“I get it, Crystal,” Mieke nodded, “but how far can we get in seven hours?”
“Not far, for now, but we just need to get to Yemen to dismantle her. Now we have to make do with towing her as high up north as we can before she disappears again. The next time she’ll reappear at the new coordinates we had reached before she teleported away. A few days and a lot of patience,” Crystal smiled, stroking Mieke’ cheek.
“And once she is dismantled?” the young blonde asked.
“We’ll have the technology they failed to harness in World War II, my darling,” Crystal smiled. “The Order will bow to our will because we will have the power of Vril to drive the unified fields and we will be the only ones who know how to contain and control it.”
“And all that’s on the ship?” Mieke asked.
“Correct.”
“Then why did they fail? If the ship has everything the Eldridge failed at, why is she teleporting every few hours? Why did she sink?” Mieke asked.
“Does that matter?” Crystal asked. She was getting annoyed with her girlfriend’s incessant questioning.
"Of course, it matters. Listen, Crystal, I love you. I want you to rule the underworld and be at your right hand to do your bidding, my love. But I am not some dumb little girl who follows orders blindly. I might look like a bimbo, but I have a brain, and I want to know what I am involved in," Mieke insisted. She did not expect Crystal’s response at all. The dark haired beauty grabbed her by the hair and slapped her across the face. With cool and calm command she licked Mieke’s face and whispered, “You are involved with me. And that is all you need to concern your pretty little head with. Are we clear?”
Mieke nodded, her face burning and her nose bleeding. It was not the first time she had provoked Crystal’s abusive side, but her love and her loyalty kept her in the pit.
"Let's get some supper, love," Crystal suggested as if nothing had happened. She released the young academic and put away her laptop. "Clean yourself up and meet me in the mess hall."
“Yes, Crystal.”
Chapter 31 — The Secret is Out
At just after 2 pm the group waited outside, ready to lift the ship.
Purdue had his tablet on hand to see when the ship would appear on the sonar readings so that they could dive immediately. During the previous dive, they had completed significant repairs and all that was left now was to lift the heavy cruiser and tow her towards Yemen. Ali kept to himself, only meeting with his men when the expedition members were asleep. The plan was to wait until they approached Somalia before taking the group of unsuspecting passengers captive and loot the ship they were towing. It was worth the wait and the annoying charade.
“Where is Sam?” Crystal asked. “He has to get this on film. It is the next big step of the salvage.”
“He’ll be here,” Purdue smiled. “Relax; it’s a good twenty minutes before she’ll appear again.”
Nina and Sam were in Nina’s cabin. He had been very secretive since the last dive when he had dared to go back to where he had lost his nerve.
“I must admit, I never thought you would go down there again,” Nina said as he hooked up his equipment to her laptop.
"I had to. My original footage was destroyed because of the magnetic waves. God, I hate digital," he moaned. "But yesterday I went with old school battery and film, and I found some details that should interest you.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, completely captivated.
“You know how you accounted for the battle cruisers of the German Kriegsmarine, right? You said all the ships manufactured by the Germans had either been scuttled or dismantled,” Sam clarified.
“Aye, so tell me what you have, for fuck’s sake. You are driving me crazy,” she said. Her tone was a mix of exhilaration and annoyance.
Sam spoke in a low voice, “What I’m about to tell you is the biggest secret in maritime history.”
Nina was about to burst. Her dark eyes shimmered with intrigue, and she almost forgot to breathe. Sam showed her the footage he had recaptured on film negatives. Skeletal remains of humans were embedded in the metal walls of the interior of the ship. He showed her the panels and instruments, the generators and the living quarters.
“You see that? Those men were not crew members, Nina; not like the USS Eldridge. Those were Jewish Germans who thought they were cruising to freedom,” he revealed.
“Sam, there was a German ship during the war that took Jewish refugees to Cuba, but when they got there, the passengers were not allowed to disembark, and Cuba revoked all but a handful of visas. The captain then steered the ship towards the Florida coast, but the US authorities also refused to let it dock, despite direct appeals to President Franklin Roosevelt. Soon the captain had no choice but to turn around and head back to Europe…” Nina relayed the story of the MS St Louis, a German ocean liner that was supposed to bring 908 Jews to freedom in 1939. Sam interrupted her.
“I know about the St. Louis. I saw the movie,” he said casually. “But this is not that. It is far, far worse. Listen to this.” He opened an old log book, with yellowed pages where paragraphs in cursive were written in pencil. Nina’s eyes widened when she saw the antique book as Sam scanned the accounts in it to explain to her.
“Is it the captain’s log?” she asked.
“Aye,” he replied. “I think so. Most of the cover is gone, though. The ship was a Nazi death ship, a floating torture chamber. The captain of the ship was Admiral Dieter Bargeist, formerly an Obersturmbannführer stationed in Kassel. He and a few Waffen-SS officers and volunteers offered to complete the experiment that Einstein had theorized and the Americans failed at."
“Based on the Philadelphia Experiment?” she asked.
"Aye, but the Nazi's actually managed to teleport the ship. The problem was that the propulsion to electromagnetic gravity ratio was unstable, so the secret ship was never put on record and aptly named the DKM Geheimnis.”
“The Deutsche Kriegsmarine… Geheimnis,” Nina translated. “It means secret. That is very aptly named,” she agreed. “So what happened?”
"Under the pretense of liberation, the torture ship was employed to carry a settlement of Jews to greener pastures, or so they were told. While on the Geheimnis, they were subjected to the sickest, most depraved experiments… all in the name of science, eugenics, and ethnic cleansing," Sam said. "Apart from that, at regular intervals they would calibrate the instruments to produce the Vril-powered unified fields, or whatever they thought it was, but because of variances in the calibration, the ship would teleport to the wrong destinations."
"Like Southern Africa," Nina added. "But why? How did it lock onto its particular destinations?"
“One for each of the seven seas,” Sam smiled enigmatically. “How cool is that?”
“How do you know that?” she asked in amusement.
“It says so in the journal,” he admitted. “According to Bargeist, the old tales of the seven seas hold more truth than just some sailor’s yarn. The DKM Geheimnis was set to teleport around the globe in seven steps, repeating its course of teleportation until it was destroyed or moved.” Sam showed her the points on the map the captain had marked. "According to this, it settled in the Baffin Bay in the Arctic Ocean, Virginia Beach in the North Atlantic… just like the Eldridge was supposed to, coincidentally.”
"Sam, this is unbelievable! Did you get this on camera?" Nina asked. "Because with this dodgy crew, I don't trust anything precious like this lying around.”