“Captain, you were supposed to -” began Hendrick in Russian.
“We know what you have here,” said Golubev and gestured toward the inside of the torpedo room.
Hendrick looked over Golubev’s shoulder and saw several of the sub’s crew behind him. He suddenly had a sinking feeling.
“Come now, Mr. Hendrick,” replied Golubev. “We only want a part of it.”
“This wasn’t our agreement, Golubev, and you know -” shouted Hendrick.
“We will change our agreement,” said Golubev calmly. Some of the sub’s crew pressed forward to lend weight to the captain’s words.
“I was afraid of this,” said Hendrick, switching back to English in a low voice.
“Suppose we say no deal, then what?” asked Malik belligerently from behind Hendrick.
“You need us to get out of here, do you not?” asked Golubev. “This submarine is your only mode of transportation for your treasure. If we left you here -”
“You bastard!” said Malik and tried to move around Hendrick, but the bigger man stopped him. Golubev didn’t flinch or step back but looked Hendrick straight in the eye.
“I don’t think you want a fight,” said Golubev. “You’re outnumbered and outgunned as well. Let us have a new agreement, and then concentrate on getting as much of the treasure as possible on board so all our shares will be great.”
“How much?” asked Hendrick in a sour tone. Malik turned and looked at his partner in disbelief. Hendrick glanced at him and shrugged.
“We’re not greedy,” said Golubev. “Ninety percent will do nicely.”
Malik ground his teeth and drew his right arm back to hit Golubev. Hendrick grabbed his arm and wouldn’t let it go.
“Easy, Joe. Easy,” he said in a calm tone. He looked at Golubev. “You don’t want a fight either, do you?” asked Hendrick through clenched teeth. “We’ll give you twenty percent.”
Twenty percent is ridiculous,” stated Golubev. “The only fair way is for each man to have equal shares.”
Hendrick struggled to do the math in his mind. There were fifteen Russians, six divers and he and Malik for a total of twenty-three men onboard. The Russians would get sixty-five percent!
“Yeah, that’s probably fair,” said Hendrick with resignation in his voice.
“But they’re going to get most of the take!” said Malik in anguish.
“That’s thirty five percent for us,” said Hendrick. “A minute ago we only had ten percent.”
“And that’s fair?” asked Malik with anguish on his face.
Hendrick turned to Golubev. “Let me have a minute with my partner.”
Golubev look over the two of them suspiciously then backed up outside the torpedo room. Hendrick slammed the door in his face. He grabbed Malik by the arm and drew him away from the watertight door.
“Are you nuts?” said Malik. “We bust our asses for years to get this treasure, and they just take most of it away from us.”
“Listen, we’re not in a particularly good bargaining position,” replied Hendrick. “They’re right about needing them to get out of here, so we have to make a deal with them.”
Malik shook his head in frustration. “The treasure was always second priority to your father’s goddamn mission, wasn’t it? So you don’t mind giving most of the gold away! Well, I got news for you, Steve. I don’t give a shit about what happened sixty years ago! We have this gold here and now. We should keep it!”
Malik’s words shocked Hendrick. He had always known that the OSS mission was uppermost in his mind, but he didn’t think he was that obvious. Did what happened over sixty years ago here matter to anyone except him? He sighed, realizing that he had been on an impossible mission and that Joe Malik had tagged along for the most practical reason of all, to get rich.
Malik saw Hendrick’s face fall with disappointment and his anger immediately dissipated. “Listen, Steve. I - I’m sorry. I didn’t -”
Hendrick looked at him, his earlier upbeat manner slowly returning. “We’ll just have to make sure that they don’t see any more treasure that we find.”
“How the hell are we going to do that?” asked Malik.
“We hide it,” said Hendrick.
“Where? On this tub we’re packed so close together that we can’t even turn around without bumping into each other,” answered Malik.
“Who said we have to hide it inside the sub?” asked Hendrick with a thoughtful expression.
CHAPTER 12
Diamonds
KURCHATOV
TAIWAN STRAIT
Hendrick, Malik, and the diving team spent the next twenty-four hours surreptitiously filling the external decompression chamber with all the loot it would hold. They couldn’t put anything like gold bars in the decompression chamber, or Golubev would notice the weight imbalance as soon as they got underway. The divers had found packages of bank notes still sealed in waterproof bales, and they had decided to store as many of them as possible in the decompression chamber, jamming the chamber completely full. The entrance to the chamber was from outside the submarine, so for Golubev’s men to inspect the chamber they would have to don diving gear and exit the sub through one of the hatches. To keep the Russians from getting suspicious, the divers also brought more gold bars through the torpedo tube.
After getting the chamber full, Hendrick and Malik decided to check out the metallic objects they had located earlier using the ROV.
Steve Hendrick and Joe Malik floated just above the large metallic object that Hendrick had found about a quarter mile away from the wreck of the Awa Maru. Malik shined his light over the rectangular hunk of metal and wondered how they would open it. Hendrick scribbled a word on his writing slate and showed it to Malik. SAFE?
Malik shrugged then made a motion implying opening a tin can. Hendrick nodded enthusiastically. Malik pulled out an underwater cutting torch, lit it off, and got to work. In ten minutes he had cut a foot long hole in one side of the metal object. Hendrick jammed a pry bar into the slot formed by the torch and after bracing himself by jamming his flippers under the object’s edge, pushed the bar downwards. The metal gave on the second try, and Hendrick was able to push the cut metal section upwards like a lid on hinges.
Malik immediately illuminated the inside with his light. They could see a series of rectangular shapes and were uncertain initially what they represented. Malik pried at one of the rectangular shapes, then pulled the whole thing upwards, revealing an elongated box.
They were drawers loosely set inside the safe, and he and Malik suddenly realized that they had cut through the back of the safe. Malik withdrew one of the long drawers completely and examined it. The drawer had a lid just like a safe-deposit box in any bank with a padlock through a padeye keeping the lid secured. Hendrick pulled out a set of metal cutters and quickly cut the lock from the end of the drawer. He pushed the hasp back, grabbed one edge of the lid and lifted it with some effort to overcome the corrosion on the hinge. Hendrick waved at the silt-covered contents inside the drawer sending up a cloud of mud into the water. They both waved furiously to send the mud on its way away from the drawer. Malik played his light back and forth over the inside of the drawer, and they both gasped at what was inside.
The diamonds caught the light and reflected it back in a glittery, breathtaking fashion. They stared at it for a long moment, then both of them exhaled at once sending a noisy cloud of bubbles upward. Malik grabbed Hendrick’s arm and shook it with new-found energy, and Hendrick did the same to his partner.
They went to work pulling out all the drawers. Hendrick made a motion to cut off another lock, but Malik stopped him by pointing toward the remote operated vehicle then pointing at the dive computer. Hendrick got the message. Load up the ROV then let’s get out of here. Hendrick nodded, but his mind swam with the vision of thousands of cut diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and other valuable gems. They quickly loaded the drawers into a sack that was suspended under the ROV, which they had brought along wit
h them. Joe Malik adjusted the buoyancy of the ROV to compensate for the added load of the drawers, and they proceeded back toward the sub.
As they neared the sub, the staterooms came to Hendrick’s mind. If he explored them, would he find nothing but bones and more wreckage? Or would he discover his father’s mission? I have to try, he thought, even though the odds are stacked against me. He looked at the dive computer strapped to his wrist. He had enough air for another hour. He swam next to Malik and tugged his arm. He wrote on his slate, GOING INSIDE, and pointed to the Awa Maru.
Malik immediately shook his head, pointing toward the sub and the sack of diamonds. Hendrick shook his head vehemently and started off for the sunken wreck. Malik parked the ROV on the sub’s hull aft of the decompression chamber and swam after his stubborn partner.
Edward Hendrick’s mind had been lost for years, but he had rambled on about his brief ill-fated voyage on the Awa Maru. The clues he had provided were sparse, but Steve Hendrick periodically reviewed them in his mind to keep them fresh. His father had been on the Awa Maru and had held something, what Steve did not know. Apparently he had dropped it when the torpedoes struck the ship. And that was about it, thought Hendrick. There was one other strange thing his father would do over and over. He remembered his mother’s words.
“Your father would stop and pick up every stick that we would walk past. I’d yank on his arm to move him along, but he’d insist that he had to polish the end of the stick. He’d do this all the time then get frustrated and look at the stick as if he was going to cry. Sometimes he did cry. I just never knew what to do with him. It would break my heart to see him like that. I wanted to help him, but I didn’t know what he was doing.”
Polishing the end of a stick. What on earth could that mean? he asked himself.
Hendrick steadied his light on the doorway where he had lingered before, his thoughts in turmoil. In a few minutes will I hold the same object in my hand? Will I recognize it when I see it?
Malik caught up to him and gave him a frustrated tug just to let him know that he was angry with him. Hendrick swam up through the doorway with a series of powerful kicks and down the corridor beyond. Most of the doors below him on the starboard side of the passage were open, but on the port side of the corridor gravity had kept all the doors closed. They spent forty-five minutes going through the empty staterooms until Malik grabbed Hendrick’s arm and wouldn’t let go. Malik pointed excitedly to his dive computer.
Hendrick knew there wasn’t much air left. He wrote on his board, 1 MORE. Malik threw his hands up in despair.
Hendrick went to the next stateroom in line and put his hand on the doorknob. He glanced over his shoulder at Malik who just shook his head.
Hendrick pushed on the door and was surprised at how easily it moved. He let the door fall backwards to rest on the bulkhead and quickly found himself in a large stateroom. Joe Malik floated into the middle of the room with his light trained on one of the room’s beds. Hendrick swam over to him and looked down the beam of Malik’s light.
A skeleton lay among a tangle of springs that used to be a mattress. Hendrick played his light on the bones and saw with surprise that the skull had a large hole in the upper forehead. Malik swam over to the remains and picked up the skull. He shook it slightly, and Hendrick saw a small object fall out the bottom and land on the foot of the bed. He picked it up and trained the light on it. It appeared to be a spent bullet with one end flattened and the other retaining a cylindrical shape.
Hendrick grabbed Malik by the arm and showed him the bullet. Malik looked puzzled until Hendrick made his hand into a gun, pointing it toward the skull and pretending to fire it by simulating the recoil of the weapon. Malik nodded then laid the skull back in its original place. Hendrick put the deformed bullet into a pouch on his wet suit used for small objects. He was reminded that the last few minutes aboard the ship must have been straight out of hell with the passengers pulling out weapons and shooting one another.
At the other end of the room was a pile of assorted debris, but chief among the trash was the remains of a leather briefcase. Hendrick went over and picked it up, looking in it only to see right through the bottom. The handle had a handcuff attached to it. He examined it curiously for a moment then threw it aside. He waved at the mud covering the remaining debris, reaching into it to spread it out. His hand closed around a solid object.
He pulled out a metal tube of roughly three inches in diameter and about a foot long. The harsh light from Hendrick’s lamp revealed characters embossed into the side of the metal cylinder. Hendrick rubbed at the writing to clean it from its long storage in the sea, then peered closely at it to make out what was on the tube. He had expected some Japanese characters, but again he was to see the unexpected.
A series of Cyrillic characters went from one point on the side of the cylinder nearly all the way around to meet the beginning characters.
Russian? thought Hendrick. He knew Russian, but he couldn’t see what was on the mysterious cylinder due to some remaining mud. He looked for a way to open the tube but found that both ends were sealed. Hendrick jammed it into his belt bag and swam over to where Joe Malik was waving him toward the exit.
Malik led the way out as Hendrick’s mind was in turmoil. Could this cylinder be related to my father’s mission? But he had been working against Japan, not Russia. The United States was allied with Russia during World War II. Disappointment filled him. He grunted to himself in self-criticism. Complete his father’s mission? That was a joke. How naive he had been.
They left the ship and swam to the submarine. Hendrick pulled the cylinder from his belt bag, looking at its Russian lettering. Maybe it’ll have some historical value, he thought. He threw the cylinder into the net beneath the ROV.
Malik wrote on his board, WHERE TO HIDE? and pointed to the diamonds. Hendrick was ready for the question. Hendrick and Malik both knew that there was no room to hide the diamonds in the decompression chamber. Hendrick scribbled on his board, ISLAND. Malik gave an exaggerated shrug, and Hendrick wrote, YOU’LL SEE.
The compression chamber door swung shut, and Hendrick and Malik spun the wheel, sealing themselves inside. Ian Howard operated the controls to bring the pair back to the pressure they had just left. He set the automatic depressurization schedule to bring them back to normal atmospheric pressure in two hours. Howard walked away from the chamber and looked in on the rest of the divers. They were all dozing during their scheduled break.
Now is as good a time as any, he thought. He went back to his quarters and pulled out a bag from under his bunk. He opened up the false bottom to the bag, removing a small electronic device and connecting it to a cable that went to the laptop lying on the bed. Howard typed a short message into the computer, then hit a key which downloaded it into the device at the end of the cable. He disconnected the cable, erased the computer memory of the message, and put the device into a pocket in his jacket.
Howard left his room and walked to the airlock, being careful to avoid the windows of the decompression chamber as he walked by. After a surreptitious look around, he donned the top half of his wet suit and a facemask, picked up a pony bottle of air and began breathing with it. He climbed into the airlock and pushed the switches to flood it with seawater. The sound of water would be heard by Hendrick and Malik in the decompression chamber, but he had already made up a story about it.
The airlock filled to the top, and Howard opened the outer hatch. He pulled the device from his pocket and activated a hidden switch that inflated a small balloon. He released it and watched it swiftly disappear from sight. When it hits the surface, the transmitter will activate, he thought, sending a very short burst to a satellite. From there the message will be relayed back to SIS and CIA.
This is not an intelligence mission, he thought paraphrasing his message. Just a rather unique and exciting salvage operation. At least, so far.
After decompression, Hendrick and Malik huddled over the ROV control station and watch
ed as the ROV headed to the west north west in the direction of Niushan Dao, the nearest island to them and unfortunately very close to mainland China.
“This I gotta see,” said Malik as he shook his head in disbelief. “We find a fortune in diamonds, and you’re sending it to God-knows-where.”
“You worry too much,” replied Hendrick.
“We have enough cable for this epic journey?” asked Malik.
“Yeah,” replied Hendrick.
Malik gave him a close look. “We’re rich beyond our wildest dreams, and you don’t look so happy. What’s up?” Hendrick shook his head.
“Your father’s mission,” said Malik quietly. It wasn’t a question.
“You got a big mouth,” replied Hendrick sourly.
Yevgeny Loshak and Anatoli Drukarev labored to search each case of gold that was stored in the forward torpedo room. They now had the equivalent of more than one hundred and fifty cases, some gold actually in cases and some individual bars, shoved into every corner of the room and they both had to look inside each case. After a few hours of intense work, they slid to the deck for a rest and tried to come to grips with the reality of the mass of gold that was stored all around them.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my whole life,” whispered Loshak. Drukarev nodded and wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve.
“How are we going to keep our share secret?” asked Loshak.
Drukarev shrugged. “I don’t know. But I do know that we had better complete our assigned mission, or else we’ll be on the gulag for a long, long time. As long as we give them what they want, then we’ll be free to quit and leave the country. Then we can spend our share of this -” He waved his arm around his head. “- and live the good life for once.”
They lapsed into silence and thought about the incredible amount of money they each would get just for being on this mission. They looked at each other simultaneously with the same thought on their minds.
Hidden Sun Page 15