Prologue

SOUTH CHINA SEA, 1965

Darwin Pinky exhaled through his mouthpiece and turned to watch the column of bubbles race to the surface seventy feet above. The scuba diver turned his attention back to the corroded steel beneath him. He floated above a ragged gash that exposed the interior of the tubelike seaplane hangar bolted to the main deck of the submarine. None of the sun’s rays entered the gash. An inky blackness teased him.

Pinky, an English building contractor from Hong Kong with a penchant for the easy life, turned his head from the void and looked down at the forward section of the submarine’s hull. Plate-sized holes, resembling blossoming petals of sharp steel, pitted the seaplane hangar, deck, and hull. Evidence of cannon fire and at least one bomb blast was obvious, but the submarine and the muddy plain it rested on showed no other sign of human disturbance. Not so much as a Coke bottle stuck out of the bottom mud. There was no marine growth on the submarine, not a single barnacle. He didn’t see any fish. He and his companions were two weeks into their spring cruising vacation, and this dive was the first one during which they had not seen any fish or marine growth.

The absence of marine life seemed strange, but Pinky dismissed the oddity as he looked for his dive partner. He looked aft, toward the stern of the vessel. A column of rising air bubbles marked Geoff Dalrymple’s location. He had just floated over the stern. Like Pinky’s, Dalrymple’s midsection resembled the bulbous curvature of the submarine’s outer hull. Pinky pulled his dive knife out of the sheath strapped to his calf and hammered the blade’s thick metal handle against the submarine’s hull three times. The sound of the sharp, metallic clicks reached his partner’s ear. Dalrymple swam toward Pinky, and when the two men were together, Pinky gestured with his hands for his partner to remain outside and shine his light into the gash.

Pinky pulled himself past the incisors of the monstrous grin, and as he entered the hangar, an awareness seemed to speak to him. It was as if the bubbles from his regulator were warning him in a foreign language to leave the wreck alone. The hangar’s interior was now visible, along with a pile of broken wooden crates, pieces of rope, and thermos-like metal containers that lay huddled under a thin layer of sediment. The crates had probably been stacked and secured at one time, but because of the bomb blast, the list to port, and corroding salt water, they had broken from their lashings and settled against the opposite curved bulkhead.

Pinky glanced at his air gauge and noticed that he was down to 50 bar, or about 725 psi. The two men had simply been out for a sport dive that morning and had not been expecting to find an intact submarine. Now, in his excitement, Pinky had lost track of time while exploring a wreck that appeared to have been undisturbed since it sank, probably sometime during WWII. Pinky knew that he had to surface soon, while he still had air in his tank, but images of treasure raced through his mind. He took a brief second to remember his training about out-of-air emergency ascents, deciding he could perform the emergency maneuver if needed, before letting his thoughts return to images of gold bars and diamonds. His eyes darted about, looking for a canister that might be easy to pull from the pile.

Both Pinky and Dalrymple had been engineers in the British Army. They had been stationed together in India during the war, but after the war, they resigned their commissions to take advantage of lucrative construction contracts to rebuild cities like Singapore and Hong Kong. It was during their time in the service that they had heard tales of wealth pillaged from all over Asia and the Pacific Islands by the Japanese, who placed it on board ships and submarines for transport back to Japan. The thought that now the two men may have stumbled upon some of that lost treasure made Pinky feel euphoric.

He selected one canister and tugged at its base until it broke free. As he pulled, a cloud of silt ballooned from the pile, blotting out all available light. Pinky held on to the canister with one hand while pushing himself out of the hangar with the other. The fingers of his left hand began to itch, so he rubbed them together after transferring the canister to his right hand. He promised himself that he would wear gloves next time.

Once outside the hangar, Pinky gazed up at the wavering outline of his yacht, and both men slowly ascended toward the silhouette. They rose no faster than their bubbles. As soon as they reached the surface, they spat out their regulators and swam to the aluminum dive ladder. Pinky looked up and saw the tall wooden mast swaying ever so slightly, brushing against the sun behind it.

“Evelyn!” Pinky shouted as he grabbed a rung. A woman’s face suddenly peered over the handrail. Her head and an enormous hat blocked the sun.

“Yes, dear?” his wife answered.

“Here, take this.”

Evelyn kneeled in the open dive gate and grabbed the canister; then she walked aft to rejoin Jane, Dalrymple’s wife, who sat in a folding wooden deck chair at a small table mounted to the deck just beyond the cockpit. Pinky and Dalrymple removed their fins before flinging them up over the handrail, onto the deck. They labored up the ladder, one at a time. Once on deck, they bent forward, taking a minute to catch their breath, before unbuckling their straps and loudly dumping their scuba tanks on the deck. Minutes later, after recovering from their exertions, they sat gulping gin and tonics with their wives, the canister standing like a large centerpiece on the table between them.

“By Jove, Pinky,” Dalrymple said after taking a long pull of his drink, “I do believe we found the jackpot. What do you think is in all of those canisters?”

Pinky, lost in thought, took a few seconds to answer. “I suggest we don’t get too excited just yet. If there is treasure in these things, I’ll wager there’s a whole line of people who would want their property back. The Japanese looted gold and other precious items from many countries throughout the war.”

The men’s wives, clothed almost identically in khaki shorts and white flowing button-up tops, lounged in their chairs. While Evelyn had been writing in her journal, Jane had been reading an article in the April edition of Playboy. Now Evelyn reached for her drink, which sat beside the canister on the tabletop. “What’s the name of this dreadful island?”

Pinky looked up from his drink, at their surroundings. They were anchored in a long bay that ran from east to west. Other than the top of an exposed rocky volcanic wall that rimmed the western shore of the island about four miles distant, all he could see was a dense tropical forest that bordered the bay.

“I think it’s called Terumbu Island,” he said, “but we’ll have to be sure of the name and find out who owns this island if we’re going to think about salvage.”

Evelyn returned to her journal. Jane was still intent on the article. The men looked at the canister, inspecting its dents. They noticed a thin black liquid running down the tin side of it, one drop at a time, each drop vaporizing before it reached the table. Out of curiosity, Dalrymple touched a drop with his bare finger.

Suddenly, Evelyn began to gasp.

“Evelyn, what’s wrong?” asked Pinky.

“I don’t know!” Evelyn snapped as her journal fell from her hands. “I am sorry. I didn’t‍—‍”

Evelyn’s eyes clamped shut, and her body snapped, forcing her to sit straight. She wrapped her arms around her midsection and bowled out of the chair, landing heavily on the deck before vomiting and writhing sporadically. Jane followed with spasms of her own, dropping the magazine and falling to the deck next to Evelyn.

Pinky lurched to assist his wife but collapsed instead. Dalrymple did the same. As Pinky struggled on the deck, his bowels and bladder emptied. It was the last sensation he felt below his waist. Pinky tried to reach for Evelyn again, but found that his arms had lost their mobility too. He lay helpless, watching his wife’s upper torso and head convulse like a dying animal until, finally, her once-lovely face transformed into a mask of torture.

Although they were not dead, the four immobile bodies could do nothing but lie on the deck as the tropical sun burned their retinas. Pinky knew they were dying, and the seconds seemed to drag forever. Spittle ran slowly from the corner of his mouth as he waited for death, and his failing brain told him that whatever had prevented that wreck from flourishing as a living reef was taking their lives away too.