The Maltese Incident Read online

  The Maltese Incident

  Russell F. Moran

  The Maltese Incident

  Coddington Press

  Copyright © 2018 by Russell F. Moran

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN (Print) 978-0-9990003-2-8

  ISBN (Ebook) 978-0-9990003-3-5

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission from the publisher or the author, except where permitted by law. Contact the publisher for information on foreign rights.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, dialogue, and plot are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  www.morancom.com

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to the men and women of the United States Navy.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As always, I thank my wife, Lynda, for her attentive reading, rereading, and editing of my many drafts, and for laughing at my jokes. I also thank my friend and editor, John White, for his keen editorial eye. And I especially thank my readers, many of whom are a constant source of inspiration and encouragement for me.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  You will find a Cast of Characters after the last chapter of the book. It can be frustrating to come across a character on page 150, who you first met on page 20, especially if you’ve put the book down for a few days. I’ve seen this done in Russian literature, and I happily add a cast of characters to The Maltese Incident as well as my other novels.

  The Maltese Incident

  Chapter One

  “What the hell was that?” I yelled to First Officer Jim Valente.

  “Beats me, captain. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  I’d never seen anything like it either. My gut told me that I was about to start a weird journey. My gut was right.

  A few minutes ago, we were steaming through the beautiful Azores when the world turned upside down, for me and everyone else aboard. It was a beautiful April evening with a sky full of stars and a half-moon. I had just chatted with the captain of a yacht off my starboard side about 300 feet away. Based on what the captain of the yacht said, we were both headed for Lisbon, Portugal. At 9:13 p.m., the Maltese was suddenly bathed in bright sunlight—at night. We felt a strange rumbling sensation along the hull below the waterline, as if we steamed over submerged logs. After two minutes, nighttime returned, and the rumbling stopped. My weird journey had begun.

  ***

  I grabbed the microphone for the PA system and announced, “General quarters, general quarters, all hands man your battle stations.”

  “Captain Harry,” First Officer Valente said, tapping me on the shoulder. “This isn’t a warship. I suggest you make another announcement.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. My Navy years just came back to me. I pressed down the speaker key and made a new announcement.

  “Good evening everyone, this is Captain Harry again. I just realized that I’m not running a warship, so please ignore my command to man your battle station, unless your battle station is a barstool. The reason for my sudden burst of nonsense is obvious—we just experienced something weird, insanely weird. First Officer Valente and I are checking all our systems to see if we can figure out what happened. I’ll keep you informed.”

  Jim Valente and I put every system on the ship through a series of tests. What else was there to do? We were trying to figure out what just happened and also checking to see if anything on the ship had changed. I wasn’t happy with what we discovered. The starlit sky was now pitch black, and the half-moon was nowhere to be seen. The yacht off to starboard was no longer there. At the moment of our bizarre incident I told Valente to take a fix, an automatic thing for me to say. As I learned in the Navy, anytime something out of the ordinary happens, you take a navigational fix. You don’t think about it, you just do it, like saying “God bless you” when somebody sneezes.

  “We lost GPS, captain,” Valente said after he tried to take a fix. “I can’t locate one satellite.”

  “Radio that yacht to see if we can get a fix from him.”

  “He doesn’t answer, captain. He’s not there anymore.”

  I grabbed the radio microphone. This time I didn’t order my passengers to man their battle stations.

  “Mayday, mayday, mayday. Any vessel, any vessel, this is the American ship Maltese. Come in please.”

  Mayday is the internationally recognized code for an emergency, and I figured we sure as hell had one.

  “Mayday, mayday, mayday. Any vessel, any vessel, this is the American ship Maltese. Come in please.” I repeated it five times.

  No response. We were alone. God knows where, but it was only us.

  ***

  The Maltese is a 920-foot ship owned by Malta Investments and which serves the company as its corporate cruise ship. Everybody calls me Captain Harry, including my crew. The Maltese can carry 2,900 passengers, but this cruise was a VIP event and only 950 passengers were aboard. The passengers were mainly executives and a few wealthy clients of Malta Investments. I was impressed by the people from Malta ever since I first joined the company. A cruise ship may sound like an extravagant investment, even for a successful company like Malta, but the ship wasn’t just for fun and entertainment. Malta donates 100 percent of the net proceeds to a preselected charity for each cruise. This cruise supported children’s cancer research. In a world of selfishness, it’s a pleasure to work for people who care about something other than themselves. Along with a crew of 35, I run the ship, or I thought I did. I retired from the Navy last year at age 40, young for a retiree, but I started my naval career at age 18 when I went to Annapolis, so I got in 22 years. I liked the Navy, actually I loved it, but after almost getting killed I decided to give civilian life a try. My wife’s death from cancer also told me I needed a change in my life, a life in which Nancy played a big part. We had no kids, so I was alone.

  In the Navy I was a destroyer captain and I got a reputation among Navy brass that I liked going into combat. That, of course, was bullshit. I never enjoyed combat, but I never avoided it either. So, I was constantly deployed to hot spots around the world. After what just happened to the Maltese, I miss the relative safety of naval combat. At least I knew what was coming at me. I went to flight school three years ago, figuring I’d get a carrier command, and who knows, maybe make admiral. That all changed, of course, when I retired.

  “Is everything okay, Harry?” Randy Borg asked as he stepped onto the bridge. Randy, or Randolph, is the CEO of the Malta Investments, the company that owns the Maltese. He’s the guy who hired me and he’s my boss, as well as a good friend. I like Randy and I appreciate his attention to detail. You can’t run a company as successful as Malta without focusing on details. But he leaves running the ship to me.

  “Sure, Randy, everything is just great. I haven’t the foggiest fucking idea where we are, how we got here, or where we’re going. The only way I’m able to communicate is like we’re doing now—talking face to face. We’ve got a problem, Randy, a big one. All stations have reported, and we sustained no damage, thank God, but we seem to be in the middle of nowhere. I know you don’t expect to hear that from the ship’s captain, but it’s the truth. We’re alone in the ocean.”

  Randy peppered me with a list of questions, the answers to which didn’t make him happy. My answers didn’t make me happy either.

  “Harry, we need to have a meeting of everyone on the ship. Our passengers and crew are entitled to know what’s goin
g on. Let’s make it for 9 a.m. tomorrow. I want you to conduct the meeting.”

  ***

  The following morning Randy and I stood at the entrance to the dining room to greet each of the guests. The list included not only executives and board members of Malta Investments, but also rich clients who invested heavily with Malta. They paid through the nose for this cruise, and even though it was for charity, they were entitled to know what happened. Any of the crew who weren’t on watch were also at the meeting. Randy and I figured that it was best to be straight with the audience and talk about our strange circumstance without holding anything back. After breakfast, I stood before the group. I figured the occasion called for it so I wore my full dress white uniform. I wanted everybody to know that I was in charge and on top of the situation. Little did they know that I was as clueless as them.

  After everyone was seated I called the meeting to order. We gathered in the main dining room overlooking the sea, which normally provided a beautiful view, but something was wrong. It was daylight, but the atmosphere had a murky quality to it, reminding me of skim milk. At least the sea was calm, without a ripple. Weather reports the night before called for a sunny and cloudless sky, with a brisk wind and choppy seas. But the sky was overcast, the sea was flat as a lake, and there was no wind. Just a few more things about our circumstance that weren’t adding up.

  ***

  “Good morning everybody,” I said. “Well, we’re here to celebrate having an ocean all to ourselves.”

  I figured that would get a few laughs.

  It didn’t.

  “Randy Borg asked me to be totally frank with you folks, and that’s exactly what I will be. But please don’t call me Frank; the name’s still Harry.”

  Again, no laughs.

  “We’re lost. There’s no other way to put it. But hey, I’ve been in worse circumstances at sea. At least nobody’s shooting at us.”

  That brought a couple of chuckles, but I think those people were trying to be polite. I could see why standup comedians spend so much money on psychotherapy.

  “I’m going to review our situation, our bizarre situation. I’ll be calling on people who wish to comment or share an idea. And I want you to weigh in. You people are smart, so I expect that some good ideas are floating around out there. I have one request—no bullshit please. Tell it like it is or how you perceive it. Okay, let me review our weird circumstance.

  “Last night, on April 17, we encountered a situation best described as strange. At 9:13 p.m., right after dinner, the dark sky turned to daylight, which lasted for two minutes. During that time the ship rumbled like it was going aground. When the darkness returned, everybody, myself included, ran for a rail to see what was going on. Because it was night, there wasn’t much to see. A yacht was on our starboard side, maybe 300 feet from us. After the incident, however, there was only darkness—the yacht simply wasn’t there. We sent messages to the boat, but we got no response. I also sent a message to our radio contact in Portugal, about 1,200 nautical miles away. Lisbon, Portugal, was our destination as you know, and I was in continuous radio contact with them, most recently five minutes before the strange event. Lisbon was silent. I then tried to contact New York. No response. Miami—ditto; Washington D.C.—the same. Again, I apologize for ordering you all to your battle stations. After I came to my senses, I figured it was time to declare an emergency to anybody with a radio receiver. I grabbed the radio microphone and yelled the international distress signal, ‘Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is the American ship Maltese, come in please.’

  “I tried that five times. Bottom line, folks, is that I had no way to communicate with any vessel or land location. We tested our radio and it works, both for sending and receiving. At least it works for sending messages from one part of the ship to another. We tried to establish a GPS navigational fix, but after 40 minutes of trying we couldn’t locate one satellite. So here we are. I know that you people expect the captain to supply answers, and you have every right to. But I began this talk by telling you that I would be straight with you, and the straight truth is that I don’t know what happened.

  “Any questions?”

  Meghan Johnson, vice president of operations, raised her hand. I grabbed for my glass of water. Ever since Nancy died four years ago, I hadn’t thought much about the opposite sex. Maybe the pain of losing her made me scared to fall for another woman. But any time I looked at Meghan Johnson, my heart started pounding. We first met a few days ago when I stood at the bottom of the stairway to welcome passengers aboard. After that, any time I saw her I couldn’t help but stare. I estimate that she’s about 5’10,” with medium length blond hair and the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever seen. She had an athletic body, almost like a gymnast, especially her shapely legs and firm butt. She was striking, and she struck me—hard.

  “Wadda you got, beautiful?” I said.

  I figured if I dropped into wiseass mode it would relax me and stop me from sweating so much. I drew a deep breath and took a sip of water. I couldn’t believe I just called a senior executive “beautiful,” true as it may be.

  “I’ve got a question, handsome,” Meghan Johnson said, chuckling.

  Holy shit, she called me handsome. Suddenly I didn’t feel like a 40-year-old sea captain. I felt like a 12-year-old boy who just got his first hard-on. I took another sip of cold water.

  “When did you realize that the sky had changed?” Meghan asked.

  “Here’s where things got totally weird, Ms. Johnson (I switched out of wise-ass mode and decided to be polite). When the sun came up this morning it wasn’t normal daylight, if you define daylight as the light cast by a risen sun. The sky was light, but a gloomy kind of light. We found ourselves and our ship inside what looks like a gigantic cave, almost too gigantic to describe. And that’s where we’ve been since ‘the incident.’ We’re in a location that doesn’t appear on any chart. If we look up, we can see a cloud cover that almost looks like a roof. The sun isn’t visible, but it rises and sets—as if it’s behind a screen. We know it rose this morning, but we didn’t see the sun itself. I steamed around for a while trying to get a bearing, but I couldn’t find out where the hell we were without any normal navigational aids including our electronics. We have an inertial navigation system, but our charts aren’t right. There should be land off to starboard, but there’s only open ocean.”

  “Harry, please review for us what you found on sonar,” Randy Borg said.

  “Our sonar can detect the sea bottom to a depth of about 1,000 meters, or 3,280 feet. We can’t detect a bottom, so we know we’re in deep water, beyond 3,280 feet. According to our sonar readings before the incident as well as our chart, we had 1,800 feet under us.”

  “Captain Harry, how much fuel do we have and how far can it get us?” Meghan Johnson asked.

  Her blouse was slightly open at the neck, showing a breathtaking view of sun-tanned cleavage. I wiped some sweat off my brow.

  “It’s comforting to have an operations VP aboard to keep me honest,” I said. “The answer won’t make anybody happy. With the amount of fuel aboard, we can cruise for no more than 600 nautical miles. I had planned to top off our tanks in Lisbon, but that never happened as we all know. Right now, we’re slowly steaming to see if we can find land.”

  “What about food, Harry? Can you update us?” asked Randy Borg.

  “The breakfast we just ate was pleasant, but we’re running low on food,” I said. “Carlos, our chef, told me that we’ll need to invade our flash frozen stores within a few days. We intended to replenish our stock when we got to Lisbon, but of course that didn’t happen. We hope that we’ll find a source of food on that land we’re heading for.”

  “Okay, the meeting’s over, folks,” Randy Borg said. “We’ll assemble again as a group when we have more information for you. If you have any questions or concerns, please call me or Captain Harry.”

  ***

  A day went by and nothing had changed. The same milky sunlight, the
same calm ocean, and the same ignorance of where we were. I ordered the engine room to give us eight knots, a fuel-conserving speed. We steamed slowly, looking for land.

  “Captain Harry, may I see you for a moment?” Meghan Johnson asked, knocking on the door to the bridge.

  “Sorry, I’m busy. You’ll have to come back later.” Of course, I didn’t say that. What I meant to say was, “Oh my God, you look gorgeous.” Instead I said, “Sure,” after I cleared my throat, “step into my office.”

  “You can take a break, Jim,” I said to the officer on deck. “I’ll take the watch from here, not that I have any idea what I’m watching.” I did know what I was watching, and it was Meghan Johnson.

  “So, what’s up, Ms. Johnson?” I said, after taking a swig of cold water. “I hope I didn’t embarrass you the other day by calling you beautiful. It just slipped out because you are, well, beautiful.”

  “I just wanted to say that I found your comment touching,” Meghan said. “You took my breath away. You’re quite good-looking yourself, captain. Ever since I came aboard I can’t help staring at you.”