Titanic 2012: Curse of RMS Titanic

THIRTY FIVE

On entering the sub, Lena Gambio gasped on seeing the pale and unconscious Lou Swigart up close; like the others, she’d heard of the trouble at the bow—two dead and Swigart injured, but she wasn’t prepared to see the virile Swigart unconscious and drooling. “My God! Is Lou… is he dead, too?” Lena asked from behind David.

“No, he’s breathing, you bone head,” replied Jens.

David tried to quell their anxiety. “Lou’s had his head slammed hard against his helmet and a fight with some falling debris, so far as I can tell. Long story. For now, suffice it to say, I cut it rather short to get here in order to get him free.”

“From what little garbled information we could get,” said Bowman, his voice agitated as well, “you witnessed two damned implosions, David. Two!”

Will and Lena had been the last to enter the sub and thankfully without any incident.

Lou then startled them all by filling the sub with, “Thank God every-one-safe-ly- back,” Lou’s groggy half-consciousness riveted the others to him. “All… all but Jacob and Kelly,” Lou added, a deep despondency in his voice.

“What the hell happened out there, Lou?” asked Will Bowman as he and Lena were strapping in. “We could only get bits and pieces over the com-link.”

Lou only groaned in pain, unable to reply.

Both Will and Lena suddenly dropped the idea of strapping in, instead hovering over Lou to ostensibly inspect what appeared far more horrible damage to the man’s suit than it actually was, but David imagined they wanted to hear the facts from Lou and not David Ingles.

“Swigart’s going to make it!” shouted David. “Quit hovering. He’s a tough old seaman. Goes in and out. Best we can do for him is get him to the surface. Now sit down and strap yourselves in!”

“Damn it, David, what happened at the bow section?” demanded Bowman.

“All of you strap the hell in, and I’ll tell you a story—a truth you won’t believe.”

“Irvin tried to kill me.” Lou muttered as the liquid oxygen inside the sub was being diminished and replaced by gaseous oxygen. They must next blow their lungs of residual oxygen-rich flourocarbons—a process no more difficult than intentionally coughing to clear the last vestiges of liquid air, but eons of evolution that’d taken mankind from the sea and gills still managed to dictate to the brain that this was indeed a distressing reversal of logic and anatomy.

“S-She… Irvin… she had so much strength…” continued a weakened Lou. “T-Took me by surprise. You know… let her talk me into all this…”

“Lena,” began David, “you’re closest to Lou back there. Help him out with blowing his lungs, please?”

“Got to get out… get up,” Lena replied, ignoring David’s request. “Got to get outta this tin can… get some real air.” She was saying as if to herself—like a mantra. “Back to the upper world.”

“I’ll take care of Lou,” said Jens, seated the other side of Lou and taking charge behind David. All that was required of Bowman was to take off Lou’s helmet and gently place his head forward and give him a few slaps on the back to clear his lungs. Coughing out as the others were doing would only add to Lou’s head injury.

David indicated he was about to take Max to full speed. Finally, they all found their seats, and everyone had cleared their lungs of all Perflourocarbons, and the sphere was filled with breathable air.

It was then that Lena, who’d kept a specimen net attached to her hip, dropped the bag alongside those of the others who’d entered with nets filled with small artifacts taken from Titanic. David was thinking about how hard this team had worked, and they had a myriad of archeologically significant finds returning with them, whereas he and Lou were just lucky to get out with their lives.

“Gotta get to the surface,” repeated Lena.

“You OK, baby?” Bowman asked her. “Hey, David, I think Lena might be having some kinda panic attack or something. “Hey, you guys monitoring Gambio up there?” he said to Entebbe and Forbes.

Entebbe’s voice came over the com-link. “Lena, you have to calm yourself down, sweetheart. Your vital signs are all over the map.”

David monitored the instruments and controls, acting as captain now, making sure their ascent was less problematic than their derailed visit to Titanic’s bow section. He prepped Max for the trip toward the surface. They needed to know their position in relation to Scorpio, so he checked the dive planes for the best trajectory, not to mention the depth gauge and reactor output. As he checked each off in his mental list, he shouted it out for the others to hear just as Lou would have done. He also checked to be sure their atmosphere was of the correct mix for their depth, which would change as they climbed. He put Jens onto monitoring the pressure gauge which reported back in bars and milli-bars.

“We’re on our way back to a world with light,” remarked Bowman, who, while again seated, could reach out and pat her hand. No one had bothered removing their Cryo-suits so as to remain warm, but everyone aboard Max had removed their head gear.

David realized that the warm glow of panel lights within the cocoon of Max’s now familiar interior felt good to them all, and for a moment they seemed to observe a spontaneous moment of silence for those who weren’t coming back with them.

“Jacob ripped his suit through sheer, dumb, stupid carelessness after I repeatedly warned him to wait for the right tool for the right job,” David began. “Maybe if Lou had been with us, Jacob would’ve likely heeded Lou, but as you all know, for reasons none of us understood, Lou switched us around like a deck of cards last minute. I assume now that was something put into his head, along with this night dive, by Kelly Irvin—or rather the thing controlling her.”

“Whoa, hold up, there David. What thing are you talking about?” Bowman wanted to know.

“I’ll get back to that. As for Jacob, he went nuts on me when he saw those Bentleys and Renaults in the hold. Ironically, one of the cars killed him.”

Fiske and Jens wanted the details of how a hundred year old car could kill a man in the deep. David told the story, finishing with, “It’ll all replay on the video from my cam.”

“You saw the cars, really? How’d they look?” asked Bowman, sounding a bit insensitive.

“Fine! Damn it, so fine they got Mendenhall killed. He was mesmerized by them.”

“Imploded, damn… .gotta be a bloody, nasty way to go,” said Fiske.

“Poor sonofabitch!” agreed Jens but not a word out of Lena.

“Bad luck,” added Will, trying to redeem himself.

“Jacob didn’t suffer—didn’t know what hit him. As for Dr. Irvin, I killed her with my laser knife beam, but only after she tried to kill Lou and me.”

This caused a wave of gasps to bounce around the cabin, and David, watching Lena for fear Bowman and Entebbe were right—that she might have a full blown medical condition building, made no response to this revelation whatsoever. He decided she was doing as Entebbe instructed, attempting meditation therapy, keeping her eyes averted from others yet examining her surroundings as if new to the place. David watched her closely in his overhead mirror.

At the same time, David continued his tale. “She was the killer, all along—or rather since Alandale.”

“Since we discovered Alandale’s body, you mean?” asked Bowman.

“Alandale was infected, and she spent time with him, and he infected her, but only after Alandale had been infected by Houston Ford. It fits the timeline; it was just after Alandale’s body was discovered that Kelly targeted Lou, influencing him, getting him to go along with her wild plans. Before that, she was enlisting my help to destroy the thing.”

“You’re not making a whole helluva lot of sense, Ingles,” Bowman assured him.

“Damn it, Will, she was the carrier—the disease that killed Alandale, Ford transferred to him. She didn’t bring it aboard, but it somehow learned that she was a serious threat to it.”

“But you said she attempted to kill Lou, and after that, she tried to kill you,” countered Bowman with the others closely listening to both men.

David realized the others hadn’t enough facts; they knew nothing of the journal or how ancient this threat was. “My cam-recorded video! When you see it topside, it’ll tell the whole story—as will the sound feed from my helmet.”

“She was killed—not by the depths,” began Bowman, “not by Titanic, but by you?”

“Damnit, Bowman, she… she wasn’t a she; she was an it…”

“An it?”

“A thing, a creature, a killing machine.”

“Ingles, you’re sounding like a psycho nutcase!” Bowman snarled at him. “Are you sure Mendenhall died the way you say? God, and we’ve got you at the controls here… damn!”

“Bowman, the pressure reduced them to dead flesh the size of… the size of a newborn mouse but hard as granite.”

“She had me convinced that Ingles was some sort of monster,” moaned Swigart, doing his level best to corroborate David’s story. “When we got below deck level out of your and Mendenhall’s sight, she had some device, a remote that took us offline. And she had a spear gun, which when she raised it at me, I knocked out of her hands. That’s when she shoved my head so hard into an iron wall, that I literally passed out from the backlash to my head. She thought she’d finished me off by snatching down some heavy debris over my body. She had enormous strength.”

David realized only now that Forbes had done a piss poor job of explaining things to the second dive team, and that they’d come aboard knowing nothing of what had gone on during the black out of communications.

“How do we know that David wasn’t the one who set us all up to die down here, huh?” It was Lena, suddenly shouting at the top of her voice, out of control, pointing a shaking finger at David.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” shouted David. “Will, you saw me reading that journal in my quarters, the one I kept from you.”

“What journal are you talking about?”

“I stuffed it behind a wall panel in our berth aboard Scorpio. You must’ve seen—”

“No… no I didn’t.”

“Well maybe if you hadn’t been playing house with Lena, you might’ve!” Ingles shouted, his temper unleashed. “Damn it, Will, you know I’m no killer.”

“Tell that to Terry Wilcox,” muttered Lena, her eyes now like those of a snake.

“If I could reach you, Lena, I’d slap your face raw for that! Damn you!”

“Take it easy! Easy!” shouted Jens. “We’ll sort everything out topside.”

Lena glared at David, a look that could kill.

“Lena, listen to me,” he implored, trying to reason with her. “Dr. Kelly Irvin placed that journal in my hands in order to earn my trust, to put me at ease around her while she… while she killed Alandale for sustenance, followed by Ford, and she—or rather it—it came for hundreds if not thousands of egg-sacs down here lost on Titanic all those years ago—stuffed in bodies inside the freezer compartment where they were put on ice—the-the night Titanic sank. It’s all in the book. Get hold of the book, the journal and read it! Read every word, then tell me what you believe and what you don’t believe.”

Forbes shouted from above, “Ingles, get control of yourself—your vitals are going wild, and you’ve got Max pushed to the limit. If you hit the surface at your present speed, you’ll all go flying over my bow!”

David realized that Forbes was right, of course, but just as he started to slow Max, he saw movement out the corner of his eye. Something wobbling, squirming. “Jesus, tell me you picked up a sturgeon out there in your net, Lena! Will! What the hell’ve you two done?”

“We discovered some sort of new life form!” shouted Bowman. “It’s our discovery. Found it together, didn’t we, babe? Found in a frozen state in the aft freezers.”

“Oh dear God!” David went white, realizing only now that the stewards, pursers, junior officers, and some senior officers would most certainly have taken victim bodies to the closest refrigerated compartment as they would be nine city blocks apart from one another.

“The airlock, now! Jettison those bloody things outta the airlock! Now before it’s too laaa—”

Too late.

Already the most evolved of the eggs exploded outward, splatting onto every surface like a black, oily eruption, including on Will’s suit, moving at eye-blinking speed, searching for a way into a host organism—squirming, crawling, and going for the unprotected face and orifices.

Will raised his laser cutter, but he could not risk hitting Lena or anyone else with it. Everyone in the sub was screaming, their masks off now and breathing in the fresh oxygen.

“Cover your head!” Ingles shouted at Lena. “Put your helmets back on!”

But it was too late for Fiske as the a globule the size of a pancake leapt from Will’s hazmat suit to strike Fiske full in the face and disappear in rivulet-fashion through his ear, which he desperately tried to prevent without success as there was no getting hold of this thing.

Amid the screams from everyone in the cabin a second and a third egg hatched and began flying about the small space, David grabbed hold of Lou’s headgear and placed it on him.

At the same time, Forbes warned from above that David must slow the ascent. “You’ll all die of the bends.”

David knew there was no fear of the bends as Max accounted for every pound per square inch as they went, adjusting the pressure accordingly. The PSI gauge said they were fine, except for the speed. The captain was right about that; at their current rate of ascent, they could enter Scorpio at the keel and come out her deck and still go off into the sky. But his immediate concern was simply finding a way to stay alive.

He’d managed to slip his own mask on in the nick of time as one of the hatchlings slapped into him. Through the mask, he saw an intricate network of nerves and the pulsating blood inside this black sack of goop.

While the parent of this thing may have evolved to a complex creature capable of mimicking or using humans, the sacs had remained in stasis and as rudimentary organisms, however deadly they might be.

Jens had failed to get his suit sealed in time, which allowed one of the creatures entry through his mouth, and the others watched his throat bulge as the creature slipped down it like an enormous oyster, seeking safety and a ready food supply—every liquid in Steve’s body. Jens would become the carrier of this dread organism; he’d carry it to the surface in unholy conspiracy with it, unless stopped, and David had been through too much, to let that happen.

He had earlier, while at the controls, reprogrammed the airlock door, and now he was grateful that he had. Fiske was unmistakably infected, and David had his doubts about both Jens and Gambino as well. If he was correct, Will, Lou, and he faced certain death by infection. The image of Alandale’s body flashed through his mind.

Lena Gabio, Steve Jens, and Kyle Fiske needed to be isolated and now, but first he slammed the airlock HAZMAT lockout tray used for passing medicines, food, and water to a confined or quarantined person. David had lifted the two specimen nets, and now he shoved them into the HAZMAT tray to shoot them into the confined area to isolate them.

David then grabbed Fiske and shoved him into the airlock hatchway, the door knocking him dizzy. David then entered the airlock combination on the keypad and the hatchway whooshed open. He quickly tossed Fiske inside. He then did the same with Jens over Lena’s objections, but Will held her in check as he too objected.

David, working around the creature still probing his mask for entry to his suit and then his body, worked against every moral fiber in his being to take these necessary steps. All while Fiske pleaded, “Dave… don’t do this, David, David.”

“No time to take a vote!” he shouted to the others in the cabin, and with a swift hand on the controls, he jettisoned everyone and everything in the airlock out into the depths of the ocean, and the others, including Lou, watched Fiske and Jens implode along with the egg sacs that’d been jettisoned alongside them.

Will Bowman held a frozen stare on David. David shouted at him, “I had no damn choice, and you know it, Will! You saw those damnable things!”

“Who’s next, me? Lena? Lou?” shouted Bowman, angry, glaring.

David’s laser came up with lightning speed, and it fried one of the alien creatures still lurking in the cab as it came within inches of Bowman’s head, and Bowman, at first thinking David about to strike him, had raised his laser knife. But in the same instant, he saw that David was not out to strike him, so he lowered his knife and holstered it.

Lena let out with a sudden howl as if the killing of the thing that attacked Will had caused her pain, and she suddenly went for her laser knife to confront and challenge David’s authority here. She was already infected, David realized now, and she had been since entering the sub. He recalled her vital signs becoming so erratic, and her mantra about getting to the surface. David imagined that during the time she discovered the eggs and had placed them into her collectibles bag, one of them had gotten into her suit. How the thing had wormed its way into her suit without her imploding out there, he could only speculate; possibly through some sort of extended osmosis, having attached itself to the suit, and if this were possible, how long did he himself have before the damnable splat on his mask would find a way in?

He fired his laser through Lena’s mask and into brain as if in a reflex action and her head exploded within the helmet she wore, filled now with brain matter and superheated flesh. She never saw it coming, and she dropped across Will Bowman’s feet.

David shouted, “She’s infected, Will! Help me grab up this thing she’s become and throw it the hell outta here, now! Into the airlock chamber!”

“Where Fiske and Jens were pleading for you to help them, Will?” he asked, his face pinched in pain at what had occurred within the last few minutes.

Then Will froze up, his mouth behind the mask agape, eyes wide, terrified of David it appeared. David snatched off his mask at the realization that the thing on it was indeed working its way through to him, so in one smooth and speedy action, he snatched it off and into the HAZMAT lockout tray that sent the mask and it into the airlock. On the inside, the vile creature was still trying to ooze through the mask.

Fiske’s voice suddenly filled the cabin, and it sounded robotic as he pleaded with David from inside the airlock, crying out, “Don’t do this, Dave… Dave… please, Dave…” It was a recording now, one that Bowman has placed on replay. “You’re the killer here, Ingles—you!”

Bowman tried to get to the airlock controls to block his way and keep him from disposing of Lena’s body as he had the others. Poor Will had no idea what was happening, but his gesture proved hopeless when David suddenly held him at the point of his laser knife. One press on the handle and Bowman’s head could be rolling about the floor.

Bowman said through gritted teeth, “You bastard! How do we know you’re not one of these things?”

“I’m not allowing a single one of those eggs to the surface, Will. Not even the one residing inside you.”

Lou had his laser gun now at David’s exposed throat. “You put it down, now!” he demanded. “There’s been enough killing today!”

“You can’t allow Bowman back onto Scorpio, sir, please!” David shouted, holding his position, a breath away from killing Bowman on the suspicion he was one of them now.

“Enough! Enough! Put it down, David!” shouted Lou. “As for Will, perhaps he can be held in isolation and that thing cut out of him if it’s there at all! Now cease and desists! That’s an order, David.”

“Thousands gave their lives that this thing might go forever to the ocean bottom, and I won’t let the death of Titanic be in vain.”

No one moved.

“Step back and away from him, Will,” suggested Lou.

Bowman took a cautionary step back from David an inch at a time. “With the oxygen tanks so near,” he said, sounding like a reasonable man, “we all die, David, if another laser cutter is opened… well, we’ve been lucky so far.”

Lou Swigart, barely able to move after his exertion, reached out to David. “It’s in your hands, David. All of it. We live or we die, all of it, on you.”

“Davey Boy, please, be reasonable.” It was Bowman again; he now reached a hand out to David, offering to take charge of his laser knife.

Forbes’ voice warned again of their speed, shouting for reason.

“Be reasonable!” Lou added his voice.

David had been unable to be certain of just how many of those damnable eggs had exploded out at them, and it had been impossible to know how many had gotten onto and under the suits of the men sharing this tight space. Or how many had managed to find a human host.

He looked into Lou’s eyes for answers, for what to do and for a millisecond, he thought he saw a shadow cross the man’s brow, speeding past his eyelids.

“Slow the ship, David. Bring it to a reasonable speed.”

Reasonable, thought David. They are all asking me to be reasonable.

His gaze went from one to the other of those who’d survived going into Titanic, those still with the living. They were few, three in number, and all saying the same thing. Be reasonable, David. Even David was chorusing the word in his head, and he wondered if something inside him, the infection itself, was talking to him. He heard it in the deepest recesses in his brain like a coiled snake hissing the word: reasonable… be reasonable. It all sounded like a hypnotist’s trick—like a post-hypnotic suggestion but not quite.

Then Lena’s mantra was repeated suddenly by Bowman. “Gotta get out of this tin can… gotta get to the surface. Gotta get real air.”

The desperation in Will’s voice recalled David’s reading about the two miner’s in that mine in Belfast—or rather Declan Irvin’s recreation and rendition of those early moments in the mine—entirely theoretical, entirely fictional as an account—that part of the journal entry. Yet there was nothing fictional about what he’d done to Jens and Fiske in the airlock or to Gambio here in the cabin.

“It’s your girlfriend’s turn, Will. She’s infected. We both know it. Put her remains in the airlock. As acting captain, that’s an order!”

“You just murdered Fiske and Jens, and-and then Lena!”

“They were infected! She was infected!” David shouted at the others here and on Scorpio. “They’d have infected the rest of us and everyone aboard Scorpio.” David refused to give up his only weapon, the metal-cutting laser. “Go ahead, Lou,” he said, “strike me down. Do it now. I won’t fight you.”

Lou looked angry enough to do it, his eyes wide behind the mask David had covered him with, and for another half a second, David saw a black, inky shadow cross Lou’s eyes, traveling from one side to the other like a sloshing watery shadow, yet gone as fast as it had appeared.

“David, be reasonable.”

Will Bowman chorused this. “Be reasonable, Ingles.”

Swigart again reached out to David, trying to touch him, looking like a stroke victim struggling with words. “We hafta… have got to make it to… to the surface safely. Slow the damned sub, David.”

Forbes was shouting the same over the communications panel. David snapped it off, silencing at least one of the voices coming in at him.

“Maybe I have gone crazy,” he murmured to himself.

When he took his eyes off Lou and the others for the millisecond it took to snap off the communications from Scorpio, he was attacked by Bowman, who began pounding him against the control panel.

“Get him! Get him now!” Lou shouted in unison with those aboard Scorpio who had begun to believe David had completely gone mad. But David, although pummeled, held tightly to his only weapon, the laser. Seeing their determination and hearing them saying to one another, “Gotta get out of here… need better air,” he knew they had all been infected, including himself.

Swigart was now shouting, “Get that laser out of his hands! Now!”

Will struggled to do as Swigart said, but David held tightly to his only weapon. All of the others had become infected; they were all now incubators for this parasitic creature—each carrying and nurturing one of those things… each having been taken over by this alien life form.

David had become the modern equivalent of Ransom and Declan rolled into one, and he acted as they had—bravely. He now squeezed the trigger and the laser knife beam hit the life-giving oxygen tanks, and Max exploded from within, killing them all and spreading their atoms to the deep, their sprinkled ashes and that of the sub floating back and down and down to have each and all return to the Titanic miles below now.

The explosion aboard Max had occurred several hundred feet below Scorpio.

The men aboard Scorpio felt the explosion lift the ship and drop her down.

Dr. Juris Forbes cursed their luck and cursed Titanic, going to his knees, knowing that his years of preparation for this expedition had come to an abrupt and horrid end, and he imagined the reason why. David Ingles had gone berserk down there, fabricated a complex story, fed by paranoia and fear, making everyone around him the enemy. A terribly sad end to his dream.

There had been no guarantees; no one knew what going to such depths might do to the human psyche. It now appeared that nothing good had come of it, and so much opportunity had gone to hell.

Forbes now stared at the ancient book that his crewmen had indeed found in the wall panel in Ingles’ quarters. Dr. Entebbe had scanned the book earlier and had insisted Forbes read it. For this reason alone, Forbes knew he must read it to fully understand what had triggered Ingles’ deadly rampage, and what’d gone on in his fevered mind.

Furthermore, how had David pulled it off? How had he killed Alandale and Ford? What had he used? What precisely had it been that killed Alandale and Ford, and ultimately all of Swigart’s dive team, including Lou?

“Sir, Captain,” his first officer—promoted after Alandale’s death, called for his attention. “Warren Kane’s helicopter is landing on the aft helipad deck, sir, now! Says he wants answers, sir.”

“Answers… fucking answers… everyone wants answers.”

“Sir? Sir? Did you hear me, sir?”

“Kane, yes, damn it, I heard you.”

“What will you tell him?”

“That we’ve failed, Mr. Walker; that we’ve failed and failed miserably.”

When Kane rushed into the control room, he had bits and pieces of what was going on likely transmitted to him by Craig Powers, Forbes imagined. Kane came in shouting, “Captain Forbes, what in God’s name happened with Ingles? He sure as hell never exhibited any signs of madness in training. So what the hell happened down there?”

“We aren’t a hundred percent sure; perhaps it was the enormous pressures. I mean they were working two and a half miles down. No one’s ever attempted anything like this before; it’s all experimental. Everyone knew that going in.”

“I want a full set of all video and voice recordings, do you understand?”

“I’ll see to it, Warren.”

“I’ll have my people study every inch of it.”

“It may help us to determine what happened to Ingles.”

“You mean what turned him into a killer, don’t you?” Kane paced the small control room, knocking over Styrofoam cups and wrappers. He angrily erupted again. “And damn it all, perhaps we’ll get another shot at Titanic in what, another hundred years?”

Walker had gotten out of the way, dropped his gaze, and had snatched off his cap, averting his eyes. He was trying to appear as if not here, looking somewhat sorry for his captain’s predicament.

Forbes took Kane aside and calmly said, “Look, shit happens; you know that better than anyone, Warren. I’m sorry, truly, but none of this could have been avoided.”

“All of us are a sorry lot, Juris! All of us are damned sorry sons-a-bitches. Especially you and Swigart—not informing me of murders aboard Scorpio when they occurred! What the hell were you two thinking? God, there’ll be inquiries, possibly a senate investigation, most certainly a forensic inquest. We can hire the best forensic psychiatrist in the business. Maybe head things off, get some answers before we all get crucified in the press.”

“What we do, gentlemen, is to arm ourselves with the truth,” said Dr. Entebbe, who, overhearing the rancor had stepped into the control room. “We have ample evidence of the parasitic organism at work—given the condition of the bodies kept on ice. We also have this.” He held out Declan Irvin’s journal, which Forbes had carelessly left in the control room. “It’s a hell of a story but one which may convince you, Mr. Kane, and you, Dr. Forbes, that Titanic must be left alone and undisturbed forever more.”

“What’s this?” asked Kane, taking the journal from Entebbe’s outstretched hand.

“Read it… makes for a compelling argument.”

“Perhaps after the grieving is done, the dead are buried, and what we’ve botched is buried we should leave Titanic to rest in peace,” said Forbes, nerves shot.

“For now, we’ve got our investors to deal with,” said Kane, Craig Powers now back of him with a microphone and a cameraman, asking him for an interview. Kane whispered to Forbes, “I suppose we can explain what happened in time… maybe share this book with somebody… See if we can fathom what that lunatic was going on about, eh, Juris?”

“You really must read the journal before you make any rash decisions,” Entebbe warned.

“Dr. Entebbe is it?” asked Kane, not waiting for an answer. “I’ll do what is necessary.”

“Captain, you too… you need to read the journal, sir,” Entebbe insisted.

Forbes reached for the journal and Kane handed it to him. He held Declan Irvin’s journal up to the light and it was bathed in the sun of a new day.