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"That's odd. Why would she ignore a ship in distress? Can you make her out?"
"She looks like a fancy yacht, a big one with sleek lines. The design you see moored in Monaco or Hong Kong."
Kelsey moved to the threshold of the radio-room doorway and nodded to the operator. "See if you can raise that boat in the distance."
After a minute or two, the radio operator shook his head. "Not a peep. They've either closed down, or they're ignoring us."
The Rio Grande slackened speed and glided slowly toward the freighter rolling slowly in the low swells. They were very close to the lifeless ship now, and from the bridge wing of the big container ship, Captain Kelsey could look straight down on her decks. He saw two inert figures and what he took to be a small dog. He hailed the wheelhouse again, but all was silent.
The boat with Sherman's boarding party was lowered into the water and motored over to the freighter.
They bumped and scraped alongside as they heaved a grappling hook over the railing and rigged it to pull up a boarding ladder. Within minutes, Sherman was over the side and bending over the bodies on the deck. Then he disappeared through a hatch below the bridge.
Four of the men had followed him while two remained in the boat and motored away from the hull a short distance, waiting for a signal to return and pick them up. Even after Sherman made certain the men lying on the deck were dead, he still half expected some of the freighter's crew to be waiting for him.
After entering the hatch, he climbed a passageway to the bridge and was overwhelmed with a sense of unreality. All hands from the captain to the mess boy were dead, their corpses strewn about the deck where they fell. The radioman was found with his eyes bulging and his hands clasped around his set as if he were afraid of falling.
Twenty minutes passed before Sherman eased Mentawai's radio operator to the floor and called over to the Rio Grande. "Captain Kelsey?"
"Go ahead, Mr. Sherman. What have you found?"
"All dead, sir, every one of them, including two parakeets found in the chief engineer's cabin and the ship's dog, a beagle with its teeth bared."
"Any clue as to the cause?"
"Food poisoning seems the most obvious. They look like they threw up before they died."
"Be careful of toxic gas."
"I'll keep my nostrils open," said Sherman.
Kelsey paused, contemplating the unexpected predicament. Then he said, "Send back the boat. I'll have it return with another five men to help you get the ship under way. The nearest major port is Apia in the Samoa Islands. We'll turn the ship over to authorities there."
"What about the bodies of the crew? We can't leave them lying around, certainly not in the tropical heat."
Without hesitation, Kelsey replied, "Stack them in the freezer. We want them preserved until they can be examined by--"
Kelsey was abruptly cut off in midsentence as Mentawai's hull shuddered from an explosion from deep inside her bowels. The hatches above the cargo holds were thrown skyward as flame and smoke erupted from below. The ship seemed to heave herself out of the water before splashing back and taking on a sharp list to starboard. The roof of the wheelhouse collapsed inward. There was another deep rumble inside the freighter, followed by the screeching sound of tearing metal.
Kelsey watched in horror as the Mentawai began to roll over on her starboard side. "She's going down!" he shouted over the radio. "Get out of there before she goes under!"
Sherman was flat on the deck, stunned from the concussion of the blast. He looked around, dazed, as the deck slanted steeply. He slid into one corner of the shattered radio compartment and sat there in shock, staring dumbly as water surged through the open door to the bridge wing. It was an unreal picture that made no sense to his stunned mind. He took one long gasping breath that was the last he ever took, and tried feebly to rise to his feet, but it was too late. He was buried under the warm, green water of the sea.
Kelsey and the crew of Rio Grande stood frozen in shock as Mentawai rolled over with her hull showing above the water like some giant, rusting metal turtle. Except for the two men in the boat who were crushed by the hull, Sherman's boarding party was trapped inside the ship when the explosions occurred. None escaped to dive over the side. With a great roar of inrushing water and expelled air, the freighter dived beneath the surface as if anxious to become one more unsolved enigma of the sea.
No one on board Rio Grande could believe the freighter could go so quickly. They stared in horror at the wreckage mixed with wisps of smoke that swirled around her watery crypt, unable to believe their shipmates were locked inside a steel coffin hurtling toward eternal darkness at the bottom of the sea.
Kelsey stood there for nearly a full minute, the grief and outrage etched in his face. Somehow a tiny thought in the back of his mind finally mushroomed and emerged through the shock. He turned from the whirlpool of death, picked up a pair of binoculars and stared through the forward windows at the yacht vanishing in the distance. Now only a white speck against a blue sky and an azure sea, it was moving away at great speed. The mysterious vessel had not ignored the distress signal, he realized. It had come and gone and was now purposely running away from the disaster.
"Damn whoever you are," he spat in anger. "Damn you to hell."
Thirty-one days later, Ramini Tantoa, a native of Cooper Island in the Palmyra Atoll chain, awoke, and as was his usual routine went for a morning swim in the warm waters of the East Lagoon. Before he took two steps in the white s
and outside his small bachelor hut, he was astonished to see what he recognized as a large Chinese junk that had somehow sailed through the outer reef channel during the night and was now grounded broadside on the beach. The port beam was already high and dry and imbedded in the sand, while the opposite side of the hull was lapped by the gentle waves of the lagoon.
Tantoa shouted a hello, but no one appeared on deck or echoed a reply. The junk looked deserted.
All sails were set and fluttering under a light breeze, and the flag that flapped on the stern was the Stars and Stripes of the United States. The varnish on the teak sides looked shiny, as if it hadn't had time to fade under the sun. As he walked around the half-buried hull Tantoa felt as if the painted eyes on the bows followed him.
