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.”
This was news to Dane. “What message?”
Foreman pulled a photo out of the file folder and pushed it across to Dane. It was an image of the sail of the Scorpion, the tower that held the periscopes and small bridge used when the sub was on the surface. Foreman slid a second picture, a close-up of the side of the sail. Something was etched in the metal, strange lines that Dane didn’t recognize. He had gotten off the submarine in the dark, cross-loading directly to a navy helicopter to be flown here. The etching must have been discovered the following morning. Below those lines was a drawing that Dane looked at for a while before he recognized that it was a map.
“What is this?”
“On top-- runic writing,” Foreman said. “It took us a little while before Sin Fen saw it and was able to recognize the language and decode it. On the bottom, a map. It also took some time to determine exactly what the map was of, because the scale and details are not exactly correct-- or what I should say is-- correct today.”
Dane found the writing interesting and almost familiar. In between two horizontal lines, were a series of vertical and curved slashes. “What language is this?” he asked Sin Fen.
“Norse,” she answered. “The language of the Vikings.”
After all the strange things he had experienced in the past month, Dane didn’t even ask how Viking Runes ended up scratched into the metal on the side of a nuclear submarine that had disappeared for over thirty years. “What does it say?”
“This is the literal translation,” Sin Fen handed Dane a piece of paper:
HERE FIND THE SHIELD
TO DEFEAT THE VALKYRIES
AND THOSE WHO FOLLOW THE DARK ONES
I HAVE DONE MY DUTY
IT STOPS THE FORGE OF VULCAN
REVENGE ME
“Vulcan’s forge?” Dane asked.
“The power of the gods breaking through the crust of the earth,” Sin Fen said. “The Shadow might have used the instability of the Earth’s surface along the juncture of the tectonic plates to destroy Atlantis.”
“Who wrote this? Who has done his duty?” Dane asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine, but the important point is the Shield stops the power of the Shadow.”
“There’s not much more information about this Shield,” Dane noted, “as the writer.”
“The Valkyries,” Sin Fen said, “are part of Norse mythology. They were the hand-maidens of the gods and were reported to devour the flesh of the dead on the battlefield.”
“Monsters of legend,” Dane said out loud.
Sin Fen nodded. “You ran into the seven-headed Naga of Khmer legend in the Angkor gate. And other strange creatures. It appears there is more truth to the Valkyries than simply legend.”
Dane looked at the sheet. “‘And those who follow the dark ones’? Does that mean those who follow the Valkyries? Or humans who worship them?”
“That’s not clear,” Sin Fen said. “There are only sixteen characters in the runic alphabet. And it was not used very extensively so there isn’t a great body of work to draw upon to even be sure the translation is correct.”
“Great,” Dane said.
“According to legend,” Sin Fen added, “the runic alphabet was given to the Vikings by the god Odin. The word run means mystery, so even the Vikings might not have been too sure about their own written language. Modern scholars aren’t certain where or how it originated, but they have noted some similarities between Vikings runes and the runes used by other ancient cultures.”
Dane put two and two together. “S
o the runic language might have come from Atlantis?”
“That is possible,” Sin Fen said. “Of course, by the time of the Vikings, the original writing was probably greatly corrupted and simplified. The height of the Viking expansion was about 11,000 years after the great dispersion from Atlantis. That’s a long time for a language to survive, even in a bastardized form.”
“Where is the here’ the message refers to?” Dane asked.
“That’s the other strange thing,” Foreman said. “Someone went to a great deal of trouble to etch that map into the metal. God knows how long it took but it appears to have been done by hand with an edged tool.”
“Where was the crew of the Scorpion while this was being done to their ship?” Dane asked.
Foreman shrugged. “Where was the crew of the Scorpion for the past thirty-one years? To them no time passed between going into the Bermuda Triangle and coming out.”
“Maybe they weren’t on board the ship,” Dane wondered out loud.
“I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly what happened,” Foreman said. “What is important right now is what they came back with-- this map.”
“Are you sure that’s all they came back with?” Dane asked.
“The ship’s in quarantine at the Groton sub pens, being gone through with a fine-tooth comb to try to figure out what happened to it,” Foreman said. He tapped the photo, bringing attention back to the map. “It isn’t exact, at least according to what we know now, but it’s rather remarkable if it’s the work of someone who only could write in runes which means the message is probably over a thousand years old, but the ship is only thirty.”
To Dane’s eyes there was something wrong about the map, though. The proportions were off and he couldn’t get oriented on the continents.
Foreman reached into the file and pulled out another sheet of paper. “This is called Piri Reis’s map. It dates back to the sixteenth century. Compare the two.”
Dane slid the paper next to the photograph. “They’re almost identical.”
“Yes,” Sin Fen said. “Which raises another problem. The Piri Reis map was drawn at Constantinople in 1513 by an Admiral in the Turkish Navy. It emphasizes the west coast of Africa, the east coast of South America ending in the Caribbean and the northern coast of Antarctica. Which is intriguing given that Antarctica wasn’t discovered until 1818. Not only that, but the Piri Reis map and the map drawn on the Scorpion both show an Antarctica without ice covering it. The last time that Antarctica wasn’t covered by ice, as near scientists can tell is at the latest, four thousand BC and mostly likely much earlier than that.”
Dane leaned back in his seat and looked down at Chelsea. She pushed her head against his thigh, her golden eyes regarding him calmly in return. He envied the dog her ignorance and the innocence that stemmed from that. “How can that be?” he asked Sin Fen.
“Piri Reis, in his notes, readily admits that he didn’t survey the map himself, but rather copied it from other maps. It appears that the ancient seafarers had a much more extensive knowledge of the world than we have ever suspected. At least some of them did. Much of that knowledge was lost when the great library at Alexandria was burned and sacked.
“What is also strange,” Sin Fen continued, “is that the map shows the use of longitudinal coordinates, something that wasn’t invented-- at least we thought wasn’t invented-- until the 18th century.”
“Why Antarctica?” Dane asked. “Why would a map be centered around that continent?”
“Perhaps because that is where Atlantis was,” Sin Fen said. Before Dane could say another word she continued. “Albert Einstein had a theory about this-- I know, you’ve never heard of it, but trust me, it is true. He believed that Antarctica was ice-free about 12,000 years ago because it wasn’t centered on the south pole as it is now. Rather it was further north in the center of the Atlantic.”
“You’re joking, right?” Dane asked. “How the hell did it move to its present location?”
“I’m not saying this is fact,” Sin Fen said. “But who am I to argue with a theory of Albert Einstein’s? He called the process by which it moved earth-crust-displacement’ and scientists we have consulted say there is something to his concept. It also ties in with the theory of plate tectonics-- which is accepted by scientists as fact today-- which ties together with the Shadow scanning the lines of tectonic faults.
“If Atlantis was originally located in the Atlantic, it was over the juncture of four major tectonic plates. That meant it wasn’t solidly anchored to the planet beneath it. It would have taken a tremendous amount of energy, but it is possible that the land was ripped free, maybe even completely submerged, before drifting-- and drifting is a rather weak word for what happened as we’re not talking about drifting on water, but rather on the magna of the planet below-- to its current location at the south pole.
“Antarctica, the land itself, is now actually below sea level. Most of it is covered by a layer of ice several miles thick. It’s only recently that we’ve mapped what the land underneath the ice looked like and it looks a hell of a lot like what’s shown in this map.”
“Is this Shield in Antarctica?” Dane asked.
“No,” Foreman said. “Note the rune marking on the map right here. It is the Viking symbol for weapon.” He reached across the table and tapped the photograph. “We correlated that with the Piri Map and with current maps. That spot is right on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle gate. Just north of the western tip of Puerto Rico.”
“Then what is the connection between that site and Atlantis?” Dane asked.
“We don’t know that yet,” Foreman said. “Although it’s possible this site was between Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle gate which would be the logical location for a shield.”
“This site is in the water?” Dane asked.
“It appears so,” Sin Fen said.
“And?” Dane said.
“We think that spot is very important,” Foreman said. “It is along the line where the Caribbean tectonic plate intersects with the North American plate and close to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge which is formed by the North American Plate meeting the Eurasian and African Plates.”
“Have you checked it out?” Dane asked.
“We’ve done satellite imagery of it,” Foreman said. “Just ocean on the surface. Nothing there. What we’re looking for must be below the surface. I’m having some other special checks run that might tell us something more, but there’s nothing like having someone put a set of eyeballs on it.”
“I ran a reconnaissance for you once before,” Dane said, “and everyone who went with me died or disappeared.”
“We have a better idea what we’re dealing with now,” Foreman said.
“Do we?” Dane retorted.
There was the buzz of a cellular phone. Foreman pulled one out of his pocket and flipped it opened. “Foreman.”
Dane studied the map wondering who would have taken the time and the energy to scratch it into the metal on the submarine.
After a terse acknowledgment, Foreman flipped the phone shut. “I have to go to the War Room immediately.” Foreman stood, abruptly ending the meeting. “Sin Fen will accompany you.”
Chelsea had gotten to her feet, her head pressed against Dane’s side. Dane ran a hand through her golden hair. “Accompany me where?”
Foreman was gathering up his files, stuffing them in the briefcase. “To the indicated spot, of course. To find this Shield.”
“But--” Dane began, but Foreman cut him off with a wave of the cell phone.
“That was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Tilson. A Trident II missile, obviously from the Wyoming, was fired out of the Bermuda Triangle gate twenty minute ago. The warheads impacted in the center of the Atlantic Ocean along the North Atlantic Ridge-- where the tectonic plates meet. All eight warheads detonated. We’re still assessing what effect they had.”
“Is the Shadow attacking?” Dane asked.
Foreman shook
his head. “We think it was a test.” He headed for the door. “Remember, they have twenty-three more Tridents with one hundred and eighty four nukes left to carry out an all out assault.”
THE PAST
Chapter 2
THE WORLD APPROACHING
THE FIRST MILLENNIUM
998 AD
A city that had taken an entire race of people five hundred years to build had been overrun in one night two centuries ago. Located in the northern highlands of Cambodia, Angkor Kol Ker had been the center of a magnificent kingdom extending south to about the Srivijayan Empire of Sumatra and the Shailandra Empire of Java. To the northeast, the Tang Dynasty of China had ruled, while to the west, in the Middle East, the tide of Islam had begun to rise.
The capitol city of Angkor Kol Ker, the heart of the Khmer empire, had held architecture the likes of which Europe would not see for half a century. In the center of the city, a massive temple had been built stone by stone, with a center Prang, or tower, over five hundred feet high. Around it, homes and businesses were constructed, all secure inside a fourteen foot high wall surrounding the entire complex, over eight miles long by four miles wide. Outside of the wall, a moat over four hundred yards wide added protection. But those noble efforts of man had not been enough to stop the enemy that came.
A Shadow had invaded through a strange gate in the very fabric of the planet. A dense fog covered the city and the surrounding terrain. No man had set foot inside that fog in almost two hundred years and those who had remained to defend the city against the Shadow had never been seen again by those who fled.
The survivors of the Khmer kingdom had reestablished to the south at Angkor Thom and tried to regain some of their former glory by building the great temple of Angkor Wat, but the reestablished kingdom was a remnant of its former self, already on the road to decay.
The ancestors of the Khmer people had once traveled halfway around the globe to avoid the Shadow and for many generations they had seemingly foiled the force that had destroyed their original homeland until the new gate opened upon their city. Their home before Cambodia had been the legacy of the ancient ones; the ones who knew the secrets of the Shadow and the Ones Before. Secrets that their descendants had forgotten or remembered only as myth.
Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle Page 2
