The sound of a door crashing open startled Alex. She looked up sharply, turning in the direction of the disturbance. She had heard a lot of strange noises during her brief stay at the hotel — fights, lovemaking, parties — but those things almost always happened late at night, not in the middle of the day when most of the rooms were empty.
It sounded like someone had just broken into the room across the hall.
Against her better judgment, she crept to her front door and eased it open a crack. The angle was just right for her to see a man standing in the doorway of room 216. He had his back to her, but she knew with certainty that the dark haired, broadly built man was the same person who had murdered Don and tried to kill her. The silenced pistol in his right hand was the giveaway.
The man surveyed the room for a moment, then swore loudly. He took out his phone and held it to his ear. “John Lee, I missed her. She’s gone.”
Alex made a mental note of the name
There was a long silence, in which she assumed the killer was being berated for having failed his assignment. Finally, the man said, “She’ll turn up again.”
Another pause.
“And where exactly would that be?”
The man nodded absently as he listened. He stashed the pistol under his jacket, and Alex barely had time to pull her door shut before he turned to leave. Through the thin wood door, she heard him say: “I’ll start packing.”
Alex desperately looked for a place to hide, certain that the man would begin a methodical search of the other rooms. She decided her best chance was to wait beside the door, where she might be able to slip past the man as he entered, but after several minutes of quiet, she realized the danger had passed. She cracked the door again, but the hallway was empty. The killer was gone.
CHAPTER 5
“Man, this ain’t what I signed up for,” Willis complained.
Bones, manning the wheel of the Jacinta, an 85-foot converted shrimp boat, made no effort to hide his smile. “Dude, you’re on a boat at sea, in the company of manly men. You were expecting something else from Navy life?”
Willis stretched in his chair, tilting his head to one side then the other, and then rubbed his eyes. “Easy for you to say. You’ve got a view.”
Bones could have argued that point. The “view” which had inflamed Willis’ envy was a vast featureless expanse of green-gray water. There were no waves or swells to break up the monotony; the only changing feature was the angle of the sun’s reflection which had been dazzling in the early morning hours. In Bones’ estimation, Willis had the more interesting job of interpreting the data received from the sonar fish that was being towed along behind the boat. There was a lot more variation to the sea floor they were scanning than the sea surface upon which they were riding, though so far the sonar had not revealed the squared outlines of a manmade object, such as a five-hundred foot long ocean liner.
He was a little fuzzy about the particulars of the mission. When the last of the cobwebs from his bender finally evaporated, he discovered that he, along with Maddock, Willis and Professor, were already on the move, cruising over the Pacific in a military transport plane. It was not the strangest wake up he’d ever experienced.
By the time the plane put down in Hawaii, he was fully sober and, more importantly, ready for action, even if the “action” amounted to nothing more than driving a boat back and forth across the sea, looking for some old shipwreck. In a way, he was kind of excited about finding the Japanese treasure ship. His adventures with Maddock in New England had awakened in him a nascent interest in historical puzzles and lost relics, just as long as it didn’t have anything to do with Native American culture. He’d had enough of that crap to last a lifetime.
It occurred to him that he might have said some stupid stuff to Maddock; he did that sometimes when he was drunk. He made a mental note to apologize when an opportunity presented itself. Then again, Maddock was kind of a tight-ass sometimes; he needed an occasional reminder, just to keep things real.
Before leaving Coronado, Maddock had arranged for the lease of the Jacinta and the rental of all the equipment they would need, which meant that they were able to hit the ground running when they set down in Manila. After a quick inspection to make sure that the boat and everything else was in good working order, they had left port and headed directly out to sea, to the coordinates where, according to Maddock’s information, the USS Queenfish had fired her torpedoes at the Awa Maru.
Commander Loughlin had only been able to make an estimate of his position. His coordinates were precise only to the degree and meridian, which meant a potential margin for error of as much as sixty miles in any direction. The officially accepted version of history placed the encounter in the Taiwan Strait, dangerously close to the Chinese mainland, but Maddock’s information put the sinking more than four hundred miles to the south, near the Spratly Islands, which were claimed by six different nations, including China and Vietnam. The claims were disputed and mostly symbolic, so there was little chance of running afoul of a military patrol, but the SEALs were acutely aware of the fact that the longer they spent crisscrossing the search zone, the more unwanted attention they would attract.
Jacinta made about fourteen knots, so it had taken them a night and a day to reach the eastern edge of the search grid. Maddock and Bones were trading turns at the helm, while Willis and Professor watched the sonar. The grid was sixty miles square, bracketing the best interpretation of Loughlin’s coordinates. They had started at the northern limit of the search zone, reasoning that the ship’s course would have kept it closer to the mainland, and were running east-west lanes, half a mile apart working their way gradually south. Running the full grid would require one hundred and twenty passes. Each pass took about four hours, so at an average of six passes per twenty-four hour day it would take twenty days of constant operation to cover the entire grid. That didn’t include trips back to refuel and reprovision, each of which would add two more full days to the effort. The math wasn’t that hard; they were going to be here a while. Worse, there was no guarantee that the wreck was even in the waters they were searching.
Maddock joined them on the bridge a few minutes later, bearing cups of coffee and sandwiches. “Did you find it yet?” he asked, half-joking, half-hopeful.
“No,” Bones answered, deadpan. “But we did find a spot where we were picking up the Playboy Channel on the sonar. Want me to circle back and drop anchor?”
“I’ll consider it.” Maddock’s expression grew serious. “Actually, what I’m really considering right now is a change of tactics.”
“I heard that,” Willis agreed. “Anything is better than this.”
Bones was inclined to agree, but recalled the old proverb about switching horses in midstream. Before he could voice his concerns, Maddock went on. “The longer we stay out here, the more likely we are to attract attention, and Maxie was very clear about us not doing that. We need to narrow our focus.”
“Well, unless you’ve got psychic powers you haven’t told us about, I don’t see how we can do that.”
Maddock put down the plate of sandwiches and took out a nautical chart. Like many such maps, they showed a best guess about the shape of the sea floor extrapolated from spotty data accumulated over many years. He circled an area with one forefinger. “We are here.”