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CHAPTER 1

The waters of the Bermuda Triangle were unusually quiet. There was a flat calm and visibility was excellent. The 7th District Coast Guard's main meteorological office in Miami reported no hurricane activity north of the Greater Antilles. This was unusual for the time of the year. Weather stations up and down the Florida coastline noted no untoward atmospheric disturbances, though fliers from the Naval Air Station at Fort Lauderdale had reported a strange luminescence above the water some miles from shore. Despite the large number of pleasure craft plying the glassy waters of these reputedly dangerous seas, no distress signals had been picked up by the Air Sea Rescue's radio tower at Palm Beach for some weeks. The boys manning the emergency monitoring station were getting quite bored. And small ships warning flags lay neatly folded in their lockers at signal stations from Key West to Savannah.

There had been no UFO sightings in the area for months. Despite three years of study, a team of researchers from the University of Wichita had come across no magnetic anomalies. A study group from the Department of Parapsychology had found no unusual psychic aberrations at play either. Within the confines of the vile vortex, there had been no sightings of freak currents, seaquakes, tidal waves, waterspouts, reverse gravitational fields, black holes or death rays from Atlantis. And, as far as anyone could tell, the space time continuum remained intact. Everything was as it should be.

At 25 degrees 49 minutes 59 seconds North, 80 degrees 2 minutes 17 seconds West - the exact spot where Eastern Airline's ill-fated flight 401 mysteriously disappeared in 1972 - a luxury yacht belonging to world-famous pop impresario Vincent Slimworth Brocklemeyer lay calmly at anchor. The $2.5 million ocean-going ketch heaved softly in the gentle swell. Small wavelets, stirred by the cooling breeze, slapped softly against the pre-stressed platinum-precipitated polycarbon hull. And plump porpoises played deep beneath her retractable titanium keel.

Brocklemeyer sat sunning himself on the poop of the Payola. He was sipping a cocaine and coca cola cocktail and shuffling through a whole heap of pre-signed recording contracts. Between slugs he sucked on a huge Havana. In his hand a diamond-studded Cartier felt-tip which deftly deleted a clause here and added one there. On his ears was a 1,000-watt quadraphonic Walkman which was gently blasting his brains out with the latest sounds around.

At the other end of the 130-foot yacht - not far from the spot where the cabin cruiser Witchcraft sank without a trace on December 24, l969 - a cabin door opened and out came former physics major and would-be good-time girl Tamale Bunsenberg. Brocklemeyer's nubile companion was dressed in a scanty bikini which covered barely three square centimetres of her breathtaking physique. Under one arm she had a batch of the latest fanzines and paperback copy of Twenty Top Ways to Marry a Millionaire. Under the other, a leather-bound volume of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity in the original German and the bumper summer issue of the Journal of Quantum Mechanics.

Her bleached blonde hair had frizzed out in the warm air. Her mirrored shades were smooth as the sea. Her lip gloss was as damp and inviting as a Caribbean cocktail. And her giddy hips swayed like a lynchmob's leftovers as she sashayed up the smooth teak gunnel.

On the aft deck, she dropped her reading material beside a recliner. She took a belt of Brocklemeyer's booze, spat her spearmint-flavoured Dentine into the ocean (it hit the water near to the point where the Stavenger sank in 1931) and surveyed the mis-shapened torso of her boorish bedmate with ill-disguised contempt.

Had Brocklemeyer's body been a traffic accident, it would have been considered a write-off. His once-proud shoulders were narrowed from years of hunching over pictures of dead presidents. He was a great admirer of George Washington - not to mention Lincoln and Jackson - especially when depicted in green. Long black hairs corkscrewed like pig's tails out of his nose, ears and the pores of back. The folds of loose skin around his pectorals hung down like the tits of a gorilla that's been through the change of life. His huge belly was spotty and shaped like a sesame seed bun - Tamale had found the onion and the gerkin, but it seemed that the short-order cook forgotten to put the meat in her burger. His canary yellow, extra-large, contour-hugging Bermuda shorts did reveal three large bulges in the front though. Unfortunately, the one on the left was made by the keys to his office safe, his home safe, the safe on his yacht, the safe on his private plane and the safes in his Rolls, Cadillac, Merc, Porsche, Lambourgine and Corvette Stingray. The one on the right contained enough small change to feed every meter in Detroit for a week. And the third bulge was much smaller than the other two.

Brocklemeyer was flattered by Tamale's attention to his petsel. He tugged the peek of his admiral's cap, shifted his triangular nose shade to a more jaunty angle and gripped his oversized stogie as if to say:"Hi, babe, how's it going." Then he went back to the serious business of amending the small print.

With one hand Tamale slipped the catch on her bikini top. It sprang from her quivering brusts. She twirled over her head like a lasso, and flung it at Brocklemeyer so it bolassed around his neck, cups akimbo. Then the topless temptress flung herself down on the sunbed and started creaming her breasts with a family-sized bottle of Ambre Solaire.

The sight of this was enough to make even a middle-aged palooka like Brocklemeyer pause for thought. He paused mid-proviso, bite hard into his butt and hissed sexily:"Hey babe, wanna hear my new band."

"Nah," said Tamale, seizing the opportunity that annunciating this single bleat presented to shove a fresh stick of Juicy Fruit into her open gob.

But Brocklemeyer was not the sort of nudnik that took nah for an answer. He flipped the cassette out of his Walkman and into the huge ghetto blaster at his feet. Suddenly the gentle lapping of the sea was drowned by a disgusting din. And Brocklemeyer began to jerk about like a blancmange on blues to the erratic tempo and mouth to the warblings of the seriously off-key singer.

"Great, aint they?" he yelled over the horrendous row. Tamale shrugged disinterestedly. "Signed them last week in Montana. They're the biggest band ever to come out of Podunk."

Tamale yawned and scratched her pubes. Her blood-red nails were plenty long enough to reach down the front of her minuscule G-string without disturbing its diaphanous fabric. Then she picked up her Einstein. Brocklemeyer immediately frowned. If there was one thing he could not stand it was bright broads. Tamale was aware of his change of expression. So she flicked through a few pages of differential equations, pretended to look puzzled, scratched herself again - this time where the hair was blonde - then put the book down and began drooling over the latest idol in one of her teen mags.

The phone on the deck by their feet rang. But Brocklemeyer didn't hear it. He was too busy bopping away to what could loosely be described as the beat. So Tamale lolled forward to answer it.

"Yeah," she said. "Sure, he's right here." She kicked Brocklemeyer in the Bermudas to get his attention and handed the receiver over to him.

"Hello Hymie," yelled Brocklemeyer. "Wanna hear my new band?" he asked. And before there was time for an answer he jammed the mouthpiece right up to one of the speakers.

"Yeah Hymie, ri-ight, that sure is one helluva hullabaloo," he said, returning the receiver to his ear.

Tamale resumed her bored expression and started to do her nails. The cleanser, the cotton, the vanish and the tools were all on the deck beside her. But as a manicure table she used the open pages of the Einstein.

"...oh her, the shiksa that answered the phone?" bawled Brocklemeyer down the long-distance connection. "She's just some dumb broad I picked up on the college gig circuit. Yeah Hymie, I know its crazy but these young foxes get the hots for us hotshot record producers."

Tamale gave him one of her looks, which addled into a grin when he looked back at her. The lunkhead, she thought. The guy don't know his kopf from his kishkes. He did not even klocked she was a kike. She resumed her vacuous gum chewing and got stuck back into space-time continuums and e=mc2.

"Okay, so what you got me?" He sighed. "But Hymie, I got Glen Campbell booked in them dates...They want how much?!...Who are these Rolling Stoned guys anyway?...Who?...Aren't they a load of drug addicts? Jeez, Hymie, I can't be messing with no bunch of junkies. There is such a thing as the Moral Majority these days, y'u know...And what?...They're English!...Jesus H. Christ Hymie. I aint putting no million bucks up to back no bunch of junkie limey preverts on a sponsored trash-in of the Holiday Inns of America. Why can't them Britishers stay home and beat on their own hotels?" But before Hymie had a chance to get an oy in edgeways, Brocklemeyer answered his own question. "'Cos dem lords would never let a bunch of longhair commies into Claridges, that's why...But nothing, Hymie. You tell this guy Jigger to go shove..."

"Jagger," corrected Tamale, looking up from her cuticles and curl vectors.

"What?" said Brocklemeyer, breaking off from his call for a moment. "Oh yeah, Jagger...and you tell this Mike Jagger to..."

"It's Mick, Mick Jagger," whispered Tamale.

"...and you tell this guy Mick Jagger that the British went out with Paul Revere. I aint putting my rock-and-roll roll on no thrift-shop five-piece band of shi..."

Tamale could stand it no longer. How had she ever gotten involved with this mental defective?

"But Vinnie baby," she protested."On their last tour the Rolling Stones grossed over forty million bucks. Fortune magazine said that their profit ratio exceeded that of any major corporation in America. Forbes compared Mick Jagger to the young Paul Getty and Business Week said that dollar for dollar..."

"Hold it a minute, Hymie, I'm being interrupterated by this meathead dame here," said Brocklemeyer putting his hand over the mouthpiece and glared in Tamale's direction.

She realised at once what was wrong. She was being too clever by half. Brocklemeyer hated any woman being too smart. He preferred cute to klug. So she changed her tactics immediately.

"But Vin-nee," Tamale whined in her sexiest babydoll voice.

"Don't call me Vinnie, baby," said Brocklemeyer in his warmest treacliest gruff masculine tone.

"But Vin-nee," said Tamale again, rubbing her foot up Brocklemeyer's hairy leg. "I jus' flip for that Mick Jagger guy. He makes me feel oh so sex-y." And she pouted and waggled her ample upper epidermis provocatively in front of him.

Brocklemeyer cleared his throat and took his hand away from the mouthpiece again.

"Listen Hymie," he barked. "Give this limey faggot anything he wants...Yeah, you heard me...I want this guy Jogger's signature on a cast-iron contract yesterday. Book the British band in on the ballpark circuit...Yeah, I know Hymie. Those English acts are lucky when they can fill a meeting house in Hackensack. But the publicity boys should be able to come up with some angle - built up Jugger's sex image, get their latest record banned, that sort of shmeer. Oh, and yeah, tell Glen that we'll try and squeeze him in next year sometime. And if he's upset about it, remind him that he's under contract so we've got him by the baitsim."

Brocklemeyer slammed down the phone bristling with macho.

"That's the way us men do business," he said in the full baritone. "Rough, tough, decisive."

Then he softened, slightly.

"You know, you inspire me, baby," he growled. "But I don't want you worrying your pretty little head about my work. It's man's business."

Tamale giggled girlishly as Brocklemeyer chucked her under the chin.

"Oh Vinnie," she said. Brocklemeyer winced. "Y'u know I love y'u, Vinnie."

"I don't know what I'd do without you babe," he replied, his eyes a little damp around the corners. He leant towards her and she could feel his hot breath on her nipples. "You know, you remind me of what Hemmingway once said." Tamale melted under his gaze. "'Only the beautiful deserve the brave.'"

Tamale closed her eyes in total submission. She pouted and her hands floated down to her tie-up bikini bottoms. She took the side bows between her fingers and slowly, divinely, excruciatingly slowly, she pulled the loose ends. The sheer fabric fell away. One touch and she'd be nothing but a damp spot on the deckchair.

But that touch never came. When her reverie subsided she heard a strange scratching sound. As soon as she opened her eyes she saw what the scratching was. It was the sound of felt-tip against contract conditions. Jeez, she thought, why don't he scratch his felt-tip over me sometime.

She retied her bikini bows and flung a fanzine at Brocklemeyer's head. Then she turned over so that her tits were covered and got stuck back into her Einstein.

Peace descended on the Payola's poop once more. The demo tape in the ghetto blaster hit autostop. And the gentle lapping of the waves against the hand-crafted hull could be heard once more.

As the afternoon drew on the temperature in the eastern Sargasso soared causing a slight heat haze on the horizon. It was a perfect afternoon like this one in 1945 that Flight 19 had gone missing over these same waters. But today there were no visible signs of danger. And the 34-berth yacht rocked itself slowly to sleep in the subtle swell.

Around 4.30, Tamale put down her book and took a little nap while Brocklemeyer started a little light figure work, trying to work out new ways to rip off his clients. It was then that it happened.

Suddenly there a strange humming sound in the air, followed by a reverse countdown.

"A-one, a-two, a-one two three four," it went.

Above the poop of the Payola a strange multicoloured mist seemed to gather. It swirled around until it was as dense as a smog on Sunset. Then out of it, a few feet in front of the startled Brocklemeyer, a strange creature materialised. It had four arms and four legs. Its skin was bright blue. Its green hair was greased back in a quiff. And it wore a shiny gold space suit with metallic blue trimmings.

Brocklemeyer sat there open-mouthed in amazement, as the alien curled its upper lip, gyrated its hips and launched into garbled, intergalactic cover of Carl Perkin's rock-and-roll classic

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