by P. W. Child
“Besides, she has a thing with Purdue, I think,” he added. That bothered Nina more than it was supposed to. She could not understand why, because a moment ago, all she wanted to hear was that Sam still wanted her. Now she had this sick feeling in her stomach at the thought of Purdue being with another woman.
“What do you mean?” she asked timidly, but she feared the answer.
“Call it my journalistic intuition,” Sam replied, once again filming the lower deck where a crew member snuck into an entrance. “I could be wrong, of course.”
His odd fascination with his subject peeled Nina away from her emotional insecurity for a moment, and she perched up on her toes to look over the railing. “What are you looking at?”
He kept his eye on his viewfinder, but he answered her honestly.
"Something is going on with this damn tugboat, love,” he said mildly. “I just don’t know what it is.”
“You mean the creepy tattered storytellers or the questionable work ethic?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. He had to neglect the unfolding mystery of the hidden door below and film what he was supposed to. Purdue and the others surfaced, looking utterly disappointed and a little bit shocked. Sam and Nina made their way down the jack ladder to join Mieke in helping them out of their diving gear.
“And? Do you think we can get it to float?” Sam asked Purdue.
Crystal sighed and looked across the waves as if she was searching for something. Purdue scowled heavily as the other two divers discussed something with Ali, sounding nothing short of alarmed.
“Purdue?” Nina urged him for a response. Purdue took a deep breath and tried to make sense of what he was about to say.
“These are the exact coordinates we mapped and confirmed this morning,” he said. “We searched the whole area but… the ship is gone.”
Chap ter 27 – Ali’s Secrets Bleed Out
Ali frowned. “How can it be gone? We saw it when we got here!”
Manni glared at him from behind Purdue and Crystal, motioning with a shaking head that Ali should mind his temper until they had successfully got the ship to float and the passengers captured. Any deviation from the plan could make it fail, so they had to play along until their valuable cargo had secured the hopefully even more valuable asset, so to speak.
“Where did you see it?” Purdue asked with renewed hope.
“On our sonar,” Ali answered. “It was there, large as a mountain right below us.”
“Can you show me?” Purdue asked with wide eyes, resting his hand on the captain’s shoulder. “I have to see what kind of technology you have on board to map it with. Maybe I am missing something.”
"Of course. Come; I'll show you," Ali agreed. He led the way to the bridge, making sure that radioactivity was disabled by him giving a barely perceptible signal to the two men watching them from the helm. Purdue, Sam, Nina, and Crystal accompanied him while Mieke and Zain spent time playing cards. Since she was only there to catalog and he was only there for the event of trouble, neither had much to do before the wreck had been lifted.
To Ali’s disbelief, the green and black shapes on the screen yielded nothing.
“I swear! I swear to you it was there! The outlines of a ship right in the middle!” he insisted.
Purdue quickly assured the captain that they believed him, but Ali was visibly shaken by the strange occurrence. He was pacing up and down in front of the control desk, holding his head, muttering and trying to make sense of this unnerving discovery.
“Look, I thought it was my equipment at first. Then I thought the ship was plated with some material to make it undetectable, but now we can all see that the bloody thing has literally disappeared!" Purdue ranted. It was disturbing to see the genius at a loss for an explanation, but Nina took comfort in the fact that Purdue would soon come up with a solution to the problem, as he always did in a crisis.
“Where is Sam?” Crystal asked, noting that the journalist had also vanished while they had been checking the radar readings and resetting the instruments. “Jesus, everyone and everything keep disappearing under our noses.”
Sam followed the narrow hallway from the small door he had filmed from the upper deck before. He felt his way along the plumbing pipes through the dark with only his night vision camera to guide him. He heard footsteps behind him but when he turned there was nothing but an empty fiberglass wormhole of mystery that led to the small red steel door he had closed behind him.
A shadow swept inside one of the small store rooms along the straight passage and Sam held his breath, pressing his body up against the wall right next to the door where the black shape moved. He pressed the red record button on his camera and waited. Whatever he would encounter would be capture on film. The door through which he had entered the hallway creaked open, allowing blinding white daylight through the ajar door, and Sam realized he was trapped. Without a place to hide, he would be in plain sight unless he accessed the room the dark figure had entered.
Pointing the lens straight onto the silhouette in the door frame, Sam’s heart slammed hard against his rib cage. A hundred potential excuses flashed through his brain, reasons explaining his presence in the narrow passage. In the glare of the harsh light, he could not discern the identity of the person who swiftly slipped through the opening, but as the door closed, he realized it was someone he knew well.
“Oh thank God,” Sam sighed in relief, holding his chest. “Nina, what are you doing here?” he whispered.
“I followed you, idiot,” she replied, sneaking quietly toward him. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered, gesturing to her to be quiet and pointing covertly to the door next to him. Nina sank to her haunches and stole toward Sam, and there she sat waiting with him. On the other side of the slightly ajar door, someone was shuffling their feet, murmuring in a low voice that quivered during its relentless litany.
“Creepy,” Nina remarked softly, looking terrified. “What language is that?”
Sam shook his head and shrugged, but he pointed to the flashing red light to show Nina that he was recording the whole thing. She nodded. They peeked around the doorway, one above the other over Sam’s lens, but they were instantly thrown back from the putrid stench in the room.
“Jesus Christ! What the fuck is that smell?” Nina choked behind the back of her hand.
The shuffling stopped. Whatever was going on inside the room ceased.
“They heard us!” Sam whispered urgently. “We have to get the hell out! Now!”
He grabbed her by the wrist and bolted for the red door as quietly as they could manage. Nina jerked open the door and almost slammed it behind them, but then gently latched it again, while Sam looked around to survey the deck, making sure they had not been seen. Once Nina had closed the door, they quickly moved up the jack ladder toward the high vantage point of the bridge.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he implored. “Not until we know who that was.”
“Aye,” she agreed as they hurried to where they heard the others discussing the new developments regarding the sonar readings. “What was that fucking smell, Sam?”
He looked at her with great concern. It was an odor he regrettably knew all too well.
"Death. Ripe death. Not completely decomposed, but already miles away from the last breath," he replied as they entered the bridge.
"Where the hell have you two been?" Crystal asked with a tad too much command. Purdue, Manni, and Ali stood quietly behind her, looking ashen and bewildered.
"I had to take a dump if you don't mind," Sam snapped. Nina winced at his choice of creative excuse and said, “I went looking for him. Just found him on his way back.”
"Well, come one, then. Have a look at this absolute weirdness," Purdue invited them. His face was still distorted in astonished confusion, and he was by no means relieved by the reappearance of the wreck. Its outlines had unmistakably reappeared on the screen. “Look at that!” Purdue moaned with
his hand over his mouth, shaking his head.
Sam lifted his camera and filmed the control panel and every screen displaying the solid representation of the shipwreck with every sweep of the radar. The sonar readings also clearly showed the ship, charted by the pings of the sound waves sent out. The visuals were crystal clear because the structure was not far below to the hull of the tug boat.
“What is the problem?” Nina asked. Her inquiry was met with wide-eyed expressions.
“Nina, it is not the fact that it is visible that is the problem,” Crystal explained a bit more cordially than the last time she had spoken. “It is the strange and unexplainable phenomenon that the wreck periodically disappears in front of our eyes.”
"We timed it," Purdue revealed, showing Nina and Sam's camera his tablet screen. "It would appear that the wreck vanishes and reappears every seven hours and remains for seven hours at a time. According to the time stamps on my readings at the beach house, it corresponds precisely with what we’ve seen here.”
“So it was not just some stealth plating that rendered it undetectable?" Sam asked. Purdue shook his head, "No, it literally vanishes." Sam filmed everyone present, including the captain of the tug. Ali had nothing to say. Manni could see that his skipper was deeply disturbed by the occurrence.
“This is the devil at work,” Ali shrieked as he stared at the sonar display. “I know you Europeans dismiss the old ways, but I’m telling you, you cannot even explain it with your fancy technology and your science! Look at that! That is a solid ship, and soon it will just fade away into the watery hell!”
His breath smelled terrible as he leaned closer to Purdue, Nina, Crystal, and Sam to convey his bewilderment in no uncertain terms. The emaciated man was hysterical, his eyes even more bloodshot than usual. When he pointed toward the instruments, they could see that his hands were shaking. “You brought us to the devil, Mrs. Meyer! You have doomed us! We are as good as dead. A ship doesn’t simply vanish and reappear unless the devil has something to do with it!” he roared in fear and distrust before finally storming out.
Manni shrugged apologetically and left to see to his skipper. Purdue looked into Sam’s lens. “Even as a man of science I cannot refute his opinion.”
Manni trotted after Ali and caught up with him just as they stepped out into the fresh afternoon air. The wind felt colder than usual on their skin as if the tongue of death licked at their bodies. Ali leaned against the railing just under the bridge and looked down into the black ocean, four stories below them.
“Manni, we are cursed!” he gasped wildly.
“No. we are not! This is what we do. We have no need for punishment. Even sharks have a task, Ali. It is a bloody job, but it serves a purpose, just like us!” Manni attempted to make sense of it. Ali turned around and leered at his friend. He was not convinced.
“This is not a heavy gust of wind or some waves, Manni! This is not a bad harvest or the loss of spoils! We are… we…" he sank to his knees. His head bowed, he took a deep breath before sharing his secret, the secret he had been harboring, and that had eaten his half-soul away. “Manni, I... never… I did not do the sacrifice I was going to make in the storm. I could not eat the Arab’s heart. He was putrid, Manni. He was putrid because I drowned him and his body decayed so quickly that I couldn’t eat his flesh anymore.”
“Listen to yourself!” Manni commanded sternly, for once standing up to his captain. “No cadaver decays quicker than the laws of nature prescribe, my friend. We just waited too long. And we waited too long because we did not know what was coming. How were we supposed to know that we’d get this freak storm; that you would need to do the rites?” Manni persisted as he watched Ali’s open mouth and bulging eyes, staring into nothingness. It was evident that Ali was losing his mind over what they had experienced over the past few days.
“Get up. The men are watching,” he whispered. Ali forced his legs to carry his weight, but his tongue was paralyzed in hopelessness. Manni had to keep up his leader’s morale and remind him of who he was.
“As soon as we bring up that wreck we will see it. It will be ours, Ali. And it will not disappear again, because we will claim it!” he smiled, patting the captain on the back. “Even if we are in hell, we are more wicked than any devil of the blue, hey?”
Ali’s voice was weary, nothing more than a weak rattle. “If we are in hell, we must appease the devil. The German and her friends must die.”
Chapte r 28 – Historical Teleportation
After marking the time of the wreck’s re-appearance, Purdue’s party knew how much time the recovery team had to complete repairs before the vessel would be gone again.
“This is going to slow us down considerably,” Crystal lamented. The diving crew was assembled to plan the next steps. It consisted of four men from the tug crew that would follow Crystal’s orders. “The seven-hour-cycle disrupts our schedule significantly, so we have to haul ass as soon as we get down there.”
As the men formed a circle around Crystal and Purdue, Mieke slipped in behind Nina and just gave the historian a wink. Sam was filming the discussion like a documentary, looking forward to present it all to Dr. Malgas when they would meet up again soon. Mieke sat down next to Nina. She had a suggestion about what could be the cause of the wreck’s odd behavior, but she did not want to interrupt the divers before they had their orders.
When Crystal had delegated the respective tasks, Mieke cleared her throat.
“I just want to wish you all good luck,” she smiled. Ali’s divers acknowledged her reluctantly, since she was nothing but a distraction right now. She put her arms around two of the divers and gave them a halfhearted hug before returning to her seat next to Nina. The historian frowned at her, “Are you drunk, Blonde Ambition?”
Mieke laughed. “No! The place is bleak enough, methinks. What everyone needs is a little good cheer; a little encouragement. It’s all so glum.”
“I suppose,” Nina shrugged. She watched Sam getting zipped up by the beautiful tall lawyer again, but she decided not let it faze her this time, thanks to Sam’s previous reassurance.
“You know what I think?” Mieke asked Nina as the rest of the party left for the dive, and Sam readied his filming gear to submerge last. "I have a theory, and you, as a historian, might agree," the blonde said.
Nina raised an eyebrow. “Let’s hear it.”
“Are you sure… certain… that this is a Nazi ship from the Second World War?” she asked. Nina nodded, “Positive.”
‘I wonder if I should tell her that it is not the Admiral Graf Spee,’ Nina wondered as she waited for the girl’s theory.
“So, I was thinking, this ship might have something in common with the USS Eldridge,” Mieke suggested.
Then it finally sunk in. "Go on," she urged Mieke.
“What is the USS Eldridge?” Ali asked, with Manni standing next to him. Outside, the divers disappeared under water to start working on the wreck.
While Nina explained it to the men, she felt an epiphany at what Mieke had just suggested. Of course! She should have known this, but for some reason the Eldridge had never crossed her mind. She had been too preoccupied with other nonsense to notice that the wreck behaved like the Eldridge was reputed to.
“The USS Eldridge was a United States military vessel that was allegedly used in the Philadelphia Experiment of 1943,” Nina sighed, placing her palms together and hugging her hands with her inner thighs while she recounted the legendary experiment. “They wanted to test a scientific theory,” she explained, making a point of keeping her explanation simple for the mariners, who did not know much about physics.
“What theory?” Manni asked, folding his arms. He enjoyed the small woman’s sharp mind, but he did not like it when women were smarter than men. To him, they were either whores or good laborers that fetched a decent price in trade.
“In short, they wanted to make a ship disappear. If they could have pulled it off, they could have made their whole fleet invisible to t
he enemy, you see?” she said.
“Did it work?” Ali asked, intrigued that science could possibly explain what terrified him so much.
Nina shrugged and sighed, “It did, in some form, they say. The popular story is that the Eldridge disappeared in a flash of blue light and was teleported over 200 miles, re-appearing in front of another ship’s crew as witnesses before vanishing again and returning to the original site…”
“But upon appearing back in Philadelphia,” Mieke interrupted excitedly, “the ship had reputedly gone ten minutes back in time too!”
Ali and Manni slowly looked at each other.
“Rubbish,” Manni said.
“Okay,” Mieke shrugged, “but how else would you explain this wreck under us disappearing every seven hours? Is that rubbish too? You call it bullshit, but you saw it with your own eyes.” Nina put her hand firmly on Mieke’s arm to warn her not to challenge the men.
“What?” Mieke asked Nina out loud. “Zain and Sibu are right over there.”
“Still,” Nina said almost imperceptibly. “Keep it nice and cozy.”
Ali and Manni exchanged angry sounding words in their language. Mieke nudged Nina and whispered, “That is not Egyptian.”
“Are you sure?” Nina asked.
“My major may be archeology but my minor is linguistics, darling, and that’s not Egyptian.”
Nina smiled at Manni and Ali as she pulled Mieke up by her arm. They joined Zain and Sibu to feel a little safer.
“What language was it then, Mieke?” Nina asked once they were a safe distance away.
“I have no idea,” the girl replied.
“Zain. Sibu,” Nina said. “Please do not let us out of your sight, at least until the others are back.”
“Why?” he asked with an aggressive undertone in his voice. “What did they say? Did they threaten you?”
Mieke calmed him down, reminding him that they were outnumbered right now. Nina peered at the two skinny sailors. "Just don't turn your back on them."