"Damndest flu I've ever had," he muttered aloud, then fell back into bed in a heap.
Security was tight at the Tokyo Hilton Hotel and guests for the private banquet were required to pass through three separate checkpoints before gaining entry to the lavish dining hall. The Japan Export Association's annual dinner was an extravagant affair featuring the best local chefs and entertainers performing for the country's top business leaders and dignitaries. Executives from Japan's major exporting companies helped sponsor the dinner on behalf of their major trading partners. In addition to key customers, in-country diplomats from all the Western and Asian countries that constituted Japan's primary trading partners were treated as special guests.
The recent assassination of U.S. Ambassador Hamilton and the bedlam at the SemCon factory opening had created a buzz in the crowd and heads turned when the American embassy's deputy chief of mission Robert Bridges entered the room, accompanied by two undercover security men.
Though a career diplomat, Bridges was more at home working policy strategies or conducting business security briefings rather than socializing in mass crowds. Hamilton had been by far the better glad-hander, Bridges thought as he made small talk with a Japanese trade representative. A dinner host soon arrived and escorted him to a small banquet table, where he was seated with a number of European diplomats.
As traditional dishes of sashimi and soba noodles were brought to the tables, a troupe of geisha dancers glided elegantly about a raised stage, dressed in brightly colored kimonos and twirling bamboo fans as they pirouetted. Bridges downed a shot of warm sake to help deaden the pain of listening to the French ambassador drone on about the poor quality of Asian wines while he watched the dancers spin.
As the first course was finished, a litany of corporate executives ok to the stage to promote their self-importance with blustery speeches. Bridges took the opportunity to visit the restroom and, with large bodyguard leading the way, walked down a side corridor and into the men's room.
The bodyguard scanned the tiled restroom, finding only a waiter washing his hands in a sink at the far end. Letting Bridges pass to the urinal, the bodyguard closed the door and stood facing the interior.
The bald waiter slowly finished washing his hands, then turned his back to the bodyguard as he dried his hands from a paper towel rack. When he spun back toward the door, the bodyguard was shocked to see a .25 automatic in the waiter's hand. A silencer was affixed to the muzzle of the small handgun, with the business end pointed directly at the bodyguard's face. Instinctively grabbing for his own weapon, the bodyguard had barely moved his hand when the .25 emitted a muffled cough. A neat red hole appeared just above the bodyguard's left eyebrow and the large man raised up and back momentarily before collapsing to the floor with a thud, a river of red blood running from his head.
Bridges failed to detect the muffled gunshot but heard the bodyguard collapse. Turning to see the waiter pointing the gun at him, Bridges could only mutter, "What the hell?"
The bald man in the waiter suit stared back at him with deathly cold black eyes, then broke into a sadistic grin that revealed a row of crooked yellow teeth. Without saying a word, he squeezed the trigger two times and watched as Bridges grasped his chest and fell to the ground. The assassin pulled a typewritten note out of his pocket and rolled it up tight into the shape of a tube. He then bent over and wedged it into the dead diplomat's mouth like a flagpole. Carefully disassembling his silencer and placing it in his pocket, he gingerly stepped over the two bodies and out the door, disappearing down a hall toward the kitchen.
The fiberglass bow of the twenty-five-foot Parker work-boat plunged through the deep, wide swells, cutting a white foamy path as it rolled through the trough before cresting on the peak of the next wave. Though tiny in comparison to most vessels in the NUMA fleet, the durable little boat, identified on the stern as the Grunion, was ideal for surveying inland and coastal waterways, as well as supporting shallow-water dive operations.
Leo Delgado rolled the helm's wheel to the right and the Grunion quickly nosed to starboard and out of the path of a large red freighter bearing down on them near the entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
"How far from the strait?" he asked, spinning the wheel hard to port a moment later in order to take the passing freighter's wake bow on.
Standing alongside in the cramped cabin, Dirk and Dahlgren were hunched over a small table studying a nautical chart of their present position near the entrance to the Pacific Ocean, some 125 miles west of Seattle.
"Approximately twelve miles southwest of Cape Flattery," Dirk said over his shoulder, then dictated latitude and longitude coordinates to Delgado. The Deep Endeavor's first officer reached over to a keyboard and tapped the position into the small boat's computerized navigation system. A few secon
ds later, a tiny white square appeared in the upper corner of a flat-screen monitor that hung from the ceiling. At the lower edge of the monitor, a small white triangle flashed on and off, representing the Grunion as it motored into the Pacific. With the aid of a satellite Global Positioning System interface, Delgado was able to steer a path directly toward the marked position.
"Now, you guys are sure Captain Burch isn't going to find out we borrowed his support boat and are burning his fuel just for a pleasure dive?" Delgado asked somewhat sheepishly.
"You mean this is Burch's private boat?" Dirk replied with mock horror.
"If he comes snooping, we'll just tell him that Bill Gates stopped by and offered us a few million stock options if he could take the Grunion out for a spin," Dahlgren offered.
"Thanks. I knew I could trust you guys," Delgado muttered, shaking his head. "By the way, how good is your fix on the submarine's location?"
"Came right out of the official Navy report on the sinking that Perlmutter faxed me," Dirk replied, grabbing the cabin door sill for balance as the boat rolled over a large swell. "We'll start with the position that was recorded by the destroyer after she sank the I-403."
"Too bad the Navy didn't have GPS back in 1945," Delgado lamented.
"Yes, the wartime action reports weren't always entirely accurate, especially where locations are concerned. But the destroyer had not traveled very far from shore when it engaged the sub, so their reported position ought to put us in the ballpark."
When the Grunion reached the marked position, Delgado eased the
throttle into neutral and began keying a search grid into the navigation computer. On the back deck, Dirk and Dahlgren unpacked a Klein Model 3000 side-scan sonar system from a reinforced plastic crate. As Dirk hooked up the cables to the operating system, Dahlgren reeled a yellow cylindrical sonar tow fish out over the stern gunwale and into the water.
"The fish is out," Dahlgren yelled from the back deck, whereupon Delgado applied a light throttle and the boat edged forward. In a matter of minutes, Dirk had the equipment calibrated, resulting in a continuous stream of contrasting shadowy images sliding across a color monitor. The images were reflections of sound waves emitted from the tow fish which bounced off the seafloor and were recaptured and processed into visual recordings of protrusions or cavities on the sea bottom.
"I have a one-mile-square grid plotted around the Theodore Knight's reported position at the time she rammed the sub," Delgado said.
"That sounds like a good starting range," Dirk replied. "We can expand the grid if we need to."
Delgado proceeded to steer the boat down a white line on the monitor until the end of the grid was reached, then he spun the wheel around and brought the boat down the next line in the opposite direction. Back and forth the Grunion sailed, in narrow two-hundred-meter paths, slowly chewing up the grid while Dirk kept a sharp eye for a long, dark shadow on the sonar monitor that would represent the I-boat lying on the bottom.
An hour went by and the only recognizable image that appeared on the sonar screen was a pair of fifty-five-gallon drums. After two hours, Dahlgren broke out tuna sandwiches from an ice chest and tried to relieve the tedium by telling an assortment of weakly humorous redneck jokes. Finally, after three hours of searching, Dirk's voice suddenly cut through the damp air. "Target! Mark position." Gradually, the fuzzy image of an elongated object rolled across the screen, joined by two smaller protrusions near one end and a large object lying next to it amidships.