Ghost Ship Read online

  GHOST SHIP

  A JAKE SANDS ADVENTURE THRILLER

  ROGER WESTON

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, dialogue, and plot are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Weston Publishing Enterprises

  All rights reserved.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER 1

  Graveyard of Ships

  Alang, India

  December 9, 2012

  The stench of burning oil filled the air along with the smell of death. That was not the problem, however.

  “Don’t go there, Professor. Please. It is not safe.”

  “I came over ten thousand miles for this.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You must not go beyond the fence.”

  Professor Jake Sands could hear grumbling truck motors, clanking on metal, and chanting voices. “I’m not worried,” he said.

  “No, professor. I would not have agreed to bring you this far.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  Dressed in rags, Bandhu stepped forward, a hostile gaze in his eyes. “I cannot let you go. Foreigners are not wanted here.”

  “I won’t be long.”

  Smoke and dust dimmed the sun behind a murky haze. It was said that a man died on this beach every single day. Occasionally, ten or twenty died in an accident or explosion, but nobody kept track. No death certificates were issued. It was that kind of place.

  “Last month, a Russian sailor wandered beyond the fence,” Bandhu said. “He has not been seen since.”

  “Thanks for your help.” Jake reached into his pocket. “I promised you ten dollars.” He handed Bandhu a hundred dollar bill knowing that was as much as Bandhu made in a year. Before the man could stop him, Jake stepped through a rift in the fence, five miles from the main entrance to this graveyard for ships. Before him, towering freighters leaned haphazardly on their final resting place. Their looming rusty carcasses lay side-by-side as far as Jake could see, which wasn’t far because mounds of oil sludge burned hot, creating a haze that swallowed up the vessels. Piles of scrap torn from the steel remains were heaped in tangled masses on the shore. Motors, pipes, wires, ropes, transformers, and metal plates littered the beach. Men dressed in rags streamed in and out of the ships carrying salvaged material. Barrels of oil and industrial fluids stood like sentries on watch.

  Thirty minutes later, Jake was inside his fourth ship, the Southern Trader. He kneeled down by a port hole. They were coming for him now, and there weren’t two or three as he had feared. There were a dozen uniformed guards with nightsticks in their fists. Would they believe him—that he was just exploring the condemned ships and collecting stories to tell his students back at the university? His worst crime was trespassing. Considering how far he’d come to see these ships, surely the guards would let him off.

  He hoped…

  Less than a kilometer away, the guards marched in unison down the grimy beach towards him.

  “Stay away,” Bandhu had said. “It is a place of death.”

  The men split into three groups and began to search the hulls further down the beach. Jake figured that would take them a while. He had a few more minutes before he had to clear out, and right now, he couldn’t leave if he wanted to because two men with shotguns were standing by the rift in the fence, his only exit from this ship breaking yard.

  Jake passed a line of the gaunt workers dressed in soiled rags and turbans as he ventured down the Southern Trader’s interior passageway. The work beasts were carrying tattered bedding toward the gangway, and they gave him no trouble. In the wheelhouse, Jake looked up at a tangle of copper wires hanging from the ceiling. More spilled out of the ship’s consul. On the ground, he spotted what he was looking for—a ship’s log. He slowly ducked and leaned toward the book, careful to keep clear of the exposed wires. He added the leather-bound book to his backpack next to the logs that he’d taken from the other ships.

  On his way to the captain’s quarters, he opened a closet and found more books. This was a maritime historian’s bonanza. He grabbed a handful of the blue books and stuffed them in with the others. He was now eager to leave the area and get out of the country. He’d had enough of sneaking around. On the lower deck, he found a porthole and scoped out the shoreline.

  He saw that the guards had finished searching the previous ships’ ruins and were marching towards the doomed Southern Trader.

  The brutes with shotguns stood directly between Jake’s ship and the gash in the fence that he’d entered through. He was trapped. He noticed a team of laborers heaving a six-by-ten slab of steel plate above their shoulders and carrying it up the beach to a waiting truck that exhaled a cloud of thick diesel smoke as it waited for its load. Several more teams of work beasts carried their similar burdens behind the first set of men. If Jake could just get to that truck at the right moment…

  From the deck below came the shout of a guard leader as he prodded his hell hounds to hurry their search and flush out their quarry. Jake waited by the porthole as a third group of workers loaded their metal slab onto the truck. These men, who were mostly covered with oil, finished their task and started back to the ship for more scraps. Jake was about to make his move when a vast plume of blue smoke belched out of the truck’s exhaust pipe.

  “No way,” Jake said. “The truck’s only half full. It can’t leave now.”

  He waited to see if the truck was going to move up the coastline and stop at the next ship, but it drove past the armed thugs and left the shore entirely.

  Then a haggard group of laborers came down the passageway he was holed up in. As they passed, every one of them stared at Jake, and they exchanged glances among themselves, as if wondering whether or not to turn Jake in. As the last raghead limped past, Jake grabbed him and pulled him aside. He waved three hundred-dollar bills in the man’s face. “Give me your clothes.”

  The man didn’t comprehend, so Jake grabbed his shirt and shook it with one hand as he shook the cash with his other. When he let go of the man’s clothes, there was oil on his hand, so he rubbed it all over his face.

  Dressed in rags and a turban, Jake limped down the stairs to the lower level where he joined the weary procession of workers who were walking single file, each carrying metal to a new truck that had just pulled up. That would have given Jake hope except that th
e two shotgun guards were now leaning against the truck. Carrying his backpack in his arms beneath a filthy rag, Jake strayed from the line toward a few other workers who were hauling heaps of bedding to a pile by the fence.

  When he got to the snarled pile of mattresses, he drifted behind a marine diesel engine that was as big as a small yacht. From there he made for the break in the fence. He had just slipped through the opening when a fast movement delivered a club to the back of his neck.

  Jake landed hard, but rolled and sprung onto his feet. He found himself surrounded by thugs. Feet shuffled. Arms whirled. Night sticks cracked against his arms, shoulders, and spine. His face landed in a puddle of asbestos-flavored mud.

  “You Greenpeace scumbags have destroyed our industry,” a man with hateful, yellowish eyes said.

  Jake tried to get up and was rewarded with a steel-tipped boot against the ribs. As he hit the mud again, clubs lashed out like the whips of a nine-tailed cat.

  “Your propaganda has left thousands out of work and starving to death.”

  “I’m not with them. I’m—” A boot in the face silenced him.

  He grunted as he hit the ground. Spitting the toxic grime from his mouth, he struggled to his feet, swaying like a mainsail in the wind. Looking around he found the faces of the guards about as friendly as a rabid wolf pack.

  “I’m just a history professor.”

  “You lie.” A man lunged toward Jake. The muscles in the man’s arm flinched and the scar on his forehead creased as he snapped out a night stick.

  Jake exploded at his tormentor, slamming him into the fence, causing him to drop his club and groan in pain. As a second man rushed at Jake with raised club, Jake blocked the man’s wrist and delivered a stunning blow to the junction of the man’s carotid artery. The thug dropped like an anchor. Another wolf rushed at him with a scream. Jake ducked the blow and lashed out at the man’s neck. With an iron grip, he crushed the man’s thyroid cartilage, taking him out of the fight. A wild-eyed brute ran at Jake with a big knife. Jake seized the man’s wrist as he delivered a kick under the butcher’s arm. Jake saw a blur as the man flew against two other thugs, knocking them down like bottles on a shelf.

  As Jake spun around, the pack rushed him. The clubs came at him from four different directions. He took blows against his arms, ribs, and mouth. He was beaten to the ground, and then a dozen boots unleashed their vengeance. Jake spit out a tooth as a boot crashed into his face. His neck snapped back as another boot slammed into his stomach. His face, ribs, kidneys and legs absorbed kicks fueled by hate. Jake realized he was being beaten to death. Through double-vision he saw two Bandhus. The last thing he heard was a gunshot.

  CHAPTER 2

  Three Days Later

  Jake lay on a table under mosquito netting, inhaling the scent of emissions and fecal odors that drifted in through an open door. He stared at newspapers that wallpapered the shack, a dilapidated structure that was built on stilts over a marsh. He watched as mosquitoes collected on the netting that surrounded him. Sitting up, he washed down an anti-malarial tablet. As he drank, the water interacted with the nerves of his freshly-chipped tooth, and a lash of pain woke him up in a hurry. He grit his teeth and tapped his fingers on the table until the pain dulled.

  He slapped on several gallons of mosquito repellant and rose from the table, which he had been honored to sleep on since it was the only bed in the shack. He stepped outside and was glad to see that for the first time in three days he was not urinating blood. The swelling in his eyes had diminished quite a bit, and he remembered his name and date of birth. He swished a few flies off his face and felt the stitches on his cheekbone. They were surprisingly well done given that he’d been stitched up by a superstitious woman who sold garments from a blanket on the sidewalk, the same woman who three days ago had pronounced him dead after a brief inspection.

  Traditional Hindi music and the blaring tunes of Bollywood filled the street and competed for dominance. The strange mixture of sound nearly drowned out the noise from all kinds of motors—trucks, cars, motorcycles and scooters and the hundreds of people that milled about on the dirt road. But the honking horns and voices chattering in a foreign tongue rose above the din. A truck painted like a shrine thundered past Jake. Its load of scrap metal crashed loudly when its back tire hit a pothole the size of the Red Sea. The truck rumbled on down the shack-lined dirt path. As it faded from sight, two cripples began yelling at each other from their fold-up chairs on opposite sides of the street. Jake couldn’t understand their argument, but it quickly dwindled into what sounded like friendly banter.

  Turning to return to the shack, Jake’s cell phone rang, and he answered it.

  CHAPTER 3

  Richter 1st Building

  Long Beach, California

  December 12

  Sitting in his luxury office suite, Charles Richter skimmed over his notes on Jake Sands again. He’d read them so many times that he didn’t even need them anymore. Sands’ curriculum vitae passed through his fingers, but he had it memorized as well.

  Charles smiled as he tossed the heavy cotton paper aside.

  Jake Sands was not an investigative journalist. That was good. Very good. He was a non-tenured professor who hadn’t published a paper of value in years. He was a prolific writer, but the research papers he wrote were about tramp freighters, not luxury cruise liners. Not only that, his papers were full of generalizations and infested with grammatical errors. This was a man who wouldn’t open closets and look under rocks. He was the type to take the path of least resistance. He would grab material from a public relations packet, spin an attitude, and run for the finish line. Perfect.

  There was even more about Jake Sands that appealed to Richter. Although he was a maritime history professor, he didn’t take his job too seriously. If he could get out of teaching to spend a day on his crab boat he would. Matter of fact, he turned down tenure just so he could spend more time on the sea and less time trying to please the fickle editors of scholarly journals. Most importantly, he’d never published a word about the Queen Mary.

  Richter knew that when Jake came to Long Beach, he wouldn’t spend his time hibernating in government archives and digging into complicated transactions. No, this was a man who knew how to enjoy life.

  Sands was nothing at all like the fool from the Florida Historical Society who had followed Richter’s development of the Miami Skyline Hotel. The man had scoured the public records for months and interviewed everyone involved. He’d written op-ed pieces for the local paper and stirred up sentiment about preserving historical landmarks. He’d dragged in experts and radical environmentalists. He’d searched for the slightest incongruence with a magnifying glass and turned inferences into theories and public accusations. The man tarnished a carefully-crafted public image and caused ongoing delays for the Skyline Hotel transaction—that is until he got drunk one night and fell off the fifteenth-floor balcony of his high-rise condo. What a shame.

  Richter picked up a thick file and felt calm as he paged through the dossier that he’d had a private investigator prepare on Jake Sands. The man was good. He’d analyzed Sands thoroughly. He even enrolled in Jake’s popular Merchant Marines History class. The man noted that while Jake’s syllabus said one thing, in class he would routinely go off on tangents and never get back on topic. He loved to tell stories and would often bring old ship log books to class and read them with his students. He would go on and on about them. To pass his class all you needed to do was listen and participate in discussions. If you shared his enthusiasm you were guaranteed an “A”. While Sands clearly loved maritime history, his focus was on rust-bucket cargo ships, not golden-age luxury liners like the Queen Mary.

  Charles knew Jake’s cell phone number, address, office location, and teaching schedule. He knew that Jake relied heavily on his assistant and steered clear of faculty politics. Charles also knew who was sending Jake mail and how much money was in his bank account. He knew Jake’s father had died at sea an
d that he was raised by his mother. He knew a hundred other details.

  He dialed Jake’s number, and his call was answered quickly.

  “Hello, Professor Sands. My name is Charles Richter, owner of the Richter hotels and casinos. I’m buying the Queen Mary from the City of Long Beach, and I understand that the city council is considering using you to give a commemorative speech before the ship’s final voyage across the Pacific.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Just a minute.”

  Richter heard static and brushing against the phone. He waited impatiently for a moment then continued, “Listen, I’m thrilled that the Long Beach city council is thinking of going with you. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s a done deal.”

  “What? Oh yeah, great. Looking forward to it.”

  “I’d like to fly you down here for the occasion. It’ll give me a chance to meet you in person. I’ll put you up in the Richter Beach Hotel. It’s a five star facility, and all your expenses will be covered. By the way, are you German?”

  “What?”

  “German heritage? Sands sounds German. Was your father German?”

  “Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

  Richter was quiet for a moment. “Just want to get to know you a little better. But we’ll have plenty of time to talk when you arrive.”

  “Sure, I’ll come down. When should I book the trip?

  “I understand you like to travel with your assistant.”

  “Yeah, Ashley helps keep track of the details and gets me to where I need to be on time.”

  “Wonderful. She won’t have many details to bother with in Long Beach. My people will handle everything. Tell Ashley she can enjoy herself. My assistants will arrange for a weekend of fun for both of you at the Richter Beach Hotel.”

  Jake hesitated, “She’ll need her own room, of course.”

  “Right. My jet will pick you up on Friday. Don’t worry about a thing. Your meals will be in five star restaurants and you’ll have a car and driver at your disposal…and two rooms at the Richter Beach Hotel. My people will be in touch.”