Of Hooves and History

A Wrecked Interruption

Exploring the Bermuda Triangle is no easy feat. This triangular expanse covers several tens of thousands of square miles of endless blue, with hundreds of unique and often wild conspiracy theories surrounding it, and many more vanished ships and airplanes within. Such disappearances are often dismissed as wild storms or navigation issues due to imbalances in the Earth's magnetic field, but I felt there was more to the disappearances.

Right off the bat, I got my first wake-up call as to where I was when I tried using the radio to scan for my home receiver. Nothing came through the mesh of static. I shut off the radio, flicked on the lights, and pulled open my sea chart. It was marked with the known routes and timestamps of several ships and planes that had gone missing throughout history. Some were close to the southeastern part of the Triangle, while others – likely planes – were much further up north, a mere fifty or hundred miles off Bermuda's coast.

I continued moving forward slowly on the surface, using the engine to recharge the batteries for a longer, deeper dive later in the night. My father had pressure-tested the sub's fourteen-inch thick double-paned walls to nearly 4000 psi, so I could dive over a mile below the surface, or around 2500 meters. It was no Alvin or Trieste, but at least I could reach within a mile of the seabed's deepest points.

Having marked a GPS point every mile from the moment I reached the Bahamian border, I could at least get a rough sense of my location if something did sabotage the navigation systems. Feeling confident, I dove down and began my search, starting out heading south, eighty miles or so north of the Turks and Caicos Islands. Gradually I turned up the sonar, sending out ping and after ping, trying to map out anything on the sea floor a good mile-and-a-half below me. A few beeps rang out, and I immediately initiated a scan, hoping to find a plane's propeller or a section of a boat hull.

Nothing.

"How odd. Well, false positives are a given in such a vast, dark world." I shrugged and kept going, peering closely at the sonar as I tweaked the pinging frequency. A few more blinking objects appeared further ahead, so I scooted over and hovered over the area, boosting the frequency even more. The scanner slowly revealed a rotting metal beam and bits of dark rock, looking like a crushed grey granola bar.

Rocky debris was nothing odd in the depths of the ocean, but to have this much in one place seemed off. I backed away and a blinking red light appeared on the instrument panel, along with a looping beep. This was a signal to warn me when I was approaching the limit of the sub's depth range. The closer I reached it, the faster the light would blink until it was solid red, and the alarm would sound at full volume. Not something I wanted to happen, but if I was to discern these debris, I needed to go deeper.

At 2000 meters the alarm started to get louder and the red light blinked rapidly. I typed in a secret code which disabled the sound and light, then turned the lights back on. This time the findings were more promising. More clumps of the rocky debris came up, and they were spaced apart by about a hundred meters. Shifting my direction a little, I noticed even more rocks... and they seemed to have a pattern, as if to...

"This is a trail left by something!" I exclaimed, quickly deciphering what I'd just observed. I fired up the motor and started moving slowly, observing the rocky debris. By midnight I'd mapped out a trail that led to the Triangle's heart, a good hundred miles north. A feasible journey, but it'd drink up most, if not all, of the precious juice. That'd be fine – I could simply rise to a safer depth, shut all power, resurface in the morning, and just mindlessly putter around for hours to recharge. But that'd be done using the emergency backup batteries, which despite having sufficient power to raise the sub from its maximum depth, were still not something to be used unwisely.

But given the uniqueness of my current discovery, I figured the reward would be worth the risk. I boosted my speed to ten knots. The trail of debris – which looked like metallic ore - got larger but decreased in overall size at times. A couple of yawns were had, as I'd been awake for over fifteen hours now. At this rate, if there was anything cool to encounter down here, I'd reach it by sunrise. My body, however, would say otherwise obviously. So, I cranked up the speed to twenty knots – as far as the sonar's perception would allow.