by Chanel Smith
“I’m still connected, Captain.” He sighed heavily. Even though they couldn’t see him, he and Captain Ellington had known that he was exhausted and worried. “Damned embarrassing situation we have here, gentlemen.”
“Understood, sir,” Captain Ellington answered for the both of them.
“Come Friday morning and that boat does show up in Auckland, we’re going to have a hell of a mess on our hands. As it is, I have had to report up the chain of command and I can tell you that there isn’t a lot of my bloody arse left to be chewed on.”
The saying about shit rolling downhill had come to life in full force for several minutes as RA Douglas had vented what he had, no doubt, received from up top upon the two of them. When he’d finally slowed down, he’d sighed heavily and delivered something of an apology, though it hadn’t been put into the actual words.
“I know you boys have done your best,” he’d said. “You’ve put a bloody lot of effort into something that is completely beyond an explanation. It’s just damned bad luck that this happened on your watch, but I have a problem. The PM wants to try to get ahead of this before a feeding frenzy hits on Friday when that boat doesn’t show.”
He’d paused and let his words sink in for several seconds. Captain Ellington and Commander Samuels had stared at each other, waiting for the other shoe to drop. That shoe, they both had understood, would be the order that assigned one or the other of them to deliver the press conference.
“Commander Samuels, since you’ve been the main man organizing the circus out there from the start, you probably have a better handle on what has been done and what is being done. Though he’s been advised against it, the PM wants straight up honesty and has threatened to have my bloody arse in permanent walkabout if he finds out we gave the press anything different, understood?”
“Understood, Admiral,” Samuels had replied.
“Be on that helo in time to meet me before we go into the press conference at 1900.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Samuels had responded.
The end of that conversation had set in motion the helicopter ride that he was taking. Captain Ellington knew that his XO had done everything he could with an impossible task, so he’d made arrangements for Samuels to have a 24-hour pass. “Get some rack time and relax a little,” he’d said. That had been the only positive thing that had come out of his being assigned to do the press conference. He was already looking forward to it being over.
However, before the press conference was over, he had to get through it. And before that, he had to face Rear Admiral Douglas face to face. He wasn’t looking forward to that meeting.
“ETA in five, Commander,” the pilot announced over his headset.
“Copy, Lieutenant,” he responded. He felt the nerves begin to flutter in his stomach. He glanced at his watch. He’d have about ten minutes to check himself out in the mirror before he had to meet with RA Douglas. Though he’d been certain that he was looking his best before he’d left the Melbourne, the ride in the helo might have worked counter to his best efforts.
Lieutenant Tattingham’s ETA was precisely on the mark. The helicopter touched down five minutes later and Samuels waited a few minutes longer to let the rotors spin down. If the rotor wash hit him with too much force, he’d have to get dressed all over again.
“Should be okay now, Commander,” Lieutenant Tattingham announced, turning around in his seat to grin back at him. “Good luck, sir.”
“I’m going to bloody need it,” Samuels replied as he hopped out of the helo and handed off his bag to the petty officer, who was waiting for him.
“I’ll give you a bit to get things straight, Commander,” he said, “and then I’ll take you to your meeting.”
“Thank you, Petty Officer,” Samuels responded.
“Right this way, sir,” he said, leading Samuels from the helicopter pad and toward the small building that served as a heliport office. Glancing at his watch again, he saw that he’d allotted himself enough time to check his uniform and relieve himself of the half dozen or so cups of coffee he’d had before he left the Melbourne. Here goes nothing, Commander.
Chapter Twenty
Aboard the Eucalyptus, Wednesday night
In spite of our best efforts over an exhausting 36-hour period, Ellen and I hadn’t made a single bit of headway toward solving the problem that had the Eucalyptus and her crew sleepless, on edge and completely captive. Over the course of that time, in spite of plenty of threats, plenty of busy work to do and pushing caffeine poisoning levels, 22 crew members and passengers had fallen asleep. I’d gotten very close to dozing off a couple of times myself.
We were walking away from one more briefing after another failed attempt to get any further information out of Pharaoh. Ellen had tried every trick in the book and hadn’t gotten the spirit to even turn Hillary’s head and look at her. He had just continued to sit on the floor in the corner of cell number three, stare straight ahead and move his lips in some paranormal conversation that was taking place between him and some other unseen entity.
“So, what now?” I asked.
“Monty, I don’t know,” she sighed. “We’ve got a whole bunch of pieces that don’t fit together and we’re no closer than we were when we started. I’m not helping our reputation in front of Captain Norris, either.”
“Why are you worried about our reputation all of a sudden? You’ve never worried about it before.” I wrinkled my brow and paused our slow stroll.
She took several steps forward and then turned around to face me and then sighed again. “I’m just frustrated because I’m exhausted. I just want to sleep. You realize that we haven’t slept in 48 hours, right?”
“I’m pretty aware of that,” I replied.
“We’re going to have to sleep soon or we’re going to crash and then where will we be?”
It was a catch-22. If we fell asleep, then we might drift off into the unknown realms of the spirit world and never wake up again, but if we didn’t sleep, at some point, we were going to become useless. I had to get some information; any information.
Besides the lack of sleep, it was getting colder and colder with each passing hour. Though we kept our insides warm with hot beverages, were dressed in several layers, tried to keep moving and kept ourselves wrapped in blankets, the cold was draining our energy as well.
“We have to fight it,” I said, pulling her in close and starting toward our cabin.
We walked arm in arm in silence. I couldn’t help thinking of how we’d started out on the most amazing trip of a lifetime and had somehow arrived at the edge of hell, which evidently was in the process of freezing over.
We made it back to our cabin and I used the key to open the lock. The battery on the keypad had done just as I’d suspected it would and gone dead earlier that afternoon.
“I’m going to go take a show…” Ellen caught herself, realizing that she couldn’t have the shower that she wanted so badly. She burst out sobbing. She’d finally reached her limit. I held her and felt her shaking as she let go of it all, even fighting back a breakdown of my own. After several minutes, she pushed away and strolled out onto the balcony.
I followed her out onto the balcony and wrapped my arms around her, just like I had several times in the preceding nights.
“Look at this. An amazing night, a perfect vantage point for looking at the stars, the perfect cruise, the perfect getaway, the perfect chance to rest and here we are. We can’t go to sleep and we’re slowly freezing to death.”
For once, I didn’t speak. I just listened and gazed out across the shimmering reflection of the stars on the water and their twinkling counterparts in the sky. In spite of everything that was against us, I was still with the woman that I loved and we were still taking on the world together.
While I was standing there against the balcony rail with Ellen, something popped into my mind. I’m not sure where the thought came from, but the minute it came to me, I couldn’t shake it. “Wait a second,” I
said, pulling away from her and scrambling back into the living room of our suite. “Do you remember that article I saw on the plane? The one about the shark god?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Where’s my tablet?” I asked, digging through drawers in search of it.
“Mon, there’s no power. You can’t get on the internet. You might not even have any power to turn on your tablet.”
“I downloaded and saved it to read later and then forgot about it,” I said. “Here it is. Okay, please, please, please have some battery left.”
I waited a few agonizing moments and then saw the screen begin to light up. At the same time, I saw the, usually green battery symbol flashing empty and red.
“Just a little longer, just a little longer,” I pleaded as I clicked on the icon that held the copy of the article. It took a lifetime for it to load the article with such a weak amount of power, but it finally loaded it and I started to read aloud.
“Dakuwanga is a shark god of Fijian mythology. Because he protected them from dangers at sea, Dakuwanga was greatly respected by Fijian fishermen. Though he was powerful and possessive…”
That was as far as I was able to read before the battery stopped and the screen turned black; however, my eyes had caught a single phrase further down the screen, though I didn’t get a chance to read it, I knew what I had seen.
“That didn’t help much,” Ellen commented. “Who is Dakuwanga and what does he have to do with anything?”
“I saw something else just before it went black, Babe,” I grinned. “It also said, ‘Known in the Cook Islands as Avatea.’”
“So, Pharaoh is doing battle with a South Pacific shark god,” she said.
“I’m not sure how that helps us,” I replied. “But it’s more than we knew a few minutes ago.”
“Now all we have to do is draw a connection.”
“Well, for starters, we are in the South Pacific and only a thousand miles or so from Fiji and about 3,000 miles west of the Cook Islands.”
“That’s a lot of territory, Mon,” she muttered.
“Not for a deity,” I argued. “If he’s any sort of decent god, he ought to be able to cover ten times that much space.”
“I think the lack of sleep is getting to your brain big time,” she laughed weakly.
“Maybe, but let’s just sit down a minute and sort through this. It could be the one puzzle piece that makes it all start to fit together.”
Chapter Twenty-one
I blinked my eyes open as sun streamed in the windows of our cabin suite. For a moment, I tried to gather my senses and they I sat up in a panic. We’d fallen asleep. We weren’t supposed to fall asleep. “Ellen! Ellen! Wake up!” I said, shaking her and feeling my pulse racing beyond control. Oh God, she’s not waking up. “Ellen, Babe, wake up!”
“Huh? What’s wrong, Mon”” she groaned.
“Oh God, Babe, you scared the shit out of me,” I said, clinging to her. “We fell asleep and I thought…”
“We fell asleep?” she said, sitting up rapidly and looking around the room. “But…”
“We woke up,” I said in a much calmer tone after realizing that the reason we weren’t supposed to fall asleep was because we’d never wake up. “What does this mean?”
Ellen had no chance to answer because there was a loud fist pounding on our cabin door. “Mr. and Mrs. Drew, are you there? You’ve missed your morning briefing.”
I got up and went to the door. “We’re here,” I called out and then opened the door. “We’ll be right down. Tell the captain that we fell asleep.”
“But we weren’t supposed to fall asleep,” the crew member said, confusion registering on his face. “We were told that if we fell asleep, we’d never wake up again.”
“You’re right,” I responded. “Something has changed.”
“So we can sleep, now?”
“Hold off until we speak to the captain. He’ll let you know.”
I turned back to Ellen. “What does this mean?”
“I don’t know yet, Mon,” she replied.
“You better figure something out. We need to get down to our briefing with Captain Norris.”
“Let me splash some water on my face,” she said. She kept the blanket wrapped around her as she shuffled toward the table where a water basin had been placed for us to freshen up a bit.
Having rested, my sense of humor was beginning to rear its ugly head again. “You look like a kiki bird,” I laughed.
“You mean a kiwi bird.”
“No, I mean a kiki bird. They waddle around saying, ‘ki-ki-ki-Christ, it’s cold.’”
“That’s not even funny,” she groused, reaching her hands into the basin of water and hitting something solid. “Mon, it’s ice.”
“What?”
“The water in the basin is frozen.”
“I knew it was colder this morning, but are you serious?”
“Does this look like the face of someone who is joking?”
It didn’t. “Wow… ice on a South Pacific cruise and it’s not in a cocktail glass.”
“Things are getting worse,” she said.
“But they’re also getting better,” I countered. “We slept and woke up again.”
“Let’s go brief the captain. No sense keeping him waiting to hear that we still don’t know anything.”
“We do know something,” I argued. “We know that Avatea and Dakuwanga are the same.”
“That’s not much,” she said as we stepped out into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind us.
“It’s more than we had.”
We’d gone down the corridor and descended several flights of stairs before something else clicked inside my head.
“It was probably sleep deprivation, but why didn’t we think to search Mr. Hillary’s cabin for some sort of clues?”
Ellen stopped and looked up at me with a guilty look on her face. “I was so focused on Pharaoh that I hadn’t even considered Edmund Hillary.”
“Well, then, now we have two new leads to tell Captain Norris about.”
“Three, if you count the fact that we fell asleep and woke up again.”
We arrived at the conference room where we had been conducting our briefings with Captain Norris, Billings and Dawson the past several days. As we entered, I began our apology. “We apologize for being late. We fell asleep and lost track of time.” I’d hoped to see the shock effect, but there was none.
“Sit down,” Captain Norris said. “I’m glad you got some rest. We started a sleeping schedule for members of the crew after some others had fallen asleep and awakened. The three of us are about ready for a little too, so we need to make this brief.”
A brief brief. I smiled at the use of the word and held back the comment that might, normally, have leapt out of my mouth unchecked.
“We’ll start with the sleeping and waking thing,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“I can’t tell you for certain, Captain,” Ellen began. “My guess is that Pharaoh might be weakening.”
“Maybe whoever he’s fighting is kicking his ass,” I commented, not checking that particular sentence before it escaped from my lips.
The captain glanced at me and then went on. “I had ice in my water basin this morning. You realize that we are coming to a critical point.”
Sort of like hell freezing over. I kept that one in check.
“As was ours,” Ellen responded. “We will need to find a break soon.”
Captain Norris noticed that Ellen seemed particularly burdened. I’d seen her break down the night before and noticed that she hadn’t really bounced back from it like she usually does, but I didn’t consider how far she’d fallen until the captain pointed it out. “Mrs. Drew, you needn’t blame yourself for what has transpired. I’ve watched you working on this and I know that you’ve been giving it everything you’ve got. You both have. Just keep at it. We’re bound to find that tiny thread that unravels the entire
ball.”
Taking that as my cue, I joined the conversation. “We did discover one new fact. It isn’t much, but we have connected Avatea to a Fijian mythological figure known as Dakuwanga, the shark god.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Billings jumped in with a smile on his face. “One of my crew members is a native of Fiji.”
“Alright then, we’ll get him with Mr. and Mrs. Drew and see where that particular lead my take us. Anything else?”
“It occurred to me this morning,” I said, hoping that I could take the pressure off of Ellen and take on the bulk of the burden for a while. “We haven’t yet searched Mr. Hillary’s cabin.”
“It hadn’t occurred to any of us,” the captain replied. “What can we hope to find?”
“I have no idea. It just seemed like something that we’ve left out.”
“It’s my fault for not having thought of it before,” Ellen said. “I’ve been focused on Pharaoh and completely forgot Mr. Hillary.”
“It’s no one’s fault and everyone’s fault,” Captain Norris responded. “But there’s no sense in assigning blame. Billings, I want the key to Hillary’s cabin ASAP and then I want you to bring your Fijian crew member to us. Dawson, go get some rack time. Billings or I will wake you when it is your time to go back on watch.”
“Aye, Captain,” Billings and Dawson replied in turn and then left the room.
“I have a gut feeling that we are going to make some progress today,” Captain Norris announced with a broad smile. We only had to wait a few minutes before Billings returned with the key. “I will bring Maciu to Mr. Hillary’s cabin.”
“Very good, let’s go,” Captain Norris said, leading us out the door.
Chapter Twenty-two
“I know why we and the others woke up,” Ellen said, surprising us with the sudden announcement.
Captain Norris and I turned toward her with our full attention.
“He has his 1,962 souls,” she said. “He doesn’t need any more.”
I watched Captain Norris doing math in his head. No doubt, he’d kept a tally of the number or crew and passengers who had originally fallen asleep as well as the ones who had fallen asleep later. When his face began to brighten, I realized that we’d finally gotten a decent break. “That’s the exact number that is asleep. So what does it mean?”