Order of the Black Sun Box Set 4

by Preston William Child

  "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.”

  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 the 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."

  29

  Shades of Evil

  Under the sun-streaked surface of the Indian Ocean, the wreck's eerily bent rods seemed to reach for the sky overhead, trapped in its watery grave of rust and corrosion. It was grotesque and massive, magnified by the water. Sam felt that familiar terror well up inside him again, but he stayed with Purdue, who saw it up close for the first time. In Sam's lens, the billionaire was like a game show host, smiling and pointing to all kinds of fascinating aspects of the wreck. He had put in a brand new memory card just before the dive, but while he followed Purdue wherever he went, Sam tried his utmost not to touch the ship.

  Especially now, that he knew there was something strange going on with the vessel, he was even warier than before. He could not help but feel as if that same consciousness he had sensed during his first dive was threatening him once more, the invisible eyes of the ship watching him, knowing that he knew. Crystal had taken two of the divers further down with her to estimate the damage to the turrets and some of the plating along the conning tower and aft tower. Purdue motioned for Sam to join him and one of the welders to film how the hull was patched and how the water was pumped out of the flooded compartment behind the patch.

  As much as Sam enjoyed watching the process, he could not help but feel the ever-present sinister vibration. He kept checking his diving watch to see how deep they were, and then he filmed it just for the record. Almost obsessively he kept track of the elapsed time, which was rapidly approaching the end of the seven-hour-cycle. Sam imagined that being present during the ship’s disappearance had to cause an immense shift in water displacement and drag him to the ocean floor. Such nightmarish thoughts plagued Sam every minute he spent near the old Nazi ship. He wondered how this vessel could exist when Nina had been so sure that all the German battleships were accounted for.

  It was minutes away from the wreck’s expected disappearance when they entered one compartment of the lower decks that was still flooded. It was a large area that would have to be patched and pumped dry during the next dive. Sam following Purdue and the other diver who led the way. Floating freely between the threatening bars, rods, and wiring of the vibrating ship Sam kept filming. Some peculiar instruments caught his eye, and he stopped to investigate.

  What he found explained the origin of his constantly fluctuating emotions and nausea when he came too close to the vessel. To some degree, it also gave reason to why Sam had a feeling that the ship was alive, with its infrasound vibrations continuously pulsing through him. Although Crystal had dismissed his findings as stress-related after the first dive, he now knew for sure why he was feeling a distinct energy radiate from the wreck. On the one hand, it comforted him that it was just the result of active equipment, but on the other hand, it unnerved him that anything would still be active on a ship that had been submerged for over seventy years.

  He filmed the electromagnetic field generators fitted in the hollow walls of different compartments and niches designed to house them in the floors. Sam was amazed. Magnets, gravitational chargers, and other copper-based materials ran all through the section. It looked like a dormitory that had been converted into a control room, but how? It did not make sense. There was evidence of beds and lavatories, even medical supplies and tattered clothing, but it was not a living area by the farthest reaches.

  Too many sophisticated machines took up residence in the same space where thick cables snaked into desks with meter readers and gauges. The closer Sam came to the cables the sicker he felt. There was a silent hum emanating from them, growing louder with every passing minute as if it charged something. Suddenly it dawned on Sam. The generators were the reason the ship teleported.

  A door to his right kept falling open and closed in slow motion from the gaining wave activity of the water, and Sam swam over to see where it led. He kept an eye out behind him to make sure Purdue was still at the entrance before he entered the pitch black room behind the swaying door. In his stomach, the pulsing energy of the gravitational waves exacerbated his nausea, but he had to see what was hidden there behind the instrument panels. What he saw filled him with such horror that he could not get out of the cabin quickly enough.

  Without a care for the nasty vibration that coursed through him at every touch of the pipes, Sam propelled himself forward to reach Purdue and the welder. They had no idea what he had seen, but he had it on film, and he had to surface. Purdue could see that Sam was spooked and signaled him to continue up to the surface.

  On the other side of the big vessel, Crystal was holding down a sheet for bolting. While the other two men from Ali's crew fired up the welding equipment, she checked her watch. It would soon be time for the ship to disappear, but, as curious as she was about its destination, she did not want to stick around to see what was going to happen. Her blue eyes scrutinized the exit, a small chimney-like chute facing upward to the faint light of the surface. They had entered the ship through the chute, having forced open the heavy steel bulkhead that had sealed the compartment.

  They had already pumped out most of the water from the compartment, which was the best access point for the hull patch. She gestured for one of the men to take over where she was holding the patch so that his colleague could weld. With hand signals, she told them that she needed to retrieve the toolbox so they could bolt the next sheet. They gave her a thumbs-up and proceeded to weld the cracks shut. Gradually, the chamber grew darker. Eventually, it was completely dark, save for the blow torch fire that illuminated the steel walls.

  They checked their watches. It was almost time to surface, and they had to pack up. Crystal was gone, even though the toolbox she was supposed to collect was still sitting on the far end of the compartment. Concerned they looked around, but the master diver was gone. Alarmed, they used their blowtorches to look around, yet they could not find any trace of her. When the designated evacuation time approached, they were still busy packing up, but they knew they would get it done on time.

  It was when they were ready to leave that genuine terror took a hold of them. The exit above them was blocked, sealed off by the closed bulkhead. That had been the reason for the increased darkness while they were working. In utter panic, the two divers rushed to the sealed bulkhead to pry it open, but it was too heavy and wedged from the other side. She had locked them in. Desperately seeking a way out, the two men searched the compartment, but there was no other way out. The only other way would have been the cracks that they had so carefully welded shut.

  Suddenly the hum of the wreck grew to a thunderous roar, a low-frequency drone that grew louder with every second that passed until the two men could feel their organs bruise under the steadily increasing pulse of the radi
o waves. An unholy magnetic force gripped them along with everything else that was within the unified fields of gravity and electromagnetic stasis. Unbearable to their bodies, the fields converged and disintegrated the two men, fusing them to the bulkhead and the hull, just like the crew members of the USS Eldridge so many decades ago.

  Not far from the Aleayn Yam, the ocean surface suddenly dropped into the void left by the sudden disappearance of the wreck. Ali stared at the phenomenon, in awe, speechless from fear of the oddity he had never seen before.

  “Two men perished. Two of my men!” he bemoaned the deaths of the divers, thinking they had drowned for their tardiness.

  Even though they were mourning the lost divers, Manni, and the others stood beside him, marveling at the unusual spectacle. After the water had evened out and the salvage tug stopped rolling, they went back to their respective stations.

  “Dave, I’ll meet you at dinner. I am exhausted,” Crystal excused herself and made her way to her cabin.

  “Alright, darling,” he shouted gleefully. “Sam! Sam, I am sorry to be such a pain, but could we analyze the footage, please?”

  Sam was shaken, but he hid it well behind a complaint of fatigue. After all, it had been hours of repairs, going up and down to get new material and filming various stages of their progress. He ran his fingers through his hair. “Purdue, I am beyond knackered. Exhausted!”

  “I know. So am I, but I would love to see what you captured, even if it is just from the time index you and I were inside with Isho,” Purdue coaxed. Sam exhaled heavily and pulled Purdue aside.

  “I saw something down there. Something dreadful. Dave, I don’t want to go down there again. And if I could give you a word of warning…” Sam spoke softly, looking around to make sure nobody else heard him. “We should leave this damned ship right here and fuck off back to Scotland. If Crystal wants it so desperately, let her have it.”