The Solomon Curse Page 2

  The men ran in confused flight to a safe elevation, but only a few made it. When the tsunami attacked the island, the wave was a hundred feet high. The surge as it crashed against the unyielding rock carried half a mile inland, wiping the ground clean like the swipe of the sea god’s hand.

  That night, the shaman and a handful of the survivors huddled around a campfire, well away from the shore, the ocean no longer their benevolent provider.

  “It is the end of days,” the holy man said with the conviction of a true believer. “Our ruler has angered the giant gods. There is no other explanation for what we endured. We have been cursed for our arrogance and all we can do is pray for forgiveness and return to lives of humility.”

  The men nodded. Their king had put himself on the same level as the giant gods and had been punished for his insufferable sin of pride. His temples and palace were gone, and he with them, erased as though he’d never existed.

  In the following days, the survivors gathered and spoke in hushed tones of the day the gods’ harsh justice had been meted out. The holy men gathered for a summit, and after three nights emerged from their sacred grove to counsel the islanders. The king’s name must never be spoken again, and any reference to his kingdom, his temples to his own glory, would be erased from their collective memory. The only hope was that by banishing his existence from the island’s lore, the giants would be appeased and forgive the islanders for his actions.

  The stretch of coast where the city had once stood was considered cursed by those who lived through the disaster. Over time, the precise reason was forgotten, as were the events of the dark times that ended the island’s prosperity. Eventually, the cove that looked out over the placid bay became an encampment of the diseased and the dying, a place of suffering colored by a reputation for misfortune that grew hazier over the years.

  Occasionally the king’s name could be heard as a muttered curse, but, beyond that, his thousand-year legacy faded into obscurity, and within a few lifetimes Loc was only remembered in forbidden stories told in whispers by the rebellious. The legend of his divine palace and its riches diminished with each successive generation until finally it was considered to be folklore, ignored by the young, who had no time for the fearful stories of the past.

  CHAPTER 2

  Solomon Sea, February 8, 1943

  Gale-force winds churned the heavy seas into white foam as the Japanese destroyer Konami plowed southeast of Bougainville Island. The ship was running without lights in the predawn gloom as it bucked through the massive waves. Engines strained as forty- and fifty-foot breaking cliffs of black water slammed into the bow.

  Conditions aboard were miserable. The vessel rolled ominously as it pursued a course well away from the calm straits to the west, where the naval force evacuating the last of the soldiers stationed on Guadalcanal was steaming through flat ocean.

  The Yūgumo-class destroyer, with a long waterline and sleek engineering, was capable of over thirty-five knots wide open. But tonight it was crawling along at less than a third of that speed, and the power plants throbbed steadily belowdecks as the weather slowed its progress to a crawl.

  The sudden squall had hit unexpectedly, and the exhausted and emaciated soldiers being transported home were hard-pressed to keep their rations of rice down. Even the seasoned faces of the sailors were strained at the pounding they were receiving. One of the seamen moved along the cots, dispensing water to the soldiers, offering what limited comfort he could. Their uniforms were little more than rags now, their bodies in the final throes of starvation.

  On the bridge, Captain Hashimoto watched as the helmsman tried to meet the chaotic swells to soften the worst of them. There seemed to be no rhythm or direction to the confused seas, and the ship was battling to stay on course. He’d briefly considered deviating to flatter water but had chosen to keep forging north toward Japan. His schedule allowed no time for detours whatever the reason.

  The destroyer had been conscripted on a top secret mission under cover of darkness, capitalizing on the confusion caused by the Japanese’s final evacuation of the island. The officer they had taken aboard had been deemed too important to the war effort to be risked in the main evacuation, so he and his elite staff had been spirited away aboard the Konami, which had veered east while the rest of the force proceeded on a more westerly tack, running the customary gauntlet from Guadalcanal to Bougainville Island.

  Hashimoto didn’t know what was so special about the army officer who required the dispatch of a destroyer for his transport. He didn’t care. He was accustomed to following orders, often seemingly in conflict with common sense. His role as a Japanese destroyer commander wasn’t to second-guess the high command—if the powers in Tokyo wanted him to take his crew to hell and back, his only question would be how soon they wanted him to leave.

  A monster of a wave appeared from out of nowhere on the port side and slammed into the ship with such force that the entire vessel shuddered, jarring Hashimoto from his position. He grabbed the console for support, and the helmsman glanced at him with a worried look. Hashimoto’s scowl matched the storm’s ferocity as he debated giving the order he hated. He sighed and grunted as another mammoth roller approached.

  “Back off to ten knots,” he grumbled, the lines in his face deepening with the words.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the helmsman acknowledged.

  Both men watched as the next cliff of water rose out of the night and blasted over the bow, for a moment submerging it before passing over the ship’s length. The vessel keeled dangerously to starboard but then righted itself as it continued its assault on the angry seas.

  Captain Hashimoto was no stranger to rough weather, having guided his vessel through some of the worst the oceans could throw at the ship since her christening a year earlier. He’d been through two typhoons, survived every type of adversity, and come out alive. But tonight’s freak storm was pushing the limits of the ship’s handling and he knew it.

  When morning came, he’d be faced with an even greater danger—the possibility of being hit by a carrier-launched Allied plane equipped with a torpedo. Night was his cloak, and usually his friend—with light came vulnerability and the ever-present threat of breaking the streak of good fortune that had marked his short wartime career.

  Hashimoto understood that at some point his number would be up, but not tonight—and not from a little wind and a few waves. Could it be that the war was lost now that their occupation of Guadalcanal was over? If so, he would do his duty to the end and die a courageous death that would do justice to his rank and family name—that was a given—and he would follow the course of so many of his fellow combatants in the best samurai tradition.

  The army officer they’d rescued from the island entered the bridge from below. His face was sallow and drawn but his bearing ramrod stiff. He nodded to Hashimoto with a curt economy of motion and eyed the frothing sea through the windshield.

  “We’ve slowed?” he asked, his sandpaper voice hushed.

  “Yes. Better to proceed with caution in this weather than race to the bottom.”

  The man grunted as though disagreeing and studied the glowing instruments. “Anything on radar?”

  Hashimoto shook his head and then braced himself for another jolt as a big wave reared out of the darkness and broke against the bow with startling ferocity. He stole a glance at the army officer’s face and saw nothing but determination and fatigue—and something else, in the depth of his eyes. Something dark that caused Hashimoto a flutter of anxiety, an unfamiliar sensation for the battle-hardened veteran. The man’s eyes looked like one of the classical illustrations of an oni, a demon, from his childhood. The thought sprang to mind unbidden and he shrugged it off. He was no longer seven years old and had seen real-world devils since the war had started; he had no need for belief in the mythical past.

  He was turning to ask the officer what he could do for him when the
ship shuddered like it had run aground, and then everyone on the bridge was yelling as alarms sounded.

  “What’s going on?” the officer demanded.

  “I don’t know.” The captain didn’t want to speak his darkest fear out loud.

  “Did we hit something?”

  Hashimoto hesitated. “There’s nothing to hit. We’re in nine thousand feet of water.” He paused as a junior officer approached with a pallid face and gave a grim report. Hashimoto nodded and issued a terse instruction, then turned back to the army man. “I’m afraid we must prepare for an unpleasant possibility. I need to ask you to go below and follow the emergency instructions that are issued.”

  “What?”

  Hashimoto sighed. “It appears that a repaired area of the hull has split open. We’re going to do everything we can, but it’s uncertain whether the pumps can keep up. If not, we may have to abandon ship.”

  The officer’s face went deathly white. “In this?” He stared through the glass at the storm.

  “We’ll know soon enough. Hopefully, we can control the damage.” He looked away. “Please. Leave me to my duty.”

  The army officer nodded grimly. He turned and moved to the stairs and barely kept his feet when another big wave crashed into the port bow, causing the ship to list alarmingly.

  Hashimoto went through the motions, directing his crew to take all possible measures as the helmsman struggled to keep the ship right, but in the end the fury of the sea proved too much. As the dark waves continued their assault and the last of the bridge lights flickered off, the vessel’s heavy steel hull now an anchor as it sank, his thoughts drifted to his wife, Yuki, and his one-year-old son—the son with whom he’d only spent a few short hours while on leave and who he’d never see grow into a man.

  But even that vision couldn’t erase the shame he felt at having failed in his mission. He vowed that he would die with dignity, going down with his ship, rather than struggling to survive like a coward.

  Three hours later, the seas flattened as the storm moved north. The depths had swallowed the four-hundred-foot-long ship without a trace. With no record of its journey and no escort or other vessels within hailing distance, its demise would go unremarked, its existence scrubbed from the official record, taking its final secret to the bottom with it.

  Only four survivors were eventually rescued by an Allied ship; heavy weather and sharks killed the rest. The Allied command showed no interest in what a Japanese ship was doing so far off the beaten path, and the men pulled from the ocean had nothing to offer but stoic silence. Their part in the war was over, their disgrace a fate worse than death.

  CHAPTER 3

  Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, present day

  Three fiberglass skiffs tugged at the lines that secured their bows to palm trees as the cobalt blue water surrounding them sparkled in the afternoon sun. Sam and Remi Fargo sat in the shade of one of the palms, the fronds stirring in the light breeze. Remi shielded her eyes from the glare with a manicured hand and watched the heads of divers bob to the surface near a fourth boat ninety yards offshore.

  Sam shifted and brushed his fingers through his medium brown hair and glanced at his wife and partner for life. Refined features bereft of makeup were framed by long auburn hair, and her smooth skin glowed from the sun’s caress. His gaze traced down her athletic form, and he reached out a hand to her. She took it with a smile and sighed. Even after countless globe-trotting adventures in search of archaeological treasures, they were still inseparable, a testimony to the strength of their bond.

  “I could get used to lying on this beach, Sam,” she said, closing her eyes.

  “It’s gorgeous, I’ll give you that,” he agreed.

  “If only they had a Bloomingdale’s . . .”

  “Or a decent dive shop.”

  “To each their own.” Remi slipped a Valentino flip-flop off her heel and dangled it from her toe.

  They hadn’t been sure what to expect when they’d agreed to fly to Guadalcanal and were relieved to find themselves in a tropical paradise of warm water and blue sky.

  A tall, lanky man in his fifties approached from down the spit of sand, with a face that was red from sunburn, a pair of battered steel-rimmed spectacles perched on his hawklike nose. His scuffed hiking boots threw up a cloud of white with each step. A group of islanders lounged nearby, watching the divers, laughing among themselves at some private joke. The man’s shadow stretched long on the shore as he neared them. Sam looked up at the new arrival and a grin lit his ruggedly handsome face.

  “Well, Leonid, what do you make of all this?” Sam asked.

  “It’s definitely unlike anything else on the island,” Leonid said in his slight Russian accent. “Looks man-made. But as I said on the phone, that’s impossible. It’s in eighty feet of water.”

  “Maybe you found Atlantis,” Remi offered brightly, teasing Sam’s longtime friend. “Although you’re about five thousand miles off the mark, if the traditional accounts are to be believed.”

  Leonid frowned, his expression conveying nothing but his usual disapproval of anything and everything. An academic on a three-year sabbatical from Moscow, Leonid Vasyev was an unhappy man even when freed from the Russian winter to roam the globe in search of lost civilizations—his passion—made possible by a grant from the Fargo Foundation.

  When Sam and Remi had gotten his call about reports of a sunken find in the Solomon Islands, they hadn’t hesitated to travel halfway around the world to join him on his quest. They’d landed that morning, arriving too late to secure diving gear until the following day, and had contented themselves with reading the background matter he supplied while enjoying the tranquillity of the beach.

  Two weeks earlier, a baffled teacher on Guadalcanal had called her former professor in Australia with an odd story. Her husband and son had registered unusual readings on their new fish finder and had turned to her for help. The Australian had been too busy with classes to do anything besides refer her to Leonid, a colleague she knew was footloose and fully funded.

  After a series of long-distance discussions, the reluctant Russian had flown in to see for himself what the teacher was describing. Over the past few days, he’d grown increasingly puzzled by the formations his divers reported. The fishermen had thought that the irregularities might have been war wreckage, but they were mistaken. Their fish finder, one of the first on the island, had spotted something unexplainable—what appeared to be man-made structures jutting up from the bottom of the sea.

  That was when Leonid decided to seek out reinforcements. He was an academic, not a deep-water diver, and he knew that he needed help. Since the Fargos were his benefactors and friends, he decided to go straight to the top, and after a long-distance conference call they’d agreed to come join him on Guadalcanal.

  “Your underwater camera system could use some fine-tuning,” Sam said, eyeing a blurry photograph taken the prior day. “And couldn’t you get some photo paper? This looks like someone spilled wine on a newspaper.”

  “You’re lucky I found a place with a color printer. In case you haven’t noticed, Guadalcanal isn’t La Jolla,” Leonid said drily. He considered the image Sam was studying. “Come on. What do you think?”

  “It could be just about anything. We’ll have to wait until I suit up and dive. This might as well be a Rorschach test, for all the detail it’s showing.”

  “Do you see your mother’s angry face?” Remi asked innocently.

  Leonid eyed them like they were insects in a jar. “I see the infamous Fargo sense of humor hasn’t melted in the heat. That’s quite a relief.”

  “Lighten up, Leonid. We’re in paradise, and this seems like it might be exactly the kind of mystery we love. We’ll get to the bottom of it,” Sam said. “Although Mom did look kind of annoyed in that last snapshot.” He looked over at the divers. “You sure I can’t borrow some gear from one of
the locals?”

  Leonid shook his head. “I already asked. They’re fiercely protective of their stuff. Sorry. We’ll reserve some for tomorrow once we’re back in town.” Because of the limited amount of equipment, during high season most of the island’s reliable gear was already claimed by the local dive tour companies.

  “That’ll work,” Sam said.

  “I’m going to check on what the divers found this time around,” Leonid said, wiping his brow with the back of his hand.

  They watched him trudge down the beach, ungainly as a stork in his long khaki pants and tropical-weight long-sleeved shirt. Remi leaned in to Sam. “What do you make of this?”

  Sam shook his head. “I have no clue. I’ll reserve judgment until we know more. But it’s definitely intriguing.”

  “What baffles me is how anything could remain undiscovered this close to shore.”

  Sam looked around the desolate bay. “Well, there isn’t a lot going on here, is there?”

  Remi nodded. “I think we agreed on that a few minutes ago.” She shook out her auburn hair, and Sam noted that she was already getting tanned. He eyed her reclining form and slid closer.

  They watched Leonid bark at the lounging islanders, who reluctantly rose and pulled one of the skiffs to the beach so he could board. A small wiry man wearing cutoffs and a dark brown T-shirt splashed to the stern and hoisted himself over the side. After three energetic pulls on the starter cord, the old motor roared to life, and they backed away from shore and cut a beeline to the dive boat.

  Remi glanced down the beach to where several of the islanders were dozing in the shade near the water’s edge and sighed.

  “You have to admit the place is idyllic. I mean, blue sky, warm water, trade winds . . . What more could you ask for?”