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  For my family.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sincere thanks go to:

  Lieutenant Commander David Randall, Director of Training for the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City, Florida, for reading and correcting the passages on marine salvage operations;

  My son, Lieutenant Commander Steve Medland, formerly of USS Tunny (SSN 682), for his comments and corrections on submarine operations;

  The talented staff at The Editorial Department - Ross Browne, Renni Browne, and Peter Gelfan - for helping take this book to the next level;

  My agent, Bob Diforio, for his always wise counsel and unflagging efforts on my behalf;

  And finally, to my wonderful family - my wife, Karen, my daughter Melissa and her husband Rick, my son Steve and his wife Kim, and the most beautiful grandchildren imaginable, Lauren, Kristen, Blake, Audrey, and Conrad. Thanks, guys, for your love, support and friendship. I love you all very much.

  Any errors are mine alone.

  The weak have one weapon: the errors of those who think they are strong.

  - Georges Bidault

  French Journalist and Politician

  “Suits on the quarterdeck, Skipper.”

  Matt Connor cursed under his breath. Through the dark glass of the welder’s mask, he focused on the bead forming up around the patch. There was no need to look. Suits could only mean Kaohsiung port officials, American IRS agents, or Gray Wolf’s enforcers. Whichever they were, they were trouble, the kind that could shut him down. Lousy timing. In a few hours, he’d have been under way.

  “Not now, Sam. Get rid of them.”

  “One of ‘em’s wearing a skirt.”

  “I don’t care what they’re wearing, get rid of them. If they’re from Gray Wolf, tell them the check’s in the mail.”

  Sam laughed and said in his rich baritone, “I think he’s heard that one before.” He squinted into the late afternoon sun glimmering across Kaohsiung Harbor. “Anyway, they don’t look much like Gray Wolf’s boys.”

  Matt blew out a long breath. That left Kaohsiung port officials and American IRS agents. They could cause him a lot of trouble, but at least they couldn’t kill him.

  He dialed the feed down, and the acetylene torch flickered out with a pop. He tilted the mask up, leaned back against a capstan, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He wasn’t worried about being seen. Dressed in his grubbies, there was nothing that would distinguish him from a dozen other crewmen swarming over the ship, making preparations to get under way. He shielded his eyes and focused on the pair.

  The man was black, early forties, close-cropped hair graying at the temples, dark suit. The woman was white, late twenties or early thirties, short brown hair, cream-colored business suit with a short skirt. Damn. He’d thrown enough IRS agents off his ship to know them when he saw them. They looked as if they’d been plucked out of their offices in Washington, D.C., and set down in the Taiwan seaport without a hair out of place.

  The IRS sent out a new team of agents to harass him every few months, and they had a talent for showing up at the worst possible time. The pair stood awkwardly on the quarterdeck, clutching briefcases, flinching at the chaos around them.

  Matt couldn’t blame them. CoMar Explorer appeared to be in a state of total confusion. Cranes swung pallets of supplies aboard as crewmen scrambled to secure topside equipment and make last-minute repairs. On the dock below, a chain of longshoremen shouted commands in Mandarin, passing crates of provisions into the ship’s hold, while engineers in blue jumpsuits pumped acrid-smelling diesel fuel into her tanks. He smiled at the anxious look on the agents’ faces. Bureaucrats out in the real world.

  The bastards never gave up. If you want to be Public Enemy Number One in America, just start your own business. Every federal, state, and local agency in existence will come swooping down on you, trying to bleed you dry with one hand and close you down with the other. After a year of trying to comply with countless idiotic government regulations, he’d moved his ocean-salvage business out of the U.S. to the Republic of China - more commonly known as Taiwan - and established new headquarters in Kaohsiung, a bustling seaport on the South China Sea.

  He’d thought that would solve the problem, but he couldn’t bring himself to give up his U.S. citizenship - which convinced the Internal Revenue Service that part of the money he made was theirs, no matter where in the world he made it. Neither Matt nor his lawyer saw it that way, but the IRS had more lawyers than he did and slapped a $2.8 million lien on his ship. He didn’t have the time or money to fight them, but it didn’t matter; as long as he stayed out of the U.S., they couldn’t touch CoMar Explorer.

  His first instinct was to throw the agents off his ship, but something about the woman - a kind of aura around her - made him hesitate. At first, he thought it was the sun behind her that gave her that radiant quality, but her companion had the same sun behind him, and he didn’t glow. He stared at her. A gentle breeze lifted her hair, pressed her skirt against her thighs. He told himself there’d be no harm in seeing them; they were on his turf now and couldn’t do anything to hurt him. The truth was that he hadn’t talked to a woman - especially an American woman - in a very long time.

  “Take them to the crew’s lounge,” he said. “Have Francisco get them some coffee. I need to change my shirt.”

  “Aye aye, Skipper.”

  He ducked down through the after hatch and paused on the ladder with his head above deck. “Make sure the fuel tanks are topped off, Sam. We’ve got a long way to go.”

  “Go where, Skipper?”

  Matt suppressed a laugh. He hadn’t told anyone where they were headed, not even his first mate. No one was going to scoop him on this job. It was too big and too important to the survival of Connor Marine. He flashed an exaggerated grin.

  “You’ll find out along with everyone else once we’re at sea.”

  He slid down the ladder to the second deck and wound his way forward to his sea cabin, checking along the way to see that everything belowdecks was secured, dodging questions from crew members. They’d be under way by midnight, and he’d announce their destination and answer all their questions once they were far at sea. He was sure they’d like what they heard. Unlike the crews of most ocean-salvage companies, Matt’s shared in the profits, like pirates of old, and this job promised to be the biggest in the company’s history.

  “Hey, Traveller.” Matt tousled the fur of the scrawny yellow dog sprawled across the deck in his sea cabin. “You’re about to live up to your name, old buddy. We’re fixing to make tracks.” The dog put its head down and went back to sleep, paws crossed, while Matt rummaged in his locker for a shirt. He found a blue one, faded but clean, and pulled it on while he glanced around the room. He liked this small cabin, used it exclusively for his quarters whether in port or at sea. Unlike the captain’s stateroom, which was luxurious and isolated, the sea cabin was spartan, just a bunk, a desk, and a locker. But it was located near the bridge, where he could see what was going on.

  Fumbling with the buttons on his shirt, he looked out the porthole at the black nuclear sub moored across the way. The USS Salt Lake City, a Los Angeles-class attack boat, had come in early that morning. In all the time he’d spent in Kaohsiung, he’d never seen a U.S. attack boat in the harbor before, and the damned thing had parked right across from him. He probably knew some of the senior officers aboard. He had no doubt that they knew of him.

  Like the IRS agents, the sub had shown up at the worst possible time. Seeing it brought back memories he’d been struggling with for years, and right now he needed to stay focused. As he watched, a young officer in khakis came aboard, saluted the colors, and dropped down the after hatch. The thought of a hatch screwing down over his head made him suck
air into his lungs. He wiped sweat from his forehead and saw his hand tremble. Christ. Nothing had changed. He closed the porthole and turned away.

  That part of his life was over, but just seeing the sub reminded him how much he missed the Navy. He could never go down in one of those steel coffins again, yet in his most private fantasies, he saw himself having his commission restored. There wasn’t much chance of that. No chance, in fact, now that he was persona non grata in the U.S.

  Matt let out a sigh and sat down at his desk, grateful for what he did have. Starting with one beat-up tugboat in San Diego, he’d built Connor Marine & Salvage into a small but respected company. It was a boom or bust business that demanded eighteen-hour days and seven-day weeks, but he couldn’t stay away from the sea. He’d managed to keep afloat during the busts by borrowing on his ocean-going tug to keep his crew intact. It had been a gamble, but his crew had never missed a paycheck, even in the leanest of times, and the gamble had paid off. He now had a bulldog-loyal crew of the best divers and salvors in the industry.

  But even the best crew would take you only so far without the right equipment. After years of scrimping, a couple of lucrative jobs, and a $4 million loan from Gray Wolf, he’d finally been able to buy a decommissioned salvage ship from a broker in Amsterdam. She was a 1930s vintage ship the Dutch Navy had declared surplus, and he felt a certain kinship with the cast-off vessel. She’d been through several owners and was a sad spectacle by the time he brought her limping into Kaohsiung Harbor.

  He’d put his heart into her restoration, feeling somehow that in proving the old ship was worth another lease on life, he was proving the same thing about himself. After months of hard work, she still looked rough on the outside, but her main systems were functional, and Matt was convinced that he was now in a position to compete for the major salvage contracts. Mortgaged to the hilt, he’d re-christened her with the lofty name CoMar Explorer, in honor of a ship he’d always admired, and waited for the phone to ring. It was another huge gamble, but all he needed was one big job to stay alive, and it looked like he had it.

  He unlocked the center drawer of his desk and retrieved the fax from his agent. A U.S. flag freighter with a load of manganese had run aground on an island off Macau. A job like this could be worth 25 percent of the value of the ship and cargo - maybe $5 or $6 million - depending on the weather conditions and the difficulty of the job.

  He glanced at his watch. June 10. Big jobs didn’t come along often, and with a payment on CoMar Explorer in arrears, this one had come along just in time. Gray Wolf wasn’t known for his patience.

  The phone on his desk buzzed. He swiveled around and hit the speakerphone button.

  “Captain.”

  “Hey, Boss-man. When you come?”

  Matt sighed. “‘Captain,’ Francisco, not ‘Boss-man.’ You’re a sailor now.”

  “Francisco chef, no sailor.”

  “Everyone on my ship is a sailor.”

  “Not me, Boss-man.”

  “What do you want, Francisco?”

  “Man in suit ‘bout to bust. He say why you not come?”

  Matt felt a knot form in his stomach. He looked at his watch, sorry now that he’d agreed to see the two IRS agents.

  “I’m on my way.”

  He switched off the speakerphone, locked the dispatch away in his desk drawer, retrieved his tax attorney’s card from his card file, and walked aft to the crew’s lounge with Traveller close at his heels. He paused at the door. The woman sat on a leather couch drumming her fingers on her briefcase, while the man stood behind her, pacing.

  “Welcome to Kaohsiung,” Matt said, stepping over the coaming. “I hope you’ve had a pleasant trip, but I think you’ve wasted your time. We’ve been all through this before.”

  “All through what?” the black man said.

  “Two-point-eight million in back taxes and penalties. You say I owe it. I say I don’t.” He took the dog-eared business card from his shirt pocket. “Here’s my tax attorney in San Diego. Talk to him.”

  The man walked around from behind the couch. Smiled. Full of himself. “We’re not from the IRS.” He extended his hand. “Cliff Howard, U.S. State Department.” He nodded to the woman on the couch. “This is Susan Elliott, Central Intelligence Agency.”

  Matt blinked. What the hell could the State Department and the CIA want with him? He made an attempt at a smile.

  “Sorry. You government types all look alike.”

  The woman’s eyes made the trip up and down his too-lean frame, his faded blue shirt, grease-stained khakis, and scuffed boots.

  “You’re Matthew Connor?”

  Matt felt his ears tingle. He’d had about four hours sleep and knew he looked like hell, but it galled him to have some manicured bureaucrat - even one with an aura - look at him as though he’d crawled out of a cardboard box.

  “Some of us have to work for a living.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-”

  “Forget it.”

  Matt glanced at their IDs and took a seat on the couch opposite her. There wasn’t that much difference in their ages, maybe ten years, but she made him feel old. Traveller sat beside him, sphinx-like, staring up at the pair. A low growl emitted from his throat.

  “Nice doggy,” Susan Elliott said.

  “Don’t patronize him,” Matt said. “He’s had a hard life.”

  “Why’s he growling?”

  “You survive on the docks by knowing trouble when you see it.” Matt reached down and stroked the dog’s ragged ears. “Cool it, Trav.”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess. I bet his name is Travis, like Travis McGee, because you live on a boat.”

  “I live on a ship, and his name is Traveller.”

  “After an insurance company?”

  “Two L’s. A horse.”

  Susan Elliott’s eyes widened. “Oh, I get it. Robert E. Lee’s famous horse. Are you a southerner?”

  Matt gave her a dip of the head. So she was well-read. “Just a student of military history.”

  Cliff Howard twisted in his seat. “Can we get down to business here?”

  “Sure,” Matt said. He glanced past their perfect hair to the container ships moored at Chichin Island, on the other side of Kaohsiung Harbor. He’d always prided himself on being able to size people up in about three seconds, and these two were no challenge. Howard was square-jawed and aristocratic-looking, older than he’d first thought, a bureaucrat used to waving his government credentials around. Susan Elliott was maybe in her late twenties, not yet experienced enough to know how to throw hers around. Or maybe she had a different weapon, an athletic body poured into a short-skirted business suit that exposed an un-business-like amount of thigh when she crossed her legs. Now that he’d met her, he was sorry he’d let his libido talk him into this. She was pretty, no doubt about that, but she seemed to have all the maturity of a teenager. He glanced at his watch, eager to be rid of them and under way. “What can I do for you?”

  “We’re looking for someone for a special assignment,” Cliff Howard said. “When we asked around, your name came up. When we found out you were Admiral Jacobs’s brother-in-law-”

  “Ex brother-in-law.”

  “He told us you’d be quick to point that out,” Susan Elliott said, tugging at her skirt.

  Cliff Howard glanced at her. “When we found out you were related, we went to see him.”

  “How is he?” Matt said.

  “Fine,” Susan Elliott said. “He was just appointed CNO.”

  “Jake?” Chief of Naval Operations. He’d had no idea. But he shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that his old mentor had the number one job in the Navy. Jake had a gift for politics, knew how to use people to get what he wanted. Not bad. Four stars on his collar, a corner office on the E-ring, and a four-striper for a secretary. His ex brother-in-law had gone as far up as Matt had gone down and at about the same speed. He managed a smile. “Good for him.”

  “He had good things t
o say about you,” Susan Elliott said.

  “I’ll bet.”

  “No, really. He said you’d someday have been sitting in his chair as CNO if you hadn’t been so hardheaded.”

  “Let’s cut the crap,” Matt said. “I’m sure you know I left the Navy under a very big cloud.”

  “We’ve gone over your record,” Cliff Howard said. “What we were hearing from everyone didn’t jibe with what we were seeing in your file. That’s why we went to see Admiral Jacobs.”

  “Great guy,” Susan Elliott said. “Old Navy family. He said you’d have gone all the way if you hadn’t resigned over some fire aboard a nuclear submarine. He said his sister, Barbara, wanted to be married to an admiral. She walked out when you resigned your commission. You pretty much lost everything overnight. Is that about right?”

  Matt glared at her. Jake must have left out the part about his father disowning him. “You tell me. You’ve got all the answers.”

  “Not all. Why did you resign?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “He said you’d say that, but he did his own private investigation of the fire. He told us you were executive officer of the USS Phoenix, a nuclear-powered attack submarine. At thirty-two, the youngest in the Navy. Fire broke out under way, running deep off the Marianas. A man died before you brought it under control. You and the skipper were automatically relieved.

  “The skipper’s career was finished, but the Navy’s a little more forgiving for an exec, especially a rising star. Admiral Jacobs tried to convince you to stay and rebuild your career, but you refused. He said you’d have had to expose someone else - a chief named Flemons - for the delay in reporting the fire, and you wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t figure out why you covered for him, but when he went poking around he found out the chief had a kid who was autistic, needed care for life, and you wouldn’t do anything that would cost him his pension.”

  Matt folded his arms across his chest. So that’s what his old mentor had come up with. Let Jake believe what he wanted. He’d die before he’d tell him - or anyone else - what really happened down there.