Circle of Bones: a Caribbean Thriller Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Inscription

  Map

  Prologue

  1-Royal Naval Dockyard

  2-The island of Guadeloupe

  3-At sea off Guadeloupe

  4-New Haven

  5-At sea off Guadeloupe

  6-The Atlantic south of Bermuda

  7-Aboard the Bonefish

  8–The harbor at Point-a-Pitre

  9- Washington, DC

  10–Pointe-à-Pitre

  11-Marigot Bay, Guadeloupe

  12-Pointe-à-Pitre

  13-The Atlantic south of Bermuda

  14-Pointe-à-Pitre

  15–Pointe-à-Pitre

  16–Pointe-à-Pitre

  17-Aboard the Bonefish

  18-Aboard the Shadow Chaser

  19-Le Mambo Cafe

  20-The Atlantic south of Bermuda

  21-Le Gosier

  22-Aboard the Bonefish

  23-Grand Terre, Guadeloupe

  24-Fort Napoleon

  25-Bourges des Saintes

  26-Îles des Saintes

  27-The Atlantic south of Bermuda

  28-Îles des Saintes

  29-Îles des Saintes

  30-Aboard Bonefish

  31-Aboard Bonefish

  32-The Atlantic south of Bermuda

  33-Aboard the Fish n’ Chicks

  34-Aboard the Bonefish

  35-Aboard the Shadow Chaser

  36-Bourges des Saintes

  37-Aboard Shadow Chaser

  38-Aboard the Shadow Chaser

  39-The Atlantic south of Bermuda

  40-Aboard the Shadow Chaser

  41-From Bonefish to Shadow Chaser

  42-Portsmouth, Dominica

  43-Aboard Fish n’ Chicks

  44-Portsmouth, Dominica

  45-Indian River, Dominica

  46-Indian River, Dominica

  47–The Atlantic south of Bermuda

  48-Indian River, Dominica

  49-Indian River, Dominica

  50-In the air

  51-The Atlantic Ocean

  52-Îles des Saintes

  53- Washington, DC

  54-McLean, Virginia

  55-Foggy Bottom

  56-McLean, Virginia

  57-Foggy Bottom

  58-The Atlantic Ocean

  59-Foggy Bottom

  60-The Library of Congress

  61-Washington, DC

  62-Washington, DC

  63-Washington, DC

  64-Georgetown

  65-At sea off Guadeloupe

  66-Georgetown

  67-Georgetown

  68-Leesburg, Virginia

  69-Leesburg, Virginia

  70-Fort Napoleon

  71-Aboard the Savannah Jane

  72-Aboard the Savannah Jane

  73-The Caribbean Sea off Guadeloupe

  74-Scott’s Head Bay, Dominica

  75-Scott’s Head Bay, Dominica

  76-Îles des Saintes

  77-Scot’s Head Bay, Dominica

  78-Aboard the Bonefish

  79-Aboard Fast Eddie

  80-Aboard the Bonefish

  81-Aboard Shadow Chaser

  82-Aboard the Bonefish

  83-Aboard the Shadow Chaser

  84-From Bonefish to Fast Eddie

  85-Off Îles de la Petite Terre

  86-Aboard Fast Eddie

  87-Aboard Shadow Chaser

  Epilogue - Cherbourg, France

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  Books by Christine Kling

  CIRCLE OF BONES

  By Christine Kling

  Published 2011 by Tell-Tale Press

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written consent of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions. Your support of authors’ rights is appreciated.

  Copyright © 2011 Christine Kling

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design, Inc.

  Visit Christine Kling at http://www.christinekling.com

  This one is for my mother,

  the ghost I talk to most.

  The tale is different if even a single breath

  Escapes to tell it

  from “The Shipwreck”

  by W.S. Merwin (1956)

  Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

  Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

  Map of Central Caribbean Islands of Guadeloupe and Dominica

  Prologue

  Cherbourg, France

  November 19, 2008

  The man lingered in the dark alley, the bill of his hat pointing through the gray veil of rain that poured off the café’s awning. From her seat inside the window, Riley blew at the steam rising off her café au lait and watched him from the corner of her eye. He rocked, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Rain dribbled from the baseball cap jutting out from under his hood. She couldn’t see his face, but she looked down anyway. She knew it in her gut. He was watching her.

  Her chest got that dizzy, hollow feeling as her heart rate climbed. She concentrated on slowing her breathing as she had been trained to do. She tried to sip her coffee with nonchalance but grimaced at the taste of it. Either the French had forgotten how to make coffee, or her mouth was dry from nerves. She’d thought she was over all this.

  When she glanced up again, the man had disappeared. Riley brushed the hair back from her eyes and pressed her nose to the window. She checked the street in both directions. Her breath fogged the glass, but there was no sign of him. Closing her eyes for a moment, she rested her hot forehead against the cool glass. She was getting as bad as Cole. Perhaps paranoia was contagious, she thought, and that made her sit back in her chair and shake her head.

  God, how she missed him. After all these months, she thought of him almost daily. Even the steady morning rain outside the café window reminded her of the falling ash. Down in the islands, it had covered everything – been impossible to wash away. It had blanketed her boat’s decks, clogged her nostrils, turned her sails gray.

  But that was more than six months ago. Now she was back in France, in Normandy, watching as another shower battered the awning in front of the café where she sipped from a soup-sized bowl of café au lait, thinking of all the dead – and tasting ash.

  Tossing some euros onto the table, she abandoned her coffee and pushed back her chair. She pulled on her yellow foul weather jacket. The rain had stopped abruptly so, when she reached the sidewalk, she left her hood down and glanced up at the gray sky. A last fat raindrop caught her in the eye. She brushed the back of her hand across her wet cheek. Not today. No tears.

  From behind, someone grabbed her arm. Her fists flew up as she spun around, then she yanked her arm out of the grip of that hard hand. Adrenaline shot through her system and her pulse roared in her ears. T
he man in the black slicker and ball cap stood behind her. He grunted and held a cardboard sign in front of his chest. Words scrawled in black marker stated that he was both deaf and dumb, a veteran of la guerre l’Indochine.

  She lowered her hands and examined him. His face was partially covered by wraparound sunglasses. Was he blind as well? Scraggly whiskers framed his yellow teeth, and beneath the slicker she saw layers of torn and dirty clothes. He bent down and picked up a crutch; his left leg was wrapped in bandages. Long strands of wet gray hair trailed out from under his cap. Riley inhaled a whiff of day-old garbage, and she saw the look of disgust on her own face reflected in the large mirrored lenses. He reached out a grimy hand, offering her one of several small brown paper bags of roasted chestnuts.

  He had been watching her — but only because she was a tourist, a likely mark.

  She swallowed the sour taste in her throat and dug into her bag. He was a soldier. Or had been. Like her. She placed a ten euro note in his palm and his fingers closed around hers.

  All the nerve endings in her fingers lit up as his hot flesh squeezed her hand tight. Her heart ricocheted in her chest as she tried to pull free, and she felt the flush travel from her hand to her face. She gulped several shallow breaths. What was going on? The Marine Corps had trained her not to react, to be a stone-faced sentry, and she’d been damn good at it.

  Then he pulled her fingers open and started to place the brown bag in her hand. She yanked her hand free. Waving off the bag, she backed away. Not certain if he could see her, she mumbled, “Non, non.”

  She turned and started walking.

  The man hobbled after her, grunting with insistence. He shook the brown paper, and she heard the sound of the nuts clicking together. She saw that she would have to take the bag to make him leave her alone.

  “Merci,” she said as she stuffed the paper bag into the pocket of her rain jacket, careful not to touch him again. She turned and marched down the street, not knowing where she was going, but only that she had to get away.

  When she’d put enough distance between herself and the old man, she stopped and leaned against the wet stones of a small church. What was that about? Her reaction hadn’t been fright – but what was it?

  Thinking about the past was making her jittery. But that was why she was there. Riley pulled out the small map the hotel concierge had given her. She found her way to the yacht basin, circled the marina to the outer jetty.

  It was important to arrive first. She didn’t know what she’d say to him, but she wanted to have a chance to see the meeting place and to think.

  From the sea, the Surcouf memorial was designed to look like a submarine’s periscope. The large bronze plaque on the face of the monument had weathered so green from battling years of sea spray, it was difficult to read. Riley ran her fingers over the names of the dead. Speak to me. She listened for their voices on the gusting North Atlantic wind but heard nothing aside from the whoosh of the waves breaking on the jetty and the cries of the gulls swooping behind a fishing boat chugging out to sea. Just because her brother Michael spoke to her on occasion, it didn’t mean all the dead would.

  So many names. There were one hundred and thirty of them. LAMOREAUX - CLAIRMONT - MICHAUT - GOHIN, and on and on, including the three British Royal Navy men: MCKAY - MULLINS - WOOLSEY. Column after column like the stark white crosses in a military cemetery. But each name had once been a living, breathing man — a son, a brother, a father.

  The blustery wind whipped her cotton skirt against her legs, and she tried in vain to keep the stray wisps of hair from blowing into her mouth as she read aloud:

  Aux morts

  du

  Sous-marin Surcouf

  Le Surcouf construit et lancé a Cherbourg le 18 octobre, 1929

  Disparu en mer le 18 fevrier, 1942 sous le commandement du Capitaine Alain Lamoreaux

  The big boat had fled France before the Nazi occupation, assisted Allied convoys in the Atlantic, and finally, left Bermuda bound for Panama just weeks after Pearl Harbor. But she never arrived.

  Disparu. But what disappears can sometimes be found. They’d proved that. Riley remembered watching the clear green water, the odd, colorless fish, and feeling the eerie stillness in Shadow Chaser’s wheelhouse as they all crowded around the small video screen while Theo steered the remotely operated vehicle into the coral-encrusted hold.

  Closing her eyes, she tried to banish the images that replayed in her memory like some kind of Mobius filmstrip. She felt her face crumpling but she fought it off, because damn it all, it still hurt too much to see that last image of Cole Thatcher, his mouth grinning impossibly around his scuba regulator, his eyes seeming to look right into hers through the face mask, lens, camera, cable.

  Like the screen they had been watching that day, she tried to make her mind go blank. Now you see him, now you don’t. Disparu en mer.

  She swallowed hard. No tears.

  When it was over, when the searchers had given up, and all but two bodies had been collected, she learned that what disappears cannot always be found. Ashes to ashes.

  After everything that had happened these past six months, only a few words had drawn her back here to France. She came because this was the birthplace of the submarine that had once been Cole’s love, his passion. Riley came to see the memorial for herself and because she was tired of looking back over her shoulder all the time. She checked her watch for the hundredth time. But most of all, she thought as she gazed back down the pier, she had come to this sea-swept jetty because it was the perfect place for a reunion.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Royal Naval Dockyard

  Ireland Island, Bermuda

  February 12, 1942

  Lieutenant Gerald Woolsey shuffled down the quay, his head bent into the chill wind, his thick arms hugging the wooden crate to his chest as if in a passionate embrace. He had no desire to find out what might happen if he dropped the thing — he was no expert with explosives. Likely wind up nothing more than a red stain, and while that was happening to the rest of his countrymen with a gruesome regularity, he was determined to survive this war. His kind generally did.

  He stopped and hiked the crate up, lifting the weight of it with his thigh, trying to improve his grip on the rough wood planks.

  He was counting on the fact that the French sentries aboard the submarine had been doing a lousy job ever since he and the other two Brits, McKay and Mullins, had come aboard. His fellow Brits were a telegraphist and signalman, and Woolsey was the BNLO, British Navy Liaison Officer, assigned to serve aboard the Free French sub because God knows, you couldn’t exactly trust the Frogs with the Allied naval code books these days, not even these Free French sailors who claimed allegiance to De Gaulle instead of Admiral Darlan. Free French or not, this crew didn’t like the English one bit. But then, the feeling was mutual on that count.

  Most of the time, when he boarded the sub, the sentry, if there was one, merely gave him that Gallic look of disdain they all managed so well.

  As he closed in on the massive boat, Woolsey thought again that she looked a good bit better from afar than she did on closer inspection. Her tall conning tower and topsides were painted the same color as the low threatening sky, but her bulbous forward gun turret and aft hangar made her appear almost comical — like she sported some sort of sausage with a tumor. The French had named her Surcouf – after an eighteenth century privateer, Robert Surcouf. There were those who referred to her as the “Pride of the French Navy,” but they tended to be either Frogs or politicians. They didn’t know that at 361 feet and 3250 tons, she was the biggest white elephant on the sea.

  When they’d assigned him to this boat, his superiors had assured him Surcouf was the first of a new class of radically different submarines, an underwater cruiser with her twin eight-inch guns in that waterproof turret, antiaircraft cannons, machine guns, twelve torpedo tubes, and a hangar with her own reconnaissance seaplane. But the truth was, she’d been plagued with bloody French des
ign flaws from the first — even before he came aboard. Everything from her electric motors with faulty armatures, to the batteries spilling sulphuric acid nearly poisoning all the crew, to the hydroplanes that struggled to keep her from rolling when she dove — all had kept this sub returning to shipyards from Portsmouth to Halifax. Though first launched in 1929, she had yet to fire her guns in battle, and the Allies were bloody tired of paying the tab to keep her afloat. Given the number of ships lost to the U-boats the last couple of months, who’d notice one more?

  As he approached the dark hull, Woolsey nodded to the sentry who, for the first time he could remember, was standing at the base of the gangplank. He tried to will the hands that gripped the crate to look relaxed, yet still hold tight. Just a box of radio equipment, he had told the captain when he left the boat that morning for launch to Hamilton to go to pick it up. A radio with new frequencies the Germans weren’t on to yet. He’d tried to sound like he knew what he was talking about, all the while being vague enough not to arouse suspicion.

  “So long as you are back aboard by this afternoon,” Captain Lamoreaux had told him. They were to sail for Panama on the tide that evening. So he’d promised to shake a leg to make it back to the boat in time. Woolsey smiled at the thought. The captain wanted to make certain he returned to the boat. The fool.

  The sentry’s jersey was wrinkled and stained with what looked like coffee, and the red pompom on his cap hung loose by a thread. A cigarette dangled from a corner of the man’s mouth. He glanced at the crate Woolsey carried, but he made no move either to question him or to offer assistance.

  What was the point of keeping a sentry if the bloke was too lazy to even have a look at a crate of equipment coming aboard? Blithering idiots, the French. They deserved what was coming.

  Once on board, Woolsey made his way through the hangar and down one deck to the signal room. He was surprised to discover both the companionways and the radio room were empty. He encountered only one man who opened a door a crack, widened his eyes, then clanged the door shut. The giant sub seemed strangely quiet apart from the constant hum of her generators and fans. Woolsey stepped over the coaming into the cramped compartment, set the crate on the floor and slid the metal door closed behind him.