Order of the Black Sun Box Set 4

by Preston William Child

  Manni smiled. He was amused by Ali's ingenuity and admired the cruel captain for his ability to fool people into believing that he was harmless.

  26

  The Enigma of the Seven Seas

  Lunch was brought from the galley into the mess hall.

  “Looks delicious!” Crystal exclaimed at the colorful dishes. “Looks like the guys here go all out. I should go on more salvages, I think.”

  “I’ll tell Jonah and the kitchen boy that you like it, Mrs. Meyer,” Ali grinned as he sat down with the expedition team.

  “Your crew?” Purdue asked. “Aren’t they dining with us?”

  "Oh no, sir. They have already eaten. Besides, now that the sea is a little calmer we have much to get ready before we are attacked by the storms again, right?" Ali said jovially. "For now, you have Manni and me as company."

  Nina noticed a tattoo on Ali's forearm, exactly the same as the other members of his crew. At first reluctant, she now used the social gathering to ask about it.

  "Ali, your ink, that symbol on your arm… what is it about?" she asked sweetly.

  She could see Sam's body tense up at her inquiry and his big dark eyes looked into hers for a long moment, but he said nothing. The captain looked bewildered at first. He never counted on the observational skills of the newcomers and had neglected to cover up the tattoo all the pirates of his wretched crew shared. It would seem uncanny that a salvage crew would mark themselves with the same sigil. A costly mistake, but he could still employ his well-practiced trickery-skills to come up with and excuse. He could see Manni swiftly cover his tattoo at Nina’s question.

  “Call me old fashioned, but I am a superstitious old sailor,” Ali said, less amicably than Nina had hoped. “The symbol is to ward off the water walkers.”

  His reply was so nonchalant before he took another bite of his food that Nina and Mieke had to pry. Both women found the tall tales of mariners fascinating.

  “Water walkers?” Mieke asked in absolute glee. “You have to tell us!”

  Without ceremony Ali only said, "Manni, tell them,” and continued eating his food. Sam saw a tiny shard of the captain’s true nature seeping through, but he hoped he was wrong. Manni, who had hardly touched his food out of his habit of eating next to nothing, shifted in his seat and looked at the two women. He loved telling stories.

  “The water walkers don’t swim. They don’t float. They don’t fly. They are not like the fish or the gulls or the ships. They walk on the water. Dead men, died at sea for sacrifice,” Manni relayed with great drama and a typically hoarse voice that perfectly complimented his wrinkled face and tobacco stained teeth. Mieke nudged Nina with a fascinated smile on her face. Purdue chuckled in silent mockery.

  “You think it’s a joke, Mr. Purdue?” Ali sneered with food between his teeth, half chewed. His eyes narrowed as he leaned forward to address the rude white man. Purdue was not intimidated. To him, it was a refreshing twist to welcome land lovers onto the seven seas, nothing more.

  “No, no, of course not,” Purdue smirked and continued to eat, allowing Manni to tell his tale in peace. Please, go on.”

  Ali remained silent for the remainder of the story.

  Mieke’ expression was dark, but her voice was fresh as she pressed Manni, “Go on. What do you mean by sacrifice at sea?”

  “Like… for a god?” Nina asked.

  Manni shook his head. “Sacrifices to appease, but not a god or any sort of deity. Such nonsense is for Christians,” he said with derision. “It is like… when you can choose to die yourself or pick somebody else to die in your place instead. The sacrifice is somebody else's, but you determine his fate. That is true power."

  Silence prevailed for a while at the stern words of the sailor that sounded just a bit too serious. Only the sound of cutlery had filled the mess hall before somebody else broke the tension.

  “Where did the sacrifice originate?” Mieke asked Manni.

  “Since the first timber tasted the tide,” Manni affirmed. “Always. Like the fish know how to swim. Like the shark knows that seals hold blood.”

  Wisely, the members of Purdue’s expedition left it at that.

  After lunch, Crystal and Purdue readied their diving gear. With them, Benjamin and Isho also checked their tanks and synchronized their watches. Benjamin was a seasoned diver. He had once been a treasure hunter who had sold his stolen goods on the black market before he had been incarcerated in Yemen. After his seven-year stint in prison, he had decided to join a syndicate, rather than to run the risk of operating alone and getting noticed by the wrong people.

  Isho, on the other hand, had once been a subsea engineer when he was in his thirties.

  “Hey, Isho, I could have used you a few years ago on one of my oil platforms in Scotland,” Purdue jested when he was made aware of Isho’s education.

  "Oh?" the middle-aged Somali asked with interest.

  “Yes, I had a submersible that I used to comb the ocean floor. I also used it to check the support structure under the platform, you know, the posts and steel piping, to make sure the place did not collapse!” Purdue explained as he pulled up his suit.

  “Oh yes. I have worked with many different oil companies and deep water systems,” he told Purdue with a big smile, reminiscing the days before he had become a ruthless killer. “But where I lived, in a small village on the coast, it was hard to get much work after I finished my studies."

  “What town are you from, Isho?” Crystal asked.

  Isho and Benjamin exchanged rapid glances. They were not very familiar with Egyptian coastal villages and could not afford to be found out on such a technicality.

  “Come! We have to go,” Benjamin shouted through the howl of the salty wind. “If the wreck is still in territorial waters we will have problems.”

  “That is true,” Crystal agreed. “We had better get a move on. Is Sam not coming with this time?”

  “No,” Purdue replied as he buckled his harness. “He has the footage we needed. Now we just have to see where we need to patch the old girl so that she can sail again.”

  Isho, Benjamin, Crystal, and Purdue disappeared under the surface as Nina and Sam watched the ocean swallow then up leaning against the railing. Nina was beyond excited to see what kind of ship it really was. As far as she could tell from Sam’s footage, it was a very close replica of ships manufactured for the German Kriegsmarine, if not the real deal. But her research had delivered nothing specific regarding of a lost ship. According to the World War II records, every pocket battleship was accounted for, either scuttled or dismantled. It was immensely intriguing to find something that was that similar to the Deutschland-class cruisers anyway.

  Sam looked absent-minded where he stood filming the dive. He took the opportunity to film more than necessary. Nina decided to abandon her juvenile vendetta if only for a while and joined Sam.

  “What is so interesting about the ropes and the cranes, Sam?” she asked with a flutter in her voice he had not heard in a while. Without breaking taking his camera down, he chuckled, and as he panned on the small group of crewmen standing around Ali, Sam whispered, “You will be surprised what interesting things happen around mundane objects, Nina. Look down there.”

  “Aye, a bunch of loud mouth seadogs chatting with their captain,” she jested.

  Sam looked at her. She seemed even-keeled, but he knew something was amiss in her heart. It took everything inside him not to ask, but he knew his reluctance to pry could be the death of their relationship – whatever was left of the romance between them.

  "What is wrong, love?" he asked. "Just come out and tell me so that we can fix it."

  He just asked, and he feared he was going to regret it, but he did not. Now that they were in their early forties it seemed that the time for mind games and tests of loyalty was very much obsolete, and he did not care if it pissed Nina off. He had to know because secrets were the cancer of the heart.

  Nina was taken aback by Sam's straightforward approac
h. At first, she wanted to snub him for it, but his genuine appeal revealed his willingness to listen. Above all, the fact that he insisted and offered to make amends for whatever shortcomings she was punishing him for only proved that he deemed her important enough to give a damn. She could not fault him for that.

  “You and Crystal...are very…” she wavered, having no idea how to express her jealousy, “…chummy.”

  “Chummy?” he gasped melodramatically in his humorous playfulness. He raised one eyebrow as he acted out the hyperbole. “She is just a sexy shark, love. I have no intention of getting to know her better than say, a plate of chips.”

  Nina tried hard not to laugh. Her smile was not born from his jokes but from her relief. Within the past three minutes, while engaged in this discussion, she had experienced countless emotions, hoping it would not flare into a fight again. Nina was so tired of fighting with Sam and then spending her nights in tears of fury while the laid-back journalist appeared to go about his business completely unfazed by her disgruntlement. It felt so nice to hear him inquire about her feelings, and it felt even better to be reassured that he was not interested in hooking up with Crystal.

  “Besides, she has a thing with Purdue, I think,” he added. That bothered Nina more than it was supposed to. She could not understand why, because a moment ago, all she wanted to hear was that Sam still wanted her. Now she had this sick feeling in her stomach at the thought of Purdue being with another woman.

  “What do you mean?” she asked timidly, but she feared the answer.

  “Call it my journalistic intuition,” Sam replied, once again filming the lower deck where a crew member snuck into an entrance. “I could be wrong, of course.”

  His odd fascination with his subject peeled Nina away from her emotional insecurity for a moment, and she perched up on her toes to look over the railing. “What are you looking at?”

  He kept his eye on his viewfinder, but he answered her honestly.

  "Something is going on with this damn tugboat, love,” he said mildly. “I just don’t know what it is.”

  “You mean the creepy tattered storytellers or the questionable work ethic?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. He had to neglect the unfolding mystery of the hidden door below and film what he was supposed to. Purdue and the others surfaced, looking utterly disappointed and a little bit shocked. Sam and Nina made their way down the jack ladder to join Mieke in helping them out of their diving gear.

  “And? Do you think we can get it to float?” Sam asked Purdue.

  Crystal sighed and looked across the waves as if she was searching for something. Purdue scowled heavily as the other two divers discussed something with Ali, sounding nothing short of alarmed.

  “Purdue?” Nina urged him for a response. Purdue took a deep breath and tried to make sense of what he was about to say.

  “These are the exact coordinates we mapped and confirmed this morning,” he said. “We searched the whole area but… the ship is gone.”

  27

  Ali’s Secrets Bleed Out

  Ali frowned. “How can it be gone? We saw it when we got here!”

  Manni glared at him from behind Purdue and Crystal, motioning with a shaking head that Ali should mind his temper until they had successfully got the ship to float and the passengers captured. Any deviation from the plan could make it fail, so they had to play along until their valuable cargo had secured the hopefully even more valuable asset, so to speak.

  “Where did you see it?” Purdue asked with renewed hope.

  “On our sonar,” Ali answered. “It was there, large as a mountain right below us.”

  “Can you show me?” Purdue asked with wide eyes, resting his hand on the captain’s shoulder. “I have to see what kind of technology you have on board to map it with. Maybe I am missing something.”

  "Of course. Come; I'll show you," Ali agreed. He led the way to the bridge, making sure that radioactivity was disabled by him giving a barely perceptible signal to the two men watching them from the helm. Purdue, Sam, Nina, and Crystal accompanied him while Mieke and Zain spent time playing cards. Since she was only there to catalog and he was only there for the event of trouble, neither had much to do before the wreck had been lifted.

  To Ali’s disbelief, the green and black shapes on the screen yielded nothing.

  “I swear! I swear to you it was there! The outlines of a ship right in the middle!” he insisted.

  Purdue quickly assured the captain that they believed him, but Ali was visibly shaken by the strange occurrence. He was pacing up and down in front of the control desk, holding his head, muttering and trying to make sense of this unnerving discovery.

  “Look, I thought it was my equipment at first. Then I thought the ship was plated with some material to make it undetectable, but now we can all see that the bloody thing has literally disappeared!" Purdue ranted. It was disturbing to see the genius at a loss for an explanation, but Nina took comfort in the fact that Purdue would soon come up with a solution to the problem, as he always did in a crisis.

  “Where is Sam?” Crystal asked, noting that the journalist had also vanished while they had been checking the radar readings and resetting the instruments. “Jesus, everyone and everything keep disappearing under our noses.”

  Sam followed the narrow hallway from the small door he had filmed from the upper deck before. He felt his way along the plumbing pipes through the dark with only his night vision camera to guide him. He heard footsteps behind him but when he turned there was nothing but an empty fiberglass wormhole of mystery that led to the small red steel door he had closed behind him.

  A shadow swept inside one of the small store rooms along the straight passage and Sam held his breath, pressing his body up against the wall right next to the door where the black shape moved. He pressed the red record button on his camera and waited. Whatever he would encounter would be capture on film. The door through which he had entered the hallway creaked open, allowing blinding white daylight through the ajar door, and Sam realized he was trapped. Without a place to hide, he would be in plain sight unless he accessed the room the dark figure had entered.

  Pointing the lens straight onto the silhouette in the door frame, Sam’s heart slammed hard against his rib cage. A hundred potential excuses flashed through his brain, reasons explaining his presence in the narrow passage. In the glare of the harsh light, he could not discern the identity of the person who swiftly slipped through the opening, but as the door closed, he realized it was someone he knew well.

  “Oh thank God,” Sam sighed in relief, holding his chest. “Nina, what are you doing here?” he whispered.

  “I followed you, idiot,” she replied, sneaking quietly toward him. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered, gesturing to her to be quiet and pointing covertly to the door next to him. Nina sank to her haunches and stole toward Sam, and there she sat waiting with him. On the other side of the slightly ajar door, someone was shuffling their feet, murmuring in a low voice that quivered during its relentless litany.

  “Creepy,” Nina remarked softly, looking terrified. “What language is that?”

  Sam shook his head and shrugged, but he pointed to the flashing red light to show Nina that he was recording the whole thing. She nodded. They peeked around the doorway, one above the other over Sam’s lens, but they were instantly thrown back from the putrid stench in the room.

  “Jesus Christ! What the fuck is that smell?” Nina choked behind the back of her hand.

  The shuffling stopped. Whatever was going on inside the room ceased.

  “They heard us!” Sam whispered urgently. “We have to get the hell out! Now!”

  He grabbed her by the wrist and bolted for the red door as quietly as they could manage. Nina jerked open the door and almost slammed it behind them, but then gently latched it again, while Sam looked around to survey the deck, making sure they had not been seen. Once Nina had closed the door, th
ey quickly moved up the jack ladder toward the high vantage point of the bridge.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he implored. “Not until we know who that was.”

  “Aye,” she agreed as they hurried to where they heard the others discussing the new developments regarding the sonar readings. “What was that fucking smell, Sam?”

  He looked at her with great concern. It was an odor he regrettably knew all too well.

  "Death. Ripe death. Not completely decomposed, but already miles away from the last breath," he replied as they entered the bridge.

  "Where the hell have you two been?" Crystal asked with a tad too much command. Purdue, Manni, and Ali stood quietly behind her, looking ashen and bewildered.

  "I had to take a dump if you don't mind," Sam snapped. Nina winced at his choice of creative excuse and said, “I went looking for him. Just found him on his way back.”

  "Well, come one, then. Have a look at this absolute weirdness," Purdue invited them. His face was still distorted in astonished confusion, and he was by no means relieved by the reappearance of the wreck. Its outlines had unmistakably reappeared on the screen. “Look at that!” Purdue moaned with his hand over his mouth, shaking his head.

  Sam lifted his camera and filmed the control panel and every screen displaying the solid representation of the shipwreck with every sweep of the radar. The sonar readings also clearly showed the ship, charted by the pings of the sound waves sent out. The visuals were crystal clear because the structure was not far below to the hull of the tug boat.

  “What is the problem?” Nina asked. Her inquiry was met with wide-eyed expressions.

  “Nina, it is not the fact that it is visible that is the problem,” Crystal explained a bit more cordially than the last time she had spoken. “It is the strange and unexplainable phenomenon that the wreck periodically disappears in front of our eyes.”