Hell Ship (15 page)

When the
Jacinta
was safely anchored outside the surf zone, they all boarded the Zodiac that Scalpel’s team had left behind. Bones skillfully navigated through the crashing breakers and into a small lagoon on the islet where Dane hopped out to drag the craft up above the tide line.

Alex
clambered over the side to stand with him in the ankle deep surf. “Doesn’t look like much.”

“Maybe not to us,” Dane agreed, “but try looking at it from the eyes of man who’s been floating in the sea for two days, menaced by sharks.
Probably looked like paradise.”

Bones cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted, “Yo, Gin
ger! Mary Ann! Pina Coladas, right here!”

Paradise
, Dane had to admit, was a bit of an overstatement. The island was little more than an hourglass shaped sandbar that had accumulated around a pair of craggy rocks, the tallest of which was shorter than Alex. There was hardly any shade, absolutely no vegetation and no evident sources of fresh water. Dane understood now why the Spratly Islands were mostly uninhabited. This was not the idyllic paradise of Gilligan’s Island or Swiss Family Robinson; this was the last rest area on the way to Hell.

“Let’s spread out. Look for anything that looks…well, interesting.”

“That won’t take long,” muttered Bones, but no sooner had he spoken the last word when his voice changed. “Wait a sec. I think that qualifies.”

He was pointing to one of the tall rocks, or more specifically to what looked at a distance like a nub of rock extending out on the sheltered side of the crag.
As they got closer, Dane saw that it wasn’t rock at all, but a waist-high heap of driftwood pieces, ranging in size from tree boughs four feet long to chunks no bigger than Dane’s thumb, all of them worn smooth by persistent wave action.

“How did those get there?” Gabby wondered aloud.

The rock was too far from the beach and the pile too neat to be the work of nature. The answer was obvious.

“Someone put them there.”
Dane raced over for a closer look, confirming that inescapable conclusion. The driftwood was not merely heaped up, but placed carefully to minimize gaps and prevent shifting. It reminded him of something….

“It’s a cairn,” said
Alex. “Like a burial mound.”

If Dane had any doubts about that, they were cleared away when
he spied something carved into a large chunk of wood at the base of the mound; a word, made up of straight lines that had been scratched repeatedly in the dense surface.

ARCHIE

“It’s not him,” said Alex, dejectedly.

“It’s someone.”
Dane inspected the marker more carefully and saw that something had been wedged into a crack in the wood. It was a circular red identification tag, stamped with letters and numbers. “‘Bailey, A.’ This is a Royal Army dog tag. The kind they used throughout World War II. Archie Bailey may have been a survivor from the
Nagata Maru
.”

“But not the one we were looking for.”

Bones chuckled. “You don’t think he buried himself, do you?”

“
There was another survivor here.” Alex stepped away from the pile. “Look for another cairn.”

“
Alex, there wouldn’t be anyone left to bury the last man.” Dane stared at the driftwood marker. “This took a lot of time and effort. Days maybe.”

“What are you saying?”

“Our castaway found a way to survive. At least long enough to bury one of his mates.” Dane took Alex’s hand and drew her along as he explored the second crag, situated at the far end of the hourglass. There was another arrangement of driftwood there, but this time instead of a large mound, the pieces were all about the same size, laid out one the ground, side by side, like a deck.

“
Is it a raft?”

Dane shook his head.
“No. Or if it was meant to be, he never finished it. There’s nothing to hold the logs together.”

He knelt down and lifted one of the logs, revealing a shallow depression underneath.
“It’s a roof! He built a shelter.”

He pulled more of the logs
aside, revealing a space easily large enough for a man to lie, protected from the elements. There was other evidence of habitation—brittle fragments of what could only be fabric, and a small heap of seashells.

The others joined them a moment later and Bones gave a low whistle of appreciatio
n. “That’s a pretty nice lodge. I’ll bet he had Indian blood.”

Dane probed at the debris
and uncovered a small red tag, just like the one on the grave marker. He rubbed the dust away and read the letters stamped there. “Hancock, T. I think that’s a negative on the Indian blood.”

“
He was here,” Alex gasped. “But where did he go?”

She
turned in a circle, looking for some other subtle indication of a human presence on the island.

“Ma
ybe he swam away again,” ventured Bones. “I would.”

“You’re a real
ray of sunshine,” said Dane.

“Just keeping it real.”
Bones turned to Gabby. “Let’s head back to
Jacinta
and get
Baby’s
metal detector. If our guy is here somewhere, then that plate in his skull is probably the only thing made of metal anywhere on the island.”

Dane
, surprised at Bones’ quick thinking, nodded his approval. As the oddly-matched pair marched back to the Zodiac, Dane tried once more to think like the castaway.

“Okay, let’s be logical.
You’re stuck here. You’ve got nothing. Even the clothes you’re wearing are rags. What do you do?”

Alex
pointed to the driftwood deck. “Basic needs. Shelter. And of course, food and water.”

Dane snapped his fingers.
“Yes. Where do you find food and water in a place like this?”

“Fish?”

“Maybe. He doesn’t have any tools, but maybe he can fashion something out of driftwood. A club, maybe even a spear. And there are dozens of tide pools around here. He could collect mollusks, maybe even fish that get trapped when the tide goes out. That takes care of food, but water’s the real problem.”

“It’s the tropics.
Rain?”

“He w
ould have to store it somehow; a catch basin or a cistern.” Dane felt like the answer had to be right in front of him; he just needed a new perspective. He scrambled onto the tall rock next the shelter. It was a change of only about four feet, but now he could see dozens of depressions pockmarking the island, any one of which might have served to catch rainwater.

Then
he saw something else.

Bones kept his
gaze on the
Jacinta
, nudging the tiller to stay on course as the little inflatable boat charged headlong into the surf. He eased off the throttle, allowing the craft to coast—or more accurately to drift backward, caught in the rush of a wave that had already broken—and then twisted the outboard engine’s throttle wide open. The burst of speed caught Gabby unprepared and she tumbled off her seat and landed half on his lap. Bones didn’t let the mishap distract him from the task at hand; with the engine at full power, he drove the boat directly at the rising face of an incoming breaker. The bow end tilted up as the craft started climbing the hill made of water, and then just when it seemed the wave would curl over, capsize the boat and slam them down into the sea once more, they broke through the crest and were rocketing down the backside of the wave.

“Nicely done,” said Gabby, laughing as she used Bones’ thigh for leverage to pull herself upright.

“Just call me the Big Kahuna,” Bones said with a grin.

She took her seat again, this time facing him, but said nothing more until they were past the incoming surf.
The subsequent waves hadn’t yet begun to crest and crossing them was considerably less dramatic, but even a momentary lapse in focus might result in them taking a dunk. Only when Bones had eased off the throttle a little, cruising through considerably smoother water toward the waiting
Jacinta
, did she speak again.

“Your boss seems like a smart guy.”

“Maddock?” He grinned to hide a twinge of jealousy. “Well, he’s what you’d call ‘book smart.’ But yeah, he’s definitely the brains of the outfit.”

“Do you think he can find this medallion you’re looking for?”

Bones shrugged. “If it can be found, Maddock will find it. He seems to have a sixth sense when it comes to stuff like this.”

She nodded as if that was sufficient reassurance and swung her gaze around to watch the final approach to the larger craft.
When the inflatable bumped against the dive platform, she nimbly hopped over and secured a mooring line to a cleat. She waited for Bones to join her, then ascended the stairs to the deck where
Baby
was stored, along with the cable spool that connected it to the operating console on the bridge.

The little yellow sub
mersible looked like the offspring of a spacesuit helmet and an air compressor, to which someone had added a robot claw hand and something that resembled the circular base of a floor lamp. The latter item was the business end of a Fisher underwater metal detector. Bones used his Leatherman multi-tool to cut the plastic zip-ties that secured the device to the ROV while Gabby went to work unscrewing the water-tight cable connector that joined the metal detector to the remote’s cable hub. Both finished their respective tasks in less than a minute. Bones casually propped the treasure finder over one shoulder as if carrying a rifle in a parade and started for the boat.

Gabby called after him.
“Hey, I’m gonna pay a visit to the head before we go back.”

“Good thought.
The island isn’t exactly equipped with modern facilities.”

Gabby waited until
Bones was on the stairs to the dive platform before ducking inside, but she did not go immediately to the lavatory. Instead, she entered the crew’s quarters and with the same economy of motion she’d employed to disconnect the metal detector, opened her duffel bag and took out an Iridium satellite phone identical to the one she’d seen Bones using two days earlier. She moved swiftly to the bridge, from which vantage she could see Bones, lashing the metal detector to the boat with bungee cords.

Without looking away, she extended the phone’s antenna and punched in a number. There was an electronic click as the connection was made, followed by a brief lag as t
he signal traveled from its source, to a satellite orbiting in space, and back down to her handset.

“
Report
.”

“Be ready,” she said.
“He’s very close to finding it.”

The wait was interminable.
She saw Bones glance impatiently up the stairs and drew back, away from the bridge window, even though there was no way he could see inside.  The seconds seemed to stretch out into minutes.
This is taking too long
, she thought, and was about to sever the connection when she heard the voice again.

“
We’re on our way. Here’s what you need to do….
”

From even a short
distance away, it was impossible to see the outline of a human skeleton. Fifty years of tropical rain and scorching sun had leached away minerals, partially dissolving the bones so that, from more than a few steps away, they looked like part of the landscape. Further obscuring the picture was the fact that the skeleton had no head. Where the skull should have been, there was a small pool, about two feet across, filled with water.

Dane knelt beside the skeleton, trying to imagine how this man’s life had ended.
He dipped a finger in the pool and tasted it. “Brackish. This was his catch basin, but it got contaminated. Or maybe he was waiting for it to rain, but it never did.”

“So where’s his head?”

“I think there are still headhunters in this part of the world. Maybe one of them visited and took a souvenir.”

Alex
shuddered.

“Kidding.”

Dane dragged a hand through the sediment at the bottom of the pool. He felt something hard, closed his fingers around it, drew his hand out.
The sand fell away to reveal a piece of crab shell. He went in again, raking the sand until he found something hard and crusty, held in place by the weight of sand and the suction of the muck beneath. He bent over the pool and stuck his other hand in as well, working his fingers underneath it until he felt water flooding into the space underneath. With an audible, sucking noise it came free and he lifted his prize out of the pool.

A slurry of wet sand dripped away to reveal a spherical object, half-encrusted with barnacles, but nevertheless easily recognizable as a completely intact human skull.
Dane dunked it in the water to clear away the rest of the sediment, and when he took it out again, something flashed in the sunlight. Affixed to the parietal bone, just above and behind where the man’s right ear would have been, was a triangle of yellow metal, slightly larger than the identification disks the man had carried as a soldier. Dane noticed that it wasn’t perfectly symmetrical, but was an obtuse scalene triangle, with one angle slightly wider than ninety degrees.