“Doesn’t look so big on paper,” Bones remarked. “But that’s close to four thousand square miles.”
“You’re right. What else do you see?”
Bones looked again. He let his eyes rove over the map, taking in the surrounding area. To the southwest the depths rose and fell chaotically breaking the surface with the hundreds charted islets and reefs — merely a token representation of the more than three thousand land formations that comprised the Spratly Islands. To the east lay Palawan and the Philippines. The upper region of the map was mainland Asia, along with the southern tip of Taiwan.
“What were you doing out here?” Maddock murmured, tapping the chart. “The Awa Maru picked up cargo in Singapore…” He moved his finger to the lower left corner of the map. “She traveled alone, without convoy escort, carrying billions of dollars in gold, heading for Japan. The safest and most direct route would have been to stay closer to the mainland, and head toward the Taiwan Strait, which is how it was originally reported. So, what was she doing way over here?”
“If the original reports were wrong about where she was sunk,” Bones mused, “maybe they were also wrong about her destination.”
“Not Japan? Where then?” Maddock moved his finger back to the starting point in Indonesia and retraced the ship’s route along a north-northwest azimuth that brought him to the search zone, but instead of stopping there, he kept going, following the same imaginary straight line until his finger reached land.
“Manila Bay,” Bones said.
“Why?”
“Does it matter? Maybe they need to refuel or pick someone up. Maybe they were supposed to meet a convoy. Maybe someone in Manila wanted to buy the bones of the Peking Duck. Whatever the reason, this ship was on its way to the Philippines, not Japan.”
“That’s an assumption,” Dane cautioned. “You know what they say happens when you assume.”
“Bullcrap.” Bones folded his arms. “Look, regardless of where the ship was headed, we know that it was sunk somewhere in our grid — Loughlin’s coordinates, plus or minus sixty miles. If she was going to Japan, we’ll probably find her in the northwest quadrant. But if she was heading for Manila, she’s somewhere in here — the middle of the grid. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll search this area sooner or later; we can do it today, or next week. So the question is, what does your gut tell you?”
“My gut?”
“Yeah. That thing you never learned to trust?”
The corner of Dane’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Well, if you’re willing to trust my gut, who am I to argue?”
With Bones still at the helm, the Jacinta motored thirty miles to the south and resumed the search. On the second pass, they found the ship.
Dane stared at the profile of the sea bottom, shown on the monochrome display of the sonar unit. A long flat protrusion, sharply angled on one end, jutted up from the otherwise smoothly undulating seafloor. It was, unquestionably, a man-made object; the keel and hull of a large ship, on its side.
Professor, who had joined them on the bridge during the trip south, clapped Willis on the shoulder, and Bones let out a war whoop worthy of his ancestors.
Dane, however, shook his head. “It’s too short.” He pointed at the screen. “The Awa Maru was over five hundred feet long. That ship is three hundred…maybe three-fifty. It’s not long enough.”
Bones waved him off. “Oh, come on, Maddock. Can’t you just let yourself be right once in a while? It’s exactly where you predicted it would be.”
“You think there’s only one sunken ship out here? They fought a war here, remember?”
Professor nodded sagely. “Actually, I’m surprised this is the first wreck we’ve found, given the history of the region.”
“Maybe the ass end broke off,” Bones said. “Like what happened to the Titanic.”
Dane just kept staring at the screen. He desperately wanted to believe that they had found it, but the numbers just weren’t on their side.
Bones wasn’t going to give up. “Look, it’s only thirty fathoms down. Let’s make the dive and be certain, one way or the other. What have we got to lose?”
“Half a day,” Dane answered, but his reply was half-hearted. They had come looking for a wreck, and even if it wasn’t the right one, at least it was a chance for a practice dive. A hundred and eighty feet was deep enough to work out the kinks. Besides, diving sure beat the hell out of pushing a shrimp boat back and forth across the sea. “Ah, why not? Let’s do it.”
No way am I giving this up, Dane thought as the green-gray depths enfolded him. If taking a promotion took him away from the sea, away from a chance to dive, then he had no use for it.
A lifelong SCUBA enthusiast, he had been drawn to the SEALs because of their legendary reputation as “frogmen,” and while amphibious operations were certainly a part of the job, it seemed like most days were spent high and dry, carrying out missions in jungles and landlocked desert countries. On those rare occasions when the job did require him to dive, the military had a way of taking all the fun right out of it. This was different; this was just him and the sea.
And Bones of course, lazily kicking his flippers to maintain the correct angle of descent, but like Dane, mostly letting the heavy weight belt and gravity do all the work.
Yeah, even if it means putting up with Bones.
The chicken soup warm water on the surface grew chilly with depth, and as the last bit of light filtering down from the surface disappeared, the temperature was positively bracing. Dane wrinkled his forehead beneath his face mask, waiting for the “ice cream” headache to subside, and then held the mask against his face and snorted to equalize the pressure in his ears. When he opened his eyes, he was in total darkness.
He savored the momentary vacation from all external stimuli. This was why he loved diving. The illusion of solitude evaporated when Bones flicked on his dive light, but Dane’s enthusiasm for the experience was undiminished.
His dive computer ticked off the depth, one-hundred fifteen feet…one-twenty…one-thirty. Somewhere below lay the wreck of a ship that had evidently remained undiscovered over the years since its sinking. Maybe it wasn’t the Awa Maru, but it was a previously undiscovered wreck — it certainly didn’t show up on the charts. They would have only a few minutes on the bottom — most of the air in their tanks would be consumed during decompression stops on the way back to the surface — but it was a small price to pay for being able to touch a previously lost piece of history.
One hundred-fifty.
Dane flicked on his light and played its beam into the darkness below. Through the faint motes of silt, he saw the ship.
Oxidation and centuries of calcium carbonate accretions made the hull look a little like an enormous vaguely ship-shaped stalagmite. If there were any identifying marks on her hull, they were covered by a mineral crust. The vessel lay on its side, appearing exactly as it had in the sonar image: a long flat hull with a raked bow and a blunt stern. The superstructure was a blocky shape, but Dane was able to distinguish the cylindrical outline of a funnel.
He added some air to his buoyancy compensator to slow his descent and kicked toward the superstructure. Bones was right behind him casting the beam of his dive light on the hull as if marking out the path Dane should take.
Up close, he could distinguish finer details: deck rails, the windows of the bridge, stairways leading to the upper decks, and a large open doorway. The latter feature was a dark void that reminded Dane of the towering black monolith in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. If there were any clues to the ship’s identity, they would surely be on the bridge. The ship’s bell or a dedication plaque perhaps — something that might have withstood the ravages of time and salt water. The bridge was the place to start, but his gaze kept wandering back to the open doorway amidships. It looked like a portal into another reality, enticing him a siren’s song of discovery.