Chapter 3

“What’s wrong?” the skipper demanded. “Why aren’t we moving?”

The first mate rolled his eyes. “We’re going fifteen knots, Captain.”

“The engines are going fifteen knots, Trine,” Captain Moran said. “That doesn’t mean the ship’s going fifteen knots.”

Yeah, right, the mate thought, checking the instrument cluster. It showed them moving across the Pacific Ocean at 14.95 knots. The captain was an old-timer who didn’t trust electronics. He put his faith in the stars and the look of the ocean and crap like that.

“See?” the mate said.

The captain ignored the display and moved to the GPS position tracker. “Holy criminy. We haven’t moved an inch in the last quarter of an hour.”

The mate was about to protest, but the display showed him the captain was correct. They were staying in place.

“Didn’t you feel the turbulence, Trine?” the captain demanded. “It woke me up.”

“What turbulence?”

“The damn ship’s working way too hard to maintain its course. We’re going against some sort of a powerful current.”

“Let me look,” the mate said, and tapped out commands on the instrument screen.

“You don’t need to look. There’s not supposed to be any fifteen-knot current, not here,” the captain declared.

“There must be,” the mate insisted, but his global positioning system confirmed that there was no charted current.

The positioning sensor altered slightly, and the captain swore under his breath. “Now we’re moving backward.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Believe it, Trine. Dammit, something is up. Call Honolulu. I want to know what’s going on.”

Skipper Moran rang the alert, waking the entire crew. Trine thought that the old man was off his rocker. Something was wrong, yes, but it had to be an instrument problem, not a mysterious new ocean current.

He rang his Navy liaison at the Pearl Harbor naval base. The satellite phone crackled with interference as the mate asked for any reports of a localized southwesterly current in the vicinity, running at fifteen knots.

“Of course not. You guys smoking something funny out there?” the Navy operator asked with a chuckle.

“Not me, but I’m not speaking for the captain,” the mate said defensively. “Wahine out.”

The captain was changing course. “What did they say?” he demanded.

“They said there’s no such current.”

“Heavy weather?”

“Nothing,” the mate said. “Captain, where are we going?”

“Anywhere away from here!” The captain had taken manual control of the Wahine, and he was adjusting the steering wheel-like helm minutely. “Feel that, Trine? She’s still struggling. I’m trying to find the flow of the current.”

“What?” Trine asked. He didn’t feel anything.

“Did you ever steer a ship, Trine?” the captain asked, giving the wheel a slight adjustment, then stared into space. “There. That’s got it.”

First Mate Trine had no clue what the captain was talking about. He felt nothing.

“If we’re going directly into the flow, we’ll have the least amount of cross current to slow us down,” the captain explained impatiently. “Now give me full speed. We have to fight our way out of this!”

Trine obeyed orders, bringing the shipping vessel Wahine up to full speed. The diesel engines rumbled below decks. Now, that Trine could feel.

Moran was tense. Was the captain actually afraid? Moran was past his prime, and he had certainly been left behind by the technological advancements of the modern merchant marine, but he still had a lifetime of experience aboard shipping vessels. Trine couldn’t understand what the old man could possibly be afraid of.

The monitor on the position display changed.

“Well, now we’re moving,” Trine said.

The captain turned on him with haunted eyes. “Not very damn fast, we’re not. The current’s getting faster.”

“How do you know?”

“Feel it, boy,” Moran said. “The Wahine’s fighting hard.”

Soon enough the mate could feel it, and everybody on board felt it. The Wahine struggled against a current that moved faster by the minute. The GPS showed that she had been pulled in reverse another thousand meters.

“We’re losing it,” the captain exclaimed.

“The GPS must be wrong,” Mate Trine insisted.

“It’s not wrong.” Moran called the engine room. “What can you do to give us more speed?”

“Not much. We’re red-lining as it is,” the chief engineer said.

The captain was distracted by the display, showing they had lost another thousand meters in just a minute. “Mr. Viscott, I don’t care what it does to the engines. You keep us moving. Override the safeties and give me speed.”

“Captain—”

“I take full responsibility.” Moran slammed down the phone.

First Mate Trine saw his opportunity for career advancement and he went for it. “Captain Moran, I cannot let you destroy the engines.”

“Shut up and get me Honolulu, Trine.”

Trine grabbed the on-board phone instead. “Chief Engineer, this is First Mate Trine. I am relieving Captain Moran of his command of the Wahine. Disregard his previous orders. You will not disable the safety mechanisms on the engine.”

“You idiot.” Moran snatched the phone away from Trine. “Engineer, this is Moran. Obey my orders.” Trine marched into the rear of the bridge and found his side arm in its locker. He was back in seconds, just as the captain slammed down the phone again.

“Captain, I am placing you under arrest for deliberately attempting to destroy the engines of this ship.”

“You’re crazy, Trine. I said I would take responsibility, didn’t I?”

“Those engines will cost three-quarters of a million dollars to overhaul. I’m saving the company a lot of money.”

The captain sneered. “Bucking for your own ship, Trine?”

The first mate smirked. “Maybe.”

“You’re a moron.” The captain’s meaty paws wrenched the gun out of Trine’s hands. “Next time, it’ll work better if you turn off the safety.” The captain flipped the safety off and leveled it at Trine’s forehead. “You, I don’t have time for. Put the cuffs on yourself and I won’t have to shoot you.”

Trine miserably obeyed orders. Well, he gave it a good try. Would it be enough to earn him a ship of his own?

Now the captain was calling Honolulu again. He was calling in a may day and asking for air evacuation.

“No cutters—aren’t you listening?” the captain demanded. “We’re caught in some sort of strong current. We’re fighting it with everything we’ve got and we’re still losing knots under the keel. You send a Coast Guard ship out here and they’ll get sucked in just like us. We need an airlift ASAP.”

The Coast Guard operator called in his commanding officer.

“Are you sure it isn’t your instruments, Captain Moran?”

Coast Guard Captain Brotz jerked the telephone receiver away from his ear at Moran’s thundering response, then handed it back to the operator and went over to the traffic control board.

“They are moving south-southeast at about six knots and accelerating,” said the traffic controller.

“Could he have the ship in reverse and not even know it?” the Coast Guard CO asked.

The traffic controller shrugged. “Not unless he’s got a screw loose. I’d say he’s trying to pull one over on us.”

“Why would he want to do that?” the CO asked.

“It’s just a little more likely than not knowing he was in reverse. I didn’t say it made sense.”

None of it made sense. The information on Captain Moran’s license showed he had thirty years’ experience on the sea, in the U.S. Navy and then the merchant marine, without a blemish.

‘I’m not taking a chance that Moran has a screw lose,” Brotz decided aloud. He barked out orders for rescue choppers to get into the air. “Alert Captain Moran.”

‘I think I’ve lost him, sir. He doesn’t respond. The Wahine’s blinked out.”

Blinked out was their inexcusably blasé piece of jargon to say a ship had disappeared from all monitors suddenly and inexplicably. It implied the ship had gone below the waves. The room buzzed with sudden activity as the Coast Guard personnel launched into rescue-mission activities.

“We’re on our way,” radioed the captain of the long-range Coast Guard cutter Reliant.

“Thank God,” said the operator. “Reliant is in the vicinity.”

“Where?” Captain Brotz demanded.

“About ten miles south-southeast. Hold on, sir, and I’ll give you better coordinates.”

Brotz snatched the receiver that enabled him to join the operator’s radio link. “Reliant commander?”

“This is Captain Burness.”

“Gil, get out of there. Turn on a north-northwest heading and come on home as fast as you can.”

“Norton, you crazy? We’re on a rescue mission.”

“We have rescue choppers en route. Let them handle it.”

“Choppers out of Oahu? It will take them an hour just to reach the Wahine’s last position. It’s a stroke of luck we’re in the vicinity.”

“Moran claimed there was an aberrant current overpowering his engines, Gil. I don’t want you caught up in it, too.”

“It’s open water. No surge is going to surface enough to affect the Reliant,” Captain Burness replied. “We could have a tsunami under our keel and hardly feel it.”

“Not a surge—a current.”

“There’s no such thing, short of typhoon or an undersea volcano. Sun’s shining, so I don’t think it’s the weather. Are there new volcanoes birthing around these parts?”

Captain Brotz hadn’t even thought of that. He knew a volcanic eruption on the ocean floor could create tidal waves, but in the open sea could it create an ocean current capable of pulling in a powerful new freighter like the Wahine? Come to think of it, what else besides seismic activity could create such a phenomenon?

“Hold on, Reliant,” Brotz barked, then shouted at his meteorology data operator. “I want a report from the Navy seismology lab.”

“On the line now, sir.”

“What?” Brotz tromped to the desk and snatched another receiver. “Seismic? This is Brotz. You guys have activity anywhere in the vicinity?”

“Sir, we have activity everywhere in the vicinity.”

“Well, what the hell is it? A volcano?”

“Maybe thirty volcanoes could create this kind of a seismic signature. We’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You don’t know. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Correct. But we’re working on it.”

“Goddamn Navy!” Brotz slammed down one receiver and barked into the second one, “Reliant, you were on the money. Something geologic is happening and it’s so big the seismic lab can’t even ID it. Now get the hell out of there.”

Brotz glanced at the traffic screen and the stricken face of the operator.

“Reliant? Talk to me.”

Reliant was gone.

“Who’s that?” Brotz demanded, jabbing at a new icon on the traffic screen.

“USS Harding. Navy spy ship on exercises. They intercepted the mayday from the Wahine.”

Brotz felt as if he were witnessing a chain reaction on a California expressway, standing there helplessly as one car after another slammed into the growing pile of wreckage. Were the Wahine and the Reliant really gone? Even on the unpredictable Pacific Ocean, catastrophe simply did not strike that fast. Ships took minutes or hours to sink …

He called for a connection to the Navy cruiser.

“Captain, your own Navy people report a major seismological disturbance throughout your vicinity. Two ships might be lost already. Don’t risk the Harding.”

“You Coast Guard boys have sure lost your balls,” replied the captain of the Harding. “Don’t tell me you want to abandon the survivors? Those are your own people in there.”

“Air rescue is on the way.”

“Not fast enough. We’re going in. Besides, this isn’t a merchant ship and it’s not a Coast Guard dinghy. It’s a Navy cruiser. We can handle a little strong water.”

Captain Brotz felt ill, and the command center was eerily silent as he and his crew monitored the Navy radio chatter. Harding reported a strong current.

“Twenty-eight knots!” Brotz said under his breath.

Harding vanished. The icon on the traffic screen simply went away. No more radio communication came in from the ship, and the Navy radio chatter became frantic.

As the two Coast Guard rescue helicopters closed in on the last known location of the Navy cruiser, Navy command radioed Brotz and belligerently demanded surrender of command of the rescue choppers. Brotz declined. “You’re welcome to listen in if you like.”

Somewhere, Navy top brass was sputtering. Brotz didn’t care.

“Sea is empty,” reported the leader of the rescue team aboard the choppers.

“No wreckage? No oil?”

“Nothing. But the water is moving like you wouldn’t believe. It’s like a river down there.”

“Pilot, what’s your status?”

“Unaffected. We’re fine up here, Base,” the pilot reported. “Dropping a tracking buoy. Jesus!”

“What happened?” Brotz demanded.

“The tracking buoy, sir. It hit the water and started moving like a bat from hell. I’m pacing it at an airspeed of sixty-three knots.”

“Coast Guard commander, this is Navy Command at Pearl Harbor. Your pilots are obviously incompetent. I want them under my command right now or it’s your ass.”

Brotz leaned into the monitor and examined the icon for the activated buoy, then he snatched the radio to the Navy. “Check it for yourself, Admiral, it should be on your screen. My pilot pinned it at sixty-three knots and climbing. Since the only bad decisions made here today were made by Navy command, I think I’ll hold on to this one.”

“Commander, there’s a Navy vessel missing—”

“And a Coast Guard vessel and a merchant ship.”

“But the Harding is a Navy ship,” the admiral insisted. “Its priority outweighs a merchant ship or even a Coast Guard cutter.”

Commander Brotz hung up on the admiral of the Navy.

“I’ve spotted the Harding!” radioed the helicopter copilot. “She’s moving like you wouldn’t believe, but she’s afloat.”

“We’re getting interference,” Brotz said. “Is there any visible cause?”

“Nothing, Base. The Harding is being pulled stem first. She’s flopping all over the place. That nut thinks he can get free—he’s rocking his thrust on the props.”

Brotz barely made out the words behind the worsening static. On the monitor, the pair of icons for the helicopters flickered, as if the aircraft were dematerializing. “Pilots, pull out now.”

“Negative, Base. There’s no danger up here. We see something ahead.”

“That’s an order—turn around.”

There was no response from the helicopters, ever, and their traffic blips blinked out.

On the other side of the world, a man was gasping for air.

“Mark, wake up.” The young woman shook him gently. The man’s eyes went wide and he crawled away from her, against the metal bars of the head board.

Sarah Slate never forgot the look. For a moment, Mark Howard didn’t know who she was—or even what she was.

Then he saw her, remembered her and remembered himself. “Oh.”

“What was it?”

He concentrated. “I don’t even know.” He looked at his hands. “I was something else. It was dark. The world was moving me and there was a light. It was going to—consume me.”

“Eat you?”

“There were others, all of us being—channeled into the light. We were food.”

“Food for what?”

The door rattled on its hinges with such noise and racket that Sarah turned, expecting an army to come pouring through it. It was a heavy old hospital door, and it remained closed.

“Open at once!” a voice squeaked from the outside.

Sarah rushed to the door and yanked it open, and was pushed aside by a figure no larger than a child. He was, however, unbelievably, old, Asian and dressed in a brightly colored robe. Close behind him came a slapping of wild wings, and a purple bird as big as an eagle flew into the room.

“Say not the name,” warned the old man, addressing Mark Howard as the bird settled on the blankets.

“What name?” he asked.

“That of the thing of which you dreamed.”

“Were you eavesdropping?” Sarah demanded.

“Forgive me, young Slate. It was something that I believed must be done. I was on guard for just such a happenstance. I did not pierce the veil of your words until I heard the tumult of the Young Prince’s awakening.”

“What happenstance?” Mark asked.

“The tumult,” the old man said. “The dreams come.”

Sarah was peeved. “You just happened to wake up at two in the morning and just happened to hear us?”

“You did not awaken me. It was the others.”

“What others?” Sarah demanded.

The old man shot out a finger so fast she couldn’t see it move, and the finger pressed against her lips to shush her. He held it there as silence fell.

But there was no silence, after all. There were shouts, cries and screams.

“Oh, God,” Sarah said. “It sounds like half the hospital. What’s happening?”

“Half of half, but that is a sufficient number of people in terror. The dream thing affects them, those with a particular bent and balance in their mind’s landscape. It is the thing of which you dreamed, Prince Mark.”

The man was listening to the cries from far away.

“Heed, Mark Howard,” the old man said. “It may discover you and exert its will. Say not the name.”

“I don’t know its name.”

“It may choose to tell you. Turn your thoughts away from it. Give it the least of your attentions.”

“What is it?” Sarah asked. “Why would it afflict Mark?”

The parrot chuckled harshly. “An adept mind in dangerous company,” it croaked, then looked surprised at itself.

“Quiet, bird,” the old man scolded.

“Who is dangerous?” Sarah Slate asked, and she didn’t offer the leeway for no answer.

“Remo.”

“Remo’s in Europe,” Sarah pointed out.

“And me,” the old man added. “I attract its attentions.”

“And wrath,” the bird added.