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official acknowledgement, and if things went south, the team would be on their own.
    “It’s an underwater salvage operation,” he continued. “You’ll be looking for a sunken wreck in the South China Sea. Find it, verify it’s really where we think it is, and then come home without attracting any attention. Zero attention, to be precise.”
    Dane was pleasantly surprised by th at. While it was true that SEALs were arguably the deadliest warriors in the US military, they were also some of the best trained divers anywhere.
    Maxie slid a file folder across the desktop and Dane scooped it up, eager to learn the details of the mission. Would they be looking for an experimental stealth drone that crashed to close to Chinese waters? An illegal arms shipment bound for North Korea?
    There was a single sheet of paper inside and most of it was blank, but even after reading it three times, Dane still couldn’t make sense of what was written there. “Is this correct sir? I’m supposed to find a Japanese ship from World War II?”
    “The Awa Maru ,” Maxie said.
    The sheet of paper included a brief excerpt detailing the sinking of the Awa Maru , an ocean liner that had been impressed into Japanese naval service, running supplies and personnel between the island nation and her colonies in the South Pacific and Indonesia. On April 1, 1945, an American submarine, the USS Queenfish , under the command of Elliot Loughlin, had sunk the ship with torpedoes.
    Dane lowered the brief and met Maxie’s impassive stare. “Sir, maybe it’s not my place to ask why, but…why?”
    “ Correct. It’s not your place to ask,” Maxie agreed in a clipped tone, but then his lips twitched into a smile. “Nor was it my place to ask the SECNAV, but I did anyway. What do you know about Admiral Loughlin?”
    Dane faintly recalled Loughlin’s name from his classes at Annapolis. Loughlin had been something of a legend during the war, and in the years that followed had become one of the most decorated officers in US Naval history, twice earning the prestigious Legion of Merit award. The incident with the Awa Maru was the only black spot on his record; the ship had been purportedly transporting supplies for POW camps, under the auspices of the Red Cross, and all US ships had been ordered not to engage her. After the sinking, Loughlin was immediately relieved of command, court-martialed, and found guilty of negligence, though ultimately his career had survived and he had gone on to earn the rank of rear admiral.
    Maxie nodded as Dane finished his recollection. “The Awa Maru went down with all hands, except for one lone survivor; over two thousand dead, mostly civilian businessmen, diplomats and merchant marines. The Navy brass feared that it would be a public relations disaster, generating sympathy for Japan, but strangely the incident was mostly hushed up. Loughlin received a slap on the wrist—a Letter of Admonition in his permanent record—and the US agreed to pay the Japanese reparations for the loss of the ship. But it turns out, there’s a lot more to the story. To begin with, the Awa Maru had already dropped off its supplies in Singapore. It was transporting cargo back to Japan, cargo which would have aided in their war effort.”
    “Which would have made it a legitimate military target,” Dane said. “No wonder the Japanese didn’t make more of a fuss; if word got out that they were using Red Cross designated ships to smuggle contraband, it would have been an even bigger PR disaster for them.”
    “And if the Awa Maru had reached its destination, it would have been a military disaster for us. She was carrying enough war loot—gold, platinum, diamonds—to finance the war for several more years. It’s also believed that the ship was carrying the bones of the Peking Man, which went missing during the war and have never been found.”
    Dane shook his head. “Let me get this straight. The SECNAV wants us to go treasure hunting?”
    “I