Fountain by Medler, John - HTML preview

Chapter 80. Storm.

Atlantic Ocean

Jimmy Pond stood on the deck of the freighter, looking out over the increasingly choppy green and black waves. The night sky was filled with a ceiling of black storm clouds. He zipped up his black Northface coat, bristling at the harsh, wet wind blowing across the bow. Down below decks, the snakes and the fake Coca-cola water tank were wrapped up safely inside a shipping crate with dozens of other cases of soda. He was not supposed to check in with Hank Armstrong at the CIA for another two days, so he did not believe that anyone would be tracking him yet. He had made arrangements with his contact to meet him in Marseille, France when the freighter arrived the day after tomorrow. He would be bringing the soda truck. Using one of his many false passports, Pond would drive the load with his French contact to Geneva, Switzerland, the headquarters of the WHO. There, he would deliver the life-saving snakes to the Director of the WHO herself. What a great day that would be.

Pond knew his life in the United States and as a CIA agent was now over. His change of plans could easily be described as treason. Once the President and the Director learned of his betrayal, he would be a marked man internationally. It would be a matter of time before they sent assassins to kill him. To his credit, however, Agent Pond did not accept a dime for the delivery of the purple snakes. In his mind, the sacrifice of his own career, his reputation, and perhaps even his own life would be worth the price to save so many people across the world.

He had no specific plans after he got to Switzerland. He told himself that he would come up with a plan on the long voyage across the Atlantic, but so far, nothing seemed very interesting. He had not spent much time in South America. That was a possibility.

On the captain’s bridge, the outlook was much more gloomy. The Captain’s radar-man had some very bad news. The National Weather Service had just upgraded the tropical storm to a full-fledged hurricane, called Hurricane Nancy. Nancy was getting bigger and bigger on the screen. The freighter, unfortunately, was headed right towards it. The Captain tried to play out alternative routes on his maps. What if we were to go further north? The radar-man said it wouldn’t do much good. The hurricane was too close to them and too big. It would catch them whether they went north or south or straight ahead. There was only one hope. They would have to reverse course and go back towards Charleston where they had started, in an effort to outrun the hurricane. The Captain’s engineer plotted their course if they went at full speed. It was going to be dicey, and depended on how fast the hurricane moved. The Captain was worried. He sent a ship-to-shore message to his shipping company, and another to his wife. He gave the order to reverse course and proceed at full speed.

Jimmy Pond, back on the deck, saw the freighter turn. He thought perhaps it was a slight alteration in their course until he saw the ship do a complete “180” and head back the way they had come. Something was wrong. Had the CIA figured out his double-cross? Was he going to be arrested? He went up to the Captain’s bridge, where he was met at the door by one of the Captain’s assistants, who was refusing Pond’s entry to the bridge.

“This area is restricted,” said the assistant.

“Why are we turning around?” asked Pond.

“Some bad weather up ahead,” said the assistant. “It’s coming right at us. We need to backtrack a little and wait out the storm. Then we are going to be proceeding as normal. Please return to your quarters.”

“Sure, no problem,” said Pond. Bad weather, my ass, thought Pond. He needed information, right away, but there was no Internet service in the middle of the Atlantic. Pond went below decks and headed for the engineer’s room. There was a small bathroom next to the engineer’s room and he went inside. Inside, one of the engineers was washing his hands. He went up to the dockhand and pressed two hundred dollar bills into his hand.

“Hey, listen, man, can you do me a favor?”

The dockhand looked at the money in his hand, and then eyed Pond suspiciously. “Sure, what do you need?”

“The entire ship just turned around and is heading back to the United States. I need to know why. I have a very important shipment that needs to get to Europe immediately, and any delay is going to kill my company.”

“Sure,” said the dockhand. “No problem.”

Pond waited outside the engineer’s room, while the deck hand went back in to talk to his boss. A few minutes later, he came out.

“Hey, don’t tell anyone else on the ship, but there’s a hurricane called Hurricane Nancy headed straight for us. Captain’s trying to outrun it.”

Pond considered this. Well at least the President wasn’t trying to have him arrested.

“Will we make it?”

“We better,” said the deck hand. “My girl is waiting for me back in Charleston and she would be pretty disappointed if I died at sea,” the hand joked. Pond smiled. Evidently, the deck hand had no idea what their chances were.

Pond had a moment of indecision. What if they didn’t make it? Those snakes would be lost to humanity forever. What could he do? As a CIA Agent trained to solve problems on the run, Pond was used to controlling his own destiny. He did not like trusting his fate to other people. But after a moment, he realized that there was nothing he could do. He would simply have to hope they rode out the storm. He went back to his bunk to get some rest. Sleeping was impossible. Pond stared at the ceiling, hoping that they would make it.

Unfortunately for Pond and the rest of the freighter’s crew, Nancy was quite a sprinter. Within the hour, the storm was right on their tail. The radar man gave the Captain the bad news.

“Captain, this thing is huge. It’s right behind us, approaching fast…..Oh, shit. Captain, you need to take a look at this.” The radar man took a gulp and had a look of dread. The Captain looked grimly at the radar man after viewing at the screen. There was a thick green line coming right at the rear of the boat. Coming right behind them was a massive wave. It was a ship killer.

“Gentlemen, it has been an honor” were the Captain’s last words as the monstrous tidal wave swept over the freighter and buried it under the water, sending Jimmy Pond, the ship, and all of its cargo to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Washington, D.C. The Oval Office

“Madame President, I have some very bad news,” said CIA Director Hank Armstrong.

“What now?” asked the President.

“Well, our agent, Jimmy Pond, was successful in retrieving the purple snakes from our actor friend in California, although the Bel Air Police Department now has an artist’s sketch of Pond as the thief. Apparently, he tranquilized two of their security guards and a number of household staff. But the really bad news is that it appears that Pond had his own agenda. We don’t know if his plan was to sell the snakes to the highest bidder, or what his exact plans were, but we know he loaded the snakes onto a freighter called the Dominance, which left Charleston, South Carolina several days ago and was headed for Marseille, France.”

“Okay, well just intercept the boat and get the snakes back. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is Hurricane Nancy, Madame President. The Dominance went right into the hurricane and is presumed lost in the storm. They have lost all radio contact.”

“Lost? What do you mean lost?”

“I mean, it is probably at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Well, what are we doing to get it, Hank?”

“You are going to need to call out the Navy, Madame President, as soon as the hurricane passes, and have them perform a search and rescue operation. It is possible the container which held those snakes is still intact.”

“Or maybe Pond put it on another ship, or maybe Pond has it stashed somewhere else, or maybe he has already sold it to terrorists, or one thousand other possibilities! Jesus, Hank, don’t you vet these guys? This is the second mole we have discovered! You have got to plug the leaks in your Agency! These snakes could cure the diseases of millions of people! We could have just lost the greatest discovery mankind has ever seen. We absolutely have to find that boat!”

“I would agree,” said Armstrong.

The President called in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and had him advise the Navy to begin the search operation.

Atlantic Ocean

It had been a day since the hurricane had passed. The seas were calm, the cumulus clouds were out in force, and the sky was a bright blue. Hundreds of feet below, on the ocean floor, lying upside down, in a watery tomb, was the cargo ship called the Dominance. On the lowest deck (or what was now the highest deck), inside a heavy wooden crate, smashed and lying on its side, was the fake Coca-cola water tank. The lid on the top had broken off on its hinges. Nothing remained in the tank. Near the top corner of the wooden crate was a six inch hole in the boards, caused when the crates were upended by the tidal wave. Forty purple snakes took turns slithering through the hole in the crate into the ocean water which had filled the interior of the ship. Slowly and silently, they undulated through the water, over crates, around posts, under ship engines, down passageways, until they finally found a two foot hole in the ship’s hull. The snakes finally escaped the ship, and slithered silently away, looking for tropical climates.

About the Author

John Medler is trial lawyer and author. He lives with his wife Tammy and their six children in St. Louis, MO. Fountain is his second published novel, and is a sequel to Quatrain, a fiction thriller about the lost prophecies of Nostradamus. Quatrain was the #1 Book in Fiction and #1 Overall on www.free-ebooks.net in 2011. Connect with John online at:

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AUTHOR NOTES

When researching the idea for this book, I stumbled quite by accident upon a journal article, “Thief, Slave Trader, Murderer: Christopher Columbus and Caribbean Population Decline” by Tink Tinker and Mark Freeland, which thoroughly laid out the case that Christopher Columbus was a genocidal murderer, a slave trader, and an altogether despicable human being. I subsequently learned that there are hundreds of articles published on the subject of Columbus’ genocide, and that there have been organized protests on the celebration of Columbus Day for many years. I guess I have been living in a cave, but I had never heard that argument before, despite years of elementary school art projects requiring the drawing of the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria, and the glowing adulation of the Spanish navigator every October. I was quite convinced by the evidence laid out in this and other articles and books, which led to a more troubling question: if these many authors and historians are correct about the villainy of Columbus, how did our history books get it so wrong for hundreds of years? Why would we name our nation’s capital, cities in Ohio and South Carolina, and benevolent institutions like the Knights of Columbus after a mass murderer? It seemed unfathomable to me. This notion that carved-in-stone truths about our nation’s history may actually be wrong served as the germ (no pun intended!) for this book.

This led to my discovery of an article espousing the novel theory that America was named not after Amerigo Vespucci, as the history books tell us, but by a Bristol cod merchant and Royal Customs Officer named Richard Amerike. I learned from the article that the idea had first been proposed in 1908 by Alfred Hudd, then Chairman of Bristol’s Clifton Antiquarian Club. I learned for the first time of the mysterious Waldseemüller Map, which has puzzled historians for centuries. The article suggested that Vespucci may have stolen Cabot’s maps, and that it was Cabot who actually discovered both America and the Pacific Ocean. For an excellent book on this subject, read Rodney Broome’s book, Terra Incognita: The True Story of How America Got its Name” (Seattle: Educare Press, 2001). Again, it hit me that much of what we learned as grade school children about our country may be completely false. I wanted to make sure that the book asked these important questions about our nation’s history.

At the time I was writing Fountain, I was also preparing for an important trial. I am a trial lawyer, and when I am not writing books, that’s what I do to put bread on the table. I represented a young man named Clayton who was rendered a paraplegic in a motorcycle accident. Clayton is the nicest client I have ever had the privilege to represent, and his parents, Sam and Christine, and his sisters Ashley and Taylor, are some of the nicest people that I have ever met in my life. Every day, as I worked on his case, I found myself wishing that there was some way for me to cure him and make him walk. Clayton was my inspiration for Teddy, and for the yearning for a magical cure. Let’s hope that someday scientists find something as wonderful as Teddy’s purple snake.

I would like to thank Professor Douglas T. Peck for his interesting article, “Misconceptions and Myths Related to the Fountain of Youth and Juan Ponce de Leon’s 1513 Exploration Voyage.” In this article, Peck explained that Ponce de Leon’s involvement with the Fountain of Youth myth was solely due to one back-handed wisecrack about impotence from historian and rival Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo in his Historia General, published in 1535. I thought this revelation was very funny because one of my best friends is named Gonzalo Fernandez. Friends who know me will undoubtedly think that I made this name up, but nope, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo was a real guy. Professor Peck is the one who explained Peter Martyr’s important Fountain of Youth reference in his Decade de Orba Nova, wherein he recounts the voyages of Juan Diaz de Solis, stating that “Beyond Veragua, the coast bends in a northernly direction, to a point opposite the Pillars of Hercules; that is, if we accept our measures certain lands discovered by the Spaniards, more than three hundred and twenty-five leagues from the north coast of Hispaniola. Among these countries is an island called by us Boinca (later Boyuca), and by others Aganeo [also referred to as Ananeo]; it is celebrated for a spring whose waters restore health to old men.” Peck concludes that the location described is not modern day Florida, but rather the Bay of Honduras, where De Solis was traveling at the time. Peck suggests that the only confusion is the reference to the Pillars of Hercules, which I sidestepped by suggesting that at the time of these events, there were large outcroppings of stone rising from the sea which reminded the navigators of the Pillars of Hercules.

I read numerous scientific journals on the Ebola virus, but special thanks goes to Richard Preston, for his New York Times best-selling book The Hot Zone, in which he recounts the real-life hair-raising story of a close encounter with a deadly virus very similar to the Ebola Virus in a Virginia monkey house. Much of the information on the detection of the Ebola Virus at the Italian lab I learned from Preston’s excellent and thrilling book.

As you can probably imagine, Charlie Sheen was my inspiration for Skip Drame. In early 2011, right after I published my first book, Quatrain, Sheen was on television and radio constantly, regularly talking about “Tiger Blood,” “Adonis DNA,” “Winning,” and a hundred other memorable and hilarious quotes. I knew then that I had to put a character like Charlie in my next book. For the 29 best Charlie Sheen quotes, see: http://www.funnyordie.com/articles/8e4a8d6fd5/charlie-sheen-quotes-crazy-insane-winning.

I would also like to thank Audrey Monahan, my wife’s Drama and English teacher, for her final edits and suggestions on the manuscript, and Dan Monahan, my wife’s History teacher, for his historical insights. Dan and Audrey directed the high school play South Pacific, where I met my wife Tammy when I was fifteen. In the play, I played the part of swashbuckling pilot Buzz Adams. I had one line in the play as I recall, “We’re going out in waves tonight... Waves.” No idea what that means. I couldn’t resist putting him in as the idiotic doctor on Mackinac Island. By the way, Monahans, sorry I killed you with the Ebola Virus!

Thanks to my high school friend Jerry McCabe for the excellent illustrations. They look truly Mayan!

And speaking of Mayans, our youngest daughter Wendi is a Mayan Indian, adopted from Guatemala when she was four. It was fun learning all the Mayan folklore. Wendi actually spoke the K’iche’ Mayan dialect for the first three years of her life. When I was writing about Xbalanque and Hunahpu, Wendi, I was thinking of you!

I would also like to thank my six children: Ryan, Kevin, Cody, Natasha, Sabrina, and Wendi. With that many kids, you have to figure, based upon the law of averages, that one of them will grow up and be a writer. Finally, to my wife Tammy, who somehow has bottled her own Fountain of Youth: You make me forever young. I am so glad I discovered you!

Thanks again for reading my book!

John Medler