Blackstone

The Mission to Loch Ness

The spring sunlight glimmered off the loch like a thousand jeweled daggers. I sat in the driver's seat of the small motorboat and played with my lifejacket and tried not to be completely bored out of my mind. I looked at Carrie and Thomas and sighed for what was probably the hundredth time.

              "Cheer up, Eliza. It could be worse. We could have gotten the Nepal mission," Thomas said cheerfully as he grabbed a bottle of water and a sandwich from a small cooler in the rear of the boat.

            "That's First Team, Charlie Company. And it's freezing in Nepal right now," Carrie said as she checked her phone.

            "It's not exactly the tropics here," I said zipping up my jacket against the morning chill.

            Our very first mission had brought us to the Scottish highlands and the legendary Loch Ness. Blackstone Control had detected a Time/Space disturbance a few weeks ago in the region and shortly thereafter reports of the legendary Loch Ness Monster had begun to surface creating an international sensation. Colonel Nash had dispatched us with a stern warning to return the plesiosaur to its proper time stream without being detected. Child's play for a pair of experienced Agents but a fairly advanced exercise for a new Blackstone team.

            "Thomas, anything on the Quantum Actual?" I asked.

            "I'll check it again." Thomas fiddled with a small metal machine in the back of the motorboat. It beeped and went silent. Thomas slapped it, picked it up and shook it.

            Carrie and I groaned. We'd been out here for three days and the Quantum Actual had been broken for about half that time. Thomas had whipped it up in a day after our assignments had been announced and sometimes I thought that he had rushed the job.

            It's a good thing he's funny, I thought, otherwise I would have drowned myself from boredom. Carrie was great and all but she wasn't the best conversationalist. She spent half her time in meditation, monitoring the time streams for any clue of the Nessie as Thomas referred to it but so far had detected nothing that could be of any help to us.

            I whipped out my razor phone and checked the countdown clock that I had set up. We had less than 40 hours. Less than 40 hours to find Nessie and get her through the time portal that Thomas would set up with the Quantum Actual before we were disqualified from the Battalion Finals.

            I smiled when I thought back to the first day on the Loch. We'd found the site of the unstable worm hole in no time and repaired the Time/Space damage in less than an hour. Thomas had come through with his mechanical genius. Carrie and I applauded his Quantum Actual that had sealed the wormhole in record time. We were sure we would set a new Blackstone record for the Battalion Finals but it seems Nessie had other plans. The exceptionally deep waters of the loch and the dense gray water had made finding the plesiosaur an almost impossible task. We had driven all over the great loch, scanning with our razor phones, but even our phones were ineffective. No wonder the legends of the Loch Ness Monster endured over hundreds of year, I thought. Finding the thing was next to impossible.

            "We should have brought Romano along with us,'" Thomas joked, "He probably would have swum down into the loch, lassoed the bloody Nessie like some cowboy and brought it back in time for tea."

            "That's it," I said, jumping to my feet.

            "What is it, Eliza," Carrie said, coming forward to join me.

            "We've been going about this all wrong, guys. We've been looking for this thing over 26 square miles of loch and haven't found it. Maybe it's time we make it come to us," I said whipping out my razor phone.