“This is Dr. Dorion,” Ophelia continued. “He’ll be handling most of the technical aspects of the search.”
Nichols shook Dorion’s hand. “Just give Cliff your laundry list. And who is this?” He stopped in front of Jade and stared at her with a mischievous grin. “Saved the best for last.”
Ophelia started to answer, but Jade spoke first matching the older man’s smile. “I’m Jade,” she said simply, eschewing the use of titles. She kind of liked Nichols, but decided to reserve judgment on the others.
Nichols executed a half-bow, then gestured to the ship’s master. “Captain Lee here probably remembers when it was considered bad luck to have a woman on board a ship. Thankfully, we live in more enlightened times, but all the same, I hope that the presence of two lovely ladies doesn’t prove distracting to the crew.”
“I’m not the crusty old barnacle that Kit seems to think I am,” Lee said without much enthusiasm. “But if it’s all the same, I’d like to get down to business. I need to know exactly where we’re going.”
Ophelia gestured to Professor. “You have the floor, Dr. Chapman.”
Professor approached Lee and handed him a slip of paper. “Captain, set course for these coordinates. I’ll explain the reasons as soon as I get my computer set up.”
Lee departed, evidently more concerned with where they were going than why.
A few minutes later, they were all staring at a map of the North Atlantic region off the east coast of the United States. There was a conspicuous red triangle connecting Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda.
Jade sensed a lecture coming on.
“This is the so-called Bermuda Triangle,” he said. “Or at least one version of it. These borders are arbitrary. From what I can tell, the term Bermuda Triangle first appeared in an article written by Vincent Gaddis in a 1964 pulp magazine; maybe the idea of a definite shape was sexier or something. In any case, the name stuck and people have been selling the myth ever since. The reality is a little more prosaic.”
Here comes the ‘I told you so,’ Jade thought.
“According to the most sensational reports, over a thousand ships have been lost in this region — which incidentally is an area of about a million and a half square miles, or more than twice the size of Alaska — in just over five hundred years of record keeping. Now, a thousand sounds like a big number, but if you average it out, that’s just two a year. When you consider that this is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and that Hurricane Alley runs right through it, two ships a year makes it a pretty safe area, statistically speaking.
“What’s more, a lot of the reports have been exaggerated, duplicated or simply fabricated from whole cloth. Many of them are simply stories that have been repeated so many times that there’s no way to go back and source them. If you cull the record down to disappearances of ships and planes that remain officially unexplained, you’re looking at maybe two dozen, but even most of those have a simple, mundane explanation.”
He touched a key on his computer and the map was replaced by a black and white photograph of a ship.
“The disappearance of the USS Cyclops in 1918 is a prime example of what I mean. The Cyclops shows up in almost every account of the Bermuda Triangle as proof of unexplained phenomena, and yet the facts of the case are that the Cyclops was overloaded, had lost one of its engines, may have been structurally unsound, and probably got hit by a storm. Any one of those factors could have doomed her. But that explanation is too boring for Triangle nuts.”
“That’s not all that’s boring,” Jade muttered.
“I heard that young lady.”
“Can’t you just give us a handout, or assigned reading?”
“It gets better, I promise.” Professor clicked another key and the image changed to a picture of several World War II era planes flying in formation. Jade sat up a little straighter. Maybe this wasn’t going to be an I told you so after all.
“Flight 19 is what really started people talking about mysterious phenomena. On December 5, 1945, a squadron of torpedo planes took off from Fort Lauderdale on a training exercise. I’ll spare you the tedious details, but the bottom line is that the pilots got lost in a place where they shouldn’t have gotten lost. It’s like those stories where people wander around in a blizzard and die within twenty feet of their front door. There was bad weather, but the squadron was in radio contact with the mainland for most of the flight. All they had to do was turn west and they would have found Florida, but they didn’t. The Navy was able to pinpoint their last known location to within fifty miles, but a massive search effort turned up nothing. The planes just vanished.
“Now, there are a lot of reasons why we shouldn’t make too much of this story. This was 1945 after all. Those pilots didn’t have GPS. The planes didn’t even have radar. Someone could have made a mistake calculating their position, which would mean that the searchers were looking in the wrong place. But if we accept the premise that there might be an unusual phenomenon at work in this region, then Flight 19 is the best place to start looking.”
“One of the big problems with conspiracy theories is that their proponents try too hard. In the case of the Bermuda Triangle, speculative writers gathered a lot of extraneous evidence to support the idea that there was this big zone of mystery, but because so much of their evidence can be refuted, it has the opposite effect. Instead of lending weight to their argument, the ninety percent of incidents with a mundane explanation obscure the remaining ten percent that we should be looking at. The first thing we need to do is get the idea of the Triangle out of our heads and focus instead on the area where Flight 19 first began encountering trouble. Somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas.”
He clicked the computer again and the screen changed to a picture of a lighthouse. “Which brings us to an incident that isn’t as well-known as these others, but is still pretty darned spooky.
“This is the lighthouse at Great Isaac Cay, northeast of Bimini and about sixty-five miles due east of Fort Lauderdale. The lighthouse is automated now and most of the buildings have crumbled into ruins, but in 1969, there were two lighthouse keepers stationed there. According to local lore, after Hurricane Anna swept through the islands in early August of that year, the lighthouse went dark. When officials went to the island to investigate, they discovered that the two lighthouse keepers had vanished without a trace.”
Nichols chuckled. “Swept away by the hurricane, no doubt.”
Professor gave patient smile. “That would be a very plausible explanation, but why didn’t the men just hunker down and ride out the storm. I checked the weather data and it turns out that there was no Hurricane Anna. Anna was a tropical storm that peaked on July 29 with maximum sustained winds of seventy miles per hour, and the closest it got to Great Isaac was three days later when the eye passed almost four hundred miles to the east.”
“Four hundred?”
“There may be a mundane explanation for what happened to those men, but then again, maybe not. In any case, it’s one of the incidents that can’t be easily dismissed, just like Flight 19, which incidentally would have passed very close to Great Isaac on the first leg of their mission, before they knew they were in trouble. That gives us two points of…well, if you’ll pardon the pun, triangulation. We’ll start our search there, at Great Isaac Cay.
“Which brings me at last to this,” He hit another button and the picture changed to a screen capture from a webpage. One of the entries was highlighted. “La Nuestra Senõra De La Misericordia was a treasure galleon that sank in 1594. The official record has it going down in the Atlantic off the coast of Portugal, but it’s never been found, and I think I may know why.