Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2) (46 page)

“Shit,” he whispered.

“Good morning to you, too.”

He whipped his head around. “Oh, you’re awake. Sorry. It’s just—”

“There’s a line at the head?”

“Three deep,” he said as he rummaged in a drawer for clothes. When he’d pulled on a pair of swim trunks, he sat on the bed and took her in his arms. “Let me say a proper good morning.” He kissed her in a manner that wouldn’t be considered “proper” at all. “But I can’t tarry. Nature calls and if the head’s not available, the aft deck will have to serve.”

“Unfair male advantage,” she called out as he slipped out the door.

Much as she would enjoy spending the morning doing more of what they’d spent most of the night doing, Riley knew Cole would be eager to see if her interpretation of the symbols on the map was right.

It had been well after dark the night before when they’d heard the sound of the outboard and realized the others were returning from their trip ashore. Cole had gone out and fetched her backpack from the galley before the rest of the crew got back aboard. Then they’d heard Theo sorting out the sleeping arrangements for the extra four guests as Riley lay half on top of him with one hand on his chest and her head tucked into the curve of his neck. He stroked her hair and they both chuckled at the wisecracks slung their way from the other side of the door.

Riley climbed out of the bunk and picked up Cole’s shirt from the floor where it had ended up the night before. She slid her arms into the sleeves and buttoned a couple of buttons. Through the windows she could see that it was a gorgeous morning outside. The sun had already heated up the decks enough to cook an egg and there was very little breeze. She picked up her backpack and peeked out the door. It looked like the coast was clear. Just as she reached for the handle, the door opened and Greg smiled when she saw Riley before her.

“I’m glad to see somebody’s got her glow on this morning,” she said.

Riley started to mumble good morning, but Greg quickly switched places with her. As she was closing the door, Greg said, “Hop in the shower, girlfriend. I’m the one bunking with three guys, so I don’t need you going around smelling like sex.” She closed the door.

When Riley entered the galley a half hour later, there was a chorus of “Good morning” from Brian and Theo, who were seated at the table. Cole was standing at the counter pouring himself a cup of coffee from an institutional-sized percolator. He grinned at her.

“Get ready for comments from the peanut gallery,” he said with a nod toward the fellows at the table.

Brian said, “I certainly wouldn’t make any off-color comments to such a beautiful young lady. I’d only question her sanity at hooking up with a crazy bloke like you.” He winked at Riley.

Riley swatted Cole on the behind and said, “I like my men crazy.”

Cole picked up another cup and poured one for her. “Yeah, crazy enough to drive my boat over here in the hope that you’ve figured out where our wreck is.”

She looked at him over the rim of her cup. “Is that a challenge?” She took a sip of the hot liquid. Theo must have made the coffee. It was excellent.

Cole shrugged. “Call it what you will, the time has come to lay it all out there.”

Brian said, “I thought that was what she did last night.”

Theo started coughing. “I think I just snorted my coffee,” he said.

“Listen, boys, that’s enough,” Riley said. “Time to put away your inner twelve-year-olds and get down to work. Where’s everybody else?”

Theo slid out of the dinette and said, “Greg asked to go take a closer look at the
Enigma
. As to those other two guys, I don’t have a clue.”

“Forget them,” Cole said. “Riley, what do you need?”

“Have you got an iPad with charts of the area?”

“Sure,” Theo said. “I’ll go get it.” He walked forward into the wheelhouse and they all heard his voice when he said, “Hello, I know you’re there. Is that you, Nils?”

The reply was muffled.

“Come on back to the galley. Riley’s about to explain where she thinks this wreck is.”

When Theo returned, Nils Skar was right behind him. Riley wondered what he’d been doing up there.

Theo handed Riley the iPad. She said, “Don’t tell me you’ve figured out a way to use this, too.”

“Sure,” he said. “Music, audio books, and I can make some pretty crazy tunes in GarageBand.”

Riley kissed Theo on the cheek. “You are amazing.”

“I know,” he said, and he sat back down on the dinette. He spread out his own tactile representation of the map, and slid a paper copy of the map they’d found in the prayer gau onto the table in front of Riley.

Riley hollered out, “Irv, are you in your cabin? I need you out here.”

From down the aft corridor she heard Irv’s voice. “I’m coming.”

When he appeared in the doorway to the galley adjusting his hat on his head, Riley asked, “You getting extra hours of beauty sleep?”

“How do you think I keep this physique in such good shape?”

On the iPad, Riley opened up the iNavX app and accessed the charts for the South China Sea.

“When comparing this Japanese map to the Babuyan Islands charts, at first blush one would assume that this phallic-looking thing in the corner is the northern tip of Dalupiri Island.”

Brian said, “She’s got phalluses on the brain.”

Cole started to open his mouth, but Riley was faster. She swung on him, pointed her finger at his mouth, and said, “Don’t even think about it.”

“Well, darling,” Brian said, “after what you did to him last night, he wouldn’t be a man if he wasn’t thinking about it.”

Riley rolled her eyes. “You guys are impossible.”

Cole put his arm around her waist. “We’re guys. It’s in our jeans.”

Riley looked at the men around her, then closed her eyes for a minute. The others seemed to be having good fun, but Peewee looked extremely uncomfortable with the sexual innuendo. She opened her eyes and sighed. “Look, guys, we can play word games, or we can find this wreck.”

Cole kissed her on the cheek. “Did you know you get red spots on your cheeks when you’re really irritated? It’s quite fetching. Okay. We’ll be good now. You were about to tell us what other island looks rather like a man’s penis.”

“It’s not exactly another island. It’s part of an island. You see, I was looking at the chart of the Babuyan Islands on the iPad like this.” She held the tablet up in the portrait-viewing mode. “My boat was bouncing around because we were at sea and the image changed orientation to landscape view, like this.” Riley moved the device to show them.

“It makes me crazy when it changes on its own like that,” Brian said.

“But when the chart changed the view—see, here—the island of Camiguin became visible in the corner of the screen. I guess it was the way I was sitting, but it was like something clicked. I saw this area not north up like we always think of charts. Instead, I saw the island on a forty-five-degree angle.” Riley turned the sheet of paper so the lower left corner pointed downward. Then she slid her fingers across the tablet screen and enlarged the view. She set the paper on top of the glowing screen and aligned the images.

“It’s a very smart way to disguise a map—draw it on the diagonal,” she said. “See, this is Magasasut Point off the southwest side of Camiguin, and this is the little Pamoctan Island in the center of the bay. It all started to fit with some of the other symbols that Irv had shown me on the key list.”

“Like what?” Cole asked.

“See these three lines here? That’s the symbol for a river. And this weird thing that looks like a hat down here? That’s a volcano, and while the scale’s a bit off, the volcano called Mount Camiguin is down at the south end of the island.”

“What are these arrows? I thought they were indicating the currents in the channel.”

Irv spoke up. “In all the work I’d done on Japanese treasure maps, I’d never seen that symbol either. I didn’t know what they were. It was Riley who explained to me how to read the symbols on the nautical charts. She pointed out that there are lots of wrecks off the main village there.”

Riley said, “I did some research then and I discovered they estimate that there are more than thirty known World War II wrecks around Camiguin. I think those are marking other wrecks, but not our wreck. See this weird duck-like symbol? I think that marks the site of the
Teiyō Maru
. That symbol is on the other sheet, and Irv told me what it’s meant in his experience. I’ll let him explain.”

“When the Japanese sealed up the caves and tunnels where they stored some of their treasure,” Irv said, “they often made various types of traps for others who might try to dig it up before the Japs returned to get it. They used bombs, poisonous gas, and various types of booby traps. Sometimes, after they set off explosives and buried the entrance to a cave, they would then flood the area above the entrance and create a man-made lake. In my experience, that?” He tapped the duck-like mark on the map. “That’s the symbol for an underwater treasure.”

“Whoo-hoo!” Brian shouted. “I like the sound of that.” He clapped Cole on the back. “What are we waiting for, mate? Let’s go get it.”

Camiguin Island
The Philippines

December 5, 2012

Cole couldn’t have asked for better weather. They’d only been searching their grid for a little over two hours, motoring through glassy calm water and towing the new dual-frequency side-scan sonar system they had recently installed, when Cole thought he saw something on the screen. It was off to their starboard side.

“Did you see that?” he asked Riley, who was standing behind the helmsman chair. He pointed at the screen, but the image was already gone.

“No. But I’m having a hard time making out what’s what. The picture isn’t very clear.”

“The problem is the depth. It’s varying between one eighty and over two hundred feet. Our cable isn’t long enough on the sonar towfish. Let me circle back.”

Cole turned the boat around and attempted to retrace their path by following the bubbles left by their wake. On the second pass, they saw something that looked like a mound on the bottom.

Theo said, “I wish I could be of more help. One of these days somebody is going to figure out how to get computers to help humans read sonar like dolphins.”

“Theo, I wouldn’t be surprised if that somebody turns out to be you.” Cole throttled back to slow the boat way down until she was barely drifting and he made another pass. “There, see that coming up on the screen?”

“Yeah,” Riley said. “It looks like the bow of a ship. Definitely.”

Theo stuck his head out the side door and hollered back to the crew on the aft deck. “Hey, guys, we may have something. Bring the sonar towfish alongside. Greg, are you ready to launch the
Enigma
?”

“Ready when you are, Theo,” Greg yelled back. “I can’t wait to drive this baby.”

Cole said to Theo, “You told her she could drive it?”

“Sure,” Theo said. “Better her than me.”

Cole watched the sonar screen in the pilothouse to make sure they weren’t going to drop the anchor on top of the wreck. The
Bonhomme Richard
carried three hundred and fifty feet of anchor chain, but the chain would be running almost straight up and down when anchoring at that depth. He dropped about one hundred feet away from the wreck. That should keep them from drifting, since there was little wind or current.

With Theo issuing directions, Greg and Brian were able to launch their ROV, the
Enigma
, with the new crane. On the starboard side aft, Brian turned the reel to feed out the cable that delivered the power and brought back the data. Greg worked the controls of the ROV from the laptop’s keyboard while sitting cross-legged on top of the cabin aft. The video feed from the camera on the underwater vehicle was being broadcast on the screen. Theo leaned against the cabin next to her and used Greg as his eyes. He had his tablet tucked under his arm.

Cole stood outside on the side deck leaning his hip against the bulwark, his arms crossed, and watched his crew working together. Over the last couple of years, Brian had often worked on their boat, so he knew it well, and watching Greg’s enthusiasm, Cole understood why Brian had hired her as his new dive master. He looked around the deck. Two of his passengers were missing. He wondered what Nils Skar and Peewee were up to and why they weren’t out there with the rest of them peering over the side.

“There it is,” Greg called out.

“Describe for me what you see,” Theo said.

“It’s pretty dark down that deep, but the ROV’s light is starting to reveal some detail. It looks like she’s pretty far over on her side. We’re approaching from the angle where most of what we see is her bottom.”

Cole and Riley both walked over to watch the laptop screen over Greg’s shoulder.

“Even from this angle I can see a gaping hole in the middle of what would be the port side reaching well below the waterline.”

Theo handed Riley the tablet. “You should be able to find the photo of the
Teiyō Maru
on there,” he said.

Riley touched the screen and there was an old black-and-white photo of a merchant vessel. “Found it.”

“That photo was taken shortly after she was launched in Holland in the 1930s. The Japanese bought the Dutch merchant vessel and turned her into a troop carrier and hospital ship.”