The Maltese Incident

by Russell Moran

  Meg’s not only good with a gun, she’s sharp with words too.

  “Yes, Meg, that’s exactly what we’ve been thinking. And not only Harry. I know that you two are a close married couple, and from what I heard about the tales of that place called Malta Town, you’re a tight-knit team in every sense. We’d like you to help Harry find the ship. So, what are your thoughts? Harry?”

  Meg gave me a glance like an arrow. I squeezed her hand.

  “Madam Director…”

  “Please call me Sarah.”

  “Okay, Sarah. Without boring you with details about how Meg and I are looking forward to starting our lives over, let me point out some simple facts. Once you go through a wormhole, you’re still on a vessel, and you’re still in the ocean. It takes no more skill for a modern captain to run his ship on the other side of the wormhole as he does on this side. It’s a ship on the water, only in a different time. We don’t know where that New Jersey wormhole leads. On the Maltese we went back few million years, and we still don’t know how the hell we did it. The point is, Meg and I have put in our time, served our time, if you will. All you need is an experienced captain and a willing crew. Their job is simple when you break it down to its essentials. Find the Ocean Magic and lead her back to the wormhole. Just make sure the rescue ship has plenty of fuel and aircraft or drones to search for the missing ship. Even as a consultant, there isn’t a hell of a lot I can tell a captain about the job. Put me and Meg into a room with a volunteer captain, and we’ll get the guy up to speed in a half hour. We don’t need to tell him how to kill dinosaurs.”

  “Harry, I can’t force you and I wouldn’t want to. But you’re a man with proven skill, ingenuity, and courage. Where do I find a guy like you?”

  “The Navy is full of good captains, Sarah,” Meg said. “Just ask Harry. He knows most of them. If I’m not out of line, I would like to offer a suggestion. Make it a volunteer operation. Plenty of people would jump at the idea, people who are brave or adventuresome or both.”

  “If I could take it a step further, Sarah,” I said, “I would pick a nuclear-powered ship that doesn’t need to stop for gas. Meg’s right. You won’t have a hard time finding volunteers.”

  “Do you two see this as a dangerous operation?” Watson asked.

  “We know a hell of a lot more about wormholes now than we did just a few weeks ago,” I said, “but we have to admit that there’s a lot we don’t know. Hell, we traveled to the time of the dinosaurs. We just don’t know if it will be dangerous or not. What I do know is that I want to spend the rest of my life with this woman next to me, without looking over my shoulder for prehistoric animals.”

  “Harry, it was my intention today to convince you to take command of a ship to search for the Ocean Magic on the other side of the wormhole. I heard your words and I also heard Meg’s. I don’t want to give you a swelled head, but nobody can do a job like this better than Harry Fenton, assisted by his more than able wife. There are over 1,000 people on the other side of that wormhole, and we’ve got to find them and bring them back home.”

  Sarah Watson is a persuasive woman. After she said the words “we’ve got to find them and bring them back home,” she just let the words hang in the air for a few moments. During those moments she stared at me like a nun I had in the fifth grade who had just asked me to walk my little cousin Billy home. Billy had missed his school bus. Sister Carol, my parents, and little Billy’s parents, all agreed that he should be my responsibility, and I could tell that Sister Carol didn’t give a rat’s ass that I wanted to play baseball after school that day. I began to feel like a real dick for trying to shirk what I knew was my responsibility.

  “So, let me be as direct as I can,” Watson continued. “Harry, I propose that you be reactivated to active duty status as a captain in the United States Navy, and I also propose that Meg be given a direct commission as a Navy lieutenant. I already cleared that with the Office of Naval Operations and the White House. But before either of you say anything, I want you both to go down the hallway to the bathrooms where you will find mirrors. I want you each to look into the mirror and say the following: ‘I refuse to rescue those people.’ After you’re done please return to my office and give me the decisions that you’ve given yourselves.”

  If I don’t take him, I thought, how the hell is little Billy going to get home?

  Meg and I did as we were asked. We skipped the part about looking in the mirror. Instead we looked into each other’s eyes, which for us is like looking into a mirror.

  “Sarah’s asking us to rescue a thousand people, hon,” I said to Meg. “From the look in your eyes, I think I know your answer.”

  “Let’s go wormhole hunting, captain.”

  We walked back into Watson’s office.

  “Okay, Sarah, we’re in,” I said.

  We shook hands and agreed to meet later in the afternoon to make detailed plans.

  “Oh, one more thing, Harry. Part of my job is to keep my ear to the ground. There’s a lot of talk, and you’ll hear it soon, about you running for office—governor or senator. The stories about your leadership in that little prehistoric town have gotten some politicos thinking, and the courage you showed this morning nailed it for me. As FBI Director, I shouldn’t say this, but I think they have a wonderful idea.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I sat at my favorite New York spot, the restaurant at the Loeb Boathouse overlooking the lake in Central Park. Some of my wise guy fellow agents call it the Buster Boathouse. It takes a lot to calm my normally frenetic nerves, and the Loeb restaurant does the trick.

  The temperature was perfect at 78 degrees with a gentle wind pushing the sailboats on the lake.

  A tall nun approached my table, wearing the severe habit of the Dominican order. I noticed that she was wearing running shoes.

  “Good afternoon young man. Care to join me in grace before meals?” Her voice was familiar, but I had a hard time placing it. She put a hand on my table, drew her face close to mine and said, “Hey, Bozo. It’s me—Mike.”

  I spit my coffee across the table. As I was coughing, “Mike” sat down, adjusting his robes. Mike is famous among the few CIA agents who know him, for his disguises.

  Mike, aka Muhammed Busharif, is the imam of a mosque in Brooklyn. Mike is six feet tall with the physique of a body builder, which he was for many years. He had to explain constantly to people in his mosque why he didn’t wear a beard. He blamed it on a rare skin condition. Truth is, Mike simply didn’t like beards. For most of his religious career, he quietly tended to the flock that worshipped at his mosque. But over time he became infuriated with all the terrorist killings in the name of his religion. When a good friend of his daughter was killed in a bomb attack at a football game, Mike went over the edge. He renounced his religion, but only to a select few people, including me. He became personal friends with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Muslim dissident and author. Besides Ali herself, I’m the only person who knows of his friendship with her. Mike’s language tends to be earthy, not what you’d expect from a religious leader. He’s the most important mole the CIA ever had, and feeds us information that we could never get without an insider like him. In his mosque, Mike hears things that wouldn’t faze a non-clergyman, including me, and I speak Arabic.

  “Hey Sister Mike, nice robes, if somewhat dated,” I said.

  Mike laughed.

  “I can’t get an up-to-date wardrobe at garage sales,” Mike said, “so put up with my datedness or increase my expense budget. To change the subject, I’m the one who usually calls meetings, Buster, so what’s up, my friend?”

  “Something big, Mike. Bigger than anything we ever discussed.”

  “Holy shit. Have you been taking drama lessons or are you shooting straight with me?”

  “I never shoot anything but straight with you, Mike. I’ll start by asking you a question: Have you heard about the Maltese and Melody incidents, the ship disappearances, and most recently, the Ocean Magic, which is still
missing?”

  “Of course. You can’t own a TV or radio and not hear about them. Amazing stuff. Two ships disappear and then all the people suddenly come back after a couple of months in the distant past. And then another one vanishes off the coast of New Jersey. From what the pundits are saying, nobody knows how the events happened. Most people think it’s a strange natural phenomenon.”

  “What do you think, Mike”

  “I don’t think there’s anything natural about it. How the fuck can three ships simply disappear? No, Buster, I think there’s a scumbag lurking in the shadows. Having said that, I don’t know how somebody or some people could pull off an operation that makes a ship disappear.”

  “That’s what I want to know,” I said. “Who and how?”

  “Am I stretching my imagination to say that you suspect a terrorist plot in the background?” Mike asked.

  “No, Mike, your imagination is right on track. Every spook instinct in me says that these events are all part of a terrorist operation. We know this: at least two of the ships slipped through some sort of portal in the ocean, and the third ship probably did too, but half a world away. Most investigators call it a time portal, also known to time travel experts as a wormhole.”

  Mike knocked over his beer, spilling it on his robes.

  “Holy shit, Buster, did you say a portal? The press has been using the word wormhole, but now that you mention it I recognize the word portal used on TV—and in my mosque.”

  “Do you think that people in your mosque may be just talking about the news reports?” I asked.

  “Does the phrase, Sacred Portal, mean anything to you, Buster?”

  “Sacred Portal? I found a piece of paper with those words on it above the coordinates of the wormhole. It was in the room of a guy who planned to kill one of the Maltese people. That phrase is mentioned in a radical book that’s been circulating among jihadis. We found a copy in the guy’s room.”

  I reached into my pocket and came out with an index card with notes on it, my favorite filing system.

  “Here it is: ‘Lure the infidel to the Sacred Portal, where he will be lost in time and space, never to return unless he finds the spot where the Sacred Portal was located.’ Can you recall any context for that phrase, Mike?”

  “I never thought about it, I’m embarrassed to admit,” Mike said. “I remember people using it with the word infidel. I heard things like: ‘The infidel will find himself lost in the Sacred Portal.’ I didn’t pay any attention to it. Some of my more radical congregants are always talking about infidels getting lost, just like they say Great Satan and the usual bullshit like that.”

  I flagged down the waitress to replace Mike’s spilled beer.

  “Buster, how the hell could somebody pull off something like that—a portal in the ocean that ships can pass through?”

  “Beats me, Mike, but you just gave me something I’ve been looking for—a lead.”

  “Well, here’s another one, Buster, but just like the first one I don’t know what it means.”

  “Let’s look for meaning later, Mike. Just tell me what you’ve heard.”

  “In the same conversations involving the Sacred Portal, I heard the word ‘satellite’ often. Hold on, let me get the cobwebs out of my brain. I heard sentences with the words, ‘create, satellite, and Sacred Portal.’ Is it possible that somebody’s manufacturing these fucking things in space?”

  “I don’t know, Mike. Do you have the names of the men involved in these conversations?”

  “Yes. One is Amir Muhammed and the other is Ali Moradi. Those are the only two I recall discussing a Sacred Portal.”

  “Do you know anything more about them, Mike?”

  “Muhammed has been a member of my mosque for years. He’s been pretty quiet until that new guy, Ali Moradi, joined. They’re both aeronautical engineers. Muhammed works for an American company called Space Tech. It’s a private company that manufactures and launches satellites. Moradi works for Northrup Grumman, the big American aerospace company, at their small New York office.”

  “How do you know so much about these guys, Mike?”

  “Everybody who joins my mosque fills out a detailed form. Advanced terrorist security, no?”

  “I think we both know what you’ll be focused on in the near future, Mike.”

  “My ears are your ears, Buster.”

  “When I started this meeting I was in my own end zone trying to come up with a play,” I said. “Now I’m 100 yards downfield and it’s first and goal. You, Mike, are the best.”

  “Just give me the ball, my friend. I’ll take it in for you.”

  Chapter Forty

  “So tell us, Mr. Super Spook, what’s new?” Sarah Watson asked.

  I sat with Sarah Watson and Bill Carlini in the conference room near Sarah’s office. Dinosaur photos hung on the walls.

  “I met yesterday with my favorite mole. As usual he almost drowned me with information.”

  “Buster, tell Sarah about Imam Mike,” Bill Carlini said.

  Although I hate to talk about a deep mole to anybody, especially somebody not from the CIA, my boss told me to bring Director Watson up to speed. I did, giving her Mike’s background and a few cases he’s helped us crack.

  “I’m going to say two words and tell me what you think. ‘Sacred Portal.’ Ring a bell?”

  “Yes,” both Sarah and Bill said. “It’s in the record from Sarah’s meeting a few days ago. That phrase was on a piece of paper you found in the room of that killer you told us about,” Bill said. “It has something to do with hoping that infidels get lost in time. So, you heard more about the phrase?”

  “I was talking to Imam Mike about the wormholes that are gobbling up American ships. He recalled two congregants from his mosque saying that phrase often. He also said that they used Sacred Portal in the same sentence as ‘create’ and ‘satellite.’ Both of those men are aeronautical engineers by trade. So, put your spook hats on. After I gave you that additional information, does Sacred Portal mean anything to you?”

  “It could be the wormhole!” Watson yelled.

  “Hey, remember, spooks don’t yell. Bill, without yelling, tell me if you agree with Sarah.”

  “Yes, too coincidental to be an accident. It sounds like Imam Mike, as usual, is on to something. But how the hell can a human being create a wormhole?”

  “We need to talk to our favorite scientist, Bob Flowers,” I said.

  ***

  On my suggestion, an agent met Bob Flowers at the building entrance and escorted him to Director Watson’s office to be deputized as a federal agent. An accelerated background check had already been done on him.

  “Hello again, Bob,” I said. “I believe you’ve met CIA Director Carlini and, of course, FBI Director Watson.”

  “I heard all about Dinosaur Town from Buster,” Carlini said. “An amazing story,”

  “Actually, we called it Malta Town,” Bob said, “but dinosaur town captures the spirit of the place. Do you mind if I ask a question? Why was I deputized just now as a federal agent?”

  “That insures that you will spend a long time in prison if you divulge what we’re talking about,” Sarah Watson said.

  “I guess I should be flattered,” Bob said, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “Buster tells us that you have a photographic memory,” Carlini said. “How did that help you to get away from prehistoric times?”

  “I never forget anything, but sometimes it takes me a while to drag the recollections from my brain. I remembered reading about wormholes in a physics textbook. At first, I didn’t accept the idea of traveling through time, but I let the science occupy my mind rather than my opinions. That’s when I pieced together our strange incident that propelled the Maltese back in time, and I realized it was a wormhole. The only thing that got in our way was our lack of fuel to get back to the wormhole location. When the Melody of the Seas came upon us, I knew that she was our ticket home. Turns out, my theory was co
rrect.”

  “Bob,” I said, “did you ever consider the possibility that the wormhole could be man-made and not just an accident of nature?”

  “I’ve toyed with the idea. Let me illustrate it for you.”

  Flowers walked over to a white board and wheeled it next to the conference table so we could see. He drew a circle representing earth, and a smaller one depicting a satellite.

  “Satellites have been part of our world ever since the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957. We use them for everything from telecommunications, to space photography, to the GPS in our cars. With a powerful and sophisticated transmitter, it could place a mark on the earth. I don’t understand the next part, but I can theorize that, given the right software, a satellite could be used to create a wormhole.”

  “Bob, I never mentioned a satellite. How did you come up with your theory?”

  “You didn’t need to mention a satellite, Buster. If you pose the idea of a man-made wormhole, the use of a satellite becomes immediately apparent. So, if you think someone or some group is behind these wormholes, who could it be?”

  “Bob, it’s obvious that we’re thinking in that direction, but for now you don’t have a ‘need to know’ just who we suspect.”

  “Ah yes, ‘need to know,’ the basic doctrine used to keep matters secret.”

  “I bet you’re a killer at Trivial Pursuit,” Watson said with a laugh.

  “Well, let’s just hope that what I’m pursuing isn’t trivial.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Meg and I put on our Navy uniforms for our trip into active duty. I looked in the mirror at the uniform on my slimmed down 2017 body.

  “My God, Harry, if you had any more ribbons you’d need an extra chest. You look adorable in uniform.”

  “You don’t look bad yourself, lieutenant,” I said, “but then you’d look great in a potato sack. I’m still amazed that President Blake gave you a direct commission as a lieutenant. I never heard of such an action. Sarah Watson obviously impressed him with her stories about you.”