If the first pulse of light corresponded to the departure of the Stormchaser 3 through the vortex, what was the second object to enter the Hunraken Vortex? Had a second object been transported back in time? No...because nothing else had been reported missing.
So if nothing had entered the vortex..., had something just come out of it?
And if so...what?
Then it dawned on him. The insane, incredible truth of what had happened.
The answer was staring at him in the photograph that was lying on his desk.
He picked up the picture of the pirate ship and laughed.
What was it that the expert on pirates had said, "Too realistic to be a fake?"
Well, now Derek knew the truth.
Chapter 32
Blue Emerald Bay Resort
Puerto Rico
2:15 p.m.
The beach was a hive of activity.
A series of Chinook helicopters had been landing and taking off almost constantly since Captain Rob had surrendered to the Governor.
Each time a helicopter landed, it disgorged eight people and a mountain full of supplies. Each person was fully clothed in biological protective clothing: a mixture of medics and soldiers, the medics dressed in white and the soldiers in green.
They had quickly put up several tents, and the doctors had got straight to work.
At 12.30 p.m. Sally had met all the staff on the tennis courts of the complex. She had set them the task of keeping the resort running, with the main job of organizing food and drink to be delivered to the rooms at least once a day, possibly twice.
She had issued them all with blue biological protection suits, supplied by the W.H.O., replacing the blue uniforms from the complex she had given them earlier.
Any person who felt sick was to confine themselves to their rooms, and call for the doctor, although it should be at least twenty-four hours before any of them would experience any symptoms, if at all.
She had promised them all double-pay for the duration of the crisis, with an all-expenses paid stay at any other hotel within the chain of hotels owned by their company as a bonus.
There had been no complaints.
There had been two more deaths aboard the Sea Dancer. And there were now fifteen of Captain Rob's crew lying on the sand underneath the trees. Richard Tyler's condition had deteriorated significantly. He was now no longer conscious, drifting in and out of delirium.
Captain McGregor had only been truly scared three times in his life before, once in battle, once at the altar when he had looked into his wife's eyes and said his wedding vows, and once as he later held his dying wife in his arms.
This was the fourth time: his crew were dying and succumbing to the plague faster than he could have imagined. At this rate, he would not be a Captain for much longer. He would have a ship, but no crew.
And then it occurred to him, for the first time, that perhaps even he might fall to the plague, and the ship might even have no Captain. Captain McGregor knew this was unlikely, because of his past, but perhaps he should not presume too much.
Death itself did not scare him. He had faced it many times before. However, he felt incredibly frustrated by the sequence of events that had led to this, and he swore to himself that he would not let this bastard plague kill him.
He was now too rich to die!
Several of the pirates were set to work to dig a large pit in the sand, on the other side of the bay near the outcrop of rock that had been used for target practice earlier that morning by the big metal birds.
Once the pit was dug, they had taken the bodies of the men from the Sea Dancer and from the beach to the pit, thrown them in, covered them with a liquid called gasoline, and set fire to them. Thankfully, the stench of the burning bodies was blown away over the bay out to sea by the light breeze.
Other Chinooks flew overhead and landed on the tennis courts, where in the next few hours, rows of tents materialized and became the field hospital in which most of the plague victims were to be treated, and where ultimately, many of them would die.
An increasing number of guests started calling the reception with imagined symptoms of the plague, and Sally and one of the doctors in white spent some time writing a bulletin for Channel 500 to explain what they should look out for, and what they could ignore.
Some guests began to panic, and a number of them were given tranquilizers.
By 7 p.m. several experts from the W.H.O. had arrived, along with another ten doctors and medical staff. More would be arriving tomorrow. If needed. They were also keenly awaiting the results of the analysis being conducted on the body that had been extracted from the resort earlier that day.
At 8 p.m. that night, Richard Tyler died.
At 9 p.m. James Silver made his way over to the tennis courts and was soon lying down on a green bunk in a green tent, being given medicine.
Captain Rob McGregor looked on, feeling powerless as his crew and friends died in front of him, victims of an enemy he was unable to fight.
--------------------
The Bluebell Mansion
Negril
Jamaica
Tuesday
4.30 p.m.
Colonel Brian Patterson stood in the entrance hall to the grand, eighteen century mansion on the west coast of the island, at the far end of Negril Beach. Once upon a time it must have been a truly impressive building, built facing the sea with a panoramic view of the Negril coastline. Unfortunately, the tranquility of the setting was periodically ripped apart by the roar of aircraft taking off or coming into land in the Negril Aerodrome, which brought over 100,000 passengers a year into the Negril Area, and was only eight miles away.
Clearly, the Bluebell Mansion had passed its prime. But it was still a beautiful place, and were it not for the sound of the aircraft, the Colonel could easily have seen himself retiring to such a place.
From the front door, a large manicured lawn ran down to the trees and the beach beyond.
Now a private home, it was originally built by Kate and her husband in 1708, financed by the profits from the extensive sugar cane plantations that the family swiftly built up during the first years of the century.
The owners of the Bluebell Mansion were not at home. They lived in America and came only twice a year to spend some time by the sea. It had taken several hours to track them down, contact them and exert some pressure on them to give permission for the local housekeeper to grant them admission to their home.
But once inside, the housekeeper had proudly opened up to the Colonel and his two accomplices, and proceeded to tell them everything he wanted to know, and more.
It turned out that Kate and her husband, although highly successful at business, were considered rather eccentric.
Their methods were different from those of other plantation owners at the time, and were thought by some to be 'dangerous'.
Whereas almost all the plantations of their day employed slave labor to work on the farms, the Bluebell Plantation did not. They purchased slaves, gave them their freedom, and paid them a wage to work on their land.
Initially they struggled, such was the huge labor cost that they carried, but then the rather different and slightly odd farming methods that they employed began to pay off with larger harvests than the other plantations. The quality of the sugar was considered better, and they quickly grew a name for themselves in the market place. So much so, that they were even able to command a premium on the price of Bluebell sugar .
Some of the locals were initially scared of Kate and her family, because of their strange ways, but as the years passed, society began to accept them, and eventually the ball that they threw once a year became the society event of the island.
Kate's husband was an intelligent man whose reputation as a man of science slowly spread out of Jamaica and to the Americas and beyond. Such was the genius of the man, that he had become known as 'Papa Brain' by his workforce.
Colonel Patterson stood underneath a large portrait of
Kate and her family. The oil painting showed Kate, her husband, five children - three boys and two girls - , and some dogs and animals.
The Colonel looked up at the picture, staring not at the image of Kate, but of her husband. In spite of himself he could not help but smile.
As a scientist, he knew that the image of the man, as did his name carved on the gravestone, heralded a problem which could have global consequences, yet, when he looked at him, he felt hope and excitement surge through his veins.
In this picture, his clothes were different, he had put on some weight, and he looked much happier than the last time he had seen him, but there was no mistaking the person and who it was.
The Colonel knew him very well indeed.
In fact, only a few hours before, he had been talking to him on his cell phone.
And perhaps now was as good a time as any to call the man again, to tell him the news that would rock his world to the core and turn his life upside down.
--------------------
Blue Emerald Bay Resort
Puerto Rico
Tuesday
6:15 p.m.
Sandy Weiss was scared.
He had been cooped up in his suite at the Blue Emerald since lunchtime, forced to remain there by the hotel staff that he had paid good money to let him come here voluntarily to enjoy...ENJOY!... a vacation.
Did they even know who he was?
Did they realise exactly just who his uncle was?
Since lunch time he had tried to reach his uncle several times, but had failed at the first hurdle. For some reason, he could get no signal on his cell phone, and his iPad told him repeatedly that there was no internet connection.
Sandy was a smart kid. He knew the score. He knew that the resort had cut off all communications with the outside world. And he knew why.
Because they were all going to die, and no one in the resort was to tell anyone outside that they were dying.
Well, 'fuck them!' Sandy was not sick yet, and he had no intention of just sitting around and waiting for the fucking illness or virus or whatever it was to come and find him. Sandy was a fighter, and he was not going to behave like all the other sheep in the resort.
He was getting out of there.
Along with the couple who lived in the suite next door, whom he had spent the past two hours persuading to join him.
But there was a problem. Looking out of the windows from his suite, the resort was swarming with people in biological suits.
Sandy, however, had come up with a plan.
A few hours ago, a small team of guards had hurried around the building leaving a little bag of food outside each of their doors. It was the first food they had eaten since breakfast. Inside each bag there was a note saying that a meal would be delivered in the evening about 8 p.m. by the hotel employees. They should stay put and wait until then. Meanwhile 'keep watching Channel 500 for updates'.
The plan was simple. At 8 o'clock when the hotel employees delivered the food, Sandy and Jake and Paula from next door would be waiting. They would overpower the hotel employees, steal the biological suits they were wearing, and then sneak over to the far corner of the resort.
There they would climb the wall, drop down into the palm trees on the other side, and run like crazy until they got as far away from the resort as possible.
The way Sandy saw it was simple: if they stayed they would die. If they escaped they would live. And plus, the resort had effectively kidnapped them and was holding them against his will. Obviously his uncle, the President of the United States of America,..incidentally the most powerful man on the planet,...knew nothing about this. But as soon as Sandy was out of here, he was going to blow the whistle, and his uncle would send in the fucking marines to set everyone free.
Sandy would be a hero.
He looked at his watch. 6.30 p.m.
Only ninety minutes to go.
--------------------
Outside the Blue Emerald Bay Resort
Puerto Rico
7:15 p.m.
Specialist Trueman sat behind the wall of sandbags, his 7.62mm M240 Machine Gun trained on the Kill Zone that he had been ordered to guard. From here he could see a clear 150 yards in either direction. From where his post was, he surveyed an area of open land that ran between the Blue Emerald Resort and the next hotel complex, which had now been evacuated. A thin line of palm trees shielded the walls of the Blue Emerald Bay from sight, but any person trying to escape the hotel would have to leave the trees to cross the open land, and the moment that happened, Specialist Trueman had been ordered to shoot to kill.
On no account was the Specialist to allow any person within twenty yards of his position. Failure to kill or stop an escapee dead in their tracks was to be considered a punishable offence, which would automatically lead to a court martial.
Specialist Trueman felt uneasy. This was a 'weird gig'. Their orders had been simple, and they would follow them, but he was sure there was more going on than they were led to believe.
Officially, they had been warned that the terrorists within the resort were likely to dress as a guest or a guard and then try to make a break for it.
It was their job to stop them.
The U.S. military did not negotiate with terrorists.
That part Specialist Trueman understood.
What he found odd was the scale of the deployment that the U.S. Army and the Puerto Rico police had engaged upon. This was no temporary activity.
All around him engineers were putting up barricades and walls, building a mini-wall of China around the resort which would eventually be encased in an immovable wall of steel, barbed-wire, plastic and wood.
At the rate at which building activity was going on, there would soon be no way on this planet that anyone from inside the resort would ever be able to get out.
What Specialist Trueman had realised, quite correctly, was that this was no two or three day temporary structure. The Generals and Police chiefs were building this to last for weeks if not months.
It was almost as if they had already given up hope of negotiating any deal with the terrorists inside and they were imprisoning them within the resort - along with the residents.
Specialist Trueman, however, had been taught to follow orders. He liked being a Specialist, but he would far rather be a Corporal: if any one of them terrorist bastards showed their faces in his kill zone, he would cut them down before they got anywhere near the twenty yard limit.
A weird gig or not, Specialist Trueman was ready to do his job.
Chapter 33
Bush Center for Geo-Electromagnetic Studies
New York
Tuesday
7:20 p.m.
Derek Martin was sitting in Mick Samuel's office. He had been there for the past three hours. The whiteboards around the room were covered in mathematical notations: new mathematical formulae that Derek and Mick had been experimenting with and exploring, scribbling their ideas on the wall and playing around with mathematical symbols and concepts, changing and altering the equations that Professor Martin had created to explain his theorem for the Hunraken Vortex and the Hunraken Amplitude.
They were trying to find an explanation for the second pulse of light they had observed on the video, hoping to find a simple way of explaining how objects or physical matter could transverse the same vortex in opposite directions.
Frustratingly, however, they couldn't. At least, not yet.
Derek was pacing around the room. His mind was racing.
It had taken Derek only thirty minutes to convince Mick that the reason why the pirate ship and crew which had appeared in Puerto Rico seemed to be so real and authentic, was quite simply, because it was real and authentic. Which is also why they had seen a second pulse of light on the video: the first pulse had signified the departure of Kate's airplane through the vortex, and the second had indicated the arrival of the pirate ship.
They had started their conversation earlier that afternoon with the exc
iting news of the phone call that Derek had received from the Colonel: Kate was alive! She had apparently been transported back in time, and then died in the year 1740.
"So, what year did she arrive in the past?" Mick had asked.
"We don't know yet. The Colonel knows a little more than he is letting on but he is doing some other research first before he tells me anything more. Mick, do you think that perhaps there is some relationship between the year she was transported to, and the year the pirate ship came from?"
"Possibly. It's an excellent question. Which means that somehow we have to find out what year the pirate ship came from."
"Agreed. Which is why I was thinking about catching a flight to Puerto Rico tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, however, the airports in Puerto Rico are all closed, because of the heightened state of emergency caused by the pirate 'terrorists'. When the Colonel calls me back, I'm going to ask him to pull a few strings for me and get me a flight down there on a military transport. But, for now, let's consider that there is some relationship between the two events happening. There has to be. They can't just be coincidental."
"Fine, let's assume that there is. But how does that help us?"
"I don't know. I can't see it yet. At first I thought that when the vortex which Kate's plane flew through opened up at the other end, maybe the pirate ship was sucked into it, and it ended up here...but the mathematics doesn't support that."
"Or we're missing something?"
"Like what?"
"Like perhaps, there wasn't just one vortex. Maybe there were two!"
"Two Hunraken Vortexes? How is that possible? Once the Hunraken Amplitude is crossed, all the energy goes into the creation of a vortex, - a single vortex."
"True...but what happens if the other vortex was created at the other side, in the other time zone?"
TIME SHIP (Book Two) - A Time Travel Romantic Adventure Page 10