by Greg Donegan
The computer beeped, letting Conners know that Bright Eye was rapidly approaching the target area. She ran through the final checks one more time. She sensed Konrad had joined her. He was looking over her shoulder waiting to see what happened.
One hundred and twenty miles up, the dual satellite combination sped through space, north to south over the globe, China passing beneath rapidly. The reactor was working perfectly, a large cylinder, lacking the shielding of its cousins on the planet's surface below. Next to it, the circular satellite containing Bright Eye was also functioning properly. The twenty foot round door that covered the laser array smoothly slid open, revealing the tips of the emitters. A large flat panel, the laser receiver, was extended on a mechanical arm to the right of the array, unfolding until it was over a hundred yards long by fifty wide, its cells ready to receive the bounceback.
Power flowed from the reactor to the lasers, accumulating in capacitors as the countdown dropped below twenty seconds. As Bright Eye passed over north-central Cambodia, the on-board computer went into hyper-drive. Bolts of laser light flashed out, each individual laser immediately firing again and again as the computer rotated both the frequency of the laser itself and the direction the tip was pointed in, making minute adjustments at the base of each. Those tiny adjustments, when multiplied over the one hundred and twenty-five mile down trip each laser beam traveled, allowed Bright Eye to take an accurate picture of a large area.
Traveling at the speed of light, the first beams reached down and hit the target area.
“We're getting something,” Conners announced as she read the data on her computer screen, a real-time downlink from Bright Eye, showing what the receiving panel was getting. “I think we've got a--”
She paused as a large glow showed in the middle of the screen. “What the heck?”
A bolt of energy, in the shape of large glowing golden ball, over fifty meters in diameter, punched out of the mist covering the triangle and raced up through the down-firing lasers, scattering them in all directions.
As it gained altitude, the ball's diameter slowly grew smaller, but it was covering the distance between it and Bright Eye at a rapid pace.
“Shut it down!” Konrad yelled.
They could both see the large golden ball on the sighting scope downlink that was part of Bright Eye. The laser image had gone completely haywire.
Conners fingers flew over the keyboard, turning off the lasers, but the ball continued to gain altitude toward Bright Eye, until it filled the entire screen. Then suddenly there was a gold flash of light and nothing. The data that had been on the computer screen suddenly went dead.
“Do you have contact?” Konrad demanded.
Conners felt the bottom of her stomach fall out as she realized what she had seen. “Nothing. I've got nothing. Bright Eye is gone!”
“Oh, man! I've got to call the Director,” Konrad was running from her office.
“Dear Lord,” Conners whispered.
CHAPTER SIX
“Monsters? What exactly did you mean by that?”
Dane had been waiting for that question and as he'd expected, Freed was the one to pose it. There'd been no time for it to be asked earlier. Since Dane had accepted the mission they had been busy, getting ready to depart and heading to the airfield.
They were in Michelet's private jet, the same converted 707 that had flown Dane and Chelsea from the disaster site to LA. Now they were over the eastern Pacific, heading west at maximum speed. Paul Michelet and Roland Beasley were seated in deep leather chairs on the other side of a small table. Freed was next to the window on Dane's right and Chelsea lay in the aisle at Dane's other side, sleeping.
“If the CIA told you about me,” Dane said, “then you probably saw the after-action report for that mission. I told them the truth.”
Michelet shook his head. “We never saw a copy of the after-action report. But if you told the CIA that monsters were responsible for the mission's failure, that would explain a lot.”
“Like my getting chaptered out of the army on a psych eval?” Dane asked.
“Yes,” Freed said, meeting Dane's gaze. “We knew about your discharge, but all we could find out was that it was listed as combat stress.”
Dane's laugh had a bitter edge to it. “I was on my second tour and I'd been running cross-border recon missions for six months. I'd had more than my share of combat stress, but when I got debriefed in Laos by the CIA field rep, he didn't back up a word I said, just passed me to their army liaison who thought I was bonkers.”
Dane hadn't been worried about keeping his army career. Not after what he had seen. Surprisingly, Foreman had listened to him carefully, asking many questions, expressing no opinion one way or the other. But the army had definitely had a negative reaction and with no back-up from Foreman, they had quickly dumped him.
“What kind of monsters?” Freed asked, ever the professional, trying to size up the opposition no matter how strange.
Dane wondered why they believed him. Of course, he reminded himself, maybe they didn't and were just humoring him.
“If we're going in there,” Dane said, pointing at the ever-present map on the table in front of him, “then you need to hear what happened on that mission.”
He told the story, from leaving the CCN camp in Vietnam, through the CIA base in Laos, the flight in, the landing zone, the movement and the crossing of the river. He wasn't interrupted once, not even when he tried as best he could to describe the encounter on the other side of the river. When he finished describing Flaherty being dragged away into the fog by a blue beam of light, he had to stop for a moment. He had never told another person the complete story after being debriefed by Foreman.
There were many times he had wondered if it all hadn't been a nightmare, but always the reality of his memory was reflected by the scar on his forearm.
“How did you get away?” Freed asked.
“I ran,” Dane said.
They waited for an elaboration, but Dane added none.
“How did you get out of immediate area and escape the monst--whatever it was that did that to your team?”
It was hard for Dane to know what Freed believed by the tone of his voice. “I was lucky.” The voice in his head, Dane decided was something he best keep to himself. Over the years working with Chelsea, he had learned to keep silent about the voices and the things his mind saw and heard that others didn’t. He’d known since he was very small that he was different. He’d learned early on that people feared and distrusted different.
“Lucky?” Michelet repeated.
Dane shrugged. “I was chased to the river. Once I got on the other side, out of the mist, there was no problem.”
“No monsters?” Freed said, his voice flat.
“No monsters.”
“No beams of light?”
“No.”
“How did you get out of Cambodia?” Freed pressed. “You said you didn't know where the CIA pick-up zone was.”
“I used the river as my left guide. I knew it would flow east, eventually emptying into the Mekong. Then I followed the Mekong to South Vietnam. I was picked up by friendly forces there and immediately flown back to Laos for debrief.”
“You make it sound simple,” Freed said. He tapped the map. “It's over five hundred kilometers from where you were to South Vietnam. Through territory thoroughly infiltrated by the Viet Cong and the NVA.”
Dane shrugged, but didn't elaborate. He felt no need to share that hellish trip with these men, safely seated in the comfort of the Michelet corporate jet. The nights spent pushing through the jungle. The days hidden, covered by leaves, insects crawling over his body. The grubs he'd eaten for nourishment. The feeling of sitting totally alone, sensing there wasn't anyone within miles, listening to the sounds of the jungle, falling into fitful sleep, nightmares jolting him awake, hearing the cries of his teammates.
“What do you think it was that burned you and Flaherty?” Freed asked, bringing the conversation back to possible
threats. “The beam of light?”
Dane thought it interesting that of everything he described that was the threat Freed focused on. He could feel the scar tissue on his forearm. “I have no idea. I just saw the beam of light.”
“A laser?” Michelet asked.
“I don't know.”
“You say there were two colors of light. One gold, one blue?” Michelet asked.
“Yes.”
“Perhaps the other things--the monsters--you saw were holograms,” Michelet suggested. “One of my divisions has been doing some work on those for the movie industry. Very realistic. In fact,” he added, “this strange fog you're talking about, it would help with the projection process considerably.”
Dane wasn't surprised at that response. “It wasn't a hologram that killed my team. The thing Flaherty shot died. I don't think you can do that with holograms. The bullets would have went right through it. And it was almost thirty years ago. I don't believe anyone had technology that could have produced those things back then or even now.”
“Did it ever occur to you that you might have imagined the whole episode?” Freed quietly asked.
Dane stared at the black man. “Yes. It occurred to me.”
“The CIA has done quite a bit of work on hallucinogens,” Freed said. “Perhaps you were part of an experiment. I know that some of those cross-border teams used chemical warfare agents, some of it pretty cutting edge stuff.”
Dane shrugged. “If you think I hallucinated the whole thing then you made a big mistake bringing me here. Unless of course you've hallucinated your plane going down.”
“I'm not doubting you,” Freed said. “I'm just doing my job.”
“I know that,” Dane said, “but remember you came to me.”
“I've heard that MACV-SOG used to issue drugs to its people,” Freed persisted, ignoring him.
Dane nodded. “We used amphetamines sometimes on missions, after we'd been in for a few days, but I hadn't taken anything on that mission. We weren't in long enough.”
“Did you carry any chemical agents to use on enemy personnel?” Freed asked.
“No.”
“But--” Freed began, when Dane interrupted him.
“Listen,” he said, pointing at the recorder on the table. “You're the one who told me that message from my old team was real and only two days old. And that it came from here,” Dane's fist thumped down onto the map. “So unless you're lying, then you have to believe I'm telling the truth.”
“Uhh--” Beasley caught everyone's attention. “Could you describe the thing that your team leader shot a little more clearly?”
Dane ignored Freed's look of irritation and gave as much detail as he could.
Beasley pulled a folder out of his briefcase when Dane was done. The professor thumbed through then stopped on a certain page. “Did it look like this?”
Dane looked at the picture of carved stone, then up at the professor. “That's it exactly.”
“Hmm,” was Beasley's only comment.
“Where was that picture taken?” Freed demanded.
“Angkor Wat,” Beasley replied. “Off a temple wall.”
“What is it?” Freed asked, taking the book and looking at it more closely.
“A creature of Cambodian myth,” Beasley said. “It seems the legends are coming alive.”
Dane flipped pages, looking at other carvings. There were no representations of the cylindrical objects that had gotten Castle. He paused at one page. “What’s this?”
Beasley looked down. “That’s a Naga.”
“There was a sculpture of that on each corner of the watchtower we found,” Dane said.
Beasley nodded. “That’s not uncommon. Naga is Sanskrit for snake. The Naga in this part of the world is a sacred snake. It plays an important part in the mythology of Southeast Asia and in Hinduism. In fact, it is probably the most important symbol in that part of the world. In Hindu mythology, the Naga is coiled beneath and supporting Vishnu on the cosmic plane. The snake also swallows the waters of life, these being set free when Indra hits the snake with a bolt of lightning, rupturing the snake’s skin.
“What’s interesting,” Beasley continued, “is that the word has meaning far beyond the borders where the Sanskrit language is used. In Egypt and even Central and South America, the word Naga is used, but in those places it means one who is wise. In China the word Naga is representative of the dragon and is associated with the Emperor or the ‘son of heaven.’”
Beasley continued. “There are some fringe groups that believe the word Naga is one of the few words from an earlier, universal language, that has survived into ‘modern’ language. The language of Atlantis.” Beasley ignored the looks that statement brought him. “Of course, the serpent myth is larger than simply the Sanskrit word Naga. Even Christianity’s oldest myth features a serpent.”
“You say this thing was what you shot?” Freed was staring at the first picture.
“Yes,” Dane answered.
“I want a full brief-up on Angkor Wat before we land,” Michelet said. “I want to know everything there is to know about it.”
Beasley shrugged. “I can do that in ten minutes because we don't know much about it at all.”
“Just get it ready,” Freed said in clipped voice, before turning back to Dane.
They questioned him in more detail but despite the nightmares that he'd had over the years, he wasn't able to elaborate much. He sensed that Freed knew he was holding something back, but Dane told them as much as they needed to know. What was his own, Dane felt he could keep to himself.
“I've got a question,” Dane said during one of the brief pauses between questions directed his way. “How do you propose to get us into the area?”
Freed pulled a piece of acetate from under the map and laid it on top. “This is an outline of the no-fly area that the Air Force imposed during the Vietnam War.”
It showed an inverted, triangular shape covering several hundred square kilometers of north-central Cambodia. Dane examined it. The eastern angle of the triangle ran along the river that he had crossed so many years ago.
“Where exactly did your plane go down?” Dane asked.
Freed used an alcohol pen to mark a spot on the overlay. It was about five kilometers inside the eastern edge of the triangle. “Right about there,” Freed said.
“When did the plane start experiencing trouble?” Dane asked.
Freed marked another spot, this one about ten kilometers further east from the last dot, just outside the triangle.
“It's bigger,” Dane said.
“What's bigger?” Michelet asked.
Dane pointed. “The triangle. It’s crossed the river, if it affected your plane that early.”
The other three stared at the map.
“This ancient guard house you saw,” Beasley prompted.
“Yes?” Dane said.
“Where was it?”
Dane looked at the map. “If this is where you say I was, then it was on the high ground, here to the east of this river.” Dane allowed his mind to project the contour lines of the map into a three dimensional mental image. “It was right here.”
Freed noted the position. “It might be a good place to start.”
“That's your job, Mister Freed,” Michelet said. He turned to Beasley. “Now it's time for you to earn your money. Tell me about Angkor Wat and this carving of the creature that Dane says his team leader shot.”
Beasley nodded. “If you want to know about Angkor Wat, I have to give you an overview of Cambodia's history first, because Angkor Wat comes later.” Beasley waved a fat hand over the map. “Around 800 AD this entire area was under the control of the Khmer Empire. Most people have heard of Angkor Wat, which is the massive temple complex built in the ancient city of Angkor Thom right here, but the first capitol of the Khmer was at Angkor Kol Ker.”
“I thought you said that was a legend?” Michelet interrupted.
“Sometimes all we have
to work with are legends,” Beasley said. “And often there is quite a bit of truth in legend. After all, they just don’t spring up from nothing. There is always a seed of something real at the core of every legend.”
“Where did the Khmers come from?” Dane asked.
Beasley shrugged. “If I could answer that, I'd have solved one of the greatest debates about that part of the world. No one really knows. Historically, the Khmer seem to have appeared out of nowhere and then a millennium later the kingdom disappeared and the city was deserted. From the Fifth to the Fifteenth centuries the Khmer empire was the greatest in Southeast Asia and the city of Angkor Thom, which contains the temple of Angkor Wat, was one of the greatest cities of the world.”
Beasley continued. “But at the very beginning of the empire, before Angkor Thom was founded, the Khmer capitol was reportedly at Angkor Kol Ker. The city was abandoned and the king moved south in 800 AD to found Angkor Thom. It has always been a subject of debate among Cambodian scholars as to the reason for that move and the location of Kol Ker.”
“When was Angkor Kol Ker founded?” Dane asked.
“The Khmer Empire was first mentioned in Chinese histories in the 5th Century which is why I said earlier that the Empire lasted a thousand years. But even those histories say the Khmer Empire existed long before then. Some suggest for several thousand years before that, which is quite remarkable if you think about it. In fact,” Beasley seemed to be relishing his role as resident expert, “in an ancient Chinese text about the Xia State, usually considered the first Chinese unified state in the third millennium BC, there is an obscure reference about an Empire far to the south whose people came from over the large sea.”
Dane frowned. “What large sea?”
“I would assume the Pacific,” Beasley said, “given the geography of that part of the world, although for the ancient people of that time, even the Sea of China would have been considered a very large body of water.”
“If it was the Pacific,” Dane said, “then that’s saying the Khmer came from the Americas three thousand years before Christ was born?”
“Possibly much earlier than that,” Beasley said.
