Flood Tide dp-14

by Clive Cussler

  “More treasure was seized than the ship could ordinarily hold. But since the Princess Dou Wan had been stripped of her furnishings and fixtures in preparation for her final voyage to the scrappers in Singapore, Kung Hui managed to cram over a thousand crates into the cargo holds and empty passenger staterooms. Most of the crates with large sculptures were tied down on the open decks. Then on November second, nineteen forty-eight, the Princess Dou Wan sailed from Shanghai into oblivion.”

  “Vanished?” said Gunn.

  “Like a midnight ghost.”

  “When you say historical art treasures,” said Rudi Gunn, “is it known exactly what pieces were seized?”

  “The ship's manifest, if there was one,” answered Perlmutter, “would make every curator in every museum of the world mad with envy and desire. A brief catalog would include the monumental designs of Shang-dynasty bronze weapons and vases. From sixteen hundred until eleven hundred B.C., Shang artists were advanced in the carving of stone, jade, marble, bone and ivory. There were the writings of Confucius inscribed in wood in his own hand from the Chou dynasty that reigned from eleven hundred to two hundred B.C.; magnificent bronze sculptures, incense burners inlaid with rubies, sapphires and gold, life-size chariots with drivers and six horses and beautifully lacquered dishes from the Han dynasty, two-oh-six B.C. to two twenty A.D.; exotic ceramics, books from China's classical poets and paintings by their masters living in the T'ang dynasty, six eighteen to nine-oh-seven A.D.; beautifully created artifacts from the Sung, Yuan, and the famous Ming dynasty, whose artisans were masters at sculptures and carvings. Their workmanship is widely known for the decorative arts, including cloisonne, furniture and pottery, and of course, we're all familiar with their famous blue- and white-porcelain.”

  Sandecker studied the smoke that curled from his cigar. “You make it sound more valuable than the Inca treasure Dirk found in the Sonoran Desert.”

  “Like comparing a cup of rubies to a carload of emeralds,” Perlmutter said, sipping his port. “Impossible to set a value on such a grand hoard. Moneywise, you're talking billions of dollars, but as historical treasure, the word priceless becomes inadequate.”

  “I can't imagine riches of such magnitude,” said Julia wonderingly.

  “There's more,” Perlmutter said quietly, adding to the spell. “The icing on the cake. What the Chinese would consider as their crown jewels.”

  “More precious than rubies and sapphires,” said Julia, “or diamonds and pearls?”

  “Something far more rare than mere baubles,” Perlmutter said softly. “The bones of Peking man.”

  “Good lord!” Sandecker expelled a breath. “You're not suggesting that the Peking man was on the Princess Dou Wan.”

  “I am,” Perlmutter nodded. “Colonel Hui Wiay swore that an iron box containing the long-lost remains were placed on board the Princess Dou Wan in the captain's cabin minutes before the ship sailed.”

  “My father often spoke of the missing bones,” said Julia. “Chinese adoration of our ancestors made them more meaningful than tombs still containing early emperors.”

  Sandecker sat up and gazed at Perlmutter. “The saga behind the loss of the Peking man's fossilized bones remains one of the great unexplained enigmas of the twentieth century.”

  “You're familiar with the story, Admiral?” asked Gunn.

  “I once wrote a paper on the missing bones of Peking man at the Naval Academy. I thought they vanished in nineteen forty-one and were never found. But St. Julien is now saying they were seen seven years later on the Princess Dou Wan before she set sail.”

  “Where did they come from?” asked Harper.

  Perlmutter nodded at Sandecker and deferred. “You wrote the paper, Admiral.”

  “Sinanthropus pekinensis,” Sandecker spoke the words almost reverently. “Chinese man of Peking, a very ancient and primitive human who walked upright on two feet. In nineteen twenty-nine the discovery of his skull was announced by a Canadian anatomist, Dr. Davidson Black, who directed the excavation and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Over the next several years, digging in a quarry that had once been a hill with limestone caves near the village of Choukou-tien, Black found thousands of chipped-stone tools and evidence of hearths, which indicated Peking man had mastered fire. Excavations carried out over the next ten years found the partial remains of another forty individuals, both juveniles and adults, and what has been acknowledged as the largest hominid fossil collection ever assembled.”

  “Any relation to Java man, who was found thirty years sooner?” asked Gunn.

  “When the Java and Peking skulls were compared in nineteen thirty-nine, they were seen to be very similar, with Java man arriving on the scene a shade earlier and not as sophisticated in toolmaking as Peking man.”

  “Since scientific dating techniques didn't come into play until much later,” said Harper, “is there any idea as to how old Peking man is?”

  “Because he cannot be scientifically dated until he's re-found, the best guess to his age is between seven hundred thousand and one million years. New discoveries in China, however, indicate that Homo erectus, an early species of human, is now thought to have migrated out of Africa to Asia two million years ago. Naturally, Chinese paleoanthropologists hope to prove that early man evolved in Asia and migrated to Africa instead of the accepted other way around.”

  “How did the remains of Peking man disappear?” Julia asked Sandecker.

  “In December of nineteen forty-one, invading Japanese troops were closing in on Peking,” narrated Sandecker. "Officials at the Peking Union Medical College, where the irreplaceable bones of Peking man were stored and studied, decided they should be removed to a place of safety. It was also evident, more so in China than in the West, that war between Japan and the United States was imminent. American and Chinese scientists agreed that the fossils should be sent to the United States for safekeeping until after the war. After months of negotiation, the American ambassador in Peking finally arranged shipment by a detachment of U.S. marines that was under orders to sail for the Philippines.

  “The ancient bones were carefully packed in two Marine Corps footlockers and, along with the marines, were put aboard a train bound for the port city of Tientsin, where both living and dead were to board the S.S. President Harrison, a passenger ship belonging to the American President Lines. The train never arrived hi Tientsin. It was halted by Japanese troops who ransacked it. By now it was December the eighth, nineteen forty-one, and the marines, who had thought themselves neutrals, were then sent to Japanese prison camps to sit out the war. It can only be assumed that after lying underground for a million years, the remains of Peking man were scattered around the rice paddies beside the railroad track.”

  “That was the last word on their fate?” Harper inquired.

  Sandecker shook his head and smiled. “Myths thrived after the war. One had the fossils secretly hidden in a vault under the Museum of Natural History in Washington. The marines who guarded the shipment and survived the war came up with at least ten different stories of their own. The footlockers went down on a Japanese hospital ship that in reality was loaded with weapons and troops. The marines buried the footlockers near an American consulate. They were hidden in a prisoner-of-war camp and then lost at the end of the war. They were stored in a Swiss warehouse, in a vault on Taiwan, in the closet of a marine who smuggled them home. Whatever the true story, Peking man is still lost in a fog of controversy. And how they somehow found their way into Chiang Kai-shek's hands and onto the Princess Dou Wan is anybody's guess.”

  “All very tantalizing,” said Julia, setting a pot of tea and cups on the center table for anyone who wanted some. “But what good is all this if the Princess can't be found?”

  Pitt smiled. “Leave it to a woman to cut to the heart of the matter.”

  “Any details surrounding her loss?” asked Sandecker.

  “On November twenty-eighth, she sent out a Mayday signal that was picked up in Valparaiso
, Chile, giving her position as two hundred miles west of the South American coast in the Pacific. Her radio operator claimed a fire was raging in her engine room and she was rapidly taking on water. Ships in the general area were diverted to the location given, but the only trace that was ever found were several empty life jackets. Repeated signals from Valparaiso brought no response, and no extensive search was undertaken.”

  Gunn shook his head thoughtfully. “You could look for years with the Navy's latest deep-sea-penetrating technology and not find anything. A vague position like that means a search grid of at least two thousand square miles.”

  Pitt poured himself a cup of tea. “Was her destination known?”

  Perlmutter shrugged. “None was ever given nor determined.” He opened another file and passed around several photos of the Princess Dou Wan.

  “For her time, she was a pretty ship,” observed Sandecker, admiring her lines.

  Pitt's eyebrows raised in speculation. He rose from his chair, walked to a desk and picked up a magnifying glass. Then he studied two of the photos closely before looking up. “These two photos,” he said slowly.

  “Yes,” Perlmutter murmured expectantly.

  “They are not of the same ship.”

  “You're absolutely right. One photo shows the Princess Dou Wan's sister ship, the Princess Yung Tai.”

  Pitt stared into Perlmutter's eyes. “You're hiding something from us, you old fox.”

  “I have no rock-hard proof,” said the big history expert, “but I do have a theory.”

  “We'd all like to hear it,” said Sandecker.

  Out came another file from the briefcase. “I strongly suspect the distress signal received in Valparaiso was a fabrication that was probably sent by Chiang Kai-shek's agents either on land or from a fishing boat somewhere offshore. The Princess Dou Wan, while en route across the Pacific, was given a few minor modifications by her crew, including a name change. She became the Princess Yung Tai, which had been broken up at the scrappers a short time before. Under her new disguise, she then continued toward her ultimate destination.”

  “Very canny of you to fathom the substitution,” said San-decker.

  “Not at all,” Perlmutter replied modestly. “A fellow researcher in Panama discovered that the Princess Yung Tbi passed through the Canal only three days after the Princess Dou Wan sent her Mayday signal.”

  “Were you able to trace her course from Panama?” asked Pitt.

  Perlmutter nodded. “Thanks to Hiram Yaeger, who used his vast computer complex to trace ship arrivals at ports up and down the eastern seaboard during the first and second week of December, nineteen forty-eight. Bless his little heart, he struck gold. The records show a vessel passing through the Welland Canal listed as the Princess Yung Tbi on December the seventh.”

  Sandecker's face lit up. “The Welland Canal separates Lake Erie from Lake Ontario.”

  “It does indeed,” agreed Perlmutter.

  “My God,” Gunn muttered. “That means the Princess Dou Wan didn't disappear in the ocean but sank in one of the Great Lakes.”

  “Who would have thought it?” Sandecker said more to himself than the others.

  “Quite a feat of seamanship to navigate a ship her size down the St. Lawrence River before the seaway was built,” said Pitt.

  “The Great Lakes,” Gunn echoed the words slowly. “Why would Chiang Kai-shek order a ship filled with priceless art treasures to go thousands of miles out of the way? If he wanted to hide the cargo in the United States, why not San Francisco or Los Angeles as a destination?”

  “Colonel Hui Wiay claimed he was not told the ship's final destination. But he did know that Chiang Kai-shek flew agents into the U.S. to arrange for the cargo to be unloaded and stored with the utmost secrecy. According to him, it was at the direction of officials at the State Department in Washington, who set up the operation.”

  “Not a bad plan,” said Pitt. “The main port terminals along the East and West coasts were too open. The dockworkers would have known what they were unloading in a second. Word would have spread like wildfire. The Communist leaders back in China would never have suspected their national treasures were to be smuggled into America's heartland and hidden.”

  “Seems to me a naval base would have been the obvious choice if they wanted secrecy,” suggested Harper.

  “That would have taken a direct order from the White House,” said Sandecker. “They were already catching flak from Communist Romania and Hungary for keeping their royal jewels in a Washington vault after the American Army found them hidden in a salt mine in Austria immediately after the war.”

  Pitt said, “Not a bad plan when you think about it. Communist Chinese intelligence agents would have put their money on San Francisco. They probably had agents crawling over the dock terminals around the bay, waiting for the Princess Dou Wan to steam under the Golden Gate Bridge, never dreaming the ship was actually headed for a port in the Great Lakes.”

  “Yes, but what port?” said Gunn. “And on which lake?”

  They all turned to Perlmutter. “I can't give you an exact location,” he said candidly, “but I do have a lead who might direct us to a ballpark location containing the wreck.”

  “This person has information you don't?” asked Pitt unbelievingly.

  “He does.”

  Sandecker looked steadily at Perlmutter. “You've questioned him?”

  “Not yet. I thought I'd leave that up to you.”

  “How can you be sure he's reliable?” asked Julia.

  “Because he was an eyewitness.”

  Everyone stared openly at Perlmutter. Finally, Pitt asked the obvious question in their minds. “He saw the Princess Dou Wan go down?”

  “Better yet, lan 'Hong Kong' Gallagher was the only survivor. He was the ship's chief engineer, so if anyone can provide details of the sinking, he can. Gallagher never went back to China but remained in the States, eventually becoming a citizen and shipping out again on an American line before retiring.”

  “Is he still living?”

  “My very same question to Yaeger,” answered Perlmutter with a smile wide with teeth. “He and his wife retired to a lakefront town called Manitowoc on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan. I have Gallagher's address and phone number right here. If he can't point the way to the wreck, nobody can.”

  Pitt came over and shook Perlmutter's hand and said warmly, “You do good work, St. Julien. My congratulations on an extraordinary piece of research.”

  “I'll drink to that,” said a happy Perlmutter, ignoring the tea and pouring another glass of the forty-year-old port.

  “Now, Peter,” Pitt said, focusing his eyes on Harper. “My question to you is what if Qin Shang should return to the United States?”

  “Unless he goes completely insane, he would never come back.”

  “But if he does?”

  “He'd be arrested the minute he stepped off the plane and placed in a federal prison until his trial on at least forty different charges, including mass murder.”

  Pitt turned back to Perlmutter. “St. Julien, you once mentioned a respected Chinese researcher you've worked with in the past who was interested in the Princess Dou Wan.”

  “Zhu Kwan. China's most renowned historian and the author of several classic books on the different dynasties. I'll have you know I followed your instructions and did not contact him for fear he might alert Qin Shang.”

  “Well, now you can feed him everything you've got except lan Gallagher. And if Gallagher puts us in the ballpark, you can give that to Zhu Kwan too.”

  “None of this makes sense,” said Julia, puzzled. “Why give away the art treasures by leading Qin Shang to them?”

  “You and Peter, the INS, FBI and the entire Justice Department want Qin Shang. And Qin Shang wants what is on board the wreck of the Princess Dou Wan.”

  “I catch your drift,” said Harper. “There is method to your madness. What you're saying is that Qin Shang is obsessed and will move h
eaven and earth to lay his hands on the missing art treasures, even risking arrest and exposure by sneaking back into the United States.”

  “Why should he risk everything when he could just as well direct a salvage expedition from his headquarters in Hong Kong?” questioned Gunn.

  “I'd bet the bank the wreck haunts his dreams and he wouldn't trust his mother to run the operation. I checked the shipping registry. Qin Shang Maritime owns a salvage vessel. The minute he sniffs the Princess Dou Wan's location, he'll send the ship and board it from Canada when it comes down the St. Lawrence River into the Great Lakes.”

  “Aren't you afraid of him finding it first?” asked Julia.

  “Not to fear. We won't show our hand until we've salvaged the treasure first.”

  “Finding it is only the first step. Salvaging the treasure will take a year, maybe more.”

  Sandecker looked doubtful. “You may be placing too much confidence in Gallagher to lead you to the wreck. He might have jumped ship before it vanished.”

  “The admiral has a point,” said Gunn. “If Gallagher knew the position of the sinking, he'd have tried to salvage it himself.”

  “But he hasn't,” Pitt said firmly, “simply because the artifacts have never surfaced. St. Julien can tell you, no one can cover up a treasure find. Whatever his reason, Gallagher has kept the location to himself or St. Julien would have found a record of his attempt.”

  Sandecker looked mildly through the smoke of his cigar at Pitt. “How soon can you leave for Manitowoc?”