The Shadow Beneath The Waves

by Matt Betts

  His right eye closed slowly and then Jakob nodded.

  “Did you finish off all the beer?” She was slightly concerned about what it would do to the poor man’s health, but she’d heard stories of his alcohol-consuming prowess from the time before she’d joined the crew. She’d never challenged him, he’d never challenged her, she just assumed he was the king of the boat when it came to alcohol.

  Jakob’s hand came up from under the table and Cass saw he was holding a half-consumed lager. He looked at it, swirled it around and then put it back under the table. “Not all of it,” he said.

  It wasn’t Cass’s turn in the rotation to make breakfast, but she decided that if she wanted to eat any time before the afternoon, she’d need to do it herself. She grabbed eggs and milk from the fridge and bread from the box and proceeded to prepare a French toast that was simple, yet delicious and hopefully compatible with hangovers. She dropped a few candied walnuts and smashed bananas into the mix and whisked it briskly, which caused Jakob’s closed eyes to twitch. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll stir a little more quietly.”

  Jakob put his head down on the table and stared at her, his expression asking her why she was doing this to him.

  “It’ll be over in a moment, I promise,” she said. Cass stopped stirring and lit the stove, waiting for it to heat up the skillet. She looked at her pitiful friend and then at the coffee maker. As he closed his eyes, she tiptoed over and pressed the start button on the unit, causing it to begin whirring and filling.

  “Hallelujah.” Jakob shook his fist in the air in triumph.

  The hangovers slowed everyone down. Takis and Ozzie came down together, dragging their feet and cringing at loud noises. Somehow Rina seemed overly-cheery, smiling, but she was wearing her largest sunglasses and moving gently as she sat down at the table.

  Martin was last. "Good lord, what a night. Let's never do that again." He laughed heartily and winked at the mass of people staring at him. "Just kidding. We should resupply for the trip home." He slapped Takis on the back. "You're in charge of the beer and Ozzie can handle the rest."

  Cass smiled, realizing he was boisterous on purpose just to torture his crew. "Can I get you some breakfast, Martin? I've made French toast and some of that sausage we picked up. I can make eggs."

  "Nah. For hangovers, I eat plain old oatmeal." Martin leaned over and opened the cupboard over the sink, pulling the box of instant oatmeal packets down.

  "She's made some killer French toast, man. You should try it. Tastes like walnuts and maple." Jakob had perked up a bit as he ate and consumed some coffee. He'd complimented Cass's cooking a number of times as he shoveled more and more food into his mouth. She figured it was just the hangover talking, but she still took the compliment to heart.

  Martin filled a bowl with hot water and dumped in the powdered oatmeal. "I'm good. Thanks."

  They all sat around the table and spoke low and quiet.

  Rina sat with her headphones in, sunglasses still on. She picked at the food, not committing to eating anything. As she watched Martin spoon oatmeal into his face, her phone on the table began to vibrate. She let it go for a moment, but glanced down to see the message. "We have a new meeting request from Subtle Bagpipe."

  This got Martin's attention. "Hmmm. Maybe she has a line on our next expedition. Didn't she hint at a manifest for the HMS Sturgeon the last time we spoke?"

  "I can't remember. When did we last talk to her?" Ozzie asked.

  "Months." Jakob mumbled with a mouthful of breakfast.

  Rina stabbed at a banana slice, seemingly energized. “She gave us that rumor that led to the plane in Alaska. I can check my log to see when the call was connected, if you want.”

  Cass felt left out of the discussion. She’d heard of their contact/informant, but never got much information. “I’ve been here nearly three months and I’ve never talked to her, or been here when you talked to her. So it has to have been at least that long.” She looked around for someone to jump in, but they were all too busy shoveling the last of their breakfast. “Who is she?”

  “Don’t know.” Ozzie threw his dish and fork in the sink. “I’ll do the dishes later.”

  Takis followed, syrup still in the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, don’t know. And he’ll do the dishes later.” Takis dropped his things in next to Ozzie’s and took off toward the ship’s ‘strategy’ room. It was their communications hub and the place where they all gathered to plan their day, or their week or their next move in a search. It also had a big screen for crew movie nights.

  Martin and Jakob both dumped their dishes and headed for the strategy room, leaving only Rina with Cass. She was slowly eating a handful of grapes and listening to her music. She stirred her coffee with the handle of her fork—either not wanting to dirty another utensil, or too unmotivated to get up to get another utensil—and took her time. She still had on the big sunglasses and Cass had no idea what the younger girl was looking at.

  “You coming?” Cass asked.

  After another sip of coffee, she turned her head toward Cass. “They won’t start without me. They don’t know how any of that stuff works.” She smiled and popped another grape into her mouth.

  “I’ll see you in a few, then.” Cass walked toward the strategy room alone. She couldn’t begrudge Rina her fun. The girl generally stayed in the background while the men did manly things, like lifting equipment, jumping off boats, fighting when needed, jumping out of planes, burping, farting, fighting, jumping off cliffs, wrestling lions—if their stories were to be believed—dancing, etc. None of which Rina wanted any part of. She liked listening to her headphones, working at her computer, and, collecting bugs from the various places they visited. She had a case with dozens of insects pinned in their own little cubicles. She had her quirks.

  When Cass got to the comms room, the men were all seated around the table and facing a blank screen on the opposite wall. They all looked at Cass.

  “You know how to turn this on, right?” Takis said.

  Cass didn’t want to respond. She knew how to turn it on, but didn’t want to face Rina’s wrath if something got screwed up.

  “Just give it to me.” Martin grabbed the remote from Jakob and pointed it at the screen, even though most of the equipment was behind him in the electronics cabinet.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Cass said. “Rina might…”

  “What? I’m in charge here. This is my boat and my equipment. I can do whatever I want.” Cass watched as he leaned in close to read the text on the remote’s buttons. “Is this AUX 1 or INPUT 4?”

  “Oh, I think Cass is right, you should really leave that alone.” Ozzie moved his chair away from Martin slightly.

  “I’ve seen her do it a thousand times.” Martin looked up at the screen, and seeing it was still blank, he looked back at the rows of buttons on the rectangular controller. “I can do it.”

  It got calm in the room quickly, and Cass realized that Rina was standing at the hatch to the comms room. Everyone looked away, or stared down at their hands or cups or the table; anything to keep from looking Rina in the eyes. Everyone except Martin, who was still fiddling with the control. When he noticed the silence, he looked over at Rina and smiled before dropping the remote on the table in front of him.

  “You know, after all this time you really should show someone else how all of this stuff works,” Martin said. “I mean, what if you aren’t around? What if…”

  “Ah...ah…ah.” Rina raised her hand to stop Martin.

  Martin tried to persist. “But…”

  “Ah.” She shook her head. “If you’ve messed anything up… If you’ve fucked my bass levels again… If you’ve increased the tint on the projector…” Her phone began buzzing, but she refused to look at it. She just stared at Martin. “We’ve been over this.” Rina waved her hands around the room at the equipment. “All this? Mine.” She finally looked at her phone. “It’s Subtle.” Rina walked over to the chair nearest the television, propped her legs
up on a bench, and began tapping away on her phone. Seconds later the projector came on, and instantly a blue box started bouncing across the wide screen with the word “Initializing.”

  “Wait,” Ozzie said. “You can do everything from your phone?”

  She nodded lightly. “There’s an app for that.”

  “So you don’t even need the remote?” Martin asked.

  “No. Not at all. That’s a cheap remote I picked up when we were in Singapore that time. The lights work, but otherwise it’s useless.”

  Cass laughed. She loved how Rina could wind Martin up and still get away with it. The others were trying to hold their own laughter in, but gave up when they saw the dumb look on Martin’s face, and the grin on Rina’s. It was a tight-knit crew and Cass felt at ease among them. She felt bad from time-to-time in the last few months about deceiving them, lying about her true purpose, but, she’d been undercover before and she knew how it went. Still, it was going to suck when it was all over. The best she could hope for was for the N.I.A. to pull her off the boat before she had to blow her cover.

  The laughter was interrupted by the screeching, hideous sounds of bagpipe music being played loudly, and poorly, from the screen. Soon, the garish avatar for Subtle Bagpipe appeared on the screen; a large cartoon bagpipe with red and pink tartan across it. Rina turned the volume down.

  “I’m assuming that’s you, Subtle.” Martin looked at the screen. The music continued for almost another twenty seconds before dying a horrible death as the air left the bellows of the screeching instrument. “Subtle?”

  “Hey Martin. What’s new?” The familiar female voice scratched out through the speakers. As usual, no image appeared other than the avatar. “Miss me?”

  “Always,” Martin said.

  Cass wondered who this informant was, and how she ever hooked up with Martin and his crew. From the sounds of it, she was crazy tech-savvy and was constantly tripping over information that was useless to most, but priceless to others. She was just good at cultivating those others, from the sounds of it.

  “Look, I don’t know how long we’ll have this link, I’ve got a storm moving in quickly, so who knows what that shit will do to our little convo.” The avatar dissolved and the screen changed to the image of a map of the world.

  “Oh, you’ve prepared a little presentation for us this time,” Takis said. “How sweet.”

  “Anything for you guys.” The screen zoomed into the map to focus on the Pacific. “You all are familiar with this area, right? I don’t need to explain, do I?” She hurried on before she got any response. “It’s the Pacific. It’s Hawaii. It’s the Aleutians, and the Bering Sea. Okay. Fun.” A red blob appeared and covered the areas from the northern-most tip of the Hawaiian Island of O’ahu, over to just beyond Midway Atoll and then up until the blob covered the Russian city of Palana, then over into the Aleutians nearly to Kodiak in Alaska. “Check that out. It’s a massive search area that includes a ton of unexplored area underwater. Autonomous sea drones have crossed a portion of that area and mapped it, but they’ve barely scratched the surface.” Slowly, a line appeared in the middle of the blob that appeared to form an upside down letter “C.” Then above it, two eyes slowly took shape, until the blob looked like a sad face. “But don’t worry, I can help.”

  “Wait,” Martin said. The whole room had been silent until he’d spoken. The crew was hanging on Subtle’s every word. “You haven’t even told us what treasure you’re talking about.”

  A black line suddenly encircled the blob’s sad face. “Oh Martin. I’m embarrassed for you. You know this one.”

  Cass certainly knew it. She’d been briefed so many times on the area and the story of the disappearance, that she knew it by heart. “She’s talking about the Cudgel A-9, Martin. The big prize.”

  The bagpipes played again through the television briefly. “Ding. Ding. Ding,” Subtle said. “That must be the new girl. She gets the prize today.”

  “My God.” Jakob leaned back with a huff. “I’ll believe it when I see it. We’ve had too many false alarms.”

  Ozzie took the same stance. “Yeah, you know we love you and all, Miss Bagpipes, but we’ve been through this before. No offense.”

  Everyone turned to Martin, who had an undecided look about him. “Well, the lady was nice enough to call us. Let’s hear what she has to say.”

  Cass took her phone out of her pocket and started the recorder app. If this woman had any real information, Cass would want to send it to the N.I.A. for analysis as quickly as she could.

  ***

  Martin sighed. They had been down this road before and to no avail. It was fun and exciting the first two times, but those times had also been expensive failures. He was almost relieved that the tip was about Cudgel, it made it easier to say no. He let her talk to humor the rest of the crew. Hopefully they would see the logic in letting this thing go without much fanfare.

  “See, the Cudgel’s last transmission came from the very eastern portion of my blob here.” There was a crackle on the line and a recording started playing from the monitor with more static in the background.

  “Strike Base, this is A-9. Listen, we’re seeing some kind of object on radar. No idea what it is. Running identifiers now.”

  “A-9, this is Strike Base. Can you get a visual?”

  “Negative Strike Base. Not exactly. All we can make out visually is some sort of shadow beneath the waves that seems to be approaching us from the opposite direction.”

  “A-9, you are authorized to take any evasive or defensive moves you deem necessary.

  “Affirmative Strike Base.”

  “It was just a few minutes later that it disappeared from radar and no one could raise them on any form of communication. They tried sat phones, text messages, smoke signals, and everything else,” Subtle continued.

  “Yes, we’ve all heard the story of the missing war machine; it was kind of a good fairy tale for a while there. My kids loved it,” Martin said. “Satellites were tasked to look, subs checked into it, drones, whatever. No one found it.”

  “True. But they were limited in what they could do at the time, because that whole area was a hotbed of activity from the Circle that had a base in eastern Russia.” Subtle’s map zoomed in to show the fortifications built at Kamchatka Krai, Russia. Martin knew that that particular island stronghold had been an important target in the war, it was all over the news waves at the time. It was close to mainland Russia, Japan and China, where many of the separatists had broken from to form the alliance.

  “So when the war was over, and the area was stable, and they actually got to search for the Cudgel, everything was a little fuzzy and the trail was cold. It was just under a year before they even got equipment in the area. The navy, the government found nothing.” The screen’s image changed to a sound playback with a wave configuration displayed. “Okay. So, on May 23, 2086, two years after the Cudgel disappears, this happens…” There was a click on Subtle’s transmission and the music player began transmitting audio. It was comprised of bubble sounds, swishing water and a low scraping sound. “That was recorded by a seismology team in the Aleutians.”

  Everyone looked at each other and then to Martin, who shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, what is that? Whales humping?”

  “No,” Subtle said. “Let me strip all the common sounds away, and let me know what you think.” She played it again, and the bubbles and water were gone. This time the scraping sounds are clearer, and showed themselves to be a more regimented pattern. Two high clicks, a pause, then two clicks and a pause. “This goes on for a full minute before stopping. The scientists who recorded it thought little of it since it didn’t happen again, but luckily for us, they archived it with their records.”

  He was intrigued and that bothered Martin. “So what do you think that is? And how does it point to the Cudgel?” He was still ready to pass.

  “First, let me say I can’t find a record of anyone recording a similar sound on that date on 2087,
but in 2088, a submarine on its way to help in the clearing of mines near mainland Russia recorded the exact same sound with the exact same pattern on the same date and time. The next year, two different sources recorded the same thing, same area, same time. One was an underwater drone shooting video for a documentary on the impact of the war on certain areas of the ocean, the other was a fishing trawler using sensors to find new fishing grounds.”

  It was a crazy longshot and it didn’t convince Martin. “The sounds happened three years in a row? Why didn’t anyone else realize this?”

  “Well, they were all different sources. None of them consulted with any of the others. A fisherman, an American sub, a documentary crew and an Aleutian research station, they had no reason to think about it. I’m sure the sub reported it, but I doubt anyone followed up. Each of them only experienced the phenomena once. And these are just the ones I’ve found. There may be more from other years, or more from the same years as these.”

  “So how did you get this information if no one else put it together?” Cass asked.

  “Martin pays me to find him info, not to tell him how I found it.”

  The crew began to discuss the sound with each other, but Martin still stared at the screen where the sound wave configuration was still up. “I don’t know what this proves. A sound happened a few years in a row, in the area where the thing was last sighted? That doesn’t appear to be a slam dunk to me. I don’t even know what that sound is. And to call it a pattern is kind of a stretch.” His head started shaking before he’d even formed words for his opinion. “No. I don’t see it. I don’t see packing the crew up and heading back out there for this. I don’t…”

  “Today is May eighth,” Rina said.

  Ozzie and Takis smiled. Jakob looked around, confused by the statement.

  “That’s why I waited to tell you. You’ve got two weeks to get out to that site—I can give you about a ten-mile search area based on triangulating all of the recordings I found. Be there on May 23, at two-oh-six in the afternoon, local time. Set up your listening equipment and get ready. I guarantee you’ll hear this.”