“The image on the top is what the sound waves of the first ten earthquakes look like when graphed. Please notice the difference between those earthquakes and the one on the bottom that was used to attack us.” The graphic on the bottom showed three shorter descending waves that preceded a much larger longer wave than the single spike depicted earlier.
“I’ve consulted with Doctor Shing Ah Chin at the University of Beijing. He is an expert on seismology, and it is his opinion that these three unusual waves that exist on our earthquake graphs are caused by an explosion. This reading is the explosion that was used to trigger the earthquake that created the tsunami.
“Let me explain these three small waves. In an underwater explosion, the first wave is a shock wave, as you see. The second, shorter wave is the cavitation pulse, and the third wave, the one you see here, that is the smallest wave and it is the bubble pulse. There is no doubt in the professor’s opinion that these readings could be created by anything other than an underwater explosion.
“It is the opinion of the Doctor that sufficient explosives, perfectly placed in an area with the proper geology, could generate the seismic activity and subsequent tsunami that destroyed our bases,” Huang said to a speechless group.
“He made a simulation of how the event would have happened. Before I start, let me explain what you will see. First will be the explosion along the cliff face of the continental shelf. Next is the landslide as a large portion of the shelf descends into the bottom of the sea. Next is the upward thrust that is the earthquake and it is caused by the change in pressure on the tectonic plate. This upward thrust is what sends the pulse through the water. That pulse is the tsunami.” Huang hit the play button on the slide and the animated simulation of the scenario he described was shown to the silent audience.
“Additionally, I believe I have identified the boat that delivered the explosives to the target area. The images taken from the destroyer recorded a team that was diving above the epicenter. The images were too far away for facial recognition, but they clearly show technical diving equipment,” Huang said as he advanced to the next slide that included an image of the Day Trader taken by the frigate Jiang’s gun camera during the encounter.
“Who does that yacht belong to?” the President asked.
“Sir, the yacht was false flagged as being owned by a man named Stephen Chang from Singapore. However, I’ve been to Singapore and there’s no Day Trader motor yacht and there’s no Stephen Chang.”
“Do we have any leads on where that yacht came from?” asked the President.
“Sir, a full investigation into finding the yacht and crew has not yet commenced. I came here today to issue an interim report on the first task I was assigned, which was to review the Navy’s incident report. I believe now, we would all agree that the initial report did not reach the proper conclusion. I have ideas on how to proceed toward identifying the yacht and crew, but felt it was most important to first deliver this information.”
“What is your name, agent?” the President asked.
“Sir, I am Colonel Huang Leiu.”
“Excellent work, Colonel Huang,” the President said as he looked over to his right at the Minister of State Security with approval.
“Colonel, you may consider yourself dismissed, while we discuss this troubling information,” the State Security Minister said.
Huang walked hurriedly to the exit in the back of the conference room. The Minister’s aide followed him out as he also was dismissed.
“You have brought great credit to the Minister; he is most pleased,” the aide said as the two drank tea in the outer office.
“Thank you, sir.”
“What will you request when you next see the Minister?” asked the aide.
“I would like to stay on this case. I believe I can find the criminals who killed our people.”
“I would bet the Ministers and the President are discussing what they will do once we find the perpetrators. It will not be good for them.”
“Will we go to war?” asked Huang.
“No, I don’t believe so. We will hunt the criminals down like dogs and kill them in a most public and spectacular way. We will show the Americans that we know what they have done and provide them with an example to understand the level of our rage. I don’t think we are prepared to go to war against the American military at this time.”
“I also suspect it’s the Americans. The images of the divers looked to be American, but that is yet to be proven. We will have to see where the facts take us.”
Huang stayed in the Minister’s outer office for almost three hours while the security leadership of China deliberated in private. Finally, the outer doors of the conference room opened, and the men inside began to flow out. President Ping was the first to exit. Huang stood by the aide and waited for the Minister.
Soon he was in the Minister’s inner office, seated across the desk from his boss.
“All eyes are on the Ministry of State Security to see how we handle this next task,” the Minister said as he lit a cigarette.
“The failure of the Peoples Liberation Army has elevated us to new heights in the eyes of the President; we must not fail.”
“We won’t, Minister.”
“Your work so far has been impressive. Finding the boat and the crew is going to require more personnel than just yourself. We’ll construct a task force. You will, of course, lead this task force. I want you to know, whatever you need, you will get. This is our top priority. We must find the men who attacked China and we must retaliate in such a way that the Americans or whoever was behind this attack understand that we will not be trifled with.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You must be very tired. I’m sure you barely slept last night. I knew you had big news and that is why I invited all of the members of the Security Council. I didn’t want to give anyone the opportunity to alter the report. I thought it best for you to deliver it directly to the President. Go home, get rest. Come back tomorrow morning with a list of what you will need to accomplish this next mission.”
“Yes sir, thank you, sir.”
Chapter 9
Paphos, Cyprus
I returned from London and went directly to the Trident hangar. I found Cheryl and the rest of the team hard at work cleaning, sorting, and cataloging the treasure. A white tarp on top of Cheryl’s thick office rug was lined with gold bars sorted by origin and age. Some were Chinese, others were from other parts of Asia and Europe. The Clearwater conference table in the adjacent room had gold coins all separated into different categories.
“Did anyone figure out the name of the junk yet?” I asked the group.
“Not yet. We have David Forrest and ALICE working on it.” ALICE is the supercomputer-powered program Clearwater uses for its core business, which is to track commercial ships for insurance companies and shipping lines. Trident occasionally uses ALICE’s unique capabilities for intelligence purposes. The US Government feeds ALICE with classified data feeds and imagery when our missions require it. When the mission doesn’t require it, ALICE relies on open source data. ALICE was developed by David Forrest, the Chair of the Edinburgh College Computer Science Department and the co-owner of Clearwater. Trident is the other Clearwater owner.
“Does that mean you’ve read David Forrest into the operation?” I asked Cheryl.
“Yes, I did. I’ve also tasked him to concentrate on counterintelligence—to give us early warning if anyone is looking for us or the Sam Houston.”
“How will he do that?”
“He has real-time access to intel feeds that include electronic communications and internet searches. If someone starts a search for us, he’ll be notified.”
“Yeah, that’s good. You’re thinking along the same lines as Mike. I have to scuttle the Sam Houston tonight.”
“He’s that worried?”
“He wasn’t happy we stayed in the area a day more than we had to and recovered the gold.”
“The
plan called for us to stay in the area until the day we detonated the charge to safeguard the area; what’s he complaining about?”
“Running into that Chinese Navy frigate was a horrible stroke of bad luck. It doesn’t matter whether we were following orders, or we got stupid because of gold fever. Either way, the Chinese will be looking for the boat, which is why I need to get rid of it.”
“Need some help, boss?” Migos asked.
“Yeah, I need to take some things off the boat, then tonight I’ll take it out and scuttle it and return with the tender.”
“What about the registration on the Sam Houston? We need to destroy the records,” Cheryl said.
“Mike’s already done that; he had the Agency call in a favor with the Bahamian government.”
“Weather better be good, that tender’s not designed for rough seas,” said McDonald.
“Forecast is good. Speaking of waves, did you see any satellite photos of our handiwork?” I asked.
“We got it from Clearwater. The islands were wiped clean,” Migos said.
“What about the collateral damage? Mike told me there was none; is that confirmed by Clearwater?”
“It is. The hardest hit area was in Vietnam and the wave was barely noticeable as anything more than a rogue. No damage to people or property.”
“So, the only people coming after us will be the Chinese, then,” I said.
“And maybe the ghosts of whoever this gold used to belong to,” McDonald said.
“How much is there?”
“Most of the bars and coins are denominated in tael. We recovered 61,241 tael. In ounces, that’s 81,645. At today’s rate that’s a little over one hundred million dollars. The thing is, all of the coins are from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they’re in good shape, and many of them are collectors’ items. We found one coin that alone is worth over five hundred thousand dollars.”
“What do you think all of this is worth?” I asked McDonald with the sweep of my hand.
“Between two hundred million and five hundred million.”
“That’s a big spread; any ideas of what to do with it?” I asked.
“We’re going to take another week to classify everything and value it based on what we find on the internet. Then we’re going to split it into six equally valued piles and we’re going to randomly assign each person their share by drawing numbers out of a hat,” McDonald said.
“That’s fine with me. But for at least the next six months, nobody should do anything. Park your share in a bank vault and don’t put anything on the market. We need to stay under the Chinese radar,” I said.
“The Chinese won’t know we found treasure,” Migos said.
“We don’t know that. That Chinese frigate had powerful cameras and we don’t know what they recorded. It could be the way they trace the tsunami back to us.”
I left the hangar with Migos. We both drove SUVs, so we could offload as much as possible from the yacht. The two of us worked all afternoon, each making six trips back to the hangar with stuff. I had a pizza dinner with the team in the Trident hangar. All of the guys were in a great mood. Sorenson, Savage, Migos, and McDonald had all just become instantly rich and the rush that came from discovering a shipwreck with a fortune inside still hadn’t left them.
We were in the fenced-in kitchen area inside the cavernous Trident hangar. The guys were all seated around a big picnic table on benches drinking beer and pulling slices of pizza from open boxes. I was drinking a diet Coke leaning against the stainless-steel refrigerator door near the back wall when Cheryl came over.
“Are you sad about your boat?” she asked.
“I am.”
“Want me to come with you?”
“No, I want to say goodbye to the Sam Houston alone.”
“You can buy another one.”
“I have a lot of great memories on that boat. Remember our first night together? It was docked in the Dubai Marina and you were still a Chinese spy, using your body to extract secrets from me. It was my home for years. I hate to kill it.”
“It’s not a living thing—it’s just a boat, and I wasn’t using my body to extract secrets.”
“You were using your feminine wiles to manipulate me, and it worked.”
“It still works, big boy,” Cheryl said with a smile.
The sea was calm. There was no wind. It was a cool, moonless night. I left the Paphos Marina on a heading that was due south for twenty miles. I steered the boat from the helm station on my favorite place on the boat, which was the flydeck. Fifteen feet above the waterline, I had a great view of the yacht and surrounding waters. The Mediterranean is deep, over forty-seven hundred feet in some places. Where I stopped was, according to the charts, over twelve hundred feet deep. I took the satchel next to me, went down two flights of stairs to the lower deck, and placed two charges in the floor of the engine room and a third charge at the bow of the yacht. On the floor of the owner’s stateroom, I tamped the charges to direct the blast downward through the hull. I used a ten-minute time fuse connected to a non-electric blasting cap that was stuck into the end of a one-and-a-quarter-pound stick of C-4. Once I pulled the igniter on all three charges, I hustled up the stairs and into the tender perched on the hydraulic ramp in the stern. I lowered the tiny thirteen-foot tender into the dark waters, started the outboard and positioned myself about a hundred yards from the Sam Houston’s starboard.
I didn’t have to wait long. The charge in the bow of the yacht went off first. Seconds later, the two in the engine room went off in rapid succession. The boat’s structure above the waterline remained intact, but underneath, the newly formed holes must have quickly flooded the yacht. I watched the Sam Houston sink fast into the dark waters. It was gone in less than five minutes. As soon as the flybridge slipped under the water, I offered a salute to my old friend, turned the tender north and headed back to Paphos.
The next morning, I left the gold bugs to finish the inventory and flew to Edinburgh, Scotland with Cheryl. We landed in a snowstorm. We had a car take us to the Balmoral in downtown Edinburgh where we were staying. I thought Cheryl would like the Balmoral because it’s in the downtown shopping area near the Castle. I always use it, because it’s near David’s office at the University. David was in the lobby waiting for us when we entered. We shook the snow off our coats and greeted him warmly. After we checked in, the bellhop took our luggage upstairs and the three of us went downstairs to “Scotch,” the appropriately named hotel whisky bar.
“It’s not even December yet and we’re having a blizzard,” David said.
“I noticed. Whatever happened to global warming?” I asked.
“Still a possibility, but it’s the sun. We’re at a point of record low sunspot activity,” David said.
“Is it the end of times?” I said jokingly.
“No, just a cycle called the solar minimum.”
“If it’s the apocalypse, then this is the place to be. Five hundred different whiskies, we won’t even notice the end,” I said to David as he smiled and lit his pipe.
Later, while David and I were enjoying a rare Mortlach Scotch and Cheryl a ginger lemon tea, the topic turned to the purpose of our visit.
“What have you learned about our shipwreck?” I asked.
“ALICE has been busy. We’ve searched every digitized maritime record in Asia.”
“But did you learn anything?”
“Quite a bit. I’m reasonably convinced the junk you discovered was the Red Dragon which sank in 1809. It was part of a fleet headed by the famous Pirate Queen Ching Shih, later known as Lady Chang.
“Lady Chang commanded the largest pirate force in world history—seventeen hundred junks and as many as seventy thousand men. When China opened up to European trade at the end of the 18th century, the rampant pirate problem was an annoyance that had to be dealt with. In 1809, the Europeans stepped in to defeat the pirates who were stifling trade.
“It was because of the Portuguese involvem
ent that I was able to find a record of the lost junk. The bulk of Lady Chang’s fighting force, including her husband, were trapped by the Portuguese and the Emperor’s navies. Terms of surrender and pardon were agreed to and Lady Chang traveled to Palawan Island where she kept part of her booty hidden in a cave. She retrieved the bounty and divided it among three junks. It was typhoon season and she took extra as an insurance policy. She lost the Red Dragon off the coast of Palawan when they were hit by a cyclone.”
“How much was the ransom?”
“It was 130,000 tael.”
“Each ship would have carried sixty-five thousand tael, which is consistent with what we found. What did you learn about the Red Dragon?”
“It was built in the late 1700s as a commercial freighter and it exchanged hands a few times after it was captured by pirates. Eventually, all pirates in the region pledged to Lady Chang, and so it would have come under her command sometime after 1804. That’s all I know.”
“That’s a lot. How’s the counterintelligence effort going?” I asked.
“Lots of inquiries for the Day Trader and Stephen Chang from Singapore. Mostly from mainland China. Lists of Azimut 64 yacht owners and maintenance records and parts shipments from service providers, manufacturers, and parts distributors are all being compiled by Chinese Intelligence. Insurance companies are being checked for boat coverage on an Azimut 64. If it hasn’t already, the Sam Houston and Pat Walsh are eventually going to make it onto one of those Chinese lists.”
“Those must be very big lists.”
“Only 217 Azimut 64s have ever been manufactured. It’s not that big of a list.”
“Once my name comes up, the Chinese will know it was me.”
“Yes, they know who Pat Walsh is and they know who you work for. You’ll be the top suspect.”
“They won’t be able to prove it was me.”
“They won’t be able to prove it in a court of law, but this isn’t a court case we’re talking about.”
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