“He seemed good. Better than I had heard him for a number of years.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She opened her mouth, closed it again, and expelled a breath. “Look. My brother spent most of his adult life in MI-6.” She paused and met his eye. “You know what that is, right?”
He nodded. “The British Secret Intelligence Service.”
“Right,” she confirmed. “When Patrick got out, he was a different sort of man. He’d seen things, done things that no human should ever have to do or see.”
“He was suffering from PTSD?”
“Almost certainly, not that he showed it. My brother was a hard man, capable of concealing his darkest thoughts to the deepest recess of the mental equivalent of a locked vault. But this was different.”
“How so?”
“He sounded scared.”
A waiter brought their food out.
Their conversation took a pause, as they devoured some breakfast. Sam glanced at the food. There were two large plates, filled to their edges with food. Grilled tomatoes, capsicum, fresh avocado slices, garnished with roughly torn fresh cress and rocket, a sweet potato hash brown and wholemeal bread.
The waiter placed a bowl of jellied salmon that looked good enough to eat down in front of Caliburn, who mewled with joy, and immediately began to eat it.
They thanked the waiter.
Sam turned to Guinevere and said, “I thought you got us the Big Breakfast?”
“I did.” She smiled. “Didn’t I mention I’m a vegetarian? Is that all right?”
“Why did Caliburn get meat?”
“What do you mean?” Guinevere asked. “Have you ever heard of a vegetarian dog? That’s nuts!”
Sam bit down on his food, devouring it within minutes. “It’s good.”
She laughed. “See, I told you, men don’t care what they eat — as long as it’s in front of them.”
“Hey, I don’t deny it.”
He waited until she finished her meal.
Guinevere asked, “Where was I up to?”
Sam said, “Your brother sounded scared.”
“Not just scared. In the years earlier, he was becoming increasingly paranoid after coming back from some mission. He kept on talking about Excalibur.”
“Excalibur?” Sam asked. “As in the legendary sword?”
She frowned. “Yeah, like I said, he was losing it. The way he rambled I figured he had PTSD. Sometimes I thought he was talking about a monster and other times he seemed to be just talking about an ancient mythical blade.”
“A monster?”
“Yeah. Some sort of creature that was hunting him. An ancient predator, released from its Earthly confines.”
Sam looked directly at her, and held her hand. “Do you think he was crazy?”
“I don’t know. I had never known him to lose it before.”
“Or do you think there was some truth to what he was saying?”
She breathed heavily. “That’s just it. He’d been delusional in other conversations after he’d left MI-6, but this one seemed like it was firmly rooted in reality.”
“And?”
“Patrick told me about an ancient monster — forged through fire and hardship every bit as strong as a traditional blacksmith might make — that was coming after him and every man in his team. It had killed most of them. Of the seven men in his team, he was one of only three left.”
“Do you know who else was part of his team?”
“No.”
Sam stood up. He paid the bill and left a generous tip. “Then, I guess we’d better go check out the wreck of the Hoshi Maru, and see if we can finally find some answers.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. “But there’s something else I haven’t told you…”
“What?”
“The Hoshi Maru’s last radio transmission referred to its crew being attacked by a mythical Japanese beast, called a Nue.”
Chapter Seventeen
Sam made his way down to Cannon Beach, Oregon.
Guinevere walked next to him with the determined stride of someone who knew with certainty that they were heading toward danger, but had to go there anyway. Caliburn, on the other hand, looked ten years younger, as he ran along the beach, sniffing new and wonderfully rotting scents, and chasing birds.
In the distance the thick mist rose eerily over Haystack Rock, the distinctive 235-foot high sea-stack, and its surrounding smaller intertidal rocks known as The Needles. In the shallow water between the sea-stacks and the beach, lay the remains of the Hoshi Maru — a jumbled barnacle laden mass barely resembling a once proud ship. Crepuscular rays shone on the shipwreck, turning it golden in the sea of gray.
“She’s not much to look at,” Guinevere said, stopping to stare at the shipwreck. “But my brother told me she was spectacular.”
“I believe it,” Sam said, thinking of the many once-majestic ships he’d seen languishing and dilapidating on the sea floor. “Come on. Let’s see what they found inside.”
They walked down toward the wreck.
Caliburn barked, and pounced on the fish in the shallow waves.
An Oregon Fish and Wildlife Officer stood guard next to the hull. His eyes were bloodshot, and Sam suspected the man had been there all night.
The Officer looked up to greet them, his jaw set firm, but not unfriendly. “Good morning. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you folks to walk right around the shipwreck. It’s currently been quarantined until we can work out where it’s come from, and what sort of marine parasites it might be carrying.”
Sam said, “I can’t tell you what parasites she’s carrying, but I can tell you her home port was Minamisōma Harbor, and she was lost during the tsunami that originated in Tōhoku, Japan, in 2011.”
The Officer grinned. “Hey, with a name like Hoshi Maru, we could guess that she most likely originated from Japan. But there’s no certainty she was lost during the tsunami. The seas surrounding Japan can be dangerous. No reason to think that she wasn’t claimed by heavy seas. Nor any reason to think, just by looking at her, that she hasn’t been in the water a lot longer than seven years. Heck, she might have been stuck in the North Pacific Gyre for decades.”
“No. She was lost trying to get out to sea in the port of Minamisōma Harbor. The vessel reached the outer harbor and was swamped by the initial thirty-foot waves.”
The Officer crossed his arms. “How could you possibly know that?”
Sam turned to Guinevere. “Because her brother was on board the Hoshi Maru at the time.”
The Fish and Wildlife Officer took off his hat. Holding it to his chest, he met Guinevere’s eye directly and said, “I’m very sorry to hear that, ma’am.”
She said, “Thank you. After all these years, it’s just nice to finally have some sort of closure.”
Sam said, “That’s why we would like to take a quick look on board.”
“You know I can’t let you do that, sir.”
“Because of the quarantine?” Sam asked. “I’m a marine biologist by trade. I know how not to disturb the marine life and afterward, we’ll bag our shoes. Please, it’s very important to her.”
The Officer shook his head and frowned. “I can understand why, but all the same, I have my orders to protect the security of the shipwreck until someone higher up than me takes possession and ownership of the scene.”
Something about the way the man spoke gave Sam the odd impression that they weren’t just dealing with a routine quarantine of a shipwreck from a foreign port. “Why? I thought this sort of thing fell in the direct jurisdiction of Oregon Fish and Wildlife Services.”
“Normally it does,” the Officer replied. The man opened his mouth to provide more of an answer to the question, but thought better of it, and closed it again.