As the men formed a circle around Crystal and Purdue, Mieke slipped in behind Nina and just gave the historian a wink. Sam was filming the discussion like a documentary, looking forward to present it all to Dr. Malgas when they would meet up again soon. Mieke sat down next to Nina. She had a suggestion about what could be the cause of the wreck’s odd behavior, but she did not want to interrupt the divers before they had their orders.
When Crystal had delegated the respective tasks, Mieke cleared her throat.
“I just want to wish you all good luck,” she smiled. Ali’s divers acknowledged her reluctantly, since she was nothing but a distraction right now. She put her arms around two of the divers and gave them a halfhearted hug before returning to her seat next to Nina. The historian frowned at her, “Are you drunk, Blonde Ambition?”
Mieke laughed. “No! The place is bleak enough, methinks. What everyone needs is a little good cheer; a little encouragement. It’s all so glum.”
“I suppose,” Nina shrugged. She watched Sam getting zipped up by the beautiful tall lawyer again, but she decided not let it faze her this time, thanks to Sam’s previous reassurance.
“You know what I think?” Mieke asked Nina as the rest of the party left for the dive, and Sam readied his filming gear to submerge last. "I have a theory, and you, as a historian, might agree," the blonde said.
Nina raised an eyebrow. “Let’s hear it.”
“Are you sure… certain… that this is a Nazi ship from the Second World War?” she asked. Nina nodded, “Positive.”
‘I wonder if I should tell her that it is not the Admiral Graf Spee,’ Nina wondered as she waited for the girl’s theory.
“So, I was thinking, this ship might have something in common with the USS Eldridge,” Mieke suggested.
Then it finally sunk in. "Go on," she urged Mieke.
“What is the USS Eldridge?” Ali asked, with Manni standing next to him. Outside, the divers disappeared under water to start working on the wreck.
While Nina explained it to the men, she felt an epiphany at what Mieke had just suggested. Of course! She should have known this, but for some reason the Eldridge had never crossed her mind. She had been too preoccupied with other nonsense to notice that the wreck behaved like the Eldridge was reputed to.
“The USS Eldridge was a United States military vessel that was allegedly used in the Philadelphia Experiment of 1943,” Nina sighed, placing her palms together and hugging her hands with her inner thighs while she recounted the legendary experiment. “They wanted to test a scientific theory,” she explained, making a point of keeping her explanation simple for the mariners, who did not know much about physics.
“What theory?” Manni asked, folding his arms. He enjoyed the small woman’s sharp mind, but he did not like it when women were smarter than men. To him, they were either whores or good laborers that fetched a decent price in trade.
“In short, they wanted to make a ship disappear. If they could have pulled it off, they could have made their whole fleet invisible to the enemy, you see?” she said.
“Did it work?” Ali asked, intrigued that science could possibly explain what terrified him so much.
Nina shrugged and sighed, “It did, in some form, they say. The popular story is that the Eldridge disappeared in a flash of blue light and was teleported over 200 miles, re-appearing in front of another ship’s crew as witnesses before vanishing again and returning to the original site…”
“But upon appearing back in Philadelphia,” Mieke interrupted excitedly, “the ship had reputedly gone ten minutes back in time too!”
Ali and Manni slowly looked at each other.
“Rubbish,” Manni said.
“Okay,” Mieke shrugged, “but how else would you explain this wreck under us disappearing every seven hours? Is that rubbish too? You call it bullshit, but you saw it with your own eyes.” Nina put her hand firmly on Mieke’s arm to warn her not to challenge the men.
“What?” Mieke asked Nina out loud. “Zain and Sibu are right over there.”
“Still,” Nina said almost imperceptibly. “Keep it nice and cozy.”
Ali and Manni exchanged angry sounding words in their language. Mieke nudged Nina and whispered, “That is not Egyptian.”
“Are you sure?” Nina asked.
“My major may be archeology but my minor is linguistics, darling, and that’s not Egyptian.”
Nina smiled at Manni and Ali as she pulled Mieke up by her arm. They joined Zain and Sibu to feel a little safer.
“What language was it then, Mieke?” Nina asked once they were a safe distance away.
“I have no idea,” the girl replied.
“Zain. Sibu,” Nina said. “Please do not let us out of your sight, at least until the others are back.”
“Why?” he asked with an aggressive undertone in his voice. “What did they say? Did they threaten you?”
Mieke calmed him down, reminding him that they were outnumbered right now. Nina peered at the two skinny sailors. "Just don't turn your back on them."
Chapter 29 — Shades of Evil
Under the sun-streaked surface of the Indian Ocean, the wreck's eerily bent rods seemed to reach for the sky overhead, trapped in its watery grave of rust and corrosion. It was grotesque and massive, magnified by the water. Sam felt that familiar terror well up inside him again, but he stayed with Purdue, who saw it up close for the first time. In Sam's lens, the billionaire was like a game show host, smiling and pointing to all kinds of fascinating aspects of the wreck. He had put in a brand new memory card just before the dive, but while he followed Purdue wherever he went, Sam tried his utmost not to touch the ship.
Especially now, that he knew there was something strange going on with the vessel, he was even warier than before. He could not help but feel as if that same consciousness he had sensed during his first dive was threatening him once more, the invisible eyes of the ship watching him, knowing that he knew. Crystal had taken two of the divers further down with her to estimate the damage to the turrets and some of the plating along the conning tower and aft tower. Purdue motioned for Sam to join him and one of the welders to film how the hull was patched and how the water was pumped out of the flooded compartment behind the patch.
As much as Sam enjoyed watching the process, he could not help but feel the ever-present sinister vibration. He kept checking his diving watch to see how deep they were, and then he filmed it just for the record. Almost obsessively he kept track of the elapsed time, which was rapidly approaching the end of the seven-hour-cycle. Sam imagined that being present during the ship’s disappearance had to cause an immense shift in water displacement and drag him to the ocean floor. Such nightmarish thoughts plagued Sam every minute he spent near the old Nazi ship. He wondered how this vessel could exist when Nina had been so sure that all the German battleships were accounted for.
It was minutes away from the wreck’s expected disappearance when they entered one compartment of the lower decks that was still flooded. It was a large area that would have to be patched and pumped dry during the next dive. Sam following Purdue and the other diver who led the way. Floating freely between the threatening bars, rods, and wiring of the vibrating ship Sam kept filming. Some peculiar instruments caught his eye, and he stopped to investigate.
What he found explained the origin of his constantly fluctuating emotions and nausea when he came too close to the vessel. To some degree, it also gave reason to why Sam had a feeling that the ship was alive, with its infrasound vibrations continuously pulsing through him. Although Crystal had dismissed his findings as stress-related after the first dive, he now knew for sure why he was feeling a distinct energy radiate from the wreck. On the one hand, it comforted him that it was just the result of active equipment, but on the other hand, it unnerved him that anything would still be active on a ship that had been submerged for over seventy years.