The Oracle Philon Read online

  The

  Oracle Philon

  Colton Banyon Adventure/Mystery #23

  By

  Gerald J. Kubicki & Kristopher Kubicki

  Other Books by Gerald J. Kubicki

  A Dubious Mission #1

  A Dubious Mission (second edition)

  A Dubious Secret #2

  A Dubious Dream #3

  A Dubious Terrain #4

  A Dubious Plan #5

  A Dubious Artifact #6

  Books by Gerald J. Kubicki & Kristopher Kubicki

  A Dubious Position #7

  A Dubious Curse #8

  A Dubious Crime #9

  A Dubious Device #10

  A Dubious Race # 11

  The Society of Orion Series

  The Weapons #1

  The Recovery #2

  The Deception #3

  The Orion Codex #4

  The Tayos Caves #5

  The Moroccan Affair #6

  The Turkish Findings #7

  The Sumi Collision #8

  Additional Book

  The Polish Discovery #17

  Colton Banyon Mysteries 1-3 #20

  Colton Banyon Mysteries 4-7 #23

  The Society of Orion Series #24

  License Note

  This eBook is for your personal enjoyment.

  It may not be re-sold.

  The Oracle Philon

  Colton Banyon Mystery #25

  Published by Gerald J. Kubicki & Kristopher Kubicki

  Copyright ©2016 by Gerald J. Kubicki & Kristopher Kubicki

  All rights reserved

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1 –The Researcher

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part 2 -Philon

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part 3- Vortices

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part 4- The Switch

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part 5 –The Team

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part 6 – The First Goal

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Part 7 – The Jihadists

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Part 8 – The Supremacists

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Part 9 – The Clash

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Epilogue

  Author’s Special Note

  Author’s Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Prologue

  In the last few minutes, things had gotten unusually strange for Captain Babar Bhatti. He stared out the front window on the bridge of his small cargo ship named “The Sea Dove”. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Although it was late at night, it seemed more like daytime. He could clearly see for about a hundred yards in any direction around the cargo ship even though he wasn’t running any ship lights and he was still about fifteen nautical miles from any land mass.

  He realized the reason he could see clearly had to do with a greenish glow that came from the water. When the bow of the cargo ship cut through it at their flank speed of about ten knots, a strong white light burst came from the wake all around the ship. It was so strong that Captain Bhatti considered wearing his sunglasses. His small ship was lit up like a star out in the middle of the ocean.

  But that wasn’t the only reason things felt weird. The usually moderately rough Arabian Sea was suddenly as calm as bathtub water. It seemed to him that the water surrounding his ship was heavier and thicker than normal seawater. It was more like syrup than ocean.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” the captain asked his first mate, Hassan Malik, as he looked over at him and scratched his nearly bald head.

  The first mate was steering the ship. “All of my time at sea has been with you Babar. If you haven’t seen it before than neither have I,” he replied sadly.

  “The sea was normal only a few minutes ago. What happened?” the captain wondered out loud and flapped his arms. “According to the ship’s sensors, the wind has not stopped, just the waves. And how can you explain the bright light coming from the water?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the gravitational pull of the moon on the oceans has changed,” the first mate offered as he in turn threw up his arms in frustration.

  “You’re not helping,” the skipper responded with a slight touch of irritation. “There has to be a reason for this,” the tough thirty-year veteran of the seas responded. “This is not logical.”

  “Maybe it has something to do with the cargo that we are carrying to Karachi?”

  “I told you,” an annoyed Captain Bhatti screamed back. “We no longer are hauling any contraband. We have a load of hardened steel from China. Don’t you remember? We picked it up in Hong Kong. You were supervising the loading of the steel just a few days ago.”

  “Babar, what about the thousand guns in the front hold?” The first mate asked with a smirk.

  “Those are for the holy war, the jihad. To Allah, it is not illegal to arm our brothers. We must fight the infidels,” the captain swore with closed fists. His statement was a fanatical justification for smuggling guns. He had been a radical for some time.

  “Then maybe the steel is causing this phenomenon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Steel can be affected by magnets, right?” The first mate asked sheepishly.

  “Yes, I’ve noticed it too,” the captain admitted with a nod of his head. “There has been some shifting of our cargo down in the hold even though the ocean has been very smooth. It couldn’t have caused it. But it could be a result of some magnetic pull from something in the ocean.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “This is the first time that we are ferrying steel through these waters. I’ve been told that there are very peculiar things occurring in this part of the Arabian Sea of late. It has something to do with the magnetic field that surrounds the earth. Some of the other captains told me that and didn’t want to ferry steel and refused this job. They said it was too dangerous.”

  “Yes, I’ve read warnings on the internet about this part of the ocean as well.
Strange things happen out here — very strange unexplainable things.”

  “Some call it the ‘Indus Valley Vortex’,” Babar Bhatti muttered as a chill went down his back despite it being over ninety degrees in the cabin.

  “I’ve heard that there are no living things in the water below or above it in this area. No fish and no birds. It’s as if nothing can survive in these gooey waters,” Malik informed the captain. “And yet ships must sail right through it.”

  “Put the ship on autopilot,” Babar Bhatti suddenly ordered. “Let’s go out on the deck. I want to see if we can identify anything nearby.”

  Hassan Malik did as instructed and soon the captain and his trusted shipmate were standing outside the bridge and smelling the salty sea air. A warm steady breeze swept past them.

  “This is so strange,” the captain uttered. “The air is silent. I can’t hear any sounds at all.”

  “Yeah,” the first mate agreed. “I can’t even hear the splash of our wake. It’s like being in the forest after a heavy snow — it’s a silent night.”

  “And there may be a worse problem,” the captain said in a chilling voice as he scanned the water ahead.

  “What’s that, Babar?”

  “We know that there are many ships headed to Karachi right now, correct?”

  “Of course,” Malik replied. “Karachi is a city of more than twenty-six million people. It has an insatiable appetite for the goods we transport. There are maybe a hundred ships coming and going this close to Karachi right now.”

  “So, where are the lights from the other ships?” A now nervous Captain Bhatti asked. “It is pitch dark out there,” he said as he pointed towards the slight glow on the horizon that was their destination — the largest city in the Arab world. “Only our ship is lit up.”

  “Maybe we are off course,” Hassan Malik said with a little panic in his voice. “There does seem to be some sort of fog surrounding the ship.”

  “No,” the captain replied sagely. “I’m pretty sure that the light on the horizon is Karachi. It’s maybe ten miles away — due north. We’re headed straight for it.”

  “I’d better check the GPS,” the first mate croaked and rushed into the cabin.

  When the captain heard the first mate cursing the holy man Allah, he ran inside. His man was acting very strangely and pounded on the large glass compass head that was set into the front of the ships console.

  “Why are you hitting the compass?” the captain screamed. He didn’t want his equipment damaged.

  “The GPS says we are heading in the right direction, but the compass is reading eighty degrees off of true north. It must be broken,” the very concerned navigator explained.

  “Uh-oh,” Babar let slip out. “The GPS gets global positioning from a satellite way out in space, but the compass depends on the earth’s magnetic signals. They must be off. There are unseen forces at work here my friend,” the captain said like a character in an alien horror movie.

  “Something is definitely messing with the earth’s magnetic flow around this part of the ocean,” Malik agreed with great concern.

  An expression of surprise quickly filled the captain’s bearded face. “Look at the compass now!” Babar yelled and pointed. The compass needle was now spinning wildly in a complete circle. The ship seemed to be changing course as well.

  Suddenly, all the metal objects in the pilot house began shooting across the room. Some flew left and some flew right, some stuck to the floor and some went to the ceiling. They were all affected by the growing magnetic pull, but were pulled in different directions.

  A metal square which the captain used to plot his navigation courses smacked Babar Bhatti in the head and knocked him to the ground. It drew blood. It then continued to the front window and stuck to the windowpane like it was metal.

  “Are you hurt badly?” Hassan Malik called out to his captain. He couldn’t rush to check on him because he had to grab the steering wheel as the autopilot had disengaged. He fought to control the direction of the ship.

  “It’s just a scrape,” the captain replied as he picked himself off of the floor. “I’d better sound the alarm and wake the other men. We will need them. Something bad is definitely happening to our ship.”

  But when he pressed the button for the ship’s alarm, it remained silent. He quickly went to the ships intercom to broadcast a warning to his men, but when Babar Bhatti pressed the microphone button he found that there was no power to run the equipment. Panic was now setting in.

  “I think we’ll need help and a rescue very soon captain,” the first mate yelled to his longtime friend. The roar of a significant wind had developed outside — somewhere in the dark open sea a storm was developing, but Malik couldn’t identify the direction of its origin. He could only feel it pushing or pulling the ship in a new direction.

  The captain was already on the ship’s radio attempting to declare mayday. After he was able provide his current position just once, the lights on the machine flickered and went out.

  “The radio is out,” he screamed back at Malik. “How can so many bad things be happening at one time?”

  Before the first mate could answer, the engines driving the ship suddenly shut down. All the electricity quickly drained from the batteries. The inside of the ship became dark, but the outside of the cargo vessel stayed illuminated and kept moving forward — only in a different direction. The ship seemed to be heading in a circle.

  “This isn’t possible,” the first mate screamed in a terrorized voice. “We’re heading back out to sea. I have no steerage. The ship is being controlled by some other force.”

  “We are either being pulled or pushed by the magnetic grid in this area,” the captain reasoned logically. “We have no control of our direction or speed.”

  “The sound of the wind is getting stronger,” Hassan Malik warned. “In all the information that I have read about this vortex, most scientists agree that a whirlpool caused by charged magnetic flows pulls anything in its path to its center. I fear that we are heading into a whirlpool.

  “Then we are doomed,” the captained wailed. Being caught in a whirlpool was a death sentence. Every sailor knew that no one returned from the natural phenomena.

  “No one has ever come back out of one,” the first mate agreed.

  “But why us?” the captain lamented. “Why is our ship being targeted? Is Allah punishing us?”

  “Babar, according to the information that I have read, there are twelve of these vortices on earth, five each along the Tropic of Cancer and five along the Tropic of Capricorn. Then there is also one at the North Pole and one at the South Pole. They are all connected by the earth’s magnetic grid that then causes these anomalies to affect anything in the area. They have always been here.”

  “I’ve studied those same reports,” the captain responded. “But in all of the reading, the Indus Vortex didn’t extend this far out into the Arabian Sea.”

  “That means that this one is either expanding or moving,” Hassan Malik said with foreboding.

  “Or both,” the captain added. The captain knew that most whirlpools were formed when a hole in the floor of the ocean suddenly opened up or sometimes by currents. This eddy was formed by something else.

  “And we can do nothing but die.”

  “Yes, it appears that we’re victims of this change in the vortex and we can’t even notify anyone about what we have discovered,” Captain Babar Bhatti said.

  Suddenly another ship appeared in front of them. It had just appeared out of the fog and was keeping pace right in front of their bow. In the distance, the captain could see another ship on the same course.

  The two men suddenly became silent as the ship began to spin. They had been circling a hole in the ocean and had reached the center axis along with at least two other ships.

  “Goodbye my friend,” Hassan Malik said sadly.

  “Farewell,” the captain replied sincerely. “No one will know what happened to us. He gripped a ha
ndhold as their ship slipped into the dark deep hole.

  ***

  The captain wasn’t totally correct. On a small slip of land at the very edge of the border between Pakistan and India, only a few miles from the sprawling city of Karachi, eleven tough looking men stood on the shore line. They all wore black workman clothes. One man held a soccer sized metal ball. He had recently activated the device.

  “It looks like it works just fine,” he commented. “I attempted to create a whirlpool and that’s exactly what happened.”

  “Father will be so pleased,” the leader said dryly. His father was not good at compliments.

  “It looks like five ships have already fallen into the center,” another man commented.

  “Okay,” the leader exclaimed. “We’ve proven our point. Turn it off, he ordered loudly.”

  “But…I…don’t know how,” the man holding the device responded with concern.

  “Well, remove the meteorite in the open middle. That should make it stop,” the leader explained.

  The man holding the round weapon grabbed the rock and pulled. His body immediately glowed like a Christmas tree. It shook for a few seconds and then suddenly turned to ashes. The meteorite was still in his hand.

  “I guess we’ll need to find a better way to turn that thing off,” the leader quipped dramatically. The men around him were too shocked to speak. “Think of it this way, we only have ten more of these devices to test.” The men around him all shuddered.

  “Look the whirlpool is disappearing,” one of his men shrieked.

  “Well,” the callous leader responded. “Now we have learned two things today.

  “What should we do now?” a man asked.

  “Now we’re going to get to the plane and head to Africa. We need to collect more meteorites for the bigger project.”

  Part One

  The Researcher

  Chapter One

  “Can you please stick it in a little further,” the throaty female voice said provocatively. “I’m almost there.”

  “I’m out my full length. Maybe if you change your position,” an equally excited male voice responded. “You’re the contortionist, not me.”

  “I always have to do all the work,” the millennial aged woman — meaning she was under thirty — complained in a whine as she attempted to change her position by untying the ropes around her body and turning over.