Bermuda Triangle Read online

  Bermuda Triangle

  By

  Susan Cartwright

  Copyright 2013 by Susan Cartwright

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  1. Mystery

  2. Heaven

  3. The Plan

  4. Crack in the Armor

  5. Nutjob

  6. Angels

  7. Uncomfortable Truth

  8. Jacob Swann

  9. Casualty

  Epilogue

  1. Mystery

  "I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?"

  "Captain," Lieutenant Dave Terwin repeated, "Man overboard!" The officer of the deck's expression remained neutral. A veteran, he had the alert-yet-relaxed demeanor so characteristic of experienced naval men. A sharp, louder than usual voice betrayed his urgency.

  The captain of the USS Maryland, Commander Mark Hanlon, was of medium height, with short brown hair and shrewd gray eyes. He glared at Terwin and set his mug of coffee down. The distinctive thud was loud amongst the background conversational noise and purring of equipment cooling fans. "Is this your idea of a joke, Lieutenant? Because if it is...."

  The officer stepped aside. "Skipper, perhaps you'd like to see for yourself."

  All conversation stopped as Captain Hanlon strode to the LCD interface of the command center. Instead of a periscope, Virginia-class submarines utilized telescoping photonics masts. With high resolution cameras, infrared sensors, range finders and electronic eavesdropping arrays -- the masts brought the outside world into Maryland via fiber optic cable.

  Hanlon stared. Twelve-hundred yards away a man was afloat, lolling on the waves like a rag doll. He wore what looked like a U.S. Navy lifejacket. Captain Hanlon sounded the alert and lifted the handset. "All hands, prepare to surface. XO to the bridge. Deck crew prepare for emergency retrieval. Helm," he said in a tight, level voice, "slow ahead. Heading two-two-zero." He waited for the responsive vessel to move, calculating position and distance, and in a moment said, "Yes, that's it. All stop."

  The massive nuclear submarine moved gracefully, barely creating a ripple in the coffee of crewmen who, moments before, had been enjoying lunch a deck below. Maryland's crew numbered one-hundred and thirty-four, with fourteen officers and a hundred and twenty enlisted men. Of those, one-third were on duty. The others could be found throughout the vessel: reading from an extensive library of both e-readers and hard copy (almost every current newspaper or magazine was brought on board before departure); resting, playing games, watching movies, or working out in the gym.

  "Get the medical team on deck, Lieutenant. The XO has the con. I'm going up topside."

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  Captain Hanlon strode through the command center, passing men on watch. Maryland had been submerged for almost two months while executing a standard surveillance and reconnaissance mission. Positioned mid-Atlantic, they were 460 miles southwest of the Azores Islands. In five days they would return to base in Connecticut -- just in time to bring in the New Year 2012.

  The deck tilted to a twenty-five degree angle and began to level off. Hanlon lurched and swayed without slowing pace. He had anticipated the normal conclusion of an ordinary patrol.

  Now? He shook his head. Not going to happen.

  He thought of his wife, Noelle. Astrology interested her, but he considered it mumbo-jumbo, pure and simple. Still, submariners could be a superstitious bunch. While he didn't own a rabbit's foot, he never walked under ladders. He liked to hedge his bets. Noelle always saw him off with admonitions to be careful. Her horoscopes were forever predicting, "life changing events." He supposed they had to be right sometime.

  God I hope not. I like my life as it is.

  Hanlon stepped over a bulkhead, moved through a narrow corridor and then upward, nodding at a petty officer who moved aside to let him pass. As he came up on deck he took a deep breath of fresh salt air. Solid, slate-gray cloud surrounded them, making little break in the horizon. An icy wind blew from the northwest and a six-foot swell was running, the rolling waves streaked with whitecaps.

  The boatswain's mates heaved lines overboard, lowering the craft. Five crewmen climbed down to board her. The zodiac inflatable, a paltry fifteen feet long by six feet wide, was dwarfed by the massive bulk of the surfaced submarine. While Maryland rolled lightly on a petulant sea, the rubber raiding craft was tossed about like dice in a crapshoot.

  Captain Hanlon watched through his binoculars as the crew of the inflatable struggled toward their objective, the outboard motor humming. His eyes narrowed and his brows drew down in concentration. It was difficult to see the guy as his orange lifejacket bobbed in and out of sight with each rolling swell.

  The man is a rag-doll, he thought, recalling a childhood game where he and his siblings rolled and fell in the back seat with every stop and turn of his parents' moving car. He must be dead.

  He watched the inflatable slow. With a surging wave Maryland dipped into a trough and a large swell blocked his view. He stared through his binoculars, training them back and forth like a gun turret in an attempt to regain contact. A few moments later he saw his men had already hauled their target from the sea and were fighting their way back toward Maryland.

  Captain Hanlon lowered his binoculars. Maryland's doctor and two seamen stood nearby with a stretcher and medical equipment, but he ignored them. He didn't feel like talking. Maryland was at the precise coordinates where the submarine USS Scorpion sank in 1968, with the loss of all her crew. At the time there were accusations of conspiracy and Soviet involvement. More recent evidence supported a "cataclysmic event" and possible torpedo malfunction. Naval investigation was inconclusive. Hanlon's jaw tightened. There was no logical reason for him to feel uneasy. Why should any of this bother him? The Scorpion catastrophe was done and dusted years ago.

  The back of Hanlon's neck tingled. He had the urge to cross himself, but not in respect for the dead man that would soon be brought aboard his boat. Bernard Shaw's poem came to mind, "Mine will be a watery grave, I feel it in my bones. Men will me in canvass sew, and weigh me down with stones." Here he was, plucking a corpse from the sea, while Maryland was floating above a maritime graveyard of ninety-nine lost souls. There was some sort of macabre irony there somewhere.

  The zodiac came alongside and the petty officer in charge clambered up Maryland's side on a steel rope ladder. His voice was loud over the sound of whistling wind and waves as he shouted, "Captain! Sir...he's alive!"

  The unconscious man was brought up on deck and onto the waiting canvas stretcher. Naked except for his life preserver, the man was thin and suffering from exposure -- but he was breathing. Strands of wet hair lay in stark contrast, black against his pale face. He seemed about thirty-five years old, perhaps younger, and had the look of a fighter. His hardened grimace refused to give in, even to unconsciousness. His nose appeared to have been broken more than once. Hanlon registered these details without conscious thought. There would be time to think of them later.

  Corpsmen cut away the lifejacket, covered the man with blankets, and strapped him in. They picked up the stretcher and started to move. The doctor glanced at the captain in silent query and Hanlon nodded. With almost no break in stride, the medical team whisked their patient away, disappearing down the main hatch. The entire operation had taken minutes.

  Maryland seemed empty once they were gone.

  Hanlon squatted down on the black deck and shook his head in disbel
ief. Not dead.

  It was incredible. He had just picked up a living man from the middle of nowhere, in the cold water of an open ocean. He couldn't recall anything more unusual in twenty-eight years at sea. He looked at the severed debris of the man's lifejacket, the only remaining evidence of the fantastic events of the last few minutes. Reaching over, he picked up the dusty orange-colored vest, attempting to get a firm grip on what, in the space of moments, had become a tenuous reality.

  Glancing at the dripping material, Hanlon's pulse sped up and his hand went to his heart.

  Oh my God!

  For a moment he stopped breathing. His hand reached for Maryland's solid hull as he swayed with shock. Printed on the side of the lifejacket in faded letters were the words: "Property of US Navy -- USS Scorpion."

  2. Heaven

  Ten hours later the rescued man opened his eyes. Having left orders to be notified, Captain Hanlon arrived within minutes. Outside the isolated infirmary he donned protective covering. This extensive ordeal included pulling on a long sleeved hospital gown that tied at the back, blue medical gloves, shoe covers and a surgical mask that had clear protective eyewear. On a contained vessel they couldn’t risk the possibility of communicable disease. Hanlon looked in the mirror above the sink. His eyes held a mocking glint.

  Perfect. I look as stupid as I feel.

  A corpsman came through the thin plastic barrier that isolated the ill man, removing his own protective clothing and placing it in a yellow plastic bag labeled "Infectious." He spoke to Hanlon in a quiet voice; there was nothing new to report. The corpsman washed his hands and left. Captain Hanlon passed through the clear plastic barrier and sat down beside the man they had pulled from the sea. Nearby was Maryland's doctor.

  "My name is Hanlon," he said. "I'm captain of this vessel. Can you tell me what happened?"

  The man looked up, but didn't speak. He stared without apparent understanding toward his rescuers.

  Captain Hanlon studied the stranger and didn't like what he saw. The man was ill and not just from exposure. His roughly six-foot frame seemed to hold no real substance. "Can you tell us how you came to be adrift at sea?" Hanlon asked, his voice subdued by his mask. When the visitor didn't respond, he spoke louder, "Can you tell me your name?"

  A flicker of understanding flashed in the stranger's expression. He opened his mouth, but no words came.

  Captain Hanlon's gray eyes narrowed. The man didn't seem unwilling to talk and he was too unwell to be playing some sort of practical joke -- as was suggested by the powers that be in Naval Intelligence. The guy could have memory loss from concussion, shock, or trauma. Perhaps -- as feasible as anything else -- he didn't speak English.

  "It may be days," the doctor said, "before we can find out anything about him."

  Captain Hanlon's brows drew down. The back of his head itched. He curbed an impulse to scratch it. Not a good plan with protective gear on. His mind filled with unanswered questions.

  That Scorpion lifejacket! A shiver of dread poured through him. He had seen some pretty strange things in his life, but this topped his SNAFU meter by miles. How had this guy gotten hold of that lifejacket? How had he come to be naked and alone in the middle of the ocean? At the exact co-ordinates Scorpion went down over forty years ago?

  Captain Hanlon said, "I wonder where he came from?"

  The doctor added, "Or where he's been…"

  "I…" the ill man choked, his voice a broken whisper. "I...."

  They both stared at the stranger they had pulled from the sea and waited for his words. Neck straining with effort, the fellow raised his head and said, "I've been to Heaven."

  3. The Plan

  Captain Hanlon, fortified by coffee and brownies, sat at the wardroom table with his XO and Maryland's physician.

  Lieutenant Commander Ron Slater, Maryland's doctor, was a tall, slim man, with gold-rimmed glasses and thinning sandy hair. He said, "My patient is in an advanced stage of pulmonary tuberculosis." He took a sip of black coffee. "It is a contagious and lethal disease."

  Hanlon said, "Just as well we instituted precautions."

  "Oh yes," Doctor Slater agreed. "TB is airborne, it spreads when an infected person coughs or sneezes." He hesitated for a long moment and then added, "An individual could be asymptomatic for months. Judging by scar tissue, my patient has been infected for perhaps a year."

  "Yes?" Captain Hanlon encouraged. He knew there was no way to speed up his friend's dissertation. The doc was a careful man. He always spoke in a slow, measured voice, as if he pre-thought each word -- which, Hanlon realized, he probably did.

  Doctor Slater took another drink and said, "The linings in both his lungs are thin and prone to rupture. His sputum is blood-tinged when he coughs." He pushed his glasses back in place from where they slipped down his nose and added, "With treatment, he'll recover."

  Hanlon could hear a, "but" in the doc's voice. He snagged a brownie -- still warm from the oven -- and said, "So, what's the problem?"

  A look of frustration crossed the doctor's expression. "TB doesn't attack the nervous system. I just don't understand why my patient is so feeble. It's as if he hasn't used his muscles for months." He shook his head and shuffled through some notes. "Then there's his lack of bone density. I don't know. I've never seen anything like this." He frowned. "I really hate mysteries that I can't solve."

  "He still hasn't offered much?" Hanlon's tone was sympathetic.

  "Nothing. He claims he doesn't know his name, and he denied that comment about Heaven." The doctor raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Says he must have been delirious. He asked where he was, time, day and month -- usual for concussion cases. I offered him a newspaper. He froze and went quite pale as he read the first page; I can't for the life of me imagine why. I asked him what was wrong. He dissembled, mumbling something incoherent in an attempt to hide his shock. I can tell you this: whatever he is -- he's no actor. He put the paper down and wouldn’t speak to me after that."

  Their eyes met.

  "He's hiding something," Hanlon observed.

  Doctor Slater nodded his agreement. "Here's what I gave him." He held out the newspaper.

  Captain Hanlon took the proffered copy of the, New York Times. Lips pursed, he scanned it. There wasn't anything exceptional: debt relief and the Euro, the 2012 presidential campaign and more finger-pointing in relation to the financial crisis. What on this page could have frightened the guy? Who was he? How had he come to be there, right where Maryland would find him? It was a ridiculous chance. He should have died of exposure. There was nada -- zip -- absolutely nothing nearby, and with Maryland's sensor array he ought to know. Had he been dropped from low altitude by plane? No, Maryland would have known about that, too.

  He shook his head and said, "None of this makes any sense." Hanlon had a sudden thought and brightened. "You know, with the off chaplain sick, I'm holding his position. Perhaps your patient needs, ah, spiritual guidance. You know, for the sake of his health."

  The XO laughed out loud. Bits of brownie showered the table, making him laugh even more. Lieutenant Commander Joseph "Bull" Weber was a stocky man with thick, dark eyebrows and a forehead that remained in a permanent crease, giving him a fierce, thinking man's frown.

  Captain Hanlon regarded his colleague with a derisive glare that demanded an explanation.

  Bull stopped laughing, but his grin was pure mischief. The wrinkles on his forehead smoothed with that grin, taking ten years off his age. He shrugged. "You might have missed your calling there, with that whole spiritual guidance thing, is all." His manner became calculated, his expression sly. "But y'know I agree, Skipper. The guy's in the dumps, and who could blame him? The sea kicked the shit out of him and that whole TB thing's got to suck. There's not much we can do to cheer him up. It's not like we can offer him a date, or even a beer."

  Expectant and hopeful, they both looked at the doctor.

  Doctor Ron Slater gave Captain Hanlon a tentative smile. He hesitated longer than usual a
nd said, "I think you'd have a chance of getting somewhere, Mark. Lord knows you have a way with people. People confide in you. If anyone can get the truth out of the fellow, you could. It really would help if I knew more about him. My patient isn't well, but he's no longer critical." He breathed in deeply and then exhaled. "So, as chaplain, you have my medical consent to speak with him."

  Hanlon got to his feet with an engaging grin. His expression was more suited to a twelve-year-old after scoring a goal, than to a seasoned submarine commander. It was those words that he had been waiting for.

  Hanlon nodded toward his executive officer. "Take the conn. We'll be in port day after tomorrow and God knows, with the government's paranoia concerning secrecy, we'll never find out what's going on after that. Perhaps he will, ah, volunteer something before then. From a humanitarian point of view we can't deny the man his right to speak with a chaplain."

  "Yes, sir."

  Meeting adjourned, the doctor and the XO stood, too. They were all smiling now, grouped all for one -- reminiscent of three musketeers, or siblings with Mom's cookie jar. They weren't breaking the rules. They had found a way to get around them. Their guest was well enough to be given subtle grilling.

  Captain Hanlon had kicked the whole thing up to CINCLANT, not daring to guess how the Commander of the Atlantic fleet would take such an odd transmission. He received clear orders concerning their mysterious visitor. This was a matter of national security. The man was to be held in isolation until he was seen by Homeland Security and Naval Intelligence. He was to have minimal interaction with others -- only as necessary to his health.

  4. Crack in the Armor

  The rescued man was lying on his bed, alone in the two-berth room. An IV was in one arm, while crisp white sheets and tan woven blankets covered him to the chest. A faint medical scent hung in the air, the nauseating antiseptic smell of an infirmary. The fellow's arms were exposed and Hanlon noticed a tattoo on his upper right bicep. A woman in a skimpy bikini, once a buxom figure, was outlined in blue, just above the word, "Navy." Originally the ink must have been placed on a healthy, muscular arm. Now the shrunken tattoo appeared pathetic in the artificial light. Hanlon hid a smile. It wasn't really funny, but that tattooed babe of his looked more like a scrawny geriatric suffering advanced osteoporosis.