Europa Journal

by Jack Castle

  Despite Harry’s assurances that the Mooks rarely bothered him, Brett and Stein had set up a perimeter using his .60 along with another one scavenged from the wrecked TBM Avenger plane they had seen from the air. Brett and Leo had taken the first watch, while Stein and Tae had turned in for some shut-eye.

  Harry and Mac sat around the campfire and swapped stories of their journeys to and adventures on the alien planet. The captain confirmed everything Mac had read in his journal. However, she never did find out what happened after his group had arrived at the palace. All she knew was that he and the Awumpai had headed to the floating palace to deliver the princess to the gods, and she had learned from Enoch that Harry subsequently had been imprisoned by the gods and had escaped.

  After story hour was over, Mac decided to take a closer look at the TBM Avenger sitting in the midst of the alien wreckage. It was hard to believe that the search plane skipper who had been sent to find the missing torpedo bombers in 1945 had finally found the Lost Patrol. The TBM Avenger torpedo bomber looked just as it had the day it disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle two centuries before.

  At the moment, the unscathed bomber had its engine cover off, and the nose cone was surrounded by makeshift scaffolding and a jury-rigged pulley system made from scavenged parts. It appeared as though Harry had just lowered a new engine into the canopy’s housing when he’d been interrupted. That’s probably when he saved our lives, Mac thought. Various tools lay around and a makeshift ladder that leaned against the nosecone, but for the most part, the infamous plane had escaped the ravages of time.

  Mac was wondering where he had found all the spare parts when she noticed a second Avenger lying in a heap in a big pile of alien wreckage. This was the damaged plane they had seen from the air. The plane looked as though it had been dropped from a great height; it was totally smashed to bits, and its broken wings lay off to one side.

  She spotted a third Avenger in another nearby heap of wreckage. It, too, was heavily damaged and looked as though it had been dropped from a great height. However, she also noticed that parts were missing from the plane, seemingly removed rather than sheared off in the crash. She realized that the captain was scavenging parts from the two most damaged Avengers to rebuild the least damaged one.

  Looking over the remains of the TBM Avengers, Mac knew she was looking at one of history’s greatest unexplained mysteries. Historians and scientists had speculated about what had happened to the Lost Patrol and the search plane that had gone out after it, and here they were. The pilots hadn’t simply lost their way and ditched in the ocean, or been sucked into an ocean sinkhole. One theory had even proposed that they had returned to Florida in cloud cover and crash-landed in the everglades, only to be eaten by alligators. No, Mac thought, the paranoid sci-fi dorks had been right all along. The Lost Patrol had really been abducted by aliens.

  Harry entered the makeshift hangar and walked slowly toward her.

  “Wait a minute,” Mac said after a few moments. “I see three of the Avengers. Where are the other two?”

  Harry had been standing quietly next to her, giving her time to absorb everything. He looked at her, and then his eyes gestured for her to look up.

  Mac followed his gaze and saw two perfectly preserved planes suspended in a green-hued stasis field. Despite the massive devastation, it seemed that there was still some power left in the alien spaceship.

  Now she understood: the stasis field must have protected the Avengers from the crash, but when the field was partially switched off during the crash, three planes had fallen free. The other two remained in the still operational areas of the storage field.

  “Even after the crash,” Harry said, “this thing still has power. I’ve tried everything to get them down but no luck. I don’t suppose you know a good alien mechanic?”

  “Wow,” Tae said, joining them, “this place is so cool.” He sounded more like a little kid in a toy store then one of the space program’s best engineers.

  Mac looked at Tae then turned back toward Harry and smiled. “You know, I just might.”

  “Hey,” Tae said, interrupting them, “do you guys realize there’s still power running through this ship?”

  Spotting them in the wreckage, Leo abandoned his post to join them. He circled the planes and caressed them, touching history. “Did you ever find the crews?” he asked in an uncharacteristically solemn voice.

  Harry regarded the young man for a second before answering. “Some of them. Come this way.” He led them deeper into the maze of alien wreckage and into one of the few rooms that had survived the impact. Several canisters lined the room’s walls.

  Mac walked over to a canister that had become dislodged from the wall and saw a man lying half-in and half-out of it. Some sort of thick amber gel remained inside the broken canister, and it had preserved the portion of the man that it touched. Mac saw a scream frozen on the man’s face. She took a closer look at the others canisters and saw that they contained human abductees as well. All were dressed in World War II pilot uniforms.

  “What are we looking at?” Tae asked Leo quietly, so as not to be heard by Harry.

  “The missing bomber pilots,” Leo said.

  “The what?”

  “You know, the five bomber planes that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in the late 1940’s.”

  “Oh.”

  The group continued to examine the pilots in the smashed hibernation chambers until Mac broke the silence. “How many have you accounted for so far?”

  “Well, twelve of the fourteen Avenger bombardier bodies are here, and I know of at least another one that crashed in the Hail Mary with me.”

  “That makes thirteen of the fourteen,” Leo calculated aloud.

  “And what about your crew? Did you find them, too?” Mac asked.

  “I’ve accounted for half of them here; one died on the alien ship.” Harry shuddered at what must have been a chilling memory. Mac remembered the scattered fear from the first entries of his journal. “And another one died when my plane crash-landed.”

  Mac watched Harry stare at a partially preserved corpse. The half that was exposed to the air had long since rotted and been picked off by the local scavengers, but the part that wasn’t exposed remained intact and was visible through the amber gel.

  As horrible as the circumstances were, Mac had to admit that the storage container was fantastic. NASA had been attempting cryo-sleep for years but had never come close. The bright liquid seemed to have preserved the occupants perfectly. She found herself wondering if it was still possible to revive any of the poor souls trapped inside the chambers.

  “You knew this man personally?” Mac asked, stepping beside the captain to offer her support.

  “He was my co-pilot,” he replied, seemingly surprised at the recollection. When he continued, he struggled with his words as if his memory was slow to resurface.

  “He was also my best friend. We flew thirty-seven missions together over the Pacific in a plane called the Hail Mary.”

  “The Hail Mary — wasn’t that the same plane you were flying when you disappeared?” Leo asked as he walked up behind them.

  “Yep. Originally, she was only built as a spotter plane, but it didn’t take the War Department long to figure out that the PBY’s could sneak up on Japanese destroyers at night and drop torpedo bombs.”

  “That’s right,” Leo recalled. “They strapped the bombs to the bottom of the wings. You guys followed the luminescent trails the destroyers left when they stirred up the ocean’s algae and then dropped them on in.”

  Mac realized that Leo had come to idolize the captain. She herself had come to enjoy reading about his adventures, but Mac believed it was more than that for her junior officer. She recalled that Leo, for the most part, had been raised by his mother and suspected that, even in his mid-twenties, Leo still craved a father figure.

 
Harry regarded Leo for a second, genuinely impressed by the young man, and then flashed him a lopsided grin. “Yep, that’s right. They never saw us coming.”

  “What happened to your PBY?” Leo asked.

  “I crash-landed it in a mountain range on one of those floating continents.”

  “What do you want to do about your friend?” Tae asked, gesturing towards Harry’s former co-pilot.

  Harry’s grin faded. “You know, I hadn’t really thought about it until now.” He walked to the young Korean, unceremoniously spun him around without warning, and removed the shovel strapped to Tae’s backpack. After looking around for a few seconds, he picked out just the right spot and began digging.

  It didn’t take Leo long to find a second shovel and join in.

  #

  Mac watched Captain Reed and the boys dig the grave. She saw the way the captain looked at his friend’s corpse. It wasn’t more than a week ago that she had looked down on his.

  The only thing they had told Harry was that two centuries had passed since he and his crew had vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. The captain had told them that he had figured as much and explained that he had run into one of his crew members who seemed to have aged over a hundred years. Everyone had agreed not to tell Harry about the journal until the time was right, but Mac wondered when the time would be right to tell Harry that his journal had been found near his corpse inside a strange pyramid. The poor man had been through so much. They all had.

  #

  After the men finished burying the pilot, Mac and Harry walked back to camp and settled in around the campfire once more. Leo returned to his post, and Tae remained in the wreckage to work on the stasis field.

  “Tae’s gonna be working on that thing all night,” Mac said, smiling to herself.

  “He should get some sleep,” Harry replied while gazing at the burning embers.

  “Hah, good luck with that one. Back on Earth then call him ‘Tireless Tae’. He won’t rest until he figures it out.”

  Mac saw that the captain had taken out his journal, the original one, and had laid it on his knee. It was far less tattered then the one she carried in her coat pocket. She wondered if he was going to write about them.

  Suddenly, a realization hit her like a bolt of lightning. It finally dawned on her; she finally understood what Professor Bort had been trying to warn her about. Joan must have seen their names in Captain Reed’s journal. That was why she was so adamant about not letting them into the pyramid: she was trying to prevent them from opening the wormhole. That was what Joan was trying to tell her before she died.

  Mac felt like an idiot. She’d been carrying around a crystal ball in her pocket and hadn’t realized it. Not only did the journal document the past, but it also documented the future — everything that would transpire until the time poor Captain Reed ended up in the Europa pyramid. She fought the urge to whip out the journal right there in front of him. If she knew events in advance, she might even find a way to prevent his death.

  She had seen enough science-fiction movies to understand that knowing one’s future often alters the original timeline. But this train of thought lasted only about a second before Mac reached for the journal she kept in her inside coat pocket.

  It wasn’t there.

  Mac frantically tore at her other pockets and checked her backpack, but the journal was nowhere to be found. Had one of the others taken it out? She looked up to see Harry watching her.

  “Lose something?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied. But what should I tell him? The last time she remembered seeing the journal was in her bedchamber at Enoch’s castle. That had to be it. She must have left it in her bedroom.

  The captain still waited for an answer. So this was it. She would tell him everything. She would tell him that two hundred and twenty-three years after he had disappeared with his crew in the Bermuda Triangle, his body had been found in an underwater pyramid on one of Jupiter’s moons.

  “Harry, what would you say if I told you that…”

  “Hey, I got it!” Tae yelled from the nearby stasis field. The captain took one last swig of his coffee and quickly joined the engineer.

  “Saved by the proverbial bell,” Mac said dryly and then followed.

  It took some experimenting, but it wasn’t long before Tae figured out how to disengage the stasis field. He was able to do so at a gradual rate, enabling the Avengers’ tires to touch down on solid ground for the first time in over two centuries without a scratch. The group now had three workable planes.

  Secretly, Mac had hoped to find equally preserved pilots in the planes, but the cockpits were empty. Judging by Harry’s face, she could tell that he had been hoping for the same thing.

  Mac and Harry spent the remainder of the night going over the planes, making small talk as they did so.

  “This one’s got about a half a tank of gas, too,” Mac called from the top of a makeshift ladder that leaned on one of the plane’s wings.

  As they worked through the night, they talked about each other’s families. Harry told her about his wife, daughter, and the little one on the way, while Mac told him about her daughter and her dream of commanding a space station. The discussion of the space station piqued Harry’s interest, and he wanted to know all about the space program.

  “Maybe we should siphon gas out of the plane you rebuilt and put it in these two?” Mac suggested. Harry agreed, but she saw that he wasn’t happy about it. He had obviously worked hard to rebuild the plane using spare parts from the wrecked ones. Spying an old Ford truck overhead, Mac asked, “You think there’s any gas in that old beater?” After saying that, Mac realized that the antique truck was probably state of the art when he had left Earth. Harry didn’t catch her slip, however. He seemed happy just to be talking with someone for a change.

  It was therapeutic for both of them.

  #

  The next morning, Brett and Stein returned from a brief scouting expedition and reported their findings to Mac. Just as she suspected, the Mooks had torn the hover chariot to pieces. Mac knew that Enoch wasn’t going to be happy.

  Seeing the commandos’ return, Tae and Leo joined them.

  “What’s going on?” Leo asked.

  “Well, it seems we just lost our ride,” Mac answered. “The Mooks tore it apart.”

  “I could take a shot at fixing it,” Tae offered.

  “Not before those little bastards ripped you apart,” Brett said.

  “How many did you see?” Mac asked.

  “More than the ammo we got twice over,” Brett replied glumly.

  Looking around, Mac asked, “Where’s Harry?” When she had finally turned in last night, Harry was still up, draining fuel from the wing of his rebuilt plane into a homemade barrel.

  “Oh, its Harry now, is it?” Brett asked.

  Mac glared at him until she realized he had tried to make his comment sound like a joke, but it had come out wrong.

  Mac hit him playfully with her hat to lighten the moment. She was not unaware of Brett’s feelings, and a part of her welcomed them. But somehow, things were different now.

  “He’s clearing a runway,” Leo said.

  Just then, the Ford truck rumbled past on a nearby plateau. It dragged a large piece of alien wreckage behind it.

  “He’s been at it since I got up this morning,” Tae added.

  Mac looked at the planes and then over at the cleared area on the plateau. There was a significant amount of debris and rough terrain between the makeshift hangar and runway, but it was certainly manageable with a lot of hard work.

  “Well, boys, let’s go give him a hand.” She donned her hat and pulled the brim down over her eyes to block out the rising sun. Despite their desperate situation, she found herself smiling. She didn’t notice Brett watching her as she walked off to help Harry.

&
nbsp; #

  By mid-afternoon, they had nearly cleared a path to the plateau that would serve as their runway. Only Tae was excused from runway duty. Mac ordered him to poke around the alien ship to see what else he could find. She gave him a pistol and some extra ammo, and told him to be wary of the Mooks.

  They took shifts covering the camp with the .60 caliber, but so far, Harry was right: the Mooks rarely ventured anywhere near his campsite. She suspected they had found the pilots’ corpses and feared the place.

  After a quick lunch of rations, they were back at it. Mac and Harry leveled a hill with shovels, while the others continued to clear the bigger debris with the old truck.

  “Harry, what happened to you? I mean, after the gods killed the princess?”

  Harry stopped digging for a second and wiped his brow with a handkerchief (something men had stopped carrying in the late-twentieth century). “I told you already. They killed two of my friends; the rest of us were imprisoned; the gods left, and I escaped. My friends were left behind.” He dug with more fervor.

  Mac suspected he wasn’t telling her everything, particularly about his escape. She suspected that Enoch probably had helped him escape and that Harry was covering for Enoch. In fact, Harry hadn’t even mentioned the prophet, let alone their conversations and chess games.

  “Hu-Nan was the one who died, right?” she asked.

  “No, it was Ba-Tu.” Harry stopped digging for a moment. “Wait a minute. I never told you any of their names, did I?”

  Tell him, her inner voice screamed, tell him about the journal. “You must have,” she said instead. “So once we get these planes on the runway, what’s your plan? To fly back and rescue your friends?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You should know, Enoch told us that the gods are due back anytime now.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You know?”

  “Yep. They return once a year to pick up tribute. That’s why I have to hurry up and rescue Hu-Nan and Fu-Mar before they arrive.”