The Tz’u-hsi, named after the last Chinese dowager empress, was the second home of Hollywood actor Garret Converse, never a nominee for an Academy Award but the biggest box-office action hero on the silver screen. The junk was twenty-four meters in length with a beam of six meters, built from top to bottom of cedarand teakwood. Converse had installed every amenity for the crew’s accommodations and the latest in navigational technology. No expense was spared. Few yachts were as luxuriously embellished. A master adventurer in the mode of Errol Flynn, Converse had sailed Tz’u-hsi from Newport Beach on a round-the-world cruise and was now running on the final leg across the Pacific, passing within fifty kilometers of Howland Island, Amelia Earhart’s destination when she disappeared in 1937.
As the two ships plodded past each other on opposite courses, Converse hailed the freighter over the radio.
“Greetings from the junk Tz’u-hsi. What ship are your”
The freighter’s radio operator replied, “The freighter Mentawai out of Honolulu. Where are you bound?”
“Christmas Island, and then to California.”
“I wish you clear sailing.”
“The same to you,” Converse answered.
The captain of Mentawai watched the junk slip astern and then nodded toward his first officer. “I never thought I’d see a junk this deep in the Pacific.”
The first officer, a man of Chinese descent, nodded disapprovingly. “I crewed on a junk when I was a young boy. They’re taking a great risk sailing through the breeding grounds of typhoons. Junks are not built for heavy weather. They ride too high and have a tendency to roll crazily. Their huge rudders are easily broken off by a rough sea.”
“They’re either very brave or very mad to tempt the fates,” said the captain, turning his back on the junk as it grew smaller in the distance. “As for me, I feel more comfortable with a steel hull and the solid beat of engines under my decks.”
Eighteen minutes after the freighter and junk crossed paths, a distress call was heard by the United States container carrier Rio Grande, bound for Sydney, Australia, with a cargo of tractors and agricultural equipment. The radio room was directly off the spacious navigation bridge, and the operator had only to turn to address the second officer, who stood the early morning watch.
“Sir, I have a distress signal from the Indonesian cargo freighter Mentawai.”
The second officer, George Hudson, picked up the ship’s phone, punched a number and waited for an answering voice. “Captain, we’ve picked up a distress signal.”
Captain Jason Kelsey was about to take his first forkful of breakfast in his cabin when the call came from the bridge. “Very well, Mr. Hudson. I’m on my way. Try and get her position.”
Kelsey wolfed down his eggs and ham, gulped half a cup of coffee and walked through a short passageway to the navigation bridge. He went directly to the radio room.
The operator looked up, a curious look in his eyes. “Very strange signal, Captain.” He handed Kelsey a notepad.
Kelsey studied it, then stared at the radio operator. “Are you sure this is what they transmitted?”
“Yes, sir. They came in quite clearly.”
Kelsey read the message aloud. “All ships come quick. Freighter Mentawai forty kilometers south-southwest of Howland Island. Come quick. All are dying.” He looked up. “Nothing more? No coordinates?”
The radio operator shook his head. “They went dead, and I haven’t been able to raise them again.”
“Then we can’t use our radio direction-finding systems.” Kelsey turned to his second officer. “Mr. Hudson, lay a course for Mentawai’s last reported position southwest off Howland Island. Not much to go on without exact coordinates. But if we can’t make a visual sighting, we’ll have to rely on our radar to spot them.” He could have asked Hudson to run the course numbers through the navigation computer, but he preferred working by the old rules.
Hudson went to work on the chart table with parallel rulers, attached by swinging hinges, and a pair of dividers, and Kelsey signaled the chief engineer that he wanted Rio Grande to come to full speed. First Officer Hank Sherman appeared on the bridge, yawning as he buttoned his shirt.
“We’re responding to a distress call?” he asked Kelsey.
The captain smiled and passed him the notepad. “Word travels fast on this ship.”
Hudson turned from the chart table. “I make the distance to Mentawai approximately sixty-five kilometers, bearing one-three-two degrees.”
Kelsey stepped over to the navigation console and punched in the coordinates. Almost immediately the big container ship began a slow swing to starboard as the computerized electronics system steered her onto a new course of 132 degrees.
“Any other ships responding?” he asked the radio operator.
“We’re the only one who attempted a reply, sir.”
Kelsey stared at the deck. “We should be able to reach her in a shade less than two hours.”
Sherman continued staring at the message in bewilderment. “If this isn’t some kind of hoax, it’s very possible that all we’ll find are corpses.”
They found Mentawai a few minutes after eight in the morning. Unlike Polar Queen, which had continued steaming under power, the Indonesian freighter appeared to be drifting. She looked peaceful and businesslike. Smoke curled from her twin funnels, but no one was visible on the decks, and repeated hails through a loudspeaker from the bridge of Rio Grande brought no response.
“Quiet as a tomb,” said First Officer Sherman ominously.
“Good Lord!” muttered Kelsey. “She’s surrounded by a sea of dead fish.”
“I don’t much like the look of it.”
“You’d better collect a boarding party and investigate,” ordered Kelsey.
“Yes, sir. On my way.”
Second Officer Hudson was peering at the horizon through binoculars. “There’s another ship about ten kilometers off the port bow.”
“Is she coming on?” asked Kelsey.
“No, sir. She seems to be moving away.”
“That’s odd. Why would she ignore a ship in distress? Can you make her out?”
“She looks like a fancy yacht, a big one with sleek lines. The design you see moored in Monaco or Hong Kong.”
Kelsey moved to the threshold of the radio-room doorway and nodded to the operator. “See if you can raise that boat in the distance.”
After a minute or two, the radio operator shook his head. “Not a peep. They’ve either closed down, or they’re ignoring us.”
The Rio Grande slackened speed and glided slowly toward the freighter rolling slowly in the low swells. They were very close to the lifeless ship now, and from the bridge wing of the big container ship, Captain Kelsey could look straight down on her decks. He saw two inert figures and what he took to be a small dog. He hailed the wheelhouse again, but all was silent.
The boat with Sherman’s boarding party was lowered into the water and motored over to the freighter. They bumped and scraped alongside as they heaved a grappling hook over the railing and rigged it to pull up a boarding ladder. Within minutes, Sherman was over the side and bending over the bodies on the deck. Then he disappeared through a hatch below the bridge.
Four of the men had followed him while two remained in the boat and motored away from the hull a short distance, waiting for a signal to return and pick them up. Even after Sherman made certain the men lying on the deck were dead, he still half expected some of the freighter’s crew to be waiting for him. After entering the hatch, he climbed a passageway to the bridge and was overwhelmed with a sense of unreality. All hands from the captain to the mess boy were dead, their corpses strewn about the deck where they fell. The radioman was found with his eyes bulging and his hands clasped around his set as if he were afraid of falling.
Twenty minutes passed before Sherman eased Mentawai’s radio operator to the floor and called over to the Rio Grande. “Captain Kelsey?”
“Go ahead, Mr. Sherman. What h
ave you found?”
“All dead, sir, every one of them, including two parakeets found in the chief engineer’s cabin and the ship’s dog, a beagle with its teeth bared.”
“Any clue as to the cause?”
“Food poisoning seems the most obvious. They look like they threw up before they died.”
“Be careful of toxic gas.”
“I’ll keep my nostrils open,” said Sherman.
Kelsey paused, contemplating the unexpected predicament. Then he said, “Send back the boat. I’ll have it return with another five men to help you get the ship under way. The nearest major port is Apia in the Samoa Islands. We’ll turn the ship over to authorities there.”
“What about the bodies of the crew? We can’t leave them lying around, certainly not in the tropical heat.”
Without hesitation, Kelsey replied, “Stack them in the freezer. We want them preserved until they can be examined by—”
Kelsey was abruptly cut off in midsentence as Mentawai’s hull shuddered from an explosion from deep inside her bowels. The hatches above the cargo holds were thrown skyward as flame and smoke erupted from below. The ship seemed to heave herself out of the water before splashing back and taking on a sharp list to starboard. The roof of the wheelhouse collapsed inward. There was another deep rumble inside the freighter, followed by the screeching sound of tearing metal.
Kelsey watched in horror as the Mentawai began to roll over on her starboard side. “She’s going down!” he shouted over the radio. “Get out of there before she goes under!”
Sherman was flat on the deck, stunned from the concussion of the blast. He looked around, dazed, as the deck slanted steeply. He slid into one corner of the shattered radio compartment and sat there in shock, staring dumbly as water surged through the open door to the bridge wing. It was an unreal picture that made no sense to his stunned mind. He took one long gasping breath that was the last he ever took, and tried feebly to rise to his feet, but it was too late. He was buried under the warm, green water of the sea.
Kelsey and the crew of Rio Grande stood frozen in shock as Mentawai rolled over with her hull showing above the water like some giant, rusting metal turtle. Except for the two men in the boat who were crushed by the hull, Sherman’s boarding party was trapped inside the ship when the explosions occurred. None escaped to dive over the side. With a great roar of inrushing water and expelled air, the freighter dived beneath the surface as if anxious to become one more unsolved enigma of the sea.
No one on board Rio Grande could believe the freighter could go so quickly. They stared in horror at the wreckage mixed with wisps of smoke that swirled around her watery crypt, unable to believe their shipmates were locked inside a steel coffin hurtling toward eternal darkness at the bottom of the sea.
Kelsey stood there for nearly a full minute, the grief and outrage etched in his face. Somehow a tiny thought in the back of his mind finally mushroomed and emerged through the shock. He turned from the whirlpool of death, picked up a pair of binoculars and stared through the forward windows at the yacht vanishing in the distance. Now only a white speck against a blue sky and an azure sea, it was moving away at great speed. The mysterious vessel had not ignored the distress signal, he realized. It had come and gone and was now purposely running away from the disaster.
“Damn whoever you are,” he spat in anger. “Damn you to hell.”
Thirty-one days later, Ramini Tantoa, a native of Cooper Island in the Palmyra Atoll chain, awoke, and as was his usual routine went for a morning swim in the warm waters of the East Lagoon. Before he took two steps in the white sand outside his small bachelor hut, he was astonished to see what he recognized as a large Chinese junk that had somehow sailed through the outer reef channel during the night and was now grounded broadside on the beach. The port beam was already high and dry and imbedded in the sand, while the opposite side of the hull was lapped by the gentle waves of the lagoon.
Tantoa shouted a hello, but no one appeared on deck or echoed a reply. The junk looked deserted. All sails were set and fluttering under a light breeze, and the flag that flapped on the stern was the Stars and Stripes of the United States. The varnish on the teak sides looked shiny, as if it hadn’t had time to fade under the sun. As he walked around the half-buried hull Tantoa felt as if the painted eyes on the bows followed him.
He finally worked up his nerve and climbed the huge rudder and over the stern railing onto the quarterdeck. He stood there disconcerted. From stem to stern the main deck was deserted. Everything seemed in perfect order, all lines coiled and in place, the rigging set and taut. Nothing lay loose on the deck.
Tantoa climbed below and walked fearfully through the interior of the junk, half expecting to find bodies. Thankfully he saw no signs of death or disorder. Not a single soul was on board.
No ship could sail from China, halfway across the Pacific Ocean, without a crew, Tantoa told himself. His imagination took hold, and he began to envision ghosts. A ship sailed by a spectral crew. Frightened, he rushed up the stairs onto the deck and leaped over the railing onto the warm sand. He had to report the derelict to the council of Cooper Island’s little village. Tantoa ran up the beach to what he believed was a safe distance before staring over his shoulder to see if he was followed by some unspeakable horror.
The sand around the junk was deserted. Only the allseeing eyes on the bows glared at him malevolently. Tantoa raced off toward his village and never looked back.
The atmosphere in the Ice Hunter’s dining room had a strange mood of subdued festivity. The occasion was a farewell party thrown by the crew and scientists for the survivors of the Polar Queen tragedy. Roy Van Fleet and Maeve had been working day and night, shoulder to shoulder, for the past three days, examining the remains of the penguins, seals and dolphins collected for study and filling notebooks full of observations.
Van Fleet had grown fond of her, but he stopped short of demonstrating any kind of affection; the vision of his pretty wife and three children was seldom out of his mind. He was sorry they couldn’t have continued working together. The other scientists in the lab agreed that they made a great team.
The Ice Hunter’s chef did himself proud with an incredible gourmet dinner featuring filets of deep-sea cod with mushroom and wine sauce. Captain Dempsey looked the other way while the wine flowed. Only the officers standing watch over the operation of the ship had to remain dry, at least until they came off duty and it was their turn to party.
Dr. Mose Greenberg, the shipboard wit, made a long speech laced with banal puns about everyone on board. He might have kept pontificating for another hour if Dempsey hadn’t signaled for the chef to bring out a cake especially baked for the occasion. It was shaped like the continent of Australia, with icing picturing the more notable landmarks including Ayres Rock and Sydney Harbor. Maeve was truly touched, and tears moistened her eyes. Deirdre appeared bored with it all.
As captain, Dempsey sat at the head of the longest table, the women sitting in honor at his elbows. Because he was head of NUMA’s special-projects division, Pitt was allotted the chair at the opposite end of the table. He tuned out the conversations flowing around him and focused his attention on the two sisters.
They couldn’t have come out of the womb more unalike, he thought. Maeve was a warm and wild creature, a light brightly glowing with life. He fantasized her as a friend’s untamed sister washing a car, clad in a tight T-shirt and cutoff shorts while displaying her girlish waist and shapely legs to great advantage. She had changed since he first met her. She talked exuberantly, her arms swaying for effect, vivacious and unpretentious. And yet her manner seemed oddly forced, as if her thoughts were elsewhere and she were under some unknown stress.
She wore a short-skirted red cocktail dress that fit her figure as if it were sewn on after she was in it. Pitt thought at first it was loaned to her by one of the women scientists on board who wore a smaller size, and then he recalled seeing her return with Deirdre from Polar Queen on Ice Hunter
’s shore boat with their luggage stacked in the bow. She wore yellow coral earrings that matched the necklace around her bare neck. She glanced in his direction and their eyes met, but only for an instant. She was in the midst of describing her pet dingo in Australia, and she quickly looked back at her audience as if she hadn’t recognized him.
Deirdre, on the other hand, exuded sensuality and sophistication, traits sensed by every man in the room. Pitt could easily picture her stretched out on a bed covered with silk sheets, beckoning. The only drawback was her imperious manner. She had seemed retiring and vulnerable when he’d found her on Polar Queen. But she too had transformed, into a cool and aloof creature. There was also a flinty hardness Pitt had not recognized before.
She sat in her chair straight-backed and regal in a brown sheath dress that stopped discreetly above her silk-stockinged knees. She wore a scarf around her neck that accented her fawn eyes and copper hair, which was drawn severely back in a huge knot. As if sensing that Pitt was studying her, she slowly turned and stared back at him without expression, and then the eyes became cool and calculating.
Pitt found himself engaged in a game of wills. She was not about to blink even as she carried on a conversation with Dempsey. Her eyes seemed to look through him and, finding nothing of interest, continued on to a picture hanging on the wall behind. The brown eyes that were locked on opaline green never wavered. She obviously was a lady who held her own against men, Pitt reasoned. Slowly, very slowly, he began to cross his eyes. The comical ploy broke the spell and Deirdre’s concentration. Thrusting her chin up in a haughty gesture, she dismissed Pitt as a clown and turned her attention back to the conversation at her end of the table.
Though Pitt felt a sensual desire for Deirdre, he felt himself drawn to Maeve. Perhaps it was her engaging smile with the slight gap between the teeth, or the beautiful mass of incredibly blond hair that fell in a cascade behind and in front of her shoulders. He wondered about her shift of manner since he first found her in the blizzard on Seymour Island. The ready smile and the easy laugh were no longer there. Pitt sensed that Maeve was subtly under Deirdre’s control. It was also obvious, to him if to no one else, there was no love lost between them.
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