Sea of Greed

“She was on a shakedown cruise when she vanished,” Perlmutter said. “Her crew were mostly new recruits. They’d spent a month in England, training with the Brits. Nothing outlandish about that. Also, she was in the process of being delivered. Unlikely that she would be on a secret mission before she’d ever reached Israel to be fitted out.”

“And yet the erroneous position reports suggest something was going on,” Kurt said.

Perlmutter tugged thoughtfully on his beard. “I must admit there have always been rumors about that vessel. The sinking, the disappearance, even the search for it, were controversial. At one point, a high-ranking Israeli officer claimed the government had deliberately misled those who’d been looking for her because they didn’t want the wreck to be found.”

“But it was discovered,” Kurt questioned. “And the Israelis had parts of the ship salvaged, including the bridge, right?”

Perlmutter nodded. “There was talk of bringing the whole ship up, but it was too costly and complicated an endeavor, especially as the wreck lies so deep.”

Kurt said, “The question I have is, why consider it at all? We’ve salvaged a few ships in our time. No one goes to that expense unless there’s an incredibly important — even singular — reason for doing so. Usually something on the sunken vessel that a government wants or something they don’t want anyone else to have. Which makes me think the Dakar was carrying something the Israeli government wanted kept secret.”

Perlmutter looked slightly out of sorts. He shifted in his chair and took another sip of the cognac and then placed the glass down slowly. “I have roughly thousands of volumes of various types here, Kurt, and I can assure you there’s nothing in any of them to support your theory.”

“I’ll accept that,” Kurt said. “But there are other forms of information, including word of mouth, and I know you speak with people who talk off the record. And honoring those commitments, I know you’ve never written a single word of it down. But you have it all stored”—Kurt tapped the side of his head—“up here.”

Perlmutter’s frame stiffened. “Talk and innuendo are dangerous things to trade in, especially when one is grasping at straws. You never know who will hand you a few, only to watch you fall. I imagine this has something to do with Joe and Ms. Priya disappearing?”

“It does,” Kurt admitted. He brought St. Julien up to speed on everything that had happened, filling him in on the link to the oil crisis and to what Millard had told him. “Right now, I have nothing else to go on. I have no way to stop what we’re dealing with, no way to track down the people who took Priya and no chance of bringing them to justice for what happened to Joe. If straws are all that are left, I’m reaching for them with both hands. So, if you have any information suggesting the Dakar was involved in a clandestine mission and carrying a secret cargo when she went down, I need to hear it.”

“There have always been rumors about that vessel,” Perlmutter admitted. “Most are frivolous, but there is one I’ve heard that may interest you. Several years ago — almost a decade now — I was in France having dinner at a wonderful gastropub with a colleague from the French Military Historical Society. We were on our second bottle of wine when the subject of missing vessels came up. I told him a few stories from NUMA’s list of great discoveries — nothing classified, I assure you. Suitably impressed, he tried to match me, story for story. Eventually, he asked if I’d heard the true story of the Dakar.

“Naturally intrigued, I told him I had not. He agreed to enlighten me but spoke in the vaguest of terms. At any rate, his intimation was that the French Air Force had sent the Dakar to the bottom, not a malfunction or accident.”

Kurt narrowed his gaze. “The French Air Force? Why would they sink an Israeli sub?”

Perlmutter stroked his beard. “My friend wouldn’t say, but he offered a possible answer in the form of another rumor. This one suggested the French and Israelis had jointly developed a new weapon. Something to be used in the event of another Arab invasion. He told me others thought it might be a hydrogen bomb — which is logical, as the French were helpful in the creation of the Israeli nuclear program — but he personally thought it was something more sinister. He described it as being a doomsday weapon.”

“Doomsday?”

“My friend is fond of dramatic terms,” Perlmutter said. “Upon later explanation, I understood him to mean a weapon that couldn’t be stopped once it was unleashed. Not even at the border.”

“Biological,” Kurt said.