The ship was still coasting forward, but her screws had stopped turning and the water pouring into the gaping wound amidships was dragging her to a halt. Nevertheless, in the space of just a few seconds, Hancock found himself fifty yards astern of the listing vessel. He couldn’t make out the name painted in white letters on the black hull, but he recognized that he had been wrong in some of his assumptions about the ship. It was not a freighter at all, but a small passenger liner, with a single smokestack and a pair of radio masts bracketing the superstructure. The Japanese, like all the powers fighting in the war, had conscripted civilian ocean liners for use as troop transports. What he had mistaken for a cargo hold had in reality been the ship’s dining hall, or perhaps even a grand ballroom, shuttered with steel armor plates to keep out both sunlight and bullets from strafing aircraft.
He saw no other vessels, which meant that there was probably a submarine lurking nearby, perhaps already lining up to loose another torpedo at the ocean liner. An Allied submarine, Hancock realized with a twist of dread. They saw only the Rising Sun emblazoned above her transom; they could not know that the liner was transporting their captive brothers-in-arms.
There was another explosion from the ship, probably a boiler or a fuel tank rupturing, and the vessel rolled over onto its starboard side, flinging prisoners and Japanese troops alike into the sea. Only now did Hancock realize just how many men were in the water, some thrashing to get away from the doomed vessel, but many more just floating face down, the last of their lifeblood leaking away from gaping bullet wounds.
There was blood in the water; a lot of it.
Creaking and groaning, the ship burrowed deeper into the sea. The bow rose up for a moment, thrusting skyward as the inundated stern aimed for the bottom, and then with a rushing sound, the black hull slipped down like a sword thrust and disappeared.
Hancock rolled over and began swimming frantically to put some distance between himself and the sinking ship, lest the cavitation suck him down as well. He must have been far enough away, for he didn’t feel even the slightest bit of pull, but that was soon the least of his worries.
“Shark!”
The screamed warning echoed again and again so that it was impossible to tell where the threat was coming from. Hancock scanned the water all around for the knife edge shape of a dorsal fin plowing toward him, but saw nothing. This did not reassure him; he’d heard that sharks struck from below, drawn to the smell of blood and the thrashing of swimmers.
The survival instinct that had energized him to escape the sinking ship drained away in the face of this realization. He had been on the verge of collapse before, his reserves exhausted. With nothing left, not even hope to propel him onward, he surrendered himself to the whim of fate and let the water carry him away.
CHAPTER 1
Any passersby would have assumed that Alexandra Vaccaro was attempting a complex juggling act, but the reality was somewhat more prosaic: she was just looking for her keys.
The shoes were the problem.
She wasn’t normally given to making impulse purchases, and certainly not Prada knock-offs sold by a shady-looking guy on the sidewalk near the College Park Metro Station. But they really were very nice shoes — silver pointed cap toe pumps — and she had the perfect outfit to go with them; a slinky black cocktail dress that made her green eyes glitter like emeralds, her not-quite-natural blonde highlights shine like gold, and her Mediterranean olive complexion looked like a killer tan. And while she was, as a general rule, morally opposed to purchasing counterfeit merchandise, she felt comfortable making this one exception since there was no way on earth she’d ever be able to afford the genuine article.
Even so, she had been on the verge of walking away from the vendor empty-handed and with no regrets, when a vaguely familiar female voice had reached out from across the street. “Allie?”
She had groaned, even without knowing for sure who the person was. No one called her Allie anymore, hadn’t in years, not since….
She looked in the direction of the shout and saw a stocky woman wearing a US Navy service khaki uniform, crossing the street and waving. As the woman drew near, Alex could easily distinguish the silver bar pinned to the woman’s collar. Mustering a smile that was about as genuine as the “Padra” pumps, she extended both hands in a “come hug me” gesture and squealed: “Lynn? Oh, my God? Look at you.”
On later reflection, Alex recognized that the encounter — or something like it — had probably been inevitable. This close to the nation’s capital, the odds of running into someone from the bad old days of boot camp were pretty good.
With as much poise as she could muster, she congratulated the recently promoted Lieutenant Junior Grade Lynn Baker and deftly turned the conversation away from a discussion about her own life. Alex could see the unasked question in Lynn’s eyes, but she made sure that no opportunity to ask it ever arose.
The unexpected reunion, which lasted no more than ten minutes, had nevertheless thrown her itinerary into a state of chaos. She’d arrived at the National Archives just as the staff was heading to lunch, and so a ten minute delay put her more than an hour behind schedule.
Don would scold her for being so late.
He was a decent enough employer, but he had an almost slavish devotion to orderliness, which included living nearly every waking moment according to schedule. Part of that owed, she imagined, to his profession; a historian — a military historian, no less — he was attuned to how complex systems like governments and civilizations could collapse with astonishing suddenness if the citizens did not mind the details. But Alex suspected that much of his insistence on orderliness stemmed from his desire to be in control of his environment. An invalid — paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet during the Vietnam conflict and thereafter confined to a wheelchair — Don had to rely on others for even the simplest of actions. As his research assistant, Alex had to be sensitive to his whims, and while her position allowed her to operate independent of his schedule, she did her best to avoid thumbing her nose at his rage for order. She certainly didn’t relish the idea of explaining to him how everything had fallen apart because she’d been distracted while window shopping.
She had however decided to treat herself, and as she headed back into the Metro station, her primary mission accomplished, she bought the shoes.
Now an hour later, standing literally on the threshold of her destination, she had cause to regret that self-indulgent decision.
Her keys were in her purse, which hung over her left shoulder. The plain cardboard box with the shoes was tucked under her right arm, and in her left hand, she held a thick manila envelope, containing nearly four hundred pages of recently declassified naval engagement records from World War II. She tried switching the shoe box to her left hand, but the keys remained just out of reach in the hidden depths of the purse. She was going to need both hands to do this, and that meant admitting defeat and surrendering to the notion that she would have to set her burdens down.
Alex hated admitting defeat.
Instead of setting the shoebox down, she placed it against the closed door and shifted her left hip to brace it in place so that she could—
The door swung open.
That’s not right, Alex thought, overcoming her initial surprise and catching the shoebox before it could drop to the floor.
Don insisted the door be locked and bolted; she had turned the key to the deadbolt herself before leaving.