The Seventh Secret

Chapter 26 — The Enigma of the Seven Seas

Lunch was brought from the galley into the mess hall.

“Looks delicious!” Crystal exclaimed at the colorful dishes. “Looks like the guys here go all out. I should go on more salvages, I think.”

“I’ll tell Jonah and the kitchen boy that you like it, Mrs. Meyer,” Ali grinned as he sat down with the expedition team.

“Your crew?” Purdue asked. “Aren’t they dining with us?”

"Oh no, sir. They have already eaten. Besides, now that the sea is a little calmer we have much to get ready before we are attacked by the storms again, right?" Ali said jovially. "For now, you have Manni and me as company."

Nina noticed a tattoo on Ali's forearm, exactly the same as the other members of his crew. At first reluctant, she now used the social gathering to ask about it.

"Ali, your ink, that symbol on your arm… what is it about?" she asked sweetly.

She could see Sam's body tense up at her inquiry and his big dark eyes looked into hers for a long moment, but he said nothing. The captain looked bewildered at first. He never counted on the observational skills of the newcomers and had neglected to cover up the tattoo all the pirates of his wretched crew shared. It would seem uncanny that a salvage crew would mark themselves with the same sigil. A costly mistake, but he could still employ his well-practiced trickery-skills to come up with and excuse. He could see Manni swiftly cover his tattoo at Nina’s question.

“Call me old fashioned, but I am a superstitious old sailor,” Ali said, less amicably than Nina had hoped. “The symbol is to ward off the water walkers.”

His reply was so nonchalant before he took another bite of his food that Nina and Mieke had to pry. Both women found the tall tales of mariners fascinating.

“Water walkers?” Mieke asked in absolute glee. “You have to tell us!”

Without ceremony Ali only said, "Manni, tell them,” and continued eating his food. Sam saw a tiny shard of the captain’s true nature seeping through, but he hoped he was wrong. Manni, who had hardly touched his food out of his habit of eating next to nothing, shifted in his seat and looked at the two women. He loved telling stories.

“The water walkers don’t swim. They don’t float. They don’t fly. They are not like the fish or the gulls or the ships. They walk on the water. Dead men, died at sea for sacrifice,” Manni relayed with great drama and a typically hoarse voice that perfectly complimented his wrinkled face and tobacco stained teeth. Mieke nudged Nina with a fascinated smile on her face. Purdue chuckled in silent mockery.

“You think it’s a joke, Mr. Purdue?” Ali sneered with food between his teeth, half chewed. His eyes narrowed as he leaned forward to address the rude white man. Purdue was not intimidated. To him, it was a refreshing twist to welcome land lovers onto the seven seas, nothing more.

“No, no, of course not,” Purdue smirked and continued to eat, allowing Manni to tell his tale in peace. Please, go on.”

Ali remained silent for the remainder of the story.

Mieke’ expression was dark, but her voice was fresh as she pressed Manni, “Go on. What do you mean by sacrifice at sea?”

“Like… for a god?” Nina asked.

Manni shook his head. “Sacrifices to appease, but not a god or any sort of deity. Such nonsense is for Christians,” he said with derision. “It is like… when you can choose to die yourself or pick somebody else to die in your place instead. The sacrifice is somebody else's, but you determine his fate. That is true power."

Silence prevailed for a while at the stern words of the sailor that sounded just a bit too serious. Only the sound of cutlery had filled the mess hall before somebody else broke the tension.

“Where did the sacrifice originate?” Mieke asked Manni.

“Since the first timber tasted the tide,” Manni affirmed. “Always. Like the fish know how to swim. Like the shark knows that seals hold blood.”

Wisely, the members of Purdue’s expedition left it at that.

After lunch, Crystal and Purdue readied their diving gear. With them, Benjamin and Isho also checked their tanks and synchronized their watches. Benjamin was a seasoned diver. He had once been a treasure hunter who had sold his stolen goods on the black market before he had been incarcerated in Yemen. After his seven-year stint in prison, he had decided to join a syndicate, rather than to run the risk of operating alone and getting noticed by the wrong people.

Isho, on the other hand, had once been a subsea engineer when he was in his thirties.

“Hey, Isho, I could have used you a few years ago on one of my oil platforms in Scotland,” Purdue jested when he was made aware of Isho’s education.

"Oh?" the middle-aged Somali asked with interest.

“Yes, I had a submersible that I used to comb the ocean floor. I also used it to check the support structure under the platform, you know, the posts and steel piping, to make sure the place did not collapse!” Purdue explained as he pulled up his suit.

“Oh yes. I have worked with many different oil companies and deep water systems,” he told Purdue with a big smile, reminiscing the days before he had become a ruthless killer. “But where I lived, in a small village on the coast, it was hard to get much work after I finished my studies."

“What town are you from, Isho?” Crystal asked.

Isho and Benjamin exchanged rapid glances. They were not very familiar with Egyptian coastal villages and could not afford to be found out on such a technicality.

“Come! We have to go,” Benjamin shouted through the howl of the salty wind. “If the wreck is still in territorial waters we will have problems.”

“That is true,” Crystal agreed. “We had better get a move on. Is Sam not coming with this time?”

“No,” Purdue replied as he buckled his harness. “He has the footage we needed. Now we just have to see where we need to patch the old girl so that she can sail again.”

Isho, Benjamin, Crystal, and Purdue disappeared under the surface as Nina and Sam watched the ocean swallow then up leaning against the railing. Nina was beyond excited to see what kind of ship it really was. As far as she could tell from Sam’s footage, it was a very close replica of ships manufactured for the German Kriegsmarine, if not the real deal. But her research had delivered nothing specific regarding of a lost ship. According to the World War II records, every pocket battleship was accounted for, either scuttled or dismantled. It was immensely intriguing to find something that was that similar to the Deutschland-class cruisers anyway.

Sam looked absent-minded where he stood filming the dive. He took the opportunity to film more than necessary. Nina decided to abandon her juvenile vendetta if only for a while and joined Sam.

“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.”