“What is so interesting about the ropes and the cranes, Sam?” she asked with a flutter in her voice he had not heard in a while. Without breaking taking his camera down, he chuckled, and as he panned on the small group of crewmen standing around Ali, Sam whispered, “You will be surprised what interesting things happen around mundane objects, Nina. Look down there.”
“Aye, a bunch of loud mouth seadogs chatting with their captain,” she jested.
Sam looked at her. She seemed even-keeled, but he knew something was amiss in her heart. It took everything inside him not to ask, but he knew his reluctance to pry could be the death of their relationship — whatever was left of the romance between them.
"What is wrong, love?" he asked. "Just come out and tell me so that we can fix it."
He just asked, and he feared he was going to regret it, but he did not. Now that they were in their early forties it seemed that the time for mind games and tests of loyalty was very much obsolete, and he did not care if it pissed Nina off. He had to know because secrets were the cancer of the heart.
Nina was taken aback by Sam's straightforward approach. At first, she wanted to snub him for it, but his genuine appeal revealed his willingness to listen. Above all, the fact that he insisted and offered to make amends for whatever shortcomings she was punishing him for only proved that he deemed her important enough to give a damn. She could not fault him for that.
“You and Crystal… are very…” she wavered, having no idea how to express her jealousy, “…chummy.”
“Chummy?” he gasped melodramatically in his humorous playfulness. He raised one eyebrow as he acted out the hyperbole. “She is just a sexy shark, love. I have no intention of getting to know her better than say, a plate of chips.”
Nina tried hard not to laugh. Her smile was not born from his jokes but from her relief. Within the past three minutes, while engaged in this discussion, she had experienced countless emotions, hoping it would not flare into a fight again. Nina was so tired of fighting with Sam and then spending her nights in tears of fury while the laid-back journalist appeared to go about his business completely unfazed by her disgruntlement. It felt so nice to hear him inquire about her feelings, and it felt even better to be reassured that he was not interested in hooking up with Crystal.
“Besides, she has a thing with Purdue, I think,” he added. That bothered Nina more than it was supposed to. She could not understand why, because a moment ago, all she wanted to hear was that Sam still wanted her. Now she had this sick feeling in her stomach at the thought of Purdue being with another woman.
“What do you mean?” she asked timidly, but she feared the answer.
“Call it my journalistic intuition,” Sam replied, once again filming the lower deck where a crew member snuck into an entrance. “I could be wrong, of course.”
His odd fascination with his subject peeled Nina away from her emotional insecurity for a moment, and she perched up on her toes to look over the railing. “What are you looking at?”
He kept his eye on his viewfinder, but he answered her honestly.
"Something is going on with this damn tugboat, love,” he said mildly. “I just don’t know what it is.”
“You mean the creepy tattered storytellers or the questionable work ethic?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. He had to neglect the unfolding mystery of the hidden door below and film what he was supposed to. Purdue and the others surfaced, looking utterly disappointed and a little bit shocked. Sam and Nina made their way down the jack ladder to join Mieke in helping them out of their diving gear.
“And? Do you think we can get it to float?” Sam asked Purdue.
Crystal sighed and looked across the waves as if she was searching for something. Purdue scowled heavily as the other two divers discussed something with Ali, sounding nothing short of alarmed.
“Purdue?” Nina urged him for a response. Purdue took a deep breath and tried to make sense of what he was about to say.
“These are the exact coordinates we mapped and confirmed this morning,” he said. “We searched the whole area but… the ship is gone.”
Chapter 27 — Ali’s Secrets Bleed Out
Ali frowned. “How can it be gone? We saw it when we got here!”
Manni glared at him from behind Purdue and Crystal, motioning with a shaking head that Ali should mind his temper until they had successfully got the ship to float and the passengers captured. Any deviation from the plan could make it fail, so they had to play along until their valuable cargo had secured the hopefully even more valuable asset, so to speak.
“Where did you see it?” Purdue asked with renewed hope.
“On our sonar,” Ali answered. “It was there, large as a mountain right below us.”
“Can you show me?” Purdue asked with wide eyes, resting his hand on the captain’s shoulder. “I have to see what kind of technology you have on board to map it with. Maybe I am missing something.”
"Of course. Come; I'll show you," Ali agreed. He led the way to the bridge, making sure that radioactivity was disabled by him giving a barely perceptible signal to the two men watching them from the helm. Purdue, Sam, Nina, and Crystal accompanied him while Mieke and Zain spent time playing cards. Since she was only there to catalog and he was only there for the event of trouble, neither had much to do before the wreck had been lifted.
To Ali’s disbelief, the green and black shapes on the screen yielded nothing.
“I swear! I swear to you it was there! The outlines of a ship right in the middle!” he insisted.
Purdue quickly assured the captain that they believed him, but Ali was visibly shaken by the strange occurrence. He was pacing up and down in front of the control desk, holding his head, muttering and trying to make sense of this unnerving discovery.
“Look, I thought it was my equipment at first. Then I thought the ship was plated with some material to make it undetectable, but now we can all see that the bloody thing has literally disappeared!" Purdue ranted. It was disturbing to see the genius at a loss for an explanation, but Nina took comfort in the fact that Purdue would soon come up with a solution to the problem, as he always did in a crisis.
“Where is Sam?” Crystal asked, noting that the journalist had also vanished while they had been checking the radar readings and resetting the instruments. “Jesus, everyone and everything keep disappearing under our noses.”
Sam followed the narrow hallway from the small door he had filmed from the upper deck before. He felt his way along the plumbing pipes through the dark with only his night vision camera to guide him. He heard footsteps behind him but when he turned there was nothing but an empty fiberglass wormhole of mystery that led to the small red steel door he had closed behind him.
A shadow swept inside one of the small store rooms along the straight passage and Sam held his breath, pressing his body up against the wall right next to the door where the black shape moved. He pressed the red record button on his camera and waited. Whatever he would encounter would be capture on film. The door through which he had entered the hallway creaked open, allowing blinding white daylight through the ajar door, and Sam realized he was trapped. Without a place to hide, he would be in plain sight unless he accessed the room the dark figure had entered.
Pointing the lens straight onto the silhouette in the door frame, Sam’s heart slammed hard against his rib cage. A hundred potential excuses flashed through his brain, reasons explaining his presence in the narrow passage. In the glare of the harsh light, he could not discern the identity of the person who swiftly slipped through the opening, but as the door closed, he realized it was someone he knew well.