Deadly Coast (30 page)

Dugan closed his eyes and thought of Bosun Luna, flaming tire around his neck, his agonizing death recorded to brutalize his family. He thought of other families in the Philippines, India, Europe, and the US—and victims yet to be. And his heart grew hard.
What goes around, comes around.

“Bon appétit, boys,” he whispered, and turned toward
Luther Hurd
without looking back.

Author’s Notes
The Facts behind the Fiction

A novelist never lets the facts get in the way of a good story, but I firmly believe the strategic use of facts make a tale more compelling. Given that truth is often stranger than fiction, I thought a review of the facts behind
Deadly Coast
might be of interest.

Unit 731
Epidemic Prevention Research Lab
Hygiene Corp
Japanese Imperial Army

I’ve visited Japan many times, and found the Japanese to be gracious and friendly. So much so, it’s often difficult to believe the events of the Second World War and the period leading up to it. Horrifying human experimentation carried out by Unit 731 was rumored for some time, and in the last fifteen years, well documented. The Dr. Ishii Shiro mentioned in the book was a real person. Under his leadership, Unit 731 committed atrocities that are almost beyond belief.

None of the perpetrators of these atrocities were brought to justice. At the war’s end, members of Unit 731 were the world’s foremost experts on chemical and biological warfare (largely as a result of their inhuman experimentation). Much documentation was destroyed before it was captured by occupying forces, and the world in 1945 was still a dangerous place. In that context, Ishii Shiro and his colleagues, a group unknown to the world at large, traded expertise for immunity. The rank and file of Unit 731 were sworn to secrecy and melted back into the general population, while higher-ranking members became advisors to classified US chemical- and biological-warfare programs. The official position was that Unit 731 never existed.

The Japanese government never changed that stance, but a decade or more ago, something extraordinary happened. Former members of the rank and file of Unit 731 began to tell their individual stories. Local governments, assisted by volunteers, many of whom were academics, set up exhibitions in sixty-one locations across Japan. In the course of eighteen months, the truth was told. Many of those testimonies are chronicled in a book by Hal Gold, titled
Unit 731 Testimony
. It isn’t reading for the faint of heart.

While Mr. Gold’s book provided the historical background, I did take license. None of the dialogue or actions attributed Ishii Shiro in
Deadly Coast
are factual, and the relationship with his Nazi counterparts is also my invention, as is Dr. Imamura. There was never an Operation Minogame, but there was an operation conceived by Dr. Ishii for a last-ditch biological attack against the US mainland.

Operation PX was finalized on March 26, 1945. It was to be a suicide attack against the US West Coast by the
I-400
, the largest Japanese submarine and one of only three vessels of its class.
I-400
carried three seaplanes in watertight hangars, and the sub’s range was to be extended by converting ballast tanks to fuel tanks. She was to launch a seaplane attack against West Coast population centers with plague, cholera, and perhaps hantavirus. The crew was then to run the vessel aground and carry other pathogens ashore.

Ishii’s plan was scrapped just prior to launch by General Umezu Yoshijiro, Chief of the General Staff. Umezu reportedly stated, “If bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world.” Umezu remained steadfast against the plan through the last five months of the war, even as the US bombed Tokyo to rubble. He faced violent opposition for his reticence.

General Umezu was given the inglorious duty of representing the Japanese Imperial Army at the surrender aboard the USS
Missouri
, and later was tried as a war criminal. He received a life sentence and died in Sugamo Prison in 1949. Dr. Ishii never served a day in prison, and died of throat cancer in 1959. Go figure. One can only hope Ishii’s demise was a painful one.

The Liberty Ship
SS
John Barry

Every good pirate tale needs a treasure ship, and I was pleased to find a real one in the neighborhood. Owned by the US War Shipping Administration and operated by Lykes Brothers Steamship Company of New Orleans, Louisiana, the SS
John Barry
sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, on July 24, 1944. She was bound for Iran with war materiel, with an intermediate stop in Saudi Arabia to deliver three million newly minted silver
riyal
coins. She never made it.

On the night of August 28, 1944, the
John Barry
was torpedoed by the German submarine
U-859
, and sank in over 8,500 feet of water, 127 nautical miles off the coast of Oman. Two seamen died in the attack, and the rest took to lifeboats. These survivors’ tales placed the
John Barry
solidly in the ranks of history’s lost treasure ships.

According to the captain’s statement, there was an additional secret cargo of $26 million (at 1944 silver prices) in silver bullion aboard the
John Barry
. The captain’s statement was backed by anecdotal evidence from other crewmen, and cryptic, if inconclusive, references scattered throughout official records. The existence of the additional silver was never established. Clearly out of reach over a mile and a half deep, the
John Barry
and her cargo became another legend in the pantheon of lost treasures.

And so it remained until 1992, when an unlikely alliance of American treasure hunters and an Omani sheik employed a British salvage expert and a French drilling vessel in an ambitious attempt to wrest treasure from the depths. Using an unmanned remotely operated vehicle to place explosives, the operators of the drillship
Flex LD
blew open the
John Barry
’s hull and used a mechanical grab of their own invention to scoop up the exposed silver coins. The salvors managed to raise 1.8 million of the confirmed cargo of 3 million silver riyals.

Unfortunately, the silver bullion (if it exists) couldn’t be identified in the jumbled wreckage, and the rest of the silver coins were too mixed in the wreckage to allow easy extraction. The salvors terminated operations with a stated intention of making another attempt. To date, the remaining riches of the
John Barry
remain unrecovered.

I took obvious liberties with the story, but the methods employed by my fictional drillship,
Ocean Goliath
, closely parallel those used by the very real drillship
Flex LD
. Most importantly, the
U-859
was not sunk immediately after her attack on the
John Barry
as indicated in the story, but sailed on to make some very interesting history of her own.

U-859

Contrary to the portrayal in the novel, the real
U-859
was outward-bound from Germany to the German-Japanese submarine base in Malaysia when she encountered and sank the
John Barry
.
U-859
was a type IXD2 boat, the latest class of submarine in the
Kriegsmarine
, and on her maiden voyage. Class IXD2 boats were large, with a range of 30,000 miles, and charged with the increasingly perilous task of maintaining a sea link between the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan. By 1944, the subs provided the only remaining method for sharing technology and scarce resources.
U-859
, like many eastbound subs, carried a cargo of mercury, in perpetual short supply in Japan and vital in the manufacture of munitions. Other boats carried not only mercury but also parts and drawings for the Messerschmitt ME163, an early jet fighter. Drawings the Japanese used to develop the Mitsubishi J8M1. Five of these advanced planes were captured when the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Records show that radar technology, optical instruments, and parts for V-2 rockets, along with German technicians, all made the long undersea voyage in the bellies of German U-boats. Reading of the technology transfer from Germany to Japan, I wondered what Germany might have received in return, and the idea of Unit 731 transferring biological-warfare expertise was born.

Before encountering the
John Barry
, the real
U-859
had already sunk two Allied ships and survived an air attack from a British Catalina off South Africa. She managed to shoot down the British plane, but was depth-charged and damaged in the fight. By the time she found and sank the
John Barry
, the limping U-boat was the subject of a search by British forces, which the loss of the
Barry
intensified. Undeterred, three days later Korvettenkapitan Jan Jebsen, the skipper of
U-859
, attacked and sank the M/V
Troilus
of the Blue Funnel Line.
U-859
sailed on, evading all British attempts to locate her.

But all was not well aboard
U-859.
Her snorkel was damaged in the earlier depth-charging and was only partially effective. Forced to remain submerged almost constantly by British patrols, the atmosphere inside the boat was increasingly toxic. It was with great relief that Jebsen surfaced on the night of 16 September and received radio orders to proceed to base at Penang, Malaysia.

A week later, on the morning of 23 September,
U-859
was approximately twenty nautical miles northwest of the base at Penang. Confident he’d finally shaken pursuit, Jebsen was cruising on the surface and allowing his weary men the luxury of coming topside in shifts to suck in lungfuls of fresh sea air. He was a bit more than an hour from the safety of the port. At Swettenham Pier in Penang, garlands of flowers were prepared for
U-859
’s crew and a Japanese naval band was tuning up. A crowd of Japanese and German naval personnel stood ready to welcome
U-859
, giving the base a carnival air.

Much closer to
U-859
, HMS
Trenchant
slipped beneath the azure waters of the Malacca Straits as her captain, Commander Arthur Hezlet, RN, studied the approaching U-boat in his periscope—the Royal Navy had found
U-859
at last. Or more accurately, the U-boat found the Royal Navy, since the British had intercepted the Germans’ signals to base and broken the code. Commander Hezlet had been in position for thirty-six hours, awaiting
U-859
’s arrival.

HMS
Trenchant
fired a spread of three torpedoes from her stern tubes, with the middle torpedo striking the German sub just astern of the conning tower.
U-859
broke in half and sank immediately. Of the sixty-seven men aboard, nineteen survivors were in the water, including seven who made an astonishing escape from inside the sinking boat. Among the seven was the only officer to survive, twenty-two-year-old Oberleutnant Horst Klatt, the sub’s first engineer. Much like my fictional Japanese, Dr. Imamura, Oberleutnant Klatt was in the toilet at the time. I based my description of Imamura’s escape on Klatt’s firsthand account of his own harrowing and miraculous experience.

Though perilously close to Japanese forces, Commander Hezlet ordered HMS
Trenchant
to surface and rescue survivors. Minutes into that exercise, Japanese ships appeared on the horizon and a Japanese fighter appeared overhead. Hezlett managed to pick up eight survivors, including Oberleutnant Klatt, before the attack forced him to submerge and evade. The remaining eleven Germans were rescued by the Japanese.

The story doesn’t quite end there, for
U-859
did indeed contain a biological hazard and she was salvaged years later. After researchers turned up the fact that the submarine sank with some thirty-one tons of toxic mercury aboard, there were wide-spread concerns the flasks would eventually leak, poisoning the seafood chain. After diplomatic discussions between West Germany and Malaysia, the West German government launched a salvage operation in the winter of 1973.

There were ethical as well as environmental concerns. Containing the bodies of almost fifty German submariners, the wreck had long since been designated a burial site by the German War Graves Commission. As
U-859
’s only surviving officer and the individual most familiar with the sub, Horst Klatt, then fifty-one years old, was asked to lead the expedition. And lead it he did, eventually recovering some thirty of the estimated thirty-one tons of mercury.

The Pirates

The world has a romanticized view of piracy; but with apologies to Johnny Depp and Captain Hook, there’s nothing romantic about it. As I write these words on September 2, 2012, Somali pirate gangs hold eleven ships and 178 hostages of various nationalities. Yesterday, pirates in Haradheere murdered a crewman from the
M/V Orna
in cold blood and wounded another, announcing in a phone call to the press “More killings will follow if the owners continue to lie to us — we have lost patience with them.” To most folks, those numbers and events mean little, but they represent a threat all too real to those who make their living on the world’s oceans and their friends and families.

The total number of hostages at any given time is a moving target, with hostages being ransomed as new hostages are captured. The International Maritime Bureau reports that last year (2011), a total of 1,206 seamen were held hostage at some point during the year, including some held for more than two years. Hostages are forced to live in deplorable conditions and subjected to constant physical and psychological abuse. Based on interviews with freed hostages, over half report being beaten and approximately ten percent suffered severe abuse, including being tied up in the sun for hours, being locked in freezers, or having fingernails pulled out with pliers. Thirty-five hostages died in 2011, nineteen of whom died while used as human shields.

Deadly Coast
is fiction, and none of the characters or their actions is real. As much as I might like to play God and wrap up the Somali pirate problem so neatly, I’m afraid the solution offered exists only between the covers of this book. But though the story is fiction, I did attempt to sketch the scenes in Somalia with some authenticity. I was greatly assisted in that effort by the book
The Pirates of Somalia
by Jay Bahadur. Mr. Bahadur is a Canadian journalist who spent time in Somalia interacting with the pirates. The result is a compelling narrative that is obligatory reading for anyone interested in learning about Somali pirates. I will add that Mr. Bahadur went to great lengths to present a balanced view and his book is wonderfully objective. As a novelist rather than a journalist, I labored under no such obligation, and my pirates are considerably nastier than Mr. Bahadur’s. I leave it to the reader to decide which portrayal they find more compelling.