimbursed for the cargo that was lost. This was tricky for many reasons, but mostly because of the nature of the cargo itself.
As a Japanese conglomerate, Shokara operated under Japanese law, but in trying to open a U.S.-based subsidiary, Takagawa was expected to comply with American rules. Those rules prohibited the transfer of certain technologies to other countries, and some of the materials on board the Kinjara Maru might well fit that category.
At this particular moment in time, he couldn’t afford for that information to come out. If it did, or if the right people caught wind of the truth and got angry, Takagawa’s time in New York might add up to nothing more than an expensive vacation.
Just when things seemed to be settling down, his intercom buzzed.
“Mr. Takagawa,” his secretary announced. “There are two men in the ground-floor lobby who would like to meet with you.”
Takagawa didn’t bother asking if they had an appointment, they would have been allowed up if that were the case.
“Who are they?”
“Their credentials indicate they are on staff with an American organization known as the National Underwater Maritime Agency,” she said. “They want to talk to you about the Kinjara Maru.”
NUMA. Takagawa knew the Agency well, and not just because chance had allowed some of its agents to spot the piracy on one of his ships and attempt to intervene. He knew all about NUMA from an incident that had occurred more than a decade ago.
Unlike others in the Japanese shipping world, he had a great fondness for the men and women of NUMA. It made his answer that much harder.
“Tell them I cannot speak on this subject,” he said.
Silence returned for a moment, and Takagawa reached over to one side. He flipped on a monitor and pressed a button that allowed him to see the front desk in the lobby.
Two young men in suits stood there, appearing bright-eyed and eager. They looked more like Ivy League lawyers or accountants than the intrepid men he’d once dealt with. Then again, there could be only one reason they wanted to talk to him about the Kinjara Maru. So why not send lawyers?
The secretary’s voice returned. “They say they’re willing to wait all day if they have to, but they must speak with you.”
“They can wait until the end of time,” he said, “but I will not talk to them. Have security escort them out of the building.”