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  The squall hit their ship forcefully, taking their breath away with the storm’s intensity. Sheets of rain driven by a powerful wind tore at them as they hurriedly made their way across the aft deck toward the ship’s cabin. The ship lurched and rolled with the heavy seas as the two men jolted up a short ladder then staggered toward the bridge. They entered the bridge and squinted into the wind that came through the holes in the shattered windscreen.

  Captain Loh Yi-Song turned from his position at the helm and gave them a fierce look. “My helmsman took a bullet in the shoulder, and another -” he gestured in the direction of an inert form stretched out on the deck “- was not so lucky.”

  Hendrick and Malik gave the body of one of their crew, a man named Li, a look of sympathy. The helmsman, Ko, was being attended to by another man who made compassionate noises as he bandaged his shipmate.

  “This is getting expensive,” said Loh.

  “I know,” replied Hendrick in a low voice.

  Loh, his face betraying new emotions, looked at Hendrick. “Thank you for saving one of my men.”

  Hendrick questioned him with a look.

  “The one who had gotten stuck on the ladder,” explained Loh. “I’m not used to seeing a Westerner save the life of a poor Taiwanese.”

  Hendrick nodded and smiled briefly in return.

  Loh turned and looked straight ahead. “If you need any help from me in the future, I stand ready. If trouble finds you, I will stand with you.”

  Hendrick looked at the Taiwanese captain in amazement. The life of one of his men meant so much to him that he would pledge unconditional help to a virtual stranger. “Thank you, Captain,” replied Hendrick in a low, surprised tone.

  Malik pointed forward to an object in the water off the port bow. “What’s that?”

  Hendrick immediately got a set of binoculars and raised them to his eyes. Something was alternately bobbing above the waves and being overwhelmed by them. He caught movement in the oblong shape, but mist from the wave tops obscured any details.

  “It looks like a body,” said Hendrick. He remembered Malik saying he had seen someone fall overboard.

  “Should we run him over?” Malik was only half kidding.

  Hendrick shook his head in indecision, then replied, “No, let’s grab him. You never know. Maybe he’ll be of some use to the Chinese Navy. Maybe he’ll tell them where the pirate base is located.”

  Malik nodded and they both went out the port side of the bridge into the weather. When they reached the main deck, Hendrick got a boat hook, Malik standing ready with his M16. The salvage ship pounded on the waves, gradually pulling alongside the person in the water. A hand stretched out of the water in supplication, then a head popped above the waves. Hendrick squinted into the rain and reached out with the pole.

  I’ll be damned, he thought. It’s a woman. This ought to be interesting.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Woman

  TAIWAN STRAIT

  Hendrick snagged the woman by the back of her belt with the boat hook and hauled her close by the ship’s hull. Malik put down his weapon and threw her a line. She grabbed it and tried to climb up the side of the ship but was too weak. Hendrick pulled on the pole raising her out of the water until Malik could get a hand on her and drag her over the gunwale. She flopped down on the deck like a caught fish. Hendrick and Malik each grabbed an arm and carried her below deck to an empty cabin.

  She sank into a chair, inhaling deeply trying to catch her breath. She brushed her wet hair out of her face and looked over the two men who had saved her. They both stared at her as if she had just been dropped from a flying saucer.

  “Could I have a towel?” she asked in a meek fashion.

  “Who are you?” asked Malik.

  “Maggie Ramsey,” she replied. “I want to thank you -”

  “Where did you come from?” he continued.

  “I . . . I escaped from those pirates,” she stammered and she pointed outboard as if the men didn’t know where the pirates had gone.

  “By jumping into the sea?” asked Malik incredulously.

  “Yes, I hoped that you would pick me up,” said Maggie.

  “We almost didn’t,” replied Malik. “Why were you with the pirates?”

  “I was captured a couple of weeks ago,” she said. She studied their faces and saw that her statement had only engendered more mistrust. She began to shiver. “I’m cold. Can I have a towel and a blanket?”

  “What did they want with you?” asked Malik. “Why didn’t they kill you?”

  “What do you mean ‘what did they want with me’?” she replied with ill concealed impatience.

  “You know what I mean,” said Malik whose eyes and the set of his mouth told her that he didn’t believe a word she had said.

  Her defiant look softened into fear and depression. “They were going to try to get a ransom for me.” She looked at Hendrick, who hadn’t said anything yet, to see if he was sympathetic. He regarded her warily.

  “Did they rape you?” asked Malik.

  Her face clouded over. She shook her head. “No.”

  Malik let out a puff of air to show his disgust. “She’s lying, Steve. Throw her back.” He gave Hendrick a long look, but Hendrick didn’t react to his partner’s remark.

  Malik finally looked about in indecision, then put the assault rifle in his right hand and turned to go. “I’ve got things to do. Do what you want with her. But be careful.”

  Hendrick nodded slightly but didn’t take his eyes off the blond woman in front of him. Malik left the room and closed the door. Hendrick reached over and locked it. He crossed the room and pulled open a drawer, producing a small hand held instrument with a loop of thick wire at the top. He turned it on and walked toward her.

  Maggie immediately grew nervous. She pushed the metal detector away as he began to wave it slowly over her body. He gave her an annoyed look and began again. She shoved it away a second time. He backed up a step and glared at her.

  “All right, we’ll do it the hard way. Take off your clothes,” he said.

  Maggie reached up to hold the buttons on her blouse. She glared back at him. “Not a chance. If you want to rape me, you’ll have to work for it.”

  He rolled his eyes slightly and screwed up his mouth in impatience. “I’m not in a hurry to contract twenty different kinds of venereal disease.” He gave her a fierce look. “You just came from a group of people who have been trying to kill all of us for the last two weeks.” He faced her directly and got within a few inches of her face. “I have to see and feel it all if you’re going to stay on board.”

  “You’re not going to examine me like I’m a slab of meat! You got some nerve!”

  “Fine. Have it your way,” he said. He grabbed her by the front of her blouse and dragged her over to the door. He threw the door open and yanked her down the passageway to the aft deck. She protested and hit him with her fists, but he ignored her futile attempts and yanked her over to the railing.

  “What are you doing?!” she shouted. She screamed in vain as he bent her over the railing, then reached down and grabbed one leg to shove it over as well. “No! Don’t!” she yelled. She was now hanging over the railing except for one leg that she pressed to the gunwale to prevent from going overboard.

  “No search, no stay,” said Hendrick as he reached for her other leg.

  A wave came up and brushed by the side of the ship slapping her in the face with cold water. She choked and gurgled a bit, then shouted surrender. “All right! All right!” she said in a husky voice.

  Hendrick ignored her and pushed her other leg up to the top of the railing as another wave came up and doused both of them.

  She screamed at the top of her lungs. “Okay! Okay! I give up!”

  “What?” asked Hendrick in a calm voice as if he had just heard her for the first time.

  “Search me!” she screamed in his ear.

  Hendrick pulled her back on board with one swift, sure motion, th
en dragged her back to the cabin. He pushed her into the chair and waited impatiently. She shivered with the renewed chill from the seawater and began to sob.

  Hendrick gave her a hard look. “You’ve got five seconds.”

  She began to unbutton her blouse. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to find.” She got her blouse off and threw the sopping wet garment straight at his face. He tried to intercept it, but missed, the blouse hitting him full in the face and wrapping around his head. He peeled it off his head, trying not to give away his amusement and searched it thoroughly as she continued to undress.

  “I knew a girl once,” he began almost pleasantly. “She hid a hand grenade up her butt. Damn near killed me.”

  “I wish she had,” mumbled Maggie as she wiggled out of her pants. She threw it at him aiming for his head again, but this time he neatly picked it out of the air. He searched her pants and threw it over in the corner with her blouse.

  “I knew another girl,” continued Hendrick. “She had a small handgun up her -”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” interrupted Maggie. Maggie gave him a defiant look as she sat in her panties and bra. “Everything okay?” she asked. “No machine gun hidden up my sleeve? No hydrogen bombs in my pockets?”

  “You’re not done yet,” he said ominously.

  She gave him a look of fury and held her arms away from her body. “Where in hell am I supposed to hide a weapon now?”

  “Remember the girl with the hand grenade up her butt?” asked Hendrick.

  Maggie hesitated then reached behind her and pulled out a small metal object from inside her underwear. She pressed a button on its side and a blade snapped straight out from the handle. She turned the knife around in her hand and slammed it blade first into a nearby wooden tabletop.

  “Little miss innocent is not so innocent after all,” said Hendrick. He pulled the knife out of the table and pushed the blade back into the handle. “I’ll keep this for now, if you don’t mind.”

  Maggie sat back in the chair. “I stole it from the pirates. I thought if they tried to rape me, I’d make them pay.”

  Hendrick pulled the metal detector from a drawer and waved it quickly over her body. This time she didn’t resist. Satisfied that she had no other weapons on her, he pulled a long robe out of a closet and tossed it to her. She quickly put it on, then slid her wet undergarments off.

  He picked up her wet clothes. “Dryer down the hall.”

  She nodded. “Thanks.”

  Ten minutes later the dryer buzzer went off, and Hendrick retrieved the mysterious woman’s clothes. He opened the door and tossed the clothes to her. She nodded and gave him a not-unfriendly look.

  Hendrick stared at her for a long moment. She returned the stare, each sizing up the other. He then abruptly turned and went up to the bridge to find Joe Malik.

  Maggie sighed with relief at being free from the pirates. She slowly put on the dry clothes, still warm from the dryer and thought over the two men who had rescued her from the sea. Neither of them had examined her with their eyes as she was used to. Men’s eyes would flick up and down from her face to her toes, lingering on her flat stomach and her shapely hips, finally locking on to her breasts. These men hadn’t done that even though her blouse had clung to her body like a coat of paint.

  One of the men was skinny, had a beard streaked with gray, and had carried an automatic weapon in his hands. While the rifle hadn’t been pointed directly at her, she felt that either one of these men wouldn’t have hesitated to use it on her.

  The other man was younger, about thirty, taller, broad chested, and had a few days’ stubble on his face. One side of his face had small lines of blood on it. She knew he must have been wounded slightly in the gunbattle. He had acted as if he were the one in charge. Maggie decided he wasn’t the best looking guy she’d ever seen. His face was angular with a sharp jaw line, pointed nose, and flat cheeks. She remembered his muscular arms and chest, and narrow waist. When he had gotten close to her, she could see the grime on him and smell a mixture of sweat, diesel fuel, and gasoline. She wondered what he would look like and smell like when he had a bath and a shave. No ring on his fingers, and no telltale white line that would betray his marital status. He might be attractive, thought Maggie, in a rough, animalistic way.

  She felt grateful to him. In spite of him almost throwing me overboard, she thought. But she had to admit, his examination of her was downright gentle compared to all the gawking, probing, and poking the pirates did with her. That really made her ill.

  So what’s with these two? she asked herself. Fighting off pirates and rescuing damsels in distress. If they weren’t so scurvy looking, they’d be heroes. She couldn’t believe her luck, finally winding up on board the ship she was supposed to investigate.

  Maggie Ramsey resolved to complete her mission, to find out why these two were in the Taiwan Strait.

  “So, how’s our blond fish?” asked Malik.

  “Found this,” said Hendrick, showing Malik the switchblade. His partner’s eyes went wide open. “We’ve got to keep an eye on her. She might make the perfect spy.”

  The events of the day started to take its toll on Hendrick. He suddenly felt overcome by fatigue and mumbled to Malik that he was going back to his cabin to rest for a while. The day was waning, the lead gray skies and the battle with the pirates lending a gloom over their ship.

  Hendrick opened the door to his cabin and flicked on a light. He pulled off his foul weather jacket, and flopped down on the bed. He closed his eyes, then heard a rustle near the doorway.

  “In spite of everything, I want to thank you for saving my life,” said Maggie.

  Hendrick opened his eyes and saw Maggie leaning against the doorframe. She was dressed in dry clothes with her hair brushed back. Her hair was starting to dry and puff out, giving her a wind blown appearance. Her body came to mind again as he figured it would, off and on for the rest of his life.

  “So the pirates really didn’t rape you?” he asked.

  “No, they didn’t,” she replied. “My stepfather is a very wealthy Japanese industrialist. He owns a helicopter company. When they found out who I was, their leader figured that my stepfather might refuse to pay a ransom if I was brutalized. So they left me alone.” She laughed silently. He raised his eyebrows in a question.

  “The pirate leader, Chang, tried,” she said. “But he’s got this problem, you see.”

  Hendrick smiled. “Droopy?” He held up a crooked index finger.

  “The droopiest,” said Maggie, and they both laughed out loud. “Maybe that was the real reason they didn’t touch me. Chang couldn’t stand the thought of his men having all the fun.” They laughed again.

  They both fell silent for a moment.

  “You can stay until the Chinese Navy arrives,” Hendrick pronounced formally. Her face turned sour. He looked her over, the mental picture of her nearly naked body roaring through his mind. He marveled at the self-control of the pirates. They must have thought that they could get an enormous sum for her. She definitely was not the kind of woman whom a man could easily resist.

  “Where did you get the suntan?” he asked. He had noted that there was no telltale lightening of her skin as it would under a bathing suit.

  Her face darkened. “They made me sunbathe in the nude. They thought if my stepfather wouldn’t pay up, then they would sell me on the slave market and a full suntan would raise the price that they could get for me.”

  Nothing like knowing your market, thought Hendrick. The pirates didn’t miss a trick. “How much do you think they could have gotten for you?” he asked, restraining a smile.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” she replied.

  “I mean wouldn’t you feel good if they got a lot, like a few hundred thousand dollars.”

  She screwed up her face in irritation. “They talked about a million American dollars.” There was a touch of pride in her voice.

  “Really. A million bucks,” mused Hendrick.
“Now that’s interesting.”

  “Don’t get any ideas,” she said with a wry smile.

  Hendrick eyed her closely. “Maybe I’d pay a million dollars.”

  She gave him a coy look. “Not for sale.”

  Hendrick closed his eyes again, and the vision of her defiantly jamming her switchblade into the table came to mind. Tall, leggy, flat stomach, nice round T and A, beautiful face, and blond, he thought. What else is there?

  “So, this is obviously a salvage ship,” said Maggie. “What are you guys going to salvage?”

  Hendrick opened one eye and stared at her for a moment, then closed it again.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you guys were going after the Awa Maru,” she said.

  Hendrick tried not to react to Maggie’s supposedly careless remark.

  “Awa Maru?” he asked with raised eyebrows.

  “Yeah. You know, that Japanese ship sunk near the end of World War Two,” she replied. “Supposedly it had anywhere from three hundred million to five billion dollars worth of stuff on board.”

  “I’ve heard about it,” said Hendrick carefully. He closed both eyes trying to be casual about the conversation.

  “That’s why the pirates were attacking you. Right?” she asked. “They talked about you handing over any recovered treasure.”

  “So how do you know about the Awa Maru?” asked Hendrick with one eye open again.

  “I overheard the pirates talk about it,” she replied.

  “You know Chinese?” he asked.

  “I majored in Oriental languages in college,” answered Maggie. “They said that they were going to wait until you had recovered something, then take it from you. They were quite put out when you didn’t just roll over and die. I guess that’s not your style.”

  “Joe would be pissed at me if I did that,” said Hendrick.

  “Oh,” said Maggie with a small smile. “It wouldn’t do to have Joe mad at you, would it?”

  “Joe is one mean son of a bitch,” he replied. He opened the other eye. “What else did the pirates say?”