"Down periscope," Moreno ordered.
"Descend to fifty meters."
According to the intelligence he had, the tanker drew almost twenty-five meters when fully loaded. Moreno went forward to the sonar man.
"Range?"
"Three hundred meters," the man announced. Moreno waited. He cocked his head as a noise began to reverberate through the hull. The sonar man turned down the volume on his set and looked up at Moreno.
"The screws."
They were hearing the sound the Jahre Viking's propellers slicing through the water. It grew in intensity as they got closer.
"Two hundred meters."Slow to one half," Moreno ordered. The Viking was big, but it was slow, making no more than tenknots.
The entire submarine had begun to vibrate, and when the ship rolled almost ten degrees before righting itself, Moreno knew they were passing through the massive tanker's bow wake.
"One hundred meters!" The sonar man had to yell to be heard over the vibrating sound echoing through the steel tube.
"Slow to one-quarter," Moreno announced.
"Are we past the propellers?" he asked, leaning close to the sonar man.
The man nodded, his eyes closed, focusing on the sound.
"Fifty meters," he announced. Moreno felt a bead of sweat dribble down his temple onto his cheek. He did not raise his hand to wipe it off, knowing the action could be more easily seen than the perspiration.
"We're under!" the sonar man yelled.
"Up, slow, very slow," Moreno ordered.
"Maintain one quarter speed."
He licked his lips, as this part was guesswork. It they were over and didn't make contact squarely or hit the propellers – he didn't allow himself to project those lines of thought further.
"Forty-five meters," the dive master announced.
"Slow and steady. Forty meters."
Moreno slowly walked back into the center of the crowded control room. Every eye was on him, except those of the dive master, who was watching his gauges, hands resting lightly on his controls.
"Thirty-five meters."
The submarine was rocking even more violently now, turbulence from the proximity to the massive ship right above them.
"Thirty meters."
"All stop. Brace for impact!" Moreno yelled, and the order was relayed through the submarine.
"Turn on the magnets."
His executive officer threw a red switch, and power ran to the two horseshoe-shaped brackets fore and aft. The energized magnets caught the nearest attraction – the steel behemoth above the submarine. The invisible lines of force reached out and pulled the much smaller submarine toward the vessel above it.
Moreno's knees buckled as the magnets made contact with the oil tanker with a solid thud.
"Contact!" the executive officer yelled unnecessarily. Moreno stood still for several moments, the only sound that of the tanker's screws behind them and the turbulent water rushing by.
"Maintaining contact," the executive officer said. Finally Moreno allowed himself to smile. They had their ride to San Francisco.
"Power down to minimum," Moreno ordered.
"Silent running."
Not that anyone was going to hear anything from the sub, given the sound of the tanker's massive screws churning just a couple of hundred meters behind them, but it never hurt to be careful.
"The Golden Lily," Vaughn said.
"Literally," Tai confirmed. They both sat back on their rucksacks, listening to the air being pulled by them.
"At least part of it."
"But our target isn't the gold," Vaughn noted.
"We still have to find Abayon."
"And when we find him?" Tai asked. They were seated on their rucksacks, the only light the dim red glow of Tai's flashlight.
Vaughn pulled out a canteen and took a deep drink.
"Then we get out of here, call it in. The rest of the team comes in. We kill him. We leave."
"Hell of a plan, since we still haven't pinpointed his location."
"That, we do next."
"And go where, after the mission is done?"
"That's too far ahead," Vaughn said.
"All right," Tai allowed.
"Say we find him. The rest of the team comes in. We kill him. Then what?" Vaughn shrugged.
"Then he's dead and the Abu Sayef are fucked."
"And the gold?" Vaughn stared at her in the glow from the red lens flashlight.
"Not my business."
"Whose business do you think it is?"
Vaughn closed his eyes and rubbed the lids, trying to momentarily drive away the irritation he felt there. He'd been up now for over thirty-six straight hours and it was beginning to wear on him.
"Who are you?"
When there was no answer, he opened his eyes and looked at Tai. She was staring at him, and he knew she was trying to figure out if she should trust him, which he didn't give a shit about, because he had no clue whether he could trust her.
"Remember back in isolation where I mentioned the Black Eagle Trust?" she finally said.
"Yes."
"It came out of the Golden Lily," Tai said.
"After the war, we recovered a good portion of the treasure that the Japanese and Germans looted. Some of it was given back to the rightful owners, mostly pieces of art in Europe where the scrutiny level was higher. But gold – like that below – a lot of it was untraceable, or could be melted down into bars that were untraceable."
"And that became?"
"The Black Eagle Trust," Tai said.
"At the end of the war some far-thinking people saw the threat that communism posed for the West. And they realized that they would need money – a lot of it – to wage the fight."
"I thought that was called taxes," Vaughn noted.
"The Black Eagle fund was a slush fund," Tai said.
"Used to bribe people, influence elections, pay for black ops with complete deniability."
The last thing she'd mentioned caught Vaughn's attention.
"There was an OSS operative by the name of Lansale," Tai continued.
"He went into the Philippines before MacArthur invaded and linked up with the guerrilla forces – not to mobilize the guerrillas, but with the explicit order to find as much of the Golden Lily as he could. Which wasn't as easy as it sounds, since the Japanese were brutal about trying to hide places like this. They thought nothing of executing all the slave labor they used to build them – and even killing their own engineers who worked on them – in order to keep the locations secret."
"How did this Lansale know about the Golden Lily?" Vaughn asked.
Tai shrugged.
"That's an interesting question. After the war, General Yamashita, the Japanese commander in the Philippines, was captured. He never talked before his execution, but his driver, a Major Kojima, was secretly tortured, and it was rumored he gave up the location of several of the caches, including some that Marcos recovered directly for his own fortune."
"But you said Lansale went in before the war was over," Vaughn noted.
Tai nodded.
"I don't know what Lansale knew or how he knew it, but however he found out about it, he realized its significance right away. He went to three of Roosevelt's top advisors – the Secretary of War and the two men who would shortly become the Secretary of Defense and the head of the World Bank. They told Roosevelt that they needed to gain control of as much of the Golden Lily as possible – and when Roosevelt died, we have to assume they went to Truman with the same cause. The treasure they recovered was spread out around the world, to a lot of banks. They used that to create gold bearer certificates that could be used in any country in the world. The war against communism was, in a way, fought in a most capitalistic way.