by Mack Maloney
Batman stared at Gunner and then at the hammer.
“Did I do that?” he asked in astonishment.
He and Gunner ran back up to the bridge to find the Senegals flipping switches and getting the controls back in order.
Everything was suddenly working again — and most important, the steering controls were back on line. They ran a diagnostic through the control panel and everything came back green. It was as if nothing had happened at all. Yet they’d lost at least an hour’s time, and they knew this only because Gunner’s digital watch was working again, and when it blinked back on, it wasn’t zeroed out. Rather, it showed that more than an hour had passed since it had blinked off.
* * *
Nolan and Twitch had spent all this time out on the bow, looking for other submerged objects they might be in danger of hitting. But they had barely spoken a word between them.
Now that the ship had come back to life, they hustled back up to the bridge.
“Who found the ‘On’ switch?” Nolan asked Batman.
“That’s the big mystery,” Batman replied. “Everything seems to be working OK now, but the diagnostics said nothing was broken in the first place. Yet the GPS says we drifted more than twenty miles out into the Atlantic.”
Nolan looked at the Senegals and just shrugged. The African seafarers all shrugged back.
“The sea is a strange place,” one said in broken English.
“Especially this sea,” Twitch said under his breath.
At Nolan’s request, the Senegals re-engaged the engines and the Dustboat started moving forward again.
They reoriented themselves, turning the small freighter 180 degrees to a westerly heading, back toward the Bahamas.
They had hoped to reach North Gin Cay before daybreak, but the unexpected stoppage had thrown that schedule out of whack.
“Just lay it on,” Nolan told the Senegals. “We’ll worry about the fuel situation later.”
They immediately pushed the diesels and the gas turbine water jets to full power. Suddenly, the Dustboat was back to roaring along at more than forty knots.
And everything seemed to return to normal — for about thirty seconds.
That’s when one of the Senegals directed Nolan’s attention to their sea surface radar screen.
Though they were supposed to be out in the middle of nowhere, with no land anywhere near them, the surface radar was showing a large land mass not a quarter mile dead ahead.
“What the hell is that?” Nolan asked, incredulous.
They all tried to look straight ahead of them, but even with night vision gear, a sudden mist was preventing them from seeing much beyond a few hundred feet.
“This is crazy,” Gunner said, looking at the GPS physical map. “We’re still out in the ocean. There’s not supposed to be anything out here.”
“Unless the GPS is fucked up,” Batman said.
Nolan ordered, “All engines stop!”
He closed his eyes and could envision them running up onto some rocky beach or reef and wrecking the Dustboat for good.
The Senegals complied immediately, killing all power and disengaging the engines.
They came to a dead stop in the water.
But no sooner was this done than the land mass they’d detected on the sea surface radar screen faded away.
“What the fuck?” Batman cried. “That was just there, solid as rock — and now…”
Nolan couldn’t believe it. None of them could.
“Now it’s gone,” Twitch said.
That’s when the lights went out again.
* * *
Crash was still shaking with excitement when the SDV returned to the Sea Shadow.
The stealth ship had been sailing in figure-eights for the past hour about fifteen miles off Havana, staying hidden in the darkness and fog.
Commander Beaux reattached the SDV to the Sea Shadow via the special brace located between the submerged hulls. Smash lowered a ladder from the vessel’s main compartment, and the team climbed back up into the stealth ship.
They were ecstatic. Commander Beaux declared the mission a success and very well done. Crash was extremely impressed by 616’s professionalism. They appeared uncannily smooth throughout. None of the bumps that Whiskey seemed to encounter anytime they went out to do a job.
Crash rarely felt nostalgic — but at that moment, climbing out of his diving suit, toweling off, he once again felt a pang of loss that he was no longer part of the SEAL brotherhood. Looking back on it, pre-9/11, pre-Tora Bora, he realized that’s when he’d been the happiest.
The IX-529 was quickly out of Cuban waters, using its high-powered propulsion system to put a lot of distance between itself and the hostile island.
They soon had the coffee percolating and broke out some freeze-dried chow. As Crash listened in and Ghost drove the boat, the SEAL team discussed the mission in all aspects, critiquing themselves on the minutest details.
When the post-mission analysis was over, Beaux turned to Crash and asked, “Just like the old days?”
Crash laughed out loud.
“Hardly,” he said.
Aboard the Dustboat
They could see nothing around them but water.
None of the onboard interior lights were working. Their trouble lights were few in number and quickly getting dim.
The Dustboat’s main engines were still working, but the ship could only crawl along, because they had no idea where they were going.
The GPS was out, as was the sea surface radar. Their steering worked, though they weren’t sure why. And while the diesels were running, the gas turbine-powered water jets were not.
No one had a clue as to what was going on. Even the star patterns above them looked out of place.
Nolan returned to the bow and shined his failing flashlight in all directions, trying to make sure they didn’t hit anything again.
One of the Senegals was with him now, scanning the water as best he could, too.
At one point, Nolan spotted a series of circular waves breaking right in front of them. He quickly handed the trouble light to the Senegal, then leaned out over the bow railing to make sure these waves weren’t being caused by rocks or a reef.
Stretching out as far as he could possibly go, Nolan looked down at the water … and saw an enormous eye looking back up at him.
He staggered backward.
“Jesus!” he started yelling. “Jesus!”
He unstrapped his pistol and began firing into the water.
The Senegal grabbed his arm.
“C’est une baleine,” he was saying. “Baleine…”
Nolan stopped shooting.
Baleine.
A whale.
He collapsed to his knees and dragged his hands over his head.
A fucking whale?
Is that what they’d hit earlier?
Batman was suddenly beside him, alarmed by the gunshots.
He saw Nolan was in a bad way, so he hastily lit up a joint and passed it to him.
“Take a puff, man,” Batman told him. “You gotta calm down.”
Nolan did so, but only because Batman insisted.
“Now, listen to me,” Batman said to him. “I think the worst thing that could have happened was those guys bringing that freaking Bermuda Triangle book on board.”
Batman took a long drag on the joint.
Then he went on. “But I read some of it. And all this stuff can be explained.”
He looked out at the water.
“We hit a whale,” Batman said. “There’s hundreds of them out here. And the mysterious landmass that disappeared? A fluke of electronics. Losing the electricity? Could have happened anytime, anywhere.”
“How about the fucking green light I saw underwater right after we hit whatever we hit?” Nolan asked.
Batman shrugged, hearing this for the first time. “A formation of luminous fish,” he said. “We’re in the fucking tropics, dude. They got schools of fish down h
ere that are brighter than Times Square.”
Nolan finally let out a long breath. He felt his whole body droop. Batman gave him a friendly tap on his shoulder.
“Everything has an explanation, Snake,” he told Nolan. “An earthly explanation.”
But suddenly Nolan wasn’t listening to him anymore.
He was looking at a spot up the night sky, directly off the port bow.
“Then, tell me something,” he said. “What the hell is that?”
Batman followed his gaze, and then swore softly.
Two bright white objects were flying toward them about 100 feet above the surface of the water. They were bathed in an eerie glow.
They weren’t missiles — they were moving too slowly. But they weren’t aircraft, either. They had no wings, no tails, no sign of any propulsion equipment.
But they were flying side by side, in a perfect formation. That was the weirdest thing.
They looked like torpedoes.
Flying torpedoes.
Everyone on the ship saw them. They watched as they went right past the bow, no more than twenty feet away, before finally disappearing over the eastern horizon.
“Please explain that?” Nolan groaned.
Batman was stumped — but only for a moment.
“It’s that place,” he said. “AUTEC or something. It’s where the Navy tests its new torpedoes — that kind of stuff.”
He pulled out the Bermuda Triangle book.
“It says here it’s on Andros Island,” he said. “They call it the ‘Underwater Area 51.’ They test new torpedoes and God knows what else. We must be near it or near one of their outlying ranges.”
Nolan laughed nervously. “They test flying torpedoes?” he asked.
Batman thought about that a moment. Then he tore the book in two and threw it overboard.
An instant later, all the lights on the ship blinked back on.
22
The Dustboat finally reached North Gin Cay three hours after sunrise.
They were way behind schedule. The plan had been to reach the island under the cover of darkness. But that idea was dashed by the freakish events that had slowed the trip.
Nolan had spent the rest of the night up at the bow, trouble light in hand, sweeping the waters in front of them. He saw more weird lights in the sky, weird shapes in the water, and their electronics — especially their compass and GPS units — continued to behave erratically throughout.
But as long as he knew there was some kind of rational explanation for these weird happenings — or at least most of them — he could live with the strangeness. At least until the sun came up.
So now, they were here. North Gin Cay looked like all the other islands of the outer Bahamas. Beautiful, isolated, a seventh heaven — but also a little mysterious, a pinprick of green in the middle of the bright blue sea.
They were approaching a small harbor on the east side of the island that was protected by a lagoon. The harbor was filled with sport fishing boats and yachts. There were a dozen buildings in the small seaside town nearby. Half of them appeared to be restaurants with outdoor bars attached, and all of the structures had a few years on them. North Gin Cay was part of the Old Bahamas. It was authentic, and seemed a million miles away from the mega-resorts on the bigger islands.
The Dustboat passed the lagoon and anchored on the north side of the island. The team had covered the boat’s weapons with tarps and fishing nets before sunrise. They’d also erected a fake wooden housing over the two helicopters. And the team had donned brightly colored island shirts, borrowed from the Senegals.
Nolan and Batman paddled ashore in a rubber boat, landing on a small beach of pearl-white sand. Palm trees swayed, and a warm breeze blew off the ocean. After the night they’d just experienced, it would have done them a world of good to collapse on the sand and take a snooze under the sun.
But they had a job to do.
They trudged along the beach, finally reaching the small town. Nolan and Batman needed haircuts and were sporting beards — their usual look. They immediately fit in with the small crowd of sports fishermen, natives and Jimmy Buffett wannabes.
Their mission statement said the informant hung out at a bar called the Smoking Conch. They walked down the dusty sidewalk, passing a handful of souvenir stands, diving shops and boat rental places. They came upon a number of “art works” along the way: weird metal things, basically trash welded together, glinting in the bright morning sun.
The first saloon they came to was attached to an upscale restaurant called The Sky Club; it was the biggest structure in town and had some interesting music coming from within. They passed it by and checked out three more bars with exotic-sounding names, but nothing called the Smoking Conch. They finally reached the end of the street — but, no Smoking Conch.
They asked a woman pushing a food cart where it might be. She looked them up and down and laughed. Then she pointed through a small cluster of palm trees to a broken-down structure beyond and said, “If you really want to know…”
Nolan and Batman looked at the place and groaned. It seemed like something transported here from the worst slum in the world.
As they started walking toward the rundown bar, the woman called over her shoulder: “Leave a trail of breadcrumbs.”
* * *
For some reason, Nolan had envisioned meeting their informant in the bar of a fashionable restaurant on an exclusive resort island. He’d even imagined the informant might be someone who’d once been a Special Forces operator himself.
But this place, the Smoking Conch, was light years away from what he’d had in mind. Built of corrugated metal and flotsam, it was amazing only in that it was even standing, that’s how ramshackle it looked.
At the front door they were greeted by the sweet smell of marijuana smoke.
Batman breathed in deeply. “Maybe this is my kind of place after all,” he said.
They went through the swinging saloon doors to find a dark, cloudy, smelly dive — with about a dozen patrons, even though it was barely nine in the morning.
Taking seats at the bar, they ordered a couple drafts, then showed the bartender a sketch of the informant, wrapped in a twenty-dollar bill.
“Cops?” the bartender asked them.
“Do we look like cops?” Batman replied.
The bartender, all tattoos and nose rings, laughed. “Yeah, you do.”
Batman peeled off another twenty.
The bartender pointed to a booth in the darkest corner of the place, where a man sat, head in one hand, sound asleep and snoring loudly.
Batman looked back at the bartender. “Am I going to want my money back?”
The bartender quickly pocketed the two bills.
“Yeah, probably,” he said.
They took their beers and walked over to the booth. The man had Rastafarian dreadlocks and clothes, and reeked of ganja.
Nolan gave him a nudge, but this only caused him to snore more loudly. Batman nudged a little harder. Still, no effect.
Batman finally pulled the man’s arm out from under him, causing his head to hit the table.
This woke him — but just barely.
“No weed to sell ’til noon, mon,” he said groggily, adding: “What time is it?”
Nolan and Batman sat down across from him.
“We don’t want any weed,” Nolan told him.
The guy finally looked up at them and said, “Cops?”
Nolan pulled out the photo of the Navy officer the guy had first spoken to. “We’re friends of a friend of yours.”
The guy somehow recognized the photo. He sat up, his eyes brightening slightly.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “You want to talk about the people who got taken away by the UFO?”
Nolan and Batman just rolled their eyes.
Batman turned back to the bar and yelled to the bartender, “We’re going to need a couple more beers over here.”
* * *
His name was Ramon. H
e was Jamaican, though he’d lived in the Bahamas for many years.
He was somewhere between thirty and fifty years old, Nolan guessed. It was hard to tell. But whatever his age, one thing was for sure: he’d spent a lot of time smoking weed.
He was an artist — of sorts. He did sculptures by welding metallic sea junk together. This was the stuff Nolan and Batman had seen earlier, walking through the tiny village.
And Ramon had a story to tell, though it wasn’t quite the same story he’d supposedly told to the visiting Navy officer a week before. Either it had gotten garbled in the translation, or Ramon was telling Nolan and Batman a new tale entirely.
But what a tale it was.
Ramon was also a handyman of sorts. He helped clean some of the restaurants in town, he repaired decks, he could cut chum, and when business was good, he helped out on the sports fishing boats.
His story began after one recent fishing trip. The boat’s owner brought his customers into North Gin Cay for a post-trip drink. But because the local marina’s fuel tanks were dry, he asked Ramon to take the boat to a nearby island and gas it up.
Ramon set out, but halfway to his destination, the boat ran out of fuel. He drifted for a long time, unable to control his direction. He passed many islands, some with people on them, some without, but he had no means of signaling them, as the boat’s batteries were also dead, killing the radio.
At one point, he almost drifted out into the Atlantic, but a violent storm blew up and forced him back in among the islands.
Night fell and, tossed by the storm’s wind and waves, he spent a terrifying several hours bailing out the boat and trying his best to reach land.
Finally, the gale washed the boat up onto an island he’d never been to before. He took refuge in a small village of native Bahamians, all of whom were women, children or elderly men. The island was one of many in the isolated northeast Abaco chain that had seen no development and attracted no tourists. Many of the people who lived there worked on other islands nearby.
When Ramon asked where all the men were, he was told by the women that one day all twenty of the island’s males were hired by three men in black clothes who said they needed a forest cut down on an uninhabited island nearby. The job would take a week. That had been a month ago, and the men had still not returned. When the women reported the situation to a passing Bahamian police boat, the police went to the island in question and found it deserted — and treeless. But the trees hadn’t been cut down; the island didn’t have any in the first place. There’d been no vegetation on the island over five feet tall to begin with.
