Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle
( Atlantis - 2 )
Robert Doherty
When a nuclear missile is launched from the waters of the Bermuda Triangle, ex-Green Beret Eric Dane must lead a team into the mysterious depths to confront an enemy which has but one objective-the total annihilation of all life on Earth.
Robert Doherty
Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Mayer is the best-selling author of 40 books. He is a West Point graduate, served in the Infantry and Special Forces (Green Berets): leading an Infantry platoon and then Battalion and then Brigade level Reconnaissance platoons; commanding an A-Team and as a Special Forces battalion operations officer; commanded a training company, and was an instructor at the JFK Special Warfare Center & School at Fort Bragg. He also served in Special Operations Western Command on a variety of classified assignments. He has been studying, practicing and teaching change, team building, leadership and communication for over thirty years.
PRELUDE
THE DISTANT PAST
10,000 BC
Like a thousand mile long crimson snake winding its way across the middle of the ocean floor, a line of magna boiled up from the inner Earth, met the cool water and, in that fiery intersection, built a ridge higher and higher.
In a contradictory way, the mid-Atlantic Ridge grew because the tectonic plates that intersected beneath it were pulling away from each other. Like blood from a wound in the very planet, molten rock boiled forth the wider the planet-long split between the North/South American plates and the Eurasian/African plates grew. This process had been going on for millions of years, since Pangea had split into the separate continents.
In the center of the Atlantic, about 20 degrees north latitude, the split was even more pronounced because there was an intersection of four plates pulling away from each other, both east/west and north/south. This widening process- no more than a couple of inches a year, but multiplied over millennia- had pushed so much magna through that the hardening lava had actually risen above the surface of the water, producing a cross-shaped string of islands, which over more time, rose high enough to connect to each other and produce a land mass almost worthy of being a continent itself.
But it was a continent built over a crack in the Earth’s crust with no firm attachment to the planet other than the line of magna that still boiled through many miles under the surface. This made it very different from the other six continents which were anchored on top of one hundred kilometers of cold rock that made up the tectonic plates.
Between the extremely fertile volcanic soil that covered the land mass, and the bountiful ocean that surrounded it, the pieces were in place for species that could reap the food supplied by both sources to develop quickly. On that central Atlantic land mass, the first civilization of mankind arose. From packs of hunter-gatherers and fishers, to villages to cities, generations of humans slowly gained dominance over their land.
But after civilization was well established a strange darkness appeared in the ocean to the west, devouring any ships that sailed into it.
Other gates’ opened around the planet bringing their own patches of darkness, but the main thrust was through the gate in the western Atlantic. It soon became clear that there was something in the darkness, a Shadow that sought to expand and conquer.
A war was fought that the ancient ones of mankind didn’t understand against an enemy no one survived seeing. The enemy came in the darkness, through the sky, from the water and under the Earth.
And others came out of the gates to help the ancient ones defend themselves against the Shadow. These others called themselves the Ones Before. They gave the people weapons to fight the Shadow with.
The ancient ones of mankind fought a war that spread around the globe until the very existence of life was threatened. And in the climactic battle the ancient ones and the Ones Before stopped the Shadow but the price was high.
The continent in the middle of the Atlantic was destroyed in a cataclysm of fire and earthquake. The resulting tsunamis from that destruction touched every shore on the planet with such devastation that the legend of the Great Flood was written of both in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Old Testament of the Jewish people on the other side of the world.
The survivors of the ancient ones, a handful of ships, scattered to the four winds and planted the seeds for future civilizations to arise thousands years later.
But the Shadow that came out of the gates was stopped.
For the time being.
Chapter 1
THE PRESENT
THE WORLD APPROACHING
THE SECOND MILLENNIUM
1999 AD
The missile broke surface undetected in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle gate. It was a Trident II, a three-stage, solid-propellant, inertial guided ballistic missile with a range of more than 4,600 statute miles developed by Lockheed Martin for the United States Navy. Trident II was a more sophisticated version of the Trident I, upgraded mostly in terms of having a significantly greater payload capability. Forty-four feet long at launch, it was six point nine feet in diameter, weighed one hundred and thirty thousand pounds at launch and cost the taxpayer over forty million dollars each; which didn’t add in the price of the nuclear warheads in the nosecone.
As it punched into the air, an aerospike telescoped out of the front of the missile, reducing frontal drag by fifty percent. The first stage, made of a very strong, very light material called graphite epoxy, released and fell back into the ocean.
The navigational system of the missile was designed to link with global positioning satellites to confirm location and direction, but this Trident didn’t do that. Its course had been determined before launch.
Six thousand feet up, the Trident came out of the gate into clear air, just as the second stage fell and the third stage motor kicked in. It was already traveling in excess of twenty thousand feet per second.
The third stage burned for forty seconds and then released. The missile still had to reach its apogee and start coming down, but it was already four hundred miles from its launch point.
The first detection of the missile was made by a satellite linked to the US Space Command deep under Cheyenne Mountain outside of Colorado Springs, but it was already far too late as the information was processed and forwarded to the War Room at the Pentagon.
Just after kicking over and beginning its descent, the nosecone of the Trident exploded open and the eight nuclear warheads encased inside separated in their own MK5 reentry vehicles, in a linear spread pattern.
The warheads splashed down into the Atlantic along a three hundred mile long line.
With no detonation.
The warheads drifted down into the relatively shallow water of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge until they touched bottom.
Then they exploded.
* * *
“The last time we met, you were pointing a gun at me,” Foreman said.
Dane stared at the old man on the other side of the conference table noting the changes the years had etched. Foreman had aged well, except that his once-thick snow-white hair was thinner than Dane remembered. Foreman’s face was narrow, hatchet-like, with clear eyes. His body was slim, the suit he wore well-tailored. If anything, the old man looked too thin, almost sickly.
“You were lying to me then,” Dane said, reaching down to his left and rubbing Chelsea’s ear. The golden retriever cocked her head and pressed against his hand.
Dane was of average height and had thick black hair, with a sprinkling of gray along the sides. He wore glasses with a thin metal frame, his face angular and attractive. Just over fifty years old, he was as lean as he ha
d been in his twenties when he had last met Foreman at a CIA forward staging base in Laos prior to going on a cross-border mission where Dane’s entire team had disappeared.
“Withholding information,” Foreman clarified. “Lying is too strong a word to be used for the situation.”
They were seated in a conference room inside CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Sin Fen sat next to Foreman. She was an exotic-looking Eurasian woman, whose past Dane knew little about except somehow she had gotten hooked up with the CIA man and his obsession with the gates. That she had some sort of strange mental abilities, Dane was certain, just as he knew he had some. But the extent of her’s was almost as unclear to him as his own.
Foreman would be leaving shortly for a high level meeting in Washington with the president and the National Security Council to discuss what had just occurred in the Angkor gate in Cambodia and the other gates. The invasion of Earth from the other side’ through the gates at Angkor Kol Ker, the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil’s Sea off the coast of Japan and other locations around the world had been stopped by Dane with the destruction of the main propagating beam of radiation and electromagnetic interference in Cambodia. Beyond that, they knew little more than they had before the bizarre invasion started. Who the invaders were- other than the term the Shadow- why they were invading, where they were coming from; what they wanted; there were many questions that had not been answered yet.
The shocking reappearance of the submarine Scorpion- listed as lost in US Navy logs in 1968- was being kept under wraps, but Dane knew it could not last much longer. They could not explain the fact that not a man in the crew seemed to have aged a day in over thirty years. Nor could the crew explain it. As far as they were concerned, just minutes had passed between the time they last radioed Foreman in 1968 that the reactor was going off-line as they entered the Bermuda Triangle to the moment Dane appeared on the ship two days ago, transported somehow from the middle of the Angkor gate to the submarine.
“Why do you still need me?” Dane asked.
“Because that mission you began thirty years ago never ended,” Foreman said. “Because you stopped the invasion through the Angkor gate.”
“For the moment,” Sin Fen added.
Dane glanced at Sin Fen. Her mind was a black wall to him. Then back at Foreman. There, he could tell more, but not as much as he would have liked. He knew the old man was telling the truth, but he also sensed there was so much Foreman didn’t know or was holding back. Based on his experiences with the CIA operative, Dane knew it was likely a combination of both.
“I put everything in my report,” Dane said.
“Also,” Foreman continued as if he had not heard, “we lost the Wyoming, inside the Bermuda Triangle gate.”
“Other submarines have been lost in the gates,” Dane said.
Foreman steepled his fingers. “Not one with twenty-four Trident II ICBMs on board. With each missile carrying eight Mk 4 nuclear warheads rated at a hundred kilotons each. That’s 192 nuclear warheads. And our friends on the other side, whoever or whatever they are- the Shadow as your man Flaherty called them- seem to have a penchant for radioactive things. We defeated their weapons in this first assault, but we might not do so good against our weapons that they’ve captured.”
“Great,” Dane said. “We get the Scorpion back; the Shadow gets the Wyoming and its nukes.”
“We have you,” Foreman said. “You have some sort of power, some sort of attachment to these gates. You made it in the Angkor gate and out again. Two times. That’s once more than anyone else has ever done.”
Dane simply stared at Foreman without comment. He felt as if he were in a whirlpool, being sucked against his will into a dark and dangerous center. And to be honest, he wasn’t sure how hard he should swim against the power drawing him in, or if he was even capable of resisting.
Foreman slid several photos across the table. “The top one is the Angkor Kol Ker gate. Then the Bermuda Triangle and other gates around the world.”
Dane looked at the first photo. It was a satellite image of Cambodia. There was a solid black triangle in the center, about six miles long on each side. It was located in the north-central part of the country, in deep, nearly impenetrable jungle.
“Each gate is now shaped the same and stable at that size,” Foreman said. “That solid black is something new and we don’t know what it means. It’s never been reported as long as we have recorded history. No form of imaging can penetrate it. Ground surveillance from those visually watching the gates say the fog has coalesced into solid black. Sensors sent on remotely piloted vehicles, whether going via ground, air or sea, simply disappear into the black and cease transmitting. And they never come back out, even if they are programmed to return.
“The Russians- and this is classified as is everything else we discuss- sent a team into one of the gates on their territory near Tunguska two days ago. The team hasn’t come back and is presumed dead. The Japanese are still missing one of their destroyers that went into the Devil’s Sea gate.
“I’m afraid that although we stopped the propagation it went on long enough to allow this thing, to gain a solid foothold on our planet at each of the gate sites. That’s something that never happened before.”
“That we know of,” Sin Fen added.
“It means they’re waiting,” Dane said.
“They?” Foreman asked.
“The Shadow.”
“For what?” Foreman asked.
“To attack again,” Dane said. “They’ve got their beachhead. Maybe that’s all this last series of events was about.” He turned to Sin Fen. “Do you agree?”
She nodded. “That is the sense I have.”
Foreman tapped a finger on the top of the conference table. “I’ve been thinking about that. The again’ part,” Foreman clarified. “As Sin Fen noted, there is much about the past we don’t know. That abandoned city you found in the center of the Angkor gate- Angkor Kol Ker- it must have been attacked a long time ago. And we have a long history of ships and planes disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle and Devil’s Sea- no one knows how long these gates have been active, but a lot of evidence points back to at least as long at ten thousand years ago, when Atlantis was destroyed.”
“You really believe that?” Dane asked.
“About Atlantis? Don’t you now?” Foreman threw back. “After all you’ve seen and heard?”
Dane reluctantly nodded. He remembered Flaherty telling him the same thing- that the Shadow and the Ones Before’ were waging a war and it spilled over onto Earth every so often. That during one of those battles Atlantis had been wiped off the face of the Earth. There were also the markings on the side of the watchtower that Beasley, the Cambodian expert who had traveled with Dane into the gate, had deciphered. They indicated that the people who founded Angkor Kol Ker had traveled from somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean in order to escape the Shadow.
“It looks likely,” Dane agreed.
“The key,” Foreman continued, “is that we have to assume that this has happened before. The gates opening. The Shadow trying to come into our world and take it over. And it’s always been defeated. Even though Atlantis was destroyed so utterly it is just a legend, the rest of the planet survived. And it appears that there were survivors from Atlantis- the people who started civilization at Angkor Kol Ker, in Egypt, China, Central America and other places.”
“So?” Dane said.
“We stopped it this time but we didn’t defeat it. What we stopped was just the first assault and another one is coming.”
“You sound as if a new attack has already started,” Dane said.
Foreman nodded. “It has.” He pulled more imagery out of the top secret file. It showed a Mercator projection map of the entire world. Dane studied it- there were lines drawn through all the oceans.
“What am I looking at?” Dane asked.
“Lines of activity propagated by the gates in bursts,” Foreman said.
“Radioactive?
” Dane asked.
“No,” Foreman said. “Low level electro-magnetic spectrum activity, barely enough to register. We think the Shadow is doing its own kind of imagery.”
“Looking for what?”
Sin Fen leaned across the table and placed a long thin finger on the map, tracing the lines. “The Mid-Atlantic Ridge.” The finger jumped North America. “The Pacific Rim along our west coast all the way around to the coast of Japan and down to Australia. The Mediterranean, bifurcating through both the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. The Antarctic Plate all the way around the bottom of the world. The Himalayas where the Eurasian Plate meets the Indian Plate. Those are just the major lines. As you can see there are several smaller ones, here in the Caribbean, the Philippines. The Shadow is checking all the lines where tectonic plates meet,” Sin Fen concluded.
“And this, I assume, is a bad thing,” Dane said.
“We have to believe it is,” Foreman ignored the sarcasm. “We have no idea what’s going on inside those gates or what is on the other side or what they are up to.
“We need to look to our history and try to discover how our predecessors dealt with this,” Foreman continued. “We believe people in the past faced the same problem we’re facing and they succeeded in stopping the Shadow.”
“The people at Angkor Kol Ker didn’t succeed very well,” Dane noted. “Nor did the people of Atlantis.”
“But the Earth wasn’t overrun or destroyed,” Foreman noted. “The Shadow tried to make it’s big push out of Kol Ker this time, but maybe the last time this happened, they tried their main effort somewhere else and it was defeated. Or there is a pattern to their assault and we’ve only met the first wave.”
“But do you have any idea where this happened? Or who fought this battle?” Thorpe asked.
“The Scorpion didn’t come back by accident,” Foreman said. “There’s something or someone on the other side of the gate that’s trying to help us. The Ones Before. The same force that sent your teammate Flaherty to you at Angkor Kol Ker. It sent the Scorpion back to us with a message.”
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