Not a long section, yet enough for a cup of tea, I think. A few more twists and turns on our way to the Grand Banks…

Music? If you’re of a certain age you’ll no doubt remember the first Christmas album put out by the Mannheim Steamroller; the ensemble blended light orchestral works with acoustic guitar and exotic percussion, and then tossed a healthy dollop of electronic instruments into the mix, and in the late 70s and early 80s their Fresh Aire albums were kind of defined one branch of the New Age moment. Well, they are back. Try their latest, Summer Song, off the 2024 album of the same name. In case you want to dive further back, all the way to the 60s, don’t forget A Summer Song by Chad and Jeremy, a true classic. Want an even older bit of nostalgia? You won’t do better than Ella and Louis wrapping up Gershwin’s Summertime.

We left off with Harry taking an unwanted dip with an orca. Enjoy your tea.

5.3

MacKenzie rushed to the docking controls on the aft deck and slipped Amaranth’s engines into neutral, then he hit the MOB alert button, marking their location on the ship’s chartplotters. With that out of the way he grabbed the man-overboard module and pulled the inflation lanyard, waiting to throw it when Callahan surfaced…

…Which he did moments after MacKenzie arrived on the swim platform; Callahan was sputtering and wildly thrashing about as he burst out of the sea…

…MacKenzie saw the orca had already let go of Callahan, and a moment later the huge, black and white orca popped up beside Harry, offering a pectoral fin for support…

…and within a half minute several more orcas appeared around Callahan, apparently studying this new addition to Amaranth.

“You alright?” MacKenzie shouted.

“No…this water’s too goddamned cold!” 

Now more than a dozen orcas had surrounded him, and Harry got the distinct impression that they were sizing him up, studying him, and if that wasn’t unnerving enough a new one appeared, one much smaller than the large male he was holding onto, and this smaller one came right up to him – until it’s eye was inches from his own. 

The eye was huge, and deep brown, almost black, and without really understanding why or how he suddenly felt an intense bond forming with the creature, and in an instant he knew this one was female. She leaned into him and he felt her smooth, cold skin pressing against his chest, then a series of clicks and shrill whistles penetrated his body. She was listening to him, listening to his thoughts as they formed in his mind, and then he saw wild new images in his mind. Images of her pod, her family, and he sure he was feeling her emotions and not his own as other orcas appeared in these fleeting images.

“What are you trying to tell me?” he whispered. “I don’t understand.”

More images came now, of two human women and a man on a sailboat, and for a moment he thought he knew the man…but then the images disappeared – as quickly as they had come to him. Then the big male moved effortlessly through the choppy water and lifted Callahan enough so that MacKenzie and Turner could take him by the arms and pull him aboard, and when Spudz looked aft he saw that all of the orcas were once again moving swiftly away from Amaranth…

And one look at Harry was all it took. He was chilled to the core, his teeth chattering as the wind hit his wet clothes, his body wracked by deep convulsive shivers.

“Let’s get you up to the hot tub,” Spudz said as he took in Callahan’s condition, just as Sara appeared with an armful of towels. She vigorously dried Harry’s arms and good leg, then his chest and back. 

“Get my – leg off,” Callahan said between bouts of intense shivers. “Chafing – bad,” he sputtered.

“Put your arm around my neck,” Spudz commanded, and when Harry was situated he and Turner helped Harry through the salon and up the stairway to the bridge deck, then aft through Spudz’s cabin to the hot tub. Turner took the cover off, then helped Callahan into the 105 degree water, and as his body settled in the warmth the old cop looked up and sighed.

“Dear god but this feels good,” he muttered as he slid lower, until his chin was awash in the bubbling water. “And…I’m hungry as hell!”

Sara nodded and took off for the galley while Turner returned to the bridge, leaving Spudz alone with Callahan again.

“Did that female try to communicate with you?” MacKenzie asked, his voice now quite subdued, almost conspiratorial.

And Callahan looked up at him, nodding. “I saw two women, and a guy I think I knew. I can’t remember his name, but I knew him…once.”

“The two women? Did you know them?”

“No, but I saw them with the guy, then they were surrounded by orcas.”

“What else?”

“Mountains. Mountains, steep mountains, right down to the edge of the water.”

“Like British Columbia?”

“Maybe. Or Norway. For some reason I think it was Norway.”

Spudz looked up and sighed. “Norway,” he sighed. “I recognized the coastline north of Bergen.”

“What?” Callahan sputtered, surprised.

“I saw them too, last week when I was in the water with one of them.”

“Did he pull you in, too?”

“No.” Spudz said as he looked away, but then he decided now was as good a time as any to tell Callahan about their encounter with the huge pod. Twenty minutes later lunch appeared, and Eve and Sara helped him out of the water and over to the table, then got him into a heavy terrycloth robe and settled in a large deck chair. Sara had whipped up batter and Callahan was now faced with a plate overflowing with banana-nut pancakes, as well as some scrambled eggs with onions and sausage already in the mix. 

“You expect me to eat all that?” Callahan said uneasily as he looked at the mountain of food.

“You look skinny,” Sara said. “You need to eat.”

“Eat what you can, buddy,” Spudz said, for the first time feeling comfortable around the old cop. “All I can say is you’re going to feel beat in a few minutes, like you went ten rounds with Tyson.”

Callahan took a bite of eggs and nodded. “Good grub,” he said before taking another fork full, then he looked up, concern in his eyes. “Where’s my leg?”

Spudz chimed in: “Chief Valdez has it. She said she can fix it.”

“Fix it? What’s wrong with it?”

“Well, for one thing, an orca chomped down on it…”

“Oh…yeah,” Harry said as he poured maple syrup onto the towering stack of frisbee-sized pancakes, then he cut off a triangle and took a tentative bite. “Oh-my-god-in-heaven,” he muttered as he rolled his eyes. “Just like the ones we used to get at the diner…”

“Oh?” Spudz said. “In San Fran?”

Harry nodded. “Yeah. The Fog City Diner…the old one…not that new thing they call a diner. Thirty bucks for a cheeseburger…sheesh…”

“I went there a few times,” Spudz said, relishing a memory, “but never had the pancakes.”

“Me and Frank…we went at least once a week. Until the tech-weenies took it over, anyway.”

“Times change, Harry,” Spudz sighed.

“Yeah, so I’ve been told,” Callahan said, reliving his final encounter with Captain Briggs and the afternoon he dusted the renegade motor jocks and then blew their fucking martinet leader to Hell and gone. He shook his head, came back to the present and looked at Eve, then Sara. “I’m curious. How am I supposed to tell you two apart. You look like twins…identical twins.”

“We are,” Eve said, “though we’re not the same age.”

Callahan’s mouth scrunched up at that. “Oh? How does that work…exactly?”

“It’s complicated,” Eve said. 

“So I’ve heard,” Harry sighed. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

“It’s not,” Spuds interjected. “At least it’s not supposed to be.” He walked over to the port side rail and looked ahead, noted that Amaranth was underway again and that there seemed to be little vessel traffic on the bay. Just then the yacht passed through a shadow – and he leaned out over the rail and looked up, saw they were passing under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge – and then he realized he’d missed Annapolis, and that apparently they’d passed his old stomping grounds a few minutes ago. Another memory came, of counting off pushups in a cold rain, and he smiled when he recognized the direct line of causation between those faraway torments and where he stood right now. His life was, in essence, a timeline, he said to himself; today’s series of events would not have, indeed, could not have happened without the going through all the navy rituals he’d endured at the Naval Academy. Everyone’s life was a timeline, and one person’s line intersected with countless others over a lifetime, each impacting the other and the other ad infinitum, and in ways one could sometimes predict – and yet in the most unpredictable ways imaginable, too. Like contemplating the infinite nature of the universe, the ways both known and unknown that our lives were effected by these interactions seemed to approach the infinite, though of course that wasn’t the case.

“It is strange, isn’t it?” Sara said as she walked up beside Spudz, wrapping her arm in his.

“Hm-m? What’s that?”

“How our lives are interconnected. It’s strange. Wonderful, but strange.”

“I’m not sure I feel comfortable when you do that,” came his terse reply.

“I’m sorry, Spudz, but it’s not like it’s something I can just turn on and off…”

“It’s a violation of privacy, Sara. A profound violation…”

“Okay. So, what about keeping secrets and deceptions? Aren’t those violations, too?”

“They are, but secrets, deceptions and evasions are also part of being human.”

“Not a very good part, Spudz.”

He shrugged. “We are what we are. Some people are comfortable lying to others, or keeping secrets. Some are comfortable swindling others, and I suppose some people have no qualms about killing other people, too…”

“Didn’t you?”

“Didn’t I what?”

“Feel comfortable about killing other people?”

“No. Never. Yet I also understood that, under certain circumstances, such actions were warranted, even justified. Even so, killing other people made me sick. Literally sick to my stomach. It still would, I think.” He tried to pull away from her, but she resisted. “I can feel it, you know. When you probe my thoughts…”

“And your feelings,” she added. “You’re afraid of me, but I can also feel that other thing. The thing you’re afraid to tell me.”

He looked away, and with his free hand he pinched the bridge of his nose, then rubbed his eyes. “Please don’t,” he whispered. “Please don’t do this to me now.”

“Do you really want me to leave you?”

He nodded. “Go take care of Callahan, would you? Get him to his cabin, see if Valdez is through with his leg…”

“Alright, Spudz.”

He walked forward to the bridge and found Turner on the helm, making a course adjustment, so he pulled out his Steiner’s and walked out onto the bridge deck. They were just passing the southern channel entrance that led past Belvedere Shoals and on into Baltimore, and he could just make out the Upper Chesapeake Lp buoy and the Tavern Creek headlands beyond. He nodded – more out of habit than any other reason – then he returned to the bridge and sat down beside Turner.

“How long since you had any serious rack time, Chief?”

“I’m doing okay, Admiral.”

“Not my question, Jim.”

“Twelve hours, sir.”

MacKenzie nodded. “You are relieved. Send Valdez up here before you hit the rack.”

“Aye, sir.” Turner knew not to argue with MacKenzie, especially when he looked upset – like he did now. That was a lose-lose proposition every time.

Spudz flipped the forward scanning sonar from Standby to Active, then watched the bottom contours rolling along under Amaranth’s keel, and from time to time he saw schools of fish swim by, a predator sometimes zeroing in for the kill, and he realized that too was a part of life. Kill or be killed…that was the law of the jungle, the hard reality that had shaped homo erectus – and all the human iterations since. No doubt deceit and evasion had been products of that existence, and perhaps those had been hard lessons to learn, lessons we might never shake, but that timeline was an immutable part of us. Those lessons were now hard wired into our limbic system, written in our genetic code. And so was the caution we felt when we confronted something truly new, or something beyond our experience.

Sara and Eve were such things, weren’t they?

He heard Valdez coming up the steps and snapped out of his trance, and out of habit he brought his Steiner’s up to his eyes and swept the far horizon…

“What the hell is that?” Jenny Valdez stammered, pointing at the sonar display.

MacKenzie was startled by the sound of alarm in her voice; he quickly turned his attention to the display again, and was stunned to see a perfect sphere skimming the bottom about a hundred yards ahead of Amaranth. “I have no idea. It wasn’t there a second ago.”

“Man, that’s weird looking.”

“Any way to measure its size, Chief?”

“Just that range and scale line on the bottom, sir.”

“So, call it about five feet?”

“About that, yessir.”

Two more shapes appeared, then a half dozen appeared, and even with the sonar on low power he could see that these latest objects were orcas, and they were swimming along with the sphere…almost in formation! He looked at Valdez and she looked even more shocked.

“Sir, what the hell is going on down there?”

“You got me, Chief.” He watched the orcas swimming along, and every minute or so one would break off – and a moment later that orca would surface, clear his blowhole and take a deep breath then dive again, rejoining the formation.

They watched this procession for several minutes, until they were well past Kent Island and the Upper Bay buoy, but pretty soon the channel underwater would narrow a bit, and to the right of the channel the depth would shoal to about twelve or so feet, so he adjusted their course to the right, to approach the shoals, to see what the sphere would do…

…And it simply followed the shoaling bottom contour, so he returned to mid-channel, back to fifty foot depths and he shook his head. “Well, it must be under intelligent control – or have a damn good autopilot…”

“I wish that P-8 was still with us, sir.”

He chuckled. “Yup. Tell you what…turn up the power on the sonar. All the way to full…”

She pulled up the appropriate dialogue box and moved the slider to FULL…

…and the sphere’s reaction was instantaneous. It jetted ahead several hundred meters so quickly that MacKenzie was shocked by its velocity, but then a moment later it disappeared from the display entirely. 

“Admiral!” Valdez cried. “Look!”

She was pointing dead ahead, and perhaps a hundred yards ahead a small translucent blue sphere hovered about fifty feet above the water; he pulled up his Steiner’s and looked at the object again and sighed. “What the devil is that thing?” he said, his voice barely audible.

“I don’t like this, sir. This ain’t right. No, ain’t nothin’  right about any of this.”

“Get the radar range down to a quarter mile, Chief.”

“One quarter mile. Aye, sir. There it is, Admiral. Four hundred feet…and closing.”

“All stop, Chief.”

“Engines answering all stop, Admiral.”

“Don’t change course, don’t change our speed,” he said as he walked out onto the bridge deck, then forward past the two Zodiacs all the way up to the bow pulpit.

The sphere continued its slow approach, but it had apparently ‘seen’ MacKenzie and now it was descending to, in effect, come right to him. 

He couldn’t take his eyes off the thing, either. He tried to look inside but it was now almost too bright to look at, and then he realized that he had been holding his breath as the thing approached.

And a moment later it was hovering almost right in front of his face, maybe five feet away.

He shielded his eyes  and a split second later the intensity of the light coming from the sphere dropped to a comfortable level – and he thought it had responded to him, to his actions…

“What do you want?” he said loudly.

There was no response.

“Can you understand me?”

No response.

He felt a question forming in his mind and was instantly afraid. “You want…me to go with you? Is that what you said?”

Valdez had never been so afraid in her life, but now she stood transfixed as she watched the sphere come closer still – until it had enveloped the Admiral – and then it simply disappeared.

And as suddenly she realized that Admiral MacKenzie was gone, too.

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites. com | this is fiction, plain and simple.

Let’s end it here with John Nitzinger’s On Foot in History. Hasta later.