Return of Sky Ghost (40 page)

Beside the door was a box of rocks he’d collected from the nearby beach just for this occasion. The door finally opened, and sure enough, there was a thick cumulus cloud rolling by.

The man inched his way over, testing the safety harness with every step. To fall now would be disastrous. Or at least he believed it would be.

He finally reached the door’s open edge and felt the vapor of the cloud on his face. It left his forehead and nose covered with hundreds of tiny water droplets.

The man leaned further over the edge and looked at the deep blue North Atlantic below. The sea was especially churned-up today.

He picked up a handful of rocks and threw them over the edge. He watched as they fell exactly 1,865 feet to the ocean surface below, landing with a barrage of splashes.

Then he smiled. And he felt better, and, the cloud came into the room again and drenched the man they called God, but he didn’t care.

It was windy Back There today.

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The Sea of Japan

T
HE
KUMO-DO MARU
HAD
been at sea for almost four days.

It was a small fishing barge, thirty-four feet long, with a very shallow draft, a cranky diesel engine, and a crew of five. Four scientists were also on board. Two were marine geologists, the other two, triatomic physicists. They were all from the University of Seoul.

They had been plying the waters around 35 degrees latitude and 140 degrees longitude for nearly one hundred hours, through rough seas and very heavy downpours. This typhoonlike weather had been the norm in this area for the past week.

But now it was close to dawn and the weather was settling down. The skies were clearing, the rain had stopped, and the wind was dying to a breeze.

For the first time in a long time, the sea was peaceful.

The senior scientist on board was Dr. Chin Lo Ho, a triatomic physicist with nearly thirty years of experience studying quantum fusion. He’d been at his daughter’s wedding when the Great Blast occurred. He would never forget the feeling of the earth moving beneath his feet and seeing all his wedding guests stagger in unison as they danced the bride’s tribute. The whole reception building shook—the
entire
city of Seoul shook—for more than two hours.

When Ho called his colleagues in the seismic department at the university on the last working phone in Seoul, he learned two were unconscious and two were busy trying to fix their earthquake-monitoring station. The two-hour rumble had been the largest earth disturbance ever recorded, by a factor of
ten.

But Ho knew even then that this titanic disturbance had not been an earthquake. Not a natural one anyway. And though it might have seemed perverse, the first thing he wanted to do once the ground stopped shaking was hurry to the east coast of Korea and see what the oceans were doing.

He was finally able to secure transport to the city of Kangnung two hours later, arriving on the coast just before dawn. He and two students set up a small control station on a ridge that rose about seven hundred feet above the sea. At the time Ho believed what he was doing amounted to little more than an experiment in suicide. He was convinced that if his estimates were right, he and his students would be washed away by a tsunami he was sure was going to come sometime later that day.

But it never did.

That was six days ago.

Now, standing on the bow of the fishing barge looking out at the ever-calming sea, Ho’s brain was stuffed with more questions than before. The whole of Northeast Asia was still in chaos because of the Great Blast. Communications were out everywhere, power grids thrown off-line, water main breaks, thousands of scattered fires. But amazingly, no tidal waves, and very little earthquake-related damages. That’s why Ho knew that whatever event shook the Earth six days before, it had not been “natural.”

The biggest question in Ho’s mind was: Had it been “supernatural?”

Ho studied the water before him now, and then turned back to the captain of the skiff.

“Are you certain your coordinates are correct?” he asked Tuk-Pak, the grizzled old skipper.

“They are the coordinates you gave me, Professor,” Pak replied. “Because I’ve never had the opportunity to
actually
sail in waters at these particular coordinates, I cannot tell you if we are at the right place or not. I can only tell you that we sailed to where you told us. Nothing more….”

Ho looked in all directions—all he saw was water.

He checked his map again. Did he have the coordinates right? One hundred forty degrees longitude, 35 degrees latitude. Yes, they were correct.

Then there was only one explanation….

He turned to the skipper and said crisply: “Bring us to a stop.”

Pak motioned to his second in command to kill the barge’s engine. Soon the vessel slowed to a stop.

To the amazement of all on board, Professor Ho then did a very strange thing: He stepped over the railing, and lowered himself down the side of the vessel into the water below.

The crew rushed to throw him a life preserver—but none was needed. Ho simply stepped from the skiff’s bottom rail into the water—and stood up.

Those aboard the barge stared in amazement. For a moment it seemed like Ho was walking on top of the water!

But then the reality of the situation began to sink in—and this was even more startling.

They had entered a part of the sea that, though vast, was at best, just a couple of feet deep.

Ho looked up at them and spread his arms wide.

“My friends,” he said.
“This
is where the city of Tokyo used to be ….”

Mack Maloney is the author of numerous fiction series, including Wingman, Chopper Ops, Starhawk, and Pirate Hunters, as well as
UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn’t Want You to Know
. A native Bostonian, Maloney received a bachelor of science degree in journalism at Suffolk University and a master of arts degree in film at Emerson College. He is the host of a national radio show,
Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files
.

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

Copyright © 1998 by Mack Maloney

cover design by Michel Vrana

978-1-4804-0680-3

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com