Nightmare Country by Marlys Millhiser

Author:Marlys Millhiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

Interim

Time and Again

Ralph Weicherding was a reporter for a UPI bureau based in Guatemala City but responsible for all of Central America and most of the Caribbean. He heard the news from a contact while on a stopover in Belmopan, the capital of Belize, and was on the next flight to the coast, certain that the contact must have been mistaken. No one could keep a lid on that kind of story for hours, let alone days. But if there was such a story, Ralph was determined to get to it before his counterpart from Reuters. The lack of real news in this region was enough to make a grown reporter cry.

He arrived in Belize City only to find all planes at Mayan Airlines either conscripted as search planes or mysteriously grounded. No flights to the cays allowed. Delayed but undaunted, Ralph Weicherding took passage on the daily supply boat to Mayan Cay. The engines ground ominously and the crew had to shout to be heard over them. Coral heads broke the water in places. Stretches of coral banks that extended close to the surface darkened huge patches of sea. Then they’d enter an area that was clear and deep. They were about an hour out of San Tomas when the supply boat jerked and nosed into a wave no one had apparently expected. Ralph had been dozing, and was awakened by the captain’s shouts, followed by a cold drenching as water cascaded over the deck.

“Aye, what’s your name again?” The captain was from the U.S. and sounded like a New York City taxi driver.

“Weicherding, Ralph.” He picked himself up out of a puddle.

“Come over here and see this, Weicherdink.” The captain yanked Ralph around the wheelhouse, where his crew lined the rail. About two hundred feet away was a gleaming white ship.

Even the gun turrets were white. And the towers topped with complicated radar devices. And a helicopter on her rear deck that several sailors seemed to be working on or preparing for flight. The only colors were the black letters on her side—D06—and the flags she flew. The top one was the red-and-white crisscross on blue of the Union Jack.

“Bit much for these waters, isn’t she?” Ralph asked.

“Get Belize City,” the captain ordered through the wheelhouse window. “Only one destroyer that size ever been around here. That’s the Gloucestershire.”

“I heard she was lost.”

“Don’t look lost now. In a clear channel. Ought to make it in with no trouble. Where in hell’s she been?” He waved back at a seaman on the destroyer’s deck. “And how’d she get right here so quick?”

Heavy static from the wheelhouse and a “whumping” sound that flashed across the water and hit them with the impact of a shock wave. Ralph felt sharp pains in his ears and a momentary pressure against his chest that stopped his breath.

HMS Gloucestershire was gone, more as if she’d never been than as if she’d vanished. No disappearing in the gradual sense. The destroyer just wasn’t. The men on the supply boat stood silent, staring at empty water, holding on as the boat pitched.

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