Sea of Crises Read online

  SEA OF CRISES

  BY

  MARTY STEERE

  Published by Penfield Publications

  2533 Eastwind Way

  Signal Hill, California 90755

  ISBN: 978-0-9854014-1-2

  Copyright © Marty Steere, 2012

  e-book formatting by Guido Henkel

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  For Martha

  PART ONE

  1

  Nate Cartwright paused in the quiet hallway outside his condominium and listened intently. No sound came from the other side of the door. But that was misleading. He knew with an overwhelming certainty the moment he stepped inside he’d be under attack. With as much stealth as he could muster, he inserted his key in the door handle and slowly rotated it. He stood frozen for an instant. Then, in one quick motion, he swung the door open, took two steps in and braced.

  There was nothing but silence.

  Then he heard it.

  From the deep shadows in the kitchen at the far end of the hallway came a sound he knew all too well. Suddenly, Buster flashed across the width of the corridor, his tiny paws skittering on the hardwood floor as he worked frantically to alter direction. Just before banging into the bedroom doorway, he managed to get himself turned, somehow staying upright on short splayed limbs. As he caromed off the door frame, he pumped his legs furiously, finally found purchase, and came hurtling down the hallway.

  Nate had just enough time to set down his briefcase before Buster was on him, his front paws scrambling at the fabric of Nate’s slacks and his stub of a tail convulsing wildly. At his full extension, Buster barely reached Nate’s knees, but his relative lack of height did nothing to discourage his enthusiasm. Nate reached down with both hands and gave the dog an affectionate scratch behind the ears.

  “Good to see you too, buddy.”

  Then he gently lowered the dog, closed the front door and retrieved his briefcase. He strode down the hall to the den, Buster padding after him, panting happily, his paws making little tapping sounds on the floor.

  The small den, which doubled as Nate’s home office, was dominated by a large floor-to-ceiling window. In the morning, the inky blackness beyond would dissolve to reveal an unobstructed view of the Santa Monica Bay. Now, however, the window merely framed a reflection of Nate standing in the pool of light from the desk lamp, his visage staring back at him intently from beneath heavy dark eyebrows - a perpetual look of solemnity that, try as he might, never seemed to leave him.

  What had Anna called it? His “brooding omnipresence?” They’d both laughed at it back then. But it had always made Nate feel a little self-conscious. In the end, he wondered, had his seriousness driven her away? Not that it mattered. The two of them would never have lasted beyond law school. He knew that. And, anyway, it was so many years ago. No point in dwelling on it.

  The man in the reflection looked as tired as he felt.

  Nate set his briefcase on the desk and was removing his jacket when the phone rang. He glanced reflexively at the clock on the wall. Almost two in the morning. Who the hell would be calling at this hour?

  He lifted the handset out of its cradle as the phone rang again and saw his brother’s number in the illuminated display. He stabbed at the talk button and put the device up to his head.

  “Peter?”

  There was no immediate reply. In the background, Nate heard metallic voices echoing through a large space - the arrival of a flight being announced. United Airlines. Peter must be in an airport terminal.

  “Peter?” he repeated.

  “Nate, it’s me.”

  Anxiety strained his brother’s voice.

  “Peter, what’s wrong?”

  “I think I’m in trouble.”

  That got Nate’s full attention.

  “What do you mean? Where are you?”

  “LAX. And I’m pretty sure they’re here.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Nate took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “What do they look like?”

  “I don’t know that either. Nate, I’m serious. Someone’s following me, more than one person. I can feel it. They followed me here from Minneapolis.”

  Nate rubbed a hand over his face. This made no sense, and it was completely unlike his brother. “Why would someone be following you, Peter?”

  Through the phone came another announcement over the public address system drowning out most of Peter’s next words. The only thing Nate could make out was: “…my project.”

  “Peter, I didn’t get all of…”

  “Can you pick me up?” Peter interrupted. “I know it’s late.”

  “Of course,” Nate replied, already sliding back into his jacket. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Ok.” Nate heard relief in his brother’s voice. “Hurry, please. I’ll be out in front of baggage claim, Terminal 6.”

  At the front door, Nate stopped and looked back down at Buster. Eyes bright with excitement, the dog stared up at him. His tongue, actually longer than his tail, lolled out one side of his mouth.

  Buster was, without question, the ugliest dog on the planet. He was the product of an insane mixture of breeds, predominated, as near as Nate could tell, by Dachshund and Rottweiler, though Nate suspected there was probably some Chihuahua thrown in for good measure. Buster stood on tiny legs that barely kept his hairless, low-slung torso off the ground. His head, in comparison to the rest of his body, was massive. Nate liked to tell people it was because Buster had such a large brain. In reality, Buster was not one of the brightest stars in the canine galaxy. He did, however, have a stout heart and a sweet personality. Nate had rescued him years before from the pound, and the little dog had repaid him with a fierce loyalty.

  “Sorry, buddy,” Nate said, “got to do this solo. But I won’t be long, and I’ll be bringing back Uncle Peter. You stay here,” Nate waved a hand, “and guard the domicile. Ok?”

  Buster emitted a short bark that came out more like a “hmmph.” Incongruously, in that crazy concoction of genes, Buster had apparently inherited some hound dog.

  As Nate wheeled his car out of the subterranean garage and turned up Ocean Avenue, he replayed Peter’s call in his mind.

  It wasn’t like his younger brother to become rattled. Though Nate still thought of Peter as a kid, the man was forty-six years old. For the past twenty years, Peter had worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, winning a number of awards for investigative journalism. He’d also written a pair of best-selling books, one on the international drug trade, another dealing with nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet era. He’d traveled from the jungles of Nicaragua to the frozen Siberian tundra. Along the way, he’d been jailed more than once, including a two-week stay in a rat-infested Burmese prison. And he’d managed to bear it all with an unwavering sense of humor.

  No, this evening’s call was not like his brother.

  Despite what he’d heard, or thought he’d heard, over the phone, Nate didn’t think Peter’s state of mind could have anything to do with his current project.

  For the past couple of months, Peter had thrown himself into something he’d talked about doing for a long time. Something he’d only recently been able to get himself in the right frame of mind to ta
ckle. The topic was close to both of them, and, though it came with heavy emotional baggage, Nate didn’t see how it could possibly cause Peter to start imagining he was being followed.

  The subject was Apollo 18, the last of NASA’s manned lunar missions, and a catastrophe that ranked up there with the Apollo 1 fire and the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters. What made it particularly personal for Nate and Peter was the fact that the Apollo 18 commander, and one of the three astronauts who died in the tragedy, had been their father, Bob Cartwright.

  It had happened on September 28, 1976. Three days before Peter’s tenth birthday, and a month before Nate’s twelfth.

  Nate and the twins, along with their grandmother, had gathered in front of the television in the living room at their old home in Houston. Outside, reporters congregated on the sidewalk in front of the house, but Gamma refused to let any of them near the front door. She’d made it clear they were to stay off the property and leave the boys alone.

  Nate had been old enough to understand the situation. The twins, maybe not so much, though Peter had always been sensitive and uncommonly attuned to things happening around him, so he might have had some appreciation for the perilous state of affairs. For Matt, it was just another exciting chapter in the saga of his father, the astronaut and sudden celebrity. And, of course, an opportunity to stay home on a school day.

  A week earlier, the spacecraft bearing their father and his two crewmates had completed a successful transit to the moon and entered lunar orbit. On September 22, the module carrying Bob Cartwright and Mason Gale touched down on the lunar surface, and the two of them became the thirteenth and fourteenth men to walk on the moon.

  As extraordinary an accomplishment as it was, it initially garnered little public attention. While the first moonwalk by the astronauts from Apollo 11 seven years earlier had captivated the world, subsequent missions to the moon had attracted an ever-decreasing audience. Odd, considering the incredible effort required to put men on the moon, the whole thing seemed like yesterday’s news, and the activities of Cartwright and Gale were conducted, for the most part, without media fanfare. That was, of course, until their last transmission.

  The astronauts had been in the process of their first moonwalk, technically referred to as an EVA, or extra-vehicular activity. They’d retrieved the lunar rover from its storage position along the side of the module and were in the process of working their way across the ancient sea of the moon known as the Mare Crisium, or Sea of Crises, when Bob Cartwright uttered the words that, to this day, remained shrouded in mystery.

  Cartwright had kept up a running commentary as the rover bounced along the uneven surface. He’d stopped briefly to allow Gale to retrieve a rock sample, and had just started the rover up again. There were a few seconds of silence before Cartwright, clear as day, said in a startled voice, “That shouldn’t be here.”

  Then the video stream from the camera mounted on the front of the rover went to black, and the audio fell silent.

  At the time, the command service module, manned by the third member of the Apollo 18 crew, Steve Dayton, was on the far side of the moon, outside radio contact and not scheduled to be within range of Earth for another twenty minutes. During that time, Mission Control tried unsuccessfully to raise the two astronauts on the lunar surface. When the module bearing Dayton emerged from behind the moon, attempts were made to contact him, also to no avail. All transmissions from the spacecraft had ceased, almost as if someone had pulled a plug.

  Suddenly, Apollo 18 had captured the world’s attention. With no way of knowing what was happening on and around the moon, speculation abounded. Was it simply a failure of the communications equipment, or was loss of contact indicative of a larger problem? And what had Cartwright been referring to when he’d uttered those last mysterious words? Were the men still alive? Could they return to earth?

  NASA scrambled, hasty plans drawn up for a rescue mission. But putting another team on the moon could take weeks… months.

  To everyone’s relief, three days later, precisely at the scheduled time, astronomers on Earth confirmed a burn of the service propulsion system and, still in eerie silence, the command service module began its return transit.

  On September 28, the world had been transfixed, awaiting first sight of the spacecraft. And, almost exactly when expected, in the clear blue skies over the South Pacific, only a few miles north of the anticipated entry point, a distant speck appeared, slowly morphing into the welcome sight of the Apollo 18 capsule dangling beneath the canopy of a trio of parachutes.

  On the television, the steady voice of Walter Cronkite provided commentary as the vessel bearing their father majestically descended and splashed down in the calm waters north of the waiting navy armada. Images captured by cameras on one of the helicopters deployed from the U.S.S. Coral Sea showed navy divers jumping into the water near the capsule, inflating a large raft to accommodate the returning astronauts.

  The first indication of a problem came just after the hatch was sprung. One of the divers perched on the inflated rubber collar encircling the capsule took a quick look inside and immediately pulled back, turning his head away with a grimace that was caught on camera. After a few seconds, he waved off the helicopter bearing the television crew. It turned back toward the carrier, leaving the newscasters fumbling for explanations.

  As young Nate had watched that day, a feeling of dread had washed over him. He knew the news was bad long before any kind of announcement was made. The minutes, even the days after, were a blur. But Nate never forgot that gut-wrenching moment when he watched the diver look away. To this day, Nate could close his eyes and see it happening all over again.

  Years later, Nate heard that the sailor who’d been the first to peer into the capsule had subsequently struggled with serious psychological issues. It had to have been difficult for him. He’d unwittingly opened the door to a smoldering coffin. The official finding was that the heat shield had failed on re-entry. The three men inside had been baked to a crisp, their bodies barely recognizable as having once been human. Everything within the capsule had been charred or melted, or both. The stench that assaulted the young petty officer had to have been overwhelming.

  As bad as it had been for the diver, however, it could not have been anything compared to the final agonizing seconds of Bob Cartwright, Mason Gale and Steve Dayton. Their skin peeling off of their skeletons. Their bodies cooking in their own juices. Death a blessing.

  Given the condition of the capsule’s contents, there had never been a resolution of the mystery surrounding the loss of contact with Apollo 18. What had those last few cryptic words uttered by Bob Cartwright meant? What had happened to the astronauts during those few days of radio silence? Of course, human nature being what it was, countless theories had been advanced, ranging from the pedestrian to the bizarre.

  A small, but stubborn percentage of the population believed that the men must have encountered extra terrestrials. Others speculated that Cartwright had, at that moment, noticed something left on the rover when it had been packed into position on the side of the lunar module prior to launch, something that wasn’t supposed to have made the journey into space. Perhaps, it was suggested, whatever it was somehow interfered with the communications system when either Cartwright or Gale reached down to pick it up.

  The most common and widely accepted theory was that Cartwright had simply seen some man-made debris. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had deposited a fair amount of junk on the lunar surface during the 1960s and 70s. The United States had successfully landed a number of unmanned probes on the moon. On each of six prior Apollo missions, the lunar module had been ejected and allowed to crash back on to the surface of the moon after returning its astronauts to the command module. The Soviets had, in turn, launched their own series of unmanned probes, and, though many of them had not made it to the moon, a number had. There was no record of any of those prior missions having resulted in the deposit of space junk i
n the Sea of Crises, but it was still possible. And it would have explained Cartwright’s surprise.

  Of course, that didn’t account for the sudden loss of radio contact. With nothing else to explain that unusual event, the pundits had chalked it up to simple equipment failure.

  One thing was certain. Unless and until man again ventured to the moon, something that did not seem likely to occur any time in the near future, this was one mystery that would remain unsolved.

  No, Nate reflected, there was nothing about that bit of old history that could possibly explain why his brother was so spooked. It had to be something else.

  At this late hour, with few vehicles on the road between Santa Monica and LAX, the drive didn’t take long. Nate quickly circumnavigated the airport, pulling up in front of Terminal 6 no more than twenty minutes after he’d hung up the phone.

  Peter stood out front, his already slight figure further diminished by a canvas suitcase slung over one shoulder and a computer bag over the other. To Nate, his brother’s anxiety was obvious. In place of his normal impish look, Peter’s jaw was clenched, lips tightly pursed, eyes darting about. As Nate eased the car to the curb, Peter opened the back door and tossed in his suitcase, then he slid into the front passenger seat.

  “Thanks. Sorry about the late hour.”

  Though it was a cool October evening, a sheen of sweat coated Peter’s broad forehead below his receding blond hairline. As Nate pulled back out into the light traffic, his brother craned his neck, scanning the sidewalk and roadway.

  “Want to tell me what’s going on?” Nate asked.

  Still looking about, Peter replied, “Let’s get out of here, first.”

  “Ok.”

  Nate took the ramp down to Sepulveda Boulevard and merged onto the wide thoroughfare, heading north. In the rear view mirror, he saw no other vehicles, either entering from the airport or on the street itself. They drove into Westchester, as near as Nate could tell, the only car on the road. The stores on either side were shut down, the sidewalks deserted.