As she stared into her drink, the chair across from her scraped on the floor. She looked up suddenly. A short, round Oriental man sat down and gave her a friendly look. He appeared to be drunk.
“Hello,” he said in passable English and smiled, showing a few missing teeth on each side of his mouth. “Can talk? Yes?”
Maggie groaned inwardly and drained the rest of her daiquiri from her glass. She glanced at him and curiously noted that his left hand was moving across the tabletop in a strange manner.
“No, we can’t talk, because I’m leaving,” she replied and grabbed her purse in preparation for her hasty exit. She glanced back at him again and saw with surprise that his half closed eyes were wide open and his alcoholic stupor had disappeared. Her eyes immediately flicked down to his hand which was still moving in smooth motions on the table top.
She followed the motion of his fingers as they traced out a figure over and over. His fingertip left a slight outline in the thin film on the tabletop from the residue of many drinks that had accumulated over time. The figure started off like a squared-off figure eight with a cross next to it and a line underneath the cross. He drew another larger cross below the first cross with a rounded end to its vertical member and a short horizontal line extending from the vertical part of the cross. She waited until he had done it three times to be sure of what she was seeing, then abruptly got to her feet.
“I’m sorry, I must go now,” she said and walked to the front door. The small man, putting a disappointed look on his face, turned his head to follow her across the room to the exit. A number of male heads also tracked her, and she received a few invitations to stay a while and get acquainted.
Maggie quickly left the bar and let the refreshing night air fill her lungs displacing the smoky atmosphere of the bar. She knew she had to get back to the hotel room quickly. The man in the bar had traced the Chinese character for time, over and over.
In a few minutes she would receive an important phone call.
PETROPAVLOVSK, RUSSIA
Hendrick and Malik glanced around them at the worn decking on the old docks framed by the huge silent, unused cranes that hovered overhead. Their submarine seemed pitifully small compared to the gigantic shipyard. They glanced about, noting the few individuals moving around the yard. There wasn’t much activity, and during their stay they hadn’t seen many ships set sail from the once bustling naval base. The Cold War really is over, thought Hendrick.
Their preparations hadn’t gone well over the last four months, and Hendrick nearly went into orbit when he discovered the condition of the old, rusty Golf class submarine the Russians had designated for his use. It needed major refurbishment, but with their limited budget he and Malik had decided on the minimum work to at least give a good chance of surfacing after a dive.
And even that work didn’t go well. The Russians couldn’t seem to understand the impatience of the two Americans and that their budget was limited. Gone were the days of unlimited defense budgets and inefficient workers and management, but the Russian workers lagged behind that realization. It had been a long four months, and now that they were getting close to sailing for the Taiwan Strait each problem became magnified beyond its normal importance.
“Well, there’s one thing you’ve learned over the past few months,” said Malik in a light tone of voice. “You can cuss these guys out in Russian pretty good now.”
Hendrick gave him a dirty look, then looked away. “Why did we ever think that these bozos could threaten us?”
“Maybe nowadays they don’t get a free twenty year vacation to Siberia if they screw up,” offered Malik.
Hendrick gave him a wry smile. “That must be it.”
“The crew seems to be working out all right,” said Malik in an attempt to mollify his friend.
“Yeah, they’re better than I figured,” conceded Hendrick. “I wish the damn shipyard workers would move their butts a little faster.” He looked around while his frustration subsided to manageable levels.
Malik nodded then turned and looked back over his shoulder. “Now that you’ve calmed down, let’s get you riled up again.”
Hendrick gave him a questioning look.
“Let’s take a look at those welds on the new fittings again to make sure they repaired all the cracks,” said Malik. New fittings were needed to attach three large mini-submarines and an emergency decompression chamber to the outside hull. The minisubs were going to be used to transport the gold from the Awa Maru back to the submarine. The external decompression chamber was a backup for the one that had just been installed in the sub’s interior through a removable plate in the top deck.
Hendrick rolled his eyes around and took a deep breath. “Yeah, let’s take a look at the welds again. My blood pressure just dropped below three hundred over two hundred. Can’t have that.”
“By the way, does this piece of shit have a name?” asked Malik as he gestured toward the submarine.
“Yeah, the Kurchatov,” replied Hendrick. “They told me he was the father of the Russian atomic bomb.”
Georgi Bakhtin peered through the dirty curtains in the office of the shipyard supervisor. They were in a ramshackle building about fifty yards down the pier from where Hendrick and Malik were standing.
“What is your status, Igor Pavelovich?” asked Bakhtin who continued to gaze down the dock toward the two Americans.
“We are almost ready, Comrade Bakhtin,” answered the shipyard supervisor. “But I understand the Americans are almost out of money.”
Bakhtin noticed the satisfied tone in the supervisor’s voice and turned to glare at the man. “You will finish your work with them on time and within their remaining budget.”
The yard boss gave him a look of fear mixed with curiosity. The old KGB was no longer in existence, but this new SVR could be just as ruthless as the organization it had replaced.
Bakhtin softened his stare a bit and explained. “There are people at the highest levels of our government who want this mission to succeed. Do I make myself clear?”
The supervisor nodded quickly. “Yes, comrade.”
Bakhtin turned back toward the window and pushed the curtain aside just enough to peek outside once again. “Send Loshak and Drukarev to see me, but do not let the others know that I am here. Make up some excuse for them to leave.”
The yard boss nodded then left with the door slamming behind him, while Bakhtin’s thoughts turned to what he had found out about the documents that had gotten Koroayev so worried. Koroayev was on the rise and may someday become President of Russia. In spite of that, Bakhtin had decided to disobey Koroayev’s orders that the documents aboard the Awa Maru be destroyed. Alexi Koroayev desperately wanted to hide this past event, and Georgi Bakhtin had to know why.
This cylinder with its mysterious documents would be kept as a form of insurance, call it financial insurance, he thought. As a colonel in the Russian Foreign Intelligence service, he continually dealt with secrets. This would be just one more secret. He, along with many of his coworkers, needed some way to insure their future against the insecurities now rampant in Russia. What better way than to keep one of his country’s most embarrassing secrets?
Minutes later, Loshak and Drukarev stood expectantly in front of him. Bakhtin turned and gave them a hard look to convey the importance of what he was about to tell them.
“Your orders have changed,” said Bakhtin in his most authoritative voice. The two men looked at him curiously. “You will not destroy the documents as previously ordered. You will retrieve them and give them only to me in the sealed container. Is that clear?”
They both nodded quickly and mumbled, “Yes, sir.”
TAIPEI, TAIWAN
Maggie Ramsey dropped the phone back on the hook. The message she had just received was couched in her employer’s peculiar code, which she knew she could never sort out without resorting to some technical wizardry. She had recorded it on a small tape recorder and played it over again to make sure she had
clear speech. The man on the phone had enunciated carefully - he knew the ultimate destination of his spoken words.
She had been trained by her supervisor not to write anything down, to use the computer, then erase both the tape and the computer files as well. She pulled out her notebook computer and quickly connected the tape recorder’s analog output to the input on the computer via a small cable. The computer would convert the speech to digital bits and analyze it to decrypt the message, as well as verify, via voice print analysis, the identity of the speaker. She started the tape playback, then called up another program and typed in the key word to set up the decoder. The computer took two minutes, then displayed the message with an accompanying beep.
Maggie’s eyes devoured the information quickly. As she sorted the message out in her mind, she felt a rare excitement. Her newest task would throw her into intrigue and quite possibly danger once again. She confirmed what the task was to be, then let her gaze linger on four words that happened to be grouped together in the body of the message.
Awa Maru and Stephen Hendrick.
So, she thought, Steve is going after the Awa Maru again. Itbayat Island would be a key place - that was where he would transfer the treasure from his submarine to another ship. But she knew she would have to get to him before he got to Itbayat Island.
She would have to go into the Taiwan Strait after him. Again.
PETROPAVLOVSK
The tall, thin Japanese man walked down the corridor of the apartment building looking for the number he had been given by his own personal intelligence service. Faded wallpaper hung in strands from the crumbling plaster walls. The rug had a long, wide, brown stain along its middle, the trail of countless inhabitants. He wrinkled his nose at the potent cabbage smells from a few of the apartments. Most of the apartments seemed to be empty, an unusual occurrence in Russia. He attributed it to the end of the cold war and the general lack of activity at the naval base nearby. He found his destination and knocked on the door. The door opened after a few moments.
“Yevgeny Loshak?” he inquired of the belligerent looking man who answered the door. The Japanese was wearing a silk scarf over his face, and attempted a smile, but the taut lines around his eyes refused to budge.
Loshak looked him over warily. In the corner of his eye he saw his partner, Drukarev, set up with his gun drawn behind the door.
“Why do you want to talk to Loshak?” he asked as he put his cigarette in his mouth for a long pull.
“A business proposition,” replied the Oriental stranger.
“Start talking,” said Loshak and blew a large cloud of smoke into the man’s face. The Japanese man didn’t flinch. He reached behind his head and untied the scarf in one fluid motion, letting it drop away revealing his features. The seams of flesh looked like granite that had coalesced from a lava flow. His eyes held nothing. They were either dead or held some monumental evil within. The skin was sallow, the mouth drawn into a tight line.
“You are about to embark on a voyage to the Taiwan Strait seeking treasure, are you not?” asked the thin man.
Loshak gave him a stony look.
“There is a service that you will be in a unique position to provide to me,” continued the stranger. “A service for which I am willing to pay quite a lot.” He pulled out a business card and handed it to Loshak. There was no name on the card just a phone number and an e-mail address. Loshak’s eyes went immediately to the Japanese characters on the right side of the card. They were printed in red ink, smeared as if they had run before drying. Underneath was the English word, Truth.
Loshak glanced at Drukarev who shrugged.
“How much?” asked Loshak.
“Ten million American dollars,” said the Japanese gentleman.
Loshak’s and especially Drukarev’s eyes went wide open.
“Would you like to come in?” asked Loshak with a smile.
CHAPTER 7
OSS Mission
CIA HEADQUARTERS,
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Robert Lindsey sank into one of the comfortable chairs around the conference room table and settled back wondering why he had been called to attend this meeting. He hadn’t been ordered - they couldn’t do that anymore - he had been retired some twelve years now.
The room filled quickly, and he shook hands with the few remaining active CIA employees that he knew. They all settled down and the meeting began. The chairman went through all the required preliminaries, classification level of the meeting and other bureaucratic information. He then swiftly got to the point.
“There is yet another team which is going to attempt to salvage the Awa Maru,” began the chairman.
So that’s why I was called, thought Lindsey. The Awa Maru again.
“This is a team of Americans led by Stephen Hendrick and Joseph Malik. Our source tells us that the Russian government has allowed them to rent a submarine for the salvage operation,” continued the meeting chairman.
The name Hendrick made Lindsey sit up straight in his chair. A relation to Ed Hendrick? he asked himself quickly. Ed had a son named Stephen. Was it the same man? He resolved to confirm the connection between his OSS partner, Ed Hendrick, and Stephen Hendrick who was now going after the Awa Maru.
“Of course, the wreck of the Awa Maru is in PRC territorial waters and the possibility that this salvage attempt is an intelligence mission is high,” said the chairman. “Therefore the prudent course of action was to get one of our own people among the sub crew, or diving team they were assembling, to keep an eye on things. Our British cousins offered to help with one of their own agents and managed to get him to go along at the last minute.”
Lindsey’s thoughts drifted as the meeting went on. I was on the Awa Maru, he thought, at its defining moment. With Ed Hendrick. It all started in Singapore on March 27, 1945. Strange that I remember the exact date. But so much of what happened was set in his memory like a vein of metal in the ground, only able to be mined by the most powerful of emotional explosives. His thoughts ran on. He let them go, reviewing the incident that occurred a lifetime ago.
The two Americans slipped quietly from the nighttime shadows around a parked vehicle, quickly flung wire around the Japanese soldiers’ necks and strangled them. Bob Lindsey and Ed Hendrick were adept at disposing of the enemy guards around an intelligence target. They had been doing the same work for three years and had gotten proficient at their murderous techniques. Lindsey was even able to suppress the pang of guilt he felt after each killing. As one of the leading agents for the American Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, in the Far Eastern Theater, he had seen too much death on both sides to remain greatly affected for long.
The two agents dragged the soldiers’ bodies over to the side of the road, Lindsey’s tall thin frame struggling more than the muscular Hendrick who seemed to move the body with ease. They propped one body up on a rickety chair and the other against the fence, which surrounded the pier area in Singapore. Hendrick handed Lindsey a half empty bottle of saki and kept one for himself. They opened the bottles and forced some into the two dead men’s mouths. They spilled some on the soldiers’ shirts then carefully placed the bottles in their hands. Lindsey stepped back and gave the dead soldiers a quick look over as Hendrick glanced around furtively. The two dead men appeared to be just two more drunken soldiers.
The ruse would not last long. The sergeant of the guard would quickly discover that they were dead, but if the deception delayed the alarm for even five seconds, then it was worth the trouble. Lindsey and Hendrick knew from experience that even a slight edge could be the difference between life and death.
They headed quickly toward the pier area, where a large green Japanese ship was about to get underway on her last voyage. The freighter was big, over eleven thousand tons displacement and over five hundred feet long, and was being loaded with war materiel desperately needed by the Japanese. Lindsey had seen dozens of similar ships, some larger, most smaller, and had photographed and collected data on many
of them.
But this one was different. Huge white crosses were painted on either side of its single stack. White crosses also appeared on the top of the bridge, on the second and fifth hatches, and two crosses were painted on either side of the hull. The white crosses were lit with lines of bulbs clearly distinguishing this vessel from all the rest in the Japanese fleet. The war, which had kept many cities, installations, and ships in the dark at night, had also miraculously produced this one brightly lit ship. This ship had been given safe passage back to Japan and was therefore off-limits to the United States Navy.
Lindsey crouched behind a wooden crate and let his eyes sweep the ship. He looked at the bustle of cars and trucks that ran up and down the length of the pier. He turned to his partner and reached for the binoculars, which Hendrick had been using. Lindsey moved to one side of the wooden box and slowly peered around the corner. A huge, black sedan rumbled up the wooden deck and screeched to a stop in front of the checkpoint nearest the ship. The guards’ casual manner immediately disappeared as they went to work verifying the identity of the latest group of people to embark on the ship.
Most of the passengers Lindsey and Hendrick had seen were Japanese merchant seamen by the look of them, and as such they were not the people that the two agents were looking for.
The groups that arrived in an arrogant manner, the VIPs, were the ones they concentrated on. Like the group that had just arrived, thought Lindsey. He stared through the binoculars at the guards in the brown uniforms that surrounded the car. The car emptied quickly, and Lindsey knew they had found what they had come for.
“Russians,” said Lindsey.
Lindsey could see two individuals in the group flanked by stocky men with ill-fitting coats betraying the array of weapons that lay within. The men with the thick figures looked about with controlled anxiety in the manner of bodyguards, then quickly moved off with the two important people in the group.
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