chart. Like many such maps, they showed a best guess about the shape of the sea floor extrapolated from spotty data accumulated over many years. He circled an area with one forefinger. “We are here.”
“Doesn’t look so big on paper,” Bones remarked. “But that’s close to four thousand square miles.”
“You’re right. What else do you see?”
Bones looked again. He let his eyes rove over the map, taking in the surrounding area. To the southwest the depths rose and fell chaotically breaking the surface with the hundreds charted islets and reefs—merely a token representation of the more than three thousand land formations that comprised the Spratly Islands. To the east lay Palawan and the Philippines. The upper region of the map was mainland Asia, along with the southern tip of Taiwan.
“What were you doing out here?” Maddock murmured, tapping the chart. “The Awa Maru picked up cargo in Singapore…” He moved his finger to the lower left corner of the map. “She traveled alone, without convoy escort, carrying billions of dollars in gold, heading for Japan. The safest and most direct route would have been to stay closer to the mainland, and head toward the Taiwan Strait, which is how it was originally reported. So, what was she doing way over here?”
“If the original reports were wrong about where she was sunk,” Bones mused, “maybe they were also wrong about her destination.”
“Not Japan? Where then?” Maddock moved his finger back to the starting point in Indonesia and retraced the ship’s route along a north-northwest azimuth that brought him to the search zone, but instead of stopping there, he kept going, following the same imaginary straight line until his finger reached land.
“Manila Bay,” Bones said.
“Why?”
“Does it matter? Maybe they need to refuel or pick someone up. Maybe they were supposed to meet a convoy. Maybe someone in Manila wanted to buy the bones of the Peking Duck. Whatever the reason, this ship was on its way to the Philippines, not Japan.”
“That’s an assumption,” Dane cautioned. “You know what they say happens when you assume.”
“Bull crap.” Bones folded his arms. “Look, regardless of where the ship was headed, we know that it was sunk somewhere in our grid—Loughlin’s coordinates, plus or minus sixty miles. If she was going to Japan, we’ll probably find her in the northwest quadrant. But if she was heading for Manila, she’s somewhere in here—the middle of the grid. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll search this area sooner or later; we can do it today, or next week. So the question is, what does your gut tell you?”
“My gut?”
“Yeah. That thing you never learned to trust?”
The corner of Dane’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Well, if you’re willing to trust my gut, who am I to argue?”
With Bones still at the hel m, the Jacinta motored thirty miles to the south and resumed the search. On the second pass, they found the ship.
Dane stared at the profile of the sea bottom, shown on the monochrome display of the sonar unit. A long flat protrusion, sharply angled on one end, jutted up from the otherwise smoothly undulating seafloor. It was, unquestionably, a man-made object; the keel and hull of a large ship, on its side.
Professor, who had joined them on the bridge during the trip south, clapped Willis on the shoulder, and Bones let out a war whoop worthy of his ancesto rs.
Dane, however, shook his head. “It’s too short.” He pointed at the screen. “The Awa Maru was over five hundred feet long. That ship is three hundred…maybe three-fifty. It’s not long enough.”
Bones waved him off. “Oh, come on, Maddock. Can’t you just let yourself be right once in a while? It’s exactly where you predicted it would be.”
“You think there’s only one sunke n ship out here? They fought a war here, remember?”
Professor nodded sagely. “Actually, I’m surprised this is the first wreck