The depth gauge clicked through 27,000 feet and DeAngelo slowed them further.
“That wall’s not natural,” Sin Fen said.
“Hold up,” Dane ordered DeAngelo. Deepflight came to a halt, floating at 27,600 feet.
A horizontal line had appeared on the rock wall, a black mark against the gray wall, almost a foot thick. It extended left and right as far as the camera could see. Dane leaned forward, getting closer to the screen. The wall below the line seemed to be the same rock as that above, but the rock was totally smooth on the lower portion. The upper portion also appeared to overhang the rock below by a couple of feet. Dane checked the sonar. The wall was completely smooth below.
“The line curves very slightly,” he said. “Follow it to the right,” he told DeAngelo.
The twin propellers churned and the submersible moved along the rock wall, tracing the line.
“It is curved,” DeAngelo confirmed. “We’re descending very slowly.”
Soon Dane could see that the line was on a sloped forty-five degree angle, heading down. “It’s a big circle,” he said.
“Semi-circle,” DeAngelo corrected. “As wide as that curve is, we’re going to be at the bottom halfway down.”
Dane checked the sonar. The bottom was less than three hundred feet below them and the curve had yet to go through the vertical.
“Two hundred from bottom,” DeAngelo announced a minute later.
“This thing is big,” Dane was calculating in his head. “Almost a half mile in radius.”
“The question is,” Sin Fen said, “what is it?”
“One hundred feet and slowing,” DeAngelo’s eyes were glued to the sonar. The line slid by. “Fifty feet.”
Dane could feel the submersible slow, his body pressed slightly against the pad beneath.
DeAngelo switched on the camera in the belly of the sub. Inky blackness met the IR searchlight.
“Twenty-five feet.”
The bottom appeared on the screen. It consisted of striated black rock that met the gray wall. The line was exactly vertical where it disappeared into the black rock. Dane reached out with his mind, but felt nothing.
“This sure as hell ain’t natural,” DeAngelo muttered as he brought Deepflight to a hover. “What now?”
Dane looked at the projection of the muon circle against the sonar pattern and their own location.
“Go west,” Dane said, “along the wall. Take us to the center.”
“Roger that.” DeAngelo turned the submersible and they scooted along, keeping the bottom twenty feet below and the wall fifteen feet off their starboard side. The gray rock was perfectly smooth and Dane wondered if it was rock at all.
“Is the bottom view normal?” Dane asked DeAngelo.
“The only time I’ve seen anything like this is when I was in the Pacific off Hawaii- molten rock that hits seawater and cools quickly. But that was near the surface- magna that flows on land and then goes into the water. Magna that comes out directly into the ocean from a vent doesn’t look like this.”
“So how do we have this type of rock at twenty-eight thousand feet?” Dane asked.
“Hell, how do you have this smooth stuff to our right?” DeAngelo asked in turn. “I’ve never seen anything like that either.”
“It’s a door,” Sin Fen’s voice came over the intercom.
That’s what Dane had been thinking, but the sheer magnitude of the door itself and the depth they were operating at made it hard to accept the concept.
“Damn big door,” DeAngelo said. He glanced at the sonar. “It’s over a mile wide.”
“It doesn’t appear to have been opened in a while,” Dane said. “The bottom half looks like its blocked in.”
“Besides the constant low level field surrounding whatever is behind the door,” Sin Fen said, “Nagoya picked up spikes of muonic activity in this area several times.”
“We’ve got something ahead on the wall,” DeAngelo said.
Dane looked at the video screen. The IR searchlights lit up a black circle in the center of the gray. The black was forty feet in diameter. The infrared light didn’t reflect off of it, but rather seemed to be absorbed.
“Can we see it in normal light?” Dane asked as DeAngelo brought them to a hover.
“It won’t look any different,” DeAngelo said, but he turned on the outer lights anyway. The computer automatically switched to the normal light video cameras.
DeAngelo was right- it looked the same. A black circle that seemed to grab the light and suck it in. Dane had seen something like it before.
“It’s a gateway,” he told the other two. “Flaherty came to me in Angkor Kol Ker through something like that and we went through the same thing to go from Angkor to the Scorpion.”
“A gateway in the middle of what looks like a door?” DeAngelo said.
“I’ve got a smaller gate in my door at home,” Dane said. “My dog uses it.”
“I don’t think I like that analogy,” DeAngelo had turned them straight on, facing the black circle.
“The question is,” Sin Fen said, “what is on the other side? Where does it lead? If it’s like the small gate you went through at Angkor, it could transport us anywhere.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Dane said.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” DeAngelo said.
“We’re here,” Dane said.
“But maybe that’s solid,” DeAngelo protested.
“Then I’d suggest you go into it very slowly,” Dane said.
“I don’t-” DeAngelo began but Sin Fen cut him off.
“Go ahead. There is something on the other side.”
“Great,” DeAngelo muttered. He edged the two drive levers forward and they approached the black circle at a crawl.
Dane tried to push his mind forward, through the door, but he was picking up nothing. He wondered what had made Sin Fen say there was something on the other side.
The nose of the submersible was less than five feet from the black circle. Four. DeAngelo slowed them even more. Three. Two. One.
Dane felt the air around him change, press in as if taking on a thicker consistency. Pain rippled across his brain and he was dimly aware that alarms were going off and DeAngelo was throwing switches and pushing buttons in a flurry of activity next to him.
Dane looked up at the screen. Water all around, but the black circle was behind them now. And there was light suffusing the water from above.
“What happened?” Dane asked.
“Extreme pressure change outside,” DeAngelo pushed another button and the wail of the alarm stopped. The sudden silence accompanied the end of the pain in Dane’s head.
“Change to what?” Dane asked.
DeAngelo simply pointed at the depth gauge. It read thirty feet.
“How can that be?” Dane asked. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” DeAngelo said.
“Why don’t we surface and take a look?” Sin Fen suggested from the rear sphere.
DeAngelo edged back and the submersible headed for the surface. They popped up and Dane blinked as the top-side cameras recorded the scene around them.
They were floating in the center of circular body of still dark water, about three miles in diameter. A smooth black beach, two miles in width encircled the water, slowly rising and ending at a rock wall that curved up and in, meeting a half-mile over their heads. A large glowing orb, so bright the camera had to click in place two filters to prevent overload, lit the entire cavern.
Dane had no doubt that this was the muon space that Nagoya’s instruments had recorded. But what hadn’t been recorded were the hundreds of ships and planes that littered the black beach all around them, slowly revealed as the cameras rotated. It was an overwhelming vista; Dane saw ships ranging from Roman galleys through modern warships. Planes from old propeller bi-planes through a SR-71 reconnaissance jet, all tumbled on the metal floor like a madman’s model toy collection. There was
even a massive dirigible, the metal skin half-collapsed, lying on its side.
Some of the ships and planes were partially destroyed or disassembled. On the far shore a huge oil tanker had been stripped of its hull, only the steel girders remaining, like a beached whale that had decomposed to its skeleton. A large warship of what appeared to be World War I vintage was missing its bow up to the first gun turret, the metal cut cleanly.
There was no sign of the crews, just the relics.
“It’s a graveyard,” Dane whispered, trying to take in the large numbers and immense variety of craft he was viewing. He reached out with his mind but picked up no signs of life.
“Let’s hope it’s not our graveyard too,” DeAngelo muttered.
“Look to the right,” Dane said. “Between that yacht and the B-24 bomber.”
The escape pod from Deeplab lay on the black beach, the latest addition to the macabre scene.
* * *
Ariana Michelet saw the small dot representing Deepflight disappear off her sonar screen. She waited for it to reappear, hoping that it had simply gone behind something but the minutes passed and nothing happened.
She picked up the phone linking her to the Glomar and reported this new development. Captain Stanton told her she had a call that he was relaying.
She waited, then with a belch of static, Foreman’s voice echoed through the operations sphere.
“Do you have any idea where Deepflight is?” Foreman asked.
“It went into the circle of muonic activity,” Ariana reported. “That’s what you wanted from the very beginning, isn’t it?”
Foreman ignored her question and asked one of his own. “You’re aware the Bermuda Triangle gate is growing? Along with the other gates?”
“We heard that it grew when the line of activity came out, but not that it’s still growing.”
“Latest imagery indicates a growth rate that will put it over your location in eight hours,” Foreman said. “You’ll be inside the gate then.”
“And?” Ariana said. “What do you expect me to do about it? Abandon Deepflight? It’ll take the Glomar six hours to pull Deeplab up anyway.”
“I’m just keeping you informed,” Foreman said. “The electro-magnetic activity through the SOSUS system is continuing and increasing. The president has ordered all available ships and subs to sea in preparation.”
“In preparation for what?” Ariana asked.
“That’s what the president asked me and that’s what I’m hoping Dane and Sin Fen can tell us when they get back.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as they re-establish contact.” Ariana cut the transmission and sat back in the command chair.
Chapter 20
THE PAST
999 AD
“No.”
Ragnarok almost smiled at Bjarni’s curt assessment of the course he had just indicated on the map. The wind was blowing steadily out of the southeast and the sail was tacked to allow them to take full advantage. The islands that lay off the southwest tip of England had passed by off their starboard side an hour ago and they were now south of Eire Land.
He had Tam Nok’s two maps- paper and metal- laid out on the rear-most rowing seat. He tapped the metal one at the spot Tam Nok had said they had to get to. “We have to get there.”
“The currents will be against us,” Bjarni amplified his answer. “We cannot go to the southwest directly. You know that.” The old man leaned over. “The sea comes this way-” his gnarled finger traced a path in the opposite direction that Ragnarok had indicated. “Even if the wind is with us- which it won’t be- we could not fight the sea. We would, at best, sit still in the same place, at worst be pushed back. Even now-” he gestured at the sea around them- “we are being pushed to the north even though our dragon head faces due west.”
“There has to a be a way,” Ragnarok argued. Tam Nok was still sleeping in the forward part of the boat and Ragnarok saw no reason to waste any time- he wanted to head in the right direction immediately.
Bjarni sighed and knelt down next to the maps, Ragnarok joining them. He was simply glad to be back on his ship. Hrolf and the ship had been waiting as promised at the same point on the beach the previous evening. Ragnarok and Tam Nok had boarded without incident and they’d immediately set sail and continued through the night, putting distance between themselves and the land of the Saxons.
With the light of day, it was time to make a decision and Ragnarok knew that was not going to be as easy as Tam Nok would like.
“The only way we could get there-” Bjarni stabbed the map with his finger- “is to travel in a large circle this way.” He traced a route to the south of Iceland, beneath Greenland and along the coast of the large land that lay to the west. “Then we can catch the current and ride into the center of the ocean to the place you wish to go,” Bjarni concluded.
“How long would that take?”
“A year. Maybe less if all goes well,” the helmsman said. “But we would be traveling where no one has ever gone. Strange waters are dangerous waters. And we would have to winter somewhere along this coast,” he indicated the large continent. “And stop often for resupply. No one I know has ever made a journey that far.”
“Remember what Lailoken said,” Tam Nok was standing over the two of them. “He said the shortest distance would not a be straight line.”
“But going all the way around in almost a circle is certainly not the shortest distance either,” Ragnarok said.
Bjarni had picked up the metal plate and was studying it.
“He also said something about a short cut,” Tam Nok said.
“How can there be a short-cut?” Ragnarok argued. “We know where we are and we know where we wish to go. We cannot go in a straight line and any other route would take too much time.”
“There is a tunnel,” Tam Nok said. She took the map from Bjarni and pointed to a spot off the northern coast of Iceland.
“A what?” Ragnarok looked where she was pointing.
“It says here, these runes, that there is a tunnel,” Tam Nok said.
“You can read the markings?” Ragnarok asked.
“It is a language from the Greeks,” the priestess replied. “I learned some in my travels. I do not understand much, but this word here, it is the word for tunnel. And this thin line goes from there to here, which is where I wish to go. I believe the line is the tunnel.”
“This place,” Ragnarok said, “off the coast of Iceland, is where Ginnungagap, the great chasm ice and fire that separates the Gods is reported to be. I have heard stories of the sea opening up, of monsters climbing out of the depths. A tunnel in the great chasm would not be strange. The legends say the gods can travel through the underworld.”
Hrolf had been hovering in the background and now he added his opinion. “I do not wish to travel through the underworld.”
“We do not even know for sure if there is a tunnel there,” Ragnarok said.
“Monsters and demonesses who fly-” Hrolf spit. “We are intruding in things beyond us.”
“It may be beyond us,” Tam Nok agreed, “but it affects us.”
“How?” Hrolf demanded. “All we have heard are your stories. You talk of a threat to the world, but I see no threat except when we stick our noses where they should not be.”
“My people were-” Tam Nok began, but Hrolf interrupted.
“Your people. Not my people.”
“All people have been affected by the Shadow,” Tam Nok said. “Where do you think you come from?”
“Not from the same place as you,” Hrolf said. He held out his arm and placed it next to her’s. “We are very different.”
Tam Nok shook her head. “That is just skin color. I live in a hot, sunny place. My people have been there for many generations just as yours have lived in a cold, dark place for many generations. We adapt to where we live. In my journey here I have seen many different types of people. The ones who built the Great Wall that I passed through. With eyes like min
e but their skin was more yellow. The riders of the steppes. All different but all the same. Not here-” she rubbed her hand along her arm- “but here.” Tam Nok pressed her hand against her chest over her heart. “And here.” She pointed at her head.
“The stories, the legends, are different in detail but the same in meaning and depth. All speak of a great flood long ago. They give different reasons for it, but all knew of it. Even those who live in the very high mountains far from the ocean, who would not have even seen the flood. How do they know of it? Because their ancestors came on the flood. All our ancestors did.
“The battles between gods- all have different names for their gods, but there is much that is the same in the way the gods act, the way they fight. Even this tunnel under the Earth- every culture I have passed through speaks of an underworld.”
Tam Nok reached out and placed her hands on Hrolf’s chest. “This Shadow destroyed our ancestors and scattered them so far around the world that you stand here now and don’t believe we are kin. But we are. And it will happen again, except this time there will be no one left. Unless we stop it.”
All activity had ceased on the ship. Other than Tam Nok speaking there was only the sound of the sail snapping in the wind and the water passing by the hull. Every Viking was staring at the small, brown woman, listening to her words.
Hrolf looked down at her hands on his chest, then reached up and placed his old, worn ones over her’s. “I do not know of these things you speak. I would like to believe we are all one people. Then maybe we would stop killing each other and hating so much.” The old man’s eyes lifted to Ragnarok’s. “I will go where my captain commands.”
“We have to go northwest anyway,” Ragnarok said.
Tam Nok nodded. “We will go that way. I know it is the right way.”
Bjarni stood and relieved the man on the rudder. He pushed on the tiller and the dragon’s head swung around to the northwest.
Chapter 21
THE PRESENT
1999 AD
Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle a-2 Page 20
