by David Wood
Nichols shook Dorion’s hand. “Just give Cliff your laundry list. And who is this?” He stopped in front of Jade and stared at her with a mischievous grin. “Saved the best for last.”
Ophelia started to answer, but Jade spoke first matching the older man’s smile. “I’m Jade,” she said simply, eschewing the use of titles. She kind of liked Nichols, but decided to reserve judgment on the others.
Nichols executed a half-bow, then gestured to the ship’s master. “Captain Lee here probably remembers when it was considered bad luck to have a woman on board a ship. Thankfully, we live in more enlightened times, but all the same, I hope that the presence of two lovely ladies doesn’t prove distracting to the crew.”
“I’m not the crusty old barnacle that Kit seems to think I am,” Lee said without much enthusiasm. “But if it’s all the same, I’d like to get down to business. I need to know exactly where we’re going.”
Ophelia gestured to Professor. “You have the floor, Dr. Chapman.”
Professor approached Lee and handed him a slip of paper. “Captain, set course for these coordinates. I’ll explain the reasons as soon as I get my computer set up.”
Lee departed, evidently more concerned with where they were going than why.
A few minutes later, they were all staring at a map of the North Atlantic region off the east coast of the United States. There was a conspicuous red triangle connecting Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda.
Jade sensed a lecture coming on.
“This is the so-called Bermuda Triangle,” he said. “Or at least one version of it. These borders are arbitrary. From what I can tell, the term Bermuda Triangle first appeared in an article written by Vincent Gaddis in a 1964 pulp magazine; maybe the idea of a definite shape was sexier or something. In any case, the name stuck and people have been selling the myth ever since. The reality is a little more prosaic.”
Here comes the ‘I told you so,’ Jade thought.
“According to the most sensational reports, over a thousand ships have been lost in this region—which incidentally is an area of about a million and a half square miles, or more than twice the size of Alaska—in just over five hundred years of record keeping. Now, a thousand sounds like a big number, but if you average it out, that’s just two a year. When you consider that this is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and that Hurricane Alley runs right through it, two ships a year makes it a pretty safe area, statistically speaking.
“What’s more, a lot of the reports have been exaggerated, duplicated or simply fabricated from whole cloth. Many of them are simply stories that have been repeated so many times that there’s no way to go back and source them. If you cull the record down to disappearances of ships and planes that remain officially unexplained, you’re looking at maybe two dozen, but even most of those have a simple, mundane explanation.”
He touched a key on his computer and the map was replaced by a black and white photograph of a ship.
“The disappearance of the USS Cyclops in 1918 is a prime example of what I mean. The Cyclops shows up in almost every account of the Bermuda Triangle as proof of unexplained phenomena, and yet the facts of the case are that the Cyclops was overloaded, had lost one of its engines, may have been structurally unsound, and probably got hit by a storm. Any one of those factors could have doomed her. But that explanation is too boring for Triangle nuts.”
“That’s not all that’s boring,” Jade muttered.
“I heard that young lady.”
“Can’t you just give us a handout, or assigned reading?”
“It gets better, I promise.” Professor clicked another key and the image changed to a picture of several World War II era planes flying in formation. Jade sat up a little straighter. Maybe this wasn’t going to be an I told you so after all.
“Flight 19 is what really started people talking about mysterious phenomena. On December 5, 1945, a squadron of torpedo planes took off from Fort Lauderdale on a training exercise. I’ll spare you the tedious details, but the bottom line is that the pilots got lost in a place where they shouldn’t have gotten lost. It’s like those stories where people wander around in a blizzard and die within twenty feet of their front door. There was bad weather, but the squadron was in radio contact with the mainland for most of the flight. All they had to do was turn west and they would have found Florida, but they didn’t. The Navy was able to pinpoint their last known location to within fifty miles, but a massive search effort turned up nothing. The planes just vanished.
“Now, there are a lot of reasons why we shouldn’t make too much of this story. This was 1945 after all. Those pilots didn’t have GPS. The planes didn’t even have radar. Someone could have made a mistake calculating their position, which would mean that the searchers were looking in the wrong place. But if we accept the premise that there might be an unusual phenomenon at work in this region, then Flight 19 is the best place to start looking.”
“One of the big problems with conspiracy theories is that their proponents try too hard. In the case of the Bermuda Triangle, speculative writers gathered a lot of extraneous evidence to support the idea that there was this big zone of mystery, but because so much of their evidence can be refuted, it has the opposite effect. Instead of lending weight to their argument, the ninety percent of incidents with a mundane explanation obscure the remaining ten percent that we should be looking at. The first thing we need to do is get the idea of the Triangle out of our heads and focus instead on the area where Flight 19 first began encountering trouble. Somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas.”
He clicked the computer again and the screen changed to a picture of a lighthouse. “Which brings us to an incident that isn’t as well-known as these others, but is still pretty darned spooky.
“This is the lighthouse at Great Isaac Cay, northeast of Bimini and about sixty-five miles due east of Fort Lauderdale. The lighthouse is automated now and most of the buildings have crumbled into ruins, but in 1969, there were two lighthouse keepers stationed there. According to local lore, after Hurricane Anna swept through the islands in early August of that year, the lighthouse went dark. When officials went to the island to investigate, they discovered that the two lighthouse keepers had vanished without a trace.”
Nichols chuckled. “Swept away by the hurricane, no doubt.”
Professor gave patient smile. “That would be a very plausible explanation, but why didn’t the men just hunker down and ride out the storm. I checked the weather data and it turns out that there was no Hurricane Anna. Anna was a tropical storm that peaked on July 29 with maximum sustained winds of seventy miles per hour, and the closest it got to Great Isaac was three days later when the eye passed almost four hundred miles to the east.”
“Four hundred?”
“There may be a mundane explanation for what happened to those men, but then again, maybe not. In any case, it’s one of the incidents that can’t be easily dismissed, just like Flight 19, which incidentally would have passed very close to Great Isaac on the first leg of their mission, before they knew they were in trouble. That gives us two points of…well, if you’ll pardon the pun, triangulation. We’ll start our search there, at Great Isaac Cay.
“Which brings me at last to this,” He hit another button and the picture changed to a screen capture from a webpage. One of the entries was highlighted. “La Nuestra Senõra De La Misericordia was a treasure galleon that sank in 1594. The official record has it going down in the Atlantic off the coast of Portugal, but it’s never been found, and I think I may know why.
“These treasure ships didn’t sail alone; they were usually part of a large fleet, with the slow moving galleons protected by smaller, faster escort ships. It’s rare, though not unheard of, for an entire treasure fleet to be sunk—”
“The Plate Fleet of 1715,” intoned Nichols. “Twelve ships were lost in a hurricane. I looked for it myself a time or two.”
“Exactly. Although in that case as in most others, there were
surviving ships that carried the news back to Spain. That’s how we know where to look. But the records going back to 1594 are spotty at best. The details could have gotten confused, but a more likely explanation is that the Spanish reported the location incorrectly in the hopes that they might one day be able to return and salvage it themselves. I think that’s what happened to the Misericordia. She actually went down near Bimini, and I think she took Alvaro and the Moon stone with her. Along with a fortune in Spanish gold.”
“Now you’re speaking my language,” said Nichols.
“You’re welcome to keep whatever gold we find,” Ophelia assured him. “Or rather, I should say, you’re welcome to fight it out with the Spanish government.”
Nichols shrugged. “Goes with the territory. Honestly, I’m too old to care about being rich. I’d rather be famous at this point.”
Well that explains the television show.
“We probably won’t find a wreck per se,” said Professor. “Four hundred years of exposure to salt water will have destroyed the wood and ferrous metals, and whatever’s left is probably buried under a couple tons of sediment. But if there really is some kind of space-time distortion going on, Paul’s clocks should detect it. From there, it’s just a matter of following our noses. The good news is that the wreck site will almost certainly lie on the continental shelf, max depth three hundred feet. Still a bit deep for recreational diving, but a hell of a lot better than twelve hundred.”
“You folks seem to know what you’re doing,” Nichols said, “Bimini is about ten hours out, figure another couple to Great Isaacs. We can start running the search as soon as cook puts out the first pot of coffee.”
He gave Ophelia a long scrutinizing stare. “You know, I’ve been sailing these waters most of my life. I’ve seen some strange things, but nothing to make me believe that there’s anything to these stories about the Bermuda Triangle. It doesn’t bother me that you’re going looking for—how’d Professor there put it?—spooky stuff. Honestly, I wish the cameras were rolling. Spooky stuff gets great ratings. I just want to know that this thing you’re looking for won’t get us all killed or give us cancer or something like that.”
Ophelia smiled. “I won’t make promises I can’t keep, Mr. Nichols. If you wanted safe, you should have chosen a different career.”
Barry gave them a brief tour of the ship’s working areas. Jade didn’t need to hear his explanation of what the “mailbox blowers” did. The big aluminum elbow pipes at the stern could be lowered into place over the ship’s screws, directing the engine thrust straight down to the sea floor, creating an artificial current to sweep tons of sediment away and hopefully uncover buried riches. The blowers were a standard tool of professional treasure hunters, though Jade had never seen boxes as big as the pair on the Quest Explorer.
Much of the deck served as a platform for the boom crane which could be used to deploy the submersible Quest Explorer-Deep, nicknamed “QED,” or retrieve heavy artifacts from the sea floor, like cannon or if they were really lucky, great big chests full of gold ingots.
The QED was parked on the foredeck, covered with heavy tarpaulins and strapped down. It looked smaller than Jade expected and she was a bit dubious about Barry’s claim that it could comfortably seat three people, “and all their cameras and sound equipment.”
The atomic clock Dorion had requested had been air freighted to Nassau ahead of their arrival, loaded aboard and stowed near the submersible. The long plastic shipping container looked ominously like a casket, “You’re welcome to inspect it now,” Barry told him, “but it’s going to be dark soon. Might be easier to wait until morning when you’ll have daylight.”
Dorion accepted this without protest and they continued the tour with a cursory glance at the engine room, finishing at their staterooms, which were nicer than some hotels Jade had slept in, but not on par with the salon. Jade’s luggage—which consisted only of a single carry-on size suitcase containing clothes and sundry items she had had picked up before leaving Greece—was waiting on the bed. There was nothing particularly essential in the case. She patted the pocket where she was keeping the Shew Stone—after Delphi, she had not let it out of her sight—then leaving everything where it was, headed back to the salon for dinner.
She found Professor standing on the deck, staring out across the water. “Hey sailor,” she called out, and then immediately wondered why she had.
He turned to her with an easy smile. “Careful. People will talk.”
She had to fight the urge to hit back with a barbed comment, maybe something about how people might talk about the time he had spent in Delphi with Ophelia. “Actually, I wanted to thank you for not shooting me down earlier.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know, you’re always Mr. Voice of Reason. You’re the last person I would expect to become a believer.”
He laughed. “‘Mr. Voice of Reason’? Jade, we’re scientists. It’s not about what we believe; it’s about going where the evidence leads. We already know there’s some weird science at work in the world. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy’ as the Bard would say. So, when I went down the list of so-called Bermuda Triangle phenomena, I had to consider space-time distortions as a possible factor.”
“Yeah, well, thanks all the same.”
“Sure thing. Just remember, we’re scientists. Belief is for people who don’t have enough facts to back up their position. We go where the—” He trailed off, his eyes leaving her face and roving to the horizon.
“What?”
“Great Isaac Key is west-northwest of Nassau. The sun should be just off the port bow.”
Jade looked toward the orange orb of the setting sun. It was almost perfectly centered on the western horizon, parallel to the course of the ship. “We’re heading due north.”
Professor turned away without confirming the statement and headed for the stairs that led to the ship’s bridge, with Jade right behind him.
The control room, with its horseshoe-shaped bank of computer screens and other electronic equipment, looked more like something from a science-fiction movie, but there was only one bored crewman present. He sat in one of the fixed swivel chairs in front of the workstation, but was turned away, using the console as an armrest while he read a paperback novel. The crewman raised his eyes, but otherwise made no move to acknowledge their presence.
“What’s our course?” Professor asked.
With a sigh, the man put down his book—Jade recognized the cover art. It was the latest book in the Easter Egg series by Sue Denim—and swung around to glance at the screen of the nearest computer. “We’re here,” he said, pointing to a red dot. “And this dotted yellow line is our track.”
The indicated line showed the ship moving in the northwesterly direction, the direction they should be going.
“What’s our compass heading?”
“Compass?”
“You do know what a compass is.” Jade could hear the irritation in Professor’s voice.
“Sure, dude.” He peered at the screen again. “Three-oh-two degrees.”
“What does your compass say?” growled Professor through clenched teeth.
“The GPS is more precise than—”
Professor pointed out the side window at the setting sun. “The sun sets in the west. Did they teach you that in your GPS class? The sun says that were traveling north. Unless the sky is lying, there’s something wrong with your GPS, so tell me what your compass says.”
The chastened crewman quickly rose and moved to the center of the console. He shifted a stack of magazines to reveal an ancient looking binnacle. Even from across the room, Jade could see that the compass globe beneath the glass was spinning wildly.
The crewman stared at it in disbelief, and in a very small voice, said, “I think I’d better get the skipper.”
TWENTY-THREE
The Bahamas
Lee arrived on the bridge reeking of mo
uthwash and after-shave, which Jade assumed was olfactory camouflage to mask a different kind of stink.
“Wonderful,” she muttered. “On top of everything else, we’ve got a drunk for a captain.”
The ship’s master went immediately to the GPS console and stared at it for several seconds. “This shows that we’re on course,” he insisted.
“Yes, sir,” explained the crewman. “But dead reckoning shows us heading north. The compass isn’t working and neither is the satphone.”
“Uh,” Lee glanced at Professor and Jade and seemed to realize he was in the spotlight. He straightened a little and when she spoke again, there was a little more certitude in his voice. “All stop. Until we can figure out where we are, there’s no sense in continuing in the wrong direction. It’s time for some good old fashioned seamanship.”
The crewman pushed a button on the console and Jade felt a subtle change in the vibrations rising from the deck.
Lee turned to face them. “I’ll have to ask you to leave so we can get some work done here. I believe dinner is being served in the salon, so why don’t you go grab a bite to eat. I assure you, we’ll be back on course within the hour.”
Jade started to bristle at the dismissal, but Professor took her arm and guided her from the room. When they were outside, she turned on him. “Are you going to trust that lush to get us back on course?”
“Not completely, but navigating open water isn’t…well, quantum physics. As long as he knows better than to trust the GPS, we should get where we’re going.”
“Speaking of the GPS, how can it be wrong? And the compass? Why was it spinning like that?”
“Did you forget where we are?”
She gave a short humorless laugh. “Is that your scientific opinion?”
“I don’t know. We could already be experiencing space-time distortions.” He paused. “Or there could be a more mundane explanation.”
“Like what?”
“Sabotage.”